Power and the Papacy During the Holocaust

Excerpted from the October 1999 issue of the Atlantic Monthly.

"It is appropriate that, as the second millennium of Christianity draws to a close"--this is John Paul II, in his 1994 apostolic letter "Tertio Millennio Adveniente"--"the Church should become more fully conscious of her children's sinfulness," recalling all those times in history when they "indulged in ways of thinking and acting which were truly forms of counter-witness and scandal."

Yet when the long-awaited Vatican document examining the record of the Church in relation to the Holocaust, "We Remember: A Reflection on the Shoah," was published in 1998, it singled out for special praise "the wisdom of Pope Pius XII's diplomacy." This seemed to be a direct rebuttal to an oft-raised criticism of the wartime pope, whose silence in the face of the Jewish genocide had become for many an emblem of the Church's own "counter-witness and scandal."

The Vatican pronouncement came as reports surfaced that the Congregation for the Causes of the Saints was preparing to advance the cause of Pius XII toward sainthood.

If Pius XII were to be named a saint, more than the restoration of his reputation would result. His policy of silence about Nazi atrocities would be justified. He would be credited with the secret rescue of Jews that was carried out by many individual Catholics across Europe. The papal absolutism of which Pius XII was the avatar would be vindicated as John Paul II's lasting legacy.

In this context the arrival of the first serious and complete biography of Eugenio Pacelli, Pius XII, could not be more timely. John Cornwell's "Hitler's Pope," rooted in a painstaking examination of Pacelli's record as the Vatican's point man in dealing with the rise of Hitler in the 1930s and of his maneuvering as Pius XII during the war years, is a devastating refutation of the claim that this pope's diplomacy can in any way be characterized as wisdom. Instead of a portrait of a man worthy of sainthood, Cornwell lays out the story of a narcissistic, power-hungry manipulator who was prepared to lie, to appease, and to collaborate in order to accomplish his ecclesiastical purpose--which was not to save lives or even to protect the Catholic Church but, more narrowly, to protect and advance the power of the papacy.

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