Exposing Hitler's Pope and Its Author -- Part 2
The intellectual dishonesty, which pervades Hitler's Pope,is nowhere more apparent than in John Cornwell's description of Eugenio Pacelli's involvement with the 1917 Code of Canon Law, as well as the German-Vatican Concordat.
"The author reflects no comprehension that anyone schooled in papal diplomacy must be trained mainly in canon law so that the diplomat can protect the interests of the Church in the country to which he is assigned. By interpreting what is required of every papal diplomat as uniquely characteristic of Pacelli in aggrandizing papal power, Cornwell shows how distorted is his understanding of the Vatican's relations with Germany" (Fr. Vincent Lapomarda, S.J., The Pilot, October 22, 1999).
Furthermore, it was precisely the 1917 Code of Canon Law which caused Hitler and the other Nazi leaders who were baptized Catholic to incur automatic excommunication (under canons 2332 and 2343 then in force) for their apostasy and violent actions -- a fact left unmentioned by the theologically ignorant John Cornwell. Moreover, modern German scholarship has demolished Cornwell's claims and proven that:
1) The Vatican did not "impose" the concordat on Germany's Catholics but did so with the full knowledge and fundamental approval of Germany's bishops and laity; 2) the concordat was not signed to increase papal control (via canon law) over German Catholics (who, in any event, were notably faithful and whose loyalty to the Pope was never a concern) but to protect Catholic religious freedom and education, which was then under ferocious assault; 3) Hitler established a dictatorship well before the passage of the Enabling Act -- which, in any event, was not a free vote but one enacted at the point of a gun; and 4) the Vatican tried desperately to preserve and protect the Catholic Center Party and signed the concordat -- as a defense mechanism -- only after it became clear that the party, under Hitler's sustained terror, had no conceivable future.
All of these facts are meticulously documented in Dr. Heinz Hurten's classic work Deutsche Katholiken [German Catholicism] 1918-1945 (Paderborn: Ferdinand Schoningh, 1992). Hurten, professor emeritus of modern history at the Catholic University of Eichstaett, is the greatest living authority on the Church's struggle against Nazism. His masterpiece, which awaits translation, is an in-depth survey of German Catholicism from the end of the Kaiser-reich to 1945, and is based upon primary archival documents -- unlike Cornwell's screed, which relies heavily upon secondary literature devoid of scholarly value. Massively researched with an extensive bibliography, Hurten's book is a crushing refutation of those who would accuse the Church of assisting the rise of Nazism -- and, for that very reason, no doubt, not listed in Cornwell's paltry bibliography. When the prestigious German monthly Stimmen Der Zeit began a search for a reputable scholar to answer Cornwell's book, it was Dr. Heinz Hurten to whom the editors turned. Hurten's review was positively scathing:
"Cornwell's portrayal of Pius XII's views about the German Catholic Center Party, and the highly developed Catholic lay organizations in Germany, is simply absurd. With regard to the former, he adopts uncritically the views of the embittered last Center Party Chancellor, Heinrich Bruning -- apparently unaware that historians have shown that Bruning's account has little foundation in reality. Cornwell is also unaware of a letter Pacelli wrote to the Vatican official who was representing him, saying that the Center Party was 'the only party we can completely depend on in regard to the Church's interest'.... [Cornwell] takes no account of the fact that during the negotiations for the concordat the Curia steadfastly refused to grant Hitler's principal demand -- the prohibition of party political activity by the German clergy -- until the collapse of all parties save Hitler's transformed this provision into a protection for the clergy against demands that they join the Nazi Party.
"Cornwell assumes that the Center Party could have stayed alive in Nazi Germany if only the Curia had refused to banish the German clergy from party politics. How this feat might have been accomplished in a totalitarian police state passes even the most highly developed imagination. When one considers the errors which appear on almost every page of this book, not much is left of the supposedly new portrait of Pius XII which Cornwell has given us."
