Jesuit Defence Of Pope Pius XII

The birth of the "black legend" of Pius XII

by Giovanni Sale, S. J.

The "black legend" of a pope who was a friend of Hitler and a supporter of totalitarian regimes was not born, as is often maintained,

in Jewish circles, in response to the presumed silence of Pius XII on the Holocaust, but in the communist world, in the period during which, shortly before the end of the second world war, the division of the world into two opposing blocs was approaching, one under Soviet influence and the other under that of the United States.

From the sources, it emerges that the "accusation" of Pius XII as a friend of Hitler, Mussolini, and other fascist dictators predates the scorching and even more controversial accusation of the pope's silence over the extermination of Jews in Europe. [...] In reality, the perception of this extermination and its theoretical elaboration, which were lightly developed in the years just after the war, made headway only beginning in the 1960's. The events surrounding the Eichmann trial [in 1961, held in Jerusalem], and his execution in 1962 made a noteworthy contribution to making the genocide of the European Jews the founding event, from the moral point of view, of the state of Israel. In this regard, the historian and diplomat Sergio Romano writes: "Up until that moment, the essential elements of Israeli identity had been the Zionist saga, the laborious progress of the Jewish presence in Palestine, the fight for life, the victorious war against the Arab states [...]. The Eichmann case changed the picture and contributed to making Jewish genocide the cornerstone of Israel. The state of pioneers and farmer-soldiers was thus replaced, in collective self-representation, with the state of victims and their heirs."

The play "The Deputy" by Rolf Hochhuth, performed for the first time in Paris in 1963, spread among intellectuals and the wider public the accusation of a pope who was silent and indifferent toward the fate of the Jews; of a pope who, out of fear of the atheistic and revolutionary communism, had aligned himself with the dictators of his time. In this way, Pius XII was called before the tribunal of history, to the roll of those charged in the offense of the Holocaust; this call of "co-defendant" extended, beyond Germany, the field of responsibility for what happened to the "hated and despised" Jews in Christian Europe. Anti-Catholic historical literature then had a field day creating the legend of a silent pope who was Hitler's friend; this literature has had great success in recent years in the English-speaking world, but today has been subjected to serious and well thought-out historical criticism. These events, moreover, were and still are exploited by the most radical and intransigent form of Judaism, interested in keeping alive, for reasons that were more political than intellectual, an old dispute with the Catholic Church for its anti-Judaism, upheld by many Catholics until Vatican Council II. The recent position statements by the Jewish world on the beatification process for Pius XII is situated in this climate of undue pressure on the Holy See.

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Giovanni Sale, S.J., is director of the Jesuit Historical Institute in Rome. He is also a member of the editorial board of La Civiltà Cattolica and teaches contemporary church history at the Pontifical Gregorian University, from which he received his doctorate in ecclesiastical history.