Unit 1012 presents’ two books about Pope Pius XII and World War II which there is a debate on whether the Pope
was good or bad in his role during Nazi Germany.
 |
| Hitler’s Pope by John
Cornwell |
Author
|
John
Cornwell
|
Subject
|
Religion
|
Publisher
|
Viking
|
Publication date
|
1999
|
ISBN
|
|
Hitler's Pope is a book published in
1999 by the British journalist and author John Cornwell that examines the actions of
Eugenio Pacelli, who became Pope
Pius XII, before and during the Nazi era, and
explores the charge that he assisted in the legitimization of Adolf
Hitler's Nazi regime in Germany, through the pursuit of a Reichskonkordat
in 1933. The book is critical of Pius' conduct during the Second
World War, arguing that he did not do enough, or speak out enough, against the
Holocaust. Cornwell argued that Pius's entire career as the nuncio to Germany,
Cardinal Secretary of State, and pope
was characterized by a desire to increase and centralize the power of the
Papacy, and that he subordinated opposition to the Nazis to that goal. He
further argued that Pius was antisemitic
and that this stance prevented him from caring about the European Jews. The
author has moderated some of his allegations since publication of the book, and
the work remains controversial.
Various commentators have challenged
the book's leading ideas, or challenged factual assertions contained within it.
Jewish historian of the Holocaust Martin
Gilbert credits Pius XII with various actions which saved Jews, and notes
that the Nazi security forces referred to him as the "mouthpiece of the
Jewish war criminals". Pius XII maintained links to the German
Resistance. and in the assessment of Catholic historian Frank Coppa writing
for the Encyclopedia Britannica, Cornwell's
depiction of Pius XII as anti-Semitic lacks "credible substantiation".
The author has been praised for
attempting to bring into the open the debate on the Catholic
Church's relationship with the Nazis, but also accused of making unsubstantiated
claims and ignoring positive evidence. The author has moderated some of his
allegations, since publication of the book. In 2004, Cornwell stated that Pius
XII "had so little scope of action that it is impossible to judge the
motives for his silence during the war, while Rome was under the heel of
Mussolini and later occupied by Germany. ... But even if his prevarications and
silences were performed with the best of intentions, he had an obligation in
the postwar period to explain those actions" He similarly stated in 2008
that Pius XII's "scope for action was severely limited", but that
"[n]evertheless, due to his ineffectual and diplomatic language in respect
of the Nazis and the Jews, I still believe that it was incumbent on him to explain
his failure to speak out after the war. This he never did." In 2009 he
described Pacelli as effectively a "fellow
traveller" of the Nazis.
Cornwell's
work
Cornwell's work was the first to have
access to testimonies from Pius's beatification
process as well as to many documents from Eugenio
Pacelli's nunciature
which had just been opened under the seventy-five year rule by the Vatican
State Secretary archives. Cornwell's work has received both praise and criticism.
Eamon
Duffy wrote that Cornwell's "gripping and impassioned account"
had presented "an indictment that [could not] be ignored" and Saul Friedländer that Cornwell had demonstrated
how "Pius XII brought the authoritarianism and the centralization of his
predecessors to their most extreme stage." Susan
Zuccotti's Under
His Very Windows: The Vatican and the Holocaust in Italy (2000) and Michael
Phayer's The Catholic Church and the Holocaust, 1930–1965 (2000) are
critical of both Cornwell and Pius XII. Ronald
J. Rychlak's Hitler, the War and the Pope is critical as well but
defends Pius XII in light of his own access to recent documents.
