This masterly survey and analysis of the pontificates of the three popes who had to grapple with the challenges of 20th-century totalitarianism is a further volume in that distinguished series – the Oxford History of the Christian Church. The eighteen pages of the bibliography demonstrate the impressive foundations on which author has constructed this penetrating and authoritative account.
His approach is remarkably judicious, so much so that, when he feels compelled to make a severe judgment, it is all the more striking. For example - after Pius X's death in 1915, he and his Secretary of State, Merry del Val, having left the Church in deplorable diplomatic isolation, Pollard comments: ‘Vatican diplomacy was passive, impotent and irrelevant.’ The tragic consequence was that any major attempt at peace-making by his successor, Benedict XV, was easily frustrated by the leaders of the warring nations. Yet the ‘dogged persistence’ of Benedict XV and Pietro Gasparri, his remarkable Secretary of State, in their humanitarian efforts, was impressive. Pollard points how closely Benedict's unsuccessful peace proposals resemble President Wilson's later famous ‘Fourteen Points’ – so much so that they must have inspired the Wilsonian proposals.
Pollard questions whether Benedict's policy was his own or Gasparri's. Indeed it is often difficult to decide whether a pope or his ‘prime minister’ is driving the politics of the Vatican. Remarkably, Gasparri was retained in office by Benedict's successor, Pius XI. This had never happened before in ‘the modern history of the papacy’. Both were strong-willed men, a powerful duo, until the future pope, Eugenio Pacelli, succeeded Gasparri in that office. Throughout the years of these popes, the neutrality of the Vatican was challenged by the exigencies of Italian politics. The great achievement was the recognition of the independent Vatican State – fruit of the Conciliazione of 1929. Was this worth the high cost of ‘morally underwriting’ Mussolini and his fascist policies?
Pacelli as Secretary of State had a crucial role to play in this alarming world of dictatorships and authoritarian regimes. He was a career diplomat, honing his skills particularly in Germany where he negotiated the concordat. He had few illusions about the challenge which Nazism posed to humane and Christian values. In 1923 he described Hitler as ‘a notorious agitator’, but in international affairs Pacelli moved tentatively and always with diplomatic caution. The great enemy of the Church was not Nazism or Fascism, but Bolshevism – this was the general conviction of the leaders of the Church during this period. Consequently, Pacelli fumbled relations with the Republican government in Spain and failed to react adequately to the support of the Austrian hierarchy over the Anschluss. The Vatican did not like what was happening but, as with Mussolini's shocking racial laws and the appalling Kristallnacht, diplomatic silence or muted protest seemed often the safest course. Pius XI reacted strongly against the racism of Mussolini's Dichiarazione of 1938, making the famous remark to Propaganda Fide that ‘spiritually we are all Jews’, but the Vatican organs explained that the pope was no ‘philo-Semite’. Anti-Semitism was rife in the Vatican and the Church. Ledóchowski, the ‘black pope’ who Pollard suggests was ‘the Vatican's evil genius’, was a virulent anti-Semite.
Some sympathy must be felt for the leaders of the Church confronted by unscrupulous and ruthless dictators. There was, however, a totalitarianism in the Church which echoed and was tolerant of authoritarianism in secular government. Throughout this period the process of centralising and Romanising the Church intensified. Who could ever forget the trappings of absolute monarchy and hieratic prestige in film clips of Pius XII, borne aloft in the sedia gestatoria? The papacy had become what the author calls a ‘charismatic institution’, its diplomatic outreach ever extending, vast crowds of pilgrims making their way to Rome and, after the war, with Mussolini dead and the Italian monarchy abolished, Pius XII was, as Pollard puts it, ‘the Emperor of Rome’.
The most hotly debated issue arising from the pontificate of Pius XII is his disastrously inadequate response to the Holocaust. Pollard wisely distances himself somewhat from the strictures of Cornwell's Hitler's Pope. But he comments that ‘the diplomat in Papa Pacelli triumphed over the prophet’ and his policy of strict neutrality, his fear of triggering a new Kulturkampf by papal condemnation, his illusory conviction that he had spoken sufficiently clearly against Nazism, these factors have resulted in very serious damage to his reputation. Pollard believes that a more damaging charge can be brought over his failure to condemn atrocities committed in two ‘Catholic’ nations – Croatia and Slovakia. In any case, we remain hobbled in the search for truth about this pontificate by the refusal of the Vatican authorities to release all the relevant papers.
Pollard describes the overall character of the three pontificates as a return to a Leonine (Leo XIII) model of the papacy. Three prelates – Benedict XV, Gasparri and Pius XII. had a background in Vatican diplomacy. This may explain much of the conservatism and caution which marked their response to great crises. Some progress was made in canon law reform, on the liturgy, over Vatican finances and the internationalizing of the Church, but vast challenges had been inadequately faced. There were tremors of seismic events to come. Dominicans have cause to remember the fall-out following Humani Generis which Pollard compares to a ‘re-run of Pius X's condemnation of Modernism’ and particularly the painful disciplining of the worker-priest movement. Even though the post-war Church looked relatively secure, major reform could not long be postponed. This splendid book brilliantly maps the often precipitous road to Vatican II.
The index is extensive, but typographically not well designed and thus quite difficult to use. Moreover, an expensive book like this should have been checked for the ‘typos’ which appear not infrequently in the text. That said, it is a triumph of erudite, lively and fair-minded scholarship and, for church historians, without a shadow of doubt, indispensable.
