The Pope at War summary

When the Vatican first began releasing files on Pius XII in 1965, four Jesuit editors worked to actively expunge all evidence of the pope’s secret negotiations with Hitler. Then, in 2020, the Vatican unsealed millions of those original documents. Through these, we’ve learned of secret meetings between the pope and Hitler’s envoy, the so-called “Nazi Prince.”

The Nazi Prince was a prince named Phillipp von Hessen – one of Hitler’s trusted associates. Married to Princess Mafalda, daughter of the king of Italy, von Hessen had a foot in both nations and was active in helping maintain the relationship between Hitler and the pope.

In situations like this, there’s no such thing as neutrality. By insisting on silence, the pope was effectively choosing a side.

His pattern throughout the beginning of the war was to leave room for the churches in each nation to respond to their individual governments as they saw fit. His motto could easily have been, “It’s best to remain silent.”

While the pope remained silent on the issues of nations falling, soldiers dying, and innocent people being slaughtered, one subject he felt strongly enough to speak on was the issue of purity.

He gave a speech to 4,000 girls all dressed in white about the importance of fighting immorality. Throughout the war years, he continued to encourage young women to dress modestly and remain pure.

The landscape of the war began to change after the United States joined the Allies. In his third Christmas speech in 1942, the pope spoke out against the atrocities being committed by the Axis powers. Of course, it was couched in verbose sentences and located all the way on page 24 of his speech, so it didn’t make much of an impact.

Surrounding nations continued to criticize the pope despite his speech, which he found upsetting. For a pope so used to silence, he no doubt considered his speech to have been a hard and strong statement. It wasn’t.

When Italy surrendered conditionally to the Allies, allowing them to land on Italy’s southern tip, Germany rolled in and began occupying Italy to keep the Allies from advancing.

With Germans occupying Rome, Hitler’s policies of rounding up and exterminating Jewish people continued. In Rome, right outside Vatican City, Nazis gathered up over 1,200 people and kept them in an old college building for two days.

There is a time for silence and there are conditions under which peace should be pursued. But that time and those conditions didn’t exist from 1939 to 1943. Whether it was anti-Semitism, pacifism, or a combination of both that kept Pius XII silent during Hitler’s atrocities, it’s difficult to forgive that silence.

Millions of people died in the war, labor camps, or gas chambers while the leader of the largest, most powerful religious organization on Earth remained silent. It’s impossible not to wonder how things might have been different had he used his power to speak out against what was happening to the Jewish people.