Philip Shenon
speaker
84 appearances
1 recordings
1 series
first heard Feb 2025
last heard Feb 2025
Philip Shenon’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
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Dave, thanks for having me.
I think it's fair to say that Pacelli loved Germany more than he loved his homeland, Italy.
Right. And he is the Vatican's diplomatic representative to Bavaria and later to Germany for a dozen years after World War I. And he, in Germany, becomes much more alarmed about the potential rise of Marxist than fascist.
And the story told by his former housekeeper is that he meets with Hitler in the diplomatic residence in Munich and hands him an envelope stuffed with cash that he wants Hitler to use to campaign against Marxists in Germany.
And the housekeeper and certainly others around Pius over the decades believed that his love of Germany affected much of his decision-making and led to this decision throughout World War II to remain silent about the Holocaust.
It's fascinating to discover her because there's reason to believe that this nun, Sister Pascalina Leonard, this sort of tough-willed barbarian nun, may have been one of the most influential women in the history of the Catholic Church. She was very close to Pius for decades. She was his housekeeper, but she also seems to have been a close advisor. And she tells the story.
There's some dispute about Pius. what she says about Pius, but she tells a Boston newspaperman that throughout the war, she pressed Pius to speak out against Nazi Germany, to protest the Holocaust, and Pius would not give in to her pressure. There's also reason to believe that she had a hand in saving thousands of lives in Rome, the lives of Roman Jews.
Because when Nazi Germany marched into Rome in 1943, she pressured Pius to shelter thousands of Jews in Vatican City. And her role in the Vatican has largely gone untold because there's been an effort to make sure it's not told. There was a fear that the disclosure of her influence on Pius would be scandalous.
Certainly the thought that a woman had this much influence on a pope would have been seen as scandalous at the time.
Over the centuries, popes had left wills. They left documents that sort of established how their earthly belongings would be divided up and to thank their aides and advisors and to sort of highlight the accomplishments of their papacy. When Pius dies, there's a frantic search for his will, which is eventually found at the bottom of a locked desk drawer in the papal apartment.
And his deputies are stunned by it because it's so short and it's simply a bleak plea for mercy. It's eight sentences long. He says nothing about his earthly belongings. He says nothing about his gratitude towards his aides and advisers. No mention of the accomplishments of his papacy. It's a plea for mercy from God.
And he talks about the need for forgiveness from those who he has sinned against or scandalized. There's a fierce debate after his death about why he would feel the need to make this bleak plea for mercy.
There's certainly a theory offered that he knew that when the truth about his actions or inactions during World War II in terms of not speaking out against the Holocaust became known, it would forever tarnish his legacy, that he needed God's mercy for his failings during World War II.
Well, he's really the hero of this book, but he is this roly-poly Italian man, balding, treasures his peasant roots, who suddenly finds himself thrust into the leadership of the Roman Catholic Church. And he makes clear from the very start that, as you say, the grim sobriety of Pius's reign is over. He loves telling jokes. He loves mocking the idea of an infallible pope.
He is really a blank slate when he's elected in terms of doctrinal matters. But he quickly makes clear that he's ready to overhaul the Catholic Church. He's ready to invite the world's bishops to come to Rome to remake it as they see fit without his interference.
And this leads to the Second Vatican Council, where the world's bishops are invited to Rome and told they can remake the church as they wish without his interference.
You know, going into this project, I think I had in the back of my mind the idea that, you know, the doctrine of priestly celibacy, that the priest couldn't marry and have families and all the rest of it. That this was sort of eternal and had been decreed in the Gospels. Well, that's not true at all. It's not in the Gospels.
In fact, most of Jesus' apostles and the larger band of disciples, they were married. The apostle Peter, the first bishop of Rome, had a wife and a mother-in-law. And in three of the four Gospels, Jesus heals his mother-in-law. What happens is after the first thousand years after the crucifixion, a thousand years in which priests got married and had kids,
and knew the comfort and the chaos of a family. A strong-willed pope in the 11th century by the name of Gregory decreed that from that moment on, priests and bishops could no longer marry. They had to be, in fact, fully celibate. And that included men who were then already married.
Gregory's motivation, historians will tell you, had something to do with the scandals of a group of shockingly promiscuous bishops in Rome. But there's also reason to believe it had something to do with money. that if priests were allowed to marry and have children when they died, their estates, their homes or anything else of value would be turned over to their survivors.
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