The Global Struggle, Excerpt from Triumph
Chapter 21: The Global Struggle
The year 1939 saw the elevation of a longtime papal diplomat, Cardinal Pacelli, to the throne of St. Peter. No candidate for the holy office was better prepared to deal with the inevitable crisis in Europe. He had been the chief negotiator of the concordats during the interwar years. He had seen Communist violence in postwar Bavaria—in a very personal way. Communists splashed his house with machine-gun fire in the hope of assassinating him. In another instance, he faced down Communist armed robbers with the words: “I have neither money nor food. For as you know, I have given all I had to the poor of the city. . . . This is a house of peace, not a den of murderers!”
Though he had experienced Communist violence first-hand in Bavaria, it did not color his feelings about Germany. Communism he loathed, but Germany—her people, civilization, language, and literature—he loved. This combination did not, as his detractors claim, make him sympathetic to Hitler. Rather, he saw Hitler for what he was—a threat to German civilization. He first criticized the Nazis in 1921 in just these terms:
The Bavarian people are peace-loving. But, just as they were seduced during the revolution by alien elements—above all, Russians—into the extremes of Bolshevism, so now other non-Bavarian elements of an entirely opposite persuasion have likewise thought to make Bavaria their base of operation.
As Professor Ronald Rychlak points out, “Of the forty-four public speeches that Nuncio Pacelli made on German soil between 1917 and 1929, at least forty contained attacks on National Socialism or Hitler’s doctrines.” As pope, he took the name Pius XII (1939–1958), a signal to the Nazis, among others, that he intended to continue the policies of his predecessor, the man who had issued Mit Brennender Sorge, a document that Cardinal Pacelli himself had drafted. It was Cardinal Pacelli, too, under Pope Pius XI’s leadership, who had called on Catholic archbishops to lobby their governments to accept Jewish immigrants from Nazi tyranny. The Nazis certainly understood that the new pope was their enemy. Shortly after Pacelli’s election in 1939, a secret Nazi security report noted, “Pacelli has already made himself prominent by his attacks on National Socialism during his tenure as Cardinal Secretary of State. . . . In adopting his name [Pius], will he not also resume the work of that man whose collaborator as Secretary of State he has been in recent years?” Indeed, Pius XI thought the Western democracies were not hard enough against Hitler, and couldn’t be, because the true anti-Nazi and anti-Communist critique came out of Catholic philosophy.
Pope Pius XII made desperate overtures to achieve peace, declaring, “Nothing is lost by peace: everything may be lost by war.” Surely even he, though a diplomat and prince of peace, must have known that it was impossible. He understood the Nazis and the Communists all too well. When the Hitler-Stalin pact was signed in August 1939, uniting the two most murderous regimes in history, the pope must have felt very much like Guy Crouchback, the hero of Evelyn Waugh’s The Sword of Honour trilogy, when he hears the news: “The enemy at last was plain in view, huge and hateful, all disguise cast off. It was the Modern Age in arms.” For the next six years, the pope devoted himself, as Pope Benedict XV had in the First World War, to bringing relief to the suffering. But Pope Pius XII had an additional mission. The Nazis openly persecuted the Jews in Germany and in every country into which they marched. Secretly, they were killing Jews by the millions. The pope—the commander in chief of the Swiss guards of Vatican City, surrounded by Fascist Italy, which, by 1940, was the ally of Nazi Germany—intended to bring as many Jews as he could to freedom. Thousands of Jews were housed, literally, in Church buildings in Rome—even after the Nazis occupied the city in 1943. But these were only a few of the hundreds of thousands of Jews that the Church saved from the Nazi executioners. In 1967, Israeli diplomat Pinchas Lapide estimated that Pope Pius XII “was instrumental in saving at least 700,000, but probably as many as 860,000 Jews from certain death at Nazi hands.” In other words, no institution, outside the Allied armies, did more during World War II to save Jewish lives from the Holocaust than the pope and the Catholic Church. To put those numbers in even clearer perspective, consider that the Nazis had within their grasp 8,300,000 Jews. Six million of these were killed, leaving only 2,300,000 survivors. If we take Lapide’s lowest estimate of the Jewish lives that Pope Pius XII was “instrumental” in saving—700,000—it amounts to 30 percent of the Jews who survived Hitler’s “final solution.”
H. W. Crocker III is vice president and executive editor of Regnery Publishing and former speech writer for Governor Pete Wilson of California. A former editorial writer for the San Diego Union, he has written for many outlets, including National Review, the American Spectator, the Washington Times, and the National Catholic Register, and is the author of half a dozen books, including the Custer of the West series, bestselling Robert E. Lee on Leadership and The Politically Incorrect Guide to the Civil War, as well as the award-winning novel The Old Limey.
