'Holy Silence' tries to get into the mind of Pope Pius XII during World War II
A portrait of Pope Pius XII. Photo courtesy of the Holy See.
(REVIEW) Popes are in these days. Films about them are, anyway. The last few months have given us the fact-challenged Netflix movie The Two Popes and the sin-filled HBO series The New Pope. A new documentary, out this month, tries to come to terms with the cost of Pope Pius XII’s silence during World War II.
The film Holy Silence, which premiered on January 21 at the Miami Jewish Film Festival, comes less than two months before the scheduled release of the Vatican Apostolic Archives regarding the pontificate of Pius XII in an effort to provide historical context for 17 million pages that will be released. Pius XII was pope from 1939 to 1958, years that included World War II.
Before historians and the public can delve into the archive, the film effectively gives historical context to this era, which is back in the news cycle this week since Monday marked the 75th anniversary of the liberation of Auschwitz. The documentary looks at the papacy of Pius XI and his successor Pius XII and whether the actions of these men could have done anything to stop the deportation and murder of six million Jews.
The film serves as a wonderful primer before the public can learn more about the historical background to the events of that time, which included the Nazi takeover of much of Europe, the Holocaust and World War II. Pope Pius XII has been accused in the past of not doing all he could to stop Adolf Hitler and save Jews. It also takes an American approach to the events that transpired across the Atlantic Ocean, including efforts by Catholics in this country to sway the pope to act.
We learn from the film that Pius XI, who had a heart condition, had grown increasingly alarmed over the treatment of Jews in Germany. In an effort to address the situation, he went around Vatican Secretary of State, then-Cardinal Eugenio Pacelli (and future Pope Pius XII), and enlisted the help of Father John LaFarge, a Jesuit priest and associate editor of America magazine living in the United States, to draft an encyclical to declare that Jews were entitled to equal rights and protections as everyone else. LaFarge had done a lot of work helping and working with African-American families in the United States.
That draft of the LaFarge encyclical was never made public. Pius XI died in 1938 and Pacelli was made pope. Throw in some anti-Semitism in the Catholic hierarchy, Pacelli’s backdoor deal-making with Italy’s dictator Benito Mussolini and Hitler and you start getting evidence that this new pope could have done more. Pacelli chose to stay silent.
Nonetheless, much of what transpired — in regards to documents made available and witness recollection — remain largely a mystery and actions open to interpretation. Is Pius XII a saint or a sinner? Well, it’s complicated.
The film ultimately doesn’t say. What it does do is tell the story of what happened at the time, giving both sides of the argument equal say, and allows for the viewer to make up their own mind on whether the pope could have done or said more. The documentary refrains from calling Pius XII “Hitler’s pope” like so many others have done in the past.
Indeed, the 72-minute film indicates that the jury is still out on whether Pius XII warned Jews of deportation to concentration camps once the Nazi’s took over Italy in 1943 or whether he ordered churches and other Catholic institutions to shelter Jews. The archive may shed more light on all this, especially as the Vatican considered Pius XII for canonization to sainthood. The process on that has, for now, been placed on hold.
The Representative, a controversial 1963 play, was one of the first portrayals of Pope Pius XXII as failing to take action to help Jews across Europe. Before that, some Jews living in Rome had praised the Vatican. Historians interviewed for Holy Silence argue that the pope chose not to pick sides, instead hoping not to upset the Nazis. Historians interviewed on camera argue that Pius XII wasn’t convinced the Allies would win the war, choosing instead to stay silent despite the insistence of the United States, and President Franklin D. Roosevelt, to have the pope use his moral authority to publicly rebuke fascism. Pius XII feared the bombing of Vatican City, a place that was ultimately spared by the Germans who had occupied Italy by 1943.
It had been back in 1929 that the Vatican and Mussolini worked out a treaty that established the Holy See as a sovereign city-state. Throughout the 1930s, Pacelli, a Vatican envoy to Germany, became a virulent anti-Communist in those years. This is some of the geo-political intrigue the film, with help from interviews from historians and interspersed with TV and radio reports of the time, that sheds light on the future actions of the Vatican and Pius XII.
It also reveals how Catholics in Europe and the United States were split on whether to sympathize or not with the Third Reich. Anti-Semitism was rampant among some Catholics at the time, something the church would address decades later through the reforms of the Second Vatican Council and the papacy of the Polish-born John Paul II.
The rise of anti-Semitism around the world in recent years and the upcoming opening of the Vatican archive make Holy Silence timely in a way producer/director/writer Steven Pressman could have never imagined when he embarked on this project. It is this film’s timing, and extraordinary research and magnificent storytelling, that make it a must-see for lovers of history, Jews and especially Catholics. It is especially important that we never forget so that the atrocities of the past are never repeated.
Clemente Lisi is a senior editor and regular contributor to Religion Unplugged. He is the former deputy head of news at the New York Daily News and teaches journalism at The King’s College in New York City.