The Pope's Last Crusade: How an American Jesuit Helped Pope Pius XI's Campaign to Stop Hitler
Justified or not, the Vatican has recently been subjected to numerous attacks for its relationship with the Nazis and its role in the Holocaust. The criticism centers on the activities (or inactivity) of Pope Pius XII. But his predecessor, Pius XI, was cut from different cloth. Before and after his ascension to the Papacy, Pius XI had been an ardent spokesman for “social justice” and opposition to various forms of racism. As pope, he well understood the dangers posed by fascism and the Nazis and didn’t hesitate to criticize Western democracies for their passivity. Before his untimely death, in 1939, Pius was influenced strongly by an American prelate, John La Farge, who had campaigned against racial injustice in the U.S. Eisner, a historian and journalist, suggests that the survival of Pius XI beyond 1939 could have put a much different focus on Catholic-Jewish relations and perhaps ameliorated some aspects of the Holocaust. That is certainly debatable, but this is an interesting work that usefully poses a what-if question while attempting to provide a more balanced view of Vatican policies in the 1930s. --Jay Freeman