Let me tell you why I think this is an important book…

As any of us look back over our life journey we can identify major turning points in our outlook and understanding of what life is all about. We identify particular teachers who influenced us at school, it might be our parents or some uncle, aunt, brother or sister who played an important part in forming our outlook. Then there are events like personal good fortune — winning some lottery — and bad fortune — like being involved in some accident, making an unwise investment decision, or enduring the hurt involved when some important relationship in our lives breaks up. Another important influence comes from the media we interact with: the books we read; the movies we take in; the music we listen to; the live theatre we experience.

In my own life when I look back I identify perhaps two dozen "big influences or events" which have shaped my outlook today. It's still a little too early to say this definitively, but I have a sneaking suspicion that Paul O'Shea's book is going to be "up there" somewhere in that list of "big events" that have helped shaped my entire outlook on my religious beliefs. In one sense he has shattered a whole fabric of my beliefs. But this is a thing that I am thankful for. That "shattering" was necessary because these things that have been shattered prevented me seeing something much deeper and more important.

Let me come back to all of that at the conclusion of this review. For now, let me try and tell you a little of what Paul O'Shea's book, "A Cross Too Heavy — Eugenio Pacelli: Politics and the Jews of Europe, 1917-1943" is about.

An overview of what this book is about…

"A Cross Too Heavy: Eugenio Pacelli" by Paul O'Shea Published by Rosenberg Publishing www.rosenbergpub.com.au

As its title implies the immediate purpose of this book is to examine the legacy of the wartime Pope, Pius XII, in the context of the on-going controversy of his response to the Holocaust and the planned genocide of the Jewish people by Hitler and the Nazis. It is a scholarly work in which Paul O'Shea seeks to examine the available evidence from Vatican archives and previously published works from a fresh set of perspectives. It seems, even before official release of the book, that O'Shea has won support from one noted scholar in this field, Professor Emeritus Michael Phayer, who in his foreword to "A Cross Too Heavy" writes:

"O'Shea's evidence surprises in two respects. It is hardly to be expected that an historian publishing for the first time in Holocaust history would dig up nuggets of data that others, long in the field, had overlooked. And it is surprising that in a field so well trodden as that of Pope Pius and the Holocaust that O'Shea could construct a new theory accounting for the Pope's nonfeasance from the evidence he produces."

I don't even pretend to be an expert, nor an historian, who can comment with any authority on how Paul O'Shea's work compares with the many other books and articles that have explored this subject. I do look forward, in due course, to seeing how the book will be received by the learned experts and scholars who have made a study of this subject a speciality. My intuitive sense is that it is going to be a book that is very well received in professional circles and amongst his historian peers. One thing can certainly be said in Paul O'Shea's favour, the man is fastidious when it comes to footnotes, cross references and the background study he has engaged in to put this book together.

I presume readers of this review will be aware enough of current affairs to appreciate that Pope Pius XII has come under fire from many quarters for a perception that he could have done much more to speak up publicly on behalf of the Jewish people who were being exterminated by the Nazis and Adolf Hitler. Pius also has his defenders. They have pointed to evidence of efforts he did make on behalf of the Jewish people. I suspect there are few people, even amongst his most vocal critics who would hold the charge against him that he did absolutely nothing. The issue in contention is whether he did enough and, in particular, if he was negligent, or otherwise, in not speaking out more publicly in defence of the Jewish people and in condemnation of the policies being pursued by Hitler and his lieutenants.

The difference in approach that Paul O'Shea takes in his study that Professor Phayer refers to is that instead of simply trying to unearth new evidence of what Pius did, and didn't do, O'Shea has essentially presented a study of the entire life and context in which Pius XII was operating. In effect he's written a biography of the man in an attempt to bring us — the general reader as well as scholarly experts — to a better understanding of the man's general outlook as a man, as a spiritual leader, and as one of the most significant players on the world stage at the time with a large amount of moral authority — moral authority in the world at large and moral authority in Germany in particular, a nation with a significant Catholic population, that might have exerted influence on their leader.

Paul O'Shea's book examines the personal life and upbringing of Eugenio Pacelli, the future Pope Pius XII. He examines his formation as a priest, from school, through seminary, and into his professional roles in the Church as a high-level and highly respected Vatican diplomat. In particular, he also examines the life of Pius in the context of the historical mind view of the institution and its theological and sociological understanding of the place of the Jewish people in the history of all humanity. With all that as background — and fascinating background it is, as I will attempt to explain at the conclusion of this review — he then examines in detail Pacelli's modus operandi as a diplomat, as Secretary of State under Pope Pius XI and then as Pope himself.

