male narrator: One of the most powerful men on Earth
holds a position that has existed
for nearly 2,000 years.
As the world changes and faith evolves,
his authority remains.
What began with one apostle
has become 1.2 billion followers under one man.
He is the head of the Catholic Church,
the pope, and this is his path to power.
In this episode...
choices in the face of war
leave an indelible mark on the papacy.
While the world debates sainthood
for one of the most controversial popes
of the modern era...
history is forced to consider:
did the Catholic Church do enough?
Pope Francis is the third sitting pope
to visit a Nazi death camp.
On July 29th, 2016,
he makes an historic visit to Auschwitz-Birkenau in Poland.
In this camp alone, the Nazis put
more than one million people to death.
- According to Catholic teaching today,
anti-Semitism is a sin.
Jewish people are to be respected.
They are not to be converted.
They have their own relationship with God.
But this was a Christian society
that somehow was able to view Jews
as enough of an other, an outsider,
that they could live with this.
narrator: Pope Francis' visit to Auschwitz
immerses the pontificate in a harrowing time
in both world and Church history.
Faced with the haunting images of the Holocaust,
Pope Francis is confronted
by the legacies of his predecessors.
- The question is not only what we think the pope did
during the Second World War and during the Holocaust
but what we think the pope should have done.
narrator: Pope Pius XII is a polarizing figure.
Many praise his bravery in the face of fascism,
while others believe he could have done more.
- There's a controversial move to canonize Pius XII,
to have him declared a saint.
I think the real crux of the issue
is whether the actions of this pope,
in the midst of one of the great tragedies
of human history,
whether that's the stuff of the vicar of Christ.
Is that the stuff of a saint?
narrator: The controversy surrounding Pius XII
begins long before he ever becomes pope.
From 1917 to 1929, Eugenio Pacelli,
the future Pope Pius XII,
serves as a papal ambassador stationed in Germany.
- Pacelli was tapped by the Vatican
to try to go to Germany to bring an end to World War I.
He didn't bring an end to the war,
but he stayed in Germany.
He was helping displaced persons,
injured persons.
Then the soldiers come back.
- Because of World War I and Germany losing World War I,
Germany was in a state of chaos,
and as a result, there was political unrest.
There was revolution.
- You've got a bunch of young men who don't have jobs,
and they feel like they were betrayed by their country,
and there's this violence in the streets.
They start forming these organizations
that eventually morph into the Nazis.
narrator: Oppressive government regimes
across Europe gain traction by blaming
outsiders, immigrants, and Jews
for the post-war economic and political crisis.
In 1922, Benito Mussolini leads
the National Fascist Party to a victory in Italy...
while Hitler and the Nazis rise to power in Germany,
where Pacelli is stationed.
New pope Pius XI is faced with unprecedented unrest.
- Pius XI was an interesting pope.
A diplomat,
very experienced in international politics,
and he saw the evil of Nazism.
narrator: The Nazi Party stands firmly
as anti-religion,
putting Jews and Catholics
in their crosshairs.
Alarmed by what he sees happening in Nazi Germany,
Pius XI implores Pacelli
to be his eyes and ears on the ground.
- Hitler's in Munich, and the future pope Pius XII
is in Munich at the same time.
He sees Hitler seizing power,
and he's reporting back to Rome about what's going on.
- Pius XI and Eugenio Pacelli
had a very unique relationship.
Pacelli was really, really critical in helping to steer
much of the major decisions that Pius XI made.
Pius XI asked Eugenio Pacelli
to become his secretary of state,
and so Pacelli becomes, effectively,
the second most powerful man
in the government of the Church.
narrator: As fascism explodes all over Europe,
Catholics become enemies of the state.
- The thing about Catholics in particular...
Catholics had a relationship,
a devotion to something outside the government.
- There's gonna be conflict over the status
of Catholic youth groups
and whether these youth groups ought to be
brought under the umbrella fascist organization.
- There are some Catholic bishops who were beaten...
Who had their homes and their offices ransacked.
- The Church, of course, to be able to operate,
has to be physically secure.
narrator: The Vatican is faced with an extraordinary dilemma.
Because of his experience as a papal diplomat,
Pope Pius XI enlists Pacelli's help to negotiate
with the fascist Italian government.
The result is the Lateran Treaty.
