Theos-Talk Archives (April 2005 Message tt01478)

Perhaps...
But maybe it is not a true picture.
Try this:
http://www.catholicculture.org/docs/doc_view.cfm?recnum=3511


M. Sufilight

----- Original Message ----- 
From: "Cass Silva" <silva_cass@yahoo.com>
To: <theos-talk@yahoogroups.com>
Sent: Saturday, April 23, 2005 2:18 AM
Subject: Theos-World Hitler's Pope









If you want to find the evil roots of all our human problems read on!

Hitler's Pope
by John Cornwell

Below is the full text of the excerpt from the book, "Hitler's Pope," as 
published in the October 1999 issue of Vanity Fair

[21 April 2005]

Emperor's Clothes is publishing a series on Pope John Paul II which includes 
material relevant to Pius XII. We've posted the first article, "Was John 
Paul II a 'Friend of the Jewish People'"? at
http://emperors-clothes.com/vatican/pope-1.htm

===========================================================

Hitler's Pope
[Excerpt]

Long-buried Vatican files reveal a new and shocking indictment of World War 
II's Pope Plus XII: that in pursuit of absolute power he helped Adolf Hitler 
destroy German Catholic political opposition, betrayed the Jews of Europe, 
and sealed a deeply cynical pact with a 20th-century devil.

By John Cornwell

One evening several years ago when I was having dinner with a group of 
students, the topic of the papacy was broached, and the discussion quickly 
boiled over. A young woman asserted that Eugenio Pacelli, Pope Pius XII, the 
Pope during World War II, had brought lasting shame on the Catholic Church 
by failing to denounce the Final Solution. A young man, a practicing 
Catholic, insisted that the case had never been proved.

Raised as a Catholic during the papacy of Pius XII - his picture gazed down 
from the wall of every classroom during my childhood - I was only too 
familiar with the allegation. It started in 1963 with a play by a young 
German author named Rolf Hochhuth, Der Stellvertreter (The Deputy) which was 
staged on Broadway in 1964.

It depicted Pacelli as a ruthless cynic, interested more in the Vatican's 
stockholdings than in the fate of the Jews. Most Catholics dismissed 
Hochhuth's thesis as implausible, but the play sparked a controversy which 
has raged to this day.

Disturbed by the anger brought out in that dinner altercation, and 
convinced, as I had always been, of Pius XII's innocence, I decided to write 
a new defense of his reputation for a younger generation. I believed that 
Pacelli's evident holiness was proof of his good faith. How could such a 
saintly pope have betrayed the Jews? But was it possible to find a new and 
conclusive approach to the issue? The arguments had so far focused mainly on 
his wartime conduct; however, Pacelli's Vatican career had started 40 years 
earlier. It seemed to me that a proper investigation into Pacelli's record 
would require a more extensive chronicle than any attempted in the past. So 
I applied for access to archival material in the Vatican, reassuring those 
who had charge of crucial documents that I was on the side of my subject. 
Six years earlier, in a book entitled A Thief in the Night, I had defended 
the Vatican against charges that Pope John Paul I had been murdered by his 
own aides.

Two key officials granted me access to secret material: depositions under 
oath gathered 30 years ago to support the process for Pacelli's 
canonization, and the archive of the Vatican Secretariat of State, the 
foreign office of the Holy See. I also drew on German sources relating to 
Pacelli's activities in Germany during the 1920s and 1930s, including his 
dealings with Adolf Hitler in 1933. For months on end I ransacked Pacelli's 
files, which dated back to 1912, in a windowless dungeon beneath the Borgia 
Tower in Vatican City. Later I sat for several weeks in a dusty office in 
the Jesuit headquarters, close to St. Peter's Square in Rome, mulling over a 
thousand pages of transcribed testimony given under oath by those who had 
known Pacelli well during his lifetime, including his critics.

By the middle of 1997, 1 was in a state of moral shock. The material I had 
gathered amounted not to an exoneration but to an indictment more scandalous 
than Hochhuth's. The evidence was explosive. It showed for the first time 
that Pacelli was patently, and by the proof of his own words, anti-Jewish. 
It revealed that he had helped Hitler to power and at the same time 
undermined potential Catholic resistance in Germany. It showed that he had 
implicitly denied and trivialized the Holocaust, despite having reliable 
knowledge of its true extent. And, worse, that he was a hypocrite, for after 
the war he had retrospectively taken undue credit for speaking out boldly 
against the Nazi persecution of the Jews.

In the "Holy Year" of 1950, a year in which many millions of pilgrims 
flocked to Rome to catch a glimpse of Pacelli, he was at the zenith of his 
papacy. This was the Pius people now in their mid-50s and older remember 
from newsreels and newspaper photographs. He was 74 years old and still 
vigorous. Six feet tall, stick thin at 125 pounds, light on his feet, 
regular in habits, he had hardly altered physically from the day of his 
coronation 11 years earlier. He had beautiful tapering hands, a plaintive 
voice, large dark eyes and an aura of holiness. It was his extreme pallor 
that first arrested those who met him. His skin "had surprisingly 
transparent effect," observed the writer Gerrado Pallenberg, "as if 
reflecting from the inside a cold, white flame." His charisma was stunning. 
"His presence radiated a benignity, calm and sanctity that I have certainly 
never before sensed in any human being." recorded the English writer James 
Lees-Milne. "I immediately fell head over heels in love
with him. I was so affected I could scarcely speak without tears and was 
conscious that my legs were trembling."

But there was another side to his character, little known to the faithful. 
Although he was a man of selfless, monklike habits of prayer and simplicity, 
he was a believer in the absolute leadership principle. More than any other 
Vatican official of the century, he had promoted the modern ideology of 
autocratic papal control, the highly centralized, dictatoria1 authority he 
himself assumed on March 2, 1939, and maintained until his death in October 
1958. There was a time before the advent of modern communications when 
Catholic authority was widely distributed, in the collective decisions of 
the church's councils and in collegial power-sharing between the Pope and 
the bishops. The absolutism of the modern papacy is largely an invention of 
the late 19th century It developed rapidly in the first decades of this 
century in response to the perception of the centrifugal breakup of the 
church under an array of contemporary pressures: materialism, increasing 
sexual freedom, religious
skepticism, and social and political liberties. From his young manhood on, 
Pacelli played a leading role in shaping the conditions and scope of modern 
papal power.

