The public statements of Pope Pius XII on the Holocaust, or lack thereof, are one of the most controversial elements of the historical debate about Pope Pius XII and the Holocaust. Pius XII's statements have been scrutinized as much, if not more, than his actions during the same period. Pius XII's statements, both public and private, are quite well documented in the Vatican Secret Archives; eleven volumes of documents from his papacy were published between 1965 and 1981 in Actes et documents du Saint Siège relatifs à la Seconde Guerre Mondiale.
Many of Pope Pius XII's critics have alleged "silence" by the pontiff during The Holocaust. Some of Pius XII's defenders have contested whether he was silent, while others have instead argued that to speak out would have been useless or counterproductive. According to Prof. Michael Phayer, "the question of the pope's silence has become the focus of intense historical debate and analysis".
Background
Terminology
The term "Holocaust" had been used since the Middle Ages, and was used by contemporaries during World War II, although it did not come to refer exclusively to the genocide of the Jews in scholarly writing until the 1960s. Pius XII used the term "holocaust" twice in his encyclicals, but used it in its religious meaning, not referring to the historical event. The term "genocide" was not coined until 1944 by Raphael Lemkin, a Polish-Jewish legal scholar.
Much scrutiny has focused on whether Pius XII specifically identified the perpetrators or victims; many of his more ambiguous statements, which make no reference to Nazi Germany or the Jews, have been argued to apply to the Holocaust by some of his supporters.
Many of Pius XII's more important writings and speeches were not given in English, and some of his words have roughly been translated as "race", "creed", and "blood". A far wider range of his speeches referred generally to "violence", "suffering" or the victims of war.
Appeals for a statement
Appeals for the pope to speak out against the Holocaust, along with information on its extent and nature, came from members of his own diplomatic corps, Catholic bishops and priests throughout Europe, ordinary lay Catholics, foreign governments and governments-in-exile, and various prominent Jews and Jewish organizations. By 1942, appeals had turned to open criticism, and messages to the effect that the pope was losing his "moral authority" due to his failure to condemn Nazi atrocities from reports which were coming in from diplomats accredited to the Vatican from the United States, the United Kingdom, Switzerland, Brazil, Uruguay, Peru, Cuba, Belgium, and Poland.
Moreover, the Allied governments condemned the genocide of the Jews on December 17, 1942. However, Pius XII refused requests to endorse the United Nations's (not yet an officially chartered body) declaration; one such request came from Harold Tittmann, his US ambassador.
Types of statements
Encyclicals
Mit brennender Sorge
Mit brennender Sorge, a 1937 encyclical by Pope Pius XI, written mostly by German Cardinal Michael von Faulhaber, is sometimes included in debates about Pius XII. As Cardinal Secretary of State, Pacelli doubtlessly contributed in some way to the drafting of the document, mostly its introduction dealing with the history of the Reichskonkordat. The Reichskonkordat was a treaty negotiated and signed by Pacelli as Secretary (and, in a general sense, as nuncio to Germany), and Mit brennender Sorge was primarily focused on the specific violations of that treaty.
The encyclical was issued along with its sister document, Divini Redemptoris (also 1937), which levied similar criticisms against communism. Pius XI also commissioned a successor encyclical to Mit brennender Sorge in 1938, Humani generis unitas, which Pius XII controversially did not promulgate upon his election as pope in 1939.
The most relevant passage of Mit brennender Sorge is as follows:
Whoever exalts race, or the people, or the state, or a particular form of state, or the depositories of power, or any other fundamental value of the human community—however necessary and honorable be their function in worldly things—whoever raises these notions above their standard value and divinizes them to an idolatrous level, distorts and perverts an order of the world planned and created by God.
Summi pontificatus
Summi pontificatus was the first encyclical of Pius XII, promulgated in 1939. The bulk of the document deals with general and abstracted themes, but the situation in Poland (which had been invaded shortly before the encyclical's promulgation) is referred to with specificity once: