REVIEW BY PHIL SHANNON
Hitler's Pope: The Secret History of Pius XII
By John Cornwell
Penguin
430 pp, $22 (pb)
The Catholic Church and Nazi Germany
By Guenter Lewy
Da Capo Press
416 pp, $38.95 (pb)
If Pope John Paul II has his way, the next newly minted saint of the Catholic Church will be Eugenio Pacelli. So what's one more glorified mystic of an outdated institution? One that would further discredit a church renowned for its reactionary stance on social and political issues because Pacelli was the wartime pope who made peace between the Vatican and the Nazi regime in Germany. He was Hitler's pope.
Two new books examine the Catholic Church's support of Nazism. John Cornwell turns a spotlight on the pope and Guenter Lewy's re-issued 1964 book focusses on the Catholic Church in Germany. The Catholic Church's hostility to the left, its own institutional self-interest and its patriotism combined with the Nazi state in a sordid alliance of swastika and cross.
Pacelli, who became Pope Pius XII in 1939, had earlier negotiated a concordat (a church-state treaty) with Mussolini's fascist regime in Italy in 1929, and, as a Vatican diplomat, had unsuccessfully pursued a concordat with Germany before striking a deal with Hitler in 1933. In return for securing financial subsidies for the church and the Catholic schools, the Catholic clergy undertook to loyally serve the Nazi state.
Pacelli was obsessed by a fear of the left and he saw anything progressive as the slippery slope to communism and its natural corollary, atheism, based on rationalism and earthly liberation, which would spell the end of religion and the church. A totalitarian fascist state was the only guarantee against "godless communism".
Hitler rightly saw the Concordat with the Vatican as representing papal endorsement of the Nazi regime. Catholic bishops in Germany welcomed the concordat. As long as the deutschmarks came into the church's coffers and schools (which Hitler ensured right through to the end of World War II), then the imprisonment in concentration camps of anti-Nazi political opponents (who were Reds, after all), the persecution of Jews (who were Christ-killers, after all) and the suppression of trade unions, parliamentary democracy and civil rights (all part of the "Red Tide") would go unchallenged.
Indeed, the Catholic Church welcomed, and willingly implemented, those Nazi policies which were in harmony with Catholic church's own anti-Semitism. When a 1.5% quota was introduced for Jews in schools and colleges, Catholic priests supplied "blood purity" information from church marriage and baptism registries to the government. Church records were also used to determine Jewish ancestry for the Nazi policy prohibiting the employment of Jews in the civil service. This assistance to the Nazi state would ultimately connect with the death camps when the price of being a Jew was not just exclusion from education or employment but death.
The partnership of church and state was publicly flaunted. The swastika was displayed on all Catholic churches when it became the German national flag in 1935 and some churches had flown it even before then. Bells were rung in all Catholic churches to celebrate the annexation and conquest of European countries as well as for Hitler's 50th birthday.
Protest from the church was isolated, defiance almost non-existent. When faced with the clinical savagery of the "Final Solution", the pope could only manage tardy, vague and innocuous responses. When the church did speak up on anti-Semitism, its concern was reserved only for Jews who had converted to Catholicism. Two millennia of Christian anti-Semitism, and political conservatism, hardly made it possible for the church to speak out — Jews were "foes of Jesus" in league with "the Bolshevist plot to destroy Christian Europe".
The church also justified its silence on Nazi "excesses", even when directed at the church itself, with the argument that if there were some bad things under the Nazis, it would be worse under Bolshevism. The church protected Nazis, not their victims. Vatican-run buildings in Rome were used as safe houses and escape routes for Croatian Ustasha war criminals and Nazis (including the notorious Klaus Barbie).
The pope's defenders argue that Pacelli's stance was dictated by his "worthy role" as "impartial peace broker" between the warring countries but Pacelli was a lifelong anti-Semite and anti-Red. When Italy was under German military occupation at the end of the war, Hitler encouraged the Vatican's continued "impartiality". As Italy's Jews were rounded up for deportation to the camps, the trucks rumbling past the Vatican itself, the "impartial" pope held his tongue. The commander of the Nazi SS in Italy appreciated the church's silence — "without the support of the church, which has kept the masses quiet, I could not have done my job with such success". Pacelli was more voluble in lobbying for more Nazi police in Rome to thwart the Italian Communist-led anti-fascist resistance.
There were very few exceptions to the church's policy of speaking softly about Nazi crimes against humanity and admonishing them with a feather duster. What could have been achieved with moral principle and political courage was shown in a few isolated instances of protest from pulpit and Catholic laypersons when Hitler was forced to abandon plans for the dissolution of Jewish/"Aryan" marriages by compulsory divorce or deportation, and to discontinue the program of forced euthanasia of people with mental disabilities. Church resistance, however, was not repeated on what the church saw as the "healthy core" of Nazism, policies which were either essential to the war effort (which the patriotic German church supported) or not at odds with Catholic dogma (anti-Semitism, anti-communism). Lewy's book shows how widespread was the desire for cooperation with the Nazis within the church from the leadership of pope, bishops and priests to the laity. This is no surprise because fascism was a mass movement, primarily of the middle class, in Germany. Two million Catholics voted for the Nazis in the 1932 national election. Forty per cent of all Germans, and one quarter of the SS, were Catholics.
Both Cornwell and Lewy are Catholics, appalled at the collaboration between the Catholic Church and the Nazi regime and their books thoroughly examine how Vatican-Nazi relations "have been obscured by extensive mythology". Neither author is a Marxist, however, so their analysis of relationship between Christianity and the capitalist state is only partial.
Christianity emerged as a rebel movement of destitute free poor within the decaying Roman empire. But as its congregations increased in number, its institutional structures became bureaucratised and possessors of enormous amounts of social wealth. In feudal Europe the Catholic Church owned a third of the land and was the largest single exploiter of serf labour.
Long before Adolph Hilter's regime, the Catholic Church preached obedience to Caesars of all stripes. The church-Nazi deal, in which the pope and German bishops called for and got obedience and faithful service to Fatherland and Fuhrer, was a logical outcome of the church's historical transformation from a rebellious movement of the poor into an ossified defender of the power and privileges of the rich.
The historical quid pro quo was state protection of the church's material interests. Lewy comes closest to raising this issue — "the logic of 2,000 years of the Church putting its own institutional survival foremost" — though neither Lewy nor Cornwell dwell on the church's interest in protecting its enormous tax-exempt wealth and its bureaucracy of professional clergy as a factor in its decision not to antagonise the Nazi regime.
Both authors also give the impression that it was only the German Catholic Church that fell from an otherwise admirable standard of Christian behaviour. The Protestant religions in Germany, however, also reached a similar church-Nazi deal, and although the Catholic Church in the capitalist democracies took a more forthright stand against the Nazis, this was only possible because such a stand was part of a broader patriotic campaign against a foreign enemy and did not require action against their own states.
Lewy argues that "specifically German conditions" resulted in the German church's nationalism, patriotism, loyalty to the state, anti-communism and institutional self-interest yet these were essential characteristics of all Catholic and other Christian churches globally and it is reasonable to conclude that, if fascism had come to power in other countries, all churches would have behaved very much in these countries as they did in Germany, Italy and Austria.
Both books convincingly show that the Catholic Church shares responsibility for the crimes of Nazism. If "God's representative on Earth" has his way and neo-Nazis find themselves able to pray to Saint Pacelli, swastika and cross will join forces again.