Daniel J. Flynn

    Intellectuals are often hesitant to provide a truthful presentation of society, people, or events becuase doing so often undermines their preconceived ideological notions about how the world works. Because of this, elites often shy away from presenting their ideas in a non-fiction format. Instead, they opt for the stage, the silver screen, television, or novels. The Leftist worldview that fails miserably in practice works remarkably well on Broadway and in Hollywood.  

    It is the priests and religious people in Detroit Rock City that are the thieves and perverts, not the rock stars. For Julia Roberts in Pretty Woman, there is no social price for promiscuity. She is a disease- and drug-free prostitute. From watching The General’s Daughter one might get the idea that the typical rapist is not a denizen of the urban jungle or of a correctional institution, but is an officer candidate at West Point who had been recommended by his Congressman. Classics like The Sands of Iwo Jima and Sgt. York are lambasted for being pro-military propaganda—yet the events depicted in these movies really happened. The General’s Daughter is only the product of a writer’s warped perception of the military, making it more of a propaganda film than any mid-century war movie.   

    In fiction, where any theory or characterization—no matter how absurd—can be made to work, readers and viewers are conditioned to believe what they see and the creator’s imagination is often processed as reality. 

    Such is the case with the fictional portrayel of a man who is being considered for sainthood by the Catholic Church. In 1963, playwright Rolf Hochhuth staged The Deputy. The production ran in numerous countries and depicted Pope Pius XII (Eugenio Pacelli) as a willing accomplice of the Nazis during the Second World War. Although Pacelli—who served as Pontiff from 1939 to 1958—had been hailed by prominent Jews for his role in saving many lives during the Holocaust, after The Deputy his reputation suffered immensely. 

    In Hitler’s Pope: The Secret History of Pope Pius XII, British author John Cornwell echoes the fictional portrayal of The Deputy and paints Pope Pius XII as “an ideal Pope for the Nazis’ Final Solution.” If Pius XII really was “Hitler’s Pope,” then both Hitler and “his” Pope had a strange way of showing it.

    Crucial to Cornwell’s argument is the claim that Pius XII’s silence created a moral environment in which the Nazis could eliminate their enemies. Yet the Pope was far from silent during the war. His 1939 encyclical “Darkness over the Earth” so enraged the Nazis that they only allowed its distribution after substituting references to “Poland” with the word “Germany,” to make the Nazis, and not the Poles, appear to be the group with which the Pope was sympathizing. In his 1942 Christmas message, the Pope called for an end to the persecution of the “hundreds of thousands, who without any fault of their own, sometimes by reason of their nationality or race, are marked for death or gradual extinction.”     

    Cornwell claims that “plain speaking might have made a difference.” There is much evidence, however, that suggests it would have made matters worse. The hope for Pius to serve at a later point as an acceptable peacemaker between the belligerents, the survival of the Vatican within Italy (an Axis power), and the spectacle of the Holy See engaging in name calling with the likes of Hitler are three reasons why the Vatican might have deemed it unwise to issue extremely specific statements (any intelligent person can deduce just who the Pope referred to in his proclamations). A better reason was that doing so was counterproductive. When the Nazis offered to exempt Christian Jews from expulsion from the Netherlands to concentration camps in exchange for the silence of Christian leaders, for instance, the author notes that “the Catholic archbishop of Utrecht rejected the bargain and issued a pastoral letter of clear denunciation to be read in all the churches.” In retaliation the Nazis gathered all the Catholic Jews—including the since canonized Edith Stein—and sent them west to death camps. A direct result of the Dutch Catholic Church’s condemnation of Hitler was that the Nazis deported a higher proportion of Jews from Holland to concentration camps than from any other nation.  

    Eugenio Pacelli’s actions spoke louder than words. Pius XII directed his bishops to issue false baptismal certificates to Jews to save them from the concentration camps. “Some brave priests exploited their control of baptismal registers to thwart the Nazis,” Cornwell insists, “but these were isolated cases,” All evidence suggests otherwise. Angelo Roncalli, one of these “brave priests” (he later went on to become John XXIII), handed out fake baptismal certificates to protect Jews while he was the papal representative in Istanbul and did so by order of the Pope. Somehow this, and other examples of the Pope’s beneficence, escapes Cornwell’s notice. 
Pius opened Vatican City and local churches to those fleeing the Nazis. It is estimated that during the war half of Rome’s Jews found refuge in Catholic churches and other ecclesiastical buildings. This number included Israel Zolli, rabbi of Rome’s synagogue, who later converted to Catholicism as a result of Pius XII’s holy example.  

    Despite Cornwell’s best efforts to purge anything that remotely places Pius XII in a positive light, his tome includes much that contradicts his thesis. “In November 1939 Pacelli became centrally and dangerously involved in what was probably the most feasible plot to depose Hitler during the war,” the “hazardous nature” of which, Cornwell admits, “can hardly be exaggerated.” While this conspiracy failed, the Vatican was able to intercept messages outlining German war plans and pass them on to the Allies—an action that enraged Hitler and put Pacelli in extreme danger within Italy. 

    As the Vatican’s Secretary of State prior to becoming Pope, Pacelli engineered the signing of an agreement between the Catholic Church and Germany in the summer of 1933 that was to limit the Church’s role in politics and the government’s role in the affairs of the Church. The signing of the agreement, Cornwell opines, demonstrated “Catholic moral approval of Hitler’s policies.” Why such an agreement represented “moral approval,” while similar agreements since that time with other nations do not, is never explained. The tradition of the Church—a tradition that is apparently lost on the author—has been to deem itself an institution that is eternal, while the governing bodies it co-exists with are only temporary. Such a vision insists on dealing with whatever unsavory despots that pop-up from time to time to ensure the survival of the Church. The alternative to such an agreement was not a Catholic Church active in the political life of Nazi Germany, as Cornwell intimates, but a Catholic Church in Germany that did not exist. 

