8

A Policy of Silence

As war clouds built in Europe, national political allegiances added an element of uncertainty to the conclave to select a new Pope. Vaticanisti, knowledgeable observers of the church, tried hard to handicap which cardinals tilted toward the Germans or the Allies.^1,I

The question of who would be the next Pope made its way even to Hitler. An unidentified intelligence source inside the Vatican approached the Gestapo with a tantalizing offer: the election could be fixed for 3 million gold reichsmarks. Once the secret tariff was paid, the Germans could pick the cardinal they wanted and he would win on the first ballot. Only a handful of top Nazis were let in on the secret proposal, and it ignited a furious debate at the highest level of the Third Reich. Hitler was tempted to approve the bribe but at the last moment he passed, worried the offer was too good to be true and might be a setup to embarrass the Nazis.²

Among the cardinals who would pick the next Pope, the front-runners were the pragmatic Secretary of State, Eugenio Pacelli, and Florence’s Cardinal Elia dalla Costa, a pious scholar. The British and French prelates assumed that because of Pacelli’s extensive diplomatic background he would stand for the democracies and resist the totalitarian governments.³ It is a testament to Pacelli’s accomplishments that he was even on the short list, given that he was an acknowledged Germanophile.⁴ He made no secret that his happiest years were his dozen serving as Papal Nuncio to Germany. He was fluent in German, surrounded himself with German advisors and housekeepers, and expressed a “special love” for all things German.⁵

Unknown to the British and French cardinals, the Italian and German ambassadors to the Vatican also encouraged their country’s cardinals to vote for Pacelli.⁶ They were convinced that his admiration of Teutonic culture and history would tilt him toward the Axis powers. But assuming that Pius would align himself with the Third Reich because he loved its culture and people was too simplistic. Having lived there during the rise of Hitler, he was wary of the Führer’s anticlerical sentiments. In 1935, he had interceded to help Jewish refugees abused by the Nazis in the Saar, a small territory returned to German control that year by the League of Nations. Still, Pacelli thought the Nazis were preferable to the communists. As Papal Nuncio, he dispatched regular reports to the Pope about “ferocious Bolshevism.” Ultimately, as a pragmatist, he concluded that since the Nazis were in power, he had no choice but to work with them.⁷

The Roman-born Pacelli descended from a long line of Black Nobles. His great grandfather had been Gregory XVI’s Minister of Finance. His grandfather had founded the L’Osservatore Romano newspaper and Pius IX had tapped him to serve as Undersecretary of the Interior for the Papal States. Pacelli’s father was the chief of Catholic Action as well as the dean of the Consistorial College of Advocates, which prepared cases for beatification. His brother Francesco was a key church negotiator for the 1929 Lateran Pacts. By the time of the conclave, Francesco was a Papal Marquis, and Mussolini had crowned him a prince. Even Pacelli’s two sisters had married ranking Vatican officials.⁸

Pacelli had begun studying for the priesthood when he was only fifteen. There was no doubt that he was smart and that his family name opened doors.⁹ By the time he was twenty-two he had doctorates of philosophy, canon law, and theology.¹⁰

At six feet and a featherweight 125 pounds—with an ash-gray complexion and a high-pitched, nasal voice—the sixty-three-year-old was delicate. When he had been appointed the Nuncio to Germany, he arranged at considerable cost a private rail car for the trip to Berlin. Baron Carlo Monti, a Black Noble, complained personally to Pope Benedict that Pacelli also had an additional car packed with dozens of cases of groceries that would not trouble his stomach.¹¹ An otherwise glowing 1939 profile in Life noted that his doctors were “very severe with him” because he “suffers from liver trouble and neuralgic headaches.”¹²

Pacelli was an avid reader and classical music enthusiast, and a moderately talented pianist and violinist. The cardinals who backed him cited his intelligence and his extraordinary memory. He showed it off once by reading twenty verses of Homer just twice and then reciting them.¹³ He was also not afflicted with Pius’s tremendous rage.¹⁴ No one could recall a single incident in which Pacelli had lost his temper. Even during the tensest stages of the Reichskonkordat negotiations, no matter how many times the Nazis provoked him, he maintained an unflappable expression and never raised his voice. That same steely discipline, combined with his insistence that those who spoke to him did so only in soft tones, made him often seem distant and aloof.

He was the most modern frontrunner ever, the first to have flown in an airplane, shaved with an electric razor, embraced daily exercise, used a typewriter and a telephone.¹⁵ To his supporters in the College of Cardinals, he seemed well suited to lead the church.

As a high-profile Secretary of State, he had earned his share of entrenched enemies and jealous rivals over the years. His opponents spread unsubstantiated gossip in the hope it might slow his momentum.¹⁶ At the start of his clerical career, Pacelli had lobbied for a special Vatican dispensation to live at home with his mother. He stayed there until he was thirty-eight, an unusual accommodation for an ambitious cleric who wanted to rise in the church hierarchy.¹⁷ In the all-men’s world of the Vatican, that gave him a “mother’s boy” rap. Combined with his refined and what some deemed effeminate mannerisms (one writer said he “move[d] with almost feminine grace”), he was the subject of salacious rumors inside the gossip-obsessed Curia.¹⁸

Pacelli once told Sister Pascalina Lehnert—a fiercely loyal Bavarian nun who had been his confidant since becoming his chief housekeeper in 1917—that they could not go on a skiing vacation alone lest they spark unwarranted backroom chatter.¹⁹ There were raised eyebrows and whispered stories about her role as his unofficial gatekeeper. Despite his warning, she accompanied him sometimes on holidays, cooked his food, prepared his clerical robes, and even advised him on whether he was too tired to hold an audience.²⁰ (When he was later Pope, she stood near him after every general Mass to disinfect his right hand since hundreds of the faithful had kissed his fisherman’s ring during the service. Skeptical Curia officials eventually gave her the irreverent nickname of “La Popessa,” the female Pope, and historians rank her as one of a handful of the most influential women who ever lived inside the city-state).²¹

The gossipmongers even tried raising untoward inferences over Pacelli’s close personal friendship he had while a Nuncio with Francis Spellman, then a young American priest serving in the Secretary of State’s office.²² The two had vacationed in the Swiss Alps and spent so much time together that Pascalina reportedly intervened to separate them. But Spellman, whom Pacelli called “Spelly,” won the nun over.²³ Pacelli sent the Curia rumor mill into overdrive when in the summer of 1930 he took both the priest and the nun on a one-month private holiday through Germany, Switzerland, and Austria.²⁴

Most of Pacelli’s critics, however, were not worried about salacious gossip. They were concerned instead about more fundamental shortcomings. He had no pastoral experience since he had spent his career as a diplomat.²⁵ Without having managed his own diocese, there were doubts about whether he had the skills to control the unruly Curia. There was also considerable pre-conclave debate about whether he was too cautious to be a decisive Pontiff. One of Pacelli’s closest aides, Monsignor Domenico Tardini, had said he “was not born with the temperament of a fighter.”²⁶ Diplomats who had worked with him did not think he had a strong enough character.²⁷ “Devoid of will and character,” concluded the Spanish ambassador to the Vatican. Osborne, the British Minister, noted that he was “not devoid of intelligence, but essentially there to obey.”²⁸ The small contingent of foreign diplomats assigned to the Vatican all agreed that while in meetings he was charming, he often seemed uncomfortable. Conversations were frequently reduced to trivial issues and banal niceties. When pressed on any contentious matter, Pacelli would repeat his last sentence several times and then fall silent, hoping that somehow the conversation might change course. In cables to London, Osborne warned British ministers that Pacelli despised a fight and would refuse—even when he thought he was right—to overrule anyone.²⁹

The concerted effort to stop him failed. The fear of war worked in his favor. His years as Nuncio and then Secretary of State convinced most of the cardinals that he was qualified to lead the church during a period of secular strife. On March 2, 1939, in the fastest conclave in three hundred years, Pacelli was selected as the 261st Pope after only three ballots.³⁰ He was the first Secretary of State chosen in more than three centuries.³¹ He too chose the name Pius.

Only three days after he had become Pope, Nazi troops marched into Czechoslovakia and divided it into two states. The next day Pius convened a meeting with four leading German cardinals. He had not called them together to chastise the Führer for the armed aggression. Instead, Pius—who had chosen a dove carrying an olive branch as his coat of arms—believed that a condemnation would only worsen the tension.³² He told the bishops that his election presented the Third Reich and the Vatican with an unprecedented opportunity to repair the fraying relationship he had inherited.³³ He assured them he would personally oversee German affairs and insisted he wanted excellent relations with the country he considered his second home. It was a complete break from the harsh rebuke of Nazi policy that his predecessor had proposed in Humani Generis Unitas. After debating whether he should address the Führer as “Illustrious” or “Most Illustrious,” he gave the cardinals a personal affirmation, in German, to take back to the Reich.³⁴

“To the Illustrious Herr Adolf Hitler, Führer and Chancellor of the German Reich! Here at the beginning of Our Pontificate We wish to assure you that We remain devoted to the spiritual welfare of the German people entrusted to your leadership. . . . May the prosperity of the German people and their progress in every domain come, with God’s help, to fruition!”³⁵ (The next month he directed Archbishop Orsenigo, his Papal Nuncio to Germany, to host a grand reception for Hitler’s fiftieth birthday.)³⁶

Pius, who started every day punctually at 6:00 a.m., immersed himself in the minutiae of the Vatican’s daily operations. Every bishop worldwide was instructed to send him regular written reports. He insisted on being kept up-to-date on all political developments. Papal Nuncios sent daily dispatches from their capitals. And the new Pope sent back instructions to them by shortwave radio.³⁷ After reinstating the discarded Papal tradition of dining alone, and ordering his three Franciscan servers to remain silent, he used mealtimes for an uninterrupted review of his huge pile of daily paperwork.³⁸ One cardinal who later had to rewrite a letter sixteen times before Pius approved it said that “An audience with Pope Pius XII was like a university examination.”³⁹

When it came to the church’s financial wizard, Bernardino Nogara, Pius did not immediately embrace him. While Pacelli was still Secretary of State, Nogara had passed a letter from the CEO of the House of Morgan to Mussolini, warning Il Duce that the United States would resist German—and therefore implicitly Italian—aggression.⁴⁰ Pacelli regarded it a breach of protocol, since he considered diplomacy his exclusive domain; Nogara should stick to finances. Now, as Pope, he announced there would be no further overtures to any government unless he signed off.