After giving numerous examples of the factual errors which pervade Hitler's Pope, Dr. Hurten issued this final salvo: "One can understand a dilettante choosing a topic which exceeds his powers. But what led the German publisher, C.H. Beck, to put its imprint on this book? The firm has the highest scholarly credentials. By publishing this work, which courtesy forbids me to characterize further, it has put its reputation at grave risk" (Stimmen Der Zeit [Voices of the Time], n. 3 -- March 2000, vol. 218, pp. 205-208).
Not surprisingly, the actual text of the Vatican-German Concordat appears nowhere in Hitler's Pope. For if it did, readers would immediately see that a central change of Cornwell's tract -- that the concordat "imposed a moral duty on Catholics to obey the Nazi rulers" (p. 157) -- is patently false. The supplementary protocol to article 32 of the treaty emphatically states that the exclusion of Catholic clergymen from party politics in Germany "does not involve any sort of limitations of official and prescribed preaching and interpretation of the dogmatic and moral teachings and principles of the Church" (emphasis added; from Controversial Concordats: The Vatican's Relations With Napoleon, Mussolini, and Hitler, edited by Frank J. Coppa, Washington, D.C.: Catholic University of America Press, 1999, p. 214; for the entire text of the "Concordat Between the Holy See and the German Reich," cf. pp. 205-214).
Ignoring this incontestable fact, Cornwell writes that as a result of the concordat, "Catholic critics fell silent. A great Church, which might have formed the basis of an opposition, confined itself to the sacristy" (p. 157).
The Persecution Of Priests
But Catholic critics did not fall silent in the face of Nazi barbarism. Catholic critics continued to speak out -- loudly and fearlessly, even to the point of death. And the legal justification they cited for doing so was the very concordat Cornwell claims muzzled them! The titanic struggle waged by the Catholic Church against the Nazi regime is recounted in The Persecution of the Catholic Church in the Third Reich, a 550-page volume of closely packed primary source material, including salient statements from the German Catholic bishops, a mass of documents from the anti-Catholic Nazi press, testimony regarding the Catholic-Jewish alliance, and descriptions of the tortures inflicted upon German Catholics for refusing to collaborate with an ungodly totalitarian regime. Published in 1940 in England by Burns and Oates, it was assembled and translated into English by Fr. Walter Mariaux -- an exiled German Jesuit working in the Curia -- who was smuggled this material by the German Catholic resistance.
Naturally, John Cornwell ignores it. Instead, he repeats the falsehoods contained in Guenter Lewy's anti-Catholic diatribe. The Catholic Church and Nazi Germany (1964), without mentioning that eminent German historian Ludwig Volk brought forth massive documentary evidence to demolish it as soon as it appeared. The brutal consequences which befell the Catholic clergy for speaking out against Hitler, Nazism, and the Final Solution is the subject of Priester unter Hitler's Terror [Priests Under Hitler's Terror] (Mainz: Matthias Grunewald-Verlag, 1984) by Dr. Ulrich von Hehl. An unprecedented and comprehensive biographical and statistical research project, its contents were assessed by Church historian John Jay Hughes:
"Over 900 pages contain a listing by dioceses of all the clergy who came into conflict with the Nazi regime, with brief details of each case. . . The editor emphasizes that the data are incomplete. Dioceses with fuller records reported far more clergy (from 60% to 80% in several cases) in trouble with the regime than dioceses with incomplete data. Information about the religious orders is especially scanty. The figures are clearly a minimum, therefore. The actual number of cases was considerably larger than those recorded here.
"The record shows, nonetheless, that between 1933 and 1945, 8,021 clergy, comprising more than a third of the diocesan clergy and not quite a fifth of the male religious in 1937, were subjected to 22,703 known punishments ranging from interrogation to execution. Four hundred and eighteen German clergymen, 55 more than previously known, were in concentration camps. (Polish research has counted 2,579 priests in Dachau alone, but this figure includes those from outside Germany.) One hundred and ten of these German concentration camp inmates perished. A further 59 were executed, murdered, or died in other ways at the hands of the Gestapo. Under terror of this kind, even a simple interrogation without further consequences could be traumatic for the victim in ways impossible for those who have never experienced a brutal dictatorship to imagine.