- Italy and the Vatican reached an agreement
to allow the Church to function,
allow the pope to feel secure
when he left the Vatican itself.
- 1929 was really a milestone.
The Italian government at this point is
a dictatorship in the hands of Benito Mussolini,
and the Lateran Treaty returns to the pope
territorial sovereignty, which meant independence.
- The Lateran Treaty made Vatican City into
an independent nation state.
narrator: In exchange for Vatican autonomy,
the pope agrees to halt all opposition
to Mussolini's regime.
The 1929 agreement sets a precedent.
The Church is willing to negotiate with dictators
in exchange for sovereignty.
narrator: In 1929,
the Vatican signs the Lateran Treaty,
an agreement with Mussolini
establishing autonomy for the Church
in exchange for political neutrality.
- It gave the Church a hold on Italian society.
- From the pope's perspective, it's a major victory,
but there's a price to be paid.
I mean, Mussolini gets something
for having given something.
Part of the deal was that the Church
was to remain outside of politics.
narrator: With Church opposition out of the way,
Mussolini's fascist government flourishes.
- The Lateran Treaty is a major step
in the consolidation of a fascist dictatorship
because one of the things that Mussolini's able to do in fact
is turn to a population that is largely Catholic
and show that in fact he's made peace
with the spiritual leader of the Church.
narrator: While Mussolini and the Church
mutually benefit from their peace in Italy...
Adolf Hitler is elected Chancellor of Germany,
and Nazism becomes the law of the land.
- Jews were a target almost immediately.
- January 30th, Adolf Hitler becomes Chancellor of Germany.
The first anti-Jewish law is April 1st.
And the Nazi movement not only was anti-Semitic,
they were anti-communist, anti-socialist, anti-Catholic.
For Catholics, suddenly, they couldn't join
their youth group organization
without fighting with the local Nazi youth.
Their schools would be confiscated.
Day-to-day violence was an everyday occurrence
from 1933 onward.
narrator: After the success of the Lateran Treaty,
Pope Pius XI looks again to Eugenio Pacelli
to help him defend Catholics in the face of another
increasingly troubling dictator.
In July 1933,
Pacelli negotiates another treaty,
this time with the German government,
called the Reich's Concordant.
- Like the Lateran Treaty, this was a defensive measure.
The State says, "Okay, we will allow
"the Church control over its affairs,
"but the price to be paid is that the Church
is not to be involved in politics."
It's a controversial agreement.
Some see it as sort of a pact with the devil.
It effectively takes the Catholic Church
out of the political realm at the moment
when opposition to an evolving dictatorship
was more needed than ever.
- It was a fatal stepping back from confronting pure evil.
narrator: Although the Reich's Concordant
officially prevents the Vatican
from working against Hitler,
many German Catholics refuse to stay silent.
- An anonymous woman in Dusseldorf
writes to Pius XI, and she says,
"I'm walking along in the streets day to day,
"and children are beating up their Jewish neighbors.
"How can we be good, moral-thinking Catholics
with this going on around us?"
narrator: Despite the tenets of the agreement,
Nazis continue to interfere in Catholic life.
Nuns and priests continue to be arrested,
and Hitler passes sterilization laws,
which stand in diametric opposition
to Catholic doctrine.
- Because, of course, Hitler was not a man
you could ever trust... and, of course,
you could never do a deal with Hitler.
- And yet the Vatican just stays on course.
"We have a treaty. We have a treaty.
We have a treaty."
- And so,
the oppression of the Church went on...
And it got worse.
Infinitely, horribly worse.
narrator: As the 1930s wear on,
Hitler's dictatorship becomes more and more violent.
A litany of anti-Jewish laws are passed,
including a boycott of all Jewish businesses.
Enemies of the state, including Catholic priests,
are put on trains to labor camps.
- The concentration camp at Dachau--
some have described it
as the world's biggest seminary.
At one point in time, there were thousands
of Catholic priests there.
- 2,500 Catholic priests died at Dachau.
Not Catholics, Catholic priests.
At this point, there's no way
that the Church and the Third Reich
are gonna get along.
narrator: The Vatican writes more than 50 complaints
to Nazis about violations of the Reich's Concordant,
but Pius XI does not speak out publicly against Hitler.
- Latter part of the 1930s, Pius XI
began to prepare himself and began to prepare the Church
for some kind of direct confrontation
with the fascist regimes.
- He distrusted Hitler.