But there were other problems when it came to Nogara. Some of those in Pius’s kitchen cabinet did not like Bernardino. Pascalina, for instance, distrusted him.⁴¹ So did the Pope’s cousin, Ernesto Pacelli, who had been the first president of the Black Noble–founded Bank of Rome. Nogara had been a trusted advisor since 1925 for Ernesto’s direct competition, Banca Commerciale Italiana (BCI).⁴² Ernesto warned his Papal cousin that Nogara’s loyalty was to foreigners, not to the Pope.⁴³

Since Nogara had reported directly to the late Pope for a decade, no one in the Vatican was quite sure what he did. In an institution where gossip sometimes seemed an avocation, the secrecy surrounding his work resulted in several scurrilous rumors. Some believed he had squandered or stolen the multimillion-dollar settlement from the 1929 Lateran Treaty.⁴⁴ Others thought he was conspiring with an ultrasecret Masonic lodge against the church.⁴⁵

Pius XII appointed three cardinals to investigate whether there was truth to the malicious whispers.⁴⁶ While that probe was under way, the Pope canceled Nogara’s standing weekly meeting.⁴⁷ The cardinals grilled Nogara as well as all the employees in his Special Administration. They pried into his private life, questioned his friends, and compiled a thick dossier about his personal habits.

The new Pope wanted a fast resolution. Pius remembered all too well the bedlam caused by World War I and the debilitating economic fallout that followed the peace. If the cardinals uncovered evidence of malfeasance, there would be little time to find Nogara’s replacement.⁴⁸

All the fretting ended when the cardinals returned in two months with their report. It concluded that the Vatican was far better off under Nogara’s guidance than at any time in its history. Nogara had invested Mussolini’s $92 million and it had grown over a decade to nearly $1 billion.⁴⁹ Nogara lived in a modest apartment and supported himself mostly from his private savings. Once a week he went to the movies, preferring American films. There was no evidence of anything disreputable in his personal life. He took only a nominal salary of less than $2,000 annually (about $27,000 in 2014 dollars).

Pius marveled, asking the prelates how Nogara did it. “From point A to point B, we have understood it all,” one of the cardinals reportedly replied. “But, your Holiness, Nogara has gone through the entire alphabet. And we are just simple cardinals.”⁵⁰

The report flipped Pius from a Nogara skeptic to an avid supporter. The Pontiff now saw Nogara as a reflection of himself, a loyal servant of God who put service to church above personal and financial gain. He restarted his weekly meetings with Nogara. The only change was that Nogara no longer maintained his notes of those one-on-one briefings.⁵¹

Having resolved any questions about Nogara, Pius turned his attention to the politics roiling Europe.⁵² In the months following his election, there had been a rush of new anti-Semitic decrees passed across the continent. In Italy, Jews were further banned from public employment. The Third Reich ordered them to carry special identity cards (a precursor to a later decree that would force them to wear a yellow star).⁵³ Given his trademark cautious approach, Pius avoided any public comment.⁵⁴

But in some countries, the Pope unwittingly sent the wrong message about anti-Semitism.⁵⁵ He lifted Pius XI’s ban that prevented French Catholics from joining the anticommunist Action Française party. But Action Française was fiercely anti-Semitic. Pius was willing to ignore its anti-Jewish hatred as an inevitable element of its commitment to fighting bolshevism. None outside his senior advisors knew what prompted his decision, and it was instead widely interpreted as a tacit approval of the party’s venomous platform.⁵⁶

In Hungary, the priests who served in parliament had voted for the country’s 1938 race laws. Some bishops and priests supported the Hungarian knockoff of the Nazi Party, the Arrow Cross.⁵⁷ Not only did the Pope fail to urge restraint for any clerical support of the fiercely anti-Semitic party, but Pius again sent mixed signals by promoting József Grösz—a key Arrow Cross backer—as Hungary’s second ranking bishop.

In Slovakia, a country that resulted from the Nazi appropriation of western Czechoslovakia, the Catholic clergy were at the forefront of a national effort to bar Jews from the country’s business and social life.⁵⁸ Priests had founded the principal political party, the unflinchingly anti-Semitic Slovak People’s Party. Jozef Tiso, the President, and Vojtech Tuka, the Prime Minister, were both priests. Pius was Pope only a month when Monsignor Tiso introduced Slovakia’s first race law (eventually thirty-eight race decrees were passed). The Third Reich expressed its “undisguised gratification” that such harsh anti-Semitic statutes “had been enacted in a state headed by a member of the Catholic clergy.”⁵⁹ In line with Nazi racial doctrines, blood triumphed over religion. Anyone who converted to Catholicism after October 30, 1918, was deemed Jewish. Tiso, a theology professor, noted support for the laws in the contemporaneous writings of a Slovakian Jesuit theologian who concluded, “The Church advocates the elimination of the Jews.”⁶⁰ Pius’s reaction to the events in Slovakia was to send Tiso an Apostolic Blessing.⁶¹ He did not do so to ratify its race laws but rather because the Vatican was pleased to have a new Catholic-run country in Eastern Europe. But many Catholic Slovaks interpreted the special blessing as a Papal endorsement.^II

To his credit, Pius reached out to Britain, France, Italy, and Germany to gauge if they were interested in him mediating a peace. But no country took him up on it. Although they all liked Pacelli as a conclave front-runner, now that he was Pope they were uncertain of his loyalties. British intelligence speculated Pius might be an agent for Mussolini. The French Foreign Ministry went one step further, thinking it possible that his pick as Secretary of State, Cardinal Luigi Maglione, was a fascist spy.⁶³ Any role Pius hoped to play as a mediator was crushed in August when the Third Reich and the Soviet Union announced a nonaggression pact. Pius had long tolerated the more thuggish aspects of the German Reich in part because he thought there was no better buffer to Stalin’s red menace. The new alliance seemed to many Vaticanisti a catastrophic development.

The news worsened the next month when the Nazi blitzkrieg into Poland marked the start of World War II. Ninety-eight percent of Poland’s thirty million residents were Catholic, making it one of the church’s largest congregations. Sixteen days after the Nazi invasion, the Soviets attacked from the East. Poland fell on October 6. The Nazis and communists split the country in half.⁶⁴

Pius mistakenly believed that a fast conquest of Poland satisfied Hitler. He assured Cardinal Tisserant—who had been a French army intelligence officer during World War I—that there would be a peace within days.⁶⁵ It was quickly evident that the Pope had greatly underestimated the scope of Hitler’s ambition. The German-occupied half of the country became ground zero for the war on Europe’s Jews, and an Italian consul who had fled told church officials early on about “unbelievable atrocities.”⁶⁶ The American envoy to the Vatican later reported that Pius feared that a “forthright denunciation of Nazi atrocities, at least in so far as Poland is concerned, would only result in the violent deaths of many more people.”⁶⁷

Pius knew there was particular reason to be vigilant about any upsurge in anti-Semitic violence in Poland. The country had a troubled and often violent history with its three million native Jews. When vicious pogroms swept the country in 1938 and 1939, the Catholic press said they were “understandable.”⁶⁸ Top Polish prelates touted blood libel, the belief that Jews murdered Christian infants and used their blood either to make unleavened bread or Passover wine.⁶⁹ The Vatican issued no reprimand a few years earlier when the country’s ranking cardinal, August Hlond, contended “that the Jews are fighting against the Catholic Church, persisting in free thinking, and are the vanguard of godlessness, Bolshevism and subversion.”⁷⁰

Some Polish bishops were alarmed not by German moves against Jews but rather by Nazi-ordered closings of dozens of churches and arrests of hundreds of priests. A few were so frustrated by Pius’s passivity that they even talked about severing their allegiance to Rome in protest.⁷¹ There was more anger among Polish clerics when on March 11, 1940—seven months after the Nazi invasion—Pius received German Foreign Minister Joachim von Ribbentrop for a state visit at the Vatican.⁷² When the Pope learned of the mutiny talk, he ordered his Nuncio to Germany to intercede with the Third Reich to ask for kinder treatment of Polish priests and lay Catholics.⁷³ The Germans turned the Nuncio away.^74,III

Poland was only the first moral challenge Pius faced now that a war was under way. Starting in 1941, Monsignor Giuseppe Burzio, the Nuncio to Slovakia, sent Pius the first of several reports that Jews were being rounded up and executed.⁷⁶ Nuncios in Hungary and Switzerland confirmed the grim account.⁷⁷ When Pius responded the following year it was in two polite, private dissents about the deportations to Karol Sidor, the Slovak delegate to the Vatican. The protests seemed focused on baptized Jews and in any case were too genteel an intervention to give the Slovakian perpetrators any pause.⁷⁸ Since Prime Minister Tiso was still a priest, Slovakia presented Pius with unique leverage. Monsignor Domenico Tardini—one of the Pope’s closest aides—thought it was a mistake not to keep Tiso in check. “It is a great misfortune,” he wrote, “that the President of Slovakia is a priest. Everyone knows that the Holy See cannot bring Hitler to heel. But who will understand that we cannot even control a priest?”⁷⁹ (The Vatican waited until after the war to condemn Tiso, when the Allies hanged him for war crimes.)

