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O C T O B E R 1 9 9 9
Some in the Vatican want to make Pius XII a saint. If they succeed,
"the Church will have sealed its second millennium with a lie"
by James Carroll
(The online version of this article appears in two parts. Click here
to go
to part two.)
HITLER'S POPE: The Secret History of Pius XII
by John Cornwell.
Viking,
448 pages,
$29.95.
"IT is appropriate that, as the Second Millennium of Christianity
draws to a close" -- this is John Paul II, in his 1994 apostolic
letter Tertio Millennio Adveniente -- "the Church should become more
fully conscious of the sinfulness of her children," recalling all
those times in history when they "indulged in ways of thinking and
acting which were truly forms of counterwitness and scandal." The
sinful "children" of the Church, spokesmen insist, can include its
leaders, even bishops and popes. Yet when the long-awaited Vatican
document examining the record of the Church in relation to the
Holocaust, We Remember: A Reflection on the Shoah, was published last
year, it singled out for special praise "the wisdom of Pope Pius
XII's diplomacy." This seemed to be a direct rebuttal to an oft-
raised criticism of the wartime Pope, whose "silence" in the face of
the Jewish genocide had become for many an emblem of the Church's own
"counterwitness and scandal." The Vatican pronouncement came as
reports surfaced that the Congregation for the Causes of the Saints
was preparing to advance the cause of Pius XII toward sainthood. At
the end of the millennium Pope John Paul II, in the words of an
observer writing in the periodical Inside the Vatican, "is preparing,
not to denounce Pius, but to canonize him."
The process of canonization is secret, and there is no official word
that Pius XII is about to be beatified, the penultimate step toward
sainthood. But it seems to signal something that his positive
prospects are being openly discussed -- even by the Vatican official
in charge of promoting his cause. If Pius XII were to be named a
saint of the Roman Catholic Church, more than the restoration of his
reputation would result. His policy of silence about Nazi atrocities
would be justified. He would be credited with the secret rescue of
Jews that was carried out by many individual Catholics across Europe.
(We Remember honors Pius XII for what he "did personally or through
his representatives to save hundreds of thousands of Jewish lives.")
By extension, Hitler's hatred of Jews would be defined as rooted in
"neo-pagan" atheism, not in Christianity. The Catholic Church, and
the Vatican in particular, would be listed as among Hitler's mortal
enemies, and exonerated from charges of at least passive
collaboration in Nazi crimes. The Church's sinlessness would be
confirmed. The papal absolutism of which Pius XII was the avatar, and
which faltered under John XXIII and Paul VI, would be vindicated as
John Paul II's lasting legacy. If Pius XII were to be named a saint,
in other words, the Catholic Church could enter the new millennium
with its timeless claim to moral transcendence intact.
In this context the arrival of the first serious and complete
biography of Eugenio Pacelli, Pius XII, could not be more timely. Its
author, John Cornwell, a contributor to Britain's distinguished
Catholic publication The Tablet, embarked on the project, as he says
in the preface, "convinced that if his full story were told, Pius
XII's pontificate, and the Catholic Church, would be vindicated."
Cornwell, it seems, is a conventional Roman Catholic with an
instinctive wish to defend the Church from accusations of malfeasance
and worse regarding the twentieth-century fate of the Jews. As such,
he says, he gained access to heretofore unavailable sources within
the Vatican -- documents from the Secretariat of State and,
especially, sworn depositions gathered decades ago in the early
stages of Pius XII's promotion to sainthood. "By the middle of 1997,
nearing the end of my research," he writes, "I found myself in a
state I can only describe as moral shock. The material I had
gathered, taking the more extensive view of Pacelli's life, amounted
not to an exoneration but to a wider indictment."
That indictment is made explicit in the title Cornwell has given his
book: Hitler's Pope. His criticism, rooted in a painstaking
examination of Pacelli's record as the Vatican's point man in dealing
with the rise of Hitler in the 1930s and of his maneuvering as Pius
XII during the war years, is a devastating refutation of the claim
that this Pope's diplomacy can in any way be characterized as wisdom.
Instead of a portrait of a man worthy of sainthood, Cornwell lays out
the story of a narcissistic, power-hungry manipulator who was
prepared to lie, to appease, and to collaborate in order to
accomplish his ecclesiastical purpose -- which was not to save lives
or even to protect the Catholic Church but, more narrowly, to protect
and advance the power of the papacy. Pacelli's personal history, his
character, and his obsession with Vatican prerogatives combined at
the crucial hour to make him "the ideal Pope for Hitler's unspeakable
plan," Cornwell writes. "He was Hitler's pawn. He was Hitler's Pope."
