The End of the Pius Wars
Joseph Bottum
Who, even among scholars in the field, could keep up with the flood of attacks on Pius XII that began in the late 1990s? John Cornwell gave us Hitler’s Pope, and Michael Phayer followed with The Catholic Church and the Holocaust. David Kertzer brought charges against Pius XII in The Popes Against the Jews, and Susan Zuccotti reversed her previous scholarship to pen Under His Very Windows: The Vatican and the Holocaust in Italy. Garry Wills used Pius as the centerpiece for his reformist Papal Sin, as did James Carroll in Constantine’s Sword. So, for that matter, did Daniel Goldhagen when he wrote what proved to be the most extended and straightforward assault on Catholicism in decades: A Moral Reckoning: The Role of the Catholic Church in the Holocaust and Its Unfulfilled Duty of Repair.
Unfortunately, you would never guess it from the publicity material his publisher, Free Press, issued to reviewers. Godman is carefully identified as “an atheist,” lest anyone think he has a personal stake in exonerating Catholicism—but the press release begins by denying that he is, in fact, doing anything other than denouncing the Church. “Finally,” it opens (and, oh, that telling, breathless “finally”: Yes, finally!), “the full story of the Catholic Church and its connection to the Nazis can be told—thanks to the historic opening of the Vatican’s most secret and controversial archives. Ever since 1542, the Catholic Church’s secretive office known as the Roman Inquisition has been its most feared, and one of its most powerful as the organization responsible for all matters concerning Catholic faith and morals. It was this committee of cardinals that was charged with formulating church policy toward the Nazis in the 1930s. Records of the Inquisition concerning the Nazis have been kept at the highest grade of papal secrecy, breach of which entails excommunication, until now.”
Until now, you understand. Until now! It would be funny—in fact, it is funny, although one feels a little guilty quoting a publisher’s press release against an author, just as one tries not to blame professors for the notes their students take in class—but the publicists at Free Press are not responding to nothing. They’re trying to sell a book, and they have correctly grasped the public consensus that has been formed over the last few years.
There was a curious moment during the exchanges about A Moral Reckoning in which Daniel Goldhagen appeared to admit that he had gotten the details wrong, but the point remained untouched. At one level, that makes no sense: He was writing an argumentative essay, after all, and if his evidence fails, so must his conclusion. But at another level, it makes perfect sense. However successfully the reviewers refuted the Pope’s detractors, the sum of all those well-publicized attacks, from Cornwell on, has had a tremendous impact on what people think—the tropes they use, the pictures they form, the things journalists think they can get away with saying, the images pundits believe will prove useful when they wish to strafe a particular target.
In the public mind at the present moment, there’s almost nothing bad you can’t say about Pius XII. The Vatican may end up declaring him a saint—the slow process of canonization has been winding its way through the Roman curia since the mid-1960s—but the general public has gradually been persuaded that Pius ranks somewhere among the greatest villains ever to walk the earth. Nearly every crime of the twentieth century seems to be laid at this man’s feet. Disapprove of the war in Vietnam? Well, according to a Ft. Lauderdale newspaper, Pius XII was “the main inspirer and prosecutor” of that war. Hate racism? An article in 2002 painted him as a slavering racist who mocked the Moroccan soldiers fighting for the Free French. Another had the young Pacelli denouncing black American soldiers for “routinely raping German women and children” after World War I.
Worse, he signed for the Vatican a hitherto-unknown “secret pact” with *bleep* Germany in the 1930s. The Catholic hierarchy has suppressed all copies, so nobody knows what it said, but it must have been bad—although it scarcely seems necessary, since (a French author assured us in 1996) the Vatican and Germany began secretly working together all the way back in 1914 to bring about a German domination of Europe. Perhaps it doesn’t matter that this contradicts other theories floating around these days: that Pius XII was secretly working with Mussolini to achieve an Italian domination of Europe, for instance, or that he was secretly plotting with hard-line anti-Soviets to make the Protestant United States and Great Britain the world’s great powers. The point is that there is simply no depravity one can put past the man. He suppressed the anti-*bleep* encyclical that Pius XI on his deathbed begged him to release. He was deeply implicated in the German’s massacre of 335 Italians in the Ardeatine Caves. He expressly permitted, even encouraged, the S.S. to round up Rome’s Jews in 1943.
