Madam, - Peter Thompson refers to Owen Chadwick's important book Britain and the Vatican during the Second World War(Cambridge, 1986). Mr Thompson appears not to have read this book himself but to have come across citations of it in Daniel Goldhagen's A Moral Reckoning.
He may therefore have gained the impression that Prof Chadwick's work is part of the case for the prosecution of Pope Pius XII. The book is a little more subtle than that. Sir D'Arcy Osborne, the British minister to the Holy See whose wartime career is the subject of Chadwick's work, was often critical of Pius XII, but it is clear that there were times when he was more positive. In 1963 Osborne wrote to the London Times to defend the Pope's memory after he had been attacked in Rolf Hochhuth's play The Representative. He ended his letter thus: ". . . he [Pius XII] would have been ready and glad to give his life to redeem humanity from [the war's] consequences. . . But what could he effectively do?" (p316).
Britain and the Vaticanalso provides other information which might be used in Pius XII's defence. Chadwick, for example, makes it clear that the Axis powers reacted with extreme hostility to the Pope's (somewhat elliptical) condemnation of persecution of the Jews in his 1942 Christmas broadcast. Elliptical that condemnation may have been but the German envoy to the Vatican threatened retaliation against the Pope, while the analysis of German intelligence was that the broadcast was "one long attack on everything we stand for. . .[ Pius XII] makes himself the mouthpiece of the Jewish war criminals" (pp218-219).
If Mr Thompson goes on to read Michael Burleigh's Sacred Causes: Religion and Politics from the European Dictators to Al Qaeda(London, 2006), he may find his faith in Pius XII's culpability shaken a little further. Prof Burleigh details the efforts of the Holy See to assist Italian Jewish emigration before and after the outbreak of the second World War (pp 221-222) and he describes Vatican help for Jewish internees in Italy (p222). He refers also to the Pope's efforts to prevent the deportation of Hungarian Jews to the extermination camps (pp280-282). He also mentions (in a work which deals at some length with the position of the Vatican during the war) Pius XII's knowledge of and sympathy with German conspirators against Hitler (pp 225-226 and p 282).
His verdict is worth quoting: "Certainly, Pius XII is not above or beyond criticism regarding what he could or could not have done during the war. . . His attempts to maintain peace were noble, but largely ineffectual. For reasons either of personal character or of professional training as a diplomat, his statements were exceedingly cautious and wrapped up in an involuted language that is difficult for many to understand. . .A more robust character, like Pius XI or John Paul II. . . might have said more in fewer words. One doubts that it would have had any effect" (p 283). - Yours, etc,