THE young priest Eugenio Pacelli was trained not as a theologian but
as a canon lawyer. He was ordained in 1899 and appointed to the
Vatican bureaucracy in 1901, during the pontificate of Leo XIII, who
is remembered as a social liberal (his 1891 encyclical Rerum novarum
was read as an endorsement of the labor movement) but who ruled the
Church as a rigid authoritarian. To Leo XIII the Church was "a
perfect society," and the Vatican was to be the living embodiment of
that perfection. In his vision, the papacy would not only exert
spiritual sovereignty over the religious lives of Catholics but also
control Church activities in every nation -- from the licensing of
schools to the appointment of bishops. Such a vision required nation-
states to relate to the Church through the Vatican rather than
through local institutions.
Leo died in 1903, and was succeeded by Pius X, whom no one would
mistake for a liberal. Famous for his condemnation of "modernism,"
Pius X continued the program of centralizing Church authority in an
absolutist papacy. Two strategies served him well in this. One was
the Oath Against Modernism, which every candidate for ordination in
the world was thenceforth required to swear (it was still in force
when I was ordained, in the late 1960s), and the other was a new Code
of Canon Law, which would give the Pope unprecedented power over
every aspect of Church life. Pacelli was one of two Vatican priests
who spent more than a decade developing the code, which was finally
promulgated in 1917. As Cornwell points out, Canon 218 defines the
Pope's authority as "the supreme and most complete jurisdiction
throughout the Church, both in matters of faith and morals and in
those that affect discipline and Church government throughout the
world."
In Europe, where the structures of Church and State were
traditionally intermingled, with much overlap of political and
religious authority (those schools, the appointment of those
bishops), the implementation of this new Code of Canon Law required
the cooperation of governments, which led to Pacelli's next
assignment. The task of negotiating treaties -- concordats -- that
recognized the freshly claimed prerogatives of the papacy fell to
him. His first success, concluded in 1914, before the code was
formally published, was in Serbia, where he negotiated a concordat
that served the Pope's purposes but undercut the Catholic hierarchy
in Austria. "The treaty implied the abrogation," Cornwell explains,
"of the ancient protectorate rights of the Austro-Hungarian Empire
over the Catholic enclave in Serbian territory." This change in
Church-State relations effectively supported Serbia's political
effort to move away from Austrian dominance. The concordat was signed
on June 24, 1914. Four days later Archduke Franz Ferdinand, of
Austria, was assassinated by an independence-minded Serb in Sarajevo.
Cornwell comments,
The emotions prompted by the Serbian Concordat became part of the
general groundswell of anti-Serbian anger.... There is no indication
that Pacelli questioned the dangerous implications of the Serbian
negotiations after the event. From this point of view, the episode
marks the ominous beginning of Pacelli's pattern of aloofness from
the far-reaching political consequences of his diplomatic actions on
behalf of the Pope.
Continued...
O C T O B E R 1 9 9 9
(The online version of this article appears in two parts. Click here to go
to part one.)
THE most important Catholic nation in Europe in the period of the First World War,
even with its Protestant majority, was Germany, and in 1917, shortly after his
consecration as bishop, Pacelli went to Munich as papal nun
cio. Cornwell writes that his "principal task in Germany was now nothing less than the
imposition, through the 1917 Code of Canon Law, of supreme papal authority over the
Catholic bishops, clergy and faithful." To that en
d he set out to renegotiate existing concordats with the German regional states.
Ultimately he hoped for a concordat with the German nation itself, one that would
solidify Vatican authority, especially in the matter of th
e appointment of bishops. The anti-Catholic suspicions of Protestants and Weimar
liberals were not the only obstacle to the new definition of Church authority.
Germany's Catholic bishops were accustomed to holding sway in
their own sphere, and the Catholic Center Party -- a political organization that
dated back to the nineteenth century, when it was formed to resist Otto von Bismarck's
anti-Catholic Kulturkampf -- was one of the most pow
erful institutions in Weimar. In 1919 the Center Party drew six million votes, second
only to the Social Democrats. The Center Party, occupying the crucial middle ground in
the mounting chaos of the Weimar era, would prov
ide five chancellors in the ten governments that came and went from 1919 to 1933.
Catholic leaders of the party consistently rejected Pacelli's -- and the Pope's --
"urgings," in Cornwell's word, to stay out of coalitions
with the left-wing Social Democrats. Once it was imposed on German Catholics, with
the approbation of the German state, the new Code of Canon Law would end such
defiance. That is the fateful background to what followed t
he rise of Adolf Hitler. Cornwell writes,
The acquiescence of the German people in the face of Nazism cannot be understood in
its entirety without taking into account the long path, beginning as early as 1920, to
the Reich Concordat of 1933; and Pacelli's crucial
role in it; and Hitler's reasons for signing it. The negotiations were conducted
exclusively by Pacelli on behalf of the Pope over the heads of the faithful, the
clergy, and the German bishops.