Eugenio Pacelli was born in Rome in 1876, into a family of church lawyers 
who served the Vatican. He had an older sister and brother and a younger 
sister. His parents, devout Catholics, shared an apartment in central Rome 
with his grandfather, who had been a legal adviser to Pius IX, the 
longest-serving Pope in history. There was only one small brazier to supply 
heat for the whole family, even in the depths of winter. Eugenio was a 
modest youth, who never appeared before his siblings unless he was fully 
dressed in a jacket and tie. He would always come to the table with a book, 
which he would read after having asked the family's permission.

> From an early age he acted out the ritual of the Mass, dressed in robes 
supplied by his mother. He had a gift for languages and a prodigious memory. 
He was spindly and suffered from a "fastidious stomach." He retained a 
youthful piety all his life. Politically and legally, however, he was 
capable of great subtlety and cunning.

The Pacelli's were fiercely loyal to the injured merit of the papacy. From 
1848, the Popes had progressively lost to the emerging nation-state of Italy 
their dominions, which had formed, since time immemorial, the midriff of the 
Italian peninsula. Six years before Eugenio's birth, the city of Rome itself 
had been seized, leaving the papacy in crisis. How could the Popes regard 
themselves as independent now that they were mere citizens of an upstart 
kingdom? Eugenio's grandfather and father believed passionately that the 
Popes could once again exert a powerful unifying authority over the church 
by the application of ecclesiastical and international law. In 1870, at a 
gathering in Rome of a preponderance of the world's bishops, known as the 
First Vatican Council, the Pope was dogmatically declared infallible in 
matters of faith and morals. He was also declared the unchallenged primate 
of the faithful. The Pope may have lost his temporal dominion, but 
spiritually he was solely in charge
of his universal church.

During the first two decades of this century, papal primacy and 
infallibility began to creep even beyond the ample boundaries set by the 
First Vatican Council. A powerful legal instrument transformed the 1870 
primacy dogma into an unprecedented principle of papal power. Eugenio 
Pacelli, by then a brilliant young Vatican lawyer, had a major part in the 
drafting of that instrument, which was known as the Code of Canon Law.

Pacelli had been recruited into the Vatican in 1901, at the age of 24, to 
specialize in international affairs and church law. Pious, slender, with 
dark luminous eyes, he was an instant favorite. He was invited to 
collaborate on the reformulation of church law with his immediate superior, 
Pietro Gaspam, a world-famous canon lawyer. Packaged in a single manual, the 
Code of Canon Law was distributed in 1917 to Catholic bishops and clergy 
throughout the world. According to this code, in the future all bishops 
would be nominated by the Pope; doctrinal error would be tantamount to 
heresy; priests would be subjected to strict censorship in their writings; 
papal letters to the faithful would be regarded as infallible (in practice 
if not in principle}: and an oath would be taken by all candidates for the 
priesthood to submit to the sense as well as the strict wording of doctrine 
as laid down by the Pope.

But there was a problem. The church had historically granted the dioceses in 
the provincial states of Germany a large measure of local discretion and 
independence from Rome. Germany had one of the largest Catholic populations 
in the world, and its congregation was well educated and sophisticated, with 
hundreds of Catholic associations and newspapers and many Catholic 
universities and publishing houses. The historic autonomy of Germany's 
Catholic Church was enshrined in ancient church-state treaties known as 
concordats.

Aged 41 and already an archbishop, Pacelli was dispatched to Munich as papal 
nuncio, or ambassador, to start the process of eliminating all existing 
legal challenges to the new papal autocracy. At the same time, he was to 
pursue a Reich Concordat, a treaty between the papacy and Germany as a whole 
which would supersede all local agreements and become a model of Catholic 
church-state relations. A Reich Concordat would mean formal recognition by 
the German government of the Pope's right to impose the new Code of Canon 
Law on Germany's Catholics. Such an arrangement was fraught with 
significance for a largely Protestant Germany. Nearly 400 years earlier, in 
Wittenberg, Martin Luther had publicly burned a copy of Canon Law in 
defiance of the centralized authority of the church. It was one of the 
defining moments of the Reformation, which was to divide Western Christendom 
into Catholics and Protestants.

In May 1917, Pacelli set off for Germany via Switzerland in a private 
railway compartment, with an additional wagon containing 60 cases of special 
foods for his delicate stomach. The Pope at that time, Benedict XV, was 
shocked at this extravagance, but Pacelli had favored status as the 
Vatican's best diplomat. Shortly after he settled in Munich, he acquired a 
reputation as a vigorous relief worker. He traveled through war-weary 
Germany extending charity to people of all religions and none. In an early 
letter to the Vatican, however he revealed himself to be less than enamored 
of Germany's Jews. On September 4, 1917. Pacelli informed Pietro Gaspam, who 
had become cardinal secretary of state in the Vatican -- the equivalent of 
foreign minister and prime minister -- that a Dr. Werner, the chief rabbi of 
Munich, had approached the nunciature begging a favor. In order to celebrate 
the festival of Tabernacles, beginning on October 1, the Jews needed palm 
fronds, which normally came from
Italy. But the Italian government had forbidden the exportation, via 
Switzerland, of a stock of palms which the Jews had purchased and which were 
being held up in Como. "The Israelite Community," continued Pacelli, "are 
seeking the intervention of the Pope in the hope that he will plead on 
behalf of the thousands of German Jews." The favor in question was no more 
problematic than the transportation of Pacelli's 60 cases of food-stuffs had 
been a few months earlier.

Pacelli informed Gaspam that he had warned the rabbi that "wartime delays in 
communication" would make things difficult. He also told Gaspam that he did 
not think it appropriate for the Vatican "to assist them in the exercise of 
their Jewish cult." His letter went by the slow route overland in the 
diplomatic bag. Gaspam replied by telegram on September 18 that he entirely 
trusted Pacelli's "shrewdness," agreeing that it would not be appropriate to 
help Rabbi Werner. Pacelli wrote back on September 28, 1917, informing 
Gaspam that he had again seen the Rabbi, who "was perfectly convinced of the 
reasons I had given him and thanked me warmly for all that I had done on his 
behalf." Pacelli had done nothing except thwart the rabbi's request. The 
episode, small in itself, belies subsequent claims that Pacelli had a great 
love of the Jewish religion and was always motivated by its best interests.

