In Defense of Pius. - Review - book reviews

Hitler's Pope: The Secret History of Pius XII, by John Cornwell (Viking, 430 pp., $29.95)

A biography of a pope who died more than 40 years ago? No such book would have received any interest, perhaps not even a publisher, in the past. This is not what is happening now-but the reason for this is not any interest in papal or ecclesiastical history. The reason is the unending interest in, and the festering rashes and wounds in many minds about, the Second World War, its crimes and evils, including the Holocaust. And the related interest is not what Pope Pius XII did during the Second World War-it is, rather, what he did not do.

This reviewer had read, written, and pondered much about the subject. He must add that many years ago he read and reviewed the twelve (not eleven, as Cornwell reports) extraordinary volumes of Vatican documents about World War II published by the Holy See, which the author of Hitler's Pope does not seem to have done. So, at the risk of presumption, here is a summary of my considered view. Eugenio Pacelli, Pope Pius XII, 1939-1958, had the great misfortune of occupying the Holy See during World War II. Caution and piety marked his character from the beginning of his conscious life. But the character of a man is also influenced by his experiences. His experience as nuncio in Munich during the short-lived Soviet period there in 1919 left a strong mark on his mind. He feared Communism; and he loved the Catholic people of Germany. Consequently he was the architect of the 1933 Concordat with Hitler, allowing the elimination of the Catholic Center Party. During his papacy he avoided an outright condemnation of the government of the Third Reich, including its criminal misdeeds. He thought that a pope must stand above the warring sides and powers, maintaining a kind of august neutrality.

This is the worst one may say about Pius XII during the Second World War. At the same time, there is no doubt that he had no sympathy for Hitlerism, and that he intervened, and allowed his nuncios to intervene many times, in the cause of suppressed and persecuted people, including Jews. He could have said-and done-more; he could have acted otherwise. That much is true. But to examine a man for what he did not say or did not do is a difficult task when it comes to the pursuit of truth.

To entitle a thick and documented book Hitler's Pope: The Secret History of Pius XII is scandalous. Pius was not Hitler's pope; and there remains not much that is secret about his record during the war. Of the two thousand years of the papacy, the years 1939-1945 are the most documented ones, in quantity as well as quality. Cornwell's book is full of mistakes of judgment. There is ample reason to criticize Pius's excessive caution, his mistaken fear of what Hitler could do to German Catholics during the war, his obsession with Communism at the expense of his concern with a National Socialism that was more powerful and more attractive than was Communism at the time, his unwillingness openly to condemn the German persecution and mass murder of Jews (and of Poles too). But these were excesses of caution, not of sympathy with Hitlerism, which is what John Cornwell on occasion suggests. Mistakes of fact, too, abound in this volume, mostly about events and people. (One, but only one, example: He refers to the ruler of Hungary as "President," and as a Catholic-Nicholas Horthy was not a president but a regent, and he was a Protestant.)

There is more trouble with this book. In addition to-or perhaps underlying-Cornwell's castigation of Pacelli's politics, there is his attack on this Pope's authoritarianism, an argument that Cornwell carries to decades before and to decades beyond Pius's life, to Pius's predecessors and to his successors. To Cornwell, Pius XII was too authoritarian, too monarchical, too powerful. It may be argued that the very opposite was true. Pius XII was not sufficiently confident of his power and of his situation. Had he spoken out clearly during the war, Hitler would have had plenty of trouble-we have evidences of this, from Hitler's own dropped words. Toward the end of his book, Cornwell posits Pope John Paul II as a continuer of papal authoritarianism, someone who has been demolishing most of the reforms of the Second Vatican Council. Such an argument not only fails to belong within the confines of this book, it is also quite wrong. Both in character and in action, John Paul II and Pius XII are very different men.

The English Catholic writer E. I. Watkin once wrote that the faith and Christ's church are the pure gold; the men who represent them in this world are the alloy; but gold without alloy is unusable. There were and are no popes who have been entirely free of human failings-what matters is the character of such failings, as well as their consequences. Two recent, and very good, portraits of Pius XII exist in the great (Anglican) church historian Owen Chadwick's Britain and the Vatican During the Second World War (1986) and Eamon Duffy's Saints and Sinners: A History of the Popes (1997). They are very different from Cornwell's biography, of which sensational excerpts were first printed in the semi-pornographic magazine Vanity Fair-another error of judgment that this author should have avoided. Hitler's Pope, alas, is also a selection of the History Book Club. History clubbed, indeed.