Men of their time & place

Commonweal, May 7, 2004 by Michael R. Marrus

Hitler and the Vatican

Inside the Secret Archives that Reveal the New Story of the Nazis and the Church Peter Godman

Free Press, $27, 272 pp.

To a subject plagued by polemics, acrimony, and ahistorical speculation, Peter Godman, a professor at the University of Rome, brings a fresh look, illuminated by newly available documentary evidence. Let it be quickly said: this is an important book which should change our understanding of how the Vatican dealt with Nazism in the years before World War II. Drawing notably on the papers of the Vatican's Congregation of the Holy Office--what used to be called the Inquisition--Godman has produced the first serious study based on recently opened Vatican archives on the relationship between the Holy See and Germany in the prewar pontificate of Pius XI. This is a learned, spirited examination, which should be attended to by both sides of a regrettably polarized debate.

Appreciative of the highly ritualistic and tradition-bound culture of the Holy See, Godman dispels the illusion that there was a single "Vatican" view of how to deal with Nazism. With procedures dating back centuries, the government of the Catholic Church was an ill-coordinated network of departments and offices, staffed by cloistered professionals and occasional part-timers, communicating in Latin and sometimes bound by strictest secrecy. Dominated during the interwar period by a chronically ill but tempestuous Achille Ratti, or Pius XI, who presided in imperial splendor, the Vatican developed policies at a snail's pace, framing priorities defined by eternity, rather than the distractions of the temporal world.

Godman's painstaking research shows how utterly ill equipped this Vatican was to contend with the dynamic, bullying, and supremely confident Nazi movement. Of the hostility between National Socialism and the Holy See, there should be no doubt--notwithstanding the ill-grounded accusations of collusion between the two recently made by John Cornwell (Hitler's Pope) and Daniel Goldhagen (A Moral Reckoning). Well informed about the brutal persecution of the Catholic Church by the Nazis, the leaders of the church knew they had to do something. For Eugenio Pacelli, the cardinal secretary of state and the future Pius XII, Nazism prompted hand-wringing about the future of the German church, many of whose nominal members, he knew, were devoted followers of Hitler. For the pope himself, Nazism was a heretical, neopagan movement, and as early as 1934 he ordered the Holy Office to begin an inquiry with a view to a point-by-point, wholesale condemnation of National Socialism. Yet for all their apprehensions, neither Pacelli nor the reputedly resolute Pius XI saw clearly what they could actually do about the matter--without, as they constantly feared, making matters worse.

It took several years, various drafts, and learned commentaries for a document to emerge from the Holy Office--a laborious effort, complicated by the opportunistic intrigues of the ambitious manipulator Bishop Alois Hudal, who was head of the German national church in Rome, and known to be anti-Semitic and sympathetic to Nazism. Meanwhile, the Vatican's intelligence from Germany remained confused, reinforcing the pope's, and especially Pacelli's commitment to strategic compromise. Wishful thinkers continued to portray Hitler as a "moderate" Nazi, who might prevail over the "radicals" who sought confrontation with the church. Others underscored the dangers of communism, then demonstrating, in Spain, unprecedented antireligious barbarism. Behind the scenes, the devious Hudal proposed an alliance between the Vatican and Hitler's "conservatives" against Nazi "left-wing extremists" and "Asiatic cultural Bolshevism"--with the added benefit of promoting his own cause as an indispensable power broker.

Most important, both Pacelli and Pius XI feared that too forceful or too explicit a condemnation of Nazism might undermine the concordat with Germany, the treaty they had negotiated in 1933, which guaranteed, to their legalistic way of thinking, a degree of autonomy for the church in the new order. Motivated by their central priority of preserving the institutional apparatus of the church so as to continue the work of saving souls, neither was able to think outside the diplomatic box. Pius XI's March 1937 encyclical, Mit brennender sorge (With Burning Concern), was actually a compromise, substantially toned down from the sharper denunciation of Nazism that had been secretly prepared by the Holy Office. "This encyclical, still hailed as the most courageous attack made by the papacy on Hitler and his followers, in fact marks a retreat," Godman notes pointedly. Nazism was not mentioned by name and there was no explicit commentary on Nazi racism and the assault on human rights, as the Holy Office had recommended. Not only Pacelli, but also the tactically impetuous Achille Ratti, wanted to leave the door open for improved relations with the Nazis. Compromise was the main goal. Hoping to eventually mend fences, Pius spurned a suggestion the following year, made by Mussolini, no less, that the Vatican excommunicate the fuhrer. Pacelli wanted to work things out with Hermann Goring--seen as a moderate--whose earlier visit to the Vatican, the secretary of state told the Italian ambassador, was "remembered with pleasure."