Eighteen months later he revealed his antipathy toward the Jews in a more 
blatantly anti-Semitic fashion when he found himself at the center of a 
local revolution as Bolshevik groups struggled to take advantage of the 
chaos in postwar Munich. Writing to Gaspam, Pacelli described the 
revolutionaries and their chief, Eugen Levine in their headquarters in the 
former royal palace. The letter has lain in the Vatican secret archive like 
a time bomb until now:

"The scene that presented itself at the palace was indescribable. The 
confusion totally chaotic, the filth completely nauseating; soldiers and 
armed workers coming and going; the building, once the home of a king, 
resounding with screams, vile language, profanities. Absolute hell. An army 
of employees were dashing to and fro, giving out orders, waving bits of 
paper, and in the midst of all this, a gang of young women, of dubious 
appearance, Jews like all the rest of them, hanging around in all the 
offices with provocative demeanor and suggestive smiles. The boss of this 
female gang was Levine's mistress, a young Russian woman, a Jew and a 
divorcee, who was in charge. And it was to her that the nunciature was 
obliged to pay homage in order to proceed.

This Levine is a young man, about 30 or 35, also Russian and a Jew. Pale, 
dirty, with vacant eyes, hoarse voice, vulgar, repulsive, with a face that 
is both intelligent and sly."

This association of Jewishness with Bolshevism confirms that Pacelli, from 
his early 40s, nourished a suspicion of and contempt for the Jews for 
political reasons. But the repeated references to the Jewishness of these 
individuals, along with the catalogue of stereotypical epithets deploring 
their physical and moral repulsiveness, betray a scorn and revulsion 
consistent with anti-Semitism. Not long after this, Pacelli campaigned to 
have black French troops removed from the Rhineland, convinced that they 
were raping women and abusing children - even though an independent inquiry 
sponsored by the U.S. Congress, of which Pacelli was aware, proved this 
allegation false. Twenty-three years later, when the Allies were about to 
enter Rome, he asked the British envoy to the Vatican to request of the 
British Foreign Office that no Allied colored troops would be among the 
small number that might be garrisoned in Rome after the occupation.

Pacelli spent 13 years in Germany attempting to rewrite the state Concordats 
one by one in favor of the power of the Holy See and routinely employing 
diplomatic blackmail. Germany was caught up in many territorial disputes 
following the redrawing of the map of Central Europe after THC First World 
War. Pacelli repeatedly traded promises of Vatican support for German 
control of disputed regions in return for obtaining terms advantageous to 
the Vatican in Concordats. The German government's official in charge of 
Vatican affairs at one point recorded the "ill feeling" prompted by 
Pacelli's "excessive demands." Both Catholics and Protestants in Germany 
resisted reaching an agreement with Pacelli on a Reich Concordat because the 
nuncio's concept of a church-state relationship was too authoritarian. In 
his negotiations, Pacelli was not concerned about the fate of non-Catholic 
religious communities or institutions, or about human rights. He was 
principally preoccupied with the interests of
the Holy See. Nothing could have been better designed to deliver Pacelli 
into the hands of Hitler later, when the future dictator made his move in 
1933.

In June 1920, Pacelli became nuncio to all of Germany, with headquarters in 
Berlin as well as in Munich, and immediately acquired a glittering 
reputation in diplomatic circles. He was a favorite at dinner parties and 
receptions, and he was known to ride horses on the estate of a wealthy 
German family. His household was run by a pretty young nun from southern 
Germany named Sister Pasqualina Lehnert. Pacelli's sister Elisabetta, who 
battled with the nun for Pacelli's affections, described Pasqualina as 
"scaltrissima"-- extremely cunning. In Munich it had been rumored that he 
cast more than priestly eyes on this religious housekeeper. Pacelli insisted 
that a Vatican investigation into this "horrible calumny" be conducted at 
the highest level, and his reputation emerged unbesmirched.

Meanwhile, he had formed a close relationship with an individual named 
Ludwig Kaas. Kaas was a representative of the solidly Catholic German Center 
Party, one of the largest and most powerful democratic parties in Germany. 
Though it was unusual for a full-time politician, he was also a Roman 
Catholic priest. Five years Pacelli's junior, dapper, bespectacled, and 
invariably carrying a smart walking stick, Kaas, known as "the prelate," 
became an intimate collaborator of Pacelli's on every aspect of Vatican 
diplomacy in Germany. With Pacelli's encouragement, Kaas eventually became 
the chairman of the Center Party, the first priest to do so in the party's 
60-year history. Yet while Kaas was officially a representative of a major 
democratic party, he was increasingly devoted to Pacelli to the point of 
becoming his alter ego.

Sister Pasqualina stated after Pacelli's death that Kaas, who "regularly 
accompanied Pacelli on holiday" was linked to him in "adoration, honest love 
and unconditional loyalty." There were stories of acute jealousy and high 
emotion when Kaas became conscious of a rival affection in Pacelli's 
secretary, the Jesuit Robert Leiber, who was also German.

Kaas was a profound believer in the benefits of a Reich Concordat, seeing a 
parallel between papal absolutism and the Führer-Prinzip, the Fascist 
leadership principle. His views coincided perfectly with Pacelli's on 
church-state politics, and their aspirations for centralized papal power 
were identical. Kaas's adulation of Pacelli, whom he put before his party, 
became a crucial element in the betrayal of Catholic democratic politics in 
Germany.

