Hitler’s Pope: The Secret History of Pius XII by John Cornwell (New York: Viking, 1999).

The Roman who first identified the Catholic Church as the cause of his troubles likely had no idea he was sounding a theme that would outlive the Sybil’s own prophecies. Antagonism for the Church has echoed throughout the West’s history, from the days when the dynasties of Rome’s western invaders struggled with the popes over Arianism, through the long Medieval conflict over the investiture of bishops, to the claims of intellectuals like Gibbon, Voltaire, Twain, and Marx. Every age seems to have its own version of what Leo XIII called the “hackneyed reproach of old date””—that the Church is “”wholly unable to afford help in spreading that welfare and progress which justly and naturally are sought after by every well-regulated State.””1 The modern era has its own list of grievances, amply displayed in John Cornwell’s book, Hitler’s Pope: The Secret History of Pius XII. Through the life of Eugenio Pacelli (who became Pope Pius XII in 1939), Cornwell purports to show his readers that Catholicism’s way of living in, and thinking about, the world is hospitable to atrocity, indifferent to the welfare of non-Catholics, and inimical to man’s legitimate aspirations to social justice and a spiritually consoling sex life. It is an intriguing attempt, written in a compelling style that cordially invites the reader to overlook its numerous and basic lapses in judgment, accuracy, method, and rational coherence.

“”Modern”” Catholicism

It is difficult to frame a comprehensive indictment of such an ancient and universal organization as the Catholic Church. The line of her popes predates the founding of any present government by centuries, even millennia. Her theologians have held their own with every school of man’s thought from Plato’s Academy to Wittgentstein’s Cambridge. The history of Western architecture is traced in her churches, the history of Western art is largely written by her patronage or condemnation. The development of law can be found, in large measure, in Justinian’s Code, the gathering of Catholic nobles at Runnymeade, and the writings of Suarez and Bellarmine. The Church has operated within, and taught about, economies dominated by barter, fiefs, guilds, and multinational corporations. The Church’s historical endurance is not merely a Catholic boast, as Macaulay’s words attest:

She saw the commencement of all the governments and of all the ecclesiastical establishments that now exist in the world; and we feel no assurance that she is not destined to see the end of them all. She was great and respected before the Saxon had set foot on Britain, before the Frank had passed the Rhine, when Grecian eloquence still flourished at Antioch, when idols were still worshiped in the temple of Mecca. And she may still exist in undiminished vigour when some traveler from New Zealand shall, in the midst of a vast solitude, take his stand on a broken arch of London Bridge to sketch the ruins of St. Paul’s.2

Lord Macaulay’s observation brings the problem into sharp relief. A comprehensive indictment of the Church must account for a great deal of time and history; the broader the indictment, the more difficult it is to keep intact. If, as Twain contended, the Church oppresses the spirit of man, why have oppressive regimes sought to destroy it? If, as Gibbon claimed, the Church subverts the social order, why have absolutists like Phillip II and Franco protected it? No, indictments of a universal Church cannot succeed unless they are universal themselves. Otherwise, one only need fetch a contradictory example to crumble the indictment into a claim that certain clerics acted badly rather than a serious argument that the Church is bad per se.

Unfortunately, Cornwell opens his book with an embarrassing attempt to moot this problem by abandoning all of the Church’s history before the First Vatican Council in 1870. His reason is that the Council clearly interrupted Catholic history and created a new Church dedicated to what he variously calls “”summitry,”” “”centralism,”” or “”the modern ideology of papal power.”” In this system, the Pope “”rules the Church in a vastly unequal power relationship”” that did not exist until “”the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.””3 This would have come as news to Pope St. Zosimus, who proclaimed in A.D. 418 that the power of ecclesiastical discipline descends from St. Peter, whose place and name are held by the reigning pope, who has “”such great authority that no one can dare to retract”” from his decisions.4 It would have surprised Pope Nicholas I, who wrote in A.D. 865 that “”[n]either by Augustus, nor by all the clergy, nor by religious, nor by the people will the judge be judged…. The first seat will not be judged by anyone…the judgment of the Apostolic See, of whose authority there is none greater, is to be refused by no one.””5 It would have stunned Martin Luther, whose preaching was often consumed by cries against the tyranny of the pope. The very document which Cornwell takes as the constitution of an historically unprecedented church, Vatican I’s Dogmatic Constitution on the Church of Christ, quotes numerous and even bolder assertions from churchmen throughout history, all of whom claim that Christ’s Church is governed by the Pope in a vastly unequal power relationship.

Cornwell’s rush to sever the Catholic Church of Pacelli’s day from anything which had gone before is apparent in his discussion of the Code of Canon Law promulgated in 1917. Pacelli was one of its principal authors, and Cornwell overstates himself by repeatedly claiming that changes in the Code demonstrate a radical difference between the Church of Innocent III and the centralized, authoritative Church of modern times. Cornwell spends a good deal of time explaining how the Code’s reservation of episcopal nominations to the Holy See is unprecedented, and how this concentrated enormous power in the hands of the Pope. Fair enough, except that he appears to believe that before 1917 the selection of bishops was entirely a local affair with which the pope had nothing to do. It is true that the nomination of bishops before 1917 was governed by a hodge-podge of rules and arrangements which varied from country to country. But the Vatican’s profound involvement in the both the nomination and selection processes, as well as the ancient law that no person could be invested in a see without the express approval of the Pope, indicates that the contrast is far less stark than Cornwell believes.

In fact, Cornwell’s insistent focus on the newness of papal primacy has compelled him to condense the thousand-year investiture controversy into a peaceful nineteenth-century movement of modern and increasingly secular nations to voluntarily abandon their role in episcopal selection. Any schoolboy knows the famous story of Pope Gregory VII’s excommunication of King Henry IV in 1076 and its vivid portrait of the king shivering in the snows outside the Pope’s residence, making his penance in the hope that the anathema would be lifted. Henry IV was excommunicated for repeatedly appointing bishops without papal leave. Reforms and recodifications of canon law, each of them giving the papacy more control over the episcopacy, were a feature of the time. Pacelli’s involvement with canon law is not unique. It is but one example of a trend which began a thousand years before when Cardinal Hildebrand, the future Pope Gregory VII, spent twenty-three years preparing changes in canon law designed to eliminate secular interference with episcopal selection and to strengthen the authority of the papacy, a vast work which culminated in Gratian’s Decretals. Cornwell’s enthusiasm for a “”golden age”” of decentralized episcopal selection seems entirely uninformed by the problems which plagued that method throughout the middle ages: problems like simony, factionalism within dioceses, and the multiplication of benefices. Cornwell does his readers a gross disservice by suggesting that the process of episcopal selection may be neatly divided into good democratic and bad autocratic periods by the institution of the 1917 Code.

