Intranzigens antikommunizmus és/vagy pragmatikus diplomácia? XII. Piusz keleti politikája világháború és hidegháború között
Intransigent Anti-Communism and/or Pragmatic Diplomacy? The Eastern Politics of Pope Pius XII between World War and Cold War

Summary/Abstract: Based on new sources freshly made available by the Holy See, the study aims to reassess the history of – supposed or real – efforts at rapprochement between the Holy See and the Soviet Union, initiated between 1942 and 1946, with the ultimate goal of identifying the considerations that shaped the eastern politics of the Holy See at the end of World War II. After a thorough investigation of the Orlemanski Action in Spring 1944, of the Flynn Mission in March 1945, and of the negotiations that were opened in 1946 via some Hungarian Jesuits, the author argues that, while at the end of the war there was indeed a moment when Moscow appeared open to cooperation, those efforts at rapprochement that in fact took place generally broke down because of the Kremlin’s basic indifference, while the Holy See remained throughout ready for communications as long as the necessary conditions were fulfilled. As a result, the eastern politics of Pius XII should be interpreted in terms of the paradigm of the Holy See’s traditional eastern politics of concordats rather than in that of intransigence. Yet the technical term of Ostpolitik cannot be applied to the eastern politics of Pius XII without further qualifications, for, while it does show connections with the Ostpolitik of the Holy See in the 1960s, several major differences can be identified between them.

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