In 1929, Pacelli was recalled to Rome to take over the most important role 
under the Pope, Cardinal Secretary of State. Sister Pasqualina arrived 
uninvited and cunningly, according to Pacelli's sister, and along with two 
German nuns to assist her, took over the management of his Vatican 
residence. Almost immediately Kaas, although he was still head of the German 
Center Party, started to spend long periods--months at a time --in Pacelli's 
Vatican apartments Shortly before Pacelli's return to Rome, his brother, 
Francesco had successfully negotiated on behalf of Pius Xl, the current 
Pope, a concordat with Mussolini as part of an agreement known as the 
Lateran Treaty. The rancor between the Vatican and the state of Italy was 
officially at an end. A precondition of the negotiations had involved the 
destruction of the parliamentary Catholic Italian Popular Party. Pius XI 
disliked political Catholicism because he could not control it. Like his 
predecessors, he believed that Catholic party
politics brought democracy into the church by the back door. 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. Pius XI and his 
new secretary of state, Pacelli, were determined that no accommodation be 
reached with Communists anywhere in the world - this was the time of 
persecution of the church in Russia, Mexico, and later Spain -but 
totalitarian movements and regimes of the right were a different matter.

Hitler, who had enjoyed his first great success in the elections of 
September 1930, was determined to seek a treaty with the Vatican similar to 
that struck by Mussolini, which would lead to the disbanding of the German 
Center Party. In his political testament, Mein Kampf, he had recollected 
that his fear of Catholicism went back to his vagabond days in Vienna. The 
fact that German Catholics, politically united by the Center Party, had 
defeated Bismarck's Kulturkampf- the "culture struggle" against the Catholic 
Church in the 1870s--constantly worried him. He was convinced that his 
movement could succeed only if political Catholicism and its democratic 
networks were eliminated.

Hitler's fear of the Catholic Church was well grounded. Into the early 1930s 
the German Center Party, the German Catholic bishops, and the Catholic media 
had been mainly solid in their rejection of National Socialism. They denied 
Nazis the sacraments and church burials, and Catholic journalists excoriated 
National Socialism daily in Germany's 400 Catholic newspapers. The hierarchy 
instructed priests to combat National Socialism at a local level whenever it 
attacked Christianity. The Munich-based weekly Der Gerade Weg The Straight 
Path) told its readers, "Adolf Hitler preaches the law of lies. You who have 
fallen victim to the deceptions of one obsessed with despotism, wake up!"

The vehement front of the Catholic Church in Germany against Hitler, 
however, was not at one with the view from inside the Vatican--a view that 
was now being shaped and promoted by Eugenio Pacelli.

In 1930 the influential Catholic politician Heinrich Brüning , a First World 
War Veteran, became the leader of a brief new government coalition, 
dominated by the majority Socialists and the Center Party. The country was 
reeling from successive economic crises against the background of the world 
slump and reparations payments to the Allies. In August 1931, Brüning 
visited Pacelli in the Vatican, and the two men quarreled. Brüning tells in 
his memoirs how Pacelli lectured him, the German chancellor, on how he 
should reach an understanding with the Nazis to "form a right-wing 
administration" in order to help achieve a Reich Concordat favorable to the 
Vatican. When Brüning advised him not to interfere in German politics, 
Pacelli threw a tantrum. Brüning parting shot that day was the ironic 
observation- chilling in hindsight-- that he trusted that "the Vatican would 
fare better at the hands of Hitler ... than with himself, a devout 
Catholic."

Brüning was right on one score. Hitler proved to be the only chancellor 
prepared to grant Pacelli the sort of authoritarian concordat he was 
seeking. But the price was to be catastrophic for Catholic Germany and for 
Germany as a whole.

After Hitler came to power in January 1933, he made the concordat 
negotiations with Pacelli a priority. The negotiations proceeded over six 
months with constant shuttle diplomacy between the Vatican and Berlin. 
Hitler spent more time on this treaty than on any other item of foreign 
diplomacy during his dictatorship.

The Reich Concordat granted Pacelli 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. In exchange, Pacelli 
collaborated 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. The Catholic Church in Germany had no say in 
setting the conditions.

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. It was Kaas, chairman of the party but 
completely in thrall to Pacelli, who bullied the delegates into acceptance. 
Next, Hitler insisted on the "voluntary" disbanding of the Center Party, the 
last truly parliamentary force in Germany. Again, Pacelli was the prime 
mover in this tragic Catholic surrender. The fact that the party voluntarily 
disbanded itself, rather than go down fighting, had a profound psychological 
effect, depriving Germany of the last democratic focus of potential 
noncompliance and resistance: In the political vacuum created by its 
surrender, Catholics in the millions joined the Nazi Party, believing that 
it had the support of the Pope. The German bishops capitulated to Pacelli's 
policy of centralization, and German Catholic democrats found themselves 
politically leaderless.

After the Reich Concordat was signed, Pacelli declared it an unparalleled 
triumph for the Holy See. In an article in L'Osservatore Romano, the 
Vatican-controlled newspaper, he announced that the treaty, indicated the 
total recognition and acceptance of the church's law by the German state. 
But Hitler was the true victor and the Jews were the concordat's first 
victims. On July 14, 1933, after the initialing of the treaty, the Cabinet 
minutes record Hitler as saying that the concordat had created an atmosphere 
of confidence that would be "especially significant in the struggle against 
international Jewry." He was claiming that the Catholic Church had publicly 
given its blessing, at home and abroad, to the policies of National 
Socialism, including its anti-Semitic stand. At the same time, under the 
terms of the concordat, Catholic criticism of acts deemed political by the 
Nazis, could now be regarded as "foreign interference." The great German 
Catholic Church, at the insistence of Rome,
fell silent. In the future all complaints against the Nazis would be 
channeled through Pacelli. There were some notable exceptions, for example 
the sermons preached in 1933 by Cardinal Michael von Faulhaber, the 
Archbishop of Munich, in which he denounced the Nazis for their rejection of 
the Old Testament as a Jewish text.

The concordat immediately drew the German church into complicity with the 
Nazis. Even as Pacelli was granted special advantages in the concordat for 
German Catholic education, Hitler was trampling on the educational rights of 
Jews throughout the country. At the same time, Catholic priests were being 
drawn into Nazi collaboration with the attestation bureaucracy, which 
established Jewish ancestry. Pacelli, despite the immense centralized power 
he now wielded through the Code of Canon Law, said and did nothing. The 
attestation machinery would lead inexorably to the selection of millions 
destined for the death camps.