As happens frequently in the book, Cornwell’s awareness of what he may not know tempts him to utter equivocations that end up adding more irritation than illumination. In his discussion of the “”new”” doctrine of papal primacy, for example, he inserts a word or two about the centralizing tendencies of “”modern means of communication”” as an element of the new Church, as though papal supremacy is less a matter of Catholic principle than the proliferation of telegraph wires. Cornwell makes another, more relevant equivocation when he briefly purports to limit his thesis to papal primacy as we have known it within living memory. Passing the dubious inclusion of 1870 “”within living memory,”” Cornwell doesn’t give any account of why the principles of papal primacy outlined by centuries of popes somehow differ from the principle known to living memory. Cornwell’s book attempts to critically examine the Church through the lens of one life, lived during the same era as Vatican I (Pacelli was born in 1876). Allowing the “”ideology of papal power”” to embrace an earlier time would raise more questions that Cornwell is prepared to address, and might even vitiate his thesis that the Church’s malice is only a modern phenomenon that is mirrored in Pacelli’s life.

Still, Cornwell has no objections to the past, so long as it provides information that bolsters his theory that “”Hitler’s Pope”” exemplified the anti-Semitic nature of the Church. He gives numerous examples of Catholic anti-Semitism during the late Roman, medieval, Renaissance, and early-modern eras. (The Bishop of Mainz calling St. Bernard to preach against a pogrom is not among them).

He concludes that Catholicism’s hatred of Jews was so virulent, and formed so early, that “”[i]t may well be asked why the Christians did not exterminate all Jews in this early period of the Christian Empire.””6 Indeed. This is the chief question which ought to be answered if Cornwell wishes to convince us that Catholicism perpetually teeters on the brink of a genocidal abyss. But Cornwell gives no fuller explanation than his depiction of papal primacy as an invention of the nineteenth century. There is little logic in this assertion, even if it were true. The institutional locus of a decision is not the same thing as the decision itself; democracies and monarchies have variously succumbed to, and defied, anti-Semitism.

Cornwell gives us no reason to believe that “”papal summitry”” requires anti-Semitism; the possibility of their being different seems never to have occurred to him. Cornwell does not give us Acton’s critique of absolute power by arguing that papal summitry freed Catholicism to vent its anti-Semitic heart. But then, Acton’s critique would not serve Cornwell’s purpose. It would lessen, perhaps even eliminate, the importance Cornwell’s own theory. The examination of a Church whose members inevitably long for the physical extermination of the Jewish people would involve far more than tracing administrative flow-charts and quibbling over canon law. Cornwell’s apparent inability to notice such fundamental questions should strongly caution the reader against regarding his anti-papal stand as anything more than a fixation on Vatican I enlarged beyond reason by the fallacy post hoc, ergo propter hoc.

Did the Papacy Start World War I?

Remaining undeterred by the dimly perceived existence of earlier centuries, Cornwell insists that the 1917 Code of Canon Law is the masterwork of “”papal summitry,”” the primary vehicle and motive for all the ills that have plagued the Church during this century. Cornwell’s willingness to attribute any calamity to the papacy and the Code of Canon Law knows no bounds. For example, by 1914 Pacelli was an undersecretary in the Vatican’s Secretariat of State. Cornwell claims Pacelli was single-handedly “”choreographing”” negotiations for a concordat between the Holy See and Serbia which would eliminate Austria-Hungary’s old rights to intervene on behalf of Serbian Catholics. The concordat was rendered necessary by—of course—the 1917 Code, whose centralizing provisions demanded the readjustment of the Vatican’s relationship to the states of Europe. Cornwell then mixes papal summitry, the Code, and Pacelli into a toxic compound responsible for the First World War. The reason? The concordat was signed four days before Archduke Franz Ferdinand was assassinated. Since the concordat’s repeal of Austria’s right to protect Serbian Catholics was perceived as an insult by Austrian nationalists, the concordat added the final measure of anti-Serbian anger needed to goad Austria into issuing its fatal ultimatum to Serbia.

Cornwell’s handling of the Serbian concordat is another example of his ability to fixate on the papacy to the exclusion of the world. He writes that the episode reveals how Pacelli conducted Vatican diplomacy: with no awareness of its power to complicate and disrupt international tensions. It is difficult to look past his elegant prose, encountered while one is still reeling from learning that Eugenio Pacelli caused the Great War, to the mundane commonplace it states. Diplomacy carries risks, whether conducted by princes of the Church or Harvard graduates. The servants of a Church whose diplomatic tradition can be said to have begun when Leo I met Attila could hardly have been unaware of this fact. Cornwell’s narrative shows that his papal fixation and its attendant historical myopia operate within centuries as well as between them. His version of the war’s outbreak does not mention imperialism, the realpolitik of interlocking European alliances, the Austro-Russian rivalry for influence in the Balkans, the quest for Serbian independence, or any other cause which may have contributed (however slightly) to the eruption of hostilities. None of this seems to matter in Cornwell’s circular thinking, which finds the cause of almost any twentieth-century tragedy in “”the ideology of papal power”” because “”the ideology of papal power”” caused almost all of the twentieth-century’s tragedies.

The Pure White Wraith

Cornwell’s personal portrait of Pacelli is also deeply impoverished, afflicted by rash judgments and a monotonous use of weird and ethereal overtones deployed to alienate Pacelli, who is called a “”pure white wraith,”” from any sympathy the reader might wish to extend. Cornwell’s pen gives us a portrait of Pacelli at his coronation, “”ascetic face bloodless as parchment, his huge deep-set eyes gazing lugubriously out upon the faithful, look[ing] for all the world like a demigod.””7 In Pacelli’s approval of the lodgings provided by the German government during his 1917 visit to the country, Cornwell finds “”beady-eyed alertness to appropriate levels of deference.””8 It is strongly hinted that Pacelli’s own piety was fake: “”the poses he struck in prayer put one in mind of a saint in a stained-glass window.””9 Cornwell never hesitates to dwell on anything which might suggest (however incorrectly) that Pacelli was self-indulgent and ostentatious. We are told several times that Pacelli rode in horse-drawn carriages—without being reminded that he was born in the age of horse-drawn transportation—and Cornwell tells us that when Pacelli, as papal nuncio sent to Berlin to foster peace negotiations in 1917, ate lunch with Kaiser Wilhelm II the lunch was attended by various princes. Anyone familiar with Germany during the Second Reich would know she had more “”various princes”” than Ziegfield had Follies Girls. But Cornwell routinely lards his narrative with such gossipy tidbits to give an impression of opulence that is often unwarranted.

Was Pacelli an Anti-Semite?

