Pius XII. - Diplomat and Pope of Peace

von Michael F. Feldkamp, Berlin (Germany)

I would like to explain why I consider Pius XII one of the most important diplomats on the Throne of Peter in the 2,000 years of Church history. He was, above all, a Pope of Peace – but also a pope in times of war: in World War I, World War II, and during the Cold War.

We Germans have a special relationship with Pius XII. There are two reasons:

First, he was Apostolic Nuncio to Germany in the final phase of the First World War and in the interwar period. 

Second, he was Pope during the Second World War: a world war, yes; but the man who started it was the German "Reich Chancellor and Führer" Adolf Hitler. It was blessing for the Church, and certainly a work of the Holy Spirit, that Eugenio Pacelli was elected Pope in March 1939. It was probably the shortest conclave since the election of Pope Nicholas II. in 1059. The Conclave chose Pacelli because he knew Germany best.

By 1939 Germany had become a sword of Damocles hanging over the whole world. The impending danger of war, and the Pope’s own view of his office, made Pius XII concerned, from the start, for the preservation of peace. His family coat of arms was almost emblematic. It shows a silver dove, on a blue background, holding in its beak an olive branch, the symbol of God’s reconciliation with man after the Flood. Above the dove is a triple arch of silver, below the earth and water.

Pacelli never thought of himself however, as a “German” Pope. He was always thinking about the needs of the whole Church. Even his later successor, Josef Ratzinger, never thought of himself, once he became Pope Benedict XVI, as a "German Pope"; but at most as a German on the papal throne.

At the same time, it remains true, even today, that no pontificate has been so closely involved

with German history, as the pontificate of Pope Pacellli.

In this lecture I would like to highlight two aspects of his pontificate:

• First his efforts for peace, from his election as Pope to the beginning of the Second World War.
• And then the pontificate’s importance for democratic European development and  integration, which has produced a peace that we in Europe continue to enjoy 80 years later.

1.   Peace

As already mentioned, Pius XII’s pontificate was under the threat of war from the very start. Already, as Cardinal Secretary of State, Pacelli had followed Adolf Hitler's war preparations and the disastrous appeasement policy of the European powers in response to Hitler's ruthless foreign policy. He could not understand the wait-and-see attitude of the west European powers. Nor could he understand why the Allies had not prevented their negotiations with Hitler in Berchtesgaden, Bad Godesberg, and Munich, from looking like a victory for Hitler.

Pacelli’s lack of understanding for the appeasement policy of the Western allies led to his conviction, as Pope, that he must never allow himself to be co-opted by one side, but must always remain uncommitted. One example. When the French, in early 1939, tried to get the Pope to comment on Germany’s takeover of Bohemia and Moravia, Pacelli refused to do this. The Church, he explained, could not get involved in political affairs that did not directly involve the Church.                                                                        

On April 20, 1939, Pius XII appealed, for the first time, for public prayer for peace during the month of May," so that, under the protection of the most blessed Virgin Mary, we may experience better times.” And he did not stop short with appeals for prayer and peace.

At the beginning of April 1939, he proposed to the Italian Duce Benito Mussolini a conference, convened by the Holy See, to settle the disputes between Germany and Poland, and between France and Italy. The Duce agreed, and Pius XII then instructed his nuncios to take appropriate steps. On the 5th of May, 1939 Cesare Orsenigo, Apostolic Nuncio in Berlin, submitted a plan for such a conference to Hitler. Hitler rejected the proposal because he could not see any danger of war – as long (he added) as long as Poland does not feel compelled resort to provocations. It would be naive to assume that Orsenigo ever believed Hitler's words, because the papal secretariat of state was very accurately informed about German war preparations and diplomatic provocations through the nunciature reports from Paris, Warsaw and Rome. In addition, many diplomats accredited to the Vatican enjoyed the pope's trust. They, too, let Pius XII know whence the danger of war arose: namely from Nazi Germany.

In the mind of Pius XII, the basis of all peace was justice. The motto of his coat of arms was a quote from the prophet Isaiah: “Opus iustitiae pax – The work of justice is peace.” (32:17) 

On 31 August 1939, Pius XII sent telegrams to the Heads of Government of Germany, Great Britain, France and Italy, asking them to "do everything possible to avoid any incident that could increase tension, and refrain from any measure that could exacerbate the current tension.”

But on that very day Hitler ordered his troops to invade Poland on the day following: September 1, 1939.

Pius XII condemned the attack on Poland with clear words in his first encyclical "Summi Pontificatus" of 20 October 1939, which deplored humanity’s moral decline and called for renewal through Christ in his Church.

From the point of view of the Nazi regime, Pius XII could hardly be regarded as friendly toward Germany. The Foreign Office in Berlin had the impression that Pius XII’s words were addressed directly to Nazi Germany.