As Nazi anti-Semitism mounted in Germany during the 1930's, Pacelli failed 
to complain, even on behalf of Jews who had become Catholics, acknowledging 
that the matter was a matter of German internal policy. Eventually, in 
January 1937, three German cardinals and two influential bishops arrived at 
the Vatican to plead for a vigorous protest over Nazi persecution of the 
Catholic Church, which had been deprived of all forms of activity beyond 
church services. Pins XI at last decided to issue an encyclical, a letter 
addressed to all the faithful of the world. Written under Pacelli's 
direction, it was called Mit Brennender Sorge (With Deep Anxiety), and it 
was a forthright statement of the plight of the church in Germany. But there 
was no explicit condemnation of anti-Semitism, even in relation to Jews who 
had converted to Catholicism. Worse still, the subtext against Nazism 
(National Socialism and Hitler were not mentioned by name) was blunted by 
the publication five days later of an
even more condemnatory encyclical by Pins XI against Communism.

The encyclical Mit Brennender Sorge, though too little and too late, 
revealed that the Catholic Church all along had the power to shake the 
regime. A few days later, Hermann Göring, one of Hitler's closest aides and 
his commander of the Luftwaffe, delivered a two-hour harangue to a Nazi 
assembly against the Catholic clergy. However, Roman centralizing had 
paralyzed the German Catholic Church and its powerful web of associations. 
Unlike the courageous grass-roots activism that had combated Bismarck's 
persecutions in the 1870s, German Catholicism now looked obediently to Rome 
for guidance. Although Pacelli collaborated in the writing and the 
distribution of the encyclical, he quickly undermined its effects by 
reassuring the Reich's ambassador in Rome. "Pacelli received me with decided 
friendliness," the diplomat reported back to Berlin, "and emphatically 
assured me during the conversation that normal and friendly relations with 
us would be restored as soon as possible."

In the summer of 1938, as Pius XI lay dying, he became belatedly anxious 
about anti-Semitism throughout Europe. He commissioned another encyclical, 
to be written exclusively on the Jewish question. The text, which never saw 
the light of day, has only recently been discovered. It was written by three 
Jesuit scholars, but Pacelli presumably had charge of the project. It was to 
be called Humani Generis Unitas (The Unity of the Human Race). For all its 
good intentions and its repudiation of violent anti-Semitism, the document 
is replete with the anti-Jewishness that Pacelli had displayed in his early 
period in Germany. The Jews, the text claims, were responsible for their own 
fate. God had chosen them to make way for Christ's redemption, but they 
denied and killed him. And now, "blinded by their dream of worldly gain and 
material success," they deserved the "worldly and spiritual ruin" that they 
had brought down upon themselves.

The document warns that that to defend the Jews as "Christian principles and 
humanity" demand could involve the unacceptable risk of being ensnared by 
secular politics--not least an association with Bolshevism. The encyclical 
was delivered in the fall of 1938 to the Jesuits in Rome, who sat on it. To 
this day we do not know why it was not completed and handed to Pope Pius XI. 
For all its drawbacks, it was a clear protest against Nazi attacks on Jews 
and so might have done some good. But it appears likely that the Jesuits, 
and Pacelli, whose influence as secretary of state of the Vatican was 
paramount since the Pope was moribund, were reluctant to inflame the Nazis 
by its publication. Pacelli, when he became pope, would bury the document 
deep in the secret archives.

On February 10, 1939, Pius XI died, at the age of 81. Pacelli, then 63, was 
elected Pope by the College of Cardinals in just three ballots, on March 2. 
He was crowned on March 12, on the eve of Hitler's march into Prague. 
Between his election and his coronation he held a crucial meeting with the 
German cardinals. Keen to affirm Hitler publicly, he showed them a letter of 
good wishes which began, "To the Illustrious Herr Adolf Hitler." Should he, 
he asked them, style the Führer "Most Illustrious"? He decided that that 
might be going too far. He told the cardinals that Pius XI had said that 
keeping a papal nuncio in Berlin "conflicts with our honor." But his 
predecessor, he said, had been mistaken. He was going to maintain normal 
diplomatic relations with Hitler. The following month, at Pacelli's express 
wish, Archbishop Cesare Orsenigo, the Berlin nuncio, hosted a gala reception 
in honor of Hitler's 50th birthday. A birthday greeting to the Führer from 
the bishops of Germany would
become an annual tradition until the war's end.

Pacelli's coronation was the most triumphant in a hundred years. His style 
of papacy, for all his personal humility, was unprecedentedly pompous. He 
always ate alone. Vatican bureaucrats were obliged to take phone calls from 
him on their knees. When he took his afternoon walk, the gardeners had to 
hide in the bushes. Senior officials were not allowed to ask him questions 
or present a point of view.

As Europe plunged toward war Pacelli cast himself in the role of judge of 
judges. But he continued to seek to appease Hitler by attempting to persuade 
the Poles to make concessions over Germany's territorial claims. After 
Hitler's invasion of Poland, on September 1, 1939, he declined to condemn 
Germany, to the bafflement of the Allies. His first public statement, the 
encyclical known in the English-speaking world as Darkness over the Earth, 
was full of papal rhetoric and equivocations.

Then something extraordinary occurred, revealing that whatever had motivated 
Pacelli in his equivocal approach to the Nazi onslaught in Poland did not 
betoken cowardice or a liking for Hitler. In November 1939, in deepest 
secrecy, Pacelli became intimately and dangerously involved In what was 
probably the most viable plot to depose Hitler during the war.

The plot centered on a group of anti-Nazi generals, committed to returning 
Germany to democracy. The coup might spark a civil war, and they wanted 
assurances that the West would not take advantage of the ensuing chaos. Pius 
XII agreed to act as go-between for the plotters and the Allies. Had his 
complicity in the plot been discovered it might have proved disastrous for 
the Vatican and for many thousands of German clergy. As it happened, leaders 
in London dragged their feet, and the plotters eventually fell silent. The 
episode demonstrates that, while Pacelli seemed weak to some, pusillanimity 
and indecisiveness were hardly in his nature.