Slovakia was no exception. Other countries with large Catholic populations were swept up into Hitler’s killing machine as the Nazi aggression expanded. The conservative Catholic majorities of the conquered nations could have been expected to pay heed to strong leadership from the Vatican. And none better than Croatia, a country that only came into being after Germany conquered and dismembered Yugoslavia in 1941. Members of the lay Croatian Catholic Movement and priests dominated the governing political party, the Ustaša (Rise Up). It was rabidly anti-Semitic, anti-Serb, and anticommunist.⁸⁰ Zagreb’s Archbishop Alojzije Stepinac was head of the Croatian church and also the Supreme Apostolic Vicar General of the Ustašan Army.⁸¹ The Ustašan leader, Ante Pavelić, a devout Catholic, boasted he never missed daily Mass. Pavelić declared fascist Croatia as Europe’s first fundamentalist Catholic nation. The man called the Poglavnik (Führer) considered a good relationship with the Vatican as key as the one he had with the Third Reich.⁸²

Archbishop Stepinac had direct access to the Pope, meeting him in February 1941.⁸³ He lobbied for a Papal audience for Pavelić. When the Yugoslavian government in exile learned that Pius might meet Pavelić, it protested.⁸⁴ Pavelić had been convicted and sentenced to death in absentia by French and Yugoslavian courts for assassinating French Foreign Minister Louis Barthou and Yugoslavia’s King Alexander. Mussolini had provided Pavelić safe haven during the 1930s. He was now the leader of an occupied nation and an illegitimate government.⁸⁵ The British Foreign Office also tried dissuading the Pope from meeting Pavelić, calling the Croat leader “a notorious terrorist and murderer.”⁸⁶ The head of the Catholic Slovene People’s Party petitioned the Pope: “In this moment of urgent danger and necessity, we appeal to Your Holiness and most humbly beg for your intervention.”⁸⁷

Pius, however, considered Pavelić “a much maligned man.” The church had wanted a Catholic state in the Balkans since the Crusades, so it was difficult for the Vatican to turn him away.⁸⁸ Monsignor Tardini told the Ustašan envoy to the Vatican, “Croatia is a young state. . . . Youngsters often err because of their age. It is therefore not surprising that Croatia has also erred.”⁸⁹ The Pontiff agreed to see Pavelić, but in a nod to his critics did not mark it as a state visit.⁹⁰

The Pope and Croatian leader met at the Vatican on May 18, 1941, the same day the Ustaša passed copycat versions of the Nazi’s Nuremberg Laws (Croats were exempt since they claimed to have Nordic origins that somehow tangentially related them to Aryans, the racial subgroup of Caucasians that the Nazis had proclaimed the superior race).⁹¹ The Vatican maintains that no notes or journal entries were kept of that meeting. Whatever the conversation, Pavelić returned home and soon unleashed a bloodbath against the country’s Jews and Orthodox Christian Serbs.

The massacres in Croatia did not begin until the German army withdrew to the east in June to join in Operation Barbarossa, Hitler’s surprise invasion of the Soviet Union. Inside the Vatican, the German offensive into Russia reaffirmed for Pius that he was right for placing his faith in National Socialism as a bulwark against communism. Pius now concluded that Hitler’s 1939 nonaggression pact with Stalin had been only a ploy to buy the Germans time to find the right moment to take on the Russians. A successful German offensive would alter the political face of Europe, removing the most powerful and antagonistic philosophy the Vatican had faced in centuries.

That the Third Reich was now involved in what some clerics considered a holy war against godless bolsheviks meant there was little chance Pius would say anything that might inflame the Germans.⁹² Both the church and the Nazis shared a common goal, the complete destruction of the Stalinist state.⁹³ Just three months after the start of the Russian campaign, Dr. Fritz Menshausen, the diplomatic counselor at the German embassy in Rome, told the Foreign Ministry in Berlin that well-informed officials in the Vatican had repeatedly assured him the Pope privately stood with the Axis forces.⁹⁴

Even if Pius had decided to give the Germans leeway because of their fight against Stalin, there was no reason why he could not intervene to stop the bloodletting when it involved only Catholic Croatians. Pavelić started the first widescale killings in July, only two months after meeting with the Pope.⁹⁵ In Croatia, there was no bureaucracy of mass murder as with the Germans, no systematic march of trainloads of emaciated prisoners to the gas chambers. There was instead brutal and chaotic ethnic cleansing. Many Jews, Serbs, Gypsies, and communists were burned alive. Roving fascist gangs went on mutilation frenzies, cutting off the breasts of women and the genitals of men, and in some cases collecting the eyes of victims as gruesome trophies. The killers put thousands of others onto hanging meat hooks or chopped them up with butcher knives and axes. Pavelić created an exemption to his own race laws to protect his half-Jewish wife.⁹⁶

In contrast to the Nazis who tried to keep victims from learning about their deadly fate until they arrived at a concentration camp, the Croats let word of the terror spread across the tiny country.⁹⁷ Pavelić figured that if he murdered half of all the Serbs, the survivors would either flee or convert to Catholicism.⁹⁸ He intended to kill all of the Jews.

The Vatican faced a unique challenge in Croatia since priests partly ran the murder machinery. Sarajevo’s Bishop Ivan Sarić—later dubbed the “Hangman of the Serbs”—told the faithful that the elimination of Jews was a “renewal of human dignity.”⁹⁹ Catholic priests served in Pavelić’s private bodyguard.¹⁰⁰ A Franciscan monk, Miroslav Filipović-Majstorović, earned the moniker the “Devil of Jasenovac,” a concentration camp where forty thousand Jews and Serbs were slaughtered.¹⁰¹ Three Franciscan monks—also Ustašan officers—served as the Devil’s deputies.¹⁰² Father Bozidas Bralo, Sarajevo’s chief of security, was responsible for enforcing the country’s anti-Semitic legislation. And a popular priest, Father Dyonisy Juricev, wrote in a leading newspaper that it was no longer a sin to kill Serbs or Jews so long as they were at least seven years old.¹⁰³ The role played by clerics in the killings helped absolve ordinary Catholics from being afflicted by a troubled conscience.¹⁰⁴

Branko Bokun was a young ex–Foreign Office worker who had joined the International Red Cross at the start of the war. At twenty-one, the Red Cross gave him a file packed with blood-curdling details about the Croatian massacres. His mission was to get to Rome and to petition the Pope to intervene. Before Bokun left Zagreb, the local head of the Red Cross—and a former chief of Yugoslav counterintelligence—explained why a public condemnation by the Vatican was critical. Bokun recorded it in his diary entry for June 26, 1941, only a month after Pius welcomed Pavelić to the Vatican: “These Catholics are killing Serbs and Jews, because in their primitive minds they are convinced that it will please the Vatican. If the Vatican does not intervene immediately, the fight between Serbs and Croats will reach such proportions it will take centuries to die down.”¹⁰⁵

The Pope and his advisors were probably better informed about what was happening in Croatia than any other country.¹⁰⁶ Every Ustašan military unit had a priest as a field chaplain. The Pontiff’s Undersecretary of State, Monsignor Giovanni Battista Montini—later Pope Paul VI—was in charge of collecting reports from both Croatia and Poland. Aggrieved clerics sent Montini chilling accounts of the atrocities. Every day he briefed Pius, who had a reputation as a Pope who wanted the details.¹⁰⁷ In December 1941, on a state visit to Venice, Pavelić boasted to the Italian Foreign Minister as well as Nogara’s good friend, Giuseppe Volpi, that Croatia’s Jewish population had been reduced by a third.¹⁰⁸

Hitler gave his seminal speech on the fate of European Jewry on February 9, 1942. That was just twenty days after the Wannsee Conference, named for the Berlin suburb where Nazi leaders met and approved the Final Solution, a plan to exterminate the continent’s Jews. In his talk, Hitler promised: “The Jews will be liquidated at least for a thousand years!” The most inflammatory passages were reprinted in Roman newspapers and the Vatican Secretary of State discussed it with Western diplomats. Pius ignored all entreaties that the church publicly distance itself from Hitler’s hateful rhetoric.

