Silence Is Consent

In May 1940, some 14 months after the election to the papacy of Cardinal Eugenio Pacelli, who took the name Pius XII, the French cardinal, Eugene Tisserant, wrote privately to the cardinal archbishop of Paris, Emmanuel Suhard: “I fear that history will reproach the Holy See for having practiced a policy of selfish convenience and little else.” Among Catholics, Tisserant’s dim view of Pius XII was that of a small minority only, at least until the pope’s death in October 1958. Since the early 1960s, however, when Rolf Hochhuth’s play “The Deputy” caused a worldwide scandal and triggered passionate debate, the controversy regarding Pius XII’s attitude toward Nazi Germany, and particularly his silence in the face of the extermination of the Jews, has sporadically erupted among Catholics and in the Christian world more generally. For Jews, the subject has remained of major importance, linked as it is not only to the past but also to ongoing relations between the two faiths.

In recent years, the Vatican repeatedly promised a clear declaration about the church and the Holocaust. When Pope John Paul II finally did issue such a statement in 1998, he entirely exonerated Pius XII and the whole leadership of the church. The pope’s words should not have come as a surprise in light of his open determination to bring the first stage of the canonization of Pius XII--a process started in 1965--to a successful conclusion in the very near future. It is in this highly charged context that John Cornwell’s fascinating new study has just appeared.

For centuries, the beatification and canonization process required a “devil’s advocate.” In 1983, this adversarial function was canceled. In a way, Cornwell plays the role of the devil’s advocate, yet one who, contrary to the tradition, does not believe that his arguments will be proven false in the end. Cornwell, a Catholic, started his inquiry into the life and times of Eugenio Pacelli with the intention of vindicating Pius’ pontificate. His genuine desire to help the “right cause” was apparently convincing enough to give him access to Vatican archival material previously unseen (the beatification files, as well as documents from the office of the Vatican secretary of state). But as his work progressed, an unexpected and dramatic change occurred: “By the middle of 1997,” he writes, “nearing the end of my research, I found myself in a state I can only describe as moral shock. The material I had gathered, taking the more extensive view of Pacelli’s life, amounted not to an exoneration but to a wider indictment.” The elements of the indictment were more widespread and more extreme than previously formulated by historians critical of Pius XII: “Spanning Pacelli’s career from the beginning of the century, my research told the story of a bid for unprecedented papal power that by 1933 had drawn the Catholic Church into complicity with the darkest forces of the era. I found evidence, moreover, that in the early stage in his career Pacelli betrayed an undeniable antipathy toward the Jews, and that his diplomacy in Germany in the 1930s has resulted in the betrayal of Catholic political associations that might have challenged Hitler’s regime and thwarted the Final Solution.”

Cornwell painstakingly describes the growing concentration of papal power that started in the middle of the 19th century under Pius IX (Pio Nono). In 1870, at the very moment when the papacy was losing control of Rome to the Italian state and being relegated to the 108 acres of Vatican City, Pio Nono had the first Vatican Council adopt the dogma of papal infallibility. Pio Nono’s successor, Leo XIII, was no less authoritarian and, after him, Pius X went one step further and led the church in a virulent “anti-modernist” campaign. It is in this atmosphere that, at the turn of the century, young Pacelli, born in 1876 to an extremely devout family whose father was a Vatican lay lawyer, was ordained priest and soon became an assistant to the secretary of state, Cardinal Pietro Gasparri.

Several decades later, close to the end of his own pontificate, Pacelli had the anti-modernist and anti-liberal Pius X canonized. There is little doubt that today, the canonization of Pius XII would be a continuation of the trend started by Pio Nono and is meant to clearly signal that the conservative and authoritarian forces in the church still have a say, notwithstanding Pope John XXIII’s opening of Catholicism to the modern world, to tolerance and to an ongoing dialogue with other religious communities.

As Cornwell brilliantly demonstrates, Pius XII brought the authoritarianism and the centralization of his predecessors to their most extreme stage. In 1930, under Pius XI, Pacelli replaced Gasparri as secretary of state, thus becoming the second most important figure in the church hierarchy. Three years later, Pacelli signed the concordat between the Vatican and Nazi Germany. In this treaty, the new secretary of state readily accepted the dissolution of all Catholic groups that had political power in Germany in return for the Vatican’s tight control over the German bishops and over all purely religious matters of the church in Germany.

Hitler, for whom Pacelli was no match, brought the negotiations that had been dragging for several years to a rapid close as his own aim was precisely to paralyze and dismantle political Catholicism in the new reich and obtain, among other political benefits, the support of the Catholic Center Party for the Enabling Act that granted him full powers on March 23, 1933.

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It has been argued that as secretary of state under Pius XI, Pacelli only followed the pope’s instructions. If Pacelli was responsible for the concordat, so was Pius XI, and if Pius XI criticized the racism of the Nazi regime in the 1937 encyclical “Mit Brennender Sorge,” the secretary of state was no less involved than the pope himself. This does not appear, however, to have been the case during the last two years of Pius XI’s pontificate. The pope himself became increasingly hostile to the Nazi regime, whereas his secretary of state tried his best to preserve friendly relations with Germany’s official delegates. The German ambassador to the Vatican, Diego von Bergen, stressed the difference between the pope and his secretary of state in his reports to Berlin. The most blatant divergence appeared in 1938. Pius XI asked the American Jesuit, John LaFarge, to prepare an encyclical against Nazi anti-Semitism. “Humani Generis Unitas” was ready in the fall of that year. But its submission for the pope’s approval was delayed by the Roman Jesuits, among others. It is not clear whether Pius XI saw the draft of the encyclical before his death in February 1939. The newly elected Pius XII decided to refrain from his predecessor’s attempt to confront Hitler’s anti-Jewish policies head on.