Most of the ballyhoo around Hitler’s Pope focused on the “”undeniable”” evidence of anti-Semitism it exposed in Pacelli’s character. Surprisingly, the evidence is scant, one might even say illusory. Perhaps Cornwell realizes as much, because he again offers one of his irritating equivocations. While insisting that the new material he has uncovered undeniably proves Pacelli was an anti-Semite, Cornwell tells us that Pacelli’s antipathy to Jews was “”secret.””10 How, exactly, does one go about displaying a secret antipathy? Or, for that matter, how does a historian go about proving its existence? And if Pacelli’s life displayed it, why does Cornwell claim it was hidden until he penetrated the Vatican archives to dig up the supposedly damning evidence? Some of the “”strongest”” evidence for Pacelli’s racist anti-Semitism comes only from Cornwell’s suspicion of anything having to do with Pacelli. For example, Cornwell recounts the virulently anti-Semitic writing published in some Roman newspapers during the Dreyfuss affair and—noting that Pacelli was a priest in Rome during that time—archly speculates that churchmen were bound to have been influenced by those articles, even though we have no idea whether Pacelli ever read the articles.

Suspicions aside, Cornwell offers only two pieces of significant evidence that Pacelli held anti-Semitic views amenable to Nazi racial policies. In the fall of 1917, while serving in the Secretariat of State, Pacelli rebuffed a request for Pope Benedict XV to pressure the Italian government into allowing a shipment of palm fronds into Germany for a celebration of the Feast of Tabernacles. Cornwell states there is no plausible explanation for this event other than Pacelli’s anti-Semitism, which caused him to recoil at the idea of helping German Jews. Cornwell’s own narrative provides, in disjointed fashion, one or two facts which suggest another explanation. Italy was at war with Germany. Due to Italy’s conquest of the Papal States and the resulting hostility that was to last until the Lateran Treaty of 1929, the Vatican did not even have diplomatic relations with Italy. During this time, the Vatican’s efforts to promote peace negotiations encountered Italian antipathy and suspicion (later proved incorrect) that the Pope wanted to use the opportunity to regain the Papal States.

Moreover, Cornwell does not record that Benedict XV had proposed another peace plan in August, 1917, which drew favorable reactions from the British and the Austrians. Germany’s reply was inconclusive, noting mostly that the United States continued to demand the replacement of the German government as the price for peace. Nor does Cornwell relate that other peace initiatives were being made. All of these facts might have counseled diplomatic reticence to grant a request that the Vatican pressure the Italian government into acting on behalf of citizens whose nation was waging war on Italy.

Cornwell also mockingly refers to Pacelli’s own explanation—namely, that the request did not seek the general kind of aid required by natural or civil rights, but instead asked for positive assistance in non-Christian worship—as a thin tissue of excuses which cannot conceal his hatred of Jews. The inability of Catholics to participate or assist non-Catholic, or non-Christian, worship is usually misunderstood in this fashion. It is surprising that Cornwell, a self-professed Catholic, would have no understanding of the restraints. Assisi lay eighty years in the future, and even those meetings make a distinction between the members of Christian and non-Christian faiths praying together and praying with one another. By the disciplinary standards of the time, applicable to any non-Christian religion, Pacelli’s concern was quite correct and based on something which cannot be so blithely identified as anti-Semitism. All in all, the allegation appears to say more about the kind of anecdotes Cornwell will accept as proof of a great evil than whether Pius XII was a racist.

The only other piece of evidence is a letter in which Pacelli recounts some dealings with German revolutionaries in Munich after the war’s end. The revolutionaries had seized hostages and were regularly trespassing onto protected diplomatic enclaves. By common agreement among the foreign diplomats in Munich, Pacelli sent Monsignor Schioppa to speak with the revolutionaries’ leader and obtain a promise to recognize the inviolability of foreign diplomats and their residences. Pacelli’s account of Schioppa’s meeting remarks that the revolutionaries were unkempt and their behavior chaotic, and uses phrases such as “”a gang of young women, Jews like all the rest of them…. Levein’s [the leader of the gang] mistress, a young Russian woman, a Jew and a divorcee…. Levein is…also Russian and a Jew. Pale, dirty, with drugged eyes, hoarse voice, vulgar, repulsive, with a face that is both intelligent and sly.”” Cornwell pronounces judgment: Pacelli has adopted the belief, later held by the Nazis, that Bolshevism is a Jewish plot. His “”repeated references to the Jewishness of these individuals, amid the catalogue of epithets describing their physical and moral repulsiveness,”” proves that Pacelli’s mind was mired in “”stereotypical anti-Semitic contempt.””11

#page#

Most historians or journalists would find it difficult to judge a life by two paragraphs in a long letter containing one man’s account of another man’s impressions. One might as well try to establish Cornwell’s character by talking with someone who had met someone who had met Cornwell. Moreover, Cornwell does not even attempt to address the plausible view that Pacelli’s letter was produced under the same cultural limits that distinguish, for example, the dons at Cambridge University during the 1920s from Nazi stormtroopers. Perhaps these concerns are the motive for yet another of Cornwell’s irritating spasms of equivocation. After identifying Pacelli’s letter with Nazi claims that Bolshevism was a Jewish plot and with Nazism’s later racist imagery for Jews, Cornwell inserts a phrase to the effect that Paceilli’s words only give an “”appearance”” of anti-Semitism. Still, in the rest of the book Cornwell uses this letter as absolute proof that Pacelli was a racist, Jew-hating bigot.

Mishandling Sources

Cornwell’s account of Pacelli’s dealings with the Kaiser introduces us to another flaw in the book: namely, Cornwell’s eagerness to abandon critical judgment whenever he is tempted by sources favorable to his thesis. A mainstay of Cornwell’s narrative is his claim that Pacelli’s human sympathies were obscured by his habit of seeing the world from the standpoint of an ambitious, ethereal demigod, a man fascinated by papal power as good in and of itself, without any need to care about the practical impact of power on real men and women. In researching Pacelli’s peace mission to Germany, Cornwell was confronted by two different accounts of a lunch arranged for Kaiser Wilhelm II and Pacelli by Germany’s Chancellor, Theobald von Bethmann-Hollweg. Cornwell picks the account which gives the most support to his staple theme that Pacelli’s commitment to papal centralism obliterated his human sympathies; he appears to have picked it for that reason alone.

