I have dealt with this miserable propaganda lie before. But...

[fpb]

...some new and interesting evidence turned up.

In 1938, just as the persecution of Jews was moving into high gear, the Vatican not only came near breaking point with Italy about its new "racial laws" (and it was not the Vatican that blinked), it also bashed Catholic Poland for some similar bright ideas. And the man who did the bashing was the future Pope Pius XII - yeah, right, "Hitler's Pope" according to the vile propaganda of creatures best left unnamed.

In 1938, the freshly-nominated French Cardinal Tisserant brought to the attention of the Secretary of State, Eugenio Pacelli - soon to be Pope Pius XII - some worrying enactments by Poland's authoritarian military government. According to newspaper reports that reached Tisserant, the Polish Government had passed a law forbidding Jewish ritual butchery. This was more harrassment than real persecution, when compared with the horrors that Hitler had already enacted and that Mussolini was in the process of imitating; but it would be a serious issue to practicing Jews (the vast majority in Poland at the time), who would have to break the law or turn vegetarian in order to obey their religion. Of course, there are plenty of non-criminal reasons to find Jewish ritual slaughter distasteful. But in that time and place, in a country that had traditionally been a refuge to Jews, it was a scarily significant straw in the wind, at least to Tisserant. At this point, the Polish government was friendly with Nazi Germany in the hope of getting a part of the impending partition of Czechoslovakia (and they did, briefly); to a French Cardinal living in Rome, it sounded unpleasantly as though they were preparing to imitate Mussolini's contemptible imitation of Hitler and introducing anti-Jewish racial laws.

Why did Tisserant go to Pacelli? Well, for a start, this sort of thing was Pacelli's responsibility as Secretary of STate. There is also the fact that Tisserant was definitely Pacelli's man. He had been nominated Cardinal before he was a Bishop, and when he was eventually promoted to Bishop, it was Pacelli who consecrated him. Evidently he expected his friend and patron to react; and react Pacelli did.

Pacelli demanded a report from the Pope's Nuncio in Poland, Archbishop Filippo Cortesi, stating clearly that "any act of anti-Semitic persecution or violence must be condemned" by the Church. Archbishop Cortesi answered with his Report no.89, dated May 7, 1938, stating that the newspaper report that had reached Tisserant was "not exact": the law had indeed cleared one of the chambers of Poland's tame Parliament, but had then been effectively dropped. The Archbishop (who does not seem to have felt the instinctive anger felt by Tisserant, Pacelli, and for that matter by the reigning Pope Pius XI) repeated a government excuse that the law had "been mainly intended to reduce the near-monopoly of the Jews on the meat trade, since the Jews slaughter well beyond their own needs", as though even a military tyranny such as Poland's could not achieve such a goal by means other than assaulting Jewish religious observances! However, he clearly got the idea of what Rome wanted, and agreed that "As Your Eminence rightly remarks, of course any violence or persecution of Jews must be condemned". Pacelli passed the report to Tisserant, and the matter, so far as I can see, ended there. One hopes that Archbishop Cortesi, who seems to have been rather less sympathetic to Jews himself, did not neglect to pass on to the Polish leadership a strong hint of the Vatican's displeasure.

What, in this story, stands out to me, is that Cardinal Pacelli reacted as I would react - condemning what he had heard vigorously and taking immediate action, before even making sure of the validity of the report. (Yes, we know; never condemn so much as a dog on newspaper evidence, etc...) This is the reaction of someone to whom Jew-bashing is a sore point, a matter of personal anger and disgust, not just an opposing policy. I imagine that the rise of Nazi Germany, and the increasingly slavish imitation by Mussolini, must have heightened whatever sensitivity to the issue there already was. But one way or anothher, only a dishonest writer (unfortunately, honesty is the last thing the English-speaking media look for in dealing with the Church) could possibly read these documents and imagine that Eugenio Pacelli had anything but detestation for Jew-bashing.

Comments

[johncwright.livejournal.com]

Thank you for speaking out. I also am outraged at the "Hitler's Pope" narrative that seems to be a commonplace in some circles.

