The Lonely Cold War of Pope Pius XII: The Roman Catholic Church and the Division of Europe, 1943-1950

Graeme S. Mount is a professor of history at Laurentian University. He
is the author of Canada’s Enemies: Spies and Spying in the Peaceable
Kingdom, and Chile and the Nazis, and the coauthor of Invisible and
Inaudible in Washington: American Policies To

Peter C. Kent, a professor and dean of arts at the University of New
Brunswick, has undertaken an ambitious study. For justifiable reasons,
scholars who have studied Pope Pius XII (1939–1958) have focused on
his relations with Nazis and Fascists and on his apparent silence in the
face of the Holocaust. Indeed, in self-defence, the Vatican has released
many documents relating to the 1939–45 period, the only such documents
accessible to historians for events since the death of Pope Benedict XV
in 1922. However, Pope Pius XII retained the papal throne for an
additional 13 years after 1945, and Kent wondered what degree of
responsibility he might have had for the outbreak of the Cold War. After
all, President Ronald Reagan and Pope John Paul II collaborated in the
destabilization of the Soviet bloc, and President Harry Truman and Pope
Pius XII shared a similar aversion to communism.

Kent notes that the Cold War years of Pius XII’s reign remain almost
virgin territory. To compensate for the absence of Vatican archival
materials, he has searched the government archives of Canada, France,
Italy, the United Kingdom, and the United States. Reports by those
countries’ envoys to the Vatican have proven invaluable. He has also
searched the archives of the Archdiocese of London (England), of the
Dioceses of Savannah (Georgia) and Jacksonville (Florida), and of the
Canadian Conference of Catholic Bishops. While this permits only an
interim report (this book), it is the best that will be available for
many years.

Kent demonstrates that U.S.–Vatican cooperation was minimal after
1948, once the Christian Democrats won the Italian election and reduced
the likelihood that Italy would join the Soviet bloc. Like most
scholars, he is no admirer of Pius XII, who was thought to have favored
a negotiated end to World War II, who called for forgiveness of Germans
and reconciliation at the very moment when the horrors of Naziism were
becoming most obvious, and who advised Roman Catholics in
Soviet-dominated countries “to refuse all cooperation” with those
who had the power, which could only be counterproductive.