Lies, Canards and Slander.

The BBC repeats the slander against Pope Pius XII.

Last night, a report on BBC News on Pope Francis’s visit to Auschwitz claimed that it was a visit motivated by reparation for the Church’s silence during the Holocaust. (The full clip is not available on the BBC website). In fact, the visit was part of the Church’s corporate commitment to remembering the Holocaust so that it may never be repeated — a commitment made by previous popes (see John Allen at Crux). 

The idea that the Church was ‘silent’ during the Holocaust is an old canard that has been comprehensively rebutted by historians (see here). There were silent and complicit Catholics — and a few priests and bishops — but the claim cannot be made of the Church as a whole, of the German hierarchy, or of Pius XII in particular. 

The following is a reflection by David Lord Alton provoked by the BBC report. 

 The BBC’s reporter clearly didn’t see the irony of stating that the Catholic Church had remained silent in the face of a genocide only to then describe how Polish Catholics were arrested and killed for sheltering Jews and how Fr Maximilian Kolbe was executed at Auschwitz after taking the place of another prisoner. Why was he in Auschwitz in the first place? He had been arrested for publishing a denunciation of the Nazis in his magazine, Knight, which had a circulation of around one million people. Hardly silence, then.

For a really interesting - and historically accurate - account, read "The Church of Spies."

The Slandered Heroic Pope. I just finished listening to Church of Spies as an audio book.

I had a moment of chill when I got the end of the book and it described how a major figure in the book - Joseph Mueller - had told Harold Tittmann, the American representative to the Vatican during the Nazi occupation of Rome that the reason that Pius didn't speak out about Nazi atrocities was that he had been asked not to do so by the German Resistance.

I've read Tittmann's memoirs and I remember that detail, but when I read it I had no idea who "Dr. Mueller" was and during this book, I had no idea that Tittman's informant was this man who had acted as the courier from Admiral Canaris to Pope Pius XII.

Reading Church of Spies is like finding the missing pieces of a jigsaw puzzle.

Here is the passage from Tittmann's memoirs (which is actually a postscript from Tittmann's son):

//My fathers memoirs ended with his move out of the Vatican in July 1944, but it is appropriate to conclude the story of his Vatican assignment by reproducing a memorandum he wrote to Myron Taylor on June 4, 1945, reporting on a conversation with Dr. Josef Mueller, a Bavarian Catholic lawyer who had been a leading figure in the anti-Nazi German underground movement and had acted as the liaison between that movement and the Holy See. My father met Mueller following a speech by the Pope to the College of Cardinals on June 2, 1945, during which the Pope had severely castigated National Socialism and had referred to the deaths of 2000 Catholic priests at Dachau.

FOR THE AMBASSADOR     June 4, 1945

Dr. Mueller told me last night that contrary to what I had heard, he had no part in drafting any part of the Pope’s speech, but that he had furnished the Holy Father with the information on which certain passages were based.

Dr. Mueller said that during the war his anti-Nazi organization in Germany had always been very insistent that the Pope should refrain from making any public statement singling out the Nazis and specifically condemning them and had recommended that the Pope’s remarks should be confined to generalities only. Dr. Mueller said that he was obliged to give this advice, since, if the Pope had been specific, Germans would have accused him of yielding to the promptings of foreign powers and this would have made the German Catholics even more suspected than they were and would have greatly restricted their freedom of action in their work of resistance to the Nazis. Dr. Mueller said that the policy of the Catholic resistance in Germany was that the Pope should stand aside while the German hierarchy carried out the struggle against the Nazis inside Germany, without outside influence being brought to bear. Dr. Mueller said that the Pope had followed this advice throughout the war.

I then said to Dr. Mueller that I had heard rather widespread criticism of the Pope in connection with his latest speech, because he had waited until Germany had been defeated before attacking the Nazis in public. Dr. Mueller said that he had already explained why the Pope had maintained silence during the war. He imagined that the Pope had decided to come out in the open now against the Nazis because the implications in the denunciations were so very important at the present time and seemed to the Pope to override other considerations.//

Interesting.

I ran across a book called "The Persecution of the Catholic Church in the Third Reich." Since it claimed to have been published in 1941, I purchased it as primary textual material.

After I received it, I wondered where it came from because the author is anonymous.

A little internet research turned up this:

2. The Persecution of the Catholic Church in the Third Reich (1942).

It was published in London during 1942 and the author’s identity had, at the time, to be kept secret. Copies and reprints are available on the Internet and seem to vary between £5 - 18 or $9 - 25 plus delivery.

This book, of 565 tightly printed pages, is full of detailed events and is indispensable to anyone researching this subject.

After the war the history of the book’s formation could be revealed. Admiral Canaris was a German hero during the First World War and very patriotic. In 1935, when the army was still free from close Nazi control, Canaris was appointed head of the Army Forces Intelligence Service – the Abwehr.

Canaris (a non-practising Catholic) organised a secret group within the Abwehr, which included Josef Muller, a dedicated Catholic. So Muller, while travelling widely on secret army work, was able to collect details of persecution without raising Nazi suspicions. When completed, he delivered the information to the Vatican where Fr. Walter Mariaux translated and organised the material. In 1941 he passed the typescript to ‘Burns and Oates’, a Catholic publisher in London. They published it in 1942.

The Canaris group were involved in an assassination attempt on Hitler’s life, to be followed by an army seizure of power. On July 20th 1944, Colonel Von Stauffenberg, another dedicated Catholic, planted a bomb close to Hitler, but he was not killed. Most of the group, including Canaris, were exposed and executed, but Muller managed to remain free.//

After reading many books on the Catholic Church under the Nazis, I had never heard that any such book existed.

Another interesting factoid - Pius XII acted as the personal conduit for meetings between the British and and the German resistance that involved Canaris.

I knew about that, but I hadn't realized that there was more information floating through that conduit.

New Review -

Helpful votes at the link are appreciated.