Cornwell researched the conduct of
Pacelli, both while he served as nuncio to Germany and after he was made Pope;
some of Cornwell's principal resources were the Vatican archives. Cornwell
stated that he intended his book as a defense of Pius XII but that
"nearing the end of my research... [t]he material I had gathered, taking
the more extensive view of Pacelli's life, amounted not to an exoneration but
to a wider indictment"
Allegations
of antisemitism
Cornwell alleged that, from at least
his early 40s onward, Pacelli had antisemitic
tendencies. He traced the earliest manifestation of these antisemitic
tendencies to an incident in 1917 in which Pacelli refused to help facilitate
the exportation of palm fronds from Italy to be used by German Jews in Munich to
celebrate the festival of Tabernacles. Cornwell argued that, although this
incident was "small in itself", it "belies subsequent claims
that Pacelli had a great love of the Jewish religion and was always motivated
by its best interests."
Cornwell stated he uncovered a
"time bomb" letter signed and personally annotated by Pacelli that
had been lying in the Vatican archives since 1919, regarding the actions of
communist revolutionaries in Munich. Regarding this letter, Cornwell stated
"The repeated references to the Jewishness of these individuals, amid the
catalogue of epithets describing their physical and moral repulsiveness, gives
an impression of stereotypical anti-Semitic contempt". Cornwell asserts
that the letter from Pacelli to Pietro Gaspam [sic Gaparri
] portrays Jews in an unfavorable light and associates
them with the Bolshevik revolution.
In the assessment of Catholic
apologist Professor Frank Coppa writing for Encyclopedia Britannica,
Cornwell's depiction of Pacelli as anti-Semitic lacks "credible
substantiation". Professor Coppa writes: "though Pius's wartime
public condemnations of racism and genocide were cloaked in generalities, he
did not turn a blind eye to the suffering but chose to use diplomacy to aid the
persecuted. It is impossible to know if a more forthright condemnation of the
Holocaust would have proved more effective in saving lives, though it probably
would have better assured his reputation."
Papal
absolutism
Cornwell asserts that Pacelli was a
strong proponent of the absolute leadership principle. He writes that,
"More than any other Vatican official of the century, [Pacelli] promoted
the modern ideology of autocratic papal control, the highly centralized,
dictatorial authority..."
Allegations
of collaboration with fascist leaders
Cornwell argued that Pacelli's
antisemitism combined with his drive to promote papal absolutism inexorably led
him to collaboration with fascist leaders, a collaboration which led to what
Cornwell characterizes as "the betrayal of Catholic democratic politics in
Germany".
Cornwell describes this collaboration
with fascist leaders as starting in 1929 with the concordat with Mussolini
known as the Lateran Treaty, and followed by the concordat with Hitler known as
the Reichskonkordat.
Lateran
Treaty
Cornwell recounts that Eugenio
Pacelli's brother, Francesco, successfully negotiated a concordat with
Mussolini as part of an agreement known as the Lateran
Treaty. A precondition of the negotiations had involved the dissolution of
the parliamentary Catholic Italian Popular Party. Cornwell claims that Pius XI
disliked political Catholicism because it was beyond his control. According to
Cornwell, a succession of Popes took the view that Catholic party politics
"brought democracy into the church by the back door". Cornwell
asserts that the result of the demise of the Popular Party was the
"wholesale shift of Catholics into the Fascist Party and the collapse of
democracy in Italy".
Anti-communist
posture of the Vatican
Cornwell asserts that Pius XI and his
new secretary of state, Eugenio Pacelli, were determined that at a time that
saw the church persecuted by Communist and socialist regimes from the Soviet
Union to Mexico and later Spain, no accommodation was to be reached with
Communists. At the same time, Cornwell alleges that Pius XI and Pacelli were
more open to collaboration with totalitarian movements and regimes of the
right.
Reichskonkordat
Cornwell asserts that Hitler was
determined to conclude a concordat with the Vatican similar to the one that
Mussolini had negotiated. According to Cornwell, Hitler was obsessed by a fear
of German Catholics who, politically united by the Center Party, had defeated Otto
von Bismarck's Kulturkampf, during the "culture struggle"
against the Catholic Church in the 1870s. According to Cornwell, Hitler was
"convinced that his movement could succeed only if political Catholicism
and its democratic networks were eliminated".
