One who opposed Pius XII’s policy of silence from within the Vatican was the first American to achieve the rank of nuncio, or papal ambassador, Joseph P. Hurley. As the first biographer of Hurley to have full access to his private archive, the Jesuit priest Charles R. Gallagher recreates the internal debates that went on in St Peter’s over the question of what the Church should say about the Nazis’ maltreatment both of Jews and of Catholic priests. Hurley believed that the Pope should say in public what he thought in private, that Hitler was ‘not only an untrustworthy scoundrel but a fundamentally wicked person’. (According to Gallagher this was ‘the only known time he ever personally expressed disdain for Hitler’.)

Hurley was — possibly rightly — thought of as President Roosevelt’s placeman in the Vatican, which is one of the reasons that his views were not adopted, and this book relates the discussion that took place between Roosevelt and Cardinal Eugenio Pacelli at FDR’s upstate New York home, Hyde Park, in 1936. According to the President’s recollection in 1943, the future Pope — then Vatican secretary of state — had said that the United States was ripe for a Communist take-over. FDR disagreed, saying that in fact the genuine peril was of America going Fascist. ‘No,’ said Pacelli. ‘Yes,’ said Roosevelt. ‘Mr President, you simply do not understand the terrible importance of the Communist movement,’ said Pacelli. ‘You just don’t understand the American people,’ FDR claimed to have replied.

This book also makes the plausible case that in the Twenties, Pacelli originally ‘saw Hitler’s Nazism as merely a political ruse. Aware that Hitler’s earliest ostensible political alliance was with the German Workers’ Party in 1919, Pacelli remained suspicious of Hitler as a politician of the left.’ He certainly told the US consul in Cologne, as late as 1939, that Hitler was not a true Nazi and that he ‘in spite of appearances would end up in the camp of the left-wing Nazi extremists where he began his career’. With such thinking, it is hardly surprising that Pope Pius XII failed to appreciate the true threat that Hitler posed to Christendom, and to respond to it effectively. These two books — both written by devout, lifelong Catholics — will not aid the Pope’s adherents’ hopes for his canonisation.

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