It is the controversy that will not be exorcised. It is Rome's persistent nightmare.No matter what the Vatican does, it cannot still the turbulence occasioned by the debates over Pope Pius XII and his role during the Second World War.
Although that role is framed largely in terms of his "silence" concerning the Nazi persecution of the Jews, it also involves his perceived reluctance to employ anything other than the most cautious diplomacy when dealing with Nazi and fascist aggression, including the invasion and brutality inflicted on Poland, that most Catholic of countries.
The reputation of Pius XII (Eugenio Pacelli) was not always the subject of such heated polemics, visceral broadsides and compromised standards of neutrality as we now have in superabundance.
Immediately after the war, he was universally lauded for the work he had done for the victims of war, the refugees, the PoWs and, specifically, the Jews. And then it all changed in the twinkling of an eye.
In 1963, German playwright Rolf Hochhuth's The Deputy identified Pius as a morally weak pontiff who failed to rise to the demands of being Christ's deputy by opting for silence over action when it came to protesting against the discriminatory and lethal policies of the Nazis against the Jews.
Although The Deputy is a seriously flawed work of history and an overwrought work of theatre, it ushered in a sea change in how the world saw Pius. Naturally, camps emerged either defending the papacy of Eugenio Pacelli or denouncing it.
The Pacellists and anti-Pacellists have yet to decamp.
If anything, the controversy, never far from the surface, has been once again ignited by the sometimes unseemly disputes over Pacelli's eligibility for official sainthood or canonization. The Vatican's recent 50th-anniversary celebrations honouring Pius's memory - he died on Oct. 9, 1958 - has fanned the flames.
As is the case with all great and impassioned controversies, the truth is supremely difficult to locate.
Stridency, defensiveness, reductionism, misplaced loyalties, intellectual legerdemain, the unquenchable desire for revenge and obsessive preoccupation with institutional and personal reputations define the landscape for anyone venturesome or foolish enough to remap the terrain. But we are desperate for new insights, disinterested scholarship and a fearless resolve to rise above the vitriolic fray, even if only briefly.
The recently published Pius XII: The Hound of Hitler (Continuum, 2008), by retired lawyer, sometime historian, past editor and Catholic savant Gerard Noel, is a laboured, worthy but ultimately unsatisfactory effort to explore the complex psychology of Pacelli, the man and the pope. It has had a long gestation, originating in the encounter the young Noel had when he shared a few minutes with the pontiff in 1948, courtesy of some influential members of his family. He had just left Oxford and Pius impressed him enormously, as he impressed nearly all who came in contact with him, by his gentleness, suavity, erudition and ethereality. Sixty years later, The Hound of Hitler is Noel's effort to make some sense of the genius, spirituality and deeply flawed pontificate of Pius XII.
But the work itself is flawed. It is heavily reliant on two sources of dubious credibility: select writings of, and Noel's oral conversations with, the renegade ex-Jesuit Malachi Martin, and the fictional reconstruction of dialogue between Pius and his Junker-like confidante Sister Pasqualina Lehnert, as found in Paul Murphy's La Popessa, the Lehnert biography.
Although Noel's familiarity with the primary sources is solid - he translated the first volume of the official documents relating to the Vatican and the Second World War - and his long personal association with and knowledge of papal diplomacy is an undoubted asset, The Hound of Hitler is in the end neither apologia nor judgment, neither convincingly revelatory of new information nor convincingly condemnatory in its assessment of a troubled papacy.
Noel's argument - that Pacelli's devotion to the new Code of Canon Law, his "grand design" to strengthen the Catholic enterprise through rigid centralization, his naive trust in the power of diplomacy and concordats when dealing with his political enemies, and his psychosomatic travails and mystical epiphanies, when all brought together make for a compelling explanation of the deficiencies and accomplishments of the Pacelli pontificate - in the end doesn't hold water.
Whereas Noel's work is largely devoid of polemical matter and tone, Margherita Marchione's Did Pope Pius XII Help the Jews? (Paulist Press, 2007) is largely made up of it.
A professor emerita of Italian studies at Fairleigh Dickinson University, and the author of five previous books on much the same subject, Marchione is a steady if not fierce defender of Pius, persuaded that the efforts to defame Pacelli are merely one volley in a larger assault on the papacy itself. Although her prose and methodology are occasionally scattered and disjointed, her relentless pursuit of unheard testimony is commendable, adding immeasurably to the complex literature on the subject.
U.S. historian and Spanish Civil War authority Jose M. Sanchez has written a temperate, judicious and measured work, Pius XII and the Holocaust: Understanding the Controversy (Catholic University of America Press, 2002), which provides a schematic outline of the contours of the debate, identifies the major critics and historians, sifts through the ideological alliances and personal agendas, and makes for a sane companion for the debate. But it is only a companion.
We have yet to see the publication of many critical primary sources, and a definitive biographical study of Pius XII eludes us still.
That is why I await with considerable interest the publication of Soldier of Christ: The Political Life of Pope Pius XII (Harvard University Press, 2011), by King's University College historian R. A. Ventresca.
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(Source: GAM)