Cornwell explains that Hitler had good
reason to fear the political power of the German Catholic Church. He asserts
that in the early 1930s, the German Center Party, the German Catholic bishops,
and the Catholic media had been united in their rejection of National Socialism. The hierarchy instructed
priests to combat National Socialism at a local level whenever it attacked
Christianity, even going so far as to deny Nazis access to the sacraments and
church burials. At the same time, Catholic journalists lambasted National
Socialism daily in Germany's 400 Catholic newspapers. According to Cornwell,
after Hitler came to power in January 1933, he made the concluding of a
concordat with the Vatican one of his top priorities. The negotiations took
over six months; Cornwell asserts that Hitler spent more time on this treaty
than on any other item of foreign diplomacy during his dictatorship.
The Reich Concordat granted the
Vatican the right to impose the new Code of Canon Law on Catholics in Germany,
and promised a number of measures favorable to Catholic education, including
new schools. Cornwell alleges that the 'quid pro quo' for Hitler's agreeing to
grant the Vatican these rights and privileges was Pacelli's collaboration in
the withdrawal of Catholics from political and social activity. The
negotiations were conducted in secret by Pacelli, Kaas, and Hitler's deputy
chancellor, Franz von Papen, over the heads of German bishops
and the faithful. According to Cornwell, the German Catholic Church was not
involved in the negotiations and had no say in the terms of the agreement.
In the end, Hitler insisted that his
signature on the concordat would depend on the Center Party's voting for the Enabling Act, the legislation that was to give
him dictatorial powers.
Cornwell recounts that Kaas, chairman
of the Center Party and a close associate of Pacelli, was the one who
marshalled the votes of the party members to pass the Enabling Act. Next,
Hitler insisted on the "voluntary" disbanding of the Center Party,
the last truly parliamentary force in Germany. Again, Cornwell alleges that
Pacelli was the prime mover in the surrender of the Center Party. Cornwell
asserts that the fact that the party voluntarily disbanded itself, rather than
go down fighting, had a profound psychological effect which deprived Germany of
the "last democratic focus of potential noncompliance and
resistance". The German bishops capitulated to Pacelli's policy of
centralization, and German Catholic democrats found themselves politically
leaderless. In the political vacuum created by its surrender, millions of
Catholics joined the Nazi Party, believing that it had the support of the Pope.
Thus, according to Cornwell, Pius XII
facilitated the rise of Hitler first through the negotiation of the Reichskonkordat
and subsequently through his passivity, silence and inaction, which ultimately
condoned and enabled the Holocaust.
Criticism
of Cornwell's work
A major response to Hitler's Pope
came from University of Mississippi law professor Ronald
J. Rychlak in his 2000 book on the subject, Hitler, the War, and the
Pope. Rychlak was acknowledged by the Vatican to have been given special
access to their closed archives for his research. Rychlak disagreed with
Cornwell's claim of having found a "time bomb letter", arguing that
the letter in question had actually been written not by Pacelli but by his
assistant, and moreover had been fully published and discussed in a 1992 book
by Emma Fattorini (a highly respected docent at the University of Rome). With respect to
Cornwell's allegations of antisemitism, Rychlak stated that "When Pius XII
died in 1958, there were tributes from virtually every Jewish group around the
world".
Rychlak also alleged that Cornwell
manipulated the photograph on the front cover of the American edition of the
book, and incorrectly dated the photo as having been taken in March 1939, the
month that Pacelli was made Pope. Rychlak charged that this had been
deliberately in order to give the impression that Pius had just visited Hitler
when, in fact, the photo had been taken in 1927 as Pius was leaving a reception
held for German President Paul von Hindenburg.
Robert Royal has also repeated this
allegation.
