d 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-war thumping of Communist party candidates across Italy, but failed to stem Soviet encroachments in Eastern Europe. The pope kept order in his own house, issuing encyclicals meant to curb certain theological tendencies throughout Christendom. Pollard notes some instances where Pius XII was interested in reform, and goes so far as to deny Pope John XXIII credit for the idea of Vatican II. With all of the activity in Rome surrounding the liturgical renewal, Pollard argues, the only thing that prevented Pius from formally calling a Council was his death.
The multi-volume Actes et Documents du Sainte Siège relatif a la Seconde Guerre Mondiale is used with great facility and frequency, but Pollard does not include other important source material that could help round out the picture of international Vatican relations. Notably missing are references to Cardinal Celso Constantini’s wartime diaries (see Bruno Fabio Pighin, ed., The Secrets of a Vatican Cardinal: Celso Constantini’s Wartime Diaries, 1938-1947, trans. Laurence B. Mussio [McGill-Queens University Press, 2014]) and the notebooks of Monsignor Joseph Hurley, the first American to work in the Vatican’s Secretariat of State. Though Pollard does use the United States Foreign Relations, he makes very few references to any of the archival holdings in the United States. I count only two, relating to documents at the National Archives. This inexplicable allergy toward American sources does not serve the project well.
Where does that leave this volume in the historiography of the papacy? The first attempt at bringing a deep analysis of the Vatican’s diplomatic power lies most proximately with Jesuit Father Robert A. Graham’s Vatican Diplomacy: A Study of Church and State on the International Plane (Princeton University Press, 1959). Though it is neither a treatise on the history of papal diplomacy nor a manual for understanding Vatican politesse, Graham sought to initiate an English-readership into the mysterious field of Vatican diplomacy as such, which for much of th