American Priest by Wilson D. Miscamble C.S.C

Author:Wilson D. Miscamble, C.S.C.
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: The Crown Publishing Group
Published: 2019-03-11T16:00:00+00:00

AMBASSADOR FOR PIUS XII AND JOHN XXIII: ATOMIC ENERGY, PEACE, AND AGGIORNAMENTO

By the time of the 1960 Notre Dame commencement, Hesburgh not only held his presidential appointments from Eisenhower, but also served as an official ambassador for the Vatican. Father Hesburgh had no deep personal affection for Eugenio Pacelli, whose election to the papacy he had witnessed as a seminarian in Rome on March 2, 1939. He found Pius XII “very formal, stiff, unapproachable, sitting ramrod straight in a chair while receiving visitors.” He characterized the pope as constantly “striking a pious pose” so as to appear as “the fourth person of the Blessed Trinity.”27 But it bears saying that his qualms about Pius XII had nothing whatever to do with the scurrilous campaign launched to defame the pope’s name and historical reputation. This deliberate campaign to trash Pius’s standing began in the West—it was already a staple of Soviet propaganda—with the production in 1963 of Rolf Hochhuth’s play The Deputy, which charged that Pius had failed in his duty by not speaking out more forcefully against the slaughter of Jews in the Holocaust. It culminated with the disgraceful labeling of Pius by John Cornwell as “Hitler’s Pope.”28 Hesburgh was aware of these calumnies and resented them. Whatever his reservations about the persona of Pius XII, he appreciated the pope’s wartime interventions to save persecuted Jews, which rightly garnered him both praise and gratitude in the 1950s.

The so-called Pius Wars remained well in the future when Hesburgh began his service for the Vatican. Representing Pius XII therefore bore no whiff of opprobrium at that stage. Quite the opposite, in fact. He had first met Pius XII in a group setting along with all the Holy Cross priests and brothers attending the congregation’s general chapter in Rome during July of 1956. A photo of the encounter captures Father Ted solemnly bowing before the pontiff while his occasional antagonist Father Christopher O’Toole hovers right behind him.29 This brief meeting hardly established a personal relationship, and as Father Ted made clear in his recounting, the initial call to serve as a Vatican delegate came from Cardinal Francis Spellman, New York’s powerful archbishop. Pius XII had authorized the cardinal to choose some delegates to the general conference to establish the IAEA, whom the pope would then appoint.

Spellman immediately called the young president of Notre Dame whom he had come to know and like through various social and fund-raising events in New York stretching back to Hesburgh’s service as executive vice president of the university. Father Ted acceded to the request. Soon Spellman arranged for Hesburgh and his co-delegate, Dr. Marston Morse, a mathematician at the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton, to receive instructions giving them “full power to discuss, approve and sign any document of the conference in the name of the Vatican without prior instructions.”30 At the gathering’s conclusion Hesburgh and Morse signed the completed statute for the IAEA along with the representatives of over eighty nations. It called for an

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