Pacelli's first wartime act of reticence in failing to speak out against 
Fascist brutality occurred in the summer of 1941, following Hitler's 
invasion of Yugoslavia and the formation of the Catholic and Fascist state 
of Croatia. In a wave of appalling ethnic cleansing, the Croat Fascist 
separatists, known as the Ustashe, under the leadership of Ante Pavelic, the 
Croat Führer, embarked on a campaign of enforced conversions, deportations, 
and mass extermination targeting a population of 2.2 million Serb Orthodox 
Christians and a smaller number of Jews and Gypsies.

According to the Italian writer Carlo Falconi, as early as April, in a 
typical act of atrocity, a band of Ustashe had rounded up 331 Serbs. The 
victims were forced to dig their own graves before being hacked to death 
with axes. The local priest was forced to recite the prayers for the dying 
while his son was chopped to pieces before his eyes. Then the priest was 
tortured. His hair and beard were torn off, his eves were gouged out. 
Finally he was skinned alive. The very next month Pacelli greeted Pavelic at 
the Vatican.

Throughout the war, the Croat atrocities continued By the most recent 
scholarly reckoning. 487,000 Orthodox Serbs and 27,000 Gypsies were 
massacred; in addition, approximately 30,000 out of a population of 45,000 
Jews were killed. Despite a close relationship between the Ustashe regime 
and the Catholic bishops, and a constant flow of information about the 
massacres, Pacelli said and did nothing. In fact, he continued to extend 
warm wishes to the Ustashe leadership. The only feasible explanation for 
Pacelli's silence was his perception of Croatia as a Catholic bridgehead 
into the East. The Vatican and the local bishops approved of mass conversion 
in Croatia (even though it was the result of fear rather than conviction), 
because they believed that this could spell the beginning of a return [? - 
EC] of the Orthodox Christians there to papal allegiance. Pacelli was not a 
man to condone mass murder, but he evidently chose to turn a blind eye on 
Ustashe atrocities rather than hinder a
unique opportunity to extend the power of the papacy.

[Note from www.emperors-clothes.com - Cornwell writes, "Pacelli was not a 
man to condone mass murder." But the Croatian Catholic Church hierarchy was 
part of the governing structure of the Independent State of Croatia which, 
as Cornwell writes, was indeed guilty of mass murder. Regarding Catholic 
involvement in these crimes, see "How the Catholic Church united with local 
Nazis to run Croatia ..." at
http://www.emperors-clothes.com/croatia/stepinac1.htm Croatian church 
leaders answered to the Vatican. Given that Pope Pius XII's Croatian 
subordinates helped carry out mass murder, what does it mean to say that 
Pius XII (that is, Eugenio Pacelli) did not condone it? After the war, the 
Church played a central role in helping Croatian war criminals escape 
Yugoslav justice through the 'Ratline.' For a discussion of the Vatican's 
role in Nazi Croatia, with primary source documentation, go to 
http://tinyurl.com/c7lqu
For descriptions of the policies of the Croatian Ustashe state, including 
from the "Encyclopedia of the Holocaust,"
go to "Meet the Nazis the CIA Married: The Croatian Ustashi," at 
http://emperor.vwh.net/docs/backin.htm
- Jared Israel]

Pacelli came to learn of the Nazi plans to exterminate the Jews of Europe 
shortly after they were laid in January 1942. The deportations to the death 
camps had begun in December 1941 and would continue through 1944. All during 
1942, Pacelli received reliable information on the details of the Final 
Solution, much of it supplied by the British, French, and American 
representatives resident in the Vatican. On March 17, 1942, representatives 
of Jewish organizations assembled in Switzerland sent a memorandum to 
Pacelli via the papal nuncio in Bern, cataloguing violent anti-Semitic 
measures in Germany and in its allied and conquered territories. Their plea 
focused attention on Slovakia, Croatia, Hungary, and unoccupied France, 
where, they believed, the Pope's intervention might yet be effective. Apart 
from an intervention in the case of Slovakia, where the president was 
Monsignor Josef Tiso, a Catholic priest, no papal initiatives resulted. 
During the same month, a stream of dispatches
describing the fate of some 90,000 Jews reached the Vatican from various 
sources in Eastern Europe. The Jewish organizations' long memorandum would 
be excluded from the wartime documents published by the Vatican between 1965 
and 1981.

On June 16, 1942, Harold Tittmann, the U.S. representative to the Vatican, 
told Washington that Pacelli was diverting himself, ostrichlike, into purely 
religious concerns and that the moral authority won for the papacy by Pius 
XI was being eroded. At the end of that month, the London Daily Telegraph 
announced that more than a million Jews had been killed in Europe and that 
it was the aim of the Nazis "to wipe the race from the European continent." 
The article was re-printed in The New York Times. On July 21 there was a 
protest rally on behalf of Europe's Jews in New York's Madison Square 
Garden. In the following weeks the British, American, and Brazilian 
representatives to the Vatican tried to persuade Pacelli to speak out 
against the Nazi atrocities. But still he said nothing. In September 1942, 
President Franklin Roosevelt sent his personal representative, the former 
head of U.S. Steel, Myron Taylor, to plead with Pacelli to make a statement 
about the extermination of the Jews.
Taylor traveled hazardously through enemy territory to reach the Vatican. 
Still Pacelli refused to speak. Pacelli's excuse was that he must rise above 
the belligerent parties. As late as December 18, Francis d'Arcy Osborne, 
Britain's envoy in the Vatican, handed Cardinal Domenico Tardini, Pacelli's 
deputy secretary of state, a dossier replete with information on the Jewish 
deportations and mass killings in hopes that the Pope would denounce the 
Nazi regime in a Christmas message.

On December 24, 1942, having made draft after draft, Pacelli at last said 
something. In his Christmas Eve broadcast to the world on Vatican Radio, he 
said that men of goodwill owed a vow to bring society "back to its immovable 
center of gravity in divine law." He went on: "Humanity owes this vow to 
those hundreds of thousands who, without any fault of their own, sometimes 
only by reason of their nationality and race, are marked for death or 
gradual extinction."

That was the strongest public denunciation of the Final Solution that 
Pacelli would make in the whole course of the war.

