This article is taken from the December/January 2023 issue of The Critic. To get the full magazine why not subscribe? Right now we’re offering five issues for just £10.

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The job of a pope is, compared to that of secular leaders, enviably straightforward. He is absolute ruler of a tiny sovereign state with a vast spiritual diaspora. His judgement is believed by the faithful (or some of them, at any rate) to be not only supreme, but infallible. Where the job starts to get more complicated is in times of global crisis, when popes are expected to provide moral leadership, not just to fellow Catholics but to the whole world. When that expectation comes into conflict with the narrower interests of the church, popes frequently fluff their lines.

In 2009, at a time when Belarus’s dictator Alexander Lukashenko was persona non grata elsewhere in Europe, Pope Benedict invited him to the Vatican. Amid handshakes and smiles, the two men signed a mutually beneficial concordat. Earlier this year, Pope Francis declined to join other world leaders in issuing an unconditional condemnation of Vladimir Putin’s invasion of Ukraine. Instead, he argued that blame for the conflict was partly due to “the barking of NATO at Russia’s door”. He went on to suggest an equivalence between the suffering of Ukrainian and Russian civilians.

Why would Francis, not previously considered gaffe-prone, risk tarnishing his moral authority in this way? One cherished long-term aim of the Roman Catholic church is to effect a rapprochement with the churches of the east. That ambition, daunting enough already, would be impossible without the support of Russia. The truth is that Francis, like any political leader, views world events in terms of how they impact the church’s agenda.

Did the Pope need to congratulate Führer on surviving an assassination attempt?

Which brings us to Eugenio Pacelli, Pope Pius XII, the 20th century archetype of pope-as-pragmatist. The story of his wartime refusal explicitly to condemn the Holocaust, and other heinous atrocities, even after plentiful evidence had been put before him, has perplexed and fascinated generations of historians and writers. John Cornwell spoke for many when he called his 1999 book about Pacelli Hitler’s Pope. Others have praised Pacelli’s efforts to save Italian Jews from deportation, though there is substantial evidence that the pope was more energetic when it came to helping Jews who had converted to Catholicism. What is beyond dispute is that Pacelli showed little appetite for speaking truth to tyrants such as Hitler and Mussolini.

David Kertzer’s book reconsiders many of the questions raised by Pacelli’s wartime conduct. Did the Pope really need to send congratulations to the Führer when he survived an assassination attempt? Why did Pacelli, citing “the extremely delicate current circumstances” forbid Poland’s Cardinal Hlond from using Vatican Radio to send a message of support to the Polish people? Was it wise to propose hosting a peace conference shortly after Dunkirk, when even his own legate in London, Archbishop Godfrey, warned such a step “might easily be badly interpreted as if the Holy See was associating itself with the invitation to surrender, calling on Great Britain to sue for peace terms”. (Unsurprisingly, the British government gave the plan short shrift.)

Kertzer has unearthed dramatic evidence from recently-released Vatican files of the extent to which Pacelli and the Nazis were in regular contact. Hitler appointed a German aristocrat, Philipp Von Hessen, as his secret envoy to the Vatican. Von Hessen, a great-grandson of Queen Victoria, was well-connected both at home and in Italy — his wife, Princess Mafalda, was a daughter of Victor Emmanuel III. He had several private meetings with Pacelli, paving the way for a visit to the Vatican in March 1940 by Joachim Von Ribbentrop, Hitler’s foreign minister.

National Socialism was the only thing standing between Christian Europe and a godless Bolshevik future

Pacelli’s agenda was clear. He wanted to restore the church’s interests in Germany and the occupied lands, where clergy were being persecuted and Catholic schools and churches shut down. If that meant not antagonising Hitler and Mussolini, so be it. For Ribbentrop, the aim was to lock the pope into a diplomatic danse macabre. As long as Pacelli felt there was something to gain from negotiations, he was unlikely to jeopardise any deal by issuing public condemnations. Sitting with Pacelli in the papal library, Ribbentrop played on what he knew was the pope’s greatest fear. National Socialism, he said, was the only thing standing between Christian Europe and a godless Bolshevik future. And National Socialism was going to prevail.

There is no evidence that Pacelli harboured Nazi sympathies, yet reading contemporaneous accounts of these meetings will not be a pleasant experience for those who would defend his legacy. The indelible impression is that Pacelli allowed himself to be strung along, judging that course of inaction preferable to confronting either the Nazis or their cheerleader Mussolini about the appalling and profoundly un-Christian barbarity of their conduct.

Kertzer is good on the frustrations Pacelli’s later intransigence caused for diplomats from Allied nations. Unable to leave Vatican City for fear of arrest, they devoted much energy to trying to persuade Pacelli to get off the fence and denounce the mass slaughter of Europe’s Jews. Yet each time they were met with what by now had become the pope’s catchphrase: “We cannot be seen to be taking sides.”

Kertzer quotes Britain’s envoy to the Vatican, Francis D’Arcy Osborne, who believed Pacelli had a grand ambition to broker a lasting peace and enhance the church’s moral authority. “He does not realise,” wrote Osborne with impressive prescience, “that the abnegation of moral leadership in the interests of a strict neutrality is likely to hinder rather than advance that ambition.”

Perhaps, in the end, we simply expect too much of popes.