And why is the Catholic Church singled out for allegations of collaboration? i seem to recall that the German Lutherans did not exactly cover themselves in glory during the Hitler years, but cooperated enthusiastically with the fascist enemy of religion.

I have heard rumors of some Protestant groups in Germany defying Hitler on religious grounds, but they are usually small denominations, the last ones anyone would expect to defy the giant, stupid, terrible power of fascism, Mormons or Christian Scientists.

[fpb.livejournal.com]

Well, the majority of Lutherans were decidedly aligned with the Nazi state, but that was in great part to do with their tradition as a state church. It does not mean that they aligned their teachings, and in fact Hitler intended to "deal with them" along with the other churches, very thoroughly, after the war. On the other hand, a large minority of Lutherans broke away to found the "Confessing Church" in the name of freedom of conscience. Among their leaders was the WWI war hero Martin Niemoeller (author of the famous quotation: ~"When they came for the Communists, I was silent because I was not a Communist. When they came for the Jews..." etc). Another leader was the legendary theologian Dietrich Bonhoeffer, who was murdered in early 1945 because the order was that he was by no means to survive the war. However, the "Confessing Church", like many other decent old-fashioned Germans, had underrated the willingness of the Nazis to stoop to any means and use any instruments against anyone they perceived as an enemy. They were arrested in their hundreds, banned from churches and colleges, forbidden from publishing and preaching, and by 1937 they had stopped existing as a corporate entity. From then on, any resistance was a matter of personal heroism such as that of the White Rose group or of the plotters of July 20.

[stigandnasty919.livejournal.com]

There is a strange irony to this comment. You are outraged and deplore the "Hitler's Pope" meme and yet are prepared to accuse Lutherans of enthusiastic cooperation with the Nazi's?

But what interests me most is the final sentence, where you write of the power of The Mormens and the Christian Scientists. I've read a lot about the Mormons, including the bizarre Book of Mormon itself, but know nothing of the Christian Scientists. I'd be interested in finding out more, including something about the power their wield. Do you have a link or a recommendation for a starting point?

[fpb.livejournal.com]

My dear man, the cooperation of the official Lutheran church with the Nazi regime is a fact, and you will find it so described in all the history books. In fact, I made excuses for it - I said that it was not enthusiastic, that it came from a long tradition of being a State church (same reason why a lot of Russian Orthodox were willing to be loyal to the Soviet state), and that a large minority - the "confessing Church" - tried to escape state control, only to be crushed by the most ruthless means and to experience martyrdom. If I had wanted to be nasty, I would have underlined that while the Catholics who became notorious for collaborating included no Church leaders and no first-class writers or thinkers, some leading Lutherans, including the famous theologians Stapel and Gogarten, were decidedly Hitlerite, and so was Heidegger, who claimed to see himself as a Lutheran theologian. I suggest you go see what Karl Barth, who was no Catholic, had to say about his fellow German Protestants.

[fpb.livejournal.com]

And you have misread John's last sentence. He meant that the few Mormons and Christian Scientists to be found in Germany were among those who did most to resist against "the giant, stupid power" of the State.

[stigandnasty919.livejournal.com]

You are quite right, I had misread John's final sentence. I suppose because, in my mind and however inaccurately, I would not have included Mormons or Christian Scientists in the set of protestant denominations. I don't know enough about the Christian Scientists to comment but I had always considered that the addition of a new Holy Text took the Mormons into another classification.

This is probably due to my Presbyterian upbringing, where the addition, subtraction or amending of the words of the King James Bible were among the greatest sins of all. The book of Mormon would have been totally beyond the pale.

Indeed,considering your essay in FA, I wonder do you consider Mormons to be Christians at all? (And i'm not trying to get you 'poke a wasps nest' I'd be interested in your views)

As to the irony of John's post. I'm not sure where we are actually in disagreement. Your reply seemed to be saying that John's comments on the Lutherans was, if not inaccurate, then an over-simplification or over statement of the activities of the Lutherans. I thought the irony lay in the opening sentence which denounced one particular charge and the second which, seemed to me, to amount to 'and these guys were worse, anyway'....