Pacelli’s account of the meeting is mundane. He records the Kaiser giving a rambling and disjointed monologue featuring justifications for Germany’s having joined and prosecuted the war; complaints about the Allies; discourses on Germany’s legitimate geopolitical aspirations; and a plea that the Catholic Church and the Prussian army join to form a solid front against Germany’s internal and external enemies. The Kaiser, on the other hand, tells us that it was Pacelli who always saw obstacles to peace, and had to be stirred by the Kaiser’s magnificent words. When Pacelli caviled at unilateral diplomatic actions which might provoke Italian nationalists to forcibly resist the Vatican’s peace initiatives, the Kaiser had to steel Pacelli for the task by asking a rhetorical question: “”Was I now to believe that [Christ’s] Viceroy on earth was afraid of becoming a martyr, like his Lord, in order to bring peace to the bleeding world; all on account of the ragged Roman [rabble]? I, the Protestant thought much too highly of the Roman priesthood—particularly the pope—to believe such a thing.””12 Fortunately, the Kaiser says, he was able to put hope in Pacelli’s breast. The nuncio grabbed the Kaiser’s hand and exclaimed, eyes bright with tears, complete agreement with Wilhelm.

Pacelli’s account of this meeting is contained in his contemporaneous diplomatic reports; the Kaiser’s memoirs appeared in the 1920s. Cornwell believes the latter account because it was “”apparently”” written from contemporaneous notes. If it isn’t clear whether they relay contemporaneous notes, then what other reasons can we have for accepting Wilhelm’s account over Pacelli’s? Cornwell mentions the existence of other accounts, but does not bother to use them to support either version, although he has every reason to make that comparison. Wilhelm’s instability of character and his willingness to dress himself up (literally and figuratively) in the best possible light are well known to any student of Imperial Germany. The Kaiser’s turbulent and contradictory relations with Bismarck and the British royal family, the ludicrous “”Willy/Nicky”” correspondence between him and Tsar Nicholas II, would each suffice to rebuke such an unquestioning and favorable belief in Wilhelm’s probity, seriousness, or distaste for self-flattering narratives in which he plays the savior’s role. Cornwell’s own portrait of Pacelli, the self-disciplined and meticulous functionary whose “”beady-eyed alertness”” weighs even the political implications of his hotel rooms, gives us more reason to accept his account over the Kaiser’s. But Cornwell leaps over these valid concerns by insisting that the Kaiser’s version is more believable.

It cannot be denied that the Kaiser’s account is more useful for Cornwell’s thesis. Pacelli appears as the burgeoning worldly dictator, concerned only with the practical compromises that attend the exercise of power. Cornwell uses the Kaiser’s supposed peroration about the pope’s unique role in world peace, as well as asides about Germany’s role as Europe’s bulwark against Communism (the October Revolution was months in the future), to suggest that Pacelli had finally found the synthesis of ambition and detached spirituality which was to dominate Pacelli’s life and motivate his complicity in Hitler’s policies. The Kaiser’s rhetorical question serves a neatly prophetic role in Cornwell’s narrative, foreshadowing his belief that Pacelli’s ambition, hostility to Communism, and anti-Semitism combined to support his reluctance to risk martyrdom for Germany’s Jews. So the Kaiser’s memoirs must be credible; they’re too good to pass up. Unfortunately, this is not the only time the book suffers from such lapses.

The Reich Concordat

In 1930, Pacelli was made a Cardinal and appointed the Vatican’s Secretary of State. Three years later, he negotiated a Concordat between the Vatican and the Nazi government (the “”Reich Concordat””). The Concordat is the centerpiece of Hitler’s Pope. It is presented as the culmination of Pacelli’s dream of papal supremacy which caused him to betray Germany’s Catholics by forcing them—via the Concordat’s terms—to cooperate with Nazism’s genocidal policies, even as Pacelli gave Hitler free reign to destroy German Catholic communities, political institutions, and social organizations. As occurs with his treatment of so many topics, Cornwell’s analysis is flawed by basic factual errors, fuzzy analysis, and a refusal to seriously consider the situation at hand.

For example, Cornwell contends that the Concordat was Hitler’s very first international treaty, a precious milestone sought eagerly by Hitler in order to strengthen his regime’s legitimacy. This is untrue. Hitler’s “”very first”” international treaty was the “”four powers pact”” he signed months earlier with Britain, France, and Italy. If Hitler needed an international treaty to bolster his legitimacy, he didn’t need to dicker with the Vatican for one. Also, Cornwell claims Hitler wanted the Concordat because the Vatican’s 1929 Lateran Treaty with Mussolini had not only established normal relations between Italy and the Vatican since the loss of the Papal States in 1870, but also “”established the semblance of an unprecedented integration of Catholicism and the corporate [totalitarian] state.””13 This is yet another of Cornwell’s irritating equivocations. What is the reader to understand by this phrasing? Is the reader supposed to think the Lateran Treaty merely “”established a semblance”” of an “”unprecedented integration”” without actually creating an “”unprecedented integration””? Is the reader supposed to conclude that this “”integration,”” whose extent or scope is not described, is unprecedented because it actually changed something or because it only appeared to have changed something? Or is the reader supposed to swallow the blatant claim that the Church had become an integral part of European fascism without noticing?

The effect of this tendentious innuendo is compounded by Cornwell’s inability to think critically about what concordats actually mean. He insists that concordats are like Church-issued certificates of wholesomeness which require Catholics to abandon any thought of disputing with a regime blessed by such an agreement and which signal the Church’s approval of anything the regime is doing, or may do, in future. Thus, Cornwell writes sweepingly that the Reich Concordat imposed a moral duty on Catholics to obey the Nazis. But he curiously admits that the Holy See has always signed treaties with monarchs and governments inimical to its beliefs. Indeed, such treaties have been signed in hopes that they might protect the religious rights of Catholics, just as the Lateran Treaty and the Reich Concordat obliged Italy and Germany to respect Catholic schools and rescind decrees abolishing Catholic organizations.

Few would argue that the Vatican’s concordat with Napoleon expressed its approbation for his rape of Europe, or that the establishment of diplomatic relations between the Holy See and the United States in 1984 constitutes “”the semblance of an unprecedented integration of Catholicism and abortion rights.”” From St. Paul’s preaching obedience to Nero, through Westphalia’s dictum, cuius regio eius religio, to Pacelli’s own day, the Church has always maintained that “”[t]he right to rule is not…bound up with any special mode of government.””14 The Church has never been dogmatically concerned with the political mechanisms by which a government is established or perpetuated. Nor has she ever obliged the faithful to disobey, resist, or overthrow civil authority on legal, as opposed to moral, grounds: “”The one only reason which men have for not obeying [civil authority] is when anything is demanded of them which is openly repugnant to the natural or the divine law, for it is equally unlawful to command to do anything in which the law of nature or the will of God is violated.””15 In such a theology, treaties with the Vatican cannot possibly have the power Cornwell gives to the Reich Concordat.

