Robert Ventresca: Soldier of Christ. The Life of Pope Pius XII, Harvard University Press
Risvolto
Debates over the legacy of Pope Pius XII and his canonization are so heated they are known as the “Pius wars.” Soldier of Christ
moves beyond competing caricatures and considers Pius XII as Eugenio
Pacelli, a flawed and gifted man. While offering insight into the pope’s
response to Nazism, Robert A. Ventresca argues that it was the Cold War
and Pius XII’s manner of engaging with the modern world that defined
his pontificate.
Laying the groundwork for the pope’s
controversial, contradictory actions from 1939 to 1958, Ventresca begins
with the story of Pacelli’s Roman upbringing, his intellectual
formation in Rome’s seminaries, and his interwar experience as papal
diplomat and Vatican secretary of state. Accused of moral equivocation
during the Holocaust, Pius XII later fought the spread of Communism in
Western Europe, spoke against the persecution of Catholics in Eastern
Europe and Asia, and tackled a range of social and political issues. By
appointing the first indigenous cardinals from China and India and
expanding missions in Africa while expressing solidarity with
independence movements, he internationalized the church’s membership and
moved Catholicism beyond the colonial mentality of previous eras.
Drawing from a diversity of international sources, including unexplored
documentation from the Vatican, Ventresca reveals a paradoxical figure:
a prophetic reformer of limited vision whose leadership both stimulated
the emergence of a global Catholicism and sowed doubt and dissension
among some of the church’s most faithful servants.
LO STORICO
Andrea Galli Avvenire 10 maggio 2013
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