"The arbitrary and haphazard nature of the punishments forbids the conclusion that clergy whose names do not appear here offered no opposition to the regime. Mere chance could determine who came to the attention of the authorities. Terror increased with time, reaching a peak of fury after the attempt on Hitler's life on July 20, 1944....
"The massive research project, a monument to German industry and thoroughness, fully justifies the editor's conclusion: No other professional group of similar size in Nazi Germany was subjected to such intensive hostile scrutiny by the regime as the Catholic clergy. No further study of Church resistance, or alleged lack thereof, can be credible if it does not take full account of the facts here related" (The Catholic Historical Review, July 1986, pp. 468-469).
This, however, is precisely what Cornwell does: He completely ignores the voluminous research of von Hehl.
John Cornwell cannot deal with the facts because he is far too busy falsifying Eugenio Pacelli's career as Vatican secretary of state (1930-1939). Thus, Cornwell claims that Cardinal Pacelli, in order to cater to Hitler, worked diligently to silence the German Catholic bishops' conference when in fact Pacelli's correspondence reveals that he fervently supported the most outspoken anti-Nazi prelates (Faulhaber, Preysing, and von Galen); Cornwell claims that Pacelli was indifferent to the anti-Semitic decrees of the Third Reich, when in fact Jewish historian Jeno Levai has documented how "Cardinal Pacelli . . . obviously played a decisive part in the dispatch of the 60 notes in which the Vatican protested to Hitler against the persecution of the Jews up to the outbreak of war" (Pius XII Was Not Silent, London: Sands and Co., 1968, p. 110); Cornwell claims that the dispatches from Germany's Vatican ambassador prove that Pacelli was an anti-Semite and pro-Nazi appeaser, when in fact these self-serving notices were thoroughly discredited by historian Fr. Robert Graham, S.J., years ago, and when the Nazis themselves did not believe in them -- as witnessed by their running campaign against Cardinal Pacelli as a "Jew-lover," complete with accompanying caricatures in the Nazi press; Cornwell claims that a huge chasm separated Pope Pius XI and his secretary of state, when in fact Pope Pius XI groomed Cardinal Pacelli to be his Successor -- and credited him with the highlights of his pontificate; Cornwell claims that Pacelli tried to undercut the impact of the great anti-Nazi encyclical Mit Brennender Sorge (1937), when in fact it was Cardinal Pacelli who was the principal author of this encyclical, and when he did everything possible to circulate and publicize it!
The Nightmare Years
But nothing will compare to Cornwell's shameless misuse of Hitler's private conversations -- to support the book's outrageous thesis, Again and again, Cornwell quotes Hitler's dictum of July 22, 1933 that the Vatican-German Concordat "will be especially significant in the urgent struggle against international Jewry" (p. 130). But what Cornwell does not tell us -- what he cannot tell us without destroying the essence of his book -- is that Hitler later admitted that the concordat was actually a grave impediment to the Nazis, that the German Catholic clergy continued to speak out and subvert the Third Reich after its signing, and that, consequently, he planned to destroy the concordat at the end of the war.
These facts were revealed in Hitler's infamous Table Talks, authentic transcripts of his tirades, taken down by a stenographer during the war, as Hitler relayed them to his henchmen. Thus, on February 8, 1942, he raged: "The evil that's gnawing our vitals is our priests. . . The time will come when I'll settle my accounts with them, and I'll go straight to the point. . . In less than ten years from now, things will have quite another look, I can promise them." On April 7, 1942: "Now, the priests' chief activity consists in undermining National-Socialist policy. The habit of exploiting the state goes back a long way. In periods of national tension, the Catholic Church always tried to occupy positions of temporal power, and always at the expense of the German community."
And on July 4, 1942, the most significant of all: "Once the war is over we will put a swift end to the concordat. It will give me the greatest personal pleasure to point out to the Church all those occasions on which it has broken the terms of it. One need only recall the close cooperation between the Church and the murderers of [Nazi leader Reinhard] Heydrich. Catholic priests not only allowed them to hide in a Church . . . but even allowed them to entrench themselves in the sanctuary of the altar. ...
