The
Wicked Pope?
By Peter Stanford
http://www.prajna.org/Art10410.html
Here are some startling revelations by John Cornwell
about Pope Pius XII who was the high priest of the Catholic world during the
World War II days. Peter Stanford reviews Cornwell's book 'Hitler's
Pope : Secret History of Pope Pius XII'
The Vatican is
well on the way to making Pope Pius XII, its leader during the second World War,
into a saint. The official explanation for wanting to award him this celestial
gong is that he was one of the unsung heroes of the fight against Hitler, a
relentless crusader for peace and a man who helped many thousands during the
conflict by giving them food or sanctuary.
Yet there has
long been a suspicion that God's business address on earth has embarked on the
exercise of allocating Pius XII a posthumous halo as a way of countering an
entirely different and increasingly articulated, although hitherto unproven view
of him - namely that he betrayed German Catholics by the Church-State treaty he
signed with Hitler in 1933, and that he was an anti-Semite who turned a
blind eye to the Holocaust. Despite having ample evidence as early as 1942 of
the horror that was unfolding in the concentration camps, Pius never uttered a
single public condemnation of the Nazis' final solution until after the war.
Sensing that it
was losing this propaganda war, the Holy See decided on a new strategy. It
allowed the writer John Cornwell access to wartime papers in its archive that
have never been made public. Cornwell, the ecclesiastical bigwigs calculated,
was a man they could trust, an ex-seminarian with a soft spot for the Catholic
church whose A Thief in the Night, written with Vatican assistance, finally
scotched the suggestion that John Paul I, the smiling Pope who lasted just 33
days in 1978, had been murdered.
Cornwell admits
that he began Hitler's Pope: The Secret History of Pius XII (Viking œ20)
confident that its outcome would be to rescue Pius from the limbo of controversy
and claim for him his rightful place in the wartime holy trinity alongside
Churchill and Roosevelt. But once he started delving in the Vatican's files, he
experienced a Road-to-Damascus conversion. The Pius who emerges from this
gripping piece of historical detective work is guilty as charged by his critics
- and more. Cornwell's biography effectively indicts him as a war criminal.
Before he
became Pope in 1939, Eugenio Pacelli was the Vatican's ambassador to Germany. He
had an all-embracing vision of the Church as a centralised, monolithic and
hierarchical structure, and was, therefore, obsessed from his arrival in Germany
in 1917 with building up the Vatican's control over both the bishops and the
faithful in a country with one of the largest and wealthiest Catholic
communities in the world. The means he hit upon was a Church-State treaty with
the German authorities that would establish Rome's pre-eminence over any local
pretensions.
But there was a
problem. Pacelli could never quite stomach the post-1918 Weimar Republic. Like
many in the Church at the time, his greatest fear was that communism would sweep
across Europe from Russia and destroy the Church. In his paranoia, he made no
distinction between Bolsheviks and Social Democrats and thus saw Weimar, even
when the left-leaning Catholic Centre party was a partner in various coalition
governments, as lily-livered. Hitler was, for Pacelli, a godsend who shared his
authoritarian views, would be a bulwark against the Reds and was keen to
cultivate the Church to give his regime a spurious moral legitimacy.
So in 1933,
Pacelli, with the authority of Pope Pius XI, signed a concordat with Hitler. At
the same time, amid howls of protest from many German bishops, he agreed to the
disbanding of the Centre party, one of the last democratic bastions against the
Nazis.
Catholicism, by the terms of the
concordat, was to devote itself to its internal affairs and spiritual matters,
leaving the political sphere free to the Fuhrer and his henchmen. It was an act
of breathtaking folly that necessitated Pacelli ignoring the evidence before his
eyes of the real intentions of the Nazis. As Hitler boasted to his cohorts soon
after signing the agreement: "It gives Germany an opportunity and creates
an area of trust which is particularly significant in the developing struggle
against the international Jewry."
By 1938, Pope
Pius XI, Pacelli's boss, had begun to see the error of such a policy and written
what was planned as a forthright condemnation of the Nazis.
But the Pope
was ailing and Pacelli, now promoted to Vatican foreign secretary, colluded in
suppressing the dying pontiff's swan song for fear that it might threaten the
concordat and hence weaken the only thing that mattered to him: the Vatican's
authority.
Elected as Pius
XI's successor the following year, Pacelli spent the war hell-bent on a policy
of such timid and spineless appeasement that he made Neville Chamberlain look
like a warmonger. Although, without a shadow of a doubt, he knew the evil that
Hitler was carrying out, Pius XII was more concerned with the dignity and
pretensions of his own office. He aimed, as Cornwell puts it, to become a judge
of judges, a world mediator, in the world but not of the world.
Nobody but Pius
himself took this claim seriously. When the war ended, his views counted for
nothing in the peace settlement. Yet for six years he insisted on a policy of
strict neutrality, while all the time showing a remarkable capacity to find some
redeeming good in fascism. In Pius' twisted and egocentric mind, he was playing
God, and in this capacity he decided that six million Jews was a price worth
paying to save the world from communism.
Although
anti-Semitism was not unusual in men of Pacelli's age and background, he showed,
from his early days in Germany as ambassador, a casual disregard of the Jews,
refusing a routine intervention to enable them to obtain from Italy the palm
hearts they needed for their liturgy. In 1944, when the Holocaust was extended
to the Jews of Rome, Pius, Cornwell shows convincingly and in direct
contradiction to what is always suggested by the Catholic authorities, did
nothing to save them from their fate.
Hitler's Pope
is a superb work of objective and rigorous scholarship, jauntily written with a
wide audience in mind. It will surely condemn a deeply flawed and profoundly
unattractive character forever, and should act as a salutary lesson to all the
Popes of the new millennium. Those who have tried to cover up Pius' misdeeds for
so long with talk of canonisation should perform a public mea culpa for their
sins on the steps of Saint Peter's.
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