 The Reich Concordat was signed in the first year of Hitler’s regime. It was signed two years before the Nuremberg Laws, five years before Kristallnacht, six years before the outbreak of World War II, and nine years before the Wannsee Conference. Hitler was supported by a majority coalition in the Reichstag, and the Enabling Act had already made him the undisputed Führer of Germany. Even Cornwell is forced to admit that Nazi policies toward the German Church in the early 1930s never amounted to a new Kulturkampf. But he insists that the Vatican ought to have foregone an agreement over concerns about the Reich’s constitutionality or possible future actions, or over a dubious principle by which the Vatican’s recognition grants a regime a “”blank check”” on the Catholic conscience.

Cornwell makes no effort to examine this contention in light of either Church teaching or common sense. His claims for the Reich Concordat’s status in Catholic thinking would require the Church to sever contact with virtually every government on earth and, by converse application, require Catholics to deny in word and deed the legitimacy of those governments. Cornwell offers us nothing to justify such drastic measures as a matter of Catholic theology or practical politics and, more to the point, he does not even consider whether any facts known in 1933 would have recommended such a policy with respect to Germany. The frequency with which he repeats his questionable assertions causes one to wonder whether he believes that the evil we now recognize in the names “”Mussolini”” and “”Hitler”” obviate any need to ask if legitimate concerns and reasonable aims could have prompted the Vatican to make agreements with them.

Cornwell also fails to give adequate thought to his suggestion that morals and reason obliged the Vatican to leave matters to the Catholic Center Party and the German bishops—to resist and, perhaps, defeat Hitler. While his narrative leaves no doubt about his belief that German Catholics would have muzzled Hitler, the facts he occasionally inserts suggest otherwise. For example, his narrative praises the Center Party as an “”impressive, independent democratic constituency”” backed by something he calls “”political Catholicism as a whole, a group that was naturally much larger than the Center Party vote, with extensive links and associations on many levels throughout the country.””16

When it comes to facts, however, Cornwell is obliged to inform us that “”political Catholicism”” had given the Center Party only 13.9% of the vote in the elections which brought Hitler to power, and that by that time the Party had “”no viable allies to form a coalition, and therefore no purchase on power.””17 Cornwell is also obliged to tell us that the Center Party conducted a straw poll after vigorous debate over whether the deputies should vote for the Enabling Act which solidified Hitler’s rule; that only fourteen of the Party’s seventy-four deputies opposed the act; and, that a telling argument in the debate concerned threats to the personal safety of the deputies themselves. Cornwell also admits that during the months between the Enabling Act and the Reich Concordat, “”Center Party deputies and members were subjected to a wave of terror: house searches, arrests, intimidation,”” and that 2,000 members of the Catholic Bavarian People’s Party were arrested in a region where “”political Catholicism”” had “”enormous traditional strength.”” Meanwhile, Nazi officials were closing Catholic schools and banning all sorts of Catholic organizations, proclaiming that Catholicism aimed in every way to sabotage the government.

Cornwell’s only conclusion from these facts is to heap further blame on Pacelli. The negotiations for the Reich Concordat went slowly, immobilizing German political Catholicism and preventing it from mounting any truly effective opposition to Hitler. (Elsewhere, Cornwell decries the unseemly haste with which Pacelli negotiated the agreement). Cornwell seems not to have grasped that matters had moved somewhat beyond the democratic process. Parliamentary parties are not very good at terror. Pacelli might reasonably have concluded that the days of Weimar were over; that Germany was bound to be ruled by a dictator such as Franco or Mussolini; and that the only hope of protecting German Catholics was to bind Germany to an agreement with an outside power which retained its freedom of action and could at least attempt to intervene, using whatever leverage Hitler’s need for international respectability provided. Cornwell gives no serious thought to his assumption that “”political Catholicism”” would have triumphed over a massive program of midnight arrests and beatings.

Instead, he offers the first of many nonsensical pictures which appear in Hitler’s Pope. He tells us the Reich Concordat put Catholics under a moral obligation to obey the Nazis, but he insists that Hitler wanted the Center Party destroyed in order to protect his regime from Catholic political opposition. He insists that the Center Party was powerful enough to thwart Hitler even as he admits that it commanded less than a quarter of the popular vote and had no viable partners for a coalition, and no purchase on power. But he also says Pacelli sacrificed the Center Party to induce Hitler to sign the Reich Concordat, and that Hitler desperately needed the concordat as a diplomatic “”first”” to bolster the legitimacy of his regime. While conceding that the Vatican’s negotiation of a concordat did not imply approval of Nazism or Hitler’s policies, he insists that the Vatican’s position was formed by a papal ideology that was sympathetic to Hitler’s disgust for free and democratic societies. And throughout his relentless damnation of Pacelli for heeding the siren call of fascism, Cornwell maintains his own silence about what, precisely, the Center Party or the German Bishops could have possibly done to oppose the Third Reich. Perhaps this is because Cornwell’s adamantine certainty in the power of “”political Catholicism”” would dissolve the moment a course of action was contemplated. Two thousand Center Party members in Nazi jails ought to be an indication that “”political Catholics”” were not in a position to write letters to the Volkischer Beobachter, publish their own newspapers, get on the radio, or engage in parliamentary offensives that would have either destroyed Nazi Germany or transformed it into something like Stroessner’s Paraguay. Cornwell has not offered us history, but naive skylarking which has little serious value to anyone who wants more than a superficial appreciation of the period.

Humani Generis Unitas

Cornwell’s unquestioning antagonism to Pacelli surfaces again in the discussion of Humani Generis Unitas, the famous “”hidden encyclical”” that was drafted, but never issued, in 1938 under Pius XI. Cornwell begins his narrative by telling us that Pius XI was moved by a general concern over the spread of anti-Semitism in Europe and a specific horror at the virulence of Nazi anti-Semitism. Cornwell then reviews the draft and concludes that it typifies Catholicism’s anti-Semitic perspective: The draft encyclical, in his estimation, proclaimed that the “”the Jews have brought their problems down upon their own heads, not because of their religion, not because of their race, but because of their purely secular man-centered political and commercial goals, for which they [were] now paying the price”” at the hands of Mussolini and the Nazis. Cornwell also notes that the draft warned Christians about the “”spiritual dangers”” associated with “”exposure to the Jews, so long as their unbelief and enmity to Christianity continue,”” and openly expressed the Church’s reluctance to protect Jews due to the danger of becoming “”compromised in defense of Christian principles and humanity by being drawn into purely man-made politics.””18 Cornwell writes that the draft exemplified the anti-Semitism proved by Pacelli’s letter from Munich.