I can also assure you that I have no particular axe to grind in this discussion. Any overtly sectarian prejudices I have (and I'd be a fool to deny that they exist at some level) tend to stop at the shores of the irish sea.

[fpb.livejournal.com]

Quite right. And yes, I do not consider the Mormons to be Christians - although I have one or two Mormons on my f-list who insist to the contrary. But the Catholic Church holds that the Mormon concept of God is so different from that of historic Christianity that their Baptism cannot be regarded as equal to the Christian one (whereas, as you may know, most Christian denominatios recognize each other's baptism).

[fpb.livejournal.com]

A summary of the performance of the Churches under Nazism would be as follows: Nazism, in spite of originating largely in the Catholic areas of Germany, became a mass movement and a governing party in the Lutheran north, whereas they never cracked the Catholic vote until they outlawed the Catholic Centrum party. The Centrum not only held back Nazism in Bavaria and the Rhineland, it even established its own party militia when that became necessary - and its 100,000 stout young men actually forced the SA and SS to keep a low profile until the Nazis became the national government. A few Bishops had actually ordered that no Nazi should be buried in consecrated ground. Altogether, the Church and its political emanations had proved among the most dedicated enemies of Nazism so long as Nazism was not in power. The Lutheran churches, by contrast, were generally identified with the conservative right and looked on the new movement with a kind of fearful fascination.

Nazism began its rule by seeking a Concordat with the Vatican, to which the Vatican agreed - and breaking it before the ink was dry on the signatures. State pressure began piling up on the Churches immediately, with arrests and murders; and the Confessional Lutherans, having come to see all too clearly what was loose in Germany, staged their doomed attempt at forming an independent Church. This gave them honour, martyrdom, and no practical success.

Both Lutherans and Catholics, in general, tended to collaborate, because neither church was willing or able to establish a genuine opposition. But more outstanding Lutherans were wholly convinced supporters of Hitler than Catholics, and no Catholic leader of any importance ever gave himself away. The Nazi assault on the Catholic tyranny of Dollfuss in Austria showed the underlying hatred of the Party for the Catholic Church and horrified Catholics throughout the world. (Dollfuss, a strange kind of dictator whom even his enemies respected, was denied a priest and allowed to bleed to death for hours by Nazi thugs.) In 1937, Pope Pius XI's condemnation of the Nazi regime, the encyclical Mit Brennender Sorge, was smuggled into Germany by a masterpiece of secret planning, placed in the hands of every priest in the country, and read on the same Sunday from every pulpit: the worst slap in the face that Hitler suffered until the War. Even if the Lutherans had wanted to do anything like this, they would not have been able to, because they did not have the supranational organization of the Catholic Church.

continued...

[fpb.livejournal.com]

The most visible and successful leader of resistance against Hitler in Germany was a Catholic bishop, Count Clemens von Galen of Munster. This man was an old-fashioned German patriot and conservative, and had not left a great impression as priest. His promotion to a smallish episcopate in mostly Lutheran Lower Saxony was not regarded with great expectation by anyone; the general feeling seems to have been that he was advanced faute de mieux, and because of his illustrious forebears. But from the moment he became a Bishop, he stared down courageously and tirelessly all the criminals in the Reich Government, discouraged ministers from even visiting his city, and denounced every crime he could hear of. A giant of a man, six foot four and with the manner of a sergeant-major, he had a faith as simple and firm as all his other principles, and while he would probably have volunteered to go as the humblest of chaplains to serve the German army, he hated like poison the whole Nazi world of political immoralism and pantheist fraud. The Pope signalled his support for him by summoning him to Rome - he, the Bishop of little Munster - along with the Cardinals Archbishops of Berlin, Cologne and Munich, for the conference on German affairs from which Mit Brennender Sorge sprang. His two crowning achievements were the great speech against euthanasia, which single-handedly put an end to the Nazi murder of the old and sick in 1941, and the fact that, in spite of their hatred for him, the Nazis were unable to lay a hand on him. In 1945, he was made a Cardinal - again, a most unusual honour for a bishop of lesser rank - but he died almost immediately, surrounded by the love of his people and the admiration of all the civilized world.

Cardinal von Galen was a hero cut out of rock, and certainly not every high prelate was willing to take the same risks. Worse still, outside Germany there were Catholics who were willing to take the help of Germany to settle matters with their domestic enemies - the Vichy French, the Slovaks, the Croats. But in general, the Church was understood to be in opposition to the Nazi regime from beginning to end, and when the war was over, Jewish communities from across Europe thanked the then Pope Pius XII for everything he had done for them (including saving the lives of almost the whole Italian Jewish community). The Lutherans had their heroes and their martyrs - foremost among them Karl BArth and Dietrich Bonhoeffer - but they were simply not able to act as effectively as Popes PIus XI and XII and Cardinal von Galen were. The collapse of the Confessing Church left them living, effectively, the lives of the catacombs, and they did not have the time or opportunity to recover organizationally.

A significant though short passage from Pope Pius XI's <i>MIt Brennender Sorge</i>

[fpb.livejournal.com]

7. Take care, Venerable Brethren, that above all, faith in God, the first and irreplaceable foundation of all religion, be preserved in Germany pure and unstained. The believer in God is not he who utters the name in his speech, but he for whom this sacred word stands for a true and worthy concept of the Divinity. Whoever identifies, by pantheistic confusion, God and the universe, by either lowering God to the dimensions of the world, or raising the world to the dimensions of God, is not a believer in God. 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 who "Reacheth from end to end mightily, and ordereth all things sweetly" (Wisdom viii. 1). Neither is he a believer in God.
8. Whoever exalts race, or the people, or the State, or a particular form of State, or the depositories of power, or any other fundamental value of the human community - however necessary and honorable be their function in worldly things - whoever raises these notions above their standard value and divinizes them to an idolatrous level, distorts and perverts an order of the world planned and created by God; he is far from the true faith in God and from the concept of life which that faith upholds.
9. Beware, Venerable Brethren, of that growing abuse, in speech as in writing, of the name of God as though it were a meaningless label, to be affixed to any creation, more or less arbitrary, of human speculation. Use your influence on the Faithful, that they refuse to yield to this aberration. Our God is the Personal God, supernatural, omnipotent, infinitely perfect, one in the Trinity of Persons, tri-personal in the unity of divine essence, the Creator of all existence. Lord, King and ultimate Consummator of the history of the world, who will not, and cannot, tolerate a rival God by His side.
10. This God, this Sovereign Master, has issued commandments whose value is independent of time and space, country and race. As God's sun shines on every human face so His law knows neither privilege nor exception. Rulers and subjects, crowned and uncrowned, rich and poor are equally subject to His word. From the fullness of the Creators' right there naturally arises the fullness of His right to be obeyed by individuals and communities, whoever they are. This obedience permeates all branches of activity in which moral values claim harmony with the law of God, and pervades all integration of the ever-changing laws of man into the immutable laws of God.

(*underlines mine*)

[stigandnasty919.livejournal.com]

I find it interesting that even thought John Cornwell's book is still on sale and still believed that he almost recanted in 2004.

"I would now argue, in the light of the debates and evidence following Hitler's Pope, that Pius XII had so little scope of action that it is impossible to judge the motives for his silence during the war, while Rome was under the heel of Mussolini and later occupied by Germany."

An imperfect and inadequate withdrawal of his charges perhaps, but probably something that should be added to each copy of his book. Its a perfect example of how difficult it is to get the cat back into the bag. Reminds me of the degree to which people believe the DaVinci Code to be based on fact.

[fpb.livejournal.com]

You were not yet on my f-list when I told this astounding story: http://fpb.livejournal.com/220575.html
Or when I reprinted this article:
http://fpb.livejournal.com/115021.html