Hitler's Pope: The Secret History Of Pius Xii. - Review - book reviews

Arthur Jones

HITLER'S POPE: THE SECRET HISTORY OF PIUS XII By John Cornwell Viking, 410 pages, $29.95

This book is compelling, convincing and cruel. It's great journalism, debatable history. Cornwell maintains a relentless narrative and skillfully arranges his text.

For example, the reader is aware that Pius XII (Eugenio Pacelli), in World War II's aftermath, stands accused of perfidy toward the Jews. An unstated accusation of personal cowardice hangs in the air concerning the pope's unwillingness to publicly, unequivocally speak out against the Nazis.

Here's how Cornwell tightens that screw.

The author-has us in Kreuznach, Kaiser Wilhelm's Rhineland headquarters. It's 1917, World War I and page 68 of Hitler's Pope. Pacelli is nuncio to Bavaria and has carried Pope Benedict XV's "peace plan to the Kaiser.

Cornwell quotes from the kaiser's memoirs as Wilhelm tells Pacelli to inform the pope he must speak out and free Catholic soldiers "from the horrors of war." Pacelli's aide suggests the pope might endanger himself by such a course of action. The kaiser records he then says to Pacelli (about Benedict XV, but with Cornwell dangling shades of the future Pius XII before the reader):

"Was I now to belive that his [Christ's] viceroy on earth was afraid of becoming a martyr, like his Lord, in order to bring peace to the bleeding world?"

Masterly. And vicious.

Cornwell is cruel because Pacelli, as priest, bishop and cardinal and as Pius XII, never gets the benefit of the doubt. This reads like a vendetta: The chapter "Pope of Peace" is followed by one titled "Friend of Croatia."

Cornwell's findings are not necessarily incorrect; it's that his tone banishes any pretext of impartiality. This a lover spurned. Let's see why.

I take Cornwell at his word that he began this book to salvage Pius XII's reputation from the ash heap of World War II and "Final Solution" history.

Imagine the coupe for Cornwell -- and the Roman Catholic church. An author, mystery writer and scholar exonerates Pius XII right on the eve of the millennium and wipes clean the dirtiest blot on the Vatican's 20th-century escutcheon.

A double coupe for, in A Thief in the Night, Cornwell cleared the Vatican (and Archbishop Paul Marcinkus) of direct responsibility in the death of Pope John Paul I.

Yet as Cornwell turns history's pages on Pacelli (often secondary sources -- hence more journalism than history) he finds not material for exculpation but greater culpability.

Cornwell as trapped- the book reads as if written in reprisal or anger.

Even so, today's readers with no inkling of life inside Germany while Hitler was in power, are suddenly presented with examples of a courageous German Catholic laity -- in the press and in politics -- and individual priests and bishops magnificent in their opposition to the fuhrer.

Cornwell handles his material like a prosecutor.

Pacelli grew up in a middle class family of striving Vatican insiders, poorly paid Vatican lawyers who lived lives of "piety" and "penurious respectability" while murmuring the general anti-Semitic views common to the day.

Anti-Semitism was accepted. Society endorsed it. So did the Catholic church.

Tile by tile, Cornwell lays the mosaic that depicts the extent to which the Catholic church furthered anti-Semitism's cause. It wasn't just Crusaders breaking their journey to "kill Jews" to and from the Holy Land and -- even the popes trampled on the Jews. The author retells the weird tale of Piux IX, Pio Nono who, despite an outcry from world leaders, adopted a Jewish boy against his parent's will, raised him in the Vatican and saw him into the priesthood. (Scarcely surprising that the doghouse of Italy's liberator, Garibaldi, was labeled, "The House of Pio Nono.")

Cornwell has seminarian Pacelli's mind "narrowed" at the Almo Collegio Capranica by the "aridity" of the Neo-Thomist revival. As a fastidious boy with stomach trouble, seminarian Pacelli is allowed, against all precedent, to live at home with mother. Meanwhile he's reading the highly anti-Semitic and anti-Judaist leading Jesuit journal, Civilta Cattolica.

The new Fr. Pacelli, at home one evening "playing the violin," is visited by none other than Msgr. Pierto Gaspari, recently appointed undersecretary in the Secretariat of State's Department of Extraordinary Affairs. Pacelli is recruited into Vatican service -- in an anti-democratic, anti-Americanism and anti-Modernism Vatican.

Connections. Connections. The family's Vatican law practice has paid off.

At St. Apollinaris, Pacelli's doctoral thesis is on "the nature of concordats" (special treaties between the Holy See and nationstates) -- another notch on prosecutor Cornwell's briefcase.

