While both of these texts are in their own way more than contributions to the on-going scholarly dispute over the role of Pope Pius xii during the Holocaust, as an historian of the Holocaust and its bystanders I cannot avoid reading both in that context. And while both works are compelling, and readers will profit from them, it is difficult to escape the conclusion that both ultimately also bear out that there is little new to say on this issue. I don't mean to suggest that these books should not be read and engaged with – Paul O'Shea's A cross too heavy especially is a wonderful addition to this crowded historiography and sensitively guides the reader through this extraordinarily difficult moral terrain. However, as O'Shea admits, his study, and the same can be said for the late Robert Michael's earlier text too, does not unearth any new information regarding the Church's relationship first with antisemitism and then with the murder of Europe's Jews. In that sense neither text adds much to our understanding of the story of Catholic reactions to the Holocaust, which is after all well established. As such both texts highlight that this is fundamentally a debate about what that story means; it is therefore a primarily moral discourse.

Both texts outline, in fairly relentless detail, the profound relationship between the Roman Catholic Church and antisemitism. Robert Michael's does that over a much longer period (beginning with ‘Pagans and early Catholics’) in order to support his Parkesian view that it was ‘the history of Catholic antisemitism and the set of beliefs that created a climate of opinion that led to untold suffering and millions of Jewish deaths before the Holocaust, and not only made the Holocaust possible but likely’ (p. 7). Indeed Michael's book ends with a valuable dismantling of the distinctions between religious and racial antisemitisms, highlighting the permanence of the stain of Judaism in many Catholic depictions of Jews. In doing so Michael disallows the distinction that is so often drawn to offer Christian Europe an alibi for the destruction of Jews in its midst. As O'Shea's book is much more squarely focused on Pius xii himself, his study of Catholic antisemitism concentrates on the later nineteenth and early twentieth centuries in order to provide readers with a sense of the ideational contexts in which Pius xii was located, which O'Shea argues were shaped by a profound anti-Judaism.

On Pius’ reaction to National Socialist destruction policy, both books again agree on the detail but they relate that narrative in markedly different tones. We know without doubt that Pius xii publicly valued Vatican neutrality above all – and as such never spoke out in clear and unambiguous terms against National Socialism and its anti-Jewish policy. This is not to say that the pope remained silent. The Christmas message of 1942 was understood by Pius to be a condemnation of Nazism and a defence of the suffering, including Jews. It was understood to be that by the Reich Main Security Office of the SS too, but for those outside the Vatican it was an oblique statement which was difficult to decode. For Robert Michael this statement was simply ‘dead end diplomacy instead of public condemnation’ (p. 181) based purely on ‘self-interest rather than moral principle’ (p. 182). It was that self-interest which governed all reactions to Nazism, and which Michael, like many other historians, is prepared to condemn as a moral failing.

The case put forward by O'Shea is a good deal more nuanced, and indeed more pained, even if fundamentally it does not disagree that Pius made choices that are morally difficult to justify. Both O'Shea and Michael agree that there was no direct intervention from the pope which directed Vatican institutions to open their doors to Jews in the period before and during the Nazi round-up of Roman Jews in October 1943. Something Michael simply condemns. But for O'Shea the absence of personal intervention is explained by the nature of Vatican politics, leadership and indeed by Catholic theology – rather than a lack of personal care. The pope had previously instructed those same institutions to provide charity to the suffering, reminding the faithful of their fundamental obligations to care. Any further specific instructions would, according to O'Shea, have undermined the pope's ethereal public position above the everyday. As such we cannot see the lack of personal intervention as necessarily a failure, but an entirely predictable articulation of the Catholic and papal approach to such issues.

Like Robert Michael's book, A cross too heavy also argues that papal reluctance to speak out publicly and clearly against the Nazi regime and its treatment of the Jews is explicable only by the Vatican commitment to neutrality. But for O'Shea this cannot simply be dismissed as the adoption of ‘realpolitik’ over moral action. Indeed, perhaps precisely the opposite was true. As Christ's representative on earth Pius xii's fundamental moral priority was the ‘preservation and salvation of the Catholic Church’ (p. 219). Indeed O'Shea argues, convincingly to my mind, that if we are to understand the well-established narrative of papal responses to the Holocaust, first we must take seriously the pope's own understanding of his obligations as Christ's vicar on earth. As such he concludes that Pius xii was, on his own terms, taking the actions that he thought likely to bring the most benefit to the Jews of Europe, and indeed all of those suffering.

Yet because this is ultimately a moral rather than historical question, O'Shea cannot leave his analysis there. In fact he rejects the moral logic that the pope employed and argues that it was in part dictated by Catholic anti-Judaism. It was that ideational context that prevented the pope from understanding that the Holocaust represented something new, a moral challenge more profound than the conflict that provided its context, a challenge which required a different and one might argue more prophetic response. It was that failure to recognise that the world had changed in Auschwitz that represented the ‘tragedy’ of Pius xii.

These books will not represent anything close to the last word on these painful subjects. The debate will continue, but both represent provocative and thoughtful contributions to a debate too often defined by invective. Paul O'Shea's measured work in particular deserves to be read by students and scholars alike.