Saturday, September 24, 2022

Review: "The Pope at War," David Kertzer



By Paul Carrier

In the years since World War II, Pope Pius XII, who led the Catholic Church from 1939 until his death in 1958, has been derided by critics as “Hitler’s pope” and praised by admirers as a saint.


Now, Brown University professor David I. Kertzer, who won the Pulitzer Prize for his 2014 book on the relationship between Pius XII’s predecessor and Benito Mussolini, has published a highly detailed and authoritative account of Pius XII’s conduct during the war.


Relying in large part on newly released records from the Vatican archives, Kertzer paints a damning portrait of an overly cautious pope who rarely spoke plainly or forcefully, routinely sought to placate fascist leaders in Germany and Italy, and lacked the strength of character to condemn Nazi territorial aggression or the horrors of the Holocaust.


To the extent that Pius XII displayed any sympathy for the plight of Europe’s Jews, he focused on Jews who had converted to Catholicism, were married to Catholics, or had been baptized at birth.


Pius XII succeeded in “protecting the institutional interests of the Roman Catholic Church at a time of war,” Kertzer writes, but as a moral leader he “must be judged a failure.”


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