Pope Pius XII's 1942 Christmas address

Hitler had broken his alliance with Stalin and advanced into the Soviet Union, although his army in Stalingrad had been surrounded, decimated, starved and was about to surrender, precipitating disaster on the Eastern Front.

The 1942 Christmas address is significant for the light it throws on the ongoing scholarly debate around the war time policies of Pius XII in response to what would later be termed The Holocaust (the systematic murder of Europe's Jews by the Nazis).

Pius XI delivered three papal encyclicals challenging the new totalitarian creeds from a Catholic perspective: against Italian Fascism Non abbiamo bisogno (1931; "We Do Not Need to Acquaint You"); against Nazism Mit brennender Sorge (1937; "With Deep Anxiety") and against atheistic Communism Divini redemptoris (1937; "Divine Redeemer").

Pius XI also commissioned an encyclical demonstrating the incompatibility of Catholicism and racism: Humani generis unitas ("The Unity of the Human Race").

Following his death however, the less confrontational Pius XII did not issue the encyclical, fearing it would antagonize Fascist Italy and Nazi Germany at a time when he hoped to act as an impartial peace broker.

[6] For this he was scorned by Hitler as a "Jew lover"[8] and a blackmailer on his back, who he believed constricted his ally Mussolini and leaked confidential German correspondence to the world.

Upon the death of Pius XII in 1958, he was praised by world leaders for his wartime leadership, with the Israeli Foreign Minister Golda Meir saying: "When fearful martyrdom came to our people in the decade of Nazi terror, the voice of the Pope was raised for the victims.

[11] A variety of historians have comprehensively examined the data received by the Vatican, which "covered not just the activity of mobile killing squads but every aspect of the Nazis' murdering process".

"[13] Messages to the effect that the pope was losing his "moral authority" due to the failure to condemn Nazi atrocities poured in from diplomats accredited to the Vatican from the United States, Great Britain, Switzerland, Brazil, Uruguay, Peru, Cuba, Belgium, and Poland.

[14] Moreover, the Allies condemned the genocide of the Jews on 17 December 1942 in the Joint Declaration by Members of the United Nations, which – according to Phayer – "must have sent the Holy See scurrying to play catch-up".

[16] A defender of Pius, the eminent historian of the Holocaust, Martin Gilbert portrays Vatican policy in the lead up to the 1942 Christmas message with a very different emphasis: "In his first encyclical as Pope, Pius XII specifically rejected Nazism and expressly mentioned the Jews, noting that in the Catholic Church there is "neither Gentile nor Jew, circumcision nor uncircumcision.

One strong piece of evidence that Dalin produces against the concept of "Hitler's Pope" is the audience granted by Pius XII in March 1940 to the German Foreign Minister, Joachim von Ribbentrop, the only senior Nazi official to visit the Vatican during his papacy.

[19] According to Rittner and Roth, "always one to choose words carefully, Pius wrote several drafts before he had crafted exactly what he wanted to say on that particular Christmas Eve".

[19]Rittner and Roth described these as the "pivotal words that remain one of the key flashpoints in the Holocaust-related controversy that continues to swirl around him", and came near the end of the speech.

[28] Tittmann pressured Pius XII in their diplomatic meetings to go further in his public statements, but privately wired the State Department that "taken as a whole, the message may be regarded as an arraignment of totalitarianism.

[31] A later pastoral letter from the Dutch bishops claimed to be "following a path indicated by our Holy Father, the Pope" and quoted the address: "The Church would be untrue to herself, ceasing to be a mother, if she turned a deaf ear to children's anguished cries.

[38] In 2000, Phayer wrote that "Pope Pius's radio talk contained twenty-seven words about the Holocaust out of twenty-six pages of text".

[39] While Phayer's views of the speech changed between 2000 and 2008 ("Pius did speak out"), his dismal assessment of the "Vatican's essential passivity in collecting and disseminating genocide information" did not.