The frustrated British Minister to the Vatican, D’Arcy Osborne, told his colleagues that Pius was hedging his bets on a Nazi victory.¹⁰⁹ The Allies sensed that the turning point had been the Nazi invasion of Russia the previous summer.¹¹⁰ Now in the wake of Hitler’s promise to “liquidate” Europe’s Jews, the judgment that the Pope was partisan was reinforced when the Vatican opened diplomatic relations with Japan, the third Axis partner. The United States and Britain had pressed Pius not to formalize ties with Japan, but the church claimed it did not have “sufficient elements of proof” about Japanese atrocities. In any case, the Vatican argued it had a duty to the eighteen million Catholics in the Far East.¹¹¹ Further evidence of the Vatican’s skewed allegiance came in a classified report by Viscount Oliver Lyttelton, Winston Churchill’s Minister of State in the Middle East. Issued the same month as Hitler’s speech, it was passed around a handful of senior British ministers with “to be kept under lock and key” stamped across the top. Based on extensive British intelligence data, Lyttelton concluded that throughout a dozen Middle Eastern countries, “the Roman Catholic Church has developed Fascist and pro-Axis tendencies, which dominate its spiritual functions.” The report revealed that the church helped distribute fascist “political propaganda, and since the war it has lent encouragement to espionage, sabotage and the escape of prisoners of war.” Lyttelton recommended replacing partisan Italian clerics with “non-enemy nationals.” That never happened. When the British reached out to the Vatican, the church shelved the findings.¹¹²

Only a month after Hitler’s speech, SS officer Kurt Gerstein walked into the Berlin office of the Nuncio, Cesare Orsenigo, wanting to confess his firsthand account of the killing of eight hundred Jews at the death camp Belżec.¹¹³ Because a diesel engine that produced the gas kept malfunctioning, it had taken a torturous stop-and-start three hours to kill the naked victims, packed into four tiny rooms of a crude gas chamber. Gerstein could not shake the gruesome images. But Orsenigo’s personal assistant, a priest who was a secret Nazi Party member, intercepted him.¹¹⁴ No one knows what the assistant told Orsenigo, but it was enough for him to turn away the SS officer. Gerstein went next to Berlin’s auxiliary bishop, Otto Dibelius. That bishop sent the first-ever confirmations of the mass murder by an SS officer in both coded cables and diplomatic pouches to the Vatican. It was buried in Rome. Nothing was shared with other countries.¹¹⁵ When Berlin’s Bishop Konrad von Preysing later tried mobilizing his fellow bishops to condemn the ongoing deportation of Jews and even warned they would be answerable before God for their silence, no one supported him. His colleagues argued that the deportation of non-Catholics was troubling but not their duty to address. They refused to tell German Catholics that it was a mortal sin to kill Jews. Preysing concluded that the moral deadlock could not be broken without the Pope’s forceful intervention. Pius did not get involved, allowing those who wanted to do nothing to prevail.¹¹⁶

The Pontiff summoned Croatia’s Archbishop Stepinac to the Vatican the month after the Gerstein report arrived.¹¹⁷ Soon after arranging the meeting the previous year between Pius and Pavelić, Stepinac had begun vocally turning against the bloodlust.¹¹⁸ He had even tried in vain to encourage his fellow Croatian clerics to distance themselves from the slaughter.¹¹⁹ By the time he met with Pius, Nazi mobile killing squads—the Einsatzgruppen—had murdered about 1.5 million Jews in Poland and Russia. Stepinac’s Croatia was on its way to eliminating 85 percent of its Jewish population.¹²⁰

The archbishop returned to Croatia more outspoken than ever against the slaughter. But Pius declined even a Papal letter that Stepinac could share with other church officials.¹²¹

Pius seemed frozen, incapable of decisive action. It was the character weakness that those who had opposed his selection as Pope most feared. Compounding the problem, the Nazis misinterpreted his silence.¹²² The Third Reich had penetrated the Vatican with well-placed informants.¹²³ The Germans had also managed to break the simple codes employed by the church’s diplomatic corps. It was possible Hitler inferred that Pius stayed quiet because he did not object to the killing of Jews so long as the perpetrators were Catholic.¹²⁴

That summer, on the heels of Gerstein and Stepinac, the archbishop of Léopol in Ruthenia (southern Ukraine) reported to the Vatican “the number of Jews massacred in our small region has certainly exceeded 200,000.”¹²⁵ Soon after, an Italian priest, an abbot, and a Latvian archbishop passed along separate accounts of the murder of Jews in Poland and Latvia.¹²⁶ The Polish government in exile released a report estimating that 700,000 Jews had been killed since the Nazi invasion and even cited the existence of gas vans at the Chelmno death camp.¹²⁷ This news, combined with the Pope’s inaction, prompted British Foreign Office officials to complain, “Papal timidity becomes ever more blatantly despicable.”¹²⁸

Franklin Delano Roosevelt dispatched his personal envoy, Myron Taylor, to meet Pius that September.¹²⁹ The goal was to convince the Pope that his moral duty as head of the world’s largest faith trumped the Vatican’s insistence on neutrality. On the day Taylor arrived, in a coordinated effort, Britain, Brazil, Poland, Belgium, and Uruguay appealed to the church, warning that its “policy of silence” likely meant “a renunciation of moral leadership and a consequent atrophy of the influence and authority of the Vatican.”¹³⁰ Two days after his arrival, Taylor received an urgent cable from Washington. The Geneva office of the Jewish Agency for Palestine had passed along an account of German war crimes from two surviving eyewitnesses: “Liquidation of the Warsaw Ghetto is taking place. Without any distinction all Jews, irrespective of age or sex, are being removed from the ghetto in groups and shot. Their corpses are utilized for making fats and their bones for the manufacture of fertilizer.” The report went on to detail mass executions in Lwów and Belżec.¹³¹

Taylor and Pius met privately three times. The American envoy, the former head of U.S. Steel, was an adept negotiator. He knew it would not be easy to convince the Pontiff to take action. He had earlier failed to persuade him to excommunicate Hitler and Mussolini.¹³² Now Taylor suggested that if the Pope did not want to specifically condemn Hitler and the Nazis, he might issue, at a minimum, a more general denunciation of the atrocities themselves.¹³³ He warned Pius that the Nazi crimes were part of a “vile and anti-Christian code of conduct” and should they prevail it “would destroy all semblance of a Christian Europe.”¹³⁴ The Pope averred that he felt as though he had spoken out enough about “the aggressions of war” and the “sufferings of civilians,” but complained that his “appeal was little heeded.”¹³⁵

Before leaving Rome, a frustrated Taylor met with other ranking clerics.¹³⁶ Monsignor Domenico Tardini told him that Pius could not concentrate on the war on the Jews since his priority was to stop communist attacks in the East on Catholics.¹³⁷ When Taylor met with Cardinal Maglione, he pleaded with the Secretary of State.¹³⁸ People of all faiths, not just Catholics, said Taylor, were anxious for the Pope “to denounce the inhuman treatment of refugees, hostages, and above all the Jews in the occupied countries.”¹³⁹

Maglione assured Taylor that the Pope at his first chance “would not fail to express anew his thought with clarity.”¹⁴⁰ As for the report from the Geneva office of the Jewish Agency for Palestine, Maglione later scribbled in the margin: “I do not believe we have the information which can confirm—in particular—this terrible news. Is this not so?”¹⁴¹ Weeks after Taylor left, Maglione gave the Americans an unsigned statement that acknowledged the Vatican had received from other sources “reports of severe measures taken against non-Aryans,” but claimed the church could not “verify the[ir] accuracy . . . and [t]he Holy See is taking advantage of every opportunity offered in order to mitigate the sufferings of non-Aryans.”¹⁴²

That was not true. By then, the Vatican had accumulated chilling evidence of the ongoing civilian carnage in nine countries. Because the church had hundreds of local parishes where the atrocities were taking place, it was uniquely situated to become a repository of eyewitness accounts long before the Allies could confirm the mass murder.¹⁴³

It cannot be determined how much Pius fretted about the fate of Europe’s Jews during 1942. Pius’s personal secretary, Father Robert Leiber, a German Jesuit who met daily with the Pope and kept a diary of their meetings, burned all his papers after the war.¹⁴⁴ What is indisputable is that a good portion of the Pope’s summer was consumed not by concerns about how to stop the civilian massacre but instead on a film he had commissioned about himself. Pastor Angelicus (Angelic Shepherd) was a narcissistic hour-long look at Pius’s life, from his birth to his reign at the Vatican.^145,IV Part documentary, part reality show, it focused on the Pontiff’s daily routine. Among other scenes, Pius was filmed getting into his limousine as his driver dropped to his knees and crossed himself, greeting the Italian royal family, visiting a class of First Communion girls, and working late into the night in his grand office.¹⁴⁷ Pastor Angelicus gave no hint that Europe was in the middle of its greatest war or that Pius was under siege to intervene to stop history’s largest civilian slaughter.¹⁴⁸

Pius’s attention was also diverted from the grim war news by a secret project he had authorized soon after becoming Pope. Three years earlier he had appointed a former aide and chief of the German Catholic Party, Monsignor Ludwig Kaas, to direct four members of the Papal Institute for Christian Archaeology to hunt in the underground Vatican Grottoes for the body of St. Peter, one of Jesus’s original twelve apostles and the founder of the Catholic Church.¹⁴⁹ The small team was sworn to secrecy. The quest for St. Peter’s corpse had long been a Catholic equivalent of the mythical hunt for the Holy Grail. Catholics based their claim to be the one and only true church in part on the belief that Peter had come to Rome from the Middle East, became the first Pope, and was then crucified for his faith. Emperor Constantine in 333 built the original St. Peter’s Basilica over what was thought to be Peter’s gravesite. All Popes descended in a straight line from Peter. Non-Catholics dismissed the story as a fairy tale. Protestant scholars contended that Peter never reached Rome. The Vatican had long sought to find Peter’s tomb to settle the matter. When Pius approved the dig, it was the first time in 350 years that one had been undertaken.¹⁵⁰ To keep it secret, Pius paid for the archaeological hunt from his personal bank account.¹⁵¹

In late May, Kaas reported excitedly to Pius that they had reached a promising spot—almost directly underground from the high altar in St. Peter’s—precisely where an ancient map had plotted the burial monument. With Pius often sitting in a chair just above the opening to the underground pit, the team spent weeks retrieving 250 bone fragments that filled three small lead boxes.¹⁵² Some nights, long after the workers had left, Monsignor Giovanni Montini joined Pius, and the two stood at the opening to the pit and prayed that the bones belonged to Peter.¹⁵³ When the excavation was done, the Pope directed the remains be locked, sealed, and stored in his private apartment.¹⁵⁴ The only person allowed access to what had been found was Pius’s personal physician, Riccardo Galeazzi-Lisi. The general practitioner, with no training in anthropology or forensics, told the Pope that the bones appeared to belong to a single person, probably a man somewhere between sixty and seventy years old. It was a broad-enough description to include Peter.^155,V

By the fall of 1942, Pius refocused on the war. In October the United States created the investigatory War Crimes Commission. On December 17, the Allies for the first time condemned the Nazi extermination of the Jews.¹⁵⁷ On December 21, Kazimierz Papée, the Polish ambassador in exile to the Holy See, handed Monsignor Tardini the most detailed report to date about atrocities.¹⁵⁸ It was the first confirmation of the existence of gas chambers and “as for the number of Polish Jews exterminated by the Germans, it is estimated it has passed a million.”¹⁵⁹

Pius’s reaction was to ask the Allies to agree to a unilateral two-day truce for Christmas Eve and Day so Christians could celebrate the holiday in peace. The United States and Britain said no. To Washington and London, Pius seemed even more detached from the realities on the ground.¹⁶⁰

The Allies had begun a bombing campaign against Italy’s industrial north with major air raids against Genoa and Turin. The month prior, Field Marshal Bernard Montgomery’s decisive victories at El Alamein over Field Marshal Erwin Rommel had put the Germans in full retreat and marked a turning point in the battle for North Africa. And although the Nazis had boasted they would take Stalingrad in days, it had held firm for five months. The Germans showed signs of buckling under the severe Russian winter. If the Pope had been banking on a quick Axis victory, it was far from assured.