The record compiled by Cornwell establishes, for example, that Pacelli "patently lied"
to Cardinal Michael Faulhaber, the archbishop of Munich, to keep him in ignorance.
"When Hitler became Pacelli's partner in negotiatio
ns," Cornwell observes, "the concordat thus became the supreme act of two
authoritarians, while the supposed beneficiaries were correspondingly weakened,
undermined, and neutralized." The first true beneficiary was Hitler
himself: the Reichskonkordat, agreed to on July 8, 1933, was his first bilateral
treaty with a foreign power, and as such gave him much-needed international prestige,
whether the Vatican intended it or not. (The Vatican
newspaper L'Osservatore Romano published a statement on July 2 saying that the
concordat implied no moral approval of Nazism, and Pacelli would make the same point
later.) Yet the price Hitler demanded for the concordat w
as stiff -- the complete withdrawal from politics (and therefore from any possible
resistance to the Nazis) of all Catholics as Catholics. On July 4 the leader of the
Catholic Center Party, Heinrich Br�ning, who had serve
d as Germany's Chancellor from 1930 to 1932, had "agreed with bitterness in his heart
to dissolve the party." Hitler wanted the Center Party gone because it represented the
last potential impediment to his program. It app
ears that Pacelli wanted it gone for the sake of his own program. (Defenders of the
Vatican have argued that it did not want the Center Party dissolved, but Cornwell
makes an opposite case, tied to Pacelli's maneuvering.)
That month the Center Party ceased to exist.
The Reichskonkordat effectively removed the German Catholic Church -- which had
successfully rolled back Bismarck's Kulturkampf, and which had opposed the rise of
Nazism, generally barring party members from receiving hol
y communion into 1933 -- from any continued role of opposition to Hitler. More than
that, as Hitler told his cabinet on July 14, it established a context that would be
"especially significant in the urgent struggle agains
t international Jewry." Cornwell comments, "This was the reality of the moral abyss
into which Pacelli, the future Pontiff, had led the once great and proud German
Catholic Church."
PACELLI became Pope in 1939. As is well known, he did not openly denounce Nazi
anti-Semitism as such, although he condemned Nazi racism in more general terms. Nor
did he explicitly refer to the Final Solution as it unfold
ed, even though he was one of the first leaders outside German-controlled Europe to be
informed of its full dimensions. On October 16, 1943, more than 1,200 Jews were
arrested by German forces in the Jewish district of Ro
me, at the foot of the Vatican hill. Within a week more than a thousand of those
arrested had been taken to Auschwitz and gassed. Critics of Pius XII's silence have
pointed to this event as emblematic of his failure; his
defenders, giving equal emphasis to it, insist that had it not been for the Pope's
urgent behind-the-scenes intervention (he dispatched his Secretary of State, Cardinal
Luigi Maglione, to protest to the German ambassador
to the Vatican, Ernst von Weiz�cker, and a German bishop resident in Rome conveyed the
Pope's concern to German military authorities), thousands more Roman Jews would have
been seized. The Vatican offered shelter to hundr
eds of Jewish fugitives, within Vatican City and in other Church institutions under
Vatican control. Cornwell's examination of relevant documents, however, leads him to
conclude that papal defenders exaggerate the signifi
cance of measures taken in behalf of Jews. Other scholars -- notably John Morely, the
author of Vatican Diplomacy and the Jews During the Holocaust 1939-1943 (1980) -- have
asserted that characterizing Vatican action on t
his occasion as "protest" seems dubious. In a presentation to a group of Jewish and
Catholic scholars last March, Morely offered a close reading of Maglione's own account
of what took place in his October 16 meeting with
Weiz�cker, summarizing it this way: "There was neither confrontation, nor criticism,
nor a plea for justice." According to Maglione, Vatican intervention led to the
release of many Jews, and the Pope's defenders have made
much of that claim, but Cornwell dismisses it as "untruthful." And as for Vatican
pressure stopping the roundup of Jews, more than a thousand additional Jews were
arrested after October 16. Neither Pacelli nor his Secret
ary of State openly protested any of this. "Their failure to speak or act," Cornwell
writes, "astonished the German leadership in the city."