			Pius XII and the Holocaust: Understanding the Controversy by José M. Sánchez Edition: Paperback Price: $15.56		58 used & new from $4.70
An objective and scholarly examination of the evidence on the "silence of Pius.", March 4, 2013 Amazon Verified Purchase(What's this?) This review is from: Pius XII and the Holocaust: Understanding the Controversy (Paperback) This book is a comprehensive, objective survey and assessment of the arguments pro and con on the putative silence of Pius XII on the Holocaust. The author, Jose M. Sanchez, is a professor of history at Saint Louis University. His purpose was to survey the arguments found in the major scholarly and popular works to judge the strengths of various arguments for or against Pius' behavior during the war. Sanchez approaches this work as a professional historian, albeit he admits up front that he is a practicing Catholic. Nonetheless, his work does not come across as an "apologetic" to defend Pius; in fact, it seemed to me that Sanchez bent over backwards to find merit in the criticism of Pius. The first issue that Sanchez approaches is what is meant by the "silence" of Pius. Sanchez notes that critics of Pius often use the term "silence" in an vague way as if to include the entire period of Nazi rule from 1933 through 1945, which is inane, since, as Sanchez points out, the Holocaust didn't start until 1941: //The words "the silence of Pope Pius" have acquired a life of their own, meaning things to different critics, sometimes having no connection to Pius at all. The controversy has become a free for all for anti-Catholics and Catholic defenders, anti-clericals and clericals, libertarians and authoritiarians, allowing all to vent their feelings and frustration regardless of the facts.// [p.3] One of the things that Sanchez is good at, which is often forgotten by critics and defenders, is that history unfolds in pieces. The Nazis of 1933 were not the Nazis of 1942. Likewise, even in 1942, even with knowledge of Nazi atrocities, as Sanchez points out, opponents of the Nazis still didn't necessarily conclude that the Nazis were aiming at total racial annihilation. We know it now. We can't get that central fact out of our minds. But the people then didn't. And that fact separates us from them. Sanchez does an excellent job of summarizing Pius's biography and character. His thesis is that while the attempts to impugn Pius' motives are not substantiated by the evidence, nonetheless Pius' character - rigid, humorless, cold, diplomatic - is the reason that subsequent generations have turned on Pius after Pius' death and the publication of Hochuth's "The Deputy," particularly when compared to his charismatic successor, John XXIII. This seemed to me to be the place where Sanchez was stretching to show his fairness and objectivity. Most people alive today don't remember Pius at all. John XXIII was followed by Paul VI, who was no charismatic whirlwind. The change in the perception of popes as "rock stars" was really John Paul II. Frankly, I think Sanchez misses the obvious point that critiques have some other agenda than issue of Pius in World War II. Rabbi David Dalin in The Myth of Hitler's Pope: Pope Pius XII And His Secret War Against Nazi Germany points out that much of the anti-Pius criticism is an intra-Catholic dispute that involves liberal Catholics who want to knock down, basically John Paul II, who denied their cultural dreams. On the other hand, Sanchez does acknowledge that for many, Pius does give a single human face for anti-Catholics to demonize, which is not far off from Rabbi Dalin. Sanchez also does a nice job of laying out what Pius did say about the Jewish Holocaust during the war. Pius directly - or his proxies - said quite a lot. Pius condemned the Nazis for their racism and the murder of defenseless people on the grounds of nationality and race. The Vatican radio and newspaper condemned the Nazi atrocities against Jews. Pius protested against Nazi atrocities to the Nazis. When I got done with that section, it seemed to me that the issue boiled down to, why didn't Pius himself personally specifically denounce Nazi atrocities against Jews and only Jews between the beginning of 1942 - when information about Nazi atrocities was probably beginning to filter through to him - and September of 1943 - when the Nazis occupied Rome? When you put it that way, it seems like the issue is no longer about Pius' motivations, but rather about how Pius' critics can thread their way through the facts in order to find something - anything - that Pius didn't do in order to gin up their case. On which point, Sanchez is good - almost the first historian I've read to say explicitly - in pointing out that our current perspective on the Holocaust was not necessarily what the people of the time were experiencing. Today, we have the luxury of focusing on the Jewish Holocaust, but in doing that we lose sight of all of the other victims of the Nazis. What Pius was dealing with was an undifferentiated human disaster, where not only Jews were being killed but Poles were being killed in equal numbers. Pius didn't explicitly address the Polish Holocaust either, which implies that there was something other than indifference or anti-Semitism at work. Further, Sanchez points out that Pius was not only dealing with the Nazis during this period; the Communists had been actively engaging in the murder of Catholics in Spain up until 1939. Sanchez then deals seriatim with the reasons proposed for Pius's putative silence. He quickly knocks off the ones that he doesn't find persuasive at all. For example, he gives no credence to the claim that Pius was an anti-semite. As he notes: //This is the unstated under-current in the arguments of many of Pius' strongest critics. Few say it outright, because they regard it as a fact - taken for granted - given the history of the papacy and the hothouse of ecclesiastical politics and training n the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, where Jews were viewed not only as "Christ-killers" but more importantly as purveyors of cultural modernism at a variance with traditional Christianity. It is also the simplest explanation for the critics of the Pope.// [p. 71] A problem for the theory is that it is essentially unsubstantiated or based on a distortion of the record. Cornwell's putative quotes about Pius' supposed anti-Semitic statements from his time in Communist occupied Munich is dismissed by Historian Istvan Deak, who is not sympathetic to Pius, but finds the comments "[not] convincing ...proof of Pacelli's anti-Semitism."[ p. 73.] (Sanchez also points out that Ronald Rychlak in Hitler, the War and the Pope demolishes Cornwell's interpretation and reveals Cornwell's inadequacy as an historian. [p. 5, n. 9]) Sanchez finds the anti-Semitic charge unsubstantiated on the grounds that Pius treated Jews and Catholic Poles alike. [p. 74.] Separating the Jewish wheat from the Catholic chaff would seem to be an insurmountable problem for the critics. Sanchez also believes that the claim that Pius was motivated by fear concerning the security of the Vatican or fear of capture or concern for Rome is unlikely. For much of the war, Italy was a German ally and the Mussolini showed no interest in alienating Italian Catholics. [p. 74 - 77.] Sanchez also does not credit that idea that Pius acted the way he did because "Vatican diplomacy was always cautious." Sanchez points out that Vatican diplomacy can be bold - as when dealing with Communism after 1945 or with Mussolini before 1945 [p. 94], but Vatican diplomacy is mostly "prudent." However, Pius could show that he was not always prudent, such as when he acted as the intermediary between anti-Nazi Germans and the British. [p. 94] Sanchez give more credence to other reasons, including Pius' stated reason that he wanted to remain neutral in order to mediate an end to the war. Although this seemed unlikely under Hitler, and particularly after the unconditional surrender policy was adopted by the Allies, there was always the chance of an overthrow of Hitler, which could change the game. [p. 110 - 112] Sanchez scores a solid point on this subject: //The German conspirators of the July 20, 1944 plot, believed that a compromise was possible with the Allies; they would assassinate Hitler and set up a government of national restoration and give up Germany's gains. The Allies they contacted told them to go ahead, but said they could make no prior commitments. If the German conspirators accepted this proviso and went ahead with their plans, it is difficult to fault the Pope for making the same assumption - namely that a compromise was not out of the question.// [p. 110 - 111] Sanchez also knocks down the canard that if Pius had only condemned the Nazis or Hitler, then German Catholics would have risen to stop Hitler and the war. Sanchez, again, makes a point that few - actually, none of the historians who I have read - have ever made, namely the effect of the Kulturkampf on the German Catholic psyche: //Let it be said at the outset that the German bishops, always with some exceptions, were scarred by Bismarck's Kulturkampf of the 1870s; they were particularly sensitive to the charge that they were not good Germans because they owed their allegiance to the Pope rather than to the German state. They felt this charge deeply, and as a result were inclined to give unqualified support to the nation, particularly in World War I.// [p. 81] Sanchez points out that Pius had grounds to fear that if given a choice between their faith and their nation, German Catholics would choose their nation. In fact, Pius' nuncio to Germany, Cesare Orsenigo (who for the first time I learn was disliked by Pius for being weak with the Nazis), was telling Pius that he feared mass apostasy "unless the clergy appeased the regime and relieved members of the church of the conflict of conscience to which they were not equal." [ p. 101] Sanchez makes a point that I have only slowly formed from reading in this area, namely: //The Nazi regime commanded an immensely powerful state. Most Germans, whatever their religion, if put to the test would choose their state over their church because it was the more immediately powerful of the two. It is a fact of modern life, historian perceptively notes, that, as in nations everywhere, "a German Catholic thought of himself as a German who happened to be Catholic, not the reverse." For the Pope to have asked German Catholics to oppose the brutal Nazi regime would have been for him to ask for heroic resistance on the part of the people; and while there are instances of Christians who resisted the regime, they paid for it with their lives. The mass of people were not capable of such heroic actions.// [p. 101] Sanchez also knocks down the canard that Pius feared Communism and therefore was pro-Hitler. The evidence that this is false is too strong to put much time on it, including Pius acting as the conduit for anti-Nazi Germans to the British. Even John Cornwell's execrable "Hitler's Pope" doesn't accept this theory. For his part, Sanchez notes that while Pius might have felt that Germany could be a bulwark against Communism, Hitler - who had ceded half of Poland to the Communists in a cynical violation of its treaty with Poland - was not a bulwark against Communism. [p. 105] Further, Pius also refused to condemn Nazi atrocities because then he would have been obliged to condemn Communist atrocities. Finally, Pius also permitted American Catholics to provide aid to the "Russian people" even if it was aiding the Communist party. (p. 106.) Sanchez ultimately concludes that the best explanation for Pius not giving an unqualified or clear condemnation of the Nazi holocaust was a combination of his communication style, which tended to couch things in diplomatic language, and his feat that a sterner condemnation would make things worse for the victims of Nazi aggression. Pius himself explained on numerous occasions that he was concerned that a condemnation would have brought down an even worse persecution on the Jews, and others, than they were already experiencing. [p. 116] Likewise, contemporary and subsequent witnesses corroborated this concern. [p. 117] This concern was clearly based in fact since Dutch Archbishop Johannes de Jong's public protest against the deportation of Dutch Jews resulted in greater persecution by the Germans, including the deportation of Jews who had converted to Catholicism. [p. 117] Defenders and detractors agree that fear of retribution was a factor in Pius' approach but they dispute its significance. [p. 118] Many of the detractors play "Monday Morning Quarterback" arguing that things could not have gotten worse for the Jews, but they ignore the fact that Pius was not privy to the Nazi's plans of total extermination: //The difficulty with this question is that it assumes that Pius knew that Germans were going to kill all the Jews. It is here that the problem of the time sequence is crucial for understanding the Pope's actions. It was, of course, common knowledge that the Jews were being persecuted, herded into ghettoes, and transported to eastern Europe. By late 1941, the Pope knew that large numbers of Jews were being killed by the Germans. Did he know that the Germans intended to kill all the Jews? If so, when did this fact become apparent to him? Another facet of the problem is that by mid-1943 when Pius certainly knew about the ferocity of the German terror against the Jews, he was also aware of the German terror against all people. Did Pius distinguish among the victims of the Nazi terror? The Germans did not kill all the Poles, or Greeks, or French, or other subject people. But they might be tempted to kill more if provoked by the Pope, and it appears that Pius so believed. Furthermore, there were thousands of priests - both Germans and Polish - in German concentration camps who might have been the victim of Nazi reprisals for a papal protest; and everywhere there were Jews who had converted to Catholicism who had, in may cases, so far been spared, and who might also have suffered.// [p. 119] Another Pope might have made a different decision. Was Pius' decision right or wrong? On the whole, it seems right, but at the very least it was not a dishonorable decision. Sanchez' s writing style is easily accessible. I tore through this rather short - approximately 177 pages - book in short order. Sanchez goes for the key issues and he brings a broad viewpoint to the issue, which is a nice change of the typically narrow-focus and buried assumptions in most such books. On the whole, I thought his treatment was fair, and I came away with the conclusion - his conclusion, actually - that the critics are extremists, who want a Pope with powers that even the most pious Catholic doesn't expect from popes. Sanchez concludes: //It is easy to criticize both defenders and critics, to take a middle position and argue that both are extremists. In fact, most of the Pope's critics tend to extremism, while the defenders tend toward moderation. This is because the critics have taken the position that the Holocaust would have been much diminished, or even averted by strong papal action, while defenders of the Pope argue more convincingly that a strong papal protest would have had little effect on the Nazi machine of destruction.// [p. 178] And: //What seems apparent is that throughout the years of controversy, the critics of Pius (and his defenders, less so) have tended to make their judgments less on the basis of an impartial reading of the documents than on their preconceived sentiments. This situation probably will not change. Pius remains an alluring target for those opposed to clericalism or the papacy or the Church or the clergy, or simply to authoritarian systems.// [p. 179] This is a very good resource on the subject. I recommend it highly.  Comment | Permalink

The Undercover Pope.

