Unsealing
of Vatican archives will finally reveal truth about ‘Hitler’s pope’
Historians
can now pore over secret files from the papacy of Pius XII, who has long faced
accusations of being a Nazi sympathiser
Harriet
Sherwood
@harrietsherwood
Sun 1 Mar
2020 06.33 GMTLast modified on Sun 1 Mar 2020 08.17 GMT
New light
will be shed on one of the most controversial periods of Vatican history on
Monday when the archives on Pope Pius XII – accused by critics of being a Nazi
sympathiser – are unsealed.
A year
after Pope Francis announced the move, saying “the church isn’t afraid of
history”, the documents from Pius XII’s papacy, which began in 1939 on the
brink of the second world war and ended in 1958, will be opened, initially to a
small number of scholars.
Critics of
Pius XII have accused him of remaining silent during the Holocaust, never
publicly condemning the persecution and genocide of Jews and others. His
defenders say that he quietly encouraged convents and other Catholic
institutions to hide thousands of Jews, and that public criticism of the Nazis
would have risked the lives of priests and nuns.
“The opening of the archives is decisive for
the contemporary history of the church and the world,” said Cardinal José
Tolentino Calaça de Mendonça, the Vatican’s archivist and librarian last week.
Bishop
Sergio Pagano, the prefect of the Vatican Apostolic Archive, said scholars
would have to make a “historical judgment”. He added: “The good [that Pius did]
was so great that it will dwarf the few shadows.” Evaluating the millions of
pages in the archives would take several years, he said.
More than
150 people have applied to access the archives, although only 60 can be
accommodated in the offices at one time. Among the first to view the documents
will be representatives of the Jewish community in Rome, and scholars from Yad
Vashem, Israel’s Holocaust museum, and the United States Holocaust Memorial
Museum.
David
Kertzer, an American expert on the relationship between the Catholic church and
fascism, who will begin examining the papers this week, said there were “signs
of nervousness” at the Vatican about what would emerge from the archives. The
Vatican archives would provide an “immense amount of fresh material from many
millions of pages”, he told the Observer.
“On the big
question, it’s clear: Pius XII never publicly criticised the Nazis for the mass
murder they were committing of the Jews of Europe – and he knew from the very
beginning that mass murder was taking place. Various clerics and others were
pressing him to speak out, and he declined to do so.
“Although
there is a lot of testimony showing that the church did protect Jews in Rome,
when more than 1,000 were rounded up on 16 October 1943 and held for two days
adjacent to the Vatican [before deportation to the death camps], Pius decided
not to publicly protest or even privately send a plea to Hitler not to send
them to their deaths in Auschwitz. Hopefully, what we’ll find from these
archives is why he did what he did, and what discussions were going on behind
the walls of the Vatican.”
Mary
Vincent, professor of modern European history at Sheffield University, said
that much of the criticism of Pius Xll lacked nuance. “He was a careful,
austere and quite unlikable man, trying to steer a path through almost
impossible circumstances. He had clear views about what he saw as the threat of
Soviet communism, and his view of Italian fascism was quite a bit softer. But
categorising him as good or bad is not helpful – it’s about the decisions he
took, and the space he had to make those decisions.”
Pius –
whose birth name was Eugenio Pacelli – was Vatican secretary of state under his
predecessor, Pope Pius XI, and a former papal nuncio, or envoy, to Germany. In
1933, he negotiated a concordat between the Catholic church and Germany. After
he was elected pope, six months before the outbreak of war, the Vatican
maintained diplomatic relations with the Third Reich, and the new pontiff
declined to condemn the Nazi invasion of Poland on 1 September 1939.
In December
1942, Pius XII spoke out in general terms about the suffering of the Jews,
although he had known for several months about the Nazi extermination plans. In
1943, he wrote to the bishop of Berlin, arguing that the church could not
publicly condemn the Holocaust for fear of causing “greater evils”.
Hitler’s
Pope, a controversial biography of Pius XII by British author John Cornwell,
published in 1999, claimed the pope was an antisemite who “failed to be gripped
with moral outrage by the plight of the Jews”. He was also narcissistic and
determined to protect and advance the power of the papacy, the book argued.
Pius XII was “the ideal pope for Hitler’s unspeakable plan. He was Hitler’s
pawn. He was Hitler’s Pope.”
Cornwell’s
claims were challenged by some scholars and authors. He later conceded that
Pius XII had “so little scope of action that it is impossible to judge the
motives for his silence during the war”, although the pontiff had never
explained his stance.
In 2012,
Yad Vashem changed the wording on an exhibit on Pius XII’s papacy, from he “did
not intervene” to he “did not publicly protest”. The new text acknowledged
different assessments of the pope’s position and Yad Vashem said it “look[ed]
forward to the day when the Vatican archives will be open to researchers so
that a clearer understanding of the events can be arrived at”.
Pope
Benedict, Francis’s predecessor, declared in 2009 that Pius XII had lived a
life of “heroic” Christian virtue, a step towards possible sainthood. But in
2014, Francis said no miracle – a prerequisite for beatification, the final
step to canonisation – had been identified. “If there are no miracles, it can’t
go forward. It’s blocked there,” Francis said after visiting Yad Vashem. Last
year, Francis said Pius XII had led the church during one of the “saddest and
darkest periods of the 20th century”. He added that he was confident that
“serious and objective historical research will allow the evaluation [of Pius]
in the correct light,” including “appropriate criticism”.