On December 17, the Allies approved a declaration condemning German-led genocide in Europe.¹⁶¹ It was blunt, citing “numerous reports” of “this bestial policy of cold-blooded extermination.” From the occupied countries, “Jews are being transported, in conditions of appalling horror and brutality to Eastern Europe.” Poland was “the principal Nazi slaughterhouse” and Jews were either being “slowly worked to death in labour camps” or “deliberately massacred in mass executions.” The Allies promised “that those responsible for these crimes shall not escape retribution.”

That resolution finally fired up Pius to say something about the civilian slaughter. The Pope worried that if he did not, the Vatican might become irrelevant and not play any postwar peace-making role. Pius, who had been trained during his diplomatic service to never confront a matter directly, hesitantly touched on the Holocaust in his 1942 Christmas radio address. In a five-thousand-word, twenty-six-page prepared statement, the Pope devoted several dozen words to it. He condemned “arbitrary attacks” and said that no nation had the right to “herd people around as if they were a lifeless thing.” Near the end, he talked about “hundreds of thousands, who without any fault of their own, sometimes only by reason of their nationality or race, are marked down for death or gradual extinction.”¹⁶² Pius never uttered the words “Jew” or “German” or “Nazi.”¹⁶³ He had reduced the number of victims from the million cited in the report delivered from the Polish ambassador to “hundreds of thousands.”

The Allied envoys at the Vatican thought that Pius had squandered his chance to make a substantive difference. A Papal aide defended the ambiguous statement to the British envoy: “The Pope could not take sides.”¹⁶⁴ When the French ambassador asked Pius why he omitted the Nazis, the Pope said that would have required him to talk about the communists.¹⁶⁵ Mussolini mocked the address to his colleagues, saying it’s “a speech of platitudes” and that any parish priest could have done a better job.¹⁶⁶ Even some of the Pope’s strong defenders, such as American Jesuit Vincent McCormick, admitted the talk was “much too heavy, ideas not clean-cut, and obscurely expressed.”¹⁶⁷ Berlin’s Bishop von Preysing thought it was too abstract to have any impact.¹⁶⁸

A week after the Christmas talk, the Pope met with Myron Taylor’s assistant, chargé d’affaires Harold Tittmann. Pius declined to sign an Allied declaration expressly condemning the Nazi crimes.¹⁶⁹ Tittmann reported to Washington that Pius sincerely believed he had spoken “clearly enough to satisfy all those who had been insisting in the past that he utter some word of condemnation of the Nazi atrocities.” The Pope seemed surprised when Tittmann told him he did not agree.¹⁷⁰ Tittmann thought Pius’s reluctance to be more direct was because he feared that German Catholics, “in the bitterness of their defeat, will reproach him later for having contributed, if only indirectly to its defeat.”¹⁷¹

The year 1943 began with more bishops and lay officials urging the Pontiff to more forcefully use the power of his bully pulpit. In March, Bishop von Preysing informed Pius about more roundups and deportations of Berlin’s Jews and pleaded with the Pope to intervene. But Pius told Preysing he had said all he intended in his Christmas address, that it “was brief but it has been well understood.” All he could do now, he said, was to pray.¹⁷² Those Jews were gassed at Auschwitz.

In a personal audience, the Hungarian Catholic activist Margit Slachta appealed to the Pope to intercede on behalf of the remaining Slovakian Jews—twenty thousand of the original population of ninety thousand. Many of the survivors had converted to Christianity.¹⁷³ Pius “expressed his shock,” she later noted, “[but] he listened to me and said very little.”¹⁷⁴ Vatican records show he seemed more upset that young Jewish girls were being used as prostitutes than by the pending death camp deportations.¹⁷⁵ It took Pius more than a year before he sent a private letter to the Slovak government asking that “Jews who are still . . . [alive] may not be subjected to even more severe sufferings.”¹⁷⁶ The Germans killed fifteen thousand of the remaining Slovakian Jews before the war ended.

Bratislava’s chargé d’affaires, Monsignor Giuseppe Burzio, sent Secretary of State Maglione a letter with details about the killings. He included a note from a parish priest: “A German officer confirmed this coldly and cynically in the presence of a person I know. Jews are killed with poison gas or guns or other means. The girls and women, after suffering every kind of humiliation and violence, are stripped and coldly murdered. Soap is made from the corpses.”¹⁷⁷ That letter was filed in the Secret Archives. The same thing happened to an unsparing nine-page report describing the horrors in Croatia that Archbishop Stepinac presented to Pius in May 1943, his third wartime visit to the Vatican and the Pope.^178,VI

A few months later in July, a French priest, Père Marie-Benoît, met with Pius and implored him to help Jews trapped in the Italian occupation zone in southeastern France.¹⁸⁰ The Pope listened and the Vatican Secretary of State’s office later told the priest that it would work on a rescue plan with the Italian government. Nothing happened. Many of those Jews ended up at Auschwitz.¹⁸¹

Marie-Benoît’s plea came when Pius was otherwise preoccupied. The Allies had landed in Sicily on July 10 and established a beachhead. Their aggressive offensive exacerbated his worries that they might carpet-bomb Rome as had earlier been done to many German cities. The Pope had made an impassioned plea to the British ambassador as far back as 1940, arguing that Rome should be off limits. The city was filled with historical monuments and important religious relics, contended Pius, and loved by people around the globe. Most important, it was home to the Vatican.¹⁸² The Pope warned that any attack on the spiritual center of Catholicism would result in an unequivocal public protest, the very condemnation he refused to make about the Holocaust.¹⁸³ Roosevelt assured Pius that “aviators . . . have been specifically instructed to prevent bombs falling within the Vatican City.” But the British refused to give the same assurance. Anthony Eden, the War Secretary, told Parliament in January 1943, “We have as much right to bomb Rome as the Italians had to bomb London. We shall not hesitate to do so . . . [if] such bombing [is] convenient and helpful.”¹⁸⁴

D’Arcy Osborne reflected a commonly held British government opinion when he later wrote in his diary: “The more I think of it, the more I am revolted by Hitler’s massacre of the Jewish race on the one hand, and, on the other, the Vatican’s apparently exclusive preoccupation with the effects of the war on Italy and the possibilities of the bombardments of Rome.”¹⁸⁵

To the Pope’s distress, as the Allies advanced from Sicily, they began regular bombing runs on northern Italian cities. Pius often stood at the east wing windows of the Apostolic Palace watching through his binoculars as the planes flew over Rome. On July 19, hundreds of Allied planes bombed Rome’s train yards. Stray bombs hit residential neighborhoods as well as damaging the Basilica di San Lorenzo fuori le Mura (Basilica of St. Lawrence outside the Walls). That news was the only time Vatican officials ever saw Pius cry. Cardinal Maglione had never seen him so “deeply saddened.”¹⁸⁶ Pius and Monsignor Montini drove to San Lorenzo that afternoon and prayed with the enormous crowds, handed out money, and announced an extraordinary plenary indulgence for all sins for the victims of air raids.¹⁸⁷ That evening, the Pope dashed off a furious letter to Roosevelt, expressing horror at “witness[ing] the harrowing scene of death leaping from the skies and stalking pitilessly through unsuspecting homes, striking down women and children.”¹⁸⁸

Only a week after the San Lorenzo bombing, King Emmanuel III shocked Italy by arresting Mussolini.¹⁸⁹ The previous day the Grand Council of Fascism voted no confidence in Il Duce’s government. Mussolini’s successor, Marshal Pietro Badoglio, a decorated military officer and tough ex-Viceroy of Italian East Africa, had little zeal for fascism. Badoglio disbanded the Fascist Party two days after assuming power. Within a week he had begun secret armistice talks with the Allies. Badoglio also considered annulling Mussolini’s race laws. He did not, in part, because of mixed signals from the Vatican. The Pope had dispatched Father Pietro Tacchi Venturi to inform the new government that the church did not want to abrogate the law.¹⁹⁰ Tacchi Venturi lobbied only for a repeal of the ban on marriages between Jews and Aryans, so that the church could again regain control over the sanctity of all Italian nuptials.