I am not sure how much authority to give this report, but given the basesless slanders against him, this might account as "balancing" the scales.

Researcher thinks that Pius XII went undercover to rescue Jews:

The Jewish New Yorker who has made it his life’s work to clear the name of Pope Pius XII of being anti-Semitic believes the wartime pontiff actually went undercover to save the lives of Jews in Rome.


Gary Krupp came across the evidence in a letter from a Jewish woman whose family was rescued thanks to direct Vatican intervention.

“It is an unusual letter, written by a woman who is alive today in northern Italy, who said she was with her mother, her uncle, and a few other relatives in an audience with Pius XII in 1947.” Next to Pope Pius during the meeting was his Assistant Secretary of State, Monsignor Giovanni Montini, the future Pope Paul VI.

“Her uncle immediately looks at the Pope and he says, ‘You were dressed as a Franciscan,’ and looked at Montini who was standing next to him, ‘and you as a regular priest. You took me out of the ghetto into the Vatican.’ Montini immediately said, ‘Silence, do not ever repeat that story.’”

Krupp believes the claim to be true because the personality of the wartime Pope was such that he “needed to see things with his own eyes.”

“He used to take the car out into bombed areas in Rome, and he certainly wasn't afraid of that. I can see him going into the ghetto and seeing what was happening,” says Krupp.

Krupp and his wife Meredith founded the Pave the Way Foundation in 2002 to “identify and eliminate the non-theological obstacles between religions.” In 2006 he was asked by both Jewish and Catholic leaders to investigate the “stumbling block” of Pope Pius XII’s wartime reputation. Krupp, a very optimistic 64-year-old from Long Island, N.Y., thought he had finally hit a wall.

“We are Jewish. We grew up hating the name Pius XII,” he says. “We believed that he was anti-Semitic, we believed that he was a Nazi collaborator—all of the statements that have been made about him, we believed.”

But when he started looking at the documents from the time, he was shocked. And “then it went from shock to anger. I was lied to,” says Krupp.

“In Judaism, one of the most important character traits one must have is gratitude, this is very important, it is part of Jewish law. Ingratitude is one of the most terrible traits, and this was ingratitude as far as I was concerned.”

Krupp now firmly agrees with the conclusions of Pinchas Lapide, the late Jewish historian and Israeli diplomat who said the direct actions of Pope Pius XII and the Vatican saved approximately 897,000 Jewish lives during the war. Pave the Way has over 46,000 pages of historical documentation supporting that proposition, which it has posted on its website along with numerous interviews with eye-witnesses and historians.

“I believe that it is a moral responsibility, this has nothing to do with the Roman Catholic Church,” says Krupp, “it has only to do with the Jewish responsibility to come to recognize a man who actually acted to save a huge number of Jewish lives throughout the entire world while being surrounded by hostile forces, infiltrated by spies and under the threat of death.”

Krupp explained that Pope Pius used the Holy See’s global network of embassies to help smuggle Jews out of occupied Europe. In one such instance, the Vatican secretly asked for visas to the Dominican Republic– 800 at a time – to aid Jewish rescue efforts. This one initiative alone is estimated to have saved over 11,000 Jewish lives between 1939 and 1945.

Closer to home, the convents and monasteries of Rome—neutral territory during the war—were used as hiding places for Jews.

Krupp speculates that the wartime actions of Pope Pius XII, whose birth name was Eugenio Pacelli, can be further understood in the light of his own personal history. His great boyhood friend was Guido Mendes who hailed from a well-known Jewish family in Rome. Together they learned the Hebrew language and shared Shabbat dinners on the Jewish Sabbath.

Later, upon his election to the papacy in 1939, A.W. Klieforth, the American consul general in Cologne, sent a secret telegram to the U.S. Department of State explaining Pope Pius’s attitude towards Nazism in Germany.

The new Pope “opposed unalterably every compromise with National Socialism,” Klieforth wrote, after a private chat with the pontiff in the Vatican. The two men had got to know each other during Archbishop Pacelli’s 12 years as nuncio in Germany.

Pope Pius, explained Klieforth, “regarded Hitler not only as an untrustworthy scoundrel but as a fundamentally wicked person,” and “did not believe Hitler capable of moderation.” Hence he “fully supported the German bishops in their anti-Nazi stand.”

Krupp describes the reputation of the wartime Pope as both glowing and intact until 1963, when German writer Rolf Hochhuth penned his play “The Deputy.” It portrayed Pope Pius as a hypocrite who remained silent about Jewish persecution.

The Pave the Way website carries evidence from a former high-ranking KGB officer, Ion Mihai Pacepa, who claims that the tarnishing of the Pope’s reputation was a Soviet plot.

Krupp explains how the communists wanted to “discredit the Pope after his death, to destroy the reputation of the Catholic Church and, more significantly to us, to isolate the Jews from the Catholics. It succeeded very well in all three areas.”


But he also firmly believes that a fundamental revision of Pope Pius’s wartime record is now well underway. “The dam is cracking now, without question,” he says.

Ironically, perhaps, Krupp says he meets more resistance when he speaks at Catholic parishes than in Jewish synagogues. “Many Jews,” he explains, “have been extremely grateful, saying, ‘I’m very happy to hear that. I never wanted to believe this about him,’ especially those of us who knew him, who were old enough to know him.”

The Pius Wars.

Israeli envoy "unpraises" Pius:

After strong criticism from the Jewish community, Israel’s ambassador to the Vatican backpedaled from his praise of the controversial wartime Pope Pius XII for his “actions to save the Jews” during the Holocaust.


“Given the fact that this context is still under the subject of ongoing and future research, passing my personal historical judgment on it was premature,” Ambassador Mordechay Lewy said in a statement on Sunday (June 26).

Lewy had said many Catholic institutions in Rome hid Jews from the occupying Germans during the mass arrests on Oct. 16, 1943, which led to the deportation of more than 1,000 people to Auschwitz.

“It would be a mistake to say that the Catholic Church, the Vatican and the pope himself opposed actions to save the Jews,” Lewy said on Thursday. “To the contrary, the opposite is true: they helped wherever they could.”

Lewy’s remarks, which were seen as a conciliatory gesture on one of the most sensitive points of Jewish-Catholic relations, quickly drew fire from a large U.S. group of Holocaust survivors.

Lewy “disgracefully conflated the praiseworthy actions of elements in the Catholic Church to rescue Jews with the glaring failure of Pope Pius to do so,” said Elan Steinberg, vice president of the American Gathering of Holocaust Survivors and Their Descendants.

Got to keep "whitey on the hook."

Israeli Ambassador Praises Pius XII...

...Jewish group takes the "never let whitey off the hook" stand.

Here's the story:

A leading Israeli official has praised Pope Pius XII for saving Jews during the Nazi occupation of Rome, a surprise twist in a long-standing controversy over the pontiff's wartime role.


The comments by Mordechay Lewy, the Israeli ambassador to the Vatican, were some of the warmest ever made by a Jewish official about Pius. Most have been very critical of his record.

In an indication of just how sensitive the subject of Pius is among Jews, Lewy was quickly assailed by a group of Holocaust survivors.

Lewy, speaking at a ceremony Thursday night to honor an Italian priest who helped Jews, said that Catholic convents and monasteries had opened their doors to save Jews in the days following a Nazi sweep of Rome's Ghetto on October 16, 1943.

"There is reason to believe that this happened under the supervision of the highest Vatican officials, who were informed about what was going on," he said in a speech.

"So it would be a mistake to say that the Catholic Church, the Vatican and the pope himself opposed actions to save the Jews. To the contrary, the opposite is true," he said.

The question of what Pius did or did not do to help Jews has tormented Catholic-Jewish relations for decades and it is very rare for a leading Jewish or Israeli leader to praise Pius.

