War and Genocide, Reconstruction and Change. The Global Pontificate of Pius XII, 1939–1958

14.–16.6.2021

This was the first international conference on Pius XII after the opening of the Apostolic Archive in March 2020. With a hybrid format, online and in Rome, this conference brought together more than 40 historians and archivists from Europe, Latin America, Israel, and the United States. In addition, the event included external participants, such as Bishop Sergio Pagano from the Apostolic Archive and Dr. Iael Nidam-Orvieto from the Holocaust Memorial Yad Vashem. Nine panels revolved around the following themes: archival approaches, the pope and the media, church government, the Vatican and the Shoah, post-war reconstruction, decolonization, the Cold War, the globalization of the Church, and the cultural changes paving the way to Vatican II.

The two decade-long pontificate of Pius XII stands amidst an ‚Age of Extremes‘, which forced Catholics to situate themselves in relation to conflicting ideologies, totalitarianism, democracy, and modernity. Although a period of accelerating secularization, the pontificate also witnessed the re-emergence of the Catholic Church as an influential global force. In these conflict-laden, but also dynamic years, the Vatican occupied a central role in international politics. With about 80 Apostolic Nunciatures, the Holy See could demonstrate a global presence and presented itself as an actor that stood above national party interests. Yet, the Vatican simultaneously took strong positions in ideological conflicts and thus actively shaped the international political landscape.

Today, historians face a multitude of questions: What were the major institutional, social, and religious changes in the global Catholic community under Pius XII’s papacy? What was the Vatican’s attitude towards democracy and human rights as well as totalitarian and authoritarian regimes? How did Pius XII and the curia cope with the legacies of fascism, collaboration, and the Holocaust within the Catholic Church? In what ways did they influence the formation of the Western alliance and the beginning of the Cold War with its nuclear arms race? How did the Holy See react to the foundation of Israel or to movements of de-colonization in Africa and Asia? How did the Vatican intervene in Latin American politics and to what extent did it support authoritarian regimes in order to prevent the spread of communism? In addition to these political questions, contributors to this conference have examined how Pius XII reacted as a theologian to challenges of secularization, technological progress, and rapidly changing gender relations. These issues, of course, gained a particular importance in the Second Vatican Council that was started only four years after Pacelli’s death.

Methodologically, this conference aimed to transcend classical thematic labels such as ‚church history‘ or ‚religious history‘. Instead, it engaged with newer approaches of global, transnational and postcolonial history. Thereby, our discussions have re-introduced questions about religion into the modern post-war historiography. They could demonstrate that an adequate understanding of the Vatican’s political and cultural role is crucial to explain the great transformative processes of the twentieth century.

A central point of this conference was of course the long-lasting historical legacy that was marked by traditional conservative perspectives and prejudices from which it would prove difficult to detach. Increasingly, the Vatican was forced to confront the policies it had taken towards Judaism during the Shoah. Although Pius XI had condemned Nazi ideology in the 1937 encyclical „Mit brennender Sorge“, the Vatican had remained deafeningly silent about the deportation and extermination of Jews during the Second World War. Even during the German occupation of Rome, when hundreds of Jews had sought shelter in monasteries and Church institutions, Pius XII had offered no clear policy in this regard and did not publicly condemn the deportation of the Roman Jews in October 1943. In addition, historical research has since then uncovered the activities of Catholic circles around Bishop Alois Hudal, the head of the Austrian-German congregation in Rome, who aided German and Italian war criminals to escape to countries like Spain, Argentina, Syria, and Egypt.

Against this background, several presenters have addressed questions of historical memory and continuity in papal policies after 1945. On the surface, it could be argued that the position of the Church during the war had been the same as in most other conflicts: neutrality, diplomacy, humanitarian action. A major difference, however, had been the Vatican’s close contacts to the fascist state apparatus in Italy, Francoism in Spain, and also the Vichy-regime in France. More importantly, the Vatican would seek to maintain the validity of the 1929 Lateran Treaty with fascist Italy and the 1933 Concordat with Germany after the end of the war. Although many of these diplomatic provisions were concerned with religious schooling, ecclesiastical privileges, and Catholic holidays, they should also be seen in the context of powerful conservative networks within the Church. And yet, we can simultaneously observe a parallel shift towards democracy, a shift that was already evident in Pius XII’s famous Christmas speech of 1944.

Until today, the historiographies of twentieth-century Catholicism have typically been highly politicized and divided between modes of apologeticism and patterns of moral accusation. By contrast, this conference sought to retrace the political and cultural ambiguities and complexities that marked the policies of the Vatican in a wider global context. The difficulty, in this context, is to understand how conservative and reform-oriented elements could co-exist within the Church and how they could equally shape its development in the twentieth century. Accordingly, the nuances and the ambivalences inherent to the Catholic Church need to be acknowledged. The presentations at our conference thus revolved around a series of contradictions between authoritarianism and democratic goals of reform, Euro-Centrism and Globalism, conflict and reconciliation.

By following these themes, this event not only contributed to a nuanced picture of church history during Second World War, but also after 1945, thus covering the periods of post-war globalization, de-colonization, and democratization. Ultimately, these processes were not driven by a one-sided confrontation between progressive and reactionary forces. Instead, they must also be understood as multi-layered patterns of societal transformation in which the fronts were not always as clear as commonly recognized. The Catholic Church, for that matter, was both a driver and a preventer of change. After 1945, it clearly promoted globalization, peace, and the integration of the ‚Third World‘, but also had difficulties to detach itself from a past that deeply entangled with authoritarian ideologies and European dictatorships.