Any debate between the new Italian government and the Vatican over who controlled mixed marriages seemed unimportant when on September 8 Badoglio announced Italy’s unconditional surrender to the Allies. The Nazis took advantage of the resulting civil strife to seize the northern half of the country. German troops marched into Rome September 10. The next day Hitler topped off the high drama with his first radio address in six months. He threatened Italians for the poor way the nation had treated Il Duce.¹⁹¹ The day after Hitler’s talk, a small squad of elite Nazi commandos freed Mussolini from his mountaintop jail in central Italy and brought him to Germany, from where he announced he would soon return to occupied Italy and form a fascist government in exile.¹⁹²

During two decades the church had become comfortable and familiar with Il Duce and his ministers. Although at times there was considerable friction between the church and Mussolini’s state, the Pope and ranking clerics never felt threatened by the fascists. The Germans, however, were another matter. The Allies stoked the Pope’s anxiety by passing along a succession of rumors that Hitler planned to occupy the Vatican and take the Pope to Germany in shackles.¹⁹³ On the day the Nazis occupied Rome, German troops were visible from the windows of Vatican City. Pius doubled his personal bodyguard and ordered the gates to Vatican City and the giant doors to St. Peter’s to be locked. The Swiss Guards replaced their ornamental pikes with firearms.¹⁹⁴ The Pope’s personal papers were buried under a slab of marble flooring in the palace.¹⁹⁵ The Allied diplomats residing inside the city-state also began burning their more sensitive documents. Cardinals packed their suitcases in case they had to flee.¹⁹⁶

After several days, German ambassador Ernst von Weizsäcker pulled up to the Vatican accompanied by a military vehicle. Weizsäcker, a German aristocrat, was lukewarm in his dedication to National Socialism. He passed along the comforting news that the Germans would “protect Vatican City from the fighting.”¹⁹⁷

While that assurance was earnest, Pius had no idea that the Vatican’s continued sovereignty in the middle of occupied Rome would bring the Nazi war against Europe’s Jews to his very doorstep. Two weeks after the German occupation, SS Obersturmbannführer Herbert Kappler—who the following year would earn the moniker “The Butcher of the Ardeatine Caves” for his massacre of 335 Roman civilians in retaliation for Italian resistance attacks—informed Rome’s Jewish community that unless it delivered 50 kilograms of gold, two hundred residents would be deported to concentration camps.¹⁹⁸ These were the descendants of the oldest Jewish community in Western Europe, predating even the arrival of Christians. Their ancestors had seen Popes build, tear down, and then rebuild the walls of the ghetto in which they lived and worked.

Word of the Nazi extortion spread fast. Rome’s Jews started gathering the gold. The Chief Rabbi, Israel Zolli, was acquainted with the Vatican’s moneyman, Bernardino Nogara. Disguised as a Catholic engineer, Zolli made his way into Vatican City, where he met with Nogara.¹⁹⁹ The Rabbi had wisely selected the ideal person to lobby. Nogara, more than anyone else at the Vatican, was someone to whom everything was filtered as a business transaction. After checking with Secretary of State Maglione, Nogara agreed to help raise the gold. Rome’s Jews would have four years to repay it.²⁰⁰

It is unlikely that Maglione and Nogara would commit to something so sensitive without Pius’s approval.^VII Pius’s inaction throughout the war was mostly in instances in which he thought speaking out might worsen conditions for the church, Catholics, or the victims. There were no such risks when it came to the gold demanded by the Nazis. At most, the church risked the nonpayment of the loan. The Nazis simply wanted their tribute; they did not care how Rome’s Jews got it. It was even possible that Hitler and his top officials might like that they were able to wrest away even a small amount of the church’s wealth.

On September 28, Zolli again visited Nogara. This time it was to inform him that the Vatican gold was no longer needed since the Roman Jews had raised it themselves.²⁰²

On October 16, the stakes changed dramatically. Despite receiving the gold, the Nazis still decided to move against the Rome ghetto. The Pope became an eyewitness to the Holocaust: the Nazis rounded up 1,200 Jews.²⁰³ The operation was directed by Obersturmbannführer Kappler. Although the ghetto was about a mile from the Vatican, the Nazis transported the Jews along the outer perimeter of a piazza a mere 250 yards from Pius’s windows.²⁰⁴ The Nazis locked the Jews into the Italian Military College in Via della Lungara, only a few hundred yards from the Vatican.²⁰⁵ Two days later, trucks transferred one thousand of them—896 women and children—to Rome’s main rail station. There they were jammed into freight cars with little food and water and no toilets.

Pius said not a public word in support of Rome’s Jews. No one then knew that Ambassador Weizsäcker had told the Pope a week earlier of an impending “resettlement.”²⁰⁶ The Vatican never warned Jewish leaders, evidently fearing that it might put both Rome’s Jews and the church at risk of Nazi reprisal.²⁰⁷

On the day of the roundup, Weizsäcker asked Secretary of State Maglione whether the Vatican intended to issue any statement. Third Reich officials privately worried that the deportations could spark strong opposition from war-weary Italians who did not share the German fervor for eliminating Jews. If the Pope weighed in against the deportations, Nazi leaders in Berlin had discussed scrapping their plans.²⁰⁸ According to Maglione’s notes, he told Weizsäcker, “It is sad for the Holy See, sad beyond telling that right in Rome, under the eyes of the Common Father, so many people have been made to suffer only because they belong to a particular race.”

Weizsäcker again asked if the Pope intended to say anything.

“The Holy See would not want to be put into the necessity of uttering a word of disapproval,” Maglione said.²⁰⁹

Pius feared that any squabble with the Nazis over the plight of Rome’s Jews might only benefit the communists. If he castigated the Germans in public, Hitler might use that as a pretext to turn Rome into a military garrison and convert it into a barrier against the advancing Allied armies. That, of course, would destroy much of the city, something Pius feared.²¹⁰

The same day as the roundup, the Vatican appointed Alois Hudal, an Austrian bishop based in Rome, to continue any further talks with Weizsäcker.²¹¹ Hudal was the leading bishop urging the Aryanization of Catholicism, in which Christ was an “intellectual Führer.”²¹² He was friendly with dozens of high-ranking Nazis and in 1936 had written The Foundations of National Socialism, a virulently pro-Nazi treatise.²¹³ Pius and his advisors evidently thought Hudal might carry more gravitas with Nazi officials than the Pope’s Italian Secretary of State.²¹⁴ It had been Pius who appointed Hudal as the rector of the Pontificio Santa Maria dell’Anima, Rome’s theological school for German seminarians.²¹⁵ The two were friendly (a friendship from which the church tried hard after the war to distance itself).

At near midnight on that same day, Weizsäcker sent two telegrams to the Foreign Office in Berlin. He summarized what he had learned from Hudal, whom the ambassador referred to as “an authoritative Vatican dignitary, who is close to the Holy Father.”

“I can confirm that this represents the Vatican’s reaction to the deportation of the Jews of Rome,” wrote Weizsäcker. “The Curia is especially upset considering the action took place, in a manner of speaking, under the Pope’s own windows. The reaction could be dampened somewhat if the Jews were to be employed in labor service here in Italy.”²¹⁶

That was a great relief to the Nazis in Berlin. It confirmed the Pope would not stir up Catholic Rome against the deportation of the Jews. The contingency plans prepared in case any Papal condemnation ignited civilian unrest were shelved.²¹⁷

The day after the roundup, Secretary of State Maglione privately requested that the Germans release any baptized Jews, what the Vatican called “Aryanized Jews.” The Nazis initially refused. Later that day they set free nearly 250 prisoners, but those were non-Jews, foreigners, one Vatican official, and some “Aryan servants” who had been visiting the ghetto and swept up in the raid.²¹⁸

The Nazis did not want to keep the Jews in Rome long. Just two days after they were detained, a train left packed with a thousand Jews. The next day, in a remarkable showing of the degree to which Vatican officials failed to understand the moral and historical significance of the events unfolding around them, the church formally thanked Hitler’s Foreign Minister, Joachim von Ribbentrop, for the German military’s respectful wartime behavior to the city-state.²¹⁹ And the Vatican asked for more Nazi forces to keep Rome’s communists under control.

Five days after the boxcars left Rome, the log at Auschwitz marked their arrival at the Third Reich’s largest extermination center: “Transport, Jews from Rome. After the selection 149 men registered with numbers 158451–158639 and 47 women with numbers 66172–66218 have been admitted to the detention camp. The rest have been gassed.”²²⁰ Only fifteen survived the war.^221,VIII

After the war, Pius wrote in his personal journal about which single day he believed would “be known in history as the most sorrowful for the Eternal City during the Second World War.”²²³ For Pius it was the Allied bombing raid that accidentally damaged the Basilica di San Lorenzo fuori le Mura. He did not mention anything about the roundup and deportation of Rome’s Jews.

Sir D’Arcy Osborne had an hour-long private audience with Pius the day after the Nazis transported the Roman Jews to Auschwitz.²²⁴ Osborne asked under what conditions the Pope might consider abandoning Rome. Never, said Pius, unless he was forcibly removed. He had no complaints, he told a surprised Osborne, about the Nazi occupation of the city.²²⁵ When Osborne raised the matter of the deported Jews, the Pope did not answer. He had decided that silence would be his response to any direct questions about them.²²⁶

Osborne watched in dismay only a few weeks later when a stray “British” bomb hit a mosaic workshop in Vatican City. Pius was furious. Two members of the Pope’s kitchen cabinet, his nephew, Prince Carlo Pacelli, and Count Enrico Galeazzi, asked the German ambassador to deploy antiaircraft artillery inside the Vatican. That never happened. The Allies convinced Pius and his aides that the so-called bombing raid was a Nazi-sponsored propaganda mission.²²⁷

Within two months of the Rome deportations, the Nazis seized another 7,345 Jews in northern Italy. Most went to Auschwitz, where 6,746 were gassed. At a detention camp near Trieste, SS and Ukrainian guards murdered 620 Jews, many by vicious beatings, others by execution.²²⁸

The massacres in neighboring European countries dwarfed the number of victims in Italy. Only a couple of months after the roundup in Rome, Maglione noted that Poland’s Jewish population had been decimated from 4.5 million before the war to 100,000. The Cardinal Secretary got some details wrong, but his notes serve as a contemporaneous marker about how much was known inside the Vatican about the Holocaust. Maglione wrote about the “horrendous situation” and how Jews were “finished off under the action of gas” at “special death camps at Lublin [Treblinka] and near Brest Litovsk [Sobibor].”²²⁹ That coincided with a letter to Pius from a Warsaw parish priest, Monsignor Antoni Czarnecki, providing jaw-dropping details of gassings at Treblinka.