Many Jews accuse Pius, who reigned from 1939 to 1958, of turning a blind eye to the Holocaust. The Vatican says he worked quietly behind the scenes because speaking out would have led to Nazi reprisals against Catholics and Jews in Europe.

JEWISH HURT

Lewy told Reuters Friday that he expected his comments to cause a stir but that he was standing by them.

"I am aware this is going to raise some eyebrows in the Rome Jewish community but this refers to saving Jews, which Pius did, and does not refer to talking about Jews, which he did not do and which Jews were expecting from him," Lewy said.

Elan Steinberg, vice-president of the American Gathering of Holocaust Survivors and their Descendants, called Lewy's comments unsustainable.

"For any ambassador to make such specious comments is morally wrong. For the Israeli envoy to do so is particularly hurtful to Holocaust survivors who suffered grievously because of Pius's silence," Steinberg said in a statement.

He said Lewy had "disgracefully conflated the praiseworthy actions of elements in the Catholic Church to rescue Jews with the glaring failure of Pope Pius to do so."

When Pope Benedict visited Rome's synagogue last year, the president of the capital's Jewish community told him that Pius' "silence before the Holocaust" still hurt Jews because more should have been done.

Many Jews responded angrily last year when the pope said in a book that Pius was "one of the great righteous men and that he saved more Jews than anyone else."

Jews have asked that a process that could lead to Pius becoming a saint be frozen until all the Vatican archives from the period have been opened and studied.

Lewy said that most probably even opening the archives would not settle the controversy over Pius's role during the war.

Anyone interested in a eyewitness account of Pius XII's actions to save Roman Jews should read "Before the Dawn: Autobiographical Reflections by Eugenio Zolli, Former Chief Rabbi of Rome."

History is complicated.

Allied diplomats urged Pius XII to stay silent about Nazi deportations:

US and British diplomats discussed exerting pressure on Pope Pius XII to be silent about the Nazi deportations of Hungarian Jews, according to newly discovered documentation.


The British feared that the wartime pope might make a “radio appeal on behalf of the Jews in Hungary” and that in the course of his broadcast would “also criticise what the Russians are doing in occupied territory”.

Sir Francis D’Arcy Osborne, the British ambassador to the Vatican, told an American diplomat that “something should be done to prevail upon the pope not to do this as it will have very serious political repercussions”.

Osborne’s comments were made to Franklin Gowen, an assistant to Myron Taylor, the US special representative to the Vatican.

Gowen recorded the conversation in a letter to Taylor, saying he had promised Osborne that he would bring his concerns to the “immediate attention” of the US ambassador.

“It was understood that, pending your reaction, he would not take any steps vis-a-vis the Holy See,” Gowen told Taylor.

In the letter, Gowen also said that Mgr Domenico Tardini, the Vatican assistant secretary of state, had told him 10 days earlier that Pope Pius would not “make any radio appeal because if he did so he would, in fairness, to all have to criticise the Russians”, a member of the Allies.

He said he withheld this information from Osborne in the belief that it would be best for Taylor to impart it himself following a meeting with Pope Pius scheduled the day after the letter was written.

The letter was dated November 7, 1944, as the Nazis were organising mass deportations of Jews from Budapest, the Hungarian capital, to death camps in Poland, Austria and Germany.

Rome had been liberated by the US Fifth Army the previous June and, with the Vatican behind Allied lines, the pope had more freedom to speak out.

But as the head of a neutral state, he understood that he could not condemn the war crimes of one side without condemning those of the other.

However, on November 19 – less than two weeks after Gowen wrote his letter – the Vatican joined the neutral states of Spain, Portugal, Switzerland and Sweden to appeal to the Hungarian government to end the deportations.

The British Jewish historian Sir Martin Gilbert, an internationally recognised expert on the Holocaust, said in his 2002 book, The Righteous: The Unsung Heroes of the Holocaust, that at that time the Catholic Church in Budapest was hiding 25,000 Jews in homes and religious institutions.

Simultaneously, the Red Army of the Soviet Union was advancing westward across Europe and killing and raping many innocent people as it was driving Adolf Hitler’s armies into retreat.

Gowen’s letter was made public for the first time by the New York-based Pave the Way Foundation, which is conducting research into the actions of Pope Pius, assisted by a US Catholic lawyer, Ronald Rychlak; German historian Michael Hesemann; and a journalist, Dimitri Cavalli.

Gary Krupp, president of the foundation, told the American Catholic News Service that the Allies feared any condemnation of Josef Stalin’s armies “would work against the unified war effort of the Allies”.

He said the letter was significant because it showed the pressures that confronted Pope Pius, who has been criticised for his alleged silence in the face of the Holocaust.

“The simple reality, which seems to be ignored by many critics, is that the Vatican was a neutral government that used its neutrality to save thousands of lives,” said Mr Krupp.

Gowen’s letter was found by Rychlak among Taylor’s documents and has been posted on the Pave the Way Foundation website.

Another letter made public by the foundation discusses help for Jewish fugitives, with Osborne telling Harold Tittman, another of Taylor’s aides, that it must be destroyed because it might endanger the life an Italian priest who was rescuing Jews if it fell into enemy hands.

It was dated May 20, 1944, barely three weeks before Rome fell to the Allies and, according to the Pave the Way Foundation, shows how the work of rescuing Jews was conducted in secrecy, with most documentary evidence of such activities destroyed almost instantly.

A few points.

First, this letter doesn't itself show that Pius was pressured by the Allies; it shows that the Allies were concerned that a balanced condemnation of Nazi and Soviet atrocities was not in the Allies war effort. This isn't surprising in that the Soviet's were as evil as the Nazis and the democracies had made the devil's deal in allying with them.

Was Pius pressured by Allies into remaining silent?  The Allied embassies undoubtedly expressed their concern to Pius.  Pius had acted as the go-between in an early effort to coordinate a coup against Hitler between German conspirators and the Allies.  Pius also made it permissible for Catholics to work with Communists in America, which was of incredible advantage for the American war effort. Pius was not unaware of existing political facts.

Second, I've seen other sources which quote Pius as expressing the concern that if he condemned the Nazis, he would also have to condemn the Soviets, which he knew would be detrimental to the Allied war effort, which Pius clearly supported.

Third, I wasn't aware of the figure of 25, 000 Hungarian Jews being hidden by Catholic institutions. 

"Pope and Devil" by Hubert Wolf.

For anyone interested in the Pius Wars – the argument that Pius XII was somehow complicit with the Holocaust by virtue of his alleged silence or other actions – or for anyone who has read the execrable John Cornwell’s “Hitler’s Pope” – “Pope and Devil” by Hubert Wolf is an essential resource for arriving at a balanced assessment of the issues. Wolf’s book largely refutes Cornwell’s specious arguments by meticulous attention to archival material released in 2003.

Not all of the relevant material have been released, but in 2003, the papacy of Pope John Paul II, released files relating to the nunciature – the diplomatic representatives of the Vatican – in Munich and Berlin during the period 1922 – 1939, as well as files relating to the Vatican’s interaction with these nunciatures. This information was not available to Cornwell, and essentially disproves Cornwell’s thesis that Pius XII, as Secretary of State Pacelli, pulled the strings that resulted in the Catholic Center Party supporting the Nazi Enabling Act. The proof is established by correspondence between Pacelli and the nunciatures indicating Pacelli’s opposition to the Center Party’s decision to dissolve itself.

Wolf also brings balance and depth that is missing from Cornwell’s Manichean good- liberal versus evil- conservative story. Thus, Wolf describes the case of the Amici Israel, which was an association of Catholic priests, including bishops and cardinals, that in the late 1920’s was committed to eradicating anti-semitism within the Catholic Church. Part of the agenda of Amici Israel was to eliminate the Good Friday prayer’s reference to “perfidious Jews.” This project was unsuccessful, and Amici Israel was suppressed, not because of anti-semitism, but because of a party of anti-liberal, conservative irredentists within the curia, led by Cardinal Merry De Val, who opposed anything that smacked of “modernism.” The point of the story is that the Catholic Church, and particularly its bureaucracy, has not ever been monolithic. There were parties within the church with their own agenda, entirely unrelated to the agendas that people like Cornwell want to find. Hence, the blanket accusation by Cornwell, Goldhagen and Carroll that the Church, pope and curia have all been anti-semitic is simply wrong.

Moreover, irony is a constant of history. One of the results of the Amici Israel affair was that the papal was that the decree of dissolution of Amici Israel in March of 1928 contained a clear condemnation of racial anti-semitism long before Kristalnacht. (p. 120.)

Wolf’s chapters generally are as follows:

Chapter 1 – Neutralizing Evil? Vatican Prescriptions for Germany (1917 – 1929).

Between 1917 and 1929. Wolf points out that the Vatican’s decision to reach out to Nazi Germany was not unusual or unexpected; it had reached out on three separate occasions to conclude a concordat with Stalinist Russia. (p. 9.) No one views those efforts as recognizing the legitimacy of the Soviet Union.