Paul O'Shea's conclusions…

What are his conclusions? They will not please zealots on the extremes of either side of this controversial debate. I think they will lead to considerable reflection by all fair-minded people. Let me try and sum up his conclusions in his own words:

"I believe the historical record shows us that he was a saintly man who honestly believed he did what he could to save the Jews of Europe. But Eugenio Pacelli was not perfect; he had flaws and he made a number of tragic errors. Perhaps his greatest flaw was his inability to see beyond the theological and social reality in which he had lived all his life, to a vision of the Church that was embraced by his successor [Pope John XXIII]. His blindness was not that of wilful ignorance or of not wanting to know; it was the fervently held belief that the mission of the Universal Pastor of Christ's Church, entrusted to him by Almighty God Himself, made him accountable to God for the preservation and salvation of the Catholic Church so that its mission in the world could continue. Nothing, not even the deaths of millions, could be allowed to stand between the Pope and this God-given task." [emphasis added p 328]

Four pages later, Paul O'Shea concludes:

"Pius XII did not speak out clearly because he did not want to. All the justifications argued above lead inexorably to this awful truth. His actions and words up to the action in Rome in October 1943 are defensible. After October 1943, they are not." [emphasis added p 332]

Now I must emphasize that you really need to read the book for yourself. Those selections I have made above are possibly too simplistic of Paul O'Shea's overall conclusions. There is considerable additional nuancing in the text that no review can adequately cover.

My own personal excitement with this book is not ultimately locked up in this controversial question of Pacelli's response, or lack of an adequate moral response to Adolf Hitler regarding the Holocaust. That question is important but as Paul O'Shea observes in parts of his study there is still material that has not been released by the Vatican covering the period of Pius XII's pontificate. He believes some of that information may further clarify some of the issues he holds up to scrutiny.

Why this book is important to me is that it has significantly increased the depths of my own self-understanding of the official mind view of this institution that I have long subscribed to as a lowly pew-sitter member. I emphasize the word "significantly". I believe what Paul O'Shea has produced here is an extremely valuable study of how Catholicism views itself at the very highest levels — and not just in some political or institutional sense but in a theological sense. It reveals much of how at least the leadership of the Church views itself as the almost exclusive mediator of the mind of God to humankind. That is a theology that in recent years I have come to significantly distrust and one that I think is deeply flawed. I would go so far as to say I believe it is not a "truth" in the sense that I do not believe it is "the mind of God". It is the view of the leaders of an institution that has significantly "run off the rails" and lost track of its true mission and role in human affairs.

As most readers of this review and Catholica would know, I have a passionate interest in trying to understand why it is that so many of the baptised faithful have deserted Catholicism over the course of the twentieth century and into the twenty-first century. On average across the educated, affluent, socially sophisticated, Western world, around 85% of the baptised population have "given up" attending Mass and listening much to what the institution has to say about anything. In our own country, new figures released at the beginning of June show that this proportion of the disaffected has now climbed to 86.2%. At the end of the First World War the figure was about 20%. What explains this massive disenchantment? The reasons I have become intrigued by the question are largely through personal circumstances and in trying to come to an understanding of an enormous conflagration that erupted in my own very Irish-Catholic family at the beginning of the 1990s and which nearly destroyed my family. I believe, rightly or wrongly, a lot of what went wrong in my family ultimately had its root in a flawed understanding of what Catholicism really teaches and stands for. Leave all that aside though, even the most disinterested observer has to come to the conclusion today that Catholicism is facing a massive crisis — perhaps the single most massive crisis in its two-millennia-long history.

Major turning points in life…

I began this review by referring to the "key events" that we remember in our lives which make us who we are. I'd just like to mention one of mine. It was an important prelude to this book. Back in 2003 I was commissioned by Church Resources to produce a study of the Popes who have ruled the Church since the colonisation of this Great South Land of the Holy Spirit by the Europeans in 1788. It was initially put to me as a fairly low-key project basically just collecting together a few Wikipedia-type links and constructing a few web pages that might be useful to the average "Joe or Sally Blo" who might want a bit of basic information about the Catholic Church in Australia. I certainly wasn't engaged for any expertise as an historian but principally for my journalism and IT skills.

That exercise ended up becoming for me one of those major "turning points" in my own spiritual life. I ended up putting a heck of a lot more work into it than I was paid for because of the value of the personal exploration of my own faith that it triggered. I suppose, in broad terms, prior to that study I would have seen myself as a "sentire cum ecclesia"-type Catholic. My personal salvation was inextricably locked up with "thinking with the mind of the Church". In simple terms, blindly obeying whatever the Pope had to say on any subject. To tell the honest truth, I'd never really studied the Popes. Most of my life as a Catholic had been dominated by John Paul II, I have a vague recollection of Paul VI, a slightly stronger, and more positive one, of John XXIII; and Pius XII — the subject of Paul O'Shea's study — is this vague figure from my childhood who was worshipped in my family as though he were God Almighty himself.