It was not merely a paltry statement. The chasm between the enormity of the 
liquidation of the Jewish people and this form of evasive language was 
profoundly scandalous. He might have been referring to many categories of 
victims at the hands of various belligerents in the conflict. Clearly the 
choice of ambiguous wording was intended to placate those who urged him to 
protest, while avoiding offense to the Nazi regime. But these considerations 
are over-shadowed by the implicit denial and trivialization. He had scaled 
down the doomed millions to "hundreds of thousands" without uttering the 
word "Jews," while making the pointed qualification "sometimes only by 
reason of their nationality or race." Nowhere was the term "Nazi'' 
mentioned. Hitler himself could not have wished for a more convoluted and 
innocuous reaction from the Vicar of Christ to the greatest crime in 
history.

But what was Pacelli's principal motivation for this trivialization and 
denial? The Allies' diplomats in the Vatican believed that he was remaining 
impartial in order to earn a crucial role in future peace negotiations. In 
this there was clearly a degree of truth. But a recapitulation of new 
evidence I have gathered shows that Pacelli saw the Jews as alien and 
undeserving of his respect and compassion. He felt no sense of moral outrage 
at their plight. The documents show that:

1. He had nourished a striking antipathy toward the Jews as early as 1917 in 
Germany, which contradicts later claims that his omissions were performed in 
good faith and that he "loved" the Jews and respected their religion.

2. From the end of the First World War to the lost encyclical of 1938, 
Pacelli betrayed a fear and contempt of Judaism based on his belief that the 
Jews were behind the Bolshevik plot to destroy Christendom.

3. Pacelli acknowledged to representatives of the Third Reich that the 
regime's anti-Semitic policies were a matter of Germany's internal politics. 
The Reich Concordat between Hitler and the Vatican, as Hitler was quick to 
grasp, created an ideal climate for Jewish persecution.

4. Pacelli failed to sanction protest by German Catholic bishops against 
anti-Semitism, and he did not attempt to intervene in the process by which 
Catholic clergy collaborated in racial certification to identify Jews.

5. After Pius XI's Mit Brennender Sorge, denouncing the Nazi regime 
(although not by name), Pacelli attempted to mitigate the effect of the 
encyclical by giving private diplomatic reassurances to Berlin despite his 
awareness of widespread Nazi persecution of Jews.

6. Pacelli was convinced that the Jews had brought misfortune on their own 
heads: intervention on their behalf could only draw the church into 
alliances with forces inimical to Catholicism. Pacelli's failure to utter a 
candid word on the Final Solution proclaimed to the world that the Vicar of 
Christ was not roused to pity or anger. From this point of view, he was the 
ideal Pope for Hitler's unspeakable plan. His denial and minimization of the 
Holocaust were all the more scandalous in that they were uttered from a 
seemingly impartial moral high ground.

There was another, more immediate indication of Pacelli's moral dislocation. 
It occurred before the liberation of Rome, when he was the sole Italian 
authority in the city. On October 16, 1943, SS troops entered the Roman 
ghetto area and rounded up more than 1,000 Jews, imprisoning them in the 
very shadow of the Vatican.

How did Pacelli acquit himself'?

On the morning of the roundup, which had been prompted by Adolf Eichmann, 
who was in charge of the organization of the Final Solution from his 
headquarters in Berlin, the German ambassador in Rome pleaded with the 
Vatican to issue a public protest. By this stage of the war, Mussolini had 
been deposed and rescued by Adolf Hitler to run the puppet regime in the 
North of Italy. The German authorities in Rome, both diplomats and military 
commanders, fearing a backlash of the Italian populace, hoped that an 
immediate and vigorous papal denunciation might stop the SS in their tracks 
and prevent further arrests. Pacelli refused. In the end, the German 
diplomats drafted a letter of protest on the Pope's behalf and prevailed on 
a resident German bishop to sign it for Berlin's benefit. Meanwhile, the 
deportation of the imprisoned Jews went ahead on October 18.

When U.S. chargé d 'affaires Harold Tittmann visited Pacelli that day, he 
found the pontiff anxious that the "Communist" Partisans would take 
advantage of a cycle of papal protest, followed by SS reprisals, followed by 
a civilian backlash. As a consequence, he was not inclined to lift a finger 
for the Jewish deportees, who were now traveling in cattle cars to the 
Austrian border bound for Auschwitz. Church officials reported on the 
desperate plight of the deportees as they passed slowly through city after 
city. Still Pacelli refused to intervene.

In the Jesuit archives in Rome, I found a secret document sworn to under 
oath by Karl Wolff, the SS commander in Italy. The text reveals that Hitler 
had asked Wolff in the fall of 1943 to prepare a plan to evacuate the Pope 
and the Vatican treasures to Liechtenstein.

After several weeks of investigation, Wolff concluded that an attempt to 
invade the Vatican and its properties, or to seize the Pope in response to a 
papal protest, would prompt a backlash throughout Italy that would seriously 
hinder the Nazi war effort. Hitler therefore dropped his plan to kidnap 
Pacelli, acknowledging what Pacelli appeared to ignore, that the strongest 
social and political force in Italy in late 1943 was the Catholic Church, 
and that its potential for thwarting the SS was immense.

Pacelli was concerned that a protest by him would benefit only the 
Communists. His silence on the deportation of Rome's Jews, in other words, 
was not an act of cowardice or fear of the Germans. He wanted to maintain 
the Nazi-occupation status quo until such time as the city could be 
liberated by the Allies. But what of the deported Jews? Five days after the 
train had set off from the Tiburtina station in Rome, an estimated 1,060 had 
been gassed at Auschwitz and Birkenau - 149 men and 47 women were detained 
for slave labor, but only 15 survived the war, and only one of those was a 
woman, Settimia Spizzichino, who had served as a human guinea pig of Dr. 
Josef Mengele, the Nazi medical doctor who performed atrocious experiments 
on human victims. After the liberation, she was found alive in a heap of 
corpses.

