How to kill the myth of Hitler’s Pope

Thank you Mr. Phillips. Not only did Mr. Cornwell manipulated the public by using that photo of Pius XII but his publishers deliberately made it darker in order to make it more sinister. Hitler's Pope is an exercise in manipulation of factoids and inuendo mascarading as truth.

Sadly there is rather alot of evidence to suggest that the Catholic Church's relationship with the Nazi's – certainly in Germany – was rather too close. This rather provocative You-Tube video suggests otherwise – http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KD_lBstvptE&feat…

Some of your readers may also be interested in Bishop Williamson's interview relating to the non-existance of Gas Chambers during the Holocaust. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Rc0NFMtgd3w

Pius XII seems to have been a towering pope in many ways. He had a lot to say, and he said a lot, yet we are chiefly concerned with his silence. If only he had placed on the record for posterity a clear public condemnation of the Holocaust. But he did not. So he is at risk of living on as “Hitler’s Pope.” Ms. Phillips, you suggest that to call him this is to fuel a myth, and that a book with the title “Hitler’s Pope” is an impertinence which might best be dealt with by the author removing it from circulation. But it is such over-the-top defences of Pius XII that fuel the myth. In my view, the discussion thus far misses the point. If Pius XII saved 200,000 Jews in France, as one comment on your blog claims, why did he not save all Jews everywhere? Playing a numbers game proves nothing. No matter how many Jews he may have saved, we can always wonder why he did not save more. Even if Pius XII had done nothing else day or night during World War II but try to stop the Holocaust, we would still be left wondering about him. We cannot pore admiringly over his words of condemnation in a missive to Hitler. We cannot sit back in moral edification and watch him condemn the Holocaust on old newsreels. But we would like to. Most of us today were brought up to believe that the Hitler regime was the very epitome of evil. We probably spent a lot of our reading lives and TV-viewing lives in states of near-shock over the Holocaust. It is natural enough to look for an articulation of clear moral leadership by the highest moral authority of the time, but we look in vain. He bottled out, so to speak. The reasons for this silence are no doubt highly complex. Due consideration of them may well put us more on the side of Pius XII. But the fact of that silence, and its challenge to our moral sensibilities, is the only place to begin. In this lies the value of Rolf Hochhuth’s play. One of its strengths is the stark contrast between the silence of the Pope and the choice of public solidarity with the Jews by the priest, Riccardo, which immediately seems right to us. The German title Der Stellvertreter contains many fruitful associations which the English title The Deputy does not. It points, for example, to the meaning of the Crucifixion, namely that Jesus was innocent and died for our sins. It is a powerful message, and a true one, when Riccardo dies innocent in Auschwitz while Pope Pius works out crafty diplomatic moves in Rome. Pope Pius is not innocent, nor are we readers and theatre-goers who understand only too well the forces of self-preservation at work in the Vatican. Hochhuth based the character of Riccardo in part on the real-life example of the Blessed Bernhard Lichtenberg, who regularly spoke out against the persecution of Jews at the Cathedral in Berlin, and lost his life as a result. The moral dilemmas of the play are real ones. They are likely to re-occur whenever the peaceful cohabitation of religion with worldly powers is shaken up by an urgent moral challenge. This is surely of far greater importance than the mere reputation of someone, even if that someone is a pope on the way to canonisation. History is full of fence-sitters, but do we draw inspiration from them? Bernhard Lichtenberg, not Pius XII, is unquestionably an inspirational character.

Eamon Kiernan

You have to be kidding. Are you saying every non-Jew who lived under the Nazis was a Nazi themselves? Would you like to present some evidence for our current pope being a Nazi? Even if he had been in the Hitler youth (which he wasn’t – he avoided the draft) how does that make him a Nazi now? The Hitler youth was an attempt to create a child army, it was hardly the SS.

