Deafening Silence
HITLER'S POPE
The Secret History of Pius XII.
By John
Cornwell.
Illustrated. 430 pp. New York:
Viking. $29.95.
Possibly the most powerful scene in Hochhuth's historical drama is the
encounter between an SS doctor on the Auschwitz selection ramp and Riccardo,
a Catholic priest who was plucked from the line of Jewish victims shuffling
toward the gas chambers. In the ensuing dialogue, the doctor sadistically
challenges Riccardo's faith in God and his church, cynically arguing that if
God existed he would surely have intervened to stop the industrialized
murder of millions of innocent people, and adding, in reference to the
inhumanity of the Inquisition: ''And what gives priests the right to look
down on the SS? We are the Dominicans of the technological age. It is not
chance so many of my kind have sprung from good Catholic backgrounds.''
While many clerics and ordinary Catholics were indeed killed or tortured
for their anti-Nazi beliefs and activities, Pope Pius XII, the head of their
church, was living in relative safety in Rome, protected by the Vatican's
extraterritoriality, which neither Mussolini nor Hitler ever dared to
revoke. More distressing, the Pope could never bring himself to publish a
clear message of condemnation of the enormous crimes against Europe's Jews
and other minorities who were earmarked for physical annihilation, although
ample and reliable information about Hitler's genocidal policies was
reaching him from all over Europe from early 1942 on, and although a variety
of people who had access to him repeatedly pleaded with him to speak out.
The Pope agonized in private, but was held back by his lifelong training in
and dedication to the Curia, the Vatican's administrative branch. He
tolerated convents and monasteries clandestinely sheltering Jews and made
vague statements, but issued no encyclical or similarly authoritative
message.
By combining the painstaking research of other scholars with his own new
documentation on Pius's knowledge and behavior during World War II, John
Cornwell, a British journalist and research associate of Jesus College,
Cambridge, makes a case in ''Hitler's Pope'' that is very difficult to
refute.
Cornwell is a Catholic, and did not expect at the start of his work to be
ending up in the camp of those who have highlighted the Pope's sad moral
failure and his fallibility as a human being. But reluctantly, he concludes
that a loud and widely disseminated statement from Rome would have made a
difference to the fate of European Jewry. The least it would have done was
to warn the Jews of western Europe that deportation meant certain death,
resulting in more of them fleeing or going into hiding. Furthermore, it
would have told millions of Catholics that they were involved, as bystanders
or even as perpetrators, in a fundamentally evil program, and this
recognition would in turn have encouraged resistance and a greater
willingness to help their Jewish neighbors.
It is likely that a papal condemnation would have resulted in the arrest,
imprisonment or even death of Pius XII, which in turn might have triggered
widespread popular unrest. That the Nazis feared this possibility became
evident when, following the fall of Mussolini, the SS appeared in the
Eternal City in October 1943 to round up Rome's Jews. Again people urged the
Pope to denounce the transport of men, women and children to Auschwitz.
Although it was by then obvious that Hitler was losing the war and that the
liberation of Rome by the Allies, advancing from the south, was merely a
matter of time, the Vatican remained passive, much to the relief of the
local German occupation authorities.
Cornwell's explanation for Pius's behavior is no less explosive than his
description of it, and seems calculated to ignite a public debate on the
evolution of Catholicism in the decades ahead, using John Paul II's current
moves for Pius's canonization as a fuse. To be sure, Cornwell shuns
monocausality. He believes that religious anti-Semitism, with its ancient
roots in the church, constituted but one motive for the Pope's silence.
Another was Rome's deep-seated fear of Communism.
But Cornwell devotes most space to his argument concerning the changing
internal organization and power structure of the church itself, which is why
his study begins in the mid-19th century with the Vatican's confrontation
with the forces of modernity. During this period, the Curia came to believe
that rallying the faithful behind a centralized papacy was the only way to
secure the survival of Catholicism in a hostile world. The Vatican Council
of 1869-70, which proclaimed the dogma of papal infallibility, was a major
step in asserting the Pope's unchallengeable spiritual as well as
administrative leadership. With the further evolution of canon law, the
author continues, another stage in the consolidation of autocratic rule was
reached by 1917, when a young Vatican bureaucrat, Eugenio Pacelli, later
Pius XII, earned his first laurels as a promoter of centralism.
That the forces of modernity had by then infiltrated Catholic laity
merely reinforced this quest for control. Catholic political parties were
becoming powerful voices in the parliamentary assemblies of Europe. As
elected representatives, they demanded a greater say in the councils of the
church. Lay communities persisted in organizing their own associational life
and pushed for liturgical reform, while the indigenous hierarchy tried to
uphold the principle of ''collegiality'' against rulings from Rome. In this
clash of two very different conceptions of institutional relations and the
societal role of Catholicism, the negotiation of concordats -- international
treaties with secular governments -- became a key instrument in the hands of
the Vatican, not only to regulate its relations with often unfriendly
nation-states but also to assert its primacy over those who dreamed of
vibrantly pluralist national churches.