What was particularly interesting in this chapter was the fact that the up until the Weimar Republic, German states – including Protestant German states – were directly involved in selecting Catholic bishops. In Berlin, the Protestant state was able to choose which candidates would be put to the local church from which it could choose a bishop. Even though Weimar Germany, saw many German states give up their control over the Catholic Church, this movement was not entirely complete, and the concordat process was intended to cement the separation of church and state.

Not surprisingly, the bishops that were selected under the prior arrangement tended to be more conciliatory to the state, including the Nazi state, than the bishops selected by Rome after the concordat was signed. Galen and Von Preysing were both bishops who became known for being anti-Nazi stalwarts who would not have been chosen under the prior system.

Not surprisingly, this fact completely escapes Cornwell’s potted history.

Chapter 2 – Perfidious Jews? The battle in the Vatican over Anti-Semitism.

This chapter covers the interesting, relatively unknown and important Amici Israel affair.

Chapter 3 – The Pact with the Devil? The Reichskonkordat (1930 – 1933.)

This chapter covers the circumstances leading to the execution of the concordat between Nazi Germany and the Vatican.

Contrary to Cornwell’s unsubstantiated claims that the perfidious Pacelli single-mindedly engineered the Nazi police state, Wolf’s scrutiny of the dispatches between Pacelli and the nunciatures show that Pacelli was outside the loop, and that the Center Party and German Catholic bishops were running their own shows.

Chapter 4 – Molto Delicato? The Roman Curia and the Persecution of the Jews.

This chapter addresses the many petitions to Pius XI to speak out and condemn Nazi persecutions of the Jews. Wolf describes how both Pius XI and Pius XII desired to speak out against anti-semitism, and encouraged others to speak out, but believed that because of their position as leader of the worldwide church were required to maintain a position of public neutrality.

Chapter 5 – Dogma or Diplomacy? The Catholic Worldview and Nazi Ideologies (1933 – 1939).

In this chapter, Wolf looks at the compatibility of Catholic and Nazi ideological claims and concludes that those claims were not compatible. In reaching this conclusion, Wolf outlines the various occasions when the Catholic Church condemned core Nazi doctrines as being incompatible with Christianity.

Wolf also tackles a “talking point” advanced by Christopher Hitchens that since the Church didn’t put “Mein Kampf” on the Index of Forbidden Books, it must in some sense have endorsed Nazism. Wolf points out that although Mein Kampf was not placed on the Index, Alfred Rosenberg’s “The Myth of the Twentieth Century,” which was viewed as the key ideological treatise on Nazism was put on the Index. Wolf concludes that the reason Mein Kampf was not indexed was due to the curia placing diplomacy ahead of doctrine, particularly with respect to a book “written by a head of state who had come to power through legal means and with whom the Vatican had just signed an agreement binding under international law.” (p. 264.) On the other hand, “the dangerous opinions to be found Mein Kampf [were] refuted in the syllabus of the Congregation of Studies and contrasted to the true Catholic doctrine in the encyclical Mit Brennender Sorge.” [p. 270.] In other words, the Church compromised short of placing Mein Kampf on the Index, but it was clear to all that the noxious teachings of Mein Kampf were condemned.

Finally, similar constraints prevented the excommunication of Hitler – which in 1938 Mussolini, of all people, was advocating. [p. 270.] As Wolf concludes the book, “Pronouncing a Reich chancellor and head of state anathema was simply out of the question. Hitler remained a member of the Catholic Church until the day he died. Like the pope, even the devil could be Catholic.”

All in all, this is a readable and balanced book that examines the real world nuances facing real people in real history, which is a far cry from the comic book version of history that is currently so popular.

I've read Hitler's Pope so you don't have to.

Brief summary: John Cornwell is to "history," what Dan Brown is to "literature."

Longer review posted on Amazon.

Of late, I've been reading a number of books on the relationship of the Christian churches with Nazi Germany in relation to the claim that the Catholic Church was somehow complicit with the Nazi Reich, e.g, Catholicism and the Roots of Nazism: Religious Identity and National Socialism,  The Holy Reich: Nazi Conceptions of Christianity, 1919-1945, Pope and Devil: The Vatican's Archives and the Third Reich, and The Aryan Jesus: Christian Theologians and the Bible in Nazi Germany. This interest has largely been inspired by the trope that Pius was "Hitler's Pope." What I've found is that real historians give no credence to the notion that Hitler was anything less than committed to the destruction of Catholicism or that the Catholic Church as a whole was the only institution that resisted "coordination" with the Nazi system, and paid a heavy price for that resistance.


I eventually decided to read Cornwell's "Hitler's Pope" to see what the fuss was about. What I discovered was a very poorly sourced book heavily based on a few secondary authorities which was illogical in its reasoning, paranoid in its depiction of Pius, confused in its apparent thesis, and ignorant of the actual condition of Catholicism in Germany during the `30s. I dog-eared each page that contained an error of logic or a double-standard applied to Pius or a failure to support a factual claim with a footnote or a fact presented without context and by the time I finished, I had dog-eared almost every other page.

To deal with some of the highlights:

1. Cornwell's actual thesis - which informs his presentation - is buried until page 371.

An engaged reader might wonder why a book ostensibly dedicated to the thesis that Pius XII was Hitler's Pope would spend 50 to 60 pages on Pius XII's life after the end of World War II, or would spend eight pages criticizing the papacy of Pope John Paul II, who, after all, had nothing to do with Catholic-Nazi relations. The answer is found on p. 371 where Cornwell writes that "[i]t has been the urgent thesis of this book that when the papacy waxes strong at the expense of the people of God, the Catholic Church declines in its moral and spiritual influence to the detriment of all."

There's nothing wrong with Cornwell having such a thesis, but it is dishonest of him to bury that thesis in a book until the end of his book. Readers are entitled to know that Cornwell's critique of Pius is informed by his opposition to "ultramontanist Catholicism" - i.e., "centralist" Catholics (Hitler's Pope ("HP") p. 5) - from the start. By not making that bias apparent from the outset, readers are either confused by all of the "cheap shots" that Cornwell levels at Pius, no matter how irrelevant, or they are "well-poisoned" by those cheap shots, which have no purpose in explaining Pius so much as disposing the reader against Pius. Knowing from the outset that Cornwell's thesis is that a strong papacy is bad for Catholicism would put the reader in a position to judge the credibility of Cornwell's claims in their proper context.

2. Cornwell's ostensible thesis is incredibly, well, lame when he states is forthrightly.

The "buzz" around Cornwell's book is that he somehow shows that Pius was a crypto-Nazi or a Nazi sympathizer, but on page xviii of the preface to the 2008 edition, Cornwell writes, "[n]one of this indicates that Pacelli was a Nazi sympathizer or that he had anything but contempt for Hitler." That must come as a shocking statement for the many people who have relied on Cornwell, or at least the title of his book, for asserting that Pius was a crypto-Nazi or that fascism is simply another word for "right wing Catholicism."

Notwithstanding all of the red herrings to the contrary, Cornwell's thesis is not that Pius was a crypto-Nazi or a Nazi sympathizer, but that Pius was guilty of "colluding appeasement." Putting aside the adjective "colluding," which is an odd description of someone that Cornwell admits "colluded" in a plot against Hitler and "quietly worked to save the lives of the persecuted" (Preface, p. xviii), Cornwell's thesis is simply that Pius "appeased" Hitler.

That Cornwell thinks that this is enough to earn the title of "Hitler's Pope" shows (a) how shallow his historical insights are and (b) how deep his bias against the men who hold the office of pope is. On Cornwell's title, Chamberlain is "Hitler's Prime Minister," Stalin is "Hitler's Dictator," and the United States until the end of 1941 is "Hitler's Country."

There was a whole lot of appeasement going around during the 1930s. Cornwell provides no analysis for why Hitler got away with so very much from so very many people. For example, France and England could have ended Hitler at any time before 1939 by using force against Germany - as they had a legal right - when Hitler re-armed the Saar or consolidated Austria into the greater Reich. And this was before the famous appeasement in Munich. Stalin's relationship with Hitler was likewise unique in that it was the only relationship that Stalin got less than he gave.

Cornwell, however, isn't interested in these other appeasements. He doesn't even acknowledge that they happened because to do so would have directed the focus from Cornwell's thesis that it was ultramontane Catholicism that was the problem rather than that there were other factors, such as, say, the desire of people who had fought a devastating war not to fight another such war.

3. Cornwell begs the question about whether an anti-ultramontane policy would have resisted Hitler.

Cornwell doesn't seem to have spent any time looking at - or thinking about - the actual sociology of German Catholics in the 1930s. He simply asserts that German Catholics would have followed the Pope or that a localized German Catholic Church would have resisted Hitler in the same way that it had resisted Bismarck during the Kulturkampf sixty years before.

