Hitler's Pope?
Dateline: November 17, 1999
Hitler's Pope: The Secret History of Pius XII, by John Cornwell. (1999 Viking/Penguin Group). Reviewed by Jim Baysinger.
The Author
John Cornwell is a Senior Research Fellow at Jesus College, Cambridge who has written extensively on Catholic issues over the years, including a bestselling book, "A Thief in the Night: The Death of Pope John Paul I."
Disquieted by the long-running controversy over Pius XII's role in World War II and the accusations that he colluded in the Nazi Final Solution against the Jews, Cornwell set himself to the task of presenting the issues fairly in the hope, as he puts it, of vindicating the Pope's policies. After assuring Vatican officials that he was sympathetic to Pius XII and wished to present a balanced account of Vatican actions during the war, Cornwell was granted access to the Church's archives, many of which had been secret until he was allowed to see them.
Unfortunately, the material Cornwell explored eventually convinced him that not only were some of the charges leveled against Pius XII quite true, but also that the pope's culpability for the suffering and deaths of millions of people in WWII was deeper and wider in scope than even many of Pius' critics supposed. Gradually, according to Cornwell himself, he was turned from a sympathetic to an accusatory stance. "Hitler's Pope" is a result of that change in attitude.
| Quote of the week: The notion of personal responsibility in fundamentalism is a curious one. You are responsible for your sins, but you cannot take credit for the good things that you do. Any good that you do must be attributed to God working through you. Yet you must try to be Christlike. When you fail, it is your fault for not 'letting the power of God work in you.' This is an effective double bind of responsibility without ability." -Marlene Winell, Leaving the Fold |
Since around 1870 there has been a debate going on between two factions of the Roman Catholic church: the Collegialists (Cornwell's own term) and the Authoritarians. Collegialists are Catholics who believe that control of the Church should be decentralized and locally-oriented, with congregations able to choose their own bishops and whether or not to engage in organized political activity under the Church aegis. Authoritarians believe that the Pope is infallible in all matters of doctrine, able to choose bishops for local congregations whether or not they meet the approval of their flocks, and that the Pope and the Vatican Curia are the only entities sanctioned to engage in political/diplomatic activity in the name of the Church. Cornwell is manifestly a collegialist. Authoritarians have had the upper hand in the Church for some time now, thus prompting this attempt to undermine their position. This issue will be addressed in greater depth in the next article.
Pacelli: Family & Early Years
Eugenio Pacelli, later to become Pius XII, was a very strange person. Although Cornwell makes only glancing attempts to delineate Pacelli's psychology, he provides enough information to enable his readers to draw their own portrait of the late Pope's mental makeup. The young Pacelli's major childhood amusement was dressing up as a priest and performing mock masses in his bedroom. His mother even made Eugenio's paraphernalia for his boyhood play-masses. This habit apparently never left him throughout his youth, and when he became an actual priest (to no one's surprise), he performed real masses and other pro forma acts of faith in public and in private with a punctilious attention to detail that astonished even many of his fellow clerics.
All through Pacelli's life, there is not so much as a hint of sexual activity of any sort. It seems as though he were born with no sexual identity and cultivated that lack with pride. Pacelli appears to have been one of those annoying prigs whose exhibitionistic asceticism was held by himself, and some others in his orbit, to be a mark of his "sanctity and holiness." Personally, I am alternately or simultaneously bored, annoyed or depressed by being around people who feel that, because they deny themselves some such or another normal human pleasure or vice, feel themselves innately superior to the rest of us.
In fact, even many of Pacelli's colleagues found him tedious, as witnessed by the reaction of the Jesuits when Pacelli tried, as Pope, to ban smoking in their order. They cheerfully and openly defied him and continued smoking with unabashed glee, their joy in doing so matched only by Cornwell's in reporting this little-known tidbit of information.
His belief in the absolute primacy and infallibility of the Pope was cultivated in his early years by his own family, who were apparently quite an odd lot themselves. His parents and relatives were ultra-devout Catholics, with his grandfather and father employed as high-ranking lawyers at the Vatican (as would be Pacelli's nephews later on). His family was stunned and outraged when the then-Pope (Pius IX) was divested of his Italian land-holdings, and Pacelli was raised among people who wore one glove, turned a chair to the wall of their living room, and kept their shutters permanently closed and a door half-closed to their home's palazzo as reminders of what had been "stolen" from their beloved papacy.
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Don't miss the other sections: |
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Part 2 |
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Part 3 |
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Notes |
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You can also view a Printable Version. |
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