In his 2005 book The Myth of
Hitler's Pope, the historian and rabbi David
G. Dalin countered Cornwell. Dalin suggested that Yad Vashem
should honor Pope Pius XII as a "Righteous
Gentile," concluding that "[t]he anti-papal polemics of ex-seminarians
like Garry Wills and John Cornwell...of ex-priests like James Carroll, and or
other lapsed or angry liberal Catholics exploit the tragedy of the Jewish
people during the Holocaust to foster their own political agenda of forcing
changes on the Catholic Church today." Dalin called the book's conclusions
"unverified" and "strongly anti-religious". Eugene
Fisher, who has a PhD in Hebrew culture and education, said it was a
"sad commentary on the secular media that this anti-Catholic screed was
ever published".
Ken Woodward, writing in Newsweek,
stated that Hitler's Pope has "errors of fact and ignorance of
context [that] appear on almost every page."
In an historical assessment of Pope
Pius XII, the Encyclopedia Britannica addressed Conrnwell's book in the
following terms: "John Cornwell's controversial book on Pius, Hitler's
Pope (1999), characterized him as anti-Semitic. [The depiction], however,
lack[s] credible substantiation". The Encyclopedia further assessed his
role in aiding Jews during the Holocaust as follows: "Although he allowed
the national hierarchies to assess and respond to the situation in their countries,
he established the Vatican Information Service to provide aid to, and
information about, thousands of war refugees and instructed the church to
provide discreet aid to Jews, which quietly saved thousands of lives".
Cornwell's
later views
According to a 2004 article in The
Economist, Cornwell's historical work has not always been
"fair-minded" and Hitler's Pope specifically "lacked
balance". The article goes on to state that Cornwell,
"chastened", had admitted as much himself, in a later work, The
Pontiff in Winter, citing the following quote as evidence:
I would now argue, in the
light of the debates and evidence following 'Hitler's Pope', that Pius XII had
so little scope of action that it is impossible to judge the motives for his
silence during the war, while Rome was under the heel of Mussolini and later
occupied by the Germans... But even if his prevarications and silences were
performed with the best of intentions, he had an obligation in the postwar
period to explain those actions."
In a more recent interview, Mr.
Cornwell stated:
While I believe with many
commentators that the pope might have done more to help the plight of the Jews,
I now feel, 10 years after the publication of my book, that his scope for
action was severely limited and I am prepared to state this.... Nevertheless,
due to his ineffectual and diplomatic language in respect of the Nazis and the
Jews, I still believe that it was incumbent on him to explain his failure to
speak out after the war. This he never did.
In 2009 he described Cardinal Pacelli
(the future Pope Pius XII) as being an example of a "fellow
traveller" of the Nazis who was willing to accept the generosity of
Hitler in the educational sphere (more schools, teachers and pupil places), so
long as the Church withdrew from the social and political sphere, at the same
time as Jews were being dismissed from universities and Jewish pupil places
were being reduced. For this he considers Pacelli as effectively being in
collusion with the Nazi cause, if not by intent. He further argues that Monsignor
Kass, who was involved in negotiations for the Reichskonkordat, and at that
time the head of the Roman Catholic Centre Party, persuaded his party members,
with the acquiescence of Pacelli, in the summer of 1933 to enable Hitler to
acquire dictatorial powers. He argues that the Catholic Centre Party vote was
decisive in the adoption of dictatorial powers by Hitler and that the party's
subsequent dissolution was at Pacelli's prompting.
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| The Myth of Hitler's
Pope: How Pope Pius XII Rescued Jews from the Nazis by David G. Dalin |
The Myth of Hitler's Pope:
How Pope Pius XII Rescued Jews from the Nazis is a book written by American
historian and Rabbi David G. Dalin and published in 2005 by Regnery Publishing.
Background
In 2001 Joseph Bottum commissioned Dalin to write an
omnibus review article on the books relating to Pope Pius XII, who was the
centre of controversy in the wake of John Cornwell's book "Hitler's
Pope." The latter received attention in the Weekly Standard.