Cornwell, however, doesn't offer any evidence for either claim. The actual evidence is to the contrary, namely, it was the anti-ultramontane Catholics, i.e., Catholics who opposed the tendency of papal centralization who became Nazi supporters, while the ultramontane Catholics were typically the Catholics who followed the Catholic Church in opposing Nazism. A good source for this point is Derek Hasting's Catholicism and the Roots of Nazism: Religious Identity and National Socialism. Hasting's book reveals how German Catholics were torn between their religious and national identities. German Catholicism not surprisingly had a strong current of Catholics who emphasized their national identities at the expense of their religious identities and who opposed the ultramontane Catholics who were relatively more loyal to the papacy. These anti-ultramontane Catholics were as critical of "political Catholicism" as Hitler and they were among the first supporters of the Nazi party, a support that ended when Hitler moved to a national stage as a protégé of General Eric Ludendorff, who was virulently anti-Catholic. The Catholics who remained in the Nazi movement are acknowledged by all actual historians as being lapsed or nominal Catholics.

In contract, Protestantism did not have such a division of loyalties. Hitler and Protestant leaders recognized that being Protestant and being a German nationalist were not in inherent conflict. Accordingly, there were Nazis who remained practicing Protestants. Goring, for example, seems to have remained a self-identifying Lutheran during his life.

Although Cornwell doesn't mention it - perhaps because he is ignorant of the history - it was Protestantism that was largely co-opted into active collusion with Nazism. There were some Protestant churches that joined the "Confessing Church" movement, but the majority of Protestant Churches belonged to the "German Christian" faction and affirmatively adopted Nazi oriented theological innovations such as removing the Old Testament from the Bible and segragating Christians of Jewish ancestry.

These innovations were not adopted by Catholicism. In fact, Mit Brennender Sorge, and, subsequently Summi Pontificatorum,threw down the gauntlet on precisely these innovations, although the reader would never know how hot button these issues were at the time from Cornwell. Nonetheless, anyone who knows the actual issues of the time - such as those who were living through it - realized that Pius XI and Pius XII were challenging Nazism directly in these encyclicals.

Another point is Cornwell's weird attitude about merits of "local control." At times, Cornwell acknowledges, and then promptly drops, the point that "local control" meant, among other things, that Catholic bishops were selected through a process that involved political entities, and, in the case of Prussia, Protestant political entities. Presumably, as a "progressive", Cornwell favors the separation of church and state, and, yet, Cornwell is "silent" about this problem. Moreover, this fact creates a problem for Cornwell in that it has to be factored into any discussion about the dynamics of the relationship between Bishops and Reich. Simply put, Bishops who are vetted, or selected, or not vetoed by a state agent, be it Protestant or Nazi, are not going to be independent from the state. It is noteworthy that one of the Bishops who showed independence, Bishop Von Galen, was appointed by Pius XI almost accidentally over the initial objections of the local community and the Prussian government. See Pope and Devil: The Vatican's Archives and the Third Reich.

As for the idea of fighting a new Kulturkampf, Cornwell nowhere addressed the differences between Bismarck and the Nazis. As bad as he was for Catholicism, Bismarck was not Hitler. Bismark did not make the totalitarian claims that Hitler made. Bismarck was not dealing with a people facing a depression and a lost war. Bismarck didn't have the tools of social control that Hitler had. At the time of Bismarck, Catholics were newly incorporated into the German Reich and didn't identify themselves with the then still foreign Prussian Reich. Bismarck wasn't willing to murder masses of his own citizens. Cornwell doesn't acknowledge any of this, much less account for it in his indictment of Pius.

4. Cornwell's book is poorly sourced.

Cornwell claims that his book is based on new material from previously unread archives. Yet, a reader who pays attention to the footnotes will see that primary archival material is rarely the source of Cornwell's claims. Like a college freshman writing a term paper, Cornwell will use only one source for particular portions of his book. Cornwell definitely does not engage in the process of compiling and harmonizing from different and competing sources, which is a good sign of someone who is not cherry-picking sources based on their adherence to his a priori thesis.

Also, Cornwell generally relied on secondary sources, such as books written by other authors, who may or not be relying on primary sources. He refers to archival sources or primary source material, such as contemporaneous newspapers on rare occasions. When he does, he seems to be cherry-picking. For example, Cornwell spends time pondering Pius' attitudes toward the Jews, and although he mentions the Israel Zolli, the Grand Rabbi of Rome who converted to Catholicism, in part because of Pius' intervention with respect to saving the Jews of Rome, rather than use Zolli's autobiography, he quotes from an American journalist. If Cornwell was actually interested in Pius' relationship with the Roman Jewish community, why wouldn't he have looked at Zolli's book? On the other hand, Cornwell does manage to quote from a survivor of the Nazi round-up of Roman Jews in order to lay a claim of anti-semitism at the feet of Pius. So, we get that, but we hear nothing from Zolli about how he felt at the protection he was offered by Pius.

In addition, Cornwell is hit or miss on providing support for his claims. He makes numerous factual assertions, apparently without support. For example, Cornwell claims that Pius required that papal servants kneel when they took calls from him. Is this true? It might be, but Cornwell doesn't tell us what source the claim comes from. Beyond the fact that providing authority is a check on authorial bias, this practice is unscholarly since it prevents readers from going to the underlying text for their own research. This kind of omission happened repeatedly throughout the book.

5. Cornwell's thesis about the quid pro quo between the Concordat and the Enabling Act is undermined by Cornwell's silence on other pertinent facts.

Cornwell's thesis is that Pius XII - as Secretary of State to Pius XI - threw political Catholicism "under the bus" in order to get a concordat. In other words, Pius was the proximate cause of the vote by the Catholic Center Party in favor of the "Enabling Act" which permitted Hitler to pass laws without a parliament. Without Pius' involvement, it seems, the Enabling Act wouldn't have been passed.

Two responses: What???? And, So what?

Cornwell rips the passage of the Enabling Act out of any context with the events that were occurring in Germany during the period. Cornwell avoid complete scholarly malpractice by mentioning the Reichstag Fire, but he doesn't mention that even prior to the vote on the Enabling Act, Hitler's cabinet had passed, and Hindenburg had signed, a decree that permitted Hitler to suspend civil liberties in order to deal with the fear of a Communist take-over generated by the Reichstag Fire. Cornwell doesn't mention that Hitler used that authority to arrest, imprison and torture not only Communists but Social Democrats, who had been partners with the Center Party in governing Germany. Likewise, Cornwell barely mentions that Catholic supporters of the Center Party members had been arrested and tortured under that same authority.

And all of this was before the Enabling Act.

Likewise, Cornwell doesn't mention that the Center Party had to pass through jeering Brownshirts to their vote on the Enabling Act, nor does he mention the fact that by voting against the Enabling Act, the Center Party would be subject to arrest for opposing German interests, just as the Communists and Social Democrats had been arrested.

Yet, under those circumstances, somehow the future Pius XII was responsible for the vote.

That's the "What???" part. The "So What?" part is that Hitler obviously already had all the authority he needed by the time the Enabling Act was passed in order to consolidate power. Hitler's obvious next move would have been to outlaw the Center Party as he had the Communists and then pass the Enabling Act with whoever was left.

Cornwell's failure to discuss this pertinent history is just dishonest.

Another problem for Cornwell is that there is no evidence of Pacelli's involvement. Hubert Wolf 's Pope and Devil: The Vatican's Archives and the Third Reich has actually looked at the archives and has found no internal evidence in the form of notes or correspondence showing that Pacelli was involved in either the vote for the Enabling Act or the self-liquidation of the Center Party. Moreover as Wolfe - who is a real historian observes "[r]umors that the Vatican was behind this move have absolutely no basis in fact and fail the test of logic." [Id. at p. 174.] This is certainly true. It would take a belief in the heroic charity of Pius XI - or his incredible naivity - to conclude that he would have given the Nazis - who Cornwell concedes Pius neither liked or trusted - what they wanted before he got what he desparately wanted.

6. Cornwell's "Uncharitable" Depiction of Pius.

From a scholarly standpoint, the principle of "charity" means attempting to understand the subject from his own perspective and that of his time. Cornwell's allegiance to his "urgent thesis" strips him of "charity" in this sense and makes his portrait of Pius laughable.

Thus, we have Cornwell implying that Pius started not only World War II, but World War I, as well. According to Cornwell, Pius drive for a concordat with Serbia heightened Austria's resentment and made it more likely to pull the trigger when Archduke Ferdinand was assassinated.

So, forget all that stuff about Gavril Princip and the assassination of Archduke Ferdinand and the instability of Austria's Slavic minorities, and Serbia's exploitation of that instability to destabilize Austria, the real culprit was Eugenio Pacelli.