He was also opposed to racism.
He was personally not very friendly to the Jews.
He shared the very widespread Christian belief that the Jews,
as a people, had been responsible
for Jesus' death, but he thought
that that didn't mean you had a right
to invade their human rights... and, in fact,
wrote an encyclical condemning it.
narrator: In 1937, Pius XI enlists
Pacelli's help yet again.
He drafts an encyclical
regarding the situation in Germany.
- An encyclical is the most formal statement
from the Vatican.
It's the highest statement a pope can make.
narrator: Pope Pius XI calls his 1937 German encyclical
"Mit Brennender Sorge,"
which means "With Burning Concern."
In it, he condemns racism
from a theological perspective.
- It was talking about how it's foolish to think
that God would lock all of what is great in humanity
into a single race.
narrator: With the Nazis on high alert
for any subversive activity...
The Vatican uses a secret courier network
to smuggle the encyclical into Germany.
- It was read from the pulpits in Catholic churches
throughout Germany on Palm Sunday.
- It was the only time that the whole of Germany
heard a denunciation of the regime from pulpits,
an extraordinarily brave thing to do.
narrator: But the papal risk is a measured one.
Although the encyclical denounces racism,
it fails to mention Hitler or the Nazi Party by name.
- It's a document that bears Pacelli's hand.
He is ever mindful of the need and of the desire
to try to maintain a diplomatic relationship.
So it's an interesting sort of doctrinal statement
that perhaps lacks some of the political punch
that-that hour called for.
narrator: Regardless of its ambiguous language,
Hitler sends Gestapo into every German church
to confiscate the document.
- Anyone who said it, printed it, repeated it,
possessed it, was getting arrested
or getting beat up, or their property
was being seized.
That kind of fear of retaliation,
that's what Hitler played upon.
narrator: In 1938, Hitler's regime expands
into Austria.
More anti-Semitic laws are passed.
More Jewish homes and businesses are destroyed,
and still the Vatican remains publicly neutral.
But on the night of November 9th, 1938,
Germany will explode in violence,
marking a sinister shift in the Nazi agenda
that the world will not be able to ignore.
narrator: In the two years after Pope Pius XI
releases his anti-racism encyclical,
the Vatican remains publicly silent
about Hitler's growing fascist regime...
and on the eve of November 9th, 1938,
Nazi violence against the Jews reaches a fever pitch.
- Kristallnacht was the Night of Shattered Glass.
It's the night when the Nazis went to the Jewish businesses,
the synagogues, and smashed everything.
- 30,000 Jewish men were sent to a concentration camp.
It was a very public, violent attack on Jews,
and after that, it was-- it was game over.
narrator: Bishops from all over Europe
write to the Vatican's secretary of state,
Eugenio Pacelli, demanding a response
to the violence in Germany.
- The Primate of the Catholic Church in England
wrote to Pacelli and said,
"We need to be clear that this is Nazi terrorism against Jews.
Can you make a statement?"
And Pacelli writes back saying, "Well, it's a difficult issue,
"and what we need to do is just issue
"a statement of general love
and concern and mercy for all in a universal way."
narrator: In January 1939,
Hitler makes a bone-chilling speech,
threatening the annihilation of the Jewish race in Europe.
More men, women, and children
are sent to concentration camps.
Despite the Vatican's neutrality treaties,
Pope Pius XI...
can no longer remain silent.
- It's quite clear that when Pius XI was dying,
he was about to denounce fascism
in quite explicit terms.
narrator: Pius XI begins to draft "On the Human Race,"
an encyclical in which he condemns anti-Semitism...
But he dies before it is ever released.
Now with Europe on the brink of another war,
the cardinals must elect a new pope.
- The conclave of 1939 comes, of course,
at a critical moment.
It's very clear that Nazi foreign policy
is becoming increasingly aggressive,
and so the election of a new pope
garners a great deal of interest
well beyond the Catholic world.
- Pius XI had clearly groomed Pacelli
to become the next pope.
narrator: After a conclave lasting less than 24 hours...
Vatican Secretary of State Eugenio Pacelli
is sworn in as pope.
He chooses to call himself Pius XII to honor his mentor.
- One of the things that made Pacelli the right choice
at this point in time was that all the rival parties
believed that he was in their camp.
He was, as it were, all things to all men.
- He was widely recognized for his diplomatic skill.
