In his Christmas broadcast for 1942, Pope Pius XII spoke of the ‘hundreds of thousands of innocent people who have been killed or condemned to a slow extinction only because of their race’. As part of a wider denunciation of the Holocaust this would have been brave and useful, but in fact it was to be his only public wartime mention of it, and he did not even identify Hitler, the Nazis or the Jews by name. This failure publicly to denounce the greatest single crime in the history of mankind has unsurprisingly led to a major debate on the wartime role of the Pontiff, of which this well-researched, very well written, sane and thoughtful book is the latest and one of the most distinguished contributions.

Few people are better qualified than Gerard Noel to disinter the subtle diplomacy conducted by the prewar and wartime Vatican. A translator of the first volume of the official documents relating to the Holy See in that period and a former editor of the Catholic Herald, Noel had a private audience with Pius XII at the Castel Gandolfo in 1948, partly because he is collaterally descended from three saints, including Sir Thomas More. Yet far from being biased towards the Pontiff, as one might expect from this ultra-papabile curriculum vitae, this book lands some heavy blows against him. 

Since Pius’ death in 1958 the debate on his actions — or inaction — has been dominated in the media by the case for the prosecution, principally Rolf Hochhuth’s 1963 play The Representative, Constantine Costa-Gravas’ film Amen, Daniel Goldhagen’s A Moral Reckoning, David Kerzer’s The Pope Against the Jews, David Cornwell’s outrageously titled Hitler’s Pope, Robert Katz’s Fatal Silence and other important and more nuanced books by Ralph McInery, Susan Zuccotti and José Sanchez. The case for the defence was best put by Professor Owen Chadwick in his succinct study Britain and the Vatican During the Second World War in 1986, but Pierre Blet S.J., Eamon Duffy, Clifford Longley, Cardinal Winning, Michael Burleigh, Paul Johnson, Ronald Rychlak and Denis Mack Smith have all landed blows that have tended to undermine the prosecution’s more extreme positions.

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