With this volume, Robert Ventresca, professor at the University of Western Ontario, contributes to the steadily growing scholarship on Pope Pius XII, born Eugenio Pacelli. As Ventresca notes, there are many works that address Pacelli's life and pontificate. Perhaps best known among these is John Cornwell's Hitler's Pope: The Secret History of Pius XII (New York: Penguin, 1999). Most works on Pacelli center on the controversies surrounding the role of Pius XII in regards to Nazi Germany and the Shoah. In the prologue to his volume, Ventresca argues “with very few exceptions, studies of Pius XII have offered a distorted or highly selective picture of the subject” (6). The author argues that scholars need to pay more attention to the entirety of Pacelli's life, especially to the years after 1945. This gap in the scholarship Ventresca begins to close by offering a complex picture of a pope who in many ways remains an enigma. While Ventresca certainly is sympathetic to his subject, ultimately, he leaves judgment to the reader.

Like most scholars who have written about Pius XII, Ventresca places much emphasis on his upbringing in a family of the lower Vatican nobility, living in modest means and marked by dedication to the papacy as a matter of family honor and religious conviction. Within a few years of Pacelli's ordination, he began training for the papal diplomatic service. Eventually, he played a role in the formulation of the 1917 Code of Canon Law, then was appointed nuncio to Bavaria and then to Berlin before returning to Rome in 1929 to become Cardinal Secretary of State, a post he held until his election to the papacy in 1939. Throughout the work, Ventresca points to this training and preparation as shaping the mind of Pius. Ventresca emphasizes that, at least until 1945, Pius used the language of diplomacy, even when addressing pastoral concerns. Acknowledging the perils of this practice, the author quotes French Catholic philosopher Emmanuel Mounier who warned that Vatican diplomacy was not the same as Catholic teaching (149). Based on the evidence that Ventresca adduces, the idea that Pius thought, wrote, and spoke like a diplomat would go far to explain why what he meant to be clear statements about Poles, Jews, Nazis, and others were perceived as weak. This explanation, however, has a number of shortcomings. The Pope was perfectly clear in his condemnations of communism. Also, why did so few outside the Vatican understand the Pope's statements and instead believe that he favored Germany, or at least that he was not willing to provoke a crisis of conscience among German Catholics? For an accurate interpretation of the Pope's pronouncements, a definitive study remains necessary of Vatican-speak, the particular language of Vatican pronouncements, which is often incomprehensible to anyone not well versed in it.

Another question left unexplored is the influence of antisemitism in his thinking. In 1939, the Pius XII wrote quite clearly about Polish suffering, but did not mentioned a word about Jewish suffering. Ventresca explains the Pope's forceful encyclicals and other statements of the post-1945 era as, in part, a response to the criticism of his wartime statements. While Ventresca outlines the postwar period in two chapters, many issues such as the desire of Pius to protect Catholics in China or to see Jerusalem designated an international city, are not addressed at all. His liturgical innovations, especially his desire to see more of the vernacular used in the mass, are worth exploring much further. The proclamation of the Assumption of Mary as Catholic dogma, while explained in a religious framework, would have benefitted from greater contextual analysis.

Finally the paucity of documentary evidence frustrates all twentieth-century scholars of this dark period in Christian history. Already in the late 1960s, Ludwig Volk, SJ, who had early access to the Vatican archives, claimed that there was no evidence to resolve some of the most vexing questions in the history of the Catholic Church of this era. Increased scholarly access to Vatican records dating from before 1939 has confirmed Volk's claims. For this, the wide array of sources Ventresca uses from the Vatican Archives and other Vatican institutions cannot compensate.

Thus, Ventresca must rely heavily on the secondary literature, particularly the autobiographies of his subject's contemporaries and collaborators. Unfortunately, in some cases, it would have been useful to cast a wider net for secondary works. The claims of Klaus Scholder and others that the Holy See traded the Center Party's support for the 1933 Enabling Act and indeed the party's existence for the Reich Concordat are simply unsustainable. (79; see Klaus Scholder, Die Kirchen und das Dritte Reich. Bd. 1: Vorgeschichte und Zeit der Illusionen [Frankfurt: Propyläen, 1977]). Gordon Craig's history of Germany, 1866–1945 has been superseded by more recent work (Gordon Craig, Germany 1866–1945, Oxford Modern History of Europe [Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1980]). For a work in which events in Germany play such an important role, the absence of German-language scholarship is regrettable.

Finally, this is not, as the book's subtitle promises, the complete story of a “life.” The post-war era needed much more analysis and explanation, and the Pacelli the Cardinal Secretary of State and Pius XII the pope required more penetrating judgment.

What makes this book valuable, however, is its openness about seeking a positive explanation for the Pope's actions while also acknowledging, even if reluctantly, the difficulty of sustaining such a benevolent analysis in face of the evidence. This is not a work of hagiography. Ventresca points out that Pius XII preserved the institutional integrity of the Church by being cautious and prudent, but then asks “were such prudence and caution appropriate for the Vicar of Christ?” (218). Also, his behavior after the war, when clearly at least some clergy in Rome were helping war criminals escape to South America, “suggests at the very least a disturbing lack of transparency and accountability in the use of relief resources, if not simple naiveté and poor judgment in the administration of relief” (270). Indeed.