It was seen that-- given that the world
was in a state of such tension,
that a diplomat pope,
and one who had considerable experience
in international affairs,
might be in order.
narrator: As tensions in Europe continue to rise,
Pope Pius XII is faced with a daunting task.
He must navigate the role of a religious leader
in an increasingly secular world.
- Compels popes to ask themselves
who they represent, and for whom should they speak?
- Pius XII was trained as a papal diplomat.
He deeply internalized the doctrine
that papacy functioned best as a neutral force.
But can the papacy really be neutral in the face of Nazism?
narrator: Six months after his election,
the Nazis invade Poland...
And World War II is officially declared in Europe.
- The Nazi invasion of Poland in September 1939
is catastrophic for Catholics.
Poland is a Catholic country.
Polish Catholics were dealt with very harshly.
Priests were often murdered right on the spot.
Women were raped-- it was brutal,
and the Vatican was receiving
reports of this and cries for help.
- This was a war against religion,
against Jews, against Catholics,
against anything that was non-German.
narrator: Pius XII is forced to reexamine his commitment
to quiet diplomacy.
With the Church under attack,
it is up to the pope to defend the faithful.
narrator: Six months after Eugenio Pacelli
is elected pope...
The Nazis invade Poland,
catapulting Europe into World War II.
Despite pressure from Allied forces,
including U.S. President Roosevelt,
Pius XII's statements remain measured and neutral.
Meanwhile, Hitler's agenda only grows
in scope and horror.
- The Nazis started a program to eliminate
people with mental and physical disabilities.
That eventually morphed into the Final Solution.
- There was a decision to exterminate
every Jewish man, woman, and child anywhere in Europe.
narrator: In the 1930s, Nazis had sent Jews,
outspoken Catholics, communists,
and the handicapped to concentration camps...
But in 1940,
Hitler opens Auschwitz-Birkenau,
the first and most lethal of what will be eight
Nazi death factories... camps engineered
for the systematic mass murder of Jews.
By the end of the war...
more than 1 million Jews will perish
in Auschwitz alone.
- News, letters and cables
of exactly what the Nazi regime was doing
went to and from the Vatican daily by the hundreds.
- Many of his own reliable sources are telling him
that the Nazis are engaged in a particularly cruel
and unique campaign against Jews.
He receives one memo from a military chaplain
that begins simply,
"The Jews. Period. A dreadful situation. Period,"
which dates to 1942.
- The Vatican knew
precisely what was going on.
There was no better informed organization in Europe
than the Vatican.
narrator: As the horrific images
from Germany and Poland
spread across the globe...
The devout look to the pope for guidance,
but ever the diplomat,
Pius XII worries that action against Hitler
might provoke more violence against Catholics.
- If Pius XII spoke out,
would it make things worse for Polish Catholics?
Well, you could actually hardly make things worse
for Polish Catholics.
- As he himself says,
"I have to watch what I say...
because I want to avoid a greater evil,"
but what he can do, he will do.
And a great example of the way
Pius XII dealt with this question comes
in the Christmas address of 1942.
narrator: In his Christmas address,
broadcast internationally
on Vatican radio,
Pope Pius XII makes one of his only
public statements about the war.
In it, he speaks for human rights and against racism,
but he fails to mention Hitler, the Nazis,
or the Jewish people by name.
- He made a very generalized statement
about the rights of people that he thought
was all he needed to say about the Jewish question.
- The bottom line was, even after violence
against Jews, the decision in Rome was,
"We're not going to name the Nazis,
"and we're not gonna name Jews.
We're just gonna offer universal love and charity."
So it's another opportunity that was missed,
and a critical one.
- He worried a lot about the consequences of speaking out.
One wonders, did he ever really think
about the consequences of not speaking out?
narrator: Despite Pius XII's public neutrality,
Hitler's march towards world domination
reaches the pope's doorstep.
In September of 1943,
Hitler invades Rome.
- It was a situation where the pope thought
that they had an operating agreement,
did not think this was going to happen,
but about 2,000 Jews were rounded up.
- The day of the roundup,
the pope says he doesn't want to have to
come out and condemn, explicitly, Nazi behavior.
It's obviously a veiled threat to do precisely that,
but he says he doesn't want to do it.
So the threat of a public condemnation is dangled,
which tells us in fact that he and his men understand
the power and the value of the pope's words.