Hitler's
Pope is a book published in 1999 by the British journalist and author John
Cornwell that examines the actions of Eugenio Pacelli, who became Pope Pius
XII, before and during the Nazi era, and explores the charge that he assisted
in the legitimization of Adolf Hitler's Nazi regime in Germany, through the
pursuit of a Reichskonkordat in 1933. The book is critical of Pius' conduct
during the Second World War, arguing that he did not do enough, or speak out
enough, against the Holocaust. Cornwell argues that Pius's entire career as the
nuncio to Germany, Cardinal Secretary of State, and Pope, was characterized by
a desire to increase and centralize the power of the Papacy, and that he
subordinated opposition to the Nazis to that goal. He further argues that Pius
was antisemitic and that this stance prevented him from caring about the
European Jews.
Various
commentators have challenged the book's leading ideas, or challenged factual
assertions contained within it. Holocaust historian Martin Gilbert credits Pius
XII with various actions which saved Jews, and notes that the Nazi security
forces referred to him as the "mouthpiece of the Jewish war
criminals". Pius XII maintained links to the German Resistance and in the
assessment of historian Frank J. Coppa writing for the Encyclopædia Britannica,
Cornwell's depiction of Pius XII as antisemitic lacks "credible
substantiation".
The author
has been praised for attempting to bring into the open the debate on the
Catholic Church's relationship with the Nazis, but also accused of making
unsubstantiated claims and ignoring positive evidence. The author has moderated
some of his allegations since publication of the book. In 2004, Cornwell stated
that Pius XII "had so little scope of action that it is impossible to
judge the motives for his silence during the war, while Rome was under the heel
of Mussolini and later occupied by Germany. ... But even if his prevarications
and silences were performed with the best of intentions, he had an obligation
in the postwar period to explain those actions". He similarly stated in
2008 that Pius XII's "scope for action was severely limited", but
that "[n]evertheless, due to his ineffectual and diplomatic language in
respect of the Nazis and the Jews, I still believe that it was incumbent on him
to explain his failure to speak out after the war. This he never did." In
2009 he described Pacelli as effectively a "fellow traveller" of the
Nazis.
Cornwell's
work was the first to have access to testimonies from Pius's beatification
process as well as to many documents from Eugenio Pacelli's nunciature which
had just been opened under the seventy-five year rule by the Vatican State
Secretary archives. Cornwell's work has received both praise and criticism.
Eamon Duffy wrote that Cornwell's "gripping and impassioned account"
had presented "an indictment that [could not] be ignored" and Saul
Friedländer that Cornwell had demonstrated how "Pius XII brought the
authoritarianism and the centralization of his predecessors to their most
extreme stage." Susan Zuccotti's Under His Very Windows: The Vatican and
the Holocaust in Italy (2000) and Michael Phayer's The Catholic Church and the
Holocaust, 1930–1965 (2000) are critical of both Cornwell and Pius XII. Ronald
J. Rychlak's Hitler, the War and the Pope is critical as well but defends Pius
XII in light of his own access to recent documents.
Cornwell
researched the conduct of Pacelli, both while he served as nuncio to Germany
and after he was made Pope; some of Cornwell's principal resources were the
Vatican archives. Cornwell stated that he reassured the archivists he was on
the side of the pope as the God's representative on earth and, acting in good
faith, he had "generous access to unseen material". He concluded
that:
Near the
end of my research I found myself in a state I can only describe as moral
shock. The material I had gathered, taking the more extensive view of Pacelli's
life, amounted not to an exoneration but to a wider indictment. Spanning
Pacelli's career from the beginning of the century, my research told the story
of a bid for unprecedented papal power that by 1933 had drawn the Catholic
Church into complicity with the darkest forces of the era. I found evidence,
moreover, that from an early stage in his career Pacelli betrayed an undeniable
antipathy toward the Jews, and that his diplomacy in Germany in the 1930s had
resulted in the betrayal of Catholic political associations that might have
challenged Hitler's regime and thwarted the Final Solution. Eugenio Pacelli was
no monster; his case is far more complex, more tragic, than that. The interest
of his story depends on a fatal combination of high spiritual aspirations in
conflict with soaring ambition for power and control. His is not a portrait of
evil but of fatal moral dislocation-a separation of authority from Christian
love. The consequences of that rupture were collusion with tyranny and,
ultimately, violence.
Cornwell
alleged that, from at least his early '40s onward, Pacelli had antisemitic
tendencies. He traced the earliest manifestation of these antisemitic
tendencies to an incident in 1917 in which Pacelli refused to help facilitate
the exportation of palm fronds from Italy to be used by German Jews in Munich
to celebrate the festival of Tabernacles. Cornwell argued that, although this
incident was "small in itself", it "belies subsequent claims
that Pacelli had a great love of the Jewish religion and was always motivated
by its best interests."
Cornwell
stated he uncovered a "time bomb" letter signed and personally
annotated by Pacelli that had been lying in the Vatican archives since 1919,
regarding the actions of communist revolutionaries in Munich. Regarding this
letter, Cornwell stated "The repeated references to the Jewishness of
these individuals, amid the catalogue of epithets describing their physical and
moral repulsiveness, gives an impression of stereotypical anti-Semitic
contempt". Cornwell asserts that the letter from Pacelli to Pietro Gaspam
[sic Gaparri ] portrays Jews in an unfavorable light and associates them with
the Bolshevik revolution.
In the
assessment of Frank J. Coppa, writing for Encyclopædia Britannica, Cornwell's
depiction of Pacelli as antisemitic lacks "credible substantiation".
Coppa writes: "though Pius's wartime public condemnations of racism and
genocide were cloaked in generalities, he did not turn a blind eye to the
suffering but chose to use diplomacy to aid the persecuted. It is impossible to
know if a more forthright condemnation of the Holocaust would have proved more
effective in saving lives, though it probably would have better assured his
reputation."
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