It is important to realize that a general knowledge of Nazi propaganda about the Jews suggests that Hitler would have been delighted to read such an encyclical. Cornwell’s most pejorative descriptions of the Reich Concordat do not claim it endorsed the view that Jews were a threat to civilization, an idea which lay at the center of Nazi propaganda from the publication of Mein Kampf to the day Hitler shot himself. Nor does Cornwell dare to claim the Concordat forbade the Vatican from interfering in German affairs. Cornwell’s tour of Humani Generis Unitas shows us a document which, if it had been issued by Pius XI, would have bound the consciences of all Catholics—as no concordat could ever do—to the belief that Jews were spiritually dangerous enemies, whom the Church could not protect without compromising the Gospel, and who may actually deserve their persecution by Hitler’s regime. If Cornwell is accurately portraying the draft, there is no choice but to conclude that if the Nazis wanted a blank check on the Catholic conscience, Humani Generis Unitas might well have given it to them. The problem arises, however, when Cornwell confronts the fact that Pacelli single-handedly prevented the encyclical from being approved by Pius XI and published to the faithful. Pacelli’s 1919 letter, and his refusal to pressure Italy to ship palm fronds to Germany in 1917, have already proved to Cornwell beyond doubt that he was a racist anti-Semite. The dilemma is obvious. Why would an anti-Semite like Pacelli quash an anti-Semitic statement like Humani Generis Unitas? Cornwell can think of only one explanation: Pacelli buried the draft to avoid offending the Nazis by publishing something which “”for all its prejudices…might have made clear to the world that the Pope condemned anti-Semitism.””19

This is a bizarre judgment. According to everything Cornwell has written to this point, Humani generis unitas would have been the culmination of Pacelli’s conciliatory policy toward Nazi Germany and hostile attitude toward the Jews, presented on a plate as the binding moral teaching of the Pope himself. Cornwell does not even ask the reader to consider whether Pacelli might have quashed the encyclical because of its contents, because it could have been easily misread by the faithful as an endorsement of Nazi policies. One can only conclude that, having nailed Pacelli’s 1919 Munich letter to his mast, Cornwell must hound Pacelli, the “”pure white wraith,”” by such accusations without regard to how badly his own book is marred in the process.

Pacelli and the Holocaust

Cornwell’s treatment of the period 1939–1945 also suffers from a relentlessly negative bias, which often deprives his narrative of depth, or even coherence. Cornwell discusses Pacelli’s acknowledged efforts to protect Jews from the Nazis in this sentence: “”We cannot belittle Pacelli’s efforts on the level of charitable relief, or his encouragement of the work of countless Catholic religious and laypeople bringing comfort and safety to hundreds of thousands.””20 The rest of the book, unfortunately, gives an unrelievedly belittling and contradictory discussion of Pacelli’s reaction to Hitler, the Holocaust, and the Second World War.

For example, Cornwell condemns Pacelli’s warning to the Allies of Hitler’s 1940 offensive, claiming that the hostility it provoked in Berlin forced Mussolini to enter the war and forfeited Pacelli’s role as a neutral peacemaker. A few dozen pages later, Cornwell excoriates Pacelli’s unwillingness to support Allied demands for Germany’s unconditional surrender as mere posturing conducted under a tissue-thin claim of Vatican neutrality. When Pacelli is neutral, Cornwell damns him for not supporting the anti-Nazi cause; when Pacelli acts sympathetically to Germany’s enemies, Cornwell damns him for forfeiting Vatican neutrality. These and similar accusations dot the book like paint thrown from the end of a broad brush, appearing every so often without the benefit of a more of a coherent perspective on Pacelli’s character than “”Pacelli always does the wrong thing.””

The book’s most sophisticated attempt to examine Pacelli’s character appears in the discussion of his participation in the 1940 plot to depose Hitler. Here, and for once, Cornwell tries to give a rounded appreciation of the risks Pacelli ran not only for himself and the Vatican, but for Europe:

The risks were extreme. Had Hitler learned of it [the plot], it is likely that he would have wreaked harsh revenge on the Catholic Church in Germany. At the same time, Mussolini could have seen it as a breach of neutrality and the Lateran Treaty, justifying radical, even violent, measures against the Vatican. The Vatican, after all, depended even for its water and electricity supply on Fascist Italy, and could be entered at any moment by Italian troops.

Cornwell rightly concludes that this episode shows that Pacelli could be daring and steadfast when success seemed probable and if the risks were acceptable:

[W]hatever his decisions, good or bad, they were his own; and he was unafraid on account of his personal safety. His hatred of Hitler was sufficient to allow him to take grave risks with his own life—and…the lives of a great many others. When the risk seemed right, he was capable of acting promptly. His exterior personality seemed delicate, oversensitive, even weak to some. Pusillanimity and indecisiveness—shortcomings that would be cited to extenuate his subsequent silence and inaction in other matters—were hardly in his nature.21

This sound judgment, however, has only one role in Cornwell’s evaluation of Pacelli’s wartime papacy. For Cornwell, a pope so bold could have kept silent about the Holocaust only because he did not think Hitler or the Holocaust worth condemning.

This blackening of Pacelli’s name owes everything to Rolf Hochhuth’s 1963 play The Deputy, whose fictional dialogues between Nazi and Vatican officials describe Pacelli as an insincere sociopath who blandly countenanced the Holocaust for reasons of state. Hochhuth places the main charge against Pacelli, then as now, in the words of a fictional Jesuit priest dismayed by Pacelli’s silence:

a deputy of Christ
who sees these things and nonetheless
permits reasons of state to seal his lips—
hesitates even for an hour
to lift his anguished voice
in one anathema to chill the blood
of every last man on earth—
that Pope is…a criminal.22

Pacelli’s failure to issue a public blast of condemnation, a great anathema “”to chill the blood of every last man on earth,”” is the alpha and omega of the modern indictment. Cornwell’s arguments for a great anathema rest on a series of questionable conclusions. First, that Pacelli was actually silent. Second, that a great anathema would not only have fulfilled the Church’s theological mission, but that it would have had a practical benefit in stopping the Final Solution. Third, that since Pacelli could act fearlessly, his silence cannot have been motivated by any worthy concern. It could only have come from a defective faith which was hostile to non-Catholics generally, and to Jews specifically. This review has already discussed the hasty and questionable manner in which Cornwell has arrived at the conclusion that Pacelli was a racist anti-Semite. Cornwell’s conclusions about the practicality and effect of a “”great anathema”” are equally flawed by an easy handling of facts and an unwillingness to examine the situation in which the Church found herself during the 1930s and 1940s.

Pacelli’s “”Silence””

Cornwell calls the soundness of his own judgments into question by repeatedly telling the reader that Pacelli’s reaction to Nazism and the Final Solution was “”silence.”” For example, he says the Reich Concordat legally bound German Catholics to remain silent whenever the Nazis persecuted Jews. We are also told that Pacelli’s anti-Semitism caused his silence about the Holocaust. A section called “”Pacelli’s Journey Into Silence”” consumes much of the Chapter titled “”Pacelli and the Holocaust.”” Pacelli supposedly agreed to maintain “”silence about Nazi atrocities as the price for recognition of Vatican neutrality during the German occupation of Rome. However, when one reads between these lines, and also accounts for statements which Cornwell does not mention, one detects an audacious double standard under which “”silence”” only means “”whatever Pius XII said.””