Some ranking prelates ignored Pius’s policy of silence and bravely tried to slow the Nazi murder machinery. The Hungarian Papal Nuncio, Angelo Rotta, repeatedly risked his life to counter Nazi directives and help Jews by providing baptismal certificates and passports. Now, from April through May 1944, he told Pius that the Nazis—who had occupied Hungary and shoved aside the puppet government only that March—had begun deporting the country’s Jews to Auschwitz.²³⁰ With the enthusiastic help of the Hungarian fascist Arrow Cross, Germans began a feverish conclusion to years of genocide, as nearly half a million Jews were sent to Auschwitz over several months.

Rotta asked once again for Pius to issue a directive to stand against the Nazi deportations. The second-highest-ranking Hungarian prelate, Archbishop Gyula Czapik, had earlier advised his colleagues “not [to] make public what is happening to the Jews; what is happening to the Jews at the present time is nothing but appropriate punishment for their misdeeds in the past.”²³¹ In a religion where Pius’s predecessor had established Papal infallibility, administrators of the Hungarian church—as did the leading clerics in most European countries—looked to the Pope for direction. Priests, likes those in Croatia who ran the death camps, were free to do as they wished since the Pope never issued a decree prohibiting their role in murdering Jews.²³²

Most frustrating about Pius’s silence is that there was less reason than at any time during the war for the Pope to have feared German retaliation for speaking out against the mass murder. By the time of Rotta’s warnings, it was evident the Germans were losing the war. The successful Allied invasion at Normandy on June 6 added to the growing battlefield momentum of Allied and Soviet troops. Diplomatic rumors had reached the Vatican that some high-ranking Nazis were angling for a negotiated truce.

By now the Allies knew precisely what was happening at Auschwitz, from a bone-chilling account told by two escapees (the so-called Auschwitz Protocols).²³³ Slovakian Nuncio Monsignor Burzio summarized the information from the two escapees into a grim, single-spaced, twenty-nine-page report that he sent to the Pope that May. The Papal Nuncio to Turkey—Bishop Angelo Giuseppe Roncalli, later Pope John XXIII—received the Auschwitz Protocols from a friend, a delegate to the Jewish Agency, a humanitarian aid organization. The future Pope cried as he read it. Roncalli expressed his frustration and anger about the inaction of his Vatican superiors.²³⁴

With their worst fears realized in the closing phase of the war, the Western governments, Protestant leaders, and neutral countries such as Switzerland bombarded Pius with urgent pleas for him to invoke his moral authority to try to save Hungary’s Jews. The Pope’s trusted apostolic delegate to the United States, Archbishop Amleto Cicognani, sent a direct appeal from four prominent rabbis who warned that the lives of possibly a million Jews were at stake. A strong appeal by Pius might shame the Nazis into sparing them. Palestine’s chief rabbi made a similar plea.²³⁵

But during the spring of 1944 Pius again appeared to be more fixated on averting any Allied bombing of the Vatican than he was about the frenzied end of the Holocaust. When Allied bombers mistakenly flattened the sixth-century St. Benedict Abbey at Monte Cassino, eighty miles south of Rome, pictures of German troops risking their lives to save precious objects from the smoldering ruins scored the Nazis a major propaganda coup.²³⁶ Pius told the Americans and British that they would “stand guilty of matricide before the civilized world and in the eternal judgment of God” if they bombed Rome.²³⁷ Unknown to Pius, Roosevelt was determined to take the capital before the presidential elections that November, even if it meant bombing sorties.²³⁸ The Germans played off of Pius’s obsessive fears by moving their command operations in the shadow of the Vatican, assuming that the city-state afforded them protection from Allied airpower.

Pius knew it was only a matter of time before the Americans liberated the city. The Pontiff directed his Secretary of State to formally request of Osborne that “no Allied colored [nonwhite] troops would be among the small number that might be garrisoned at Rome after the occupation.” The Pope thought black troops were more prone to raping civilians than white soldiers.²³⁹ When he was Nuncio to Germany, he accepted as fact the often repeated tales that French African troops had committed terrible assaults on women and children in the post–World War I occupation of the Rhineland.²⁴⁰ Pius also repeated his opposition to the Allies’ insistence on an unconditional Nazi surrender. He feared it would devastate Germany and advance communism.²⁴¹ The Pope’s comments about “colored troops” and his desire that the Allies not force the Nazis to fully surrender added to the Western perception that Pius was out of touch.²⁴²

On June 5, 1944, Allied troops liberated Rome. The Vatican had fretted that Hitler might order his army to mount a destructive door-to-door battle to hold the city, but German troops simply retreated north. Although relieved the Germans were gone, Pius spent his first day calling his Secretary of State to insist the Americans move a tank that he could see from his window. He thought its proximity to the Vatican showed a lack of respect for the church’s sovereignty.²⁴³

With the battle for Rome over, Pius basked in the unabashed adoration of Romans, most of whom hailed his role in saving the city from destruction. Newspapers bestowed on Pius a medieval title, Defensor Civitatis (Defender of the Citizenry), and it stuck.²⁴⁴ But it did not take long before Allied representatives at the Vatican brought Pius back to earth, turning his attention again to the mass deportations under way in Hungary. Pius told Osborne that he was not sure why everyone seemed so agitated only about the Jews in Hungary. What about Soviet atrocities against Catholics in Poland? Even Osborne, accustomed to the many ways by which Pius avoided taking any responsible action over the mass murder of Jews, was surprised at this latest canard. He told the Pope that the British had seen no evidence of Russian crimes, and whatever might have been done to Catholics did not compare to the systematic slaughter of the Jews.²⁴⁵

Pius consulted with Cardinal Maglione, Monsignor Montini, and some other aides. He would not, Osborne was told, criticize the Nazis. On June 25, the Pope instead sent a short telegram to the Hungarian Regent, Admiral Miklós Horthy: “We personally address Your Royal Highness, appealing to your noble sentiments and being fully confident that you wish to do all in your power in order that so many unfortunate people be spared further afflictions and sorrows.”²⁴⁶

Western governments sent their own warnings to Horthy alluding to criminal consequences for helping the Nazis move against the country’s Jews.²⁴⁷ Horthy dithered for several weeks before he stopped cooperating with the German deportations. By that time, half of Hungary’s Jews had been murdered. The hiatus was short lived. That October, a hard-line Arrow Cross government shoved Horthy aside and resumed the transports to Auschwitz. The Allies asked the Pope for another note since the Arrow Cross leadership was mostly Catholic. Pius refused. He resented that he felt pressured into his first plea to Horthy. Once was enough he decided. Although the Papal Nuncio, Angelo Rotta, continued to send a steady stream of ghastly details to the Vatican, Pius did not again react.^248,IX

Other than his short and generic telegram over the Hungarian deportations, there is no journal entry or other contemporaneous account of Pius or any of his top advisors anguishing over what else they might do to stem the genocide. Pius’s public silence and inaction in the face of such barbarity has sparked for decades a fierce debate among historians and theologians as to why he did not do more. The extremes are on the one hand the depiction by British historian John Cornwell of Pius as “Hitler’s Pope,” and the other is the Vatican’s move to anoint Pius a saint (in 2009 Benedict XVI bestowed on him the title of “Venerable,” meaning the church has officially acknowledged his Heroic Virtue, the first step in Pius becoming a saint).²⁵⁰

Most historians search for the truth somewhere between those two poles. Those less partisan than the Vatican, but still sympathetic to the Pope, contend that he was convinced his cautious approach spared the Jews even greater atrocities. In 1940, Pius had told the Italian ambassador to the Vatican that if he had forcefully spoken out, he feared “making the plight of the victims even worse.”²⁵¹ And he worried—with some justification—that the Nazis might use such a Pontifical statement to declare him an enemy and to wage a war against the church, arresting clergy, limiting the rights of Catholics to worship, bombing or seizing Vatican City, and possibly imprisoning him.²⁵²

Some explain away Pius’s wartime actions by noting that his great love for Germany made him resistant to believing the gory details that filtered into the Vatican, and then reticent to act. The public silence of Pius was no worse, others assert, than that of the Allied governments, which before the end of the war knew as much as the Vatican about the atrocities. The Allies still said little publicly and refused to bomb the railway lines on which the packed deportation trains kept running on schedule to Auschwitz.

But the Vatican had a unique power to influence events compared to the Allies. As the head of the world’s then largest religion, Pius wielded a moral authority far beyond the scope of any Western government. The church counted millions of loyal worshippers inside Nazi Germany and the occupied countries. They had become accustomed to Popes setting policy on critical and often divisive issues. Catholics dominated the leadership of every puppet government allied with the Nazis. Many devout Catholics maintained their faith at the same time they worked at concentration camps and ran the Third Reich’s bureaucracy of mass murder. Some priests were involved in both fascist politics and the civilian slaughter. The Pope’s passive behavior did nothing to disabuse them of that contradiction. In an era in which the faithful were more likely to follow Pontifical decrees, an unequivocal declaration from Pius that it was a mortal sin for any Catholic to aid in the killing of Jews might have dealt a serious blow to Hitler’s Final Solution.

