Soldier of Christ: The Life of Pope Pius XII. By Robert A. Ventresca. Cambridge, Mass.: The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 2013. 405 pp. $35.00 cloth.

Abstract

(ProQuest: ... denotes non-US-ASCII text omitted.)Soldier of Christ: The Life of Pope Pius XII . By Robert A. Ventresca . Cambridge, Mass. : The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press , 2013. 405 pp. $35.00 cloth.Book Reviews and NotesWith this volume, Robert Ventresca, professor at the University of Western Ontario, contributes to the steadily growing scholarship on Pope Pius XII, born Eugenio Pacelli. As Ventresca notes, there are many works that address Pacelli's life and pontificate. Perhaps best known among these is John Cornwell's Hitler's Pope : The Secret History of Pius XII (New York: Penguin, 1999). Most works on Pacelli center on the controversies surrounding the role of Pius XII in regards to Nazi Germany and the Shoah. In the prologue to his volume, Ventresca argues with very few exceptions, studies of Pius XII have offered a distorted or highly selective picture of the subject (6). The author argues that scholars need to pay more attention to the entirety of Pacelli's life, especially to the years after 1945. This gap in the scholarship Ventresca begins to close by offering a complex picture of a pope who in many ways remains an enigma. While Ventresca certainly is sympathetic to his subject, ultimately, he leaves judgment to the reader.Like most scholars who have written about Pius XII, Ventresca places much emphasis on his upbringing in a family of the lower Vatican nobility, living in modest means and marked by dedication to the papacy as a matter of family honor and religious conviction. Within a few years of Pacelli's ordination, he began training for the papal diplomatic service. Eventually, he played a role in the formulation of the 1917 Code of Canon Law, then was appointed nuncio to Bavaria and then to Berlin before returning to Rome in 1929 to become Cardinal Secretary of State, a post he held until his election to the papacy in 1939. Throughout the work, Ventresca points to this training and preparation as shaping the mind of Pius. Ventresca emphasizes that, at least until 1945, Pius used the language of diplomacy, even when addressing pastoral concerns. Acknowledging the perils of this practice, the author quotes French Catholic philosopher Emmanuel Mounier who warned that Vatican diplomacy was not the same as Catholic teaching (149). Based on the evidence that Ventresca adduces, the idea that Pius thought, wrote, and spoke like a diplomat would go far to explain why what he meant to be clear statements about Poles, Jews, Nazis, and others were perceived as weak. This explanation, however, has a number of shortcomings. The Pope was perfectly clear in his condemnations of communism. Also, why did so few outside the Vatican understand the Pope's statements and instead believe that he favored Germany, or at least that he was not willing to provoke a crisis of conscience among German Catholics? For an accurate interpretation of the Pope's pronouncements, a definitive study remains necessary of Vatican-speak, the particular language of Vatican pronouncements, which is often incomprehensible to anyone not well versed in it.Another question left unexplored is the influence of antisemitism in his thinking. In 1939, the Pius XII wrote quite clearly about Polish suffering, but did not mentioned a word about Jewish suffering. …