Robert Graham

Robert Graham, who probed the secrets of the Vatican, died on February 10th 1997, aged 84

The Roman Catholic church is not easily rattled. It seeks to rise above what it regards as petty attacks. “Confident in its destiny,” Robert Graham wrote in his book Vatican Diplomacy, the church “does not reckon in terms of years but of centuries”. All the same, in the 1960s Catholic leaders became worried by persistent stories that Pope Pius XII, the church’s head during the second world war, had chosen to ignore German atrocities against the Jews and others.

The crisis facing the Vatican had something in common with the claims now being made by a new generation that Switzerland was Germany’s willing banker during the Nazi period. Both Switzerland and the Vatican, tiny in area but a sovereign state nevertheless, claimed neutrality in a Europe mainly under fascist rule. Did their accommodation with Europe’s masters extend to the unspeakable: to condoning the Holocaust, the name Jews give to the mass killing of their people?

Mr Graham was a clever choice by the Vatican to probe the career of Pope Pius. He was an American, so was distanced, at least geographically, from the Vatican cabal. He had a mildly colourful background. His father, Charlie Graham, had played professional baseball for the Boston Red Sox. But Robert Graham was, as he put it, “batting for God”. He belonged to the Jesuits, a Catholic order noted for its rigorous discipline and scholarship.

His Vatican Diplomacy was not only a first-rate piece of scholarship, it was elegantly written. Mr Graham’s skill as a communicator had been honed while working for America, a Jesuit magazine with a reputation for tackling controversial subjects and reporting them with a pithiness unusual in religious publications. Clearly the place to start the most important investigation of his career was in the archives of the Vatican. Mr Graham packed his bag and his typewriter and headed for Rome. He stayed there for most of the rest of his life.

Whatever pithiness Mr Graham had acquired in America was abandoned when he immersed himself in the archives of the Vatican. His report on Pope Pius runs to a dozen volumes. Those interested in exploring the thinking of a pope under extreme worldly pressures can find details of many of the documents unearthed by Mr Graham in the library of Georgetown University, which has thoughtfully put them on the internet. Although any summary stands the risk of seeming a distortion, it is fair to say that Mr Graham emerged at the end of his inquiries as a strong defender of Pope Pius.

The main complaint of the pope’s critics was that he did not make a public statement condemning the murder of Jews when the extermination camps first came to the knowledge of the Vatican. Such a statement, it was argued, might have halted the massacre. At least, a pastoral letter stating that killing Jews was a sin might have deterred collaborators from delivering them to the Germans.

Mr Graham said that Pope Pius, working quietly behind the scenes, helped the underground to rescue more than 800,000 Jews from the gas chambers, hiding them in churches and in the Vatican itself.

Speaking in public against the oppressors would, the pope believed, have made matters worse for Jews and Catholics. In Dachau, a concentration camp, 2,000 Catholic priests were held. A speech against the Germans would have invited reprisals.

Pope Pius has also been accused of favouring Germany’s attack on the godless Soviet Union. Mr Graham noted that Germany tried to get the pope to give his approval to the Russian campaign, and even to declare it a crusade. But, to Germany’s disappointment, he said nothing about the invasion. This time the papal silence was more conspicuous.

However, despite Mr Graham’s efforts, it is unlikely that many critics of Pope Pius changed their minds, just as Switzerland’sname will remain besmirched for many people even if every Swiss banker turns out to have been a secret resistance leader. The Deputy, a play by Rolf Hochhuth, a German, which first caused a stir in the 1960s by depicting Pope Pius as a German collaborator, is still being performed in various places. The Statement, a novel by Brian Moore and currently selling well, is about an elderly French war criminal sheltered by the Catholic church. Mr Graham, though, believed that the future would provide a less prejudiced audience for his work; that history had a more open mind.

In his researches in the Vatican’s and other archives Mr Graham came across many an embarrassing skeleton, not directly connected with the war. In a file he labelled “hoaxes, howlers and humbug” there is an account of an American spy planted in the Vatican who filed colourful, and entirely imaginary, reports of chats with the pope. Robert Graham “unloaded all my stuff before I pop off”, and told his colleagues in the Vatican that it was time for him to return home to his native California. In a few months he was dead.