If the 1929 Lateran Treaty with Fascist Italy was, as Cornwell puts it,
''designed to cripple political and social Catholicism,'' the ''super
concordat'' with Germany, brought to a successful conclusion by Pacelli, the
Vatican's secretary of state, in secret negotiations with the Nazis in July
1933, seemingly marked the greatest triumph of this strategy. With Hitler
solemnly recognizing Rome as the exclusive voice of the church, the treaty
destroyed the independence of German Catholicism. The Catholic Center Party
was brutally pushed into self-liquidation; the German bishops who had
hitherto staunchly opposed Nazism were silenced; the faithful were told that
it was all right for them to serve a dictatorship that many of them had
previously voted against. In Cornwell's eyes, this outcome was an
unmitigated disaster in that it removed a major center of resistance to
Nazism. Ultimately, he believes, the Vatican's centralist strategy, coolly
pursued by its chief negotiator, Pacelli, was crucial to the rapid
consolidation of the Hitler dictatorship. What he underestimates at this
point is that many German Catholics were themselves ready to make their
peace with the Nazis, whether out of fear or latent sympathy with many of
Hitler's political and economic promises.
By 1940-41, the Axis partners, buoyed by their rapid conquest of the
European continent, were powerful enough to destroy the centralized papacy
if, instead of appeasing the dictators, the Vatican had begun to oppose
them. Silence, punctuated by a few generalized warnings against the ravages
of total war, now seemed to be the only guarantee for the preservation of an
institution and its command structures that Pacelli had so laboriously built
in previous decades. The arrest of the Pope by Hitler, Cornwell implies,
would have destroyed it all. Worse, the unrest that such a move would have
created among the faithful would not only have cost many Catholic lives but,
with the Axis defeat on the horizon by 1942-43, would also have resulted in
a renewal of precisely those forces of autonomy inside the church that had
once challenged the Vatican's quest for autocracy.
The benefits of Pius XII's strategy of survival became very visible
during the rest of his papacy: Until his death in 1958 he ''presided over a
monolithic, triumphalist Catholic Church in antagonistic confrontation with
Communism both in Italy and beyond the Iron Curtain.'' Cornwell does not
think this achievement was worth the moral failure of the Pope's wartime
silence.
But the ferment that had been building for a more participatory church
since the 19th century could not be quelled in the postwar world. The demand
for greater diversity re-emerged during the Second Vatican Council, having
found a supporter in Pope John XXIII. However, his early death in 1963,
Cornwell contends, restrengthened the authoritarian traditions of the
Vatican bureaucracy. It continued to pursue a model of Catholicism that is
strictly led from the top, in which ''pluralism and collegiality are
characterized as antagonistic to central authority,'' and that is based on
an unquestioning popular piety and acclamation by the ''masses.'' We may not
quite be back to where we were in the 1950's, but the pendulum has swung
back pretty far under Paul VI and John Paul II, Cornwell says, even if, ''in
an era largely hospitable to religious freedom it is difficult to assess the
full extent of the moral and social enfeeblement of the local churches.''
Hoping for a different future, Cornwell is depressed by the prospect of
the canonization of Pius XII, who ''has become the icon, 40 years after his
death, of those who read and revise the provisions of the Second Vatican
Council from the viewpoint of an ideology of papal power.'' Knowing that
canonization will offend many people, he concludes, ''If better relations
are to be built between the Catholic Church and Jews, it will result not
from blind faith in the single oracular voice of Catholic apologetics, but
from Catholics heeding unflinchingly the pluralist narratives of history.''
For he is convinced ''that the cumulative verdict of history'' shows Pius
XII ''to be not a saintly exemplar for future generations, but a deeply
flawed human being from whom Catholics, and our relations with other
religions, can best profit by expressing our sincere regret.''
Chances are not particularly bright that the ferment of liberal reformism
that is again stirring Catholicism in Europe and North America will prevail.
The Vatican -- immovable, though equipped with the latest communication
devices of the technological age -- still looks the way it looked a century
ago: a fortress built against the tide of time.
In 1963, the German dramatist Rolf Hochhuth published ''The Deputy,''
a play about Pope Pius XII and the Holocaust that was quickly translated
into some 20 languages and performed around the globe. Highly controversial
in its time, the work marked the beginning of a heated and continuing debate
on the Vatican's silence in the face of the mass murder of Europe's Jews in
World War II. Hochhuth dedicated ''The Deputy'' to two Roman Catholics: the
Rev. Maximilian Kolbe, who died in place of a Polish fellow prisoner at
Auschwitz and was canonized in 1982, and Bernhard Lichtenberg, the provost
of St. Hedwig's Cathedral in Berlin, who repeatedly spoke out publicly
against Nazi anti-Semitism and criminality and, jailed in May 1942, died in
October 1943 on his way to the Dachau concentration camp.
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