Hitler's Pope?
Dateline: November 10, 1999
Hitler's Pope: The Secret History of Pius XII, by John Cornwell. (1999 Viking/Penguin Group). Reviewed by Jim Baysinger.
World War II
Cornwell discusses numerous reasons, equivocations and apologies for Pius' behavior toward the Jews during the Holocaust, chief among them being that Pacelli, as Pius XII since his coronation in 1939, felt that to press the case of Jews to Hitler would inflame him further against them and cause the Nazis to persecute the Catholics with greater vigor than they were already doing. This argument, as Cornwell argues at length, is akin to believing that allowing a thug to beat you to a pulp is preferable to fighting back. After all, resistance might turn a thorough beating into a murder, right? Pacelli stuck to his self-spiked guns despite abundant evidence that the Nazi mugging of the Catholics and Jews had already become murder. Cornwell provides many instances where a sharp popular or Vatican reaction to certain local situations did indeed improve matters.[2] Unfortunately for the victims, Pius XII was not about to do anything to endanger his ability to bully bishops and celebrate High Masses with every gesture, jot and tittle in place.
Although few things could match Pacelli's impotent, self-serving silence on the Final Solution, there is the matter of crimes committed by Catholics (the Croatian Ustashe and other groups) in the Balkans. While the Holocaust has found it's pro-Pacelli apologists, even among the Jews,[3] the atrocities committed by Catholics in Yugoslavia and Hungary, many by gun-toting priests, have no possible earthly excuse other than Pacelli's tacit approval of them. Cornwell documents that Pius XII was kept abreast of these horrors even as they happened and chose to say nothing, believing the victory of pro-Nazi Catholics in the Balkans would lead to future power there for the Vatican.
Another example, much closer to Pacelli's home, was the roundup and near-extermination of the Roman Jewish community, which took place literally under the windows of Pacelli's Vatican apartments! Again, silence from the Supreme Pontiff as more bodies piled up in mounds.[4]
The one time Pius XII did verbally chastise a pro-Nazi Catholic (President Tiso of Slovakia, a priest!), he achieved positive results. The lesson was lost on Pacelli, however, and even though atrocities were instigated and committed by other priests throughout the Balkans, nothing was done to put a stop to it. Quite the contrary, in fact. Pacelli on several occasions praised the nasty little Hitler-leeches of the Balkans, his attitude being that, as long you're Catholic, everything's fine! (Quotes exactly to this effect are provided by Cornwell.) One of the many evil legacies of Pacelli's reign as Pius XII has been the lingering resentments among Balkan peoples which have exploded into violence in our generation. No wonder those people can't settle their differences, with "peacemakers" like Pius XII involved - or uninvolved, depending on how you look at it.
Judging Pius
Overall, it is made clear that Cornwell does not consider Pius XII to be so much an active collaborator of Hitler's, but rather a man too wrapped up in himself and his own agendas to realize just how much he was manipulated by der Fuehrer.[5] All the same, Cornwell makes it equally clear that Pacelli's naivete and distaste regarding Hitler in no way excuses his own anti-Semitism, his attraction to fascist regimes (Franco's in Spain and Horthy in Hungary, to name only a few), his failure to speak out against unspeakable war crimes which he knew of, and his desire to strengthen his own ecclesiastical fascism at the expense of any other moral principle which he claimed to hold dear. All of these factors are what played Pius XII into the hands of Hitler and the pro-Nazi satellites.
One important factor that cannot be ignored is Pacelli's extreme phobia against communism, and his consequent view of the unsavory fascist regimes as being the lesser of two evils: imperfect, yet necessary, bulwarks against the encroaching Bolshevist-atheist behemoth of the East, Soviet Russia. Being that Pacelli was famously anti-democratic and anti-socialist, he must have found the alliance between the Western democracies and Stalin's Russia extremely off-putting, leading to his hope, despite the Church's frosty relationships with Hitler and Mussolini, that the fascist dictatorships would hold the line against the perceived menace of the leftist-oriented countries. And to Pacelli, of course, democracy was a leftist orientation. God forbid, literally, that people should be allowed to vote - it might lead to a diminution in the authority of despots, like...well, like Pius XII himself, for example.
After WWII, the aging Pius XII became increasingly remote from wordly considerations and ever more autocratic. Cornwell describes how Pacelli became more self-involved and wrapped up in the minutia of liturgical observances while making decisions in virtual isolation. Likewise, his "grandiosity" and autism became more pronounced and reflected in three main areas: his propensity for delivering "allocutions" on a wide range of topics in which he had little or no actual expertise; his tendency to identify himself more and more as God's sole true link to mankind; and his burgeoning hypochondria. The total effect of Pacelli's later papacy was a virtual stagnation of intellectual development within the Church, exacerbated by his declaration that, once the Pope has had his say on any given subject, it was no longer a cause for discussion, even among qualified Catholic theologians.
At last, in 1958 Pacelli died. Cornwell takes evident delight in describing his funeral, which, due to a sloppy and amateurish embalming method, featured his body swelling with gas, farting audibly, smelling abominably and his nose turning black and falling off in public before his internment. Apparently, Cornwell finds all this to be a fitting display for Pacelli's last public appearance. I would hazard a guess that, if Pacelli is canonized, there will be no attempt to exhume the body for examination.
Besides offering a stunning, extremely well-researched portrait of Pius XII, the book also provides a fascinating overview of Church history from the 1870's onwards and a reasonably balanced critique of the centralization of Church authority over the same span of time, including a few choice tidbits about John Paul II which are relevant to Cornwell's secondary theme of the autocratic papacy's continuing development. Pius XII's legacies and the controversy surrounding "Hitler's Pope" will be explored further in the next article.
-- Jim Baysinger
