Pius XII and the Second World War: According to the Archives of the Vatican

Theology Today, Oct 2000 by Fisher, Eugene J

Pius XII and the Second World War: According to the Archives of the Vatican. Pierre Blet, New York, Paulist, 1999. 304 pp. $29.95.

Blet's book is organized around the twelve volumes of documents from the Holy Sees Secretariat of State issued from 1965-1981 in response to German playwright propagandist Rolph Hochhuth's 1963 attempt to portray Pius XII as callously indifferent to the Shoah. It is to Hochhuth that we owe the infamously misleading notion that Pius was "silent" during World War II. The documents summarized by Blet will serve to disabuse any open-minded reader of that notion. To the Holy Sees documents, Blet has added insightful and appropriate use of archival material for the period from the governments of Germany, Italy, Britain, and the United States. It is a magisterial presentation that could only have been done by a scholar such as Blet who has spent a lifetime dealing with original sources.

This volume is also very readable, narrating the attempts (often in vain) of the Holy See first to head off the War, then to limit its scope, then to ameliorate its unprecedented devastation and human suffering. As Blet comments, the mood in the Holy See became increasingly one of a profound sense of "helplessness" as diplomatic efforts to influence the governments of Europe and America and clandestine schemes to save Jewish lives in large measure failed. But failure, as the sheer plethora of the attempts vividly shows, should not be translated by history into "inaction." The Holy See and the pope who headed it throughout World War II might not have had the resources to stop or even significantly slow down the carnage of the war. But they certainly tried everything they could think of, and a bit more. This is a story not of moral failure but of human limitation in the face of what has justly been described as the worst eruption of pure Evil in human'history.

Eugene J. Fisher, National Conference of Catholic Bishops, Washington, DC