The second of March marked the birth and the inauguration of the much contested papacy of Eugenio Maria Giuseppe Giovanni Pacelli, officially known as Pope Pius XII. The latter was the 260th Pope in the history of the Roman Catholic Church. In his homily of 9 October, 2008, in memory of the death of Pius XII on the 50th anniversary of his death, Pope Benedict XVI delineated the driving force which fuelled the challenging ministry of the deceased Pontiff: “Only Christ is the true hope of man; only entrusting the human heart to Him can it open up to love that overcomes hate.”
At the beatification of Pope John XXIII and of Pope Pius IX, John Paul II said: “Holiness lives in history and no saint has escaped the limits and conditioning, which are part of our human nature. In beatifying one of her sons, the Church does not celebrate the specific historical decisions he may have made, but rather points to him as someone to be imitated and venerated because of his virtues, in praise of the divine grace which shines resplendently in them.”
It is a well known fact that Pope Pius XII had to face one of the toughest epochs of European civilisation. In Benedict’s XVI’s words, Pius’s “ministry … began when the menacing clouds of a new world conflict grew over Europe and the rest of the world”. In front of the pernicious threat of an impending war, Pope Pacelli strongly appealed for peace, as his message on the radio on 24 August, 1939, clearly confirms: “The danger is imminent, but there is still time. Nothing is lost with peace. Everything can be lost with war.”
When his fatherly plea was completely ignored, and ever more so, when he was informed of the atrocities that were being committed against the Jews, Pius XII started a series of effective measures in order to protect innocent people. In his 1940 encyclical On the unity of human society, Summi Pontificatus, the Holy Father refuted anti-Semitism by affirming that within the Catholic Church “there is neither Gentile nor Jew, circumcision nor uncircumcision, barbarian nor Scythian, bond nor free. But Christ is all and in all” (§ 48). Moreover, Pius XII’s 1942 Christmas address on the Vatican radio can be considered as his official denunciation of the holocaust. In that emotional radio message the Holy Father categorically condemned the tragedy of “the hundreds of thousands of persons who, without any fault on their part, sometimes only because of their nationality or race, have been consigned to death or to a slow decline”.
On a diplomatic level Pius XII continued to defend the Jewish people. In June 1942, Pope Pacelli personally protested versus the mass deportations of Jews from France, by ordering the papal nuncio to protest to the French Marshal Philippe Pétain and his puppet government against “the inhuman arrests and deportations of Jews”. A year earlier Pius XII disapproved a Slovak Jewish Code that prohibited intermarriage between Jews and non-Jews. The Roman Pope used all his diplomatic tactics outside the formal fora so as to obtain the best results he failed to achieve on the negotiations’ table. In Benedict XVI’s words, Pius XII “often acted secretly and silently because, in the light of the concrete realities of that complex historical moment, he saw that this was the only way to avoid the worst and save the largest possible number of Jews”.
The crowning of Pius XII’s heroic efforts to save the Jewish race are to be found in the immortal expression of gratitude voiced by the Israeli Foreign Minister Golda Meir, who wrote: “During the 10 years of Nazi terror, when our people went through the horrors of martyrdom, the Pope raised his voice to condemn the persecutors and commiserate with their victims.” Then, she ended emotionally: “We mourn a great servant of peace.”
It is my fervent prayer and hope that the Servant of God, Pope Pius XII, the greatest rescuer of Jews, will soon be beatified and proposed as a shining example for those who are, or aspire to be, heralds of peace.
Fr Mario Attard OFM Cap
San Gwann