Cornwell tells us that Pacelli was “”outraged”” when Cardinal Innitzer publicly welcomed Hitler into Austria and publicly supported the Anschluss, Austria’s incorporation into Germany. Pacelli therefore summoned Innitzer to the Vatican, but Innitzer delayed in coming, and so Pacelli placed an article in L’Osservatore Romano declaring that Innitzer’s actions did not represent the views of the Holy See and were not undertaken with the endorsement of Pius XI. Moved by this public rebuke, Innitzer traveled to Rome and was subjected to what Cornwell calls Pacelli’s icy presence. Innitzer was ordered to sign a statement that the consciences of Austrian Catholics were not bound by Innitzer’s welcome. Innitzer was allowed to see Pius XI only after he had signed this document, and Cornwell says this audience was the “”most tempestuous”” ever given by that Pope. Cornwell presents this episode as evidence of Pacelli’s dictatorial bent, his outrage being solely directed at independent and localized action. He makes no attempt to support this judgment, which seems rash, given that Pacelli’s humiliation of Innitzer followed the publication of the encyclical Mit Brennender Sorge (“”With Burning Sorrow””) by less than a year.

While Mit Brennender Sorge was issued by Pope Pius XI, there is no dispute that Cardinal Pacelli was a significant, if not primary, force behind its drafting and publication. Perhaps this fact has moved Cornwell to claim that the encyclical is proof of “”residual anti-Judaism,”” part of a complex of Catholic sympathies which bound the Church to “”the very right-wing nationalism, corporatism, and Fascism that have sustained anti-Semitism or complicity in anti-Semitism on racial grounds.””23 From this description one would expect a right-wing regime which sustained anti-Semitism to welcome the document. But the facts show that it was printed in secret and smuggled by Catholic messengers into the pulpits of every German priest to be read on Passion Sunday. Afterwards, as Cornwell tells us, the Nazis shrieked in outrage at what they considered a “”subversive document”” and a direct attack on the Nazi state. They shut down the German firms which had secretly printed the encyclical and arrested many of those firms’ employees. Hitler himself condemned Mit Brennender Sorge and threatened further measures against the Catholic Church in Germany if it continued to assume rights that only belonged to the Nazi state. Yet Cornwell insists that Mit Brennender Sorge was part of the Vatican’s “”silence”” because the encyclical’s condemnation of Nazism was a mere “”subtext”” in which there appeared “”no explicit condemnation of anti-Semitism,”” and which confined itself to some words “”in reference to natural law, that might be applied to the Jews.””24

There is an arguable case that the Nazi’s reaction to Mit Brennender Sorge was not the result of a deranged hysteria that somehow kept them from grasping its “”residual anti-Judaism”” and general sympathy with fascism’s view of the world. In the encyclical, when Pius XI discusses the Church’s attempts to sow the seeds of peace in Germany, he calls Nazis “”the ‘enemy’ [referred to in] Holy Scripture””—the enemy is Satan—who “”oversowed the cockle of distrust, unrest, hatred, defamation, of a determined hostility overt or veiled, fed from many sources and wielding many tools, against Christ and His Church.”” Pius XI mocked the intellectual foundations of Nazism, writing that only “”superficial minds could stumble into concepts of a national God, of a national religion; or attempt to lock within the frontiers of a single people, within the narrow limits of a single race, God, the Creator of the universe, King and Legislator of all nations before whose immensity they are ‘as a drop in a bucket.'””

Pius XI called Nazi racial ideology (which was, by 1937, fairly well known to be hostile to Jews, Slavs, and other non-Aryans) as something which “”exalts race, or the people, or the State, or a particular form of State…above their standard value and divinizes them to an idolatrous level,”” and which “”distorts and perverts an order of the world planned and created by God.”” Anyone who believes such an ideology, said Pius XI, “”is far from the true faith in God and from the concept of life which that faith upholds.”” Mit Brennender Sorge did not spare the “”culture”” of Nazism formed by its love of Wagnerian myth: “”Whoever follows that so-called pre-Christian Germanic conception of substituting a dark and impersonal destiny for the personal God, denies thereby the Wisdom and Providence of God…. Neither is he a believer in God.””

Pius XI did not content himself with these complaints. He also gave a warning of disaster to anyone who accepted the deification of Hitler via the Führerprinzip: “”Should any man dare, in sacrilegious disregard of the essential differences between God and His creature, between the God-man and the children of man, to place a mortal, were he the greatest of all times, by the side of, or over, or against, Christ, he would deserve to be called prophet of nothingness, to whom the terrifying words of Scripture would be applicable: ‘He that dwelleth in heaven shall laugh at them.'””25

Cornwell pays no mind to this possible reading of the encyclical. He portrays Mit Brennender Sorge as a mundane list of complaints about the violation of Catholic rights guaranteed by the Reich Concordat. He minimizes the encyclical’s appeal to natural law as something which “”might”” pertain to Jews. In fact, the barest acquaintance of this Catholic concept knows that the natural law governs all men, whether or not they profess Christianity. Pius XI even says as much in Mit Brennender Sorge:

We are especially referring to what is called the natural law, written by the Creator’s hand on the tablet of the heart (Rom. II. 14) and which reason, not blinded by sin or passion, can easily read. It is in the light of the commands of this natural law, that all positive law, whoever be the lawgiver, can be gauged in its moral content, and hence, in the authority it wields over conscience. Human laws in flagrant contradiction with the natural law are vitiated with a taint which no force, no power can mend.26

Cornwell’s failure to make an unbiased evaluation of Pacelli’s sentiments in Mit Brennender Sorge has caused him to be distastefully cavalier in characterizing Innitzer’s recall to Rome as nothing but Pacelli’s attempt to make churchmen dance to the tunes of “”papal summitry”” and “”complicit silence.”” Cornwell ought to have at least discussed whether Pacelli’s humbling treatment of Innitzer might not have resulted from the Austrian’s public contradiction of the anti-Nazi position of Mit Brennender Sorge and its exhortation for the clergy to witness that position by word and example.

