Hitler's Pope
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Hitler's Pope is a book published in 1999 by the Catholic ex-seminarian, historian, and journalist John Cornwell. It examines the actions of Pope Pius XII during the Nazi era and explores the charge that he assisted in the legitimization of Hitler's Nazi regime in Germany through the pursuit of a Reichskonkordat in 1933. It is critical of his conduct during the Second World War. 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, such as the praise lavished on Pius XII by Jewish leaders during his lifetime. Ken Woodward, in Newsweek, summarized Hitler's Pope as having "errors of fact and ignorance of context [that] appear on almost every page."[1] More recently, Cornwell acknowledged that he had erred in ascribing evil motives to Pius when writing Hitler's Pope, and said he now found it "impossible to judge" the wartime pontiff's motives.[2] Hitler's Pope remains a highly controversial book that has incited many other books on the subject.
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[edit] Cornwell's work
Cornwell, like other scholars, made use of the Vatican archives to research the conduct of Eugenio Pacelli, both as Nuncio to Germany and as Pope. He explains how he began his book as a defense of Pius XII from claims that he could have done more to prevent or mitigate the Holocaust, the genocide of European Jews under Adolf Hitler, but that something unexpected happened along the way. "By the middle of 1997," he wrote, "nearing 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."[3] Cornwell, relying on exclusive access to Vatican and Jesuit archives, argues that through a 1933 Concordat with Hitler, his anti-Semitic tendencies early on, and his drive to promote papal absolutism inexorably led him to collaboration with fascist leaders. Thus, according to Cornwell, Pope Pius XII facilitated the dictator's rise and, ultimately, the Holocaust.
[edit] Critical analysis of Cornwell's work
In The Myth of Hitler's Pope: How Pope Pius XII Rescued Jews from the Nazis published in 2005, author Rabbi David G. Dalin presents documentation culled from Church and State archives throughout Europe. Rabbi Dalin suggests that Yad Vashem should honor Pope Pius XII as a "Righteous Gentile," concluding that "[t]he anti-papal polemics of ex-seminarians like Garry Wills and John Cornwell (author of Hitler’s Pope), of ex-priests like James Carroll, and or other lapsed or angry liberal Catholics exploit the tragedy of the Jewish people during the Holocaust to foster their own political agenda of forcing changes on the Catholic Church today."
In addition, Sir Martin Gilbert praised Pope Pius XII's efforts on behalf of the Jews throughout World War II. According to Miriam Zolli, daughter of WW II Chief Rabbi of Rome, Cornwell does not consider the context of what he calls Pius XII's silence in the face of Nazism and anti-semitism. In a 1998 interview with Inside the Vatican, she stated, "Pacelli and my father were tragic figures in a world where every moral reference point had been lost. An abyss of evil had opened up, but ordinary people did not believe it and the great ones — Roosevelt, Stalin, de Gaulle — were silent. Pius XII had understood that Hitler would not descend to pacts with anyone, that his madness was of the type that could explode in any direction, in the massacre of German Catholics or in the bombing of Rome, and he acted in the light of this knowledge. The Pope was like a person constrained to move in solitude among the lunatics of an insane asylum. He did what he could. His silence must be read in that context, as an act of prudence, not of cowardice."[4]
[edit] Covers
The covers for both the US and the UK-editions of the book use a 1927 photograph, taken while the future pope was papal nuncio to Germany during the Weimar Republic. Compared to the UK version, the US cover was cropped, darkened, and blurred.
[edit] References
- ^ Kenneth L. Woodward, Newsweek, September 27, 1999.
- ^ John Cornwell, The Pontiff in Winter (2004), p. 193
- ^ John Cornwell, Hitler's Pope (1999), p. viii.
- ^ Miriam Zolli, A conversation with Miriam Zolli [http://www.catholicculture.org/docs/doc_view.cfm?recnum=1067"My Father Never Stopped Being a Jew" Inside the Vatican, February, 1999
[edit] Additional reading
- Jimmy Akin, How Pius XII Protected Jews (Catholic Answers, 1979-2005)
- Anonymous, Persecution of the Catholic Church in the Third Reich (Pelican Pub Co; February 2003). ISBN 1-58980-137-7 (originally published in 1941)
- Joseph Bottum, The Pius War: Responses to Critics of Pius XII (Lexington Books, 2004). ISBN 0-7391-0906-5
- James Carroll: Constantine’s Sword (Houghton Mifflin, 2002). ISBN 0-618-21908-0
- John Cornwell, Hitler's Pope: The Secret History of Pius XII (Viking, 1999) ISBN 0-670-87620-8
- Rabbi David G. Dalin, The Myth of Hitler’s Pope: How Pope Pius XII Rescued Jews from the Nazis (Regnery, 2005). ISBN 0-89526-034-4.
- Guenter Lewy, The Catholic Church and Nazi Germany (Da Capo Press, 2000). ISBN 0-306-80931-1
- Sr. Margherita Marchione, Pope Pius XII: Architect for Peace (Paulist Press, 2000). ISBN 0-8091-3912-X
- Ronald J. Rychlak, Hitler, the War, and the Pope (Our Sunday Visitor, 2000). ISBN 0-87973-217-2
- Karl Scholder, The Churches and the Third Reich (London, 1987)
- Garry Wills: Papal Sin (Bantam Dell, 2001). ISBN 0-385-49411-4
- Eugenio Zolli, Before the Dawn (Roman Catholic Books; Reprint edition, February 1997). ISBN 0-912141-46-8 (author is the former wartime chief rabbi of Rome who took the name "Eugenio" at his Baptism in honor of Pope Pius XII)
- Susan Zuccotti,Under his very Windows, The Vatican and the Holocaust in Italy (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 2000). ISBN 0-300-08487-0