This is just silly. Austria was unstable. It was a declining empire. Serbia was emerging. The Concordat recognized that fact. Presumably, if the Serbian Concordat had been deferred out of concern for Austria's feelings, Cornwell would argue that Pacelli's reactionary allegiance to an unstable empire insulted Serbia causing its involvement in terrorism which, then, triggered World War I. Either way, the culprit would still be Eugenio Pacelli to a fanatic like Cornwell.

Then, there is the gratuitous slander of Pius for bringing food by a sealed train into war-torn, embargoed Germany! This is depicted as showing that Pius was ...what? Selfish? Self-indulgent? Not a man of the people? Yet, this is the same person who Cornwell's acknowledges and criticizes later on for his ascetism, who ate very little during the war.

Might an explanation be that Pius knew he was going into a country that was not able to import food? And how else was he going to get there except by sealed train. Germany in World War I was not overladen with food. Bringing in a shipment - whether it was for him or to be shared - made perfect sense.

But what does this have to do with whether Pius was "Hitler's Pope"? Nothing. It is simply a bit of "spin" that might induce readers to dislike the character of Pius, and, presumably, that of all other popes.

Part of that tactic is a good deal of Anti-Catholic tropes. Cornwell trots out loving details about "cults" of Mary and saint-making and papal coronations that would appeal to the anti-Catholic sympathies of English readers. Although "cult" is a perfectly acceptable term, Cornwell knows that too modern ears is offensive. In fact, he plays that card against Pius with respect to Pius' apparent refusal to assist German Jews with their "cult." What Cornwell misses throughout the book is that Pius is constantly explaining his conduct in relation to "natural law," but Cornwell spends no time explaining why Pius might or might not have felt justified in his actions based on Catholic natural law. Apparently, as a "progressive," natural law is not something that Cornwell feels he needs to spend time on.

Another instance of Cornwell's Anti-Catholicism is found on page 337, where Cornwell claims that visiting certain basilicas in Rome would give Catholics "a complete amnesty from time to be spent in Purgatory." Well, sure, that's the traditional anti-Catholic trope, but it is strange for someone who claims to be Catholic to put it that way, and not mention the little detail of going to confession. Likewise, what is a Catholic doing claiming that shops were selling "holy objects" including a "plaster statue of Pius with an arm that automatically raised its arm in blessing." (id. (unfootnotef.)) Holy object? Really? Cornwell is providing "cover" for Anti-Catholics to argue that Catholics consider that this bit of kitsch is a "holy object." I would expect this kind of observation from a Jack Chick tract, but not from someone who claimed to be a devout Catholic.

Then, there is Cornwell's fatuous attempt to minimize Pius's personal involvement in rescuing Roman Jews by giving them refuge in Vatican buildings. Cornwell spends essentially no time on this, except to assert that if Pius is to be given credit for that act of charity, he deserves the blame for permitting Ustashe and Nazi criminals to use the same buildings.

Cornwell doesn't explain how this even makes sense. Pius knew that he was giving refuge to the Jews. He knew he was taking a risk. In contrast, with respect to the use of the building by Nazi and Ustashe criminals, Cornwell provides no evidence that Pius knew of this activity, which apparently was being managed by Bishop Hudal. On the other hand, as Cornwell notes, after the Allies liberated Rome, the Axis embassies moved into the Vatican, and the Allies who had previously taken refuge with the Pope moved out, and escaped British POWs were replaced by escaped German POWs. Cornwell never manages to factor into his thinking that Pius might have taken the idea of neutrality as seriously as Switzerland and Sweden.

7. Pius' alleged Silence.

A brief point here is that Cornwell employs a surprising double standard - well, not really surprising given his "urgent thesis." Namely, notwithstanding the fact that the Nazis counted Pius an enemy for his statements and the Allies used Pius' speeches for anti-Nazi propaganda, because Pius didn't mention Hitler or the Nazis or the Jews by name, Pius was "silent" or "complicit" in Nazi atrocities.

Yet, when it comes to Pius pronouncement in Humani Generis, Cornwell is able to translate various passages into an attack on Nouvelle Theologie, even though Pius never mentions Nouvelle Theologie by name!

Amazing! When reading something in the context that Pius wrote the text is important to Cornwell's "urgent thesis," he's able to provide the context. When reading the text in context detracts from his "urgent thesis," Cornwell becomes a dense literalist.

8. Conclusion.

This book is really awful. It is not scholarly in the slightest. It is misleading and biased.

So why do I give it two stars? Three reasons:

First, I want people to read this review.

Second, reading the book is useful in a limited way: if this is the best that the people who favor the "Hitler's Pope" thesis can manage, then it shows how weak that thesis is.

Third, even Cornwell can't suppress the truth. Although he spends 330 pages insinuating that Pius was somehow sympathetic to the Nazis, he can't account for why Pius involved himself in an anti-Hitler plot that put at personal risk. Cornwell observes:

"As Pacelli faced the extreme moral choices and crises in the continuing conflagration, two things seem clear in the light of his central part in the conspiracy to topple Hitler during the twilight war: whatever his decisions, good or bad, they were his own; and he was unafraid on account of his personal safety. His hatred of Hitler was sufficient to allow him to take grave risks with his own life - and as Robert Leiber indicated, the lives of a great many others. When the risk seemed right, he was capable of acting promptly. His exterior personality seemed delicate, oversensitive, even weak to some. Pussilanimity and indecisiveness - shortcomings that would be cited to extenuate his subsequent silence and inaction in other matters - were hardly in his nature." (p. 240.)

This is an amazing concession from the author of "Hitler's Pope," and, yet, Cornwell never integrates this observation into the rest of his book. Cornwell's "urgent thesis" apparently would not allow it.

"''Hitler's Pope' saved thousands of Jewish lives."

This is old news, but worth repeating.  According to the Telegraph, Pope Pius XII secretly issued thousands of visas to save Jewish lives:

 Pope Pius, who was labelled “Hitler’s Pope” because of his silence during the Holocaust, may have arranged the exodus of about 200,000 Jews from Germany just three weeks after Kristallnacht, when thousands of Jews were rounded up and sent to concentration camps.


The claim was made by Dr Michael Hesemann, a German historian carrying out research in the Vatican archives for the Pave the Way Foundation, a US-based inter-faith group.


He said that Cardinal Eugenio Pacelli – the future Pius XII – wrote to Catholic archbishops around the world to urge them to apply for visas for “non-Aryan Catholics” and Jewish converts to Christianity who wanted to leave Germany.

Elliot Hershberg, the chairman of the Pave the Way Foundation, said:“ We believe that many Jews who were successful in leaving

Europe may not have had any idea that their visas and travel documents were obtained through these Vatican efforts.

“Everything we have found thus far seems to indicate the known negative perception of Pope Pius XII is wrong.”

And:

The appeal from Cardinal Pacelli, then the Vatican’s Secretary of State, was dated Nov 30, 1938 – 20 days after Kristallnacht, the “night of broken glass”.


Cardinal Pacelli was able to ask for the visas because the 1933 concordat he signed with the Nazis specifically provided protection for Jews who converted to Christianity.

Dr Ed Kessler, the director of the Cambridge-based Woolf Institute of Abrahamic Faiths, said: “It is clear that Pius XII facilitated the saving of Roman Jews.”

In December, Pope Benedict XVI placed Pius one step closer to sainthood when he declared him “Venerable”, meaning that the Church believes he lived a life of “heroic virtue”.

Two miracles are needed to canonise him as a saint and the Vatican is investigating at least one apparently inexplicable healing.

Some Jewish groups want the process frozen until the Vatican is ready to open its secret wartime archives in 2014.

Sir Martin Gilbert, a British historian and the world’s leading expert on the Holocaust, has said that Pope Pius XII should be considered as a “Righteous Gentile” by Yad Vashem, the Israeli Holocaust remembrance authority.

The Tenth Beatitude:  Blessed are you when they revile and persecute you for my names sake...


There has been a singularly modern effort to ruin the reputation of Pope Pius XII.  Pius has been depicted as an anti-semite, but he was a man who in the face of Nazi Anti-Semitism said that we are spiritually all Semites, putting a marker on the inseparability of Christianity from Judaism, a marker that the Nazis would have redeemed with the lives of all Christians if they had the opportunity. 

New documents are confirming that Pius worked to save not ony Jewish lives, but Jewish culture.

Zenit reports:

NEW YORK, JULY 1, 2010 (Zenit.org).- The recently opened sections of the Vatican Secret Archives have revealed that Pope Pius XII not only helped save thousands of Jews, but also their patrimony, from the Nazis.


Pave the Way Foundation reported Tuesday that its researchers found documents of "great importance."

Michael Hesemann, a historian and foundation representative from Germany, has been researching documents in the Vatican archives and he found a letter sent by Cardinal Eugenio Pacelli, who would later become Pius XII, on Nov. 30, 1938, only three weeks after the Kristallnacht.

In this letter, which was sent to the nunciatures and apostolic delegations as well as 61 bishops, the cardinal requested 200,000 visas for "non-Aryan Catholics." Just over a month later, on Jan. 9, 1939, he sent three additional letters.