On June 15, the conference included a roundtable discussion, titled „Genocide, Diplomacy and Humanitarianism“ with Giuliana Chamedes, David Kertzer, Raffaella Perin, and Karène Sanchez Summerer. Crucially, none of these historians expected the archives to reveal a „smoking gun“ on the Vatican’s role during the Holocaust, but they anticipated that the new sources will lead to a more detailed understanding of ambiguous papal policies in this context. Raffaella Perin, for example, underlined the importance of diplomacy as a necessary condition for humanitarian action. This was the key for the continuity of the Vatican’s impartial position throughout the World Wars, and of the attempts to remain neutral after 1945 as well. Karène Sanchez Summerer stressed the importance of newly available sources in understanding the centrality of missionaries in Catholic humanitarianism. Missionaries often acted as political intermediaries on the ground, a role which might be overlooked if scholars focused too much on the institutional side of these initiatives. Giuliana Chamedes argued, however, that Catholic humanitarianism often conflicted with the Vatican’s goal of defending national Concordats. Finally, David Kertzer stated that the most important findings based on the new source material will probably be about the post-War period. One very important example would be the Papacy’s role in Italian politics and the formation of the Christian Democratic Party after 1945.

One constant issue in all of these debates is that the Vatican engaged in diplomatic relations as a sovereign state, but that the Church may also be considered as a ‚non-governmental actor‘. Across the world, ecclesiastical structures offered localized modes of action and influence that reached down to the level of individual parishes. Through a network of educational institutions and welfare organizations the Church could maintain its role as a transnational power that transcended the borders between the great political blocs. At the same time, of course, the Vatican was anything but neutral. From the pre-war to the post-war period, it had its own political agenda and actively sought, for example, to contain and to fight communism across the globe.

Clearly, the opening of the Vatican Archives now allows for a systematic analysis of the policies taken and the strategies pursued in the 1940s and 50s. One major aim for future research will be to retrace and to stress this transnational dimension of papal policies, which placed the Vatican in a global concert of powers. In this context, for example, the Cold War against communism also corresponded to a re-invention of the Church, which now began to strategically endorse the values of the Western alliance. While Pius XI and Pius XII had criticized capitalism, liberalism, and democracy in the pre-war period, the Church now clearly embraced Truman’s and Eisenhower’s vision of ‚the West‘.

In parallel to this East-West conflict, however, the fifteen years between 1945 and 1960 were marked by the rapid and unforeseen crumbling of European colonial empires, the rise of the ‚Third World‘, and a reconfiguration of North-South relations. The Catholic Church played a critical role in these processes, but was itself deeply affected by these changes. Via non-governmental, humanitarian, and missionary actors, papal diplomacy took part in the renegotiation between colonial powers and the emerging postcolonial societies. While reassessing its complicity with the European imperial powers, such as France and Belgium, during the 1950s, the Vatican created new alliances with the formerly colonized societies by erasing previous forms of imperialism from its memory and public representation (with saints, liturgies, languages, spatial ordering, new dioceses, and a new indigenous clergy). The coalition with colonialism was thus increasingly replaced by an outspoken affirmation of anti-colonialism. In his mission encyclicals („Evangelii praecones“), for instance, Pius XII urged missionaries to overcome colonialism. At the same time, however, this new strategy was never explicitly announced within Europe, where the Church would continue to present itself as the standard bearer of occidental identity and thus perpetuate its alignment with old colonial powers such as de Gaulle’s France, Franco’s Spain, and Salazar’s Portugal.

While the Catholic Church regained after 1945 some of the political influence that it had lost in the nineteenth and the early twentieth century, it was also confronted with rapid demographical transformations and with an opening to the non-European world. The Vatican was forced to react to the rapid population increase in Catholic countries of the ‚Third World‘, such as Brazil or Angola (which remained under Portuguese administration until 1975). This is evident not least in the fact that the number of Latin American and Asian cardinals sharply rose under Pius XII (Africa gained its first native cardinal as late as 1960). At the same time, however, it must be asked how these changes affected the traditional balance of power within the Vatican that had been dominated for generations by Italian clerics. Did the cultural opening of the Church fostered by Pius encounter internal resistance in Rome? Or was he himself driven by political pressure abroad?

We are dealing, in other words with competing tendencies of Occidentalism and ‚Third-Worldism‘. Conservatives such as Marcel Lefebvre, for example, the papal legate to French Africa, vehemently opposed the rapprochement with the colonies and would later lead the conservative schism of the Priestly Fraternity of St Pius X. Accordingly, it may even be asked whether the divide over matters of decolonization must be understood as a precursor of the church schism that would follow after the Second Vatican Council in the 1960s.

Against the background of the Vatican’s entanglement in the history of colonialism, future research will have to analyze how the Church could become a supporter of decolonization movements across the globe in a matter of just a few years. In order to explain this contradiction, historians may obviously point to modes of a very strategic political opportunism. The key to understand this development, however, is also to acknowledge the ideological and cultural antagonisms and the plurality within the Catholic Church. In this context, various spaces of activism have to be addressed: missionary movements, Christians NGOs (e. g. Catholic Action), transnational networks established around newly founded Christian Democratic parties, Catholic trade unions, and missionary movements. All these stakeholders witnessed a vast expansion of their activities after 1945 and re-defined their views on colonialism. More importantly, however, they also diversified the Vatican’s diplomacy across the globe, where it could now appear as an actor, negotiator, broker and interlocutor.

If anything, we think that this conference has highlighted the need for international cooperation and coordination of research. At this occasion, the German Historical Institute and the École française would like to thank the Fritz-Thyssen-Foundation for its generous financial support.