But there was a more profound failure than Pacelli's unwillingness to help 
the Jews of Rome rounded up on October 16. Pacelli's reticence was not just 
a diplomatic silence in response to the political pressures of the moment, 
not just a failure to be morally outraged. It was a stunning religious and 
ritualistic silence. To my knowledge, there is no record of a single public 
papal prayer, lit votive candle, psalm, lamentation, or Mass celebrated in 
solidarity with the Jews of Rome either during their terrible ordeal or 
after their deaths. This spiritual silence in the face of an atrocity 
committed at the heart of Christendom, in the shadow of the shrine of the 
first apostle, persists to this day and implicates all Catholics. This 
silence proclaims that Pacelli had no genuine spiritual sympathy even for 
the Jews of Rome, who were members of the community of his birth. And yet, 
on learning of the death of Adolf Hitler, Archbishop Adolf Bertram of Berlin 
ordered all the priests of his
archdiocese "to hold a solemn Requiem in memory of the Führer."

There were nevertheless Jews who gave Pacelli the benefit of the doubt. On 
Thursday, November 29, 1945, Pacelli met some 80 representatives of Jewish 
refugees who expressed their thanks "for his generosity toward those 
persecuted during the Nazi-Fascist period." One must respect a tribute made 
by people who had suffered and survived, and we cannot belittle Pacelli's 
efforts on the level of charitable relief, notably his directive that 
enclosed religious houses in Rome should take in Jews hiding from the SS.

By the same token, we must respect the voice of Settimia Spizzichino, the 
sole Roman Jewish woman survivor from the death camps. Speaking in a BBC 
interview in 1995 she said. "1 came back from Auschwitz on my own. . I lost 
my mother, two sisters and one brother. Pius XII could have warned us about 
what was going to happen. We might have escaped from Rome and joined the 
partisans. He played right into the Germans' hands. It all happened right 
under his nose. But he was an anti-Semitic pope, a pro-German pope. He 
didn't take a single risk. And when they say the Pope is like Jesus Christ, 
it is not true. He did not save a single child."

We are obliged to accept these contrasting views of Pacelli are not mutually 
exclusive. It gives a Catholic no satisfaction to accuse a Pope of 
acquiescing in the plans of Hitler. But one of the saddest ironies of 
Pacelli's papacy centers on the implications of his own pastoral self-image. 
At the beginning of a promotional film he commissioned about himself during 
the war, called The Angelic Pastor, the camera frequently focuses on the 
statue of the Good Shepherd in the Vatican gardens. The parable of the good 
shepherd tells of the pastor who so loves each of his sheep that he will do 
all, risk all, go to any pains, to save one member of his flock that is lost 
or in danger. To his everlasting shame, and to the shame of the Catholic 
Church, Pacelli disdained to recognize the Jews of Rome as members of his 
Roman flock, even though they had dwelled in the Eternal City since before 
the birth of Christ. And yet there was still something worse. After the 
liberation of Rome, when every
perception of restraint on his freedom was lifted, he claimed retrospective 
moral superiority for having spoken and acted on behalf of the Jews. 
Addressing a Palestinian group on August 3, 1946, he said, "We disapprove of 
all recourse to force...Just as we condemned on various occasions in the 
past the persecutions that a fanatical anti-Semitism inflicted on the Hebrew 
people." His grandiloquent self-exculpation a year after the war had ended 
showed him to be not only an ideal pope for the Nazis Final Solution but 
also a hypocrite.

The postwar period of Pacelli's papacy, through the 1950s, saw the 
apotheosis of the ideology of papal power as he presided over a triumphant 
Catholic Church in open confrontation with Communism. But it could not hold. 
The internal structures and morale of the church in Pacelli's final years 
began to show signs of fragmentation and decay, leading to a yearning for 
reassessment and renewal. In old age he became increasingly narrow-minded, 
eccentric and hypochondriacal. He experienced religious visions, suffered 
from chronic hiccups, and received monkey-brain-cell injections for 
longevity. He had no love for, or trust in those who had to follow him. He 
failed to replace his secretary of state when lie died and for years he 
declined to appoint a full complement of cardinals. He died at the age of 82 
on October 9,1958. His corpse decomposed rapidly in the autumnal Roman heat. 
At his lying-in-state, a guard fainted from the stench. Later, his nose 
turned black and fell off. Some saw in
this sudden corruption of his mortal remains, a symbol of the absolute 
corruption of his papacy.

The Second Vatican Council was called by John XXIII who succeeded Pacelli, 
in 1958, precisely to reject Pacelli's monolith in preference for a 
collegial, decentralized, human, Christian community, the Holy Spirit, and 
love. The guiding metaphor of the church of the future was of a "pilgrim 
people of God." Expectations ran high, but there was no lack of contention 
and anxiety as old habits and disciplines died hard. There were signs from 
the very outset that papal and Vatican hegemony would not easily acquiesce, 
that the Old Guard would attempt a comeback. As we approach the end of this 
century, the hopeful energy of the Second Vatican Council, or Vatican II, as 
it came to be called, appears to many a spent force. The church of Pius XII 
is reasserting itself in confirmation of a pyramidal church model: faith in 
the primacy of the man in the white robe dictating in solitude from the 
pinnacle. In the twilight years of John Paul II's long reign, the Catholic 
Church gives a pervasive
impression of dysfunction despite his historic influence on the collapse of 
Communist tyranny in Poland and the Vatican's enthusiasm for entering its 
third millennium with a cleansed conscience.

As the theologian Professor Adrian Hastings comments, "The great tide 
powered by Vatican II has, at least institutionally, spent its force. The 
old landscape has once more emerged and Vatican II is now being read in Rome 
far more in the spirit of the First Vatican Council and within the context 
of Pius XII's model of Catholicism.'' A future titanic struggle between the 
progressives and the traditionalists is in prospect, with the potential for 
a cataclysmic schism, especially in North America, where a split has opened 
up between bishops compliant with Rome and academic Catholicism, which is 
increasingly independent and dissident. Pacelli, whose canonization process 
is now well advanced, has become the icon, 40 years after his death, of 
those traditionalists who read and revise the provisions of the Second 
Vatican Council from the viewpoint of Pacelli's ideology of papal power--an 
ideology that has proved disastrous in the century's history.

Copyright Vanity Fair, 1999
Reprinted for educational and non-commercial purposes only

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