Cornwell’s book is most illuminating in the analysis of Pacelli’s formative years, in the assessment of his personality, in the discussion of his abandonment of German political Catholicism for the sake of the concordat with Hitler and in the description of Pacelli’s unrelenting efforts to centralize all major initiatives in the pope’s hands. In dealing with the war years and particularly with Pius XII’s silence in the face of the extermination of the Jews (of which the pope was well-informed from early 1942 onward), Cornwell had no choice but to rely on the abundant documents and studies that were published from the mid-1960s onward. His access to Vatican archival material did not include any significant new documents on these essential issues.

At the end of the 1960s, in response to historians’ criticism, the Vatican had started the publication of a highly selective series of documents from its archives, dealing with its policies during the war. To this day the Curia argues that this series includes all documents of importance for that period. This position does not reflect the truth. Among the documents that neither Cornwell nor anybody else from the outside has been able to see should be the daily exchanges between the German authorities in Rome and the Curia during the months of October to December 1943, when the deportation of the Jews in Rome and Italy took place. These documents, listed as File No. 7 in the German political archives at the Foreign Ministry in Bonn, disappeared from the German archives in the early 1960s.

It is the section of Cornwell’s book dealing with the war period that will certainly rekindle the strongest controversy. As just mentioned, it will not be as a result of the publication of new documents but rather in the wake of Cornwell’s interpretation of the existing evidence. The author of “Hitler’s Pope” is straightforward. One of the main reasons for Pius’ silence in the face of the extermination of the Jews was his long-standing anti-Semitism, as expressed in several letters written during his stay as nuncio in Munich in the last period of World War I and during the postwar revolutionary period.

For example, in a description of the headquarters of the revolutionary forces, drafted by Pacelli’s deputy but signed and annotated by Pacelli and addressed to Gasparri, one reads: “ . . . in the midst of all this, a gang of young women of dubious appearance, Jews like all the rest of them, hanging around in all the offices with lecherous demeanor and suggestive smiles. The boss of this female rabble was Levien’s mistress, a young Russian woman, a Jew and a divorcee. . . . This Levien is a young man . . . also Russian and a Jew. Pale, dirty, with drugged eyes, hoarse voice, vulgar, repulsive, with a face that is both intelligent and sly.”

“Given this background,” Cornwell writes, “we are obliged to conclude that his silence had more to do with a habitual fear and distrust of the Jews than a strategy of diplomacy or a commitment to impartiality. He was perfectly capable of partiality when Holland, Belgium and Luxembourg were invaded in May 1940. And when German Catholics complained, he wrote to the German bishops pointing out that neutrality was not the same as indifference and apathy when moral and human consideration demanded a candid word. So, did not moral and human consideration involved in the murder of millions merit a ‘candid word?’ That failure to utter a candid word about the Final Solution in progress proclaimed to the world that the Vicar of Christ was not moved to pity and anger. From this point of view, he was the ideal Pope for Hitler’s unspeakable plan. He was Hitler’s pawn. He was Hitler’s Pope.”

Whether anti-Semitism played a decisive role in Pius’ silence is a moot question. His antipathy toward the Jews certainly contributed, as was the case for many Christians and Europeans at the time, to passivity rather than action in the face of the Final Solution. It seems that other reasons for his silence were more compelling.

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Cornwell convincingly describes Pius’ authoritarianism and centralism. Such centralism probably dissuaded him from taking any steps that could have endangered the unity of the church, more specifically any steps that could have led to a split within German Catholicism resulting from a public stand against the reich. Moreover, speaking out against Germany at the height of the war would have meant the weakening of the German bulwark against Bolshevism. Pius may have hoped that in due time his “neutrality” would allow a reversal of existing alliances and the establishment of a common Western-German (non-Nazi) alliance against the Soviet Union.

Compared to such grand issues, the fate of the Jews of Europe may have appeared to him to be of minor importance, the more so if some “moral” rationalization could bolster his position. Such a rationalization was found: According to Pius himself, any pronouncements would only make matters worse. What could have been meant? Probably a Nazi retaliation against Jews converted to Catholicism who lived in mixed marriages and whose deportation had been delayed. A protest by Dutch bishops against the deportations from Holland did precisely lead to this kind of German retaliation and to the deportation of some 90 Jewish converts, among them the Carmelite nun Edith Stein. Pius mentioned this case in private conversations, although he grotesquely inflated the numbers involved.

In the summer of 1942, as the war had reached its most fateful phase and as details about the Final Solution were accumulating on his desk, Pius started a close collaboration with Luigi Gedda, president of the Catholic Action in Italy, to prepare a full-length film about his daily life. It was entitled: “Pastor Angelicus” (Angelic Shepherd). Cornwell describes a sequence in which, in the early hours, as his office light burns on, the vigilant pope strives without respite to serve all humankind while the world is asleep.

All humankind? For Pius XII, this most probably meant the whole of the Catholic world, for it certainly did not mean the Jews. Nor did it mean Christendom, for he was equally silent over the massacre of Orthodox Serbs by Catholic Croats. Pius XII may not have been “Hitler’s Pope.” But was he a saint? Nowadays we may not know what a saint should be, but we do know what a saint should not be--a man of narrow spirit and heart, a man who could not find at the very least a “candid word” when millions of human beings from all corners of Europe, some of them from under his own windows, were led to their systematic extermination.