Hitler's Pope: Legacy and Controversy
Dateline: December 01, 1999
Hitler's Pope: The Secret History of Pius XII, by John Cornwell. (1999 Viking/Penguin Group). Reviewed by Jim Baysinger.
"HITLER'S POPE: LEGACY AND CONTROVERSY" > Page 1 , 2 , 3 , 4 , 5
Notes
[1] (...polemical work by a collegialist Catholic writer...) Non-Catholics may be unaware that there has been a cyclical battle between the collegialists and the authoritarians within the Church since the time of Pius X (1835-1914), who asserted the unlimited power and infallibility of the papacy. Pacelli, the future Pius XII, served as a curial lawyer under Pius X and helped draft the Code of Canon Law (formally adopted in 1917) which upheld the power of the Pope over all Church affairs. Since that time, the authoritarians have controlled the Roman Catholic Church. Their opposition, the collegialists, believe that control of Church matters should be de-centralized and the local bishops and their congregations given greater say in ecclesiastical and secular activities. A major crux of the debate between the two factions has been over the power of the Pope to appoint bishops without the approval of the local congregations.
[2] (...unable to "let go"...of power...) The phrase Cornwell uses to describe the post-John XXIII popes' sporadic despotism. Quoting Cornwell: "Total authority...remained exclusively with the papacy. There was a moral obligation [imposed by Vatican II] on popes to apply collegiality, but no institutional mechanism."
[3] (...Paul VI "a liberal at heart"...) In fact, at one time Montini had fallen out of favor for suspected socialist leanings, and was virtually exiled from the Vatican by Pacelli.
[4] (...Paul VI's "agonizing"...over decisions...) Yallop describes how Paul vacillated beyond all reason over urgent issues like the irregularities in the Vatican Bank and Cardinal Marcinkus' role in questionable banking activities, and over the case of Cardinal Cody of Chicago, himself involved in shady financial dealings and described by one prominent priest as a "son-of-a-bitch." According to Yallop, apparently Cody's peace of mind was more important than that of 2.4 million Catholics.
[5] (...including archbishop Weakland...) St. Louis Post-Dispatch, Nov. 18, story by Patricia Rice.
[6] (Sister Margherite Marchione) Sister Marchione is also the author of "Yours is a Precious Witness: Memoirs of Jews and Catholics in Wartime Italy." (1997) This book was put out by the Paulist Press, the same publisher of Blet's Pius XII and the Second World War. Apparently, Marchione is making a career of apologizing for the Vatican.
[7] (...priests participating in Balkan atrocities...) Cornwell extensively documents that, in hopes of establishing a future Vatican power base in the Balkans, Pius XII deliberately overlooked massacres by the pro-Nazi Croatian Catholic Ustashe and other crimes instigated by gun-toting Franciscan priests. In fact, Pius lauded those murderers and significantly contributed to the ongoing tensions in that area.
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