Eugenio Pacelli, Pope Pius XII (1876–1958), bears the dubious distinction of being the twentieth century’s most discredited Catholic – and also the millennium’s most controversial pontiff. The case against Pius, prosecuted most famously by John Cornwell (‘Hitler’s Pope’), is that he aided and abetted, or at least did nothing to prevent, the Nazi regime’s unprecedented crimes against European Jews. A stiff, diffident Roman patrician, he was simply too steeped in cultural anti-Semitism to see the importance of speaking out against Nazi racial ideology or the genocide it encouraged.

As pope (1939–58), Pius prioritised the institutional Church’s survival above all other considerations – even when that meant accommodating unspeakable evil and breaching every tenet of the teachings he claimed to have inherited from Christ. The parallel with a later generation of Catholic leaders who have covered up child sexual abuse ‘for the greater good’ is obvious. Pius’s actions, or rather inaction, leave a stain on the Church comparable to those deriving from more recent scandals. What claims to moral leadership can his successors have when they fail even now to condemn his dishonourable example? Many were disgusted when Benedict XVI declared him venerable in 2009, a status which put him on the path to sainthood.