Aloisius Joseph Muench - Relationship With Pius XII

Relationship With Pius XII

There is much evidence of genuine camaraderie between Pius XII and Muench. He met Eugenio Pacelli (the future pope) for the first time while Pacelli was nuncio to Bavaria, when Muench visited Munich as a student representative of the Catholic Central Verein of America (CCVA).

As pope, Pius XII received Muench in several audiences, and after their second audience on July 12, 1946, the two always conversed in German. Muench also wrote many reports on the events in Germany directly to Pius XII between 1946 and 1958, and there is some evidence that Pius XII read many of them personally, even in 1953 when his health began to deteriorate. The reports spoke not only of the immediate, material needs of German Catholics, but also of the spread of communism, a fear shared by Muench and Pius XII, and the subject of another 1954 audience between the two.

Muench and Pius XII met in February 1947 and in the fall of 1948 and 1949; although initially Muench (in his letters to others) expressed satisfaction with Pius XII's grasp of the situation in Germany, he later stated that the pope was too reliant on his own, earlier experiences in Germany and did not "fully grasp" the implications of the occupation and increasing secularization. Muench wrote that Pius XII was continuing to interpret the events unfolding in Germany "according to this or that phrase of the Concordat".

In the 1953 dedication of the North American College in Rome, Pius XII stopped as he passed by Muench, expressed his gratitude that Muench could join him in Rome, and added "don't forget to see me before you leave". Muench was, according to Father Gerald Weber (in attendance), the only one of the many assembled bishops and cardinals whom Pius XII stopped and talked to.

Muench mourned the death of Pius XII in October 1958, telling friends that the pope "treated him with the affection and love of a father to his son".

The correspondence between Muench and Pius XII focused almost exclusively on the various opinions shared by the two men, often with great levity, but rarely touched on the issues of anti-Semitism, the Holocaust, the wartime relationship between the church and Nazi Germany, and the situation of the postwar Jewry. According to Brown-Fleming, in one private audience between the two in May 1957 Pius XII told Muench a joke about Hitler dying, going to Heaven, and meeting the Old Testament Prophet Moses, who forgives Hitler; Hitler then asks Moses if he set fire to the burning bush himself, a tongue-in-cheek reference to the Reichstag fire, which apparently elicited a "big laugh" from Pius XII.