Abstract
Writing to a senior Vatican official in December 1933, an anonymous figure criticized Pope Pius XI for not using his singular authority to speak out and lead an aid initiative in support of victims afflicted by terrible famine in the Soviet Union. ‘A whole population is suffering and is begging for help’, wrote the unidentified correspondent. ‘Are the installation of the [new Vatican] radio station or the minting of new coins or the new grotto of St Bernadette to be considered as more important responsibilities?’ (p. 77). The Vatican official addressed in the letter was none other than Cardinal Eugenio Pacelli, the future Pope Pius XII, whose failure to speak out in the face of another tragedy – the Holocaust – has been a hotly discussed topic for years.
This remarkable letter is featured in The Holy See and the Holodomor, a small and admittedly incomplete collection of documents related to the 1932−3 Soviet famine from the Vatican Archives. The documents were discovered by Athanasius McVay in 2008 and subsequently edited and ably translated by McVay and Lubomyr Luciuk, both Fellows of the Chair of Ukrainian Studies at the University of Toronto. Their collaboration has produced a fascinating but frustrating snapshot of the Vatican as it attempted to respond to Stalin’s murderous artificial famine of 1932−3, known as ‘Holodomor’ in Ukrainian, which claimed the lives of millions primarily in Ukraine, but also in the North Caucasus, the Lower Volga region, and elsewhere in the Soviet Union. The book should be of interest not only to scholars of the Vatican and of Ukraine, but also to all historians of twentieth-century Europe, particularly those looking for a broader context in which to frame the actions of Eugenio Pacelli/Pius XII during the Holocaust.
McVay and Luciuk notably do not make the Holocaust connection. Yet the documents in The Holy See and the Holodomor offer a glimpse of Pacelli, the future wartime pontiff, weighing the needs and interests of the church against the needs of suffering innocents, with ultimately dire consequences. In May 1933, as Cardinal Secretary of State, Pacelli advised against a proposal by Pius XI to approach Soviet representatives with an offer of material assistance for the starving. Pacelli was among those who seemed to believe, not without reason, that such an offer would anger the Kremlin, which was denying the very existence of famine within its borders, and in turn invite anti-Catholic persecutions at the hands of the Soviet secret police. Although more documents elaborating upon his position may come to light in the future, the exchanges in The Holy See and the Holodomor reveal Pacelli struggling to balance moral duty with realpolitik, with deference to the latter.
In a useful and well-written introduction, McVay and Luciuk draw attention to an important counterpart to Pacelli: Michel d’Herbigny, the French Jesuit who as president of the Vatican’s Pro Russia Commission unsuccessfully urged his superiors ‘to bring aid to [the] many poor unfortunates … without distinction with respect to [their] religion’ (p. 9). In the end, McVay and Luciuk argue that the efforts of d’Herbigny and others led the Holy See to understand the severity of the famine and to ‘[try] to help’ (p. iv), mainly by raising public awareness in the pages of the Vatican newspaper, L’Osservatore romano. They also claim that the help was ‘expeditious’ (p. x), which is a very generous reading. Indeed, most of the correspondence compiled in The Holy See and the Holodomor is dated well after the spring of 1933, when victims of the famine perished at a rate of 10,000 a day. The articles that appeared in L’Osservatore romano in 1933, moreover, were published months after the journalist Gareth Jones exposed the famine in a press release on 29 March 1933 and made headlines in the world press. Jones was subsequently and infamously discredited in the pages of the New York Times by Walter Duranty, who called the famine nothing more than a ‘big scare story’. One wonders what would have happened if Pius XI – who, according to the documentation in The Holy See and the Holodomor, was clearly aware of the famine as early as 24 March 1933 – had directly and forcefully supported Jones’s account at the time.
The Holy See and the Holodomor also comes with a helpful afterword from Laura Pettinaroli of the Catholic University of Paris, who argues, again generously, that the Vatican was in ‘an unenviable position, easily criticized in retrospect, but far less easily managed in its day’ (p. 86). The book is nicely annotated with concise historical background information and biographical profiles.