In fact, when the Vatican’s Berlin correspondent for the official newspaper, L’Osservatore Romano, once asked Pius XII whether he would protest the extermination of the Jews, the pope told him that he could “not forget that millions of Catholics serve in the German armies. Shall I bring them into conflicts of conscience?”⁹

Pope Pius XII and the Nazis​—A Fresh Viewpoint

DID he do the right thing by not speaking out? The controversy over Pius XII’s silence on Nazi atrocities during World War II has raged intermittently for three decades. Critics say that a papal protest to the Nazis might have saved millions of lives. But the present pope, Paul VI, insists that “an attitude of protest and condemnation would have been not only futile but harmful.”

But why bring the matter up again? Is it not just whipping a dead issue? No. The Vatican itself is keeping it alive. Officials have even set aside their fifty-year-delay policy on publishing archive documents. They realize that, unless people do understand, critics have a most powerful argument to illustrate moral failure in the Church.

Many sincere Church members want to know the answer. They know that even Pope Paul VI was very much involved in matters back there as a close aide to Pius. Thus a Jesuit committee has been publishing selected documents from the Vatican archives since 1965. The latest, titled “The Holy See and the War Victims,” came out in April 1974. Does it provide any fresh insights?

A Deeper Issue

News reports give the limelight to documentary evidence that the Vatican had received much information about Nazi atrocities from a very early date. But much more significant is another little-noticed item. It shows that one of Pius XII’s trusted aides raised an issue that probes much deeper than the question of why the pope did not speak out against the Nazis. “Monsignor” Domenico Tardini (later a cardinal) is reported to have asked in exasperation:

“That the Holy See cannot make Hitler behave, everybody understands. But that it cannot keep a priest on the leash​—who can understand this?”

Shallow debate over how much good the voice of Pius XII would have done has all but obscured this far more fundamental issue. Honest Christians are forced to face the question: How could Nazi atrocities even have been committed in the first place if it were not for the cooperation of the people and their spiritual leaders? Ninety-five percent of Germans back there were either Catholic or Protestant. Nearly 32 million, over 40 percent, were Catholic, as was almost the entire population of Germany’s European allies, Austria and Italy. Even among the dreaded S.S., almost a fourth were still Catholic in 1939, despite S.S. leadership pressures to resign.¹

Pius XII himself lays bare this very issue in a recently published private letter to the priest who caused “Msgr.” Tardini’s exasperation. As president, the priest, Jozef Tiso,a ruled the Nazi protectorate of Slovakia throughout the war (1939-45). Pius wrote “Monsignor” Tiso that he had hoped that the Slovak government and people, “Catholic almost entirely, would never proceed with the forcible removal of persons belonging to the Jewish race,” and the fact that “such measures are carried out among a people of great Catholic traditions, by a government which declares it is their follower and custodian,” distressed him greatly.​—April 7, 1943.²

But how could any form of cooperation with the Nazi racial extermination program even be considered among a people who the pope himself said were ‘Catholic almost entirely and of great Catholic traditions’? Surely the moral teachings of the Church would make it unthinkable for “Msgr.” Tiso and his flock to have any part in genocide! History shows whether they did. Honest-hearted church members certainly desire an explanation for such conduct as well as that of the other so-called “Christian” nations involved with the Nazis.

The Vatican’s own Cardinal Eugène Tisserantb supplies one reason with the candor and openness of a private letterc to a friend. After the fall of France in 1940, he wrote complaining to Cardinal Suhard of Paris that “Fascist ideology and Hitlerism have transformed the consciences of the young, and those under thirty-five are willing to commit any crime for any purpose ordered by their leader.” But how could these Church-trained consciences be so easily “transformed”? After all, Hitler had been working on them only about seven years, while the Church had been training its flock for well over a thousand!

“Vital Point of Christianity”

Surely Pope Pius could do something about this Nazi encroachment into traditional Church territory​—the human conscience! But Cardinal Tisserant mourns:

“Since the beginning of November [1939], I have persistently requested the Holy See to issue an encyclical on the duty of the individual to obey the dictates of conscience, because this is the vital point of Christianity.” (Italics added)

However, history reveals no papal statements during the war on this “vital point of Christianity.” In fact, Tisserant went on to make the melancholy forecast: “I fear that history may have reason to reproach the Holy See with having pursued a policy of convenience to itself and very little else. This is sad in the extreme.”³

No doubt the pope’s “policy” of diplomatic care in dealing with the Nazis did ensure the “convenience” of survival for the Vatican and the Church. Pius himself advised the German bishops that “the danger of reprisals and pressures,” or worse, called for “restraint” in their pronouncements “in order to avoid greater evils. This is one of the motives,” he wrote, “for the limitations” he put on his own declarations.​—April 30, 1943.⁴

This explanation helps us to understand why Pius conducted himself as carefully as he did.