Critics of Pius XII have accounted for his failure to challenge Hitler more directly,
even on the matter of the Jewish genocide, by charging him with cowardice, or with
quietly held Nazi sympathies, but Cornwell shows tha
t neither was the case. Pius XII's courage, and his contempt for Hitler, were
demonstrated by his active participation, early in his pontificate, in a plot to
overthrow the German dictator. From late 1939 through March of
1940 Pius XII served as a channel of communication between a group of anti-Hitler
German army chiefs, led by General Ludwig Beck, and the British government,
represented by Britain's Vatican minister, Francis d'Arcy Osbo
rne. The Germans indicated their readiness to stage a coup and end the war, but only
with assurances from London that the Munich settlement would be honored. For whatever
reason, the British failed to pick up on the initi
ative. Nonetheless, the plotters and the Pope himself had acted in ways that Hitler,
had he learned of them, would have savagely punished. This episode leads Cornwell to a
firm conclusion about Pacelli: "Pusillanimity and
indecisiveness -- shortcomings that would be cited to extenuate his subsequent
silence and inaction in other matters -- were hardly in his nature."
THEN what accounts for the Pope's wartime record -- for his silence not only in the
face of the Final Solution but also in full knowledge of the Nazi atrocities against
Catholic Poland? For his repeated efforts to prevent
the Allies from bombing Rome, alongside his relative inaction regarding the bombing
of other cities, and also for his firm support for Catholic nationalism in Croatia,
even after the Ustache regime revealed itself as gro
tesquely genocidal? The Pius XII that emerges from the pages of Hitler's Pope was no
coward and no crypto-Nazi. He was not indifferent to the suffering of innocents, nor
was he unaffected by the murderous policies of the
Nazis in occupied Europe. If the arguments that his defenders base on his secret
maneuvering ("the wisdom of his diplomacy," as We Remember deems it) fall short, as in
Cornwell's convincing account they do, what explains
this Pope's historic failure?
Cornwell suggests that Pius XII's particular indifference to the fate of the Jews (he
apparently never used the word "Jew" in any of his wartime pronouncements, apparently
never once used the word "anti-Semitism") was rel
ated to his attitude toward the Jewish people.
Until now, it has not been possible to relate the full history of Pacelli's career as
diplomat and as Cardinal Secretary of State. The new material made available in this
narrative, however, reveals Pacelli's long-standin
g anti-Jewishness, indicating that he failed to be gripped with moral outrage by the
plight of the Jews.
Certainly, from the Reichskonkordat forward (that treaty included an annex granting
some protection to Jews who had converted to Catholicism but explicitly defining the
fate of other Jews as Germany's "internal affair," a
bout which the Church would have nothing to say) Pacelli showed no sign of seeing Jews
as within the Catholic circle of concern. And there are other indications (he accepted
the stereotypical association of the Jew with B
olshevism) that Pacelli regarded Jews as a contemporary as well as an ancient enemy of
the Church.
But a factor more important even than anti-Semitism accounts for Pacelli's early
failings as a diplomat and his later failings as a Pope, and that was his
determination to put the accumulation and defense of papal power a
bove everything else -- above the fate of the Jews, and even above the fate of the
Catholic Church elsewhere in Europe. "Was there something in the modern ideology of
papal power," Cornwell asks, "that encouraged the Holy
See to acquiesce in the face of Hitler's evil, rather than oppose it?" The answer to
this awful question, it seems increasingly clear, is yes.
And that is why the unfinished story of Pius XII matters so much -- especially to
Catholics. Even though the ancient Christian anti-Semitism that fueled the Nazi
program has been roundly repudiated by the Church, "the mod
ern ideology of papal power" that helped to make the hatred of Jews so lethal in this
century still marks Roman Catholicism. And that is the meaning of the campaign to make
Pius XII a saint despite everything. It is appar
ently a cause dear to the heart of John Paul II, who has single-handedly restored the
spirit of papal absolutism. Yet that campaign contradicts John Paul's equally firm
assertion of the moral meaning of the new millennium
, and the Catholic Church's obligation to enter it in a spirit of repentance and truth.
The story of Eugenio Pacelli, and of the modern papacy, began with
Pius X, whose condemnation of modernism and commissioning of the
Vatican-dominated Code of Canon Law set the Catholic Church on its
disastrous twentieth-century course. That Pope gave Pacelli his
mission in life -- the expansion of power, which became his moral
undoing. It is an omen, perhaps, that Pacelli repaid his patron, and
reified his view of the Church, by canonizing Pius X in 1954.
Hitler's Pope makes it clear that if Pacelli himself is to be
canonized now, the Church will have sealed its second millennium with
a lie, and readied its third for new disasters.
The online version of this article appears in two parts. Click here
to go
to part one.
James Carroll is the author of nine books, including the National
Book Award-winning memoir An American Requiem (1996). He is at work
on a book about the history of the conflict between Catholics and
Jews.
Copyright � 1999 by The Atlantic Monthly Company. All rights
reserved.
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