Published in February 2001, Dalin's
essay (later expanded into the book) concluded that Pius XII was a Righteous
Gentile who saved hundreds of thousands of lives during the Holocaust. Bottum
stated that the essay "went far beyond any claim I had been willing to
make", though he did not say whether he disagreed with any of the claims
in the essay, and also noted that one New York Times reviewer who
"responded in the way I had supposed most would" and "grumbled a
little but eventually concluded the claims about Pius XII were overwrought and
Dalin was basically right: the Pope did 'more than most to shelter Jews.'"
Bottum said that at a Holocaust
symposium the next summer, one conservative editor, who had previously
supported Bottum's approach, declared he would never read another word David
Dalin wrote. Bottum also said that in "conservative Catholic" circles
it was generally well received, but noted that many in these circles have a
"self-image as victims" and fear that attacks on Pius XII are signs
of "rampant anti-Catholicism" in larger society, and that these sorts
of fears drive them to an insular attitude of wanting to "flee to small
fellowships of the saved and away from the corruption of the public
square". When people like this endorse the book, Bottum says, then in the
minds of others who completely disagree with Dalin and were "only
angered" by his pro-Pius XII argument, these endorsements just serve to
confirm "that David Dalin let himself be used as a Jew to advance a
sectarian Catholic agenda".
Contents
Dalin first presents evidence to
support his conclusion that popes through history have defended the Jews, and
that they have refuted attacks like the blood
libel.
Then he gets to the main part of the
book: defending the reputation of the late Pope Pius XII by presenting
extensive documentation culled from Church and State archives throughout Europe.
Rabbi Dalin suggests that Yad Vashem should
honor Pope Pius XII as a "Righteous Gentile", and documents that Pius
was praised by many leading Jews of his day for his role in saving more Jews
than Schindler. Pius's admirers included
Chief Rabbi Yitzhak HaLevi Herzog of the Palestinian
Mandate and Israel, Israeli Prime Ministers Golda Meir
and Moshe
Sharett, and Israel's first president Chaim
Weizmann.
Dalin also presents Albert
Einstein as one of the Jews who supposedly praised Pius XII, writing that
Einstein "paid tribute to the 'courage' of Pope Pius and the Catholic
Church". He references a 23 December 1940 article in Time
magazine and quotes Einstein as saying in the article that "Only the
Catholic church stood squarely across the path of Hitler's campaign for suppressing
the truth." However the article actually quoted Einstein saying,
"only the church", not the "Catholic church", and in the
original 1934 La Crosse Tribune and Leader-Press article that the quote
came from before it was reprinted 6 years later in Time, the author
prefaced it by saying he was "quoting in free translation a statement made
by Professor Einstein last year to one of my colleagues who has been
prominently identified with the Protestant church in its contacts with
Germany." In a 1943 letter Einstein said he made a statement "which
corresponds approximately" with the Time article, but that it was
made much earlier than 1940 "during the first years of the Nazi
regime" and that his actual comments were "more moderate." In a
1950 letter Einstein said that his quoted remarks from the Time article
were "not my own", that they had been "elaborated and
exaggerated nearly beyond recognition" and that he was "predominantly
critical" of the clergy. In a 1943 interview Einstein was extremely
critical of the Catholic Church's behavior under the Nazis, and also singled
out Pope Pius XII for criticism because of his Concordat with Hitler, saying
"Since when can one make a pact with Christ and Satan at
the same time?"
Reviews
In the July/August 2006 issue of The
American Spectator, Martin Gilbert, a Holocaust historian, writes:
"Building on earlier, documented defenses of Pius XII...[ Dalin ] builds a
powerful case for Pius XII, suggesting that the desire of Pope John Paul II to
canonize Pius need not have been offensive -- or insensitive -- to Jews, as it
was widely portrayed." Gilbert asserts that "Professor Dalin's book
is an essential contribution to our understanding of the reality of Pope Pius
XII's support for Jews at their time of greatest danger."