And repeatedly, consistently,
even as people were being rounded up,
he declines to utter that clear word.
narrator: As the war rages outside the Vatican walls...
Pius XII becomes a target.
Rumors fly about a Nazi plan to kidnap the pope.
- Hitler actually got a general and told him to draw up plans
to invade the Vatican.
Pius XII gathered everyone together
and essentially released them
if they wanted to leave,
but he also submitted a letter that was his resignation
that said, "If I'm captured, I resign the papacy.
"So they will not capture the pope.
"They will capture Eugenio Pacelli,
but not the pope."
narrator: As bombs go off and Jews are rounded up
right under the pope's windows,
Pius XII must take stock.
His diplomatic efforts have failed,
and the Vatican is now directly in Nazi crosshairs.
narrator: In September 1943, Nazi troops invade Rome.
An imminent attack on the Vatican looms,
and more than 2,000 Roman Jews
are rounded up for deportation to extermination camps.
They're held at the Military College of Rome,
mere blocks from St. Peter's Basilica.
But despite the atrocities unfolding
right at his doorstep,
Pope Pius XII remains publicly silent.
- He takes the path of diplomatic caution
in terms of his public pronouncements,
but it's not that the pope was inactive.
There is a view that the pope worked behind the scenes
to try to put an end to the roundup.
There is some evidence in fact that that actually worked.
- They got several Jews released,
primarily because they were married to a Catholic
or they invoked the Concordant
to help some of them avoid deportation.
- He also then says, "Well, let's do
what we can to alleviate suffering on the ground."
- There were some Vatican trucks
that would go around and take food
and take blankets and try to bring
additional supplies to where it was needed.
narrator: Some believe that Pope Pius XII's silence
is a cover... that throughout the war,
he is secretly involved with covert operations
with the Allies.
- The pope did secretly tape his conversations.
During the week of his election in 1939,
the Vatican's tapes show quite clearly
that he opted for public acquiescence
with the Nazis and at the same time deciding
that they must be resistant behind the scenes.
Pius XII received information from a Vatican spy in Germany,
and he passed this information on to the Western Allies.
narrator: Some historians even speculate about
papal involvement in a plan to assassinate Hitler.
- The key figure in the German resistance to Hitler
was Admiral Wilhelm Canaris,
the head of German military intelligence,
whom, as it happens, Pacelli had met in the 1920s
when he was in Germany.
Canaris reached out to his old friend Pacelli
and said, "Help me and help Germany
get rid of Hitler."
Canaris then had access to explosives.
narrator: Between 1940 and 1944...
there would be three failed attempts
to assassinate Adolf Hitler.
Information about these plots
is still shrouded in conspiracy theory,
and documented proof of Pius XII's role
is almost nonexistent.
- For a long time, it wasn't known about,
because the pope knew if he kept written records,
it'd get people killed.
- To be really clear, the pope was not involved
in any of the details.
He does help to facilitate
these contacts plotting to remove Adolf Hitler,
and that's important.
It was risky.
It was something that he kept
from his closest advisers,
and it shows us that for all of our understanding of him
as very cautious and maybe too cautious,
he could, at times, take some very bold
and even risky actions.
narrator: Despite the uncertainty surrounding
any papal involvement in a plan to kill Hitler,
the Church's role in hiding Jews during the war
is undeniable.
- There's good, reliable evidence
that Church institutions, religious houses
were used to rescue and house Jews.
narrator: There is even evidence
that Jews were hidden
on Vatican-owned properties.
- There's some fascinating photographs
where you see people not only sleeping
on the floors in churches,
not only in the hallways, but even on the staircases,
up and down the staircases, three across.
narrator: Close to 6 million European Jews
perish during World War II...
but nearly 80% of the 12,000 Roman Jews survive.
- A large percentage of Jews in Rome survive,
in large part because of the actions
of many of these religious houses.
- The debate around that is,
was there a central order to do this?
Did Pius XII remain silent during the actual roundup
but secretly issue an order
that as many Jews should be hidden as possible?
And we've never found an order from Pius XII
to shelter and hide Italian Jews,
and there were even some cases where he was displeased
because it put that particular religious order
or religious house at risk.
narrator: Despite more than 70 years of retrospect,
the pontificate of Pius XII is still veiled in mystery.