Pacelli is soon a monsignor himself and masterminding the new (1917), written-insecret Code of Canon Law. The code, writes Cornwell, "exhaustively regulates conditions within the church" and, with its "creeping infallibility," is "unlike anything the church has previously possessed in its 2,000-year existence.

Hard to dispute, though, whether Pacelli masterminded the 1917 code to the degree Cornwell suggests is a historic bone for others to chew on. And they've already started.

As Cornwell has it, Pacelli later uses the code to skewer Germany's bishops and demolish the anti-Hitler, anti-Nazi German Catholic Center Party. Pacelli (now secretary of state) "favored a quiescent, docile church and collaboration with the Nazi Party over the continued existence of the Catholic Center Party, which represented the final obstacle on Hitler's path to dictatorship." Comments the author: "How well these two men [Hitler and Pacelli] seemed to understand each other."

Phew!

Cornwell contrasts that with German Catholic criticism of Nazism, "vehement and sustained" in the press and from the pulpits, with a Mainz diocese bishop and priest both telling the Nazis that "Hitler's Party's policy of "racial hatred" was "un-Christian and un-Catholic." Pius XII never speaks out that directly.

Cornwell produces a 1930 editorial in the Vatican's official paper L'Osservatore Romano. It declares Nazi (National Socialist) Party membership "incompatible with Catholic conscience," but it does so only by adding that membership in any socialist party is incompatible.

In 1939, Pacelli is Pius XII. In 1940, in private, he utters the most important words (by may measure) that he and history have to offer in his defense.

They are not exoneration, but they are illustrative. Contrast Cornwell's handling of the incident with that of Pierre Blet.

The incident: The war is on. Italian ambassador Alfieri conveys to Pius XII Mussolini's protestations over the pope's telegrams to the sovereigns of Holland, Belgium and Luxembourg. By interference, the telegrams criticize the Nazi invasion. Pius never mentions the Germans directly.

Cornwell: "Pacelli replied that he was not afraid of being put in concentration camp. He said he had been reading the letters of St. Catherine of Sienna, who reminded the pope of her day that God would judge him harshly if he failed in his duty."

Blet: "The pope calmly replied that he did not fear being shipped off to a concentration camp. Alluding to the most critical moments during his stay in Munich, Pius XII added: `We did not fear the revolvers that were aimed at us the first time around; we will have even less fear the second time.' Furthermore: 'The Italians are certainly well aware of the terrible things taking place in Poland. We might have an obligation to utter fiery words against such things; yet all that is holding us back from doing so is the knowledge that if we should speak, we would simply worsen the predicament of these unfortunate people.'"

That was Pacelli's view. Rightly or wrongly, he stayed with it. But it sorely haunted him (see Pius and the nurses in Stransky's preface to Blet in accompanying review.

Cornwell writes of 1942 when the U.S. charge d'affaires at the Holy See tells the U.S. State Department that the pope was (in Cornwell's words) "diverting himself, ostrichlike, into purely religious concerns and that the moral authority won for the papacy by Pius XI was being eroded."

In rebuttal to such an accusation, Pius XII's defenders frequently turn to the pope's Christmas Eve radio address of that year as a pontiff speaking out as clearly as he dared under the circumstances. Without referring to Hitler or the Jews, Pacelli said, "Humanity owes this vow to those thousands who, without any fault of their own, sometimes only by reason of their nationality or race, are marked down for death or gradual extinction."

This was diplomatese. Cornwell provides Mussolini's quite devastating comment, in part: "This is a speech of platitudes which might be better made by a parish priest of Predappio [Mussolini's backwater village birthplace]."

Despite its condemnatory tone, Cornwell's book is an honest challenge to the church, to history and Christians. Canonization will not cleanse Pius XII's reputation. Only Pius XII himself could have done it. The pope had 13 years between the end of World War II and his death to explain himself. He had a duty as head of the Roman Catholic church to do that. Do it in some detail, even if it was not to be released until after his death.

He didn't.

Post-Cornwell, what next? A repeat of what happened after Rolf-Hochhuth's play, "The Deputy," opened in 1963 in Europe (1964 in the U.S.) is likely. The play accused Pius of being Hitler's deputy. The furor developed a life of its own and resulted in a book, The Storm Over The Deputy.

Hitler's Pope is developing a life of its own (deservedly so).

It could well result in the Storm, Part II.

Arthur Jones, NCR editor-at-large, in 1963-64 wrote the first extensive articles in the United States on the anti-Pius XII play, "The Deputy," in the Catholic Star Herald of Camden, N.J.

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