It ended up being a tough assignment producing that study of the Popes for the Catholic Australia website. You can view the completed project at: www.catholicaustralia.com.au. Tough from the journalistic point of view of endeavouring to present a very balanced appreciation of both the characteristics of each Pope and their pontificate, and in trying to give some overview of their impact on the historical development of the Church in this country. From this vague sense that I have carried with me all of my life wherein I basically viewed our Popes as men, literally chosen by God through the Holy Spirit, to direct and guide our lives, I began to see them as very flawed individuals — men who struggle as you and I struggle with these "big issues" about the meaning of life, where does it ultimately end, what we have to do personally to merit "salvation" or however you define the end objective. They are basically flawed individuals like all of us, driven by ego and the hurts that life throws up and often very far from humble individuals albeit that there is a very carefully constructed aura of humility attached to them as part of the public relations and propaganda construct that is used to build the "institutional identity" of Catholicism.

Why Paul O'Shea's book is important to me…

Paul O'Shea's book has become important to me as it has taken me an important step beyond the step I took a few years ago by giving me a far more detailed insight into one particular pope. In a sense, this is almost a by-product of what Paul set out to do in examining the Holocaust questions. It comes from the necessary and detailed biographical study of Eugenio Pacelli he has given us. His book confirms for me, in a very powerful way, the conclusions I'd more tentatively come to in my earlier study. I honestly think we (collectively as an institution) have cast our pontiffs in an untenable position. We need, as an institution, to urgently re-visit not only the role of priesthood, but the role of the Supreme Priest, the Roman Pontiff, in his role as the "guide" of our lives. I no longer believe God speaks to us exclusively through the Pope. God speaks to humankind through ALL of the people. The role of our primate is not essentially as some mediator or substitute for God, nor for Jesus Christ. His role as primate ought be perceived as the Chief Executive Officer of a collective human initiative to be discerning what our Creator-God is saying to humankind through the medium of ALL women and men. That is not some "royal telephone" role where primarily the Pope perceives of himself as "listening to God" and reporting back to us what God is saying. It is primarily a role of listening to what God is saying through ALL people and then acting as the coordinator of the collective human effort to discern what is truly of Divine origin and then to articulate that. John Henry Cardinal Newman was a man of enormous insight. This, I believe, is what he was getting at in his monumental series of essays subsequently published under the title "On consulting the faithful in matters of doctrine".

A Cross Too Heavy…

Paul O'Shea's book is entitled "A Cross too Heavy". It is a poignant title. With the benefit of hindsight we can see here was a man who crumbled under the burden that was placed on him by the events in Europe during the Second World War. The Vatican's own official history of the Pontificate of Paul VI suggests that he was crushed also by the weight placed on his shoulders. I think we owe it to our leaders, as much as we owe it to ourselves, to go back to the drawing board and re-think this entire matter of what the role of Pope is in the affairs of our Church and in the affairs of humanity. A re-thinking along the lines of what I have been suggesting in recent times in other commentaries on Catholica might also solve the great stumbling block that the role of the Pontiff has played in the disunity of Christendom. God speaks through all of humankind, yes, even through the atheists and unbelievers. We do need a structure to help us collectively discern what our Creator-God has to say collectively to humanity. Ultimately we do need some figurehead, or chief executive officer, who coordinates that collective responsibility we all have to discern what God is saying. That role is essentially one of listening to God through what God is saying to ALL of humankind and to then help us to collectively discern and articulate "the Word" and "the Wisdom (Sophia)" of God. Would not our brothers and sisters in the Orthodox and Eastern branches of Christianity be more inclined to respect the Primacy of Peter if that is the picture we presented? Would not our brothers and sisters in the other Christian denominations be more inclined to respect the Primacy of Peter if that is the picture we presented?

I strongly recommend Paul O'Shea's book to any Catholic, indeed any Christian, seriously interested in coming to a better understanding of the role of the Pope in our lives, and in the world. Albeit that the lessons Paul O'Shea reveals to us are not comfortable, nevertheless they are extremely valuable.

PUBLISHERS INFORMATION:
"A Cross Too Heavy: Eugenio Pacelli" by Paul O'Shea, ISBN 9781877058714 (pbk.) is published by Rosenberg Publishing, PO Box 6125, Dural DC, NSW 2158 Phone: 61 2 9654 1502 email: rosenbergpub@smartchat.net.au web: www.rosenbergpub.com.au

Brian Coyne is the editor and publisher of Catholica Australia.

We welcome your thoughts in response to this commentary in our forum.

Brian Coyne can be contacted at: Brian Coyne <editor@catholica.com.au>

©2008 Brian Coyne

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