Comment & Blogs
John Julius Norwich dredges up the same old slur about Pius XII
His assessment of Pius as ‘odiously anti-Semitic’ is based on one source – John Cornwell
By Francis Phillips on Monday, 4 July 2011 The handsome and much-publicised book costs £25
I have just picked up John Julius Norwich’s The Popes: a History. It is a handsome volume and will set you back £25. Published earlier this year with the usual publicity (I heard Norwich himself discuss his book in a radio interview, assuring listeners that he would steer clear of all theological considerations), I started on his introduction. My hackles were instantly raised at the reference to “the odiously anti-Semitic Pius XII to whom the beloved Pope John XXIII came as such a welcome contrast…”
The same old ignorance; the same old slur. Turning to the chapter on Pius XII I checked Norwich’s sources: there was only one: Hitler’s Pope by John Cornwell. Cornwell’s book, as Norwich should have known if he had done any homework before throwing out his vicious comment, has been comprehensively demolished by respectable historians such as Michael Burleigh in Sacred Causes and Sir Martin Gilbert in The Righteous.
As it happens, Pius XII and the Jews happened to have been the subject of my first blog last summer. The posts I received about it were instructive and helpful. As well as referring to Burleigh, whom I had read, and Gilbert, whom I hadn’t, people mentioned the research done by Pierre Blet SJ, Ronald Rychlak, Hubert Wolf and Gerhard Besier. It was pointed out that Cornwell had not seen vital Vatican archival material which shows Pius XII in a much more favourable light than in his (deliberately mischievous) portrayal. Indeed, Rabbi David Dalin, a Jewish historian, had written The Myth of Hitler’s Pope, a book I had also read, to demonstrate just how misleading and selective Cornwell’s book is.
Burleigh’s verdict in Sacred Causes is that “there is not the slightest evidence to support the idea that Pius XII was ‘Hitler’s Pope’”. Indeed, after his death in 1958, Pius was praised by Golda Meir, later to be prime minister of Israel, and in the useful little CTS booklet, “A History of the Papacy” by Fr Nicholas Schofield, the author concludes: “Pius XII’s concern for the Jews impressed many outside the Church. In 1945 the chief rabbi of Rome, Israel Zolli, became a Catholic and took as his baptismal name ‘Eugenio’, in tribute to the pope.” (Pius’s baptismal name was “Eugenio”.)
John Julius Norwich, a well-known writer and broadcaster on the arts – the blurb on the dust jacket of his book cites his industry and versatility – is content to blacken the reputation of a greatly respected historical figure on the flimsiest evidence. His introduction concludes with the extraordinary statement, “as an agnostic Protestant, I have absolutely no axe to grind… My job has been to look at [the papacy] and to give as honest, as objective and as accurate an account of it as I possibly can.” There is nothing objective or accurate in his assessment of Pius XII. I think readers might save themselves £25 and read Fr Schofield’s booklet in the CTS’s “concise histories”; it is only £1.95. Interestingly, Schofield doesn’t bother to mention another myth, that of “Pope Joan”; Norwich gives her six pages.In This Article
John Cornwell, John Julius Norwich, Pope Pius XIIShare
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Francis Phillips
Francis Phillips reviews books for the Catholic Herald.
Contact the authorRelated PostsHow to kill the myth of Hitler’s PopeMorning Catholic must-reads: 05/07/11Allied diplomats urged Pius XII to stay silent about Nazi deportationsMorning Catholic must-reads: 10/12/10In new book, Pope says abuse crisis left him ‘stunned’

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Post as … Showing 22 comments Sort by Popular now Best rating Newest first Oldest first   Subscribe by email   Subscribe by RSS Paul Zerzan 1 day ago According to Rabbi Boteach: Pius was the man who, as Cardinal Secretary of State, became the first statesman, in 1933, to sign an agreement with the man he called “the illustrious Hitler,” sending him a letter expressing his confidence in his leadership. His concordat with Hitler forced the Catholic Centre Party into dissolution, not only removing the last obstacle to Hitler’s goal of absolute power in Germany but also destroying any further resistance by Germany’s Catholic bishops to the Nazis.He was the Pope who famously refused, amid unmistakable evidence of thousands of Jews being shipped to slaughter in Nazi concentration camps, to ever speak out against the holocaust. This followed Pius’ successful efforts to prevent the publication of an encyclical commissioned by his dying predecessor to condemn Nazi anti-Semitism. This is also the Pope who sent Hitler birthday greetings every single year and who refused to excommunicate Hitler or any other top Nazis who were on official Catholic rolls (to give this context, the singer Sinead O’Connor was excommunicated). He ignored the pleas of President Roosevelt and Winston Churchill to denounce the Nazis. He later refused to endorse a joint declaration by Britain, U.S and Russia condemning mass murder of Europe’s Jews, claiming that he simply could not condemn “particular” atrocities. The most he ever did was a single pronouncement during the war on the murder “of hundreds of thousands.” By then, of course, there were millions, and he did not mention Hitler, Nazi Germany, or the Jews in the statement. Most infamously, he was silent when the Germans rounded up Rome’s Jews in October 1944 for slaughter. They were being processed for extermination in a military school a few hundred yards from his window in St. Peter’s. An Italian princess, Enza Pignatelli, forced her way into the Pope’s study and warned him about the imminent assault on the city’s Jewish citizens. “You must act immediately,” she cried. “The Germans are arresting the Jews and taking them away. Only you can stop them.” The Pope assured her, “I will do all I can.” He made no protest and nearly all were later gassed in Auschwitz. Curiously, amid the Pope’s inability to find his voice to condemn the extermination of European Jewry, when the Catholic archbishop of Berlin issued a statement mourning Hitler’s death, the Pope did not reprimand him.Author John Cornwell unearths letters from Pius’ early career in Germany which reveals a stubborn, even distasteful disposition toward Jews. While Papal nuncio in Germany, Pius refused to perform favors for the Jewish community on the flimsiest of grounds and describes the Munich chapter of the German Communist Party as being filthy and full of Jews. Pius refers derisively to “a group of young women, of dubious appearance, Jews like all the rest of them” and he describes Communist leader Max Levien as a Jew, “pale, dirty, with drugged eyes, hoarse voice, vulgar, repulsive…” Perhaps this would explain why, in one of the greatest acts of mass-kidnapping in history, Pius, in 1946, instructed the French Church to refuse return of entire classes of Jewish children who were entrusted to the Church for safekeeping during the holocaust if they had already been baptized.Now, if, as the Church maintains, Pius is being falsely maligned by his critics as a pious fraud and moral coward who disgraced a great world religion, then why doesn’t the Vatican fix the error by simply opening their archives on his pontificate that would reveal Pius’s correspondence and actions during the War? It has thusfar released a very select and carefully scrubbed collection of wartime documents that reveal next to nothing about the Church’s interactions with the Third Reich.There is a comical element to this debate, which would be more humorous if it weren’t so tragic. It involves Pius’ defenders arguing that Pius purposefully refrained from condemning the holocaust because the Jews would have fared even worse had the Pope spoken out.Worse than the holocaust? Now that’s funny.