Hesemann explained that this language, in which Cardinal Pacelli speaks about "converted Jews" and "non-Aryan Catholics," is most likely a cover to hide the real scheme from the Nazis.

At that time, under the concordat of 1933, Germany allowed the Holy See to aid those considered "non-Aryan Catholics."

The foundation added that Cardinal Pacelli specifically requested in his letter: "Care should be taken that sanctuaries are provided to safeguard their spiritual welfare and to protect their religious cult, customs and traditions."

Persecuted

The communiqué explained that this seems to refer to a group other than converted Jews, who, upon their baptisms, "just became normal Catholics" without any "sanctuaries, customs, or traditions on their own."

Furthermore, many of the bishops responded to the cardinal's request, and documents show that they referred to aiding the "persecuted Jews" rather than the "converted Jews" or "non-Aryan Catholics."

Matteo Luigi Napolitano, political science professor at the University of Urbino, Italy, told ZENIT that one of the Jan. 9, 1939, letters was even more explicit.

It too was sent to over 60 prelates, and the instructions, written in Latin, "leave no room for doubt about the intentions of the Holy See and about Eugenio Pacelli's thoughts," the scholar said.

The letter, he reported, reads, "Do not engage in saving only Jewish people but also synagogues, cultural centers and everything that pertains to their faith: the Torah scrolls, libraries, cultural centers, etc.)."

The foundation explained that this point is important, because many historians have only acknowledged the efforts of Pius XII to save converted Jews, but the evidence seems to paint a different picture.

It continued: "Since many of the critics of this papacy have not yet accepted the proven Nazi threat against the Vatican State and the life of Pope Pius XII directly, they seem not to understand that there was a need for deception sending only encrypted or verbal directives.

"In many cases the historians are ignorant of the unique Vatican language sometimes using ancient Latin to express the hidden meaning of these requests."

It added that "the terms non-Aryan Catholics, non-Aryans, and Catholic Jews all indeed meant Jews," thus coded so that "if documents were intercepted, this deception would not raise a red flag since the concordat signed in 1933 specifically provided protection for Jews who converted to Christianity."

One good feature of the "Pius Wars" is that it has forced people to remember Pius XII, who was a courageous and decent man. In my case it has caused me to adjust my assessment of Piux XII, who if I thought of him I viewed him as a kind of nondescript humorless non-entity, to a model of courage and sanctity.
 
Ora Pro Nobis, Pius XII.

The Pius Wars - Round II

The reviewer of "Did Pius XII Help the Jews" responded to my comment:

Again, I hesitate to spend too much time on this unfortunate time in Catholic life. Why don't people write more about the great Catholics, famous and unknown, the priests who spend time helping the homeless, church members who help the poor and handicapped, nuns toiling in obscurity helping the aged with the only thanks that they are doing something that is good and honorable. Write about Catholic opposition to slavery and its horrors. But no you chose to again discuss Pius and the murder of Jews and others, women, children, the medical experimentation, torture, and stacking of dead bodies.


Agreed that Pope Pius provided substantial help to the Jews in Rome, which negates the argument that he wished to help Nazis. Had his legacy with others been equal, we can agree that we would be remembering his courage. Instead, his followers and other Christians help imprison, torture, and murder so many, in so many cruel ways, mwomen and children included. How about Poland. What help did he provide.

You quoted a passage Mit Brennender Sorge, which said in part:

"Whoever exalts race, or the people, or the State, or a particular form of State, or the depositories of power, or any other fundamental value of the human community - however necessary and honorable be their function in worldly things - whoever raises these notions above their standard value,...

Not much of a condemnation to me. "However necessary and honorable", the torture of defense persons, the murder of children, medical experiments, these are things that are "necessary and honorable." Why would the Nazis murderers honorable and why were the horrors necessary. Sadly Pius followers played a sad role in murder. This type of statements cannot be seen as a condemnation to deter.

Why not write. No German should murder children. No German should murder women. Do not kill civilians. Even if one accepts the German war machine, there are standards of morality that were freely violated.

My counter-response:

My point in writing what I did was to suggest to readers that there is a deeper historical context to understand Pius XII than was suggested by the two dimensional "if I had been there, I would have done it right" perspective of Bobby's review. For example, I questioned Bobby's claim that "Nazis and Christians saw no Inconsistency Between Christian Teachings, and Nazi teachings..." by quoting from Mit Brennender Sorge which showed taught the Catholic doctrine that "Whoever exalts race...and divinizes them to an idolatrous level, distorts and perverts an order of the world planned and created by God; he is far from the true faith in God and from the concept of life which that faith upholds. "


Since the Nazis "exalted race" and "divinized race to an idolatrous" level, the fair conclusion is that the future Pius XII - the author of Mit Brennendor Sorge - was teaching that Nazism was inconsistent with Catholicism, notwithstanding whatever broad brush Bobby and a conventional wisdom sadly ignorant of the actual history might choose to publish.

Bobby's response is to take exception to the phrase "However necessary and honorable" as if it applied to the barbaric practices that the Nazi regime practiced, as opposed to what the relevant sentence is talking about, to wit "any other fundamental value of the human community." It is a sad - but apparently too deep for a lot of people to understand - fact that human nature has the ability to take any fundamental value - freedom, democracy, equality - and turn it into an idol that distorts it into something that can dehumanize those who idolize it.

I asked whether Bobby was aware of the facts that I pointed too, but did not get an answer to that question. I suspect that the answer is "no" in that he seems not to understand that Mit Brennender Sorge was written in 1937, when Nazi anti-semitic legislation was just beginning to ramp up, when a good number of American political and business leaders, including John F. Kennedy's father, were still enamored of Hitler, and a full 18 months before Kristalnacht. But, as is typical for this kind of writing instead of praising Pius XI and the future Pius XII for being the lone voice of dissent in 1937's long litany of rampant anti-semitism, Bobby criticizes Pius for not saying quite enough.

Of course, for some people, there would always be something else that needed to be said. Thus, Bobby asks "Why not write. No German should murder children. No German should murder women. Do not kill civilians. Even if one accepts the German war machine, there are standards of morality that were freely violated." But this is tendentious. These things were said, repeatedly. Certainly, Bobby is not really suggesting that the Germans who killed women and children and committed atrocities were unaware of the moral implications of their actions. It is a signal fact that the Nazis developed their "impersonal" methods of mass killing because of the high incidence of nervous breakdowns among those who served on the death squads. Morality is apparently a hard thing to totally wipe out. So, one is permitted to ask, what were Germans supposed to learn from a restatement of the 10 Commandments that they didn't already know? Although if Bobby were to be fair, he would acknowledge that Pius XII sent many private protests against Nazi atrocities.

Likewise, Bobby is probably unaware of the Nazi response to Mit Brennender Sorge: "The reaction to the encyclical's publication was immediate. The German regime sent a formal protest to Rome; it was swiftly rejected by Cardinal Pacelli. An enraged Hitler and Goebbels gave orders to bring to trial dozens of clerics on charges of immorality and "slanders against the State." Gestapo and SS squads were dispatched to find which presses had produced the encyclical: 12 were confiscated and editors rounded up. In one parish, Essen in the diocese of Oldenburg, seven girls were arrested inside a church as they handed out copies after the Palm Sunday service. "

This was part of a steady barrage of Anti-Catholic persecution on the part of the Nazis. Such policy was not persecution was not unique in German history - Bismark had started the Kulturkampf for the same reason that Hitler suppressed Catholics - both realized that Catholics were a substantial minority in a largely Protestant state which had separatist tendencies. This last fact made Catholics dangerous and distinctly unNazi. Accordingly, among other things, the Nazis - like the Communists had done for their movement - prohibited church attending Catholics from being members of the Nazi Party. Anyone surprised by this really ought to read Eric Hoffer's "The True Believer" for the reasons why these totalitarian mass movements adopted such similar policies.

Bobby writes: "Agreed that Pope Pius provided substantial help to the Jews in Rome, which negates the argument that he wished to help Nazis. Had his legacy with others been equal, we can agree that we would be remembering his courage."

Note that Bobby seems to concede that Pius showed great personal courage in personally helping the Jewish community in Rome at his own risk. But he ignores the fact that it has long been conceded that the Catholic Church - at the orders of Pius XII - rescued and assisted more Jews during the Holocaust than any other organization, private or governmental, according to the study by Israeli diplomat Pinchas Lapide. It is therefore calumny to write "...you chose to again discuss Pius and the murder of Jews and others, women, children, the medical experimentation, torture, and stacking of dead bodies" as if Pius was proximately responsible for any of that.

Also notice that Bobby doesn't address any of the other historical points that I brought up.

If anyone is interested in getting a different perspective on Pius XII - something other than the Monday Morning Quarterbacking of those safely sitting in their living rooms long after the era of totalitarian nightmares have ended - I recommend Ronald Rychlak's "Hitler, the War and the Pope."