Who was he,
and does he deserve
to be called a saint?
narrator: To be canonized a saint is to be recognized
as one who shares an eternal life with God in heaven.
In the last 1,000 years,
only seven popes have been made saints.
Reigning for nearly two decades,
many Catholics see Pius XII as a prolific religious leader,
responsible for shaping the modern Church...
but as the world debates canonization
for the wartime pope...
we are forced to consider the holiness of his actions
during one of the most turbulent times
in world history.
- The heart of the controversy really is whether
his diplomatic caution saved lives.
Those who advance his cause
see that as an argument to make him a saint.
- Pius XII is often excused for not having condemned
the extermination of the Jews because,
as he himself said... had he done so,
it wouldn't have done any good,
and it might have made things worse.
But I think it's hard to avoid the feeling
that there was some kind of moral failure.
narrator: The crux of the debate
lies in the character of Pope Pius XII.
Who was he,
and why did he make
the decisions he did?
- There are those who see in his reluctance
to identify the suffering of Jews in particular,
some see in that the strains of anti-Semitism.
- Eugenio Pacelli's time in Germany as a papal diplomat
is really critical to his formation,
his thinking about Germans and Germany,
and, one could argue, his thinking about Jews.
He describes meeting with Jewish officials,
who he describes as dirty communists
with slanted eyes.
We can see his negative stereotypes
about Jews in his writings,
and I'm not convinced they ever really exited his thinking.
- The whole of Pius XII's papacy
is dominated in our memory by questions.
Seems a bit simple to say
that there are evil people and good people,
because most of us aren't actually one or the other.
We're a mixture. It's much more complex.
narrator: But the complexities of Pope Pius XII
are yet to be unraveled.
Questions about what he did and did not do
during the Holocaust remain unanswered.
- We don't yet have access to all of the wartime archive,
so we don't really have a full historical record for Pius XII.
- Once they are available, and scholars
can make a determination
of exactly what he did or didn't do,
then we can say definitively
what the record of Pius XII was,
and before we can do that,
it would be premature to move forward with sainthood.
narrator: Until the records are released,
the world can only speculate.
Polarized opinions color the emotional debate
over the canonization of a deeply controversial
historical figure.
- If in fact he wanted to protect his own church
and his own coreligionists
in the face of the Holocaust,
that decision had consequences.
I think Pius XII was a human being who made mistakes,
and maybe he didn't make
the right decision in this case,
and maybe that's a lesson for this church,
that sometimes we don't make the right decision,
and we need to atone,
and we need to correct ourselves,
and we need to do better in the future.
narrator: In 2016, as Pope Francis
walked through the shadows of Auschwitz...
He must face the legacy of his predecessors.
He prays for the mistakes he has inherited
and for the lessons that will carry the Church forward.
- Pope Francis is a radically different kind of pope
than the Catholic Church has seen for a long time.
He has the rule of love. That's it.
Love your neighbor, and if you're doing that,
then you're a good Catholic.
narrator: Modern popes engage in politics
at the highest level...
regularly meeting with world leaders
and taking meaningful stands
against atrocity and injustice.
John Paul II worked tirelessly to end communism
and help the African continent heal
in the wake of colonialism and apartheid.
Pope Francis continues in that brave legacy,
a champion for human rights,
unafraid to fight for the freedoms of the oppressed.
- Francis and John Paul II have moved us on
very significantly.
They opened the door.
Now the Vatican is actually a player in world politics,
particularly in humanitarian aspects,
and that's been an enormously important aspect
of its ministry.
During the Second World War, there was this sense
that the Church was very different from the world.
The pope was isolated.
- I'm a lifelong practicing Catholic
who has worked for 17 years at the Holocaust Museum,
and I'm a historian.
And so it's difficult to just look clinically
at a document where a Ukrainian Catholic shooter
is taking a Jewish child by the neck
and shooting them while their mother watches
and then going to church the following Sunday.
To see that Catholics have the capacity
to set their faith to one side
and be part of the Holocaust
that destroyed 6 million families,
and to this day these families come to the museum,
and you can see that it goes generations deep,
it makes one question--
what is the point of my faith at all?
What is the point of a pope leading a church
where love and mercy is not paramount?
And it makes you wonder.
narrator: In times of tragedy...
Humanity continues to wrestle with faith.
The world looks to the pope for guidance and comfort...
and in the darkest of times,
lessons of the past must light his way.