At the root of all this lies the fact that Pius XII was, fundamentally, a follower of Hitler, a genocidal hater of the Jews in his heart and in his mind, and once we recognize him as a *bleep* who somehow escaped punishment at the Nuremberg trials, we can see the origin of all the rest. He was Hitler’s Pope, in the title of John Cornwell’s book. The Holocaust happened Under His Very Windows, in the title of Susan Zuccotti’s. Pius XII represents the highest pitch of Papal Sin, in Garry Wills’ title. Modern times is defined by The Popes Against the Jews, in David Kertzer's—and just so nobody misses the point, the drawing on the dust jacket of Michael Phayer's book features a *bleep* with whip and a Catholic priest standing on the body of a Holocaust victim.
Meanwhile, the Times of London named him “a war criminal” in 1999. The next year the television program 60 Minutes insisted there was “absolutely” no difference between the writings of Pius and the writings of Hitler. Daniel Goldhagen called him a “*bleep* collaborator” who “tacitly and sometimes materially aided in mass murder”—which was relatively mild compared to Goldhagen’s other description of the Pope as a willing servant of “the closest human analogue to the Antichrist” and a man whose Church’s two-thousand-year history is nothing but preparation for the Holocaust’s slaughter of the Jews.
Forget the often-denounced “silence of Pius XII” about the Holocaust. Pacelli didn’t just accept Hitler; he loved the *bleep* leader and agreed with him about everything. Did you know that shortly after World War I he gave the starving Adolf Hitler money because he so much approved the young man’s ideas? (This, by the way, is from a book that also reveals how Pius XII was merely the puppet of his Vatican housekeeper, Sister Pascalina.) Perhaps avarice to increase Vatican finances is what made him force reluctant Swiss banks to confiscate Jewish accounts. But only enduring belief in *bleep* ideas can explain why Pius was the chief funder and organizer of the Ratline that helped hunted Gestapo agents escape to South America after Hitler’s defeat.
Regardless, the Pope was manifestly an anti-Semite of the first water—John Cornwell declared his views “of the kind that Julius Streicher would soon offer the German public in every issue of his notorious *bleep* newspaper Der Stürmer”—except when Pius is said to have merely allowed Hitler free rein, accepting the murder of the Jews as the price to be paid for getting Germany to war against the greater menace of the godless Communists in Soviet Russia. These notions are not necessarily contradictory. In a 1997 essay, the widely published Richard L. Rubenstein concluded: “during World War II Pope Pius XII and the vast majority of European Christian leaders regarded the elimination of the Jews as no less beneficial than the destruction of Bolshevism.”
All of these claims are mistaken, of course—and more than mistaken: demonstrably and obviously untrue, outrages upon history and fellow feeling for the humanity of previous generations. But none of them are merely the lurid fantasies of conspiracy-mongers huddled together in paranoia on their Internet lists. Every one of these assertions has been made in recent years by books and articles published with mainstream and popular American publishers.
And when we draw from them their general conclusion—when we reach the point at which Rubenstein, for example, has arrived—then discourse is over. Research into primary sources, argument about interpretation, the scholar’s task of weighing historical circumstances: All of this is quibbling, an attempt to be fair to monstrosity, and by such fairness to condone, excuse, and participate in it. After printing the opening salvo of Goldhagen’s offensive against Catholicism, the publisher of the New Republic announced that Pius XII was, simply and purely, “a wicked man.” And once one has said that, one has said all that needs to be known.
It was here that the Pius War was lost—and lost for what I believe will be at least a generation—despite the victories of the reviewers. The question of “why now?” is an interesting one. Philip Jenkins understands it as not particular to Pius XII at all, but merely a convenient trope by which American commentators express what he calls an entirely new form of anti-Catholicism. Others see it in a continuum of more old-fashioned American distaste for the *bleep* of Babylon that dwells in Rome, spinning Jesuitical plots. Ralph McInerny linked it darkly to contemporary hatred of the Church’s stand against abortion. Noting the predominance of a certain sort of Catholic author in these debates, Justus George Lawler suggested the root lay in a “papaphobia” that has turned against the entire idea of authority. David Dalin argued that it was finally about John Paul II: an intra-Catholic fight over the future of the papacy, with the Holocaust merely the biggest club around for opponents of the current pope to use against his supporters.
