Pope Pius XII, An Agent of the Final Solution?

by Mary DeTurris

Pope Pius XII has long been fodder for the scapegoat gristmill that purports he was "silent" throughout the Holocaust. He is now under attack in a controversial new book that takes these unsubstantiated charges to new levels, calling the Pontiff "an ideal pope for the Nazi's Final Solution."

"Hitler's Pope: The Secret History of Pius XII" has sparked outrage among scholars who say that author John Cornwell has not produced any new information on which to base his findings but has instead twisted and distorted previously published materials in order to cast a dark shadow on the man whose sainthood cause has been introduced.

"This is clever, sensational propaganda that will be refuted by sound and patient scholarship," said Sister Margherita Marchione, a member of the' Religious Teachers Filippini and the 1997 author of "Yours is a Precious Witness: Memoirs of Jews and Catholics in Wartime Italy" (Paulist, $15). "The supposedly, new evidence is only new in the sense of the vicious interpretation that Cornwell gives to the documents."

Sister Marchione, whose newest book, "Pius XII: Architect for Peace," will be out later this year, said that Cornwell's book is "full of falsehoods and is ignorant of current scholarship." Although Cornwell's book will not hit store shelves until later this month, a 12-page excerpt was printed in the current issue of Vanity Fair.

"They have an innocent man who is not here to defend himself. Pope Pius XII, who really does not deserve this kind of treatment," Sister Marchione said.

According to Sister Marchione, the Swiss Guards' numbers grew from 400 at the beginning of the war to 4,000 by the end of the war because young Jewish men who were hiding in the Vatican were given guard duty in order to save their lives.

"The Pope went to that extreme. And what about all the baptismal certificates that were distributed and all the false identity cards that were sent around to all the Jews?" she asked. "The Church was doing that in order to save them, and the Church did save them."

Sister Marchione said that the world is all too willing to believe Cornwell's accusations because "they have to have a victim.".

"There were people here in this country who did nothing. The Jews themselves here did nothing to help their own fellow Jews in Europe. President Roosevelt and Churchill did very little. They only got on the scene to help the Jews after the war. Whereas Pius XII was working all those years, through the Church, through the bishops, through the nuns, through the convents, through the seminaries, hiding hundreds of thousands of Jews" she explained. "Put the blame where it belongs, not with Pius XII but with the rest of the world."

AIMING HIGH

Sister Marchione and others said that Cornwell's work reveals a much larger target than Pope Pius XII, one that includes the Church at large and the papacy. Reading Cornwell's Vanity Fair excerpt certainly reveals an agenda that seems to go much deeper than Pope Pius XII's World War II policies. He seems obsessed with the Pope's eating habits, his wardrobe, his pale complexion, even the decomposition of his body, all apparently in an attempt to paint a portrait that will support his allegations. Even when he describes his own research at the Vatican, Cornwell's words seem caught up in a melodramatic world of his own making.

Dwarfed by the sensationalism of Cornwell's work is another book on Pope Pius XII, whose publication seems. to have gone unnoticed by the editors at Vanity Fair. "Pius XII and the Second World War According to the Archives of the Vatican," by Jesuit Father Pierre Blet, was published this month by Paulist Press. Father Blet was one of four scholars who compiled 12 volumes of documentation from the Holy See's archives.

"Journalists and others interested in learning more about the actual Pius XII would be better served reading the 'other' new book about the subject," said Eugene Fisher, an ecumenical and interreligious-affairs adviser for the U.S. bishops' conference in Washington, D.C.

In a recent interview with the Rome-based ZENIT News Agency, Father Blet said, "Unlike Cornwell, I limit myself to the documentation . . . where you can see what the Holy See did during the Second World War, day by day and hour by hour. Specifically, it demonstrates how Pius XII did everything possible to promote peace, first by trying to avoid the occupation of Poland, then by trying to keep Italy out of the war."

Father Blet noted that documentation shows that Pope Pius XII carefully considered the best ways to help the Jews and that when he wanted to make a public declaration, even the Red Cross dissuaded him for fear of reprisals. "A declaration against Germany would have provoked a severing of ties with the Pope and would have played into the hands of Nazi propaganda," he explained, "which portrayed Pius XII as an enemy of Germany."

Fisher, of the U.S. bishops' conference, stressed that one of the central arguments of Cornwell's excerpt is mistakenly based on the notion that a. concordat signed with Hitler in 1933 signified Vatican support of his Final Solution.

"This was part of the overall policy of Pius XI and Benedict XV before him.. ..This was how Pius XI was realigning the relationship between the Church and the modern states that were arising in the early part of the 20th century. This was just one of a series of concordats," Fisher said.

INVIDIOUS AND INSIDIOUS

As for Cornwell's allegations that Pope Pius XII was the "prime mover" in the "tragic Catholic surrender" that led to the dissolution of the Catholic-organized Center Party in Germany, Fisher said that any American would see the wisdom of not having a Church-sponsored political party.

"To say that there's something invidious and insidious about the Holy See because it's doing something that's imbedded in the Constitution of the United States — well, I'm sorry, as an American I can object to that," said Fisher, adding that Cornwell uses turns of phrase and innuendo to make something out of nothing. "We're dealing here with somebody who certainly does not have the capability of using the tools of historical methodology. He's out to make a point and will torture anything to get to that point."

Fisher noted that Cornwell ignores specific efforts by Pope Pius XII on behalf of the Jewish people. One example, he said, was when Pope Pius asked his personal representative to take Jewish refugees from Northern Italy to Northern Africa, which had just been freed from the Nazis by the Allies. The French priest organized a fleet of Italian vessels to take 10,000 Jews to safety, but the British opposed the plan because they didn't want the Jewish refugees clogging up the Allied war efforts.

"That was a failed effort, but the bad guy there is not the Pope. The Pope, personally through his representative, was trying to save Jewish lives though a rather large-scale scheme," said Fisher.

"There are lots of questions, and the Church bears its full share, but it's certainly not alone," he continued. "This was a failure of Western civilization, and the Church is part of it.... The Pope did not have a magic wand that would have made World War II go away. To make him the scapegoat for World War II, which is in essence what this article tries to do, is just absurd."

DeTurris is a senior correspondent for Our Sunday Visitor

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