“Pius XII was neither the pope of the Jews nor the pope of Hitler”
During his pontificate (1939-1958), did Pius XII deliberately keep quiet about what he knew about the ongoing Holocaust? Or did he, on the contrary, seek to protect the Jews? To answer this debate, historian Nina Valbousquet spent three years delving into the Vatican archives declassified by Pope Francis in 2020. She details her discoveries and her experience for us.
Pius XII has been criticized for his silence on the Holocaust during World War II. But was the Vatican aware of the extermination of the Jews?
Yes. As early as 1941, he received reports from Catholic military chaplains sent to the Eastern Front to help the Germans, who witnessed the Holocaust by bullets. One of these chaplains, Pirro Scavizzi, was received in secret audience by Pius XII in January 1942. Metropolitan Andrew Sheptytsky, of the Greek Catholic Church of Ukraine, also recounts the massacres of Jews in August 1942.
A phrase from your book* partly sheds light on this silence: “Pius XII is the last pope king…”
He is the last heir to an intransigent culture, born after the French Revolution. The Church felt like a citadel besieged by liberal upheavals. Pius XII appears as the last pope with a rather negative relationship to modernity. It was John XXIII, then Paul VI who reversed this trend, notably the relationship between Catholicism and Judaism.
What relationship does the Vatican have with Judaism under Pius XII?
A very old Christian anti-Judaism was never called into question. The Jews were accused of deicide – they supposedly killed Jesus – or of “perfidy” – the Good Friday prayer, suppressed in 1959, described them as such. Anti-Judaism within the Vatican constituted a systemic problem at this time, even if it did not appear systematic. This resulted in the difficulty, for Catholics, of seeing the Jews as victims during the war. The word “exaggeration” came up several times in the archives when reports evoking the annihilation of the Jews arrived at the Vatican. In particular, from Mgr Angelo Dell’Acqua, a young administrator of the Vatican steeped in anti-Semitic prejudices. His reports weighed in the official responses sent by the Curia. On information related to the Shoah, he wrote in October 1942 that “exaggeration is easy, among the Jews too”. And criticizes the Ukrainian metropolitan’s cry of alarm: “Eastern people are not an example of sincerity either.”
Pius XII’s silence shocks us today. But in such a perilous time, when anti-Semitism was so widespread, does this judgment not seem anachronistic?
In truth, criticism of Pius XII’s silence came very early. Father Roger Braun, chaplain of the French camps in the Southern Zone, wrote to the nuncio in September 1942 about the deportations of Jews in France: “I found among priests, religious, civilians, even civil servants, astonishment and almost a scandal to see the hierarchy, and even Rome, remain silent.” There were alternatives between silence and public denunciation. Cardinal Eugène Tisserant had thus proposed to the pope to write an encyclical that would have sent the faithful back to the examination of their own conscience. The Vatican could also have shared its information on the Shoah with the Americans, who had asked for it. It did not do so because it feared that the latter would weaken its neutrality if they revealed it. And also because it was a secondary subject for it. In the Netherlands, Catholic bishops and Protestants publicly and jointly condemned the deportations as early as July 1942. In retaliation, the Church suffered repression, particularly against Catholics of Jewish origin. However, the Dutch Catholic bishops protested again in 1943. As for the five French bishops who denounced the deportations during the war, they were not disturbed.
Is there anti-Semitism in Pius XII?
As nuncio in Munich, he sent a report in 1919 imbued with the myth of the Bolshevik who was Jewish, a view then widespread in the Vatican. But his writing as pope rarely appears in the archives. He relied heavily on his administrators and often followed the advice of Dell’Acqua. The latter also wrote the draft of a response to the Allies concerning the sharing of information on the Holocaust, saying that the Vatican had it but could not share it on the pretext that it had not been verified. Pius XI, Pius XII’s predecessor, had expressed himself much more clearly on the danger of anti-Semitism. But he was not a diplomat. “Pius XII behaved more like a diplomat than a prophet,” wrote Mauriac. He was neither the pope of the Jews nor the pope of Hitler.
What surprised you the most?
I was shocked by the persistence of anti-Jewish prejudice in the Vatican after the war. Dell’Acqua wrote in 1946 that “it is not the habit of Jews to suffer for long.” It seems disturbing, too, that Pius XII’s silence persisted when the Church was no longer in danger. In 1946, the Catholic philosopher Jacques Maritain asked him to condemn anti-Semitism. In vain. I was also touched by the actions of prelates. Like the nuncio Filippo Bernardini, in Switzerland, who really tried to help the Jews. No doubt it was easier to do so in a neutral country. Or the apostolic delegate in Jerusalem, Mgr Gustavo Testa. There is real empathy among them. I also did not expect to find so many pleas from persecuted Jews in the archives. The pope was seen as an important moral authority.
Are there secrets left to be discovered in the Vatican archives?
In the archives of Pius XII alone, there are gold mines on decolonization, the Cold War, the relationship to mass culture such as cinema. All this is new. Colleagues are working on it.
What do you think of the defenders of Pius XII?
They bother me when they attribute to this pope what others did on the ground. The fact that many congregations in Rome hid Jews in 1943, during the German occupation, does not mean that Pius XII authorized them to do so. There is no evidence to that effect.
Can your work provide a lesson on the situation in Israel, where you work?
In any case, they highlight the complexity of individual identities and journeys. Many people act very differently within the same group. This is one of the reasons why I am interested in history. Because it shows the nuances and complexities.
His bio
- October 6, 1987 Born in Périgueux (Dordogne).
- 2016 Thesis defense at Sciences Po Paris, published in 2020: Catholic and anti-Semitic. The Mgr Begnini network, 1918-1934 (CNRS Ed.).
- 2019 Member of the French School of Rome until 2023.
- 2022-2023 Scientific curator of the exhibition at the Shoah Memorial in Paris: “By the grace of God, the Churches and the Shoah”.
