Hitler's Pope: The Secret History of Pius XII

Christian Century, Feb 23, 2000 by John T. Pawlikowski

Hitler's Pope: The Secret History of Pius XII. By John Cornwall, Viking Penguin 430 pp., $29.95.

THESE TWO VOLUMES stand in stark contrast. John Cornwall indicts Pope Plus XII for aiding and abetting the Nazis in order to consolidate his power over the Catholic Church. Pierre Blet offers an equally strong defense of Pius as a compassionate leader who did all he could to help Jews and other Nazi victims under very trying circumstances--a claim Blet considers confirmed by 12 published volumes of Vatican archival materials. There is little or no middle ground between the two authors. Cornwall is the prosecutor, Blet the defense attorney. Neither succeeds fully in his assumed role, though Blet's scholarship is by far the sounder.

Cornwall has good credentials--he is a senior research fellow at Jesus College, Cambridge, and author of the best-selling A Thief in the Night: The Death of Pope John Paul I--but his new book is full of exaggerated claims and deceptions, beginning with the title and dust cover. The title implies that Pius XII was a virtual agent of the Nazis. Yet Cornwall's actual argument stops short of any direct connection between the pope and Hitler's program. He presents Pius's willingness to enter into a concordat with Hitler and to refrain from strong public criticism of the Nazis as based on Catholic self-interest rather than on any support of Nazism as an ideology. And the cover photo of Pius was taken in 1927, before he was pope, as he was leaving a reception for Paul von Hindenburg, president of the Weimar Republic. Though the photograph is correctly identified in very small print, it conveys the impression that the pope is visiting the Third Reich.

The exaggerations do not stop there. Far more serious are the unfounded claims about the "secret" materials on which the book supposedly is based. Vatican library records show that Cornwall spent very few hours there and that he was not privy to any materials unavailable to other scholars. In short, there is little really new in Cornwall's account. And his interpretation of materials is often deeply flawed. His claim, for example, that Plus harbored a deep anti-Semitism is based simplistically on a condemnatory remark Pius made about Jewish bolsheviks. The comment may have been inappropriate, but many Jews of the time said far worse things about Jewish bolsheviks.

Cornwall presents only the evidence that suggests his predetermined view. Nowhere does he seriously engage the major scholarship on Plus that has come from such important Jewish and Christian researchers on the period as Michael Marrus, John Morley, John Conway and Owen Chadwick. Some of their works are listed in Cornwall's bibliography, but he does not seem to have used them. He does not even acknowledge Marrus's major work on the subject. Nor does he deal in any comprehensive way with the published Vatican archival material.

It is disturbing to see the attention this book has received from the secular press, including reputable journals. That publisher hype can elevate a work of deeply flawed scholarship to the bestseller list is a serious threat to responsible scholarship. No well-recognized scholar who has studied the relationship between the Vatican and the Holocaust was asked to review this volume in the nonreligious press.

Cornwall does raise some issues that cannot be ignored, especially by Catholics, but most of these have already been raised in a more comprehensive fashion by other scholars. At best, Cornwall serves as a devil's advocate. Perhaps the most important issue with which he deals is Pius's signing of the concordat with Hitler. Cornwall interprets this signing as integral to Pius's efforts to centralize the church's power in the papacy. He makes it a major aspect of his indictment in part because he sees a connection between centralization then and centralization later under Pope John Paul II, of which he is profoundly critical. The supposed connection may be an important subtext of this book.

There is little doubt that Pius XII strove to bring about such centralization, and his effort is surely open to critique. But there is a real question about the motives that Cornwall attributes to Pius's efforts. It is clear that Pius had no illusions about full Nazi implementation of the accord. While his judgment about the value of the accord for the preservation of Catholic life in Europe may be seriously questioned, he did not support the agreement simply to enhance his own power, as Cornwall implies, but because he felt it was in the best interest of the church at the time. Pius's vision may have been too insular and diplomatic; he was insufficiently concerned about protecting the human rights of non-Catholics; he seriously misjudged the significance of the concordat in legitimizing the Third Reich; and his treatment of the Catholic Center Party in Germany is deeply disturbing. These issues must be considered seriously by anyone who cares about maintaining the moral integrity of the church. But Cornwall's book is of little help.