REVIEW POTPOURRI – Graham Greene: The Paradox of a Pope

Pope Pius XI

by Peter Cates

Graham Greene

The Paradox of a Pope, from his Collected Essays
Originally written in 1951.

Eugenio Pacelli (1876-1958) later became Pope Pius XII upon the death of Pope Pius XI, in 1939, during very evil years of the last century and, upon his own death, would be succeeded by the even more famous Pope John XXIII. His own leadership of the Catholic Church, particularly with respect to Nazism and the Holocaust, still continues as a subject of controversy with enough material to last several lifetimes and well beyond the scope of these few paragraphs.

One of my top five favorite writers, Graham Greene (1904-1991) wrote Paradox while the Pope was still living and he included it in the 1969 volume, Collected Essays, without changing a single word. It is a fascinating study of the complexities in human character, a subject Greene was so good at in everything of his I have ever read and re-read. He also became a Catholic during his early 20s and his faith would always resonate in his writings.

Graham Greene

Greene’s opening comments of how “strange to come on a monument to a living man, for even the greatest usually appear only on tablets and tombstones after death,” are interesting because of the reasons for these monuments while Pius was still living. A few of these examples included his visits with soldiers from the allies and axis powers at the Vatican and receiving all of them as pilgrims; his words to a grieving father whose son had been killed during World War II and had no faith to sustain him in his loss (after Pius convinced the man there was an afterlife and the father and his son would be re-united, he left the Pope very happy); and finally the Pope’s unrelenting efforts in saving countless lives of Jewish people and other refugees in war-torn countries, while maintaining the Vatican’s neutrality publicly during these war years.

When I first saw a photo of Pius XII presiding at a Mass decades ago, he exuded an aura of both mien and mean, which started my interest in him as a historical figure. Little did I know of his real character!

A quote of this man: “To live without risk is to risk not living.”