    Throughout, Cornwell inflates the Pope’s political power and maintains that he could have had a major influence within a Germany that was only one-third Catholic. Cornwell, who on several occasions reminds the reader that large numbers of modern Catholics disagree with Pope John Paul II on such matters as abortion and contraception, somehow deludes himself into believing that Pius commanded the unanimous obedience of Catholics within the Axis nations.

    Predictably, the author attempts to link the conservative philosophy of Pius with the Nazi ideology. The word “Right” is used interchangably with “Nazi” throughout the book. Nazi, of course, is an abbreviation for National Socialism. Among the 25 unalterable tenets of the party were the banning of income from investments (Point 11), the nationalization of Germany’s trusts (Point 12), and the sharing of the profits from big business with the state(Point 18). It is not by accident that the Nazi flag is the same color of all flags flown by socialists. Euthanasia, abortion, price controls, anti-smoking campaigns, and gun control were all championed by the vegitarian and rabid environmentalist Hitler. William Shirer observed that a large proportion of Nazi leaders “were notorious homosexual perverts” and noted that Hitler, “who was so monumentally intolerant by his very nature, was strangely tolerant of one human condition—a man’s morals.” The Law for Reconstruction of the Reich abolished the German States and centralized all power in Berlin. “You are either a Christian or a German,” the self-described “complete pagan” Hitler often said. “You can’t be both.” Like today’s opponents of the so-called Religious Right, Hitler never tired of telling Christians to stay out of politics. On almost every issue that is hotly contested today, Hitler falls in line with the liberal camp. Yet liberal intellectuals ceaselessly parade the slander that the Nazis were somehow men of the Right. That the propagation of such a lie is quite common, does not make Cornwell’s employment of it any less a lie.  

    Having great difficulty in painting the Pope as a hater, the author grasps at straws in attempting to associate Pacelli with offensive things said by other people or not said at all. In one document that Cornwell acknowledges Pacelli did not write, the author attempts to attribute alleged anti-Semitism in the memorandum to the future Pius XII anyway. “Pacelli’s spirit,” he maintains, “breathes through every line of this manifesto.” At another point when discussing a separate statement the author inserts the word “deserved” between quotes lamenting the fate of the Jews to imply Pacelli’s approval. That Cornwell injects false meaning into this quote to impugn Pacelli’s character is bad enough. Far worse is when the reader learns that the quote was written by someone other than Pacelli!

    That Pius XII was the most effective, non-military roadblock to Hitler’s Final Solution is one matter that many Jews and Nazis were in agreement upon. 

    “When fearful martyrdom came to our people in the decade of Nazi terror,” proclaimed Golda Meir upon Pius XII’s death, “the voice of the Pope was raised for its victims.” “Only the Church, stood squarely across the path of Hitler’s campaign for suppressing the truth,” Albert Einstein explained after the war. “I never had any special interest in the church before, but now I feel great affection and admiration.” The secular physicist was “forced to thus confess that what I once despised, I now praise unreservedly.” In his study Three Popes and the Jews, Israeli diplomat and scholar Pinchas Lapide wrote, “The Catholic Church under the pontificate of Pius XII was instrumental in saving lives of as many as 860,000 Jews from certain death at Nazi hands.” Furthermore, he explained, this “figure far exceeds those saved by all other Churches and rescue organizations combined.” In tribute, the Israeli government planted more than 800,000 trees southeast of Jerusalem to symbolize the lives saved by the Pope. The World Jewish Congress demonstrated its appreciation of the Pope’s actions by donating 20 million Lire to Catholic causes.  

    Perhaps as damning to the characterization of Eugenio Pacelli as “Hitler’s Pope” as the praise from Jewish quarters, were the rabid denunciations of Pius XII from the Nazi government.  
Upon his ascension to the Papacy, the major newspaper in Berlin wrote, “The election of Pacelli is not favorably accepted in Germany, since he has always been hostile to National Socialism.” After 1942’s Papal Christmas message the Reich Central Security Office complained, “In a manner never known before, the Pope has repudiated the National Socialist New European Order.” The Nazis continued: “Here he is virtually accusing the German people of injustice toward the Jews, and makes himself the mouthpiece of the Jewish war criminals.” Several of the Pope’s messages were banned within Germany during the war. In 1943, Hitler’s Pope begrudgingly notes, the Fuehrer outlined a plan to kidnap the Pope that was eventually scrapped. 

    In many ways, the fruits of the Allied victory were bitter for the Catholic Church. Within a few years, Stalin had gobbled up ten Christian nations, outlawed the Church, and, like Hitler, slaughtered and imprisoned hundreds of priests. If Pius is to be vilified for not being sufficiently belligerent toward Nazi Germany, what price should the reputations of FDR, Churchill, and others pay for aiding and abetting Stalin’s global conquest? 

    How a Pope who conspired to overthrow Hitler, ordered his deputies to issue phony documents that showed Jews had been Christened, handed over secret German war plans to the Allies, condemned Nazism publicly and through back channels, opened up houses of worship as refuges for the Holocaust’s intended victims, and was marked for kidnapping by the Furher, could be considered “Hitler’s Pope” is bizarre. 

    Hitler’s Pope fails as a piece of history. John Cornwell would have been better off abandoning his biographical sketch and writing a Broadway production. At least then he wouldn’t have had to worry about inconvenient facts getting in the way of a good story.