In the content of his appeal for peace, and in his choice of words, Pius XII was drawing on his personal experience of Benedict XV during the first World war. All sides had accused him, unjustly, of lacking neutrality. That taught Pius XII a lesson. He must show the greatest possible neutrality toward all warring states in order to demonstrate his unquestioned moral neutrality to all. Moreover, the Lateran Pact of 1929 obligated the Pope to be neutral.

During the war, Pius XII called for peace, especially in his Christmas messages broadcast on Vatican Radio, which read like a "guide to the return to international reason", as Ambassador to the Holy See Ernst von Weizs?cker writes in his memoirs (p. 357).

In his Christmas address of 1939, Pius XII. stated five conditions for the establishment of peace. (Pius XII., Justice creates peace, p. 93-114)

"1. The principle condition for a just and honorable peace is the "right to life and freedom" for all peoples. ...The right to life of one state must never mean the death sentence for another.

2. In order for such a restored order to be permanent, states and peoples must free themselves from any tendency to move at once to armed conflict.

3. In any restoration of intergovernmental relations, all parties must avoid the mistakes and weaknesses of the past, especially in establishing and restoring new international organizations.

4. In particular, all parties must recognize ...the true and justified claims of nations and peoples, as well as of ethnic minorities; claims which, even when they do not always establish a strict right, are recognized or confirmed as justifiably existing. All such claims deserve benevolent scrutiny.

5. But even the best regulations will be imperfect and doomed to failure if the Heads of State and nations themselves no longer allow themselves to be penetrated by the spirit that regards only the dead letter of international laws, for authority and commitments. We mean that spirit of intimate, living responsibility that measures and weighs human statutes according to the sacred, unshakeable norms of divine rights. They must be penetrated by the hunger and thirst which Jesus praised in his Sermon on the Mount.

The papal call for peace was seconded and accompanied by a proposal by Mussolini to restore Poland and the Czech Republic; but Hitler was not simply a peace partner, but a warmonger.

 In the Christmas message of 1942, Pius XII condemned legal positivism, condemned the theory that the state is the highest and absolute power, and defended the rights of the human person created by God. Everyone knew that he was talking about the fascist and Nazi states.

2.   Neutrality

In his attitude towards the belligerent states, Pius XII distinguished between moral and political neutrality. Moral neutrality would have been passive indifference or indifference to the suffering caused by war. That is certainly not what Pius XII wanted.

? He felt committed to political neutrality and impartiality in the sense of international law. In a frequently cited speech on 18 May 1939 he said: 

 "We will never extend Our activity, which is always focused on the salvation of souls, to purely secular controversies or to territorial concerns between states, unless we are specifically requested to do so. But it is precisely the duty of this ministry that does not allow us to close our eyes when new and immeasurable dangers arise for the salvation of souls..." (Utz/Groner, Vol. 2, p. 2154):

That is why the Pope did not refrain from pointing out and condemning errors of communism and National Socialism, without taking a political position himself. But reports during the first months of the war in "Osservatore Romano" and Vatican Radio on Nazi atrocities in the occupied Polish areas led to new and much more severe acts of revenge. From then on, the Vatican refrained from reporting on these events, or did so only with great reserve.

 Pius XII deviated only three times from his obligation to remain neutral: He condemned the invasion of Belgium, the Netherlands and Luxembourg by

German troops in May 1940 and denounced Germany for its military actions against Poland in 1939, and again in 1943.

 A well-known example of papal neutrality is the following example. Shortly after Japan’s attack on the US Pacific Fleet on the island of Pearl Harbor (7 December 1941) the Japanese asked for the establishment of diplomatic relations with the Vatican. This displeased the US President Roosevelt; but in 1942 the Holy See, citing its neutrality, began diplomatic relations with Japan.                                      

3.   Secret Diplomacy

Pius XII also practiced secret diplomacy. As early as January 1940, he entered into contact for the first time wit German resistance circles connected with Admiral Wilhelm Canaris. The Germans wanted to persuade the Pope to communicate their ideas to the British government. The reactions from London remained very non-committed. And the efforts of the military opposition ended when Count Stauffenberg’s attempt to assassinate Hitler failed on 20 July 1944.

4.   A lance for democracy

Pius XII grew up at a time when the popes rejected democratic forms of government and even forbade Italians Catholics to vote, let alone to accept election to office. The Pope's predecessors generally expressed great reserve with regard to various forms of government. And they had strongly condemned liberalism, capitalism, and other ideologies. One could see, however, that the popes preferred royalty.

The Pope’s Christmas address in 1944, was the first time that a pope spoke comprehensively and positively about a papal acceptance of democracy as a constitutional form.