All of these are quite interesting. None are quite persuasive. What the real cause may be, I cannot decide for myself. But it is into a world of public and scholarly opinion formed by books like Hitler’s Pope that every new attempt to consider the issue must enter. Relatively mild efforts to praise the Pope (such as José Sánchez’s Pius XII and the Holocaust in 2002), like relatively mild criticism (such as Martin Rhonheimer’s November 2003 essay in First Things), are as clueless about the situation in which they appear as the proverbial visitors from Mars. Indeed, there is something willful and maddening in their tone of Olympian detachment. In a world of imbalance, what but pressure on the other side can restore the balance that a true scholar is supposed to love? I am convinced that we will not achieve anything resembling historical accuracy until all present views have been cleared away—and thus, that the job for every honest writer who takes up the topic now is to correct the slander of Pius XII.
I did not always think so. A minor member of the chattering classes, I entered the Pius War in 2000 with an essay that was far from an exoneration of the Pope. Attempting to strike a balance (the voice of sweet reason and evenhandedness is always easier for a writer to cobble up than the reality), I suggested in an article for Crisis magazine that perhaps no one could have been expected to do better than Pius XII, but, even so, what he did was not enough when faced with World War II and the Holocaust.
And there I left it. Although the continued flow of books attacking the Pope began to annoy me, they even more began to bore me, and I refused to commission a review of any of them for the Weekly Standard, the magazine at which I work. But one day, I bumped into the historian and rabbi David Dalin on the street in Washington, D.C. Over coffee, he mentioned that he had been reading John Cornwell and Susan Zuccotti, and although it wasn’t precisely his field—and, anyway, he’d never thought particularly well of Pius XII—there was something about these books he didn’t trust: some manifest desire to find guilt whether it was there or not, some adventitious and hungry tone that put his teeth on edge.
And at that point, there on M Street, I had an idea. It occurred to me that if a scholarly American reader like David Dalin was feeling this way, then probably others were beginning to as well. A neoconservative and center-right publication, the Weekly Standard is widely read by the pundit class in New York and Washington, and so I commissioned David to write an omnibus review of the enormous set of new books on Pius. What weekly magazine editors want, more than anything else, is to get out just enough ahead of opinion that it looks as though they’re leading the parade, giving first expression to an idea inchoate but building among readers. Moreover, I imagined the vast majority of neoconservative commentators—together with neoliberal and center-left, for that matter—would nod in agreement when the review appeared.
Events proved me wrong. More prescient than I in understanding where the debate was actually going, David Dalin grew more furious the more he read in the popular books. Eventually he turned in an essay that went far beyond any claim I had been willing to make. Published in February 2001, it concluded that Pius XII deserves recognition among Jews as a Righteous Gentile who saved hundreds of thousands of lives during the Holocaust.
The reaction, in the arena I had hoped to influence, was brutal, and the Weekly Standard found itself leading the parade only in the sense that a man running for his life leads the mob pursuing him. Judith Shulevitz of the New York Times responded in the way I had supposed most would, writing a piece for the New York Times Book Review that grumbled a little but eventually concluded the claims about Pius XII were overwrought and Dalin was basically right: the Pope did “more than most to shelter Jews.”
But the center-left New Republic immediately commissioned Daniel Goldhagen to interrupt the book he was writing and
savage Pius XII instead—which he did in what is said to be the longest essay ever published in the magazine’s pages. The neoconservative Commentary was so rankled that it did what it would not have done in nearly any other circumstance: it published a long rebuke of the Weekly Standard by a leftist author who had already made many of the same complaints in an article for Christian Century. At a Holocaust symposium the next summer, one conservative editor declared he would never read another word David Dalin wrote—because Pius XII was beyond apology. Curiously, this was the same editor who had told me the year before that my own nuanced defense of the Pope in Crisis seemed exactly the right way to understand the topic. But the momentum of the continuing offensive against Pius was stronger than I had guessed, and in my own journalistic world, David Dalin’s essay served mostly to harden opinion toward exactly the opposite of what I had intended.
