NEWS FEATURE: Book raises questions about Pope Pius XII’s wartime role

c. 1999 Religion News Services UNDATED _ In the two decades since his coronation, Pope John Paul II has ushered in an unprecedented thaw in relations between Catholics and Jews _ a nearly unbelievable mend, given the centuries of ugly and sometimes murderous behavior by the majority faith. The first pope to visit a synagogue […]

c. 1999 Religion News Services

UNDATED _ In the two decades since his coronation, Pope John Paul II has ushered in an unprecedented thaw in relations between Catholics and Jews _ a nearly unbelievable mend, given the centuries of ugly and sometimes murderous behavior by the majority faith.

The first pope to visit a synagogue or a concentration camp, John Paul recognized Israel and, in a groundbreaking document last year, apologized for centuries of anti-Semitism and Catholic failures during the Holocaust.


But among many Catholics and Jews, tension lingers over John Paul’s stalwart defense of Pope Pius XII, born Eugenio Pacelli, who headed the church during World War II. Even the present pope’s comprehensive statement on the war _”We Remember: A Reflection on the Shoah”_ dismisses criticism of the wartime pope’s silence during the Holocaust without serious discussion. John Paul has said he wants to make Pius XII a saint.

Now a new book by British journalist John Cornwell, carrying the inflammatory title”Hitler’s Pope,”threatens to ignite the embers of Jewish resentment and anger that until recent years smoldered beneath the surface.

Cornwell concludes Pius XII failed utterly in his exalted position as vicar of Christ. As millions of Jews were marched off to the Nazi death camps, some of them taken from neighborhoods within sight of the Vatican, the pope offered little objection, in part, Cornwell claims, because he himself was anti-Semitic. Cornwell also says early blunders by Pius XII inadvertently strengthened Hitler’s hand by weakening the local church in Germany.

All of this, of course, is deeply offensive to the Vatican and its defenders, who look at the same documents and see a compassionate pope who exercised what influence he could in an impossible situation.

At the Vatican, defenders of Pius XII argue that the pope did not speak out more bluntly against the Nazis because he feared retaliation against Catholics in Germany and occupied countries and worried about the fate of hundreds of Jews given refuge in convents in Rome, Assisi and elsewhere in Italy.

To support their case, they cite a gift of 2 million lire, equivalent to about $1.1 million today, from the World Jewish Congress to Pius XII in October 1945 to thank him for his help to Jews persecuted by the Nazis.

In a letter to the then-president of the Italian Jewish Community, Raffaello Cantoni, Monsignor Giovan Battista Montini, an official in the Vatican Secretariat of State who was to become Pope Paul VI, reported that Pius XII probably would use the sum to help needy Jews. The letter is now in Israeli archives.


The Rev. Peter Gumpel, who is in charge of presenting the case for the pope’s canonization, contends the church under Pius XII saved 800,000 Jews during the war and says there are dozens of documents at the Vatican and in archives outside Italy attesting to this.

Cornwell, a Catholic, relied on interviews, the works of other scholars, a 12-volume set of Vatican papers and reams of documents collected to advance the canonization cause. He makes no original charges but condenses the arguments of detractors into a concise and strenuous critique.

The book studies Pacelli’s early career, when he entered the Vatican’s diplomatic service at the age of 25, as the pope’s representative to Germany between world wars. He negotiated concordats _ church/state treaties _ tying Rome to Germany, Austria and several other European nations. Cornwell contends the Reich Concordat of 1933 weakened the local church and played into Hitler’s hands by effectively silencing a key opponent of National Socialism.

More pointedly, Cornwell condemns Pius XII’s silence during the war, and says his one significant statement _ a radio address given on Christmas Eve 1942 _ was so weak it did more harm than good. In the speech, the pope decried the loss of “hundreds of thousands who, without any fault of their own, sometimes only by reason of their nationality or race, are marked down for death or gradual extinction.” But he named neither Nazis nor Jews and deflated the numbers in a way that soothed the consciences of millions who failed to act against the slaughter, Cornwell argues.

In”Pius XII and the Second World War,”a newly published book summing up decades of research in Vatican archives by a team of Jesuit historians, the Rev. Pierre Blet says the pope’s meaning was clear to Hitler’s security forces.

Blet quotes a memorandum reporting back to Hitler:”He virtually accuses the German people of injustice toward the Jews, and he makes himself the spokesman of the Jews, who are war criminals.” Cornwell also points to the pope’s failure to protest when the Nazis cleared Rome of Italian Jews, who were whisked away on railroad cars for Auschwitz.


Blet argues the Vatican intervened directly to Italian Fascist leader Benito Mussolini, with some success at first, on behalf of both Italian Jews and Jews who had fled to Italian-occupied territory to escape the Nazis.

Cornwell believes the pope was able to turn a blind eye to suffering because of a lingering hatred of Jews. He makes much of an 80-year-old letter penned by Pacelli when he was a Vatican diplomat in Germany. But the letter _ in which Pacelli condemns a Bolshevik revolutionary as “a Jew, pale, dirty with vacant eyes, hoarse voice, vulgar, repulsive, with a face that is both intelligent and sly” _ is evidence of the diplomat’s hatred of communists as much as Jews.

Scholars in the United States who have studied the same arguments for decades look askance at Cornwell’s arguments.

The Rev. John F. Morley, a Seton Hall University professor whose own 1980 dissertation on the subject was sourced by Cornwell, questioned some of the leaps made by the author.

Historians may disagree on the concordat, Morley said, but it’s difficult to argue it was orchestrated to support Hitler. And the allegations of anti-Semitism based on one letter go too far.”If that’s all there is, that doesn’t prove anything,”he said.

The Rev. Gerald P. Fogarty, a professor of religious studies at the University of Virginia and a noted historian on the wartime pope, said Cornwell has selectively dismissed evidence of Pius XII’s real hatred for Hitler.”It’s an example of a fantastic imagination,” Fogarty said. “He talks about having access to secret Vatican archives, which is simply false. As soon as he gets to the 1940s, he’s quoting from other people.”


In an interview, Cornwell said his contention is not so much that Pius XII intentionally supported Hitler but that his actions played into the dictator’s hands.”I wrote this book for people of my own children’s generation,” he said.”I have this belief that young people are drifting away from the church because of the perception that the church sided with right-wing totalitarian regimes.” (OPTIONAL TRIM _ STORY MAY END HERE)

Cornwell says he had no prejudice against the pope and actually began his work intending to disprove the allegations against Pius XII. But he reacted with “moral shock” to what he found, he said. To him, the vehement defense of the former pope has something to do with the cause for sainthood.

The canonization effort has undoubtedly polarized views on Pius XII. Earlier this year, an Israeli ambassador shocked Vatican officials by opposing sainthood, prompting predictable grumbling from some quarters that Jews were interfering in church business.”Certainly the Vatican can make whomever they want a saint,” responded Elan Steinberg, executive director of the World Jewish Congress and a fierce critic of Pius XII, “but not if they seek to distort Jewish history in the process.”

Scholars at Seton Hall University, a center of Jewish-Catholic relations predating the Second Vatican Council’s official endorsement of warmer relations, said they hope Cornwell’s book leads to deeper discussions about the role of the church in the Holocaust.”All of us who have been working in this field were most eager over the years to read something Pius XII had done or spoken out or tried to do during the war years to save Jews, to stop the Germans from going into Poland, to save people,” said Sister Rose Thering, whose endowment helps teachers study Jewish-Christian issues, particularly the Holocaust. “We looked in vain.” DEA END CHAMBERS-POLK

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