Narrator: In May 1938, Rome was transformed. The ancient city, the heart of Catholicism, was draped in a sea of swastikas to welcome Adolf Hitler on his first state visit. Benito Mussolini had orchestrated a grand spectacle to showcase the power of the new Axis alliance. Yet, as the two dictators paraded through the streets, the Vatican, the city’s spiritual core, fell dark and silent. Pope Pius XI, deeply disturbed by the celebration of what he called "the sign of another cross that is not the Cross of Christ," had fled Rome, ordering the Vatican museums closed and its lights extinguished in a powerful, symbolic protest. This act of defiance, however, masked a deep and dangerous division within the Church itself—a conflict between a dying pope determined to condemn fascism and his powerful secretary of state who believed that diplomacy, not denunciation, was the only way forward. The story of what happened next, of the secret negotiations, the moral compromises, and the high-stakes political maneuvering, has been debated for decades. In his book, The Pope at War, historian David I. Kertzer draws on newly opened Vatican archives to provide a groundbreaking account of the secret history of Pope Pius XII, Mussolini, and Hitler, revealing the complex choices made behind holy walls as the world plunged into darkness.

Narrator: On the eve of World War II, the Vatican was not a monolith but a house divided against itself, embodied by the starkly different worldviews of two men: the aging Pope Pius XI and his heir apparent, Cardinal Eugenio Pacelli. Pius XI, who had initially seen Mussolini’s Fascist regime as a bulwark against communism, had grown profoundly disillusioned. He watched with horror as Mussolini drew closer to Hitler, whose Nazi ideology he viewed as a neopagan cult fundamentally hostile to Christianity.

This opposition came to a dramatic head during Hitler's 1938 visit to Rome. Pius XI’s decision to retreat to his summer palace at Castel Gandolfo and plunge the Vatican into darkness was a public rebuke of the highest order. He refused to even be in the same city as Hitler, let alone grant him an audience, unless the Führer first changed his anti-Catholic policies in Germany. Behind the scenes, the Pope’s resistance was even more radical. He was secretly preparing a landmark encyclical that would have condemned racism and antisemitism, and he planned to deliver a speech to Italy’s bishops denouncing Mussolini’s alliance with Nazi Germany. For Pius XI, the moment for quiet diplomacy had passed; the time had come for a moral reckoning.

In sharp contrast stood his Secretary of State, Cardinal Pacelli. A seasoned diplomat who had served as nuncio to Germany, Pacelli was pragmatic and cautious. While he held no personal fondness for Hitler, he was haunted by the specter of Communism, which he considered the gravest threat to the Church. He believed that Germany was Europe’s strongest defense against the Soviet Union and that publicly antagonizing Hitler would only worsen the persecution of German Catholics. Pacelli’s strategy was one of negotiation and preservation. He argued for using Mussolini’s influence to moderate Hitler, believing that maintaining diplomatic channels, however compromised, was better than open conflict. This fundamental clash—between Pius XI’s moral clarity and Pacelli’s diplomatic calculus—set the stage for the fateful decisions the Church would make when Pacelli himself became Pope Pius XII.

Narrator: The political landscape of the late 1930s was dominated by the burgeoning and complex relationship between Benito Mussolini and Adolf Hitler. Kertzer reveals that this alliance, while portrayed as a union of ideological brothers, was fraught with tension and insecurity, particularly on the Italian side. Mussolini was desperate for the alliance to shore up his international prestige, but he faced a critical domestic problem: the Italian people were deeply Catholic, and he could not afford to alienate the Church. He needed the Pope’s tacit approval, or at least his silence, to maintain popular support for his pact with the anti-Christian Nazi regime.

The story of Hitler’s 1938 state visit vividly illustrates this dynamic. Mussolini pulled out all the stops to create an image of unbreakable unity. Yet the visit began with an awkward protocol dispute. Hitler, who despised monarchies, was forced to stay with King Victor Emmanuel III, whom he found unimpressive. After being transported in a horse-drawn carriage, Hitler quipped, "Have they not heard of the invention of the motor car?" It was only in Florence, under Mussolini’s personal care, that the spectacle took full flight. The city was festooned with flags, and a gala dinner was held, from which Jewish invitees were quietly disinvited to appease the German guests—a grim sign of Nazism’s growing influence on Fascist policy. The visit culminated in an emotional farewell at the train station, where Mussolini, with tears in his eyes, told Hitler, "Now, no force will ever be able to separate us."