The justifications offered for Pius’s silence seem insufficient to explain why he failed in his spiritual and moral duty to condemn in public a genocide that unfolded during his Papacy. Pius did not symbolically excommunicate Hitler and Mussolini or banish Mein Kampf to the Vatican’s list of disapproved books. He did not renounce the Reichskonkordat even after it was evident the Nazis had violated every substantive article. The best Pius could do was muster vague appeals against the oppression of unnamed victims.

There is little doubt that Pius’s diplomatic training taught him to write and speak in periphrases and so as not to offend anyone.²⁵³ He might have better served the church during the war as the Vatican’s Secretary of State rather than as the leader of hundreds of millions of Catholics who considered him the Vicar of Christ. The tool he knew—diplomacy—was useless when dealing with Hitler and institutionalized mass murder.

Pius believed—as had all Popes before him—that his first obligation was to protect Catholics. He would do nothing that might heighten the risks for the church in Germany, Austria, and the occupied countries. Western diplomats privately dubbed this “the faith of a long perspective.” It was the idea that the church had survived nearly two thousand years of wars, horrendous Popes, the persecutions by unfriendly Kings, and the sacking of Rome by foreign armies. “The Vatican thinks in centuries and they regard Fascism as a transitory interlude,” concluded British envoy D’Arcy Osborne.²⁵⁴

A further consideration that likely pushed the Pope to stay silent was rooted in the church’s own tortured history of anti-Semitism. Pius and his top advisors had been raised and inculcated with a religious bias against Jews that was an integral part of Catholic theology and liturgy. Centuries of Catholic traditions had helped sow the seeds of Hitler’s hatred toward Jews. It was a Pope, Paul IV, who had in the sixteenth century issued a decree that created ghettos. He ordered Jews under Papal control into them, ruling they were condemned to “eternal slavery” for crucifying Jesus.²⁵⁵ Pius XII—when still a cardinal—had written and talked at length about how Jews were the masterminds of Russia’s godless Bolshevik Revolution, and that their main goal was to destroy Christian civilization.²⁵⁶ That learned anti-Semitism meant there was little urgency to help the Jews.²⁵⁷ And it might even have contributed to a sense that the horrible events unfolding in Europe were somehow God’s will—what Catholics called divine law—against the people who had rejected Christ.²⁵⁸

There is another factor, however, that likely influenced Pius to remain silent in the face of overwhelming evidence of mass murder: money. A similar dynamic had played out in 1935 when Pius XI remained quiet during Italy’s brutal aggression into Ethiopia. The church then had investments in munitions companies and was inextricably bound with Mussolini’s government. Any moral duty for the Pontiff was lost in the pursuit of profits.

In World War II, Pius XII’s silence helped protect a complex web of interlocking business interests with the Third Reich, relationships that yielded significant profits for the Vatican. In some cases they are dealings the Church has denied to this day. And some of the biggest returns came from Nazi-occupied countries, the same ones in which the Pope mostly turned a blind eye to mass murder. It was in the killing fields of Eastern Europe that Bernardino Nogara created a labyrinth of multijurisdictional shell companies that kept profits, bloody and not, flowing into the Vatican’s coffers.

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I. In the twentieth century, the term Vaticanologists also came into wide use. It is most commonly used to refer to journalists who cover the Vatican.

II. A year later, Tiso passed new laws banning marriage between converted Jews and Catholics. Pius understood that unless Jews were assured that conversion spared them from discrimination and punishment, the church would have a tough time getting converts. Since Tiso was a priest, Pius expected him to be receptive to that argument. But Tiso was unmoved. The Pope stripped Tiso of his monsignor’s title, demoting him to merely a priest.⁶²

III. The best the activist clerics mustered from their repeated entreaties was a private letter by Pius nearly two years later. He authorized five thousand copies be distributed through the church’s underground. In that letter, the Pope expressed his solidarity with Polish Catholics. Even then, he did not mention Jews or criticize the Nazi violence against both Jews and the church.⁷⁵

IV. “Pastor Angelicus” came from supposed prophecies by St. Malachy O’Morgair, a twelfth-century monk, to describe a future Papacy that Pius believed was his. Although some Catholic scholars have dismissed the “prophecies” as a sixteenth-century forgery, Pius wholeheartedly embraced them, believing they forecast that he had a divine destiny.¹⁴⁶

V. It was eight years, 1950, before Pius announced that he believed St. Peter’s grave had likely been found. He did not mention any bones. They were still in his apartment. There they remained for another fourteen years until an Italian anthropologist examined them and concluded they belonged to several people and even some animals. That same year, 1964, Margherita Guarducci, a professor of Greek epigraphy at the University of Rome, published a book asserting that some of the bones were indeed those of the apostle. She based her case on a questionable translation of Greek graffiti at the excavation site. Although leading anthropologists ridiculed her conclusion, it carried much weight inside the Vatican. On June 26, 1968, Pope Paul VI (who, as Monsignor Montini, had joined Pius at St. Peter’s during the dig) declared that the church had recovered the bones of St. Peter. In November 2013, Pope Francis concluded a Year of Faith by displaying the bones publicly for the first time since their discovery.¹⁵⁶

VI. As for Stepinac’s nine-page document, not only did the Vatican lock it inside the Secret Archives, it is still sealed, “accidentally” withheld from a postwar Vatican production of documents. The Secret Archives are estimated to contain fifty-two miles of shelving packed with documents, some dating back to the seventh century. The collection is stored today in temperature-controlled, fireproof underground chambers dubbed the “Bunker.” Over the centuries important files were lost. Much of the Inquisition’s history was burned in 1559. Part of the archive was lost in 1810 when it was transported to Paris by Napoleon’s troops. Some documents were lost in transit or later sold in bulk for the value of the paper itself. Most files about Pius XII were sealed for seventy-five years from the beginning of his pontificate. The date upon which they would have been made public was March 12, 2014. It passed without any documents released by the Vatican.

It was during this time—May 1943—that Ante Pavelić, the murderous head of Croatia, wanted to again visit the Pope. Although the Vatican had by then been inundated with firsthand accounts of the slaughter in Croatia, Secretary of State Maglione inexplicably assured Pavelić there would be no problem, but reminded Pavelić that he could not “be received as a sovereign.” And Pius promised Pavelić another Apostolic Blessing. Only the deteriorating conditions on the battlefield caused Pavelić to cancel the trip.¹⁷⁹

VII. Some historians have thought any offer of help in gathering the gold was out of character for the risk-averse Pius. Defenders of Pius have often distorted the offer of a loan by converting it instead into an outright gift. Some have Zolli skipping Nogara entirely and appealing directly to the Pontiff. Others claim Pius added a million lire as a gift on top of the gold. On the other hand, hard critics of Pius refuse to credit the Vatican with any role. That is because the story relating the Vatican’s offer of assistance was not told until 1954, eleven years after the incident, in a book by the former Chief Rabbi. By then, Zolli and his wife had made a stunning 1945 conversion to Catholicism, and he had taken the Pope’s given name, Eugenio. He even had a job in the church’s Pontifical Biblical Institute. Zolli was simply concocting the story, some claimed, to buttress the church’s philo-Semitism during the war. But a contemporaneous letter from Nogara to Secretary of State Maglione leaves no doubt that Zolli’s recollection is fact based. In that September 29, 1943, letter, Nogara confirmed that the Vatican had completed accumulating the gold Zolli had requested.²⁰¹

VIII. Defenders of Pius XII claim that there were no more roundups of Rome’s Jews because the Pope covertly intervened. In fact, another thousand Jews were seized after October 16, with not a single word of protest by Pius. The other 2,500 to 3,000 Roman Jews not found by the Nazis went into hiding. Some found safety in monasteries and nunneries. A diary from the Augustinian nuns of the Roman convent of the Santa Quattro Coronati—leaked by the church in 2006 from the Secret Archives—claims that Pius ordered “hospitality be given in the convents” to “his children, also the Jews.” In 2013, Jerusalem’s Yad Vashem Holocaust Memorial softened the text in an exhibit to acknowledge that “the lack of overt and unequivocal guidance by the Vatican left the decision to initiate rescue of Jews to the heads of Catholic institutions. Some superiors of convents, monasteries and other institutions opened their doors to Jewish fugitives, sometimes with the knowledge of the Vatican.” Contemporaneous wartime documents reveal that the Curia was divided over whether Catholic institutions should shelter Jews. The credit for saving many Roman Jews belongs to Père Marie-Benoît, the priest who had beseeched Pius three months earlier to intervene on behalf of Jews in the Italian-occupied French zone. Israel honored him in 1966 as one of the Righteous Among Nations for his brave work. A mostly spontaneous network of lay Italians and parish priests helped those on the run.²²²

IX. When Secretary of State Maglione died in August 1944, Pius considered his old friend Cardinal Spellman for the role. An internal FBI memo dated April 12, 1945, reported a “persistent rumor” that Spellman was at the top of a short list. But the opposition to Spellman inside the Curia was furious. Pius was so confident of his own diplomatic capabilities that he decided not to appoint anyone, instead assuming the duties, assisted by Maglione’s two undersecretaries, Monsignors Domenico Tardini and Giovanni Montini. “I don’t want advisers,” Pius told Tardini. “I want people who do as I say.” Pius left the Secretary of State office empty for the rest of his tenure, another fourteen years.²⁴⁹