For years, the policies of the Catholic Church during the rise and
terribly destructive rule of the Nazis have been controversial.
Pope Pius XII has been attacked as "Hitler's Pope," an anti-Semitic
enabler who refused to condemn Nazism, much less urge Catholics to
resist the German regime. The Church has been accused of standing
by while the Nazis steadily revealed their evil designs. Yet all
such arguments have been based only on sketchy evidence. The
Vatican has kept its internal workings secret and locked away from
scrutiny.
Until now. In February 2003, the Vatican opened its archives for
the crucial years of the Nazi consolidation of power, up until
1939. Peter Godman, thanks to his long experience in Vatican
sources and his reputation as an impartial, non-Catholic historian
of the Church, was one of the first scholars to explore the new
documents. The story they tell is revelatory and surprising and
forces a major revision of the history of the 1930s. It is a story
that reveals the innermost workings of the Vatican, an institution
far more fractured than monolithic, one that allowed legalism to
trump moral outrage.
Godman's narrative is doubly shocking: At first, the Church
planned to condemn Nazism as heretical, and drafted several
variations of its charges in the mid-1930s. However, as Mussolini
drew close to Hitler, and Pope Pius XI grew more concerned about
communism than fascism, the charge was reduced to a denunciation
only of bolshevism. The Church abandoned its moral attack on the
Nazis and retreated to diplomacy, complaining about treaty
violations and delivering weak protests while the horrors of
religious persecution mounted. As Godman demonstrates, the
policiesof Pius XII were all determined by his predecessor, Pius
XI. The Church was misled not so much by "Hitler's Pope" as by a
tragic miscalculation and a special relationship with the Italian
government. Mussolini toyed with the Church, even proposing that
Hitler be excommunicated. Yet in the end, when presented with
further evidence of Nazi depredations, Pius XI could only comment,
"Kindly God, who has allowed all this to happen at present,
undoubtedly has His purpose."
Reproducing the key Church documents in full and quoting
verbatim conversations between Pius XI and his bishops, "Hitler and
the Vatican" is the most extraordinary look inside the secretive
Vatican ever written.
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