As World War II looms, Pope Pius XI calls on a humble American priest to help him challenge the evils of Nazism and anti-Semitism. But death intervenes, and Pope Pius XII now carries out a very different response to Hitler and the Holocaust.
Some impressive archive research has gone into this otherwise rather shallow analysis of the Popes Pius XI & Pius XII as they tried to reconcile their faith and their church with the increasing fascist nationalism that was gripping Europe in the 1930s. With contributions from various American academ
... ics it tries to speculate as to the extent to which the former pontiff was prepared to take a much more proactive stance condemning anti-semitosm before his death led to the elevation of his politically savvy Secretary of State to a papacy that he felt had to tread a very fine line between acquiescence and condemnation. Sadly, though it does use the actuality to illustrate their predicament quite well, the underlying journalism doesn't really ask anything especially penetrating, nor does it consult sources who actually lived and worked in Europe at the time, even had they been talking in a "World at War" style retrospective. I don't think there's an Italian or a German interviewed throughout the documentary and that lack of more local objectivity from a European perspective does rather limit it's scope. Ultimately, I found it added little to the detail of this fascinating and internecine period of history but delivered a lot of overly simplistic commentary.
