Hitler's Pope: The Secret History Of Pius Xii. - Review - book reviews

National Catholic Reporter, Nov 19, 1999 by Arthur Jones

HITLER'S POPE: THE SECRET HISTORY OF PIUS XII By John Cornwell Viking, 410 pages, $29.95

This book is compelling, convincing and cruel. It's great journalism, debatable history. Cornwell maintains a relentless narrative and skillfully arranges his text.

For example, the reader is aware that Pius XII (Eugenio Pacelli), in World War II's aftermath, stands accused of perfidy toward the Jews. An unstated accusation of personal cowardice hangs in the air concerning the pope's unwillingness to publicly, unequivocally speak out against the Nazis.

Here's how Cornwell tightens that screw.

The author-has us in Kreuznach, Kaiser Wilhelm's Rhineland headquarters. It's 1917, World War I and page 68 of Hitler's Pope. Pacelli is nuncio to Bavaria and has carried Pope Benedict XV's "peace plan to the Kaiser.

Cornwell quotes from the kaiser's memoirs as Wilhelm tells Pacelli to inform the pope he must speak out and free Catholic soldiers "from the horrors of war." Pacelli's aide suggests the pope might endanger himself by such a course of action. The kaiser records he then says to Pacelli (about Benedict XV, but with Cornwell dangling shades of the future Pius XII before the reader):

"Was I now to belive that his [Christ's] viceroy on earth was afraid of becoming a martyr, like his Lord, in order to bring peace to the bleeding world?"

Masterly. And vicious.

Cornwell is cruel because Pacelli, as priest, bishop and cardinal and as Pius XII, never gets the benefit of the doubt. This reads like a vendetta: The chapter "Pope of Peace" is followed by one titled "Friend of Croatia."

Cornwell's findings are not necessarily incorrect; it's that his tone banishes any pretext of impartiality. This a lover spurned. Let's see why.

I take Cornwell at his word that he began this book to salvage Pius XII's reputation from the ash heap of World War II and "Final Solution" history.

Imagine the coupe for Cornwell -- and the Roman Catholic church. An author, mystery writer and scholar exonerates Pius XII right on the eve of the millennium and wipes clean the dirtiest blot on the Vatican's 20th-century escutcheon.

A double coupe for, in A Thief in the Night, Cornwell cleared the Vatican (and Archbishop Paul Marcinkus) of direct responsibility in the death of Pope John Paul I.

Yet as Cornwell turns history's pages on Pacelli (often secondary sources -- hence more journalism than history) he finds not material for exculpation but greater culpability.

Cornwell as trapped- the book reads as if written in reprisal or anger.

Even so, today's readers with no inkling of life inside Germany while Hitler was in power, are suddenly presented with examples of a courageous German Catholic laity -- in the press and in politics -- and individual priests and bishops magnificent in their opposition to the fuhrer.

Cornwell handles his material like a prosecutor.

Pacelli grew up in a middle class family of striving Vatican insiders, poorly paid Vatican lawyers who lived lives of "piety" and "penurious respectability" while murmuring the general anti-Semitic views common to the day.

Anti-Semitism was accepted. Society endorsed it. So did the Catholic church.

Tile by tile, Cornwell lays the mosaic that depicts the extent to which the Catholic church furthered anti-Semitism's cause. It wasn't just Crusaders breaking their journey to "kill Jews" to and from the Holy Land and -- even the popes trampled on the Jews. The author retells the weird tale of Piux IX, Pio Nono who, despite an outcry from world leaders, adopted a Jewish boy against his parent's will, raised him in the Vatican and saw him into the priesthood. (Scarcely surprising that the doghouse of Italy's liberator, Garibaldi, was labeled, "The House of Pio Nono.")

Cornwell has seminarian Pacelli's mind "narrowed" at the Almo Collegio Capranica by the "aridity" of the Neo-Thomist revival. As a fastidious boy with stomach trouble, seminarian Pacelli is allowed, against all precedent, to live at home with mother. Meanwhile he's reading the highly anti-Semitic and anti-Judaist leading Jesuit journal, Civilta Cattolica.

The new Fr. Pacelli, at home one evening "playing the violin," is visited by none other than Msgr. Pierto Gaspari, recently appointed undersecretary in the Secretariat of State's Department of Extraordinary Affairs. Pacelli is recruited into Vatican service -- in an anti-democratic, anti-Americanism and anti-Modernism Vatican.

Connections. Connections. The family's Vatican law practice has paid off.

At St. Apollinaris, Pacelli's doctoral thesis is on "the nature of concordats" (special treaties between the Holy See and nationstates) -- another notch on prosecutor Cornwell's briefcase.

Pacelli is soon a monsignor himself and masterminding the new (1917), written-insecret Code of Canon Law. The code, writes Cornwell, "exhaustively regulates conditions within the church" and, with its "creeping infallibility," is "unlike anything the church has previously possessed in its 2,000-year existence.

Hard to dispute, though, whether Pacelli masterminded the 1917 code to the degree Cornwell suggests is a historic bone for others to chew on. And they've already started.