The possibility that Pacelli and the Church might have fundamentally and publicly disagreed with Nazism ought to have been evident to Cornwell, whose research brought him into close contact with records of Vatican Radio’s broadcasts under Pacelli’s papacy. Vatican Radio denounced Hitler’s proposed new world order as “”a world order which is as dry as the desert, an order which is the same order as the order of the desert. It is being achieved by the exploitation of human life. What these falsehoods call life is no life. It is dissolution—it is death.””27 In 1940 Vatican Radio told Germans that “”Hitler’s war is not a just one,”” and “”God’s blessing cannot be upon it.””28 It warned that, “”Jews and Poles are being herded into separate ghettos, hermetically sealed and pitifully inadequate,”” and stated that “”the horror and inexcusable excesses committed on a helpless and homeless people have been established by the unimpeachable testimony of eyewitnesses.””29 By 1943, Vatican Radio was assuring countries which engaged in deportations and slave labor that the “”curse of God”” would afflict them.30 But Cornwell has only one perspective on Vatican Radio: that it was run by unruly Jesuits and muzzled by Pacelli whenever the Germans complained about its broadcasts. The reader is presented with another nonsensical picture. Here we are given Pacelli, now Pope Pius XII, who is so powerful and vigilant that he controls the very content of Vatican media (as he did by inserting an article into the Vatican’s newspaper about Innitzer), and whose powers have reached unprecedented heights due to “”papal summitry.”” And we are also given the Jesuits, priests who take a special vow of personal obedience to the Holy Father. And we are expected to believe that these Jesuits rebelliously seized control of the Vatican’s only radio station in order to broadcast anti-Nazi propaganda in direct opposition to the Holy Father’s policy of “”complicity”” and “”silence.”” Pacelli did reduce Vatican Radio’s scathing commentary on Nazi policies and atrocities due to the pleas of Catholics who were subjected to Nazi reprisals, as well as the Allies’ habit of putting their own propaganda in Pacelli’s mouth and then claiming Vatican Radio as the source. But if the issue is Pacelli’s “”silence,”” then shouldn’t we receive a more thoughtful discussion of whether Pacelli might actually have been responsible for the anti-Nazi broadcasts rather than Cornwell’s bizarre picture of a “”Jesuit conspiracy”” to defy Pacelli?

Another nonsensical picture appears when Cornwell’s discusses—or, more accurately, fails to discuss—the Nazi’s own attitudes toward Pacelli. The day after Mit Brennender Sorge was read in Germany’s Catholic churches, Nazism’s official newspaper condemned the “”Jew-God and His deputy in Rome.””31 The Nazi media also objected to Pacelli’s election as Pope—six years after the Concordat—because he was “”a servile perpetrator of Pius XI’s doomed policy”” who was “”always opposed to Nazism and practically determined the policies of his predecessor,”” and because “”Pius XI was a half-Jew, for his mother was a Dutch Jewess; but Cardinal Pacelli is a full Jew.””32 Cornwell does not find such things indicative of Pacelli’s relations with the Nazis. Indeed, he does not mention them at all. He prefers to quote cables from German diplomats touting their influence with Pacelli, such as Ambassador von Bergen’s cable about a meeting with Pacelli one day before Mit Brennender Sorge‘s release in which Pacelli, referring to the state of tension between the Vatican and Germany due to repeated Nazi violations of the Concordat, received the ambassador with friendliness and assured him that friendly relations would be restored as soon as possible. Cornwell takes the cable, and only the cable, as irrefutable proof that Pacelli “”secretly promised to mitigate the strength of [Mit Brennender Sorge] by private diplomatic reassurances to the Germans”” because Pacelli “”believed the Jews had brought misfortune on their own heads.””33 What results from Cornwell’s discussion is another nonsensical picture of Pacelli being able to “”take much credit for the final”” version of Mit Brennender Sorge and arranging its secret distribution within Germany, then promising to mitigate the encyclical—which contains what Cornwell calls “”residual anti-Judaism””—in order to please the anti-Jewish Nazis, who then publicly vilify Pacelli for continuing the anti-Nazi sentiments proclaimed by the same encyclical.

#page#

A Paradigm of Suspicion

A demonstration of “”silence,”” a pure and unpunctuated absence, does not require such tortuous explanations or omissions of fact. But Cornwell feels entitled to level the claim of “”silence”” because he thinks he has already established Pacelli’s anti-Semitism beyond any doubt, thus creating a paradigm of suspicion that can be abandoned only if a statement cannot be reconciled with it by even the most tortuous anti-Semitic or pro-Nazi gloss. So, for example, Cornwell quotes with approval the condemnatory verdict of Helen Fein, that “”no representative of the Vatican ever publicly told Catholics that they must not cooperate [in the Holocaust] because Germany was killing Jews systematically and totally, and killing Jews was a sin.””34 It is not enough for a pope to condemn the Nazis; he must do so with certain words which, in the author’s hostile judgment, cannot possibly be reconciled with a paradigm of suspicion.

A good example of this method can be found in Cornwell’s attempt to bolster his weak case for Pacelli’s anti-Semitic sentiments by discussing Pacelli’s 1943 encyclical Mystici Corporis. After relating the encyclical’s discussion of the Church of Christ as visibly extant in the Catholic Church in communion with the Pope, Cornwell concludes that this vision of Christianity is inimical to a sense that Jews are fellow human beings. In the encyclical’s assertion that salvation is not beyond the hope of even hardened sinners who still retain the Christian faith, Cornwell finds only an exculsionary metaphor in which “”Catholics, no matter how grievous their sins, could rest assured that they were part of the people of God, while those who refused to pay allegiance to the Pope, however good and decent, were to be regarded as excluded.”” Because Pacelli’s vision of the Church can be labeled a “”rejection of social responsibility”” which denies “”the solidarity of the human race”” and confirms the prejudice “”that non-Catholics were alien to the human race,””35 then that’s all his encyclical could really mean.

By reading Mystici Corporis consistently with the paradigm of suspicion, Cornwell has unwittingly revived an old anti-Catholic slander: Catholicism’s stress on communion with the Pope compels Catholics to hold allegiances that are inimical to the common good. One cannot help but compare his severely tortured examination of the encyclical with the views of the famous anti-Catholic crusader, Ellen Gould White:

It is Satan’s constant effort to misrepresent the character of God, the nature of sin, and the real issues at stake in the great controversy. His sophistry lessens the obligation of the divine law and gives men license to sin. At the same time he causes them to cherish false conceptions of God…. Thus the minds of men are blinded, and Satan secures them as his agents…. The Roman Catholic Church…misrepresenting the character of God, has resorted to practices no less cruel and revolting. In the days of Rome’s supremacy there were instruments of torture to compel assent to her doctrines…. There were massacres on a scale that will never be known until revealed in the judgment…. Such was the fate of Rome’s opponents….36

Cornwell claims Mystici Corporis misrepresents God’s character and the nature of sin because it supposedly teaches that God’s charity only concerns Catholics who “”pay allegiance to the Pope””—who may then sin without fear of losing Heaven (thus echoing another of White’s claims, that Catholicism’s teaching on absolution encourages men to sin).37

The paradigm of suspicion can excise a great deal of contradictory information. Consider this selection from Mystici Corporis: