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Tuesday, Nov 24, 2009
A new book accusing Pius XII of being "Hitler's Pope" overestimates the pontiff's influence and underestimates his character.
Oct 27, 1999 | As the 20th century draws to a close, a moral reckoning with its horrors is in the air. Accusations of collusion, collaboration or passive cooperation with the forces of evil have turned into a veritable orgy of sly finger-pointing. The recent trial of Nazi collaborator Maurice Papon in Bordeaux stirred bitter and conflicted memories in France, while in the publishing world, books about supposed collaborators and guilty bystanders have become ever more extravagant.
We have had Daniel Goldhagen, in 1996's "Hitler's Willing Executioners," dubbing the entire German nation congenital anti-Semites responsible for Auschwitz, and Philip Gourevitch holding the Clinton administration morally responsible for the slaughter in Rwanda in 1998's "We Wish to Inform You That Tomorrow We Will Be Killed With Our Families." In the genocide-accusation game, almost everyone close to a collective crime is subject to severe cross-examination.
And now it's the turn of a pope: Eugenio Pacelli, Pope Pius XII, leader of the Catholic world from 1939 to 1958. Was even the spiritual heir of Peter a Nazi collaborator? In "Hitler's Pope: The Secret History of Pius XII," Cambridge historian John Cornwell poses this question. It is not being asked for the first time: Ever since Saul Friedlander published his "Pius XII and the Third Reich" in 1966, Pacelli has been suspected of cowardice, self-aggrandizement and selfish Realpolitik.
According to many commentators, Pius maintained an ambiguous stance of neutrality during the Second World War, significantly failed to speak up about the Holocaust and failed to intervene in the notorious deportation of 1,000 Roman Jews in 1943 -- even though the SS trucks made a deliberate detour so that the German soldiers could get a glimpse of St. Peter's Square. Some historians have shown Pius in a sympathetic light. A 1992 book by historian Anthony Rhodes called "The Vatican in the Age of the Cold War" claimed that Pius could not speak truth to power when that power was Hitler. The pope, Rhodes argued, was doomed to Faustian bargains in which he could not prevail.
With a current move in the Vatican to beatify Pius, the controversy over his wartime behavior has heated up. Cornwell's book attempts to deliver a definitive blow, to nail Pius once and for all on the charge that he was a passive accomplice in the Nazi reign of terror. Pius, argues Cornwell, could have swung the vast weight of global Catholicism against Hitler. In particular, Cornwell claims that Pius could have mobilized the powerful German Catholic churches against the coming atheistic dictatorship. Why did he not do so? Wasn't Hitler, by his own dark admission, Christianity's most rabid enemy?
Cornwell has brought some new material to bear against Pius, including recently discovered letters that show that the suspicion of papal cowardice had been voiced even during the war by the British envoy to the Vatican, Francis d'Arcy Osborne. On July 31, 1942, for example, Osborne wrote from inside the Vatican:
It is very sad. The fact is that the moral authority of the Holy See, which Pius XI and his predecessors had built up into a world power, is now sadly reduced. I suspect that His Holiness hopes to play a great role as a peace-maker but, as you say, the German crimes have nothing to do with neutrality.
Yet as damning of Pius XII as they may be from a moral perspective, Osborne's letters do not exactly prove that Pius was secretly rubbing his hands behind the scenes at the thought of Nazi atrocities, or even gazing at them indifferently. Quite the contrary. When the Dutch Catholic bishops finally condemned the round-up of Jews in 1942, a furious Hitler retaliated by killing 40,000 Jews who had converted to Catholicism. A horrified Pius decided at that point that saving lives was more worthy than uttering papal condemnations.