"Not only the history of the past, but also present times afford numberless examples of the very hard-boiled diplomats to be found in the service of the Catholic Church, and of how extremely cautious one must be in dealing with them" (Hitler's Secret Conversations: 1941-1944, edited by H.R. Trevor-Roper, New York: Octagon Books, 1976, pp. 247, 332 and pp. 449-450 respectively).
Chief among Vatican diplomats of those times was Eugenio Pacelli -- first as cardinal secretary of state, then as Pope. And it was Pacelli, both as a Christian and as a diplomat, who exhorted, counseled, and sustained the anti-Nazi resistance daring those "nightmare years" (to use William Shirer's appropriate phrase); it was Pacelli who never ceased to make clear his implacable opposition to the Third Reich. Three thick volumes of Cardinal Pacelli's protests to the German government exist and are available for any historian to consult. (The historian Dieter Albrecht edited them in German under the title Der Notenwechsel zwischen dem Heiligen Stuhl und der Deutschen Reichsregierung [Exchange of Notes Between the Holy See and the Government of the German Reich], Mainz: Matthias-Grunewald 1965-1980).
And try as they might to ignore them, misuse them, or dismiss them out of hand, propagandists like Cornwell will never be able to suppress their testimony on behalf of the Church. "For a period of three and a half years, 1933 to the publication of Mit Brennender Sorge," writes Dr. Victor Canzemius, who has examined these protests, "we have 84 notes of the secretary of state to the German government or to the German ambassador. Only about one-fifth of the documents got an answer. The attitude of Pacelli, as reflected in these documents, is strong and firm from the beginning; one could hardly imagine a more forceful defender of violated rights.
"Along with the teachings of Leo XIII, Pacelli stresses the indifference of the Church to the different forms of governments. But this did not mean to him an unconditional obedience to the state; obedience to the government had to conform to the general principles of natural law and the Ten Commandments. In the note of July 10, 1935--it precedes the Nuremberg Laws against the Jews of September 1935 by a few months -- Pacelli states: 'There is no stipulation of the concordat which could oblige the Church to consider laws as binding in conscience for its subjects, which lack the elementary conditions of morally binding laws, namely, their conformity with the divine laws. "The state which decrees such laws commits already an injustice if it tries to force its citizens to obey such laws by threat of force and punishment. The government which requires the Church, the guardian and harbinger of the Christian moral laws, to consider such laws as binding in conscience and thus encourage her faithful to trespass on divine norms, this government should know that it requires something which is morally unlawful and therefore impossible. . .'
"There is no doubt that Pacelli used his position as a channel to reiterate the principles of natural law and human rights to a totalitarian state, which had created a new scale of sights and values. That his partner was deaf to his entreaties did not discourage him. Again and again he came back to the charge and did not shrink from criticizing the intolerable grip of the totalitarian state on German community life at large" ("Pius XII and Nazi Germany in Historical Perspective," in J.C. Beckett [ed.] Historical Studies. Papers Read Before the Irish Conference of Historians, VII. London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1969, pp. 112-113).
The Throne Of St. Peter
What all these facts demonstrate is that Cornwell has history backward: The concordat did not silence the German Catholic opposition, but strengthened and propelled it to confront the Nazi murder machine. Consequently, it was not Adolf Hitler who outwitted Cardinal Pacelli by concluding the concordat; it was Eugenio Pacelli who outwitted Hitler.
Small wonder, then, that when the man John Cornwell tries to smear as "Hitler's Pope" was actually elevated to the throne of St. Peter, the reaction was anything but what Cornwell would have us believe:
"The election of Eugenio Cardinal Pacelli on March 2, 1939 meant continuance of his Predecessor's policy which, as papal secretary of state, he had helped to effect: a policy of opposition to race prejudice, religious persecution, wars of aggression. Cannons roared, the bells of Rome rang out, congratulations poured in. But there was small rejoicing in Germany, for the Reich had made clear that of all the candidates, the 'pro-Ally' Pacelli would be the least acceptable" (Current Biography, 1941, p. 673). © The Wanderer, 201 Ohio Street, St. Paul, MN 55107, 612-224-5733.
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