The Papacy in the Age of Totalitarianism, 1914-1958
By John Pollard (Oxford University Press, 2014)
Review by Patrick J. Hayes
Popes make for interesting subject matter, not only because they are the objects of global fascination but also because their influence on the world stage is both vital and secretive. In the political sphere, the pope and the curia that supports him is bound (at least on paper) to strict neutrality by the Lateran Accords of 1929, though it has often been difficult for popes to remain impartial. This has become even more challenging in the present moment: Celebrity is now part and parcel of the office as cameras follow the pope’s every move and the Twittersphere leaps into action at every pronouncement.
John F. Pollard, a Fellow of Trinity Hall, Cambridge, canvases a period that is bookended by totalitarianism run amuck—spilling over boundaries and affecting large swathes of humanity. The prospect and actuality of total war shaped Vatican statecraft over the course of three papacies: Benedict XV (1914-1922), Pius XI (1922-1939), and Pius XII (1939-1958). For Pollard the papacy was a beacon for peace and restorative justice, but it had to learn its lessons on the way, always seeking to create a space for belligerents to relent even while struggling to remain relevant in the search for tranquility. He has a lucid narrative that undergirds this thesis, covering much territory, and insofar as he hits the high notes of papal diplomacy over four and a half decades, he presents a tour de force of Western history.
Pollard cut his teeth writing on papal diplomacy in his first book, The Vatican and Italian Fascism, 1929-1932 (Cambridge University Press, 1985) and later focused on one of the most under-studied pontiffs in the modern period, Benedict XV, in an acclaimed biography, The Unknown Pope: Benedict XV (1914-1922) and the Pursuit of Peace (Geoffrey Chapman, 1999). His latest volume will add to our understanding of the papacy between the two world wars. Few understand Italian fascism better, and Pollard weaves a synthetic and broad analysis of the rest of Catholic Europe through judicious use of archival material. Some of that has already been unearthed for his previous books, such as the personal details of the life of Giacomo della Chiesa (Benedict XV) drawn from the della Chiesa family archive, but in the present study Pollard delves much more deeply into the documents of the Vatican Secretariat of State’s bureau of Extraordinary Ecclesiastical Affairs. The book’s first half mines these papers brilliantly. Pollard also covers numerous cultural and religious changes—from the cautious embrace of psychoanalysis to the politics of canonizations and the coolness shown to the ecumenical movement.
The author has also waded through mounds of secondary literature, but the chapters related to Pius XII could be developed more through wider consultation of open archive material. For example, Pollard criticizes Americans who assisted in the Vatican or worked on its behalf. The Jesuit Edmund Walsh, whose posting to Soviet Russia to direct famine relief in 1922 comes under particular fire—served up as fodder for Pollard’s assertion that Walsh’s mission now “raises serious doubts about Pius XI as a judge of men” (450). A more careful consideration of Walsh’s papers at Georgetown University, the records of the Catholic Near East Welfare Association in New York, or the secondary literature may have resulted in a more robust and accurate description of an earnest and focused diplomat working under conditions that would have been even more ruinous if the Vatican did not have Walsh on the scene.
Pollard’s remarks on Pius XII’s reign are sympathetic but not fawning, showing a pope scrambling to hold Europe together, housing foreign diplomats in the Vatican during the Second World War—the American chargé d’affaires, Harold Tittmann, Jr., among them—and orchestrating a massive relief effort for Jews and other refugees in Rome and beyond. Pius was a Cold Warrior par excellence, lending the weight of his office in the post-w