This public display of devotion was precisely what worried Pope Pius XI and what his successor, Pius XII, believed he could leverage. The Vatican understood that Mussolini was caught in a bind. He needed Hitler’s military might, but he also needed the Pope’s moral authority. This created a triangular power dynamic where the Vatican, Mussolini, and Hitler were locked in a delicate dance of influence, pressure, and appeasement, with the fate of European peace hanging in the balance.

Narrator: In February 1939, Pope Pius XI died, just before he could deliver his thunderous denunciation of fascism. His secret encyclical against racism was buried with him. In his place, the cardinals elected the very man who had championed the opposing strategy: Cardinal Pacelli, who became Pope Pius XII. For Mussolini and the Fascists, this was a moment of profound relief. One of Mussolini’s top ministers remarked, "He is just the Pope that is needed." They believed, correctly, that the new pope would be far more cautious and accommodating than his predecessor.

Pius XII immediately put his long-held diplomatic strategy into practice. His papacy would be defined not by public condemnation but by a "calculus of silence." This policy was rooted in two core convictions. First, he believed that any public denunciation of Nazi atrocities would only provoke Hitler into more brutal retaliation against both Catholics and the Jews the Vatican was trying to help through quiet, back-channel means. He feared it would shatter the German Catholic Church and lead to mass bloodshed. Second, Pius XII’s fear of Communism was all-consuming. He saw Nazi Germany as an indispensable, if deeply flawed, bulwark against the westward expansion of the godless Soviet Union. In his strategic view, the defeat of Germany could pave the way for a far greater evil to overrun Christian Europe.

This calculus led him to pursue a path of strict neutrality, maintaining diplomatic relations with the Axis powers throughout the war. He relied on secret emissaries, such as the German prince Philipp von Hessen, to pass messages directly between him and Hitler. While he worked behind the scenes to save individuals, his public statements remained famously ambiguous, never explicitly naming the Nazis or the Jews when speaking of wartime atrocities. This was a deliberate choice, born of a diplomat’s calculation that the institutional survival of the Church and the defeat of Communism were the paramount priorities.

Narrator: As the war progressed and the tide turned against the Axis, Pope Pius XII’s policy of diplomatic neutrality was tested to its limits. The horrors of the Holocaust were no longer distant rumors but a well-documented reality, and the war arrived literally on the Vatican’s doorstep with the fall of Mussolini in 1943 and the subsequent Nazi occupation of Rome. Kertzer’s research into the newly opened archives reveals a pope under immense pressure, besieged by requests from Allied diplomats to speak out while simultaneously negotiating with the German command in Rome to prevent bloodshed in the city.

The archives detail the Vatican’s frantic efforts to protect people, but often in a selective way. Much of the focus was on saving "the Pope’s Jews"—those who had converted to Catholicism or were the children of mixed marriages. While convents and monasteries across Rome did shelter thousands of Italian Jews, the Pope’s public silence remained unbroken, even when Roman Jews were rounded up for deportation to Auschwitz from a location less than a mile from the Vatican walls.

This refusal to issue a clear, public condemnation of the Holocaust is the crux of the controversy that has defined his legacy. Defenders argue that his quiet diplomacy saved hundreds of thousands of lives and that speaking out would have been a futile and counterproductive gesture. Critics, however, argue that the head of the world’s largest Christian church had a moral duty to speak truth to power, regardless of the political consequences. They contend that his silence lent a veneer of legitimacy to the Nazi regime and represented a profound moral failure. Kertzer’s work does not seek to definitively label Pius XII as a saint or a sinner. Instead, it exposes the complex, often contradictory, evidence from the Vatican’s own records, showing a leader whose choices were consistently driven by a cold, political calculus aimed at preserving the Church in a world on fire.

Narrator: The single most important takeaway from The Pope at War is that Pope Pius XII’s controversial silence during the Holocaust was not an accident, nor was it born of cowardice or secret Nazi sympathies. It was the result of a deliberate, deeply considered, and consistently applied diplomatic strategy. Pius XII was a man who believed his primary duty was to protect the institutional power of the Catholic Church and to ensure its survival against what he saw as the existential threat of Communism. This led him to make a tragic calculation: that a public, moral stand against Nazi genocide was a price too high to pay if it risked the Church’s institutional security and weakened the German front against the Soviet Union.

Kertzer’s meticulous research, grounded in the Vatican’s own secret files, moves the debate beyond simple caricatures. It challenges us to confront a more unsettling question: What is the true moral responsibility of a global leader in an age of atrocity? By choosing the path of the diplomat over that of the prophet, Pius XII may have preserved his institution, but he left behind a legacy of silence that continues to echo, forcing us to ask what we value most in our leaders—political pragmatism or moral courage.