In a handful of other worlds—particularly conservative Catholic ones—the essay did quite well. But those were the worlds that hardly needed it. For people of that persuasion, the omnipresent assault on Pius XII drives them toward the worst possibilities for their communities: a dread that rampant anti-Catholicism is shortly to unleash itself upon them, a hunger to flee to small fellowships of the saved and away from the corruption of the public square, an embracing of a self-image as victims, and a belief that a dark cloud rests over the sum of modern times. “Even a Jewish writer—and a rabbi, too—sees the slander for what it is,” they say. And thereby they confirm, for those whom the essay only angered, that David Dalin let himself be used as a Jew to advance a sectarian Catholic agenda (mine, presumably, although my friends have had the courtesy not to say that to my face). And so the whole coil curls up around itself once more, and we get no forwarder.
Perhaps a book that collected the best reviews would help. However large it personally looms, the part played by David and me was small. The attempt to sift through the endless stream of books about Pius XII in recent years was actually carried out by indefatigable reviewers in dozens of magazines and journals, responding to the texts one by one.
The controversy also motivated additional research, and new material now seems to arrive every week. As far as I can tell, all this recent information tells in favor of Pius XII. A recently discovered 1923 letter to the Vatican from Eugenio Pacelli, then nuncio to Germany, for instance, denounces Hitler’s putsch and warns against his anti-Semitism and anti-Catholicism. A document from April 1933, just months after Hitler obtained power, reveals how Pacelli (then secretary of state) ordered the new German nuncio, Cesare Orsenigo, to protest *bleep* actions.
Meanwhile, newly examined diplomatic documents show that in 1937 Cardinal Pacelli warned A. W. Klieforth, the American consul to Berlin, that Hitler was “an untrustworthy scoundrel and fundamentally wicked person,” to quote Klieforth, who also wrote that Pacelli “did not believe Hitler capable of moderation, and . . . fully supported the German bishops in their anti-*bleep* stand.” This was matched with the discovery of Pacelli’s anti-*bleep* report, written the following year for President Roosevelt and filed with Ambassador Joseph Kennedy, which declared that the Church regarded compromise with the Third Reich as “out of the question.”
Archives from American espionage agencies have recently confirmed Pius XII’s active involvement in plots to overthrow Hitler. A pair of newly found letters, written in 1940 on the letterhead of the Vatican’s Secretariat of State, give Pius XII’s orders that financial assistance be sent to Campagna for the explicit purpose of assisting interned Jews suffering from Mussolini’s racial policies. And the Israeli government has finally released Adolf Eichmann’s diaries, portions of which confirm the Vatican’s obstruction of the Nazis’ roundup of Rome’s Jews.
There’s more, a regular flow of new material. Intercepts of *bleep* communications released from the United States’ National Archives include such passages as “Vatican has apparently for a long time been assisting many Jews to escape,” in a *bleep* dispatch from Rome to Berlin on October 26, 1943, ten days after the Germany’s Roman roundup. New oral testimony from such Catholic rescuers as Monsignor John Patrick Carroll-Abbing, Sister Mathilda Spielmann, Father Giacomo Martegani, and Don Aldo Brunacci insists that Pius XII gave them explicit orders and direct assistance to help persecuted Jews in Italy. The posthumous publication this year of Harold Tittmann’s memoir, Inside the Vatican of Pius XII, is particularly interesting, for in it the American diplomat reveals, for the first time, that Pius XII’s wartime conduct drew upon advice from the German resistance.
Out of all this, one might begin to build a new case for Pius XII. My own sense is that the anti-Pius books are coming to an end. Even small academic publishers seem to be tiring of the genre, and the market for such books may have at last dried up. Still, I could be wrong. America seems to have an inexhaustible appetite for books about World War II (especially the military aspects) and a nearly equal appetite for books about the Holocaust. Robert Katz’s recent
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