Citing Pope Leo XIII, Pius XII said that Church teaching did not forbid acceptance of governmental forms which reflected the will of the people. The Church, he said, does not reject any form of government "provided that it promotes the well-being of its citizens".

Pius did not call democracy the best form of the state. Rather he emphasized the difficulty of promoting “an authentic democracy.”

His principle was: respect the dignity of individuals, and freedom of citizens. The was the duty of democracies. Pius XI said that a democracy must respect freedom of opinion, of speech, of election, of free assembly, and freedom among parties.                                                                  

Pius recognized these freedoms were guaranteed in states where political authority belonged to the people. Only dictatorships were incompatible with these rights.

6.   European Integration

With this Christmas address, delivered at a time when the war’s end was foreseeable, Pius was preparing the Catholic Church for active participation in the democratic future. Without the principles that he laid down, European integration would have failed. Catholics had achieved leading positions in France, Italy, and Germany. They wanted to establish a Christian Europe in place of the ghastly tyranny of National Socialism.

The boundary between a Christian Europe and the Soviet Communist sphere of influence ran right through Germany. Until 1990 Germany was a divided country. The Berlin wall, erected in 1961, symbolized this division between the freedom-loving democracies and freedom-hating dictatorships.

In Germany, the Iron Curtain went down and divided a country, a continent, and a world!

The fiercest opponents of Pope Pius XII were to be found in Germany. We will hear about this from others at this meeting.

Due to the division of Germany, the confessional map of the Federal Republic of Germany, founded in 1949, shifted in favor of the Catholics. The previously Protestant dominated Germany chose as Chancellor the Catholic Konrad Adenauer. This aroused fears in Evangelical circles of the end of a “continental European Protestantism,” which, in reality had never existed.

In an interview with the Daily Mail on December 14, 1949, Martin Niem?ller (1892-1984), head of the foreign office of the Evangelical Church in Germany, went so far as to say: "The current West German government was conceived in the Vatican and born in Washington.”

With these words the founder of political Protestantism in Germany, and later holder of the Lenin Peace Prize of the Soviet Union, was defending himself against a German Catholic government which he considered too subservient to the Pope. Niem?ller’s words were an indirect confirmation of Pius XII’s role in the restoration of a Christian West Europe.

In fact, the post-war political history of Central Europe was shaped and strongly influenced by three strongly Catholic personalities: the German Chancellor Konrad Adenauer, the French Prime Minister (1947-1948) and Foreign Minister (1948-1952) Robert Schuman (1886-1963), and the Italian Prime Minister (1945-1953) Alcide de Gasperi (1881-1954). Of these three politicians, Adenauer had the best relationship with Pius XII, whom he had met repeatedly and personally as nuncio. It was not without reason that Adenauer's first state visit as chancellor was to Rome in 1951. He held political talks with de Gasperi and raised “spiritual and religious problems" with the Pope. It turned out that the Pius XII considered Germany's role to be "extraordinarily important in its defensive position against the Eastern European states under communist domination."

 Pius XII’s Eastern policy was not limited to the condemnation of communism. The Pope himself had no direct contact with the Soviet rulers; but he did have contacts with politicians, generals and bishops in the communist countries. When he realized that Stalin would remain as dictator, he started in 1949 to send to the Eastern Bloc bishops whom he had secretly consecrated.

During the pontificate of Pius XII. the Vatican's position on European integration, Eastern policy and the reunification of Germany was in remarkable agreement with Adenauer's policy. This was clearly confirmed in the Pope's private audiences with Adenauer.

In 1956, Pius XII highly praised the chancellor of the young Federal Republic. Conversely, when asked which men of the present he valued most, Adenauer named the British Prime Minister Sir Winston Spencer Churchill (1874-1965), the American President Dwight D. Eisenhower (1890-1969) and Pius XII. Adenauer's personal and almost cordial relationship with the Pope was well known. On January 30, 1957, the Israeli Nahum Goldmann approached Adenauer, asking him to work with Pius XII to establish diplomatic relations between Israel and the Vatican. Goldmann had previously had word from the Vatican that endorsement of his request by the German Chancellor would be of the utmost importance.

 On October 9, 1958, at 3:52 a.m., Pope Pacelli died.

The participation of high-ranking politicians and diplomats in the funeral celebrations demonstrated the high esteem for Pius XII throughout the world, with the exception of the communist states. Among the expressions of condolences were also many from Jewish organizations, which took the death of the Pope as an opportunity to pay tribute to his services in rescuing persecuted Jews during the Third Reich. Israel's Foreign Minister Golda Meir (1898-1978) telegraphed (Lapide, p. 178):

"We share in mankind’s mourning at the passing of His Holiness of Pope Pius XII. In a world depressed by war and disunity, he represented the highest ideals of peace and compassion. ......We mourn a great servant of peace".