Robert A. Graham

Father Robert Andrew Graham, SJ (born March 11, 1912, Sacramento, California – died February 11, 1997, Los Gatos, California) was an American Jesuit priest and World War II historian of the Catholic Church. He was a vigorous defender of Pope Pius XII over accusations that he had failed to do what he could to defend the Jews and others persecuted by the Nazis.

The son of Charlie Graham, a former professional baseball player for the Boston Red Sox and part owner of the San Francisco Seals (baseball), Graham joined the California province of the Jesuits as a young man. He was ordained priest in 1941 and was soon sent to New York City to work on the Jesuit weekly, America, where he remained for two decades. In 1952, he gained a doctorate in political science and international law from the Graduate Institute of International Studies in Geneva during a sabbatical.

In 1959, his book, Vatican Diplomacy: A Study of Church and State on the International Plane, was published. This treatise on pontifical ecclesiastical diplomacy published by Princeton University Press would endure to become a discipline classic thus qualifying Rev. Graham as one of the Church's experts on the subject of Holy See diplomacy. This classic treatise continues to be used by English-language scholars specializing in the field of pontifical ecclesiastical diplomacy and diplomatic history even today. Following the publication of his book Rev. Graham travelled the world interviewing witnesses on the Vatican's diplomatic response to Nazism during the Second World War at a time when the Vatican archives remained closed.

To counter growing attacks, in 1965 the Vatican began publication of some of its wartime documents in a series of books edited by a Jesuit team, Actes et Documents du Saint Siège relatifs à la Seconde Guerre mondiale. Graham joined them in Rome in 1966 from the third volume (eleven would eventually be published by the project's completion in 1981. With Vatican permission, Graham also supplied researchers on request with other documents not included in the published collection. In 1968, Graham published a book, "The Pope and Poland in World War II," a summary of Volume III of the Actes, which deals with the Church in Poland.

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