2023-10-22 17:13:14
The War of Silence. Pius XII, Nazism, the Jews
by Andrea Riccardi
Cerf, 396 p., 25 €
Andrea Riccardi, co-founder of the community of Sant’Egidio, discusses the issue of Pope Pius XII’s silence on the fate of the Jews during the Second World War. The research “is not intended to absolve or condemn, in the manner of a historical tribunal, but only seeks to reconstruct a part of History”, he indicates.
The author prefers to talk about“a defeat of Christianity as a whole”. Pius XII was first accused of being silent on the fate of Poland, fearing, according to Giovanni Battista Montini (the future Paul VI), that “every word spoken against Germany and Russia” ultimately turned against Polish Catholics. As early as 1940, Pius XII himself confided: “We should fulminate fiery words against this (the invasion of Poland), and the only reason which keeps us from doing so is knowing that the fate of the poor unfortunates would be made even more difficult if we spoke . »
An informed pope
It is a similar reasoning that the Vatican holds regarding the Jews: an overly explicit condemnation which leads to an increase in persecution. At the end of the war, survivors sincerely thanked him. It was only later that the controversy over the silence of Pius XII arose.
There remains this fact: “the thesis according to which Pius XII “did not know”, which is based on the isolation of the Holy See, supported by the first defenders of Pius XII, does not stand up to the test of the documents”, says Andrea Riccardi. For the latter, “Pope Pacelli and his collaborators behaved like academic diplomats in a context where this model was no longer valid”…
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