On Monday, the Vatican Archives holdings for the years 1922-1939 were opened to scholars.
Over sixty researchers visited the Vatican’s secret pre-World War II archives yesterday asking to consult more than 30,000 documents dating from the 1922-1939 papacy of Pius XI which were opened for examination this week.
With all of the reports I’ve always read about the glacial pace of acquiring documents from the Archives, I’m surprised that scholars, a few days into it, are already reporting on their findings:
A 1938 diary written near the end of Pope Pius XI’s papacy confirms his opposition to fascism was hardening as the outbreak of World War II grew closer, a historian said Tuesday after examining documents in the Vatican’s just-opened secret archives.
The diary quoted Pius as saying, “’I won’t be afraid. I prefer to beg for alms’” than to give into pressures from Italian dictator Benito Mussolini’s fascist regime, said French historian Philippe Chenaux.
The diary was written by Monsignor Domenico Tardini, a top aide who served as Pius XI’s foreign minister, and was based on Tardini’s private conversations with the pontiff in September 1938. That was just before the Munich conference, which became a symbol of Western Europe’s futile attempt to appease Hitler.
The Vatican opened the archive Monday to scholars, allowing them access to millions of documents from Pius XI’s pontificate, which lasted from 1922 to February 1939.
Chenaux said Tardini quoted Pius XI as uttering the alms quote after being informed that Mussolini’s regime had prohibited Italian newspapers from reporting on articles in the Vatican’s official newspaper, L’Osservatore Romano.
The diary also indicated that Pius XI was determined to oppose the 1938 anti-Jewish laws enacted by Mussolini’s regime, Chenaux said in a telephone interview.
Entries “showed the great firmness of Pius XI. He wasn’t afraid” to oppose both fascism and Nazism, said Chenaux, who is a professor of church history at the Pontifical Lateranense University in Rome and a biographer of wartime Pope Pius XII.
Another AP story about an incident with which I was not famiiliar, involving a US prelate:
The newly opened files cover only the pontificate of Pius XI, which lasted from 1922 to February 1939, and are unlikely to solve the controversy that surrounds his wartime successor, accused by some historians of failing to do enough to protect Jews during the Holocaust, Wolf said.
However, the documents offer an insider’s look on how Pacelli mediated between various currents within the clergy and helped shape the Vatican’s stance on the growing power of Nazi Germany.
In 1937, the pope held council in his summer residence of Castel Gandolfo with Pacelli and 10 other cardinals to discuss reactions to a strongly anti-Nazi pronouncement by Cardinal George Mundelein, the archbishop of Chicago. Mundelein had publicly branded Hitler an "inept paperhanger," prompting an official protest to the Vatican by the Nazi regime.
"The discussion centered on whether the Vatican should blame Mundelein or exonerate him," Wolf said. Some cardinals sought to condemn their American colleague for his harsh words on Hitler, but Pacelli successfully pushed for a reply to German authorities that defended Mundelein by saying he had only exercised freedom of speech within his diocese.
"We already knew this was the result, but for the first time we see the discussion within the Vatican," Wolf said. "This shows who had the ear of the pope."
A year later, the secretary of state took strong action again when Cardinal Theodor Innitzer, the archbishop of Vienna, endorsed the 1938 German annexation of Austria with an enthusiastic declaration that was signed "Heil Hitler!"
Wolf said the Vatican archive contains extensive documents on the case, including harsh letters from Pacelli ordering Innitzer to report to Rome, in an effort that ultimately resulted in a retraction of the pro-Nazi statement.
"Pacelli was acting on the instructions of the pope," said Frank Coppa, director of the history department of St. John’s University and writing a book on Pius XII.
That’s after the jump. Before you jump, check out Daniel Mitsui’s quite interesting blog post about a Chicago-area church, the construction of which might be in part a consequence of Mundelein’s speech.
Catholic priests in Germany, to assert their right to train their own flocks, last week prepared to celebrate a "Sunday of Youth" with mass meetings of Catholic youngsters.
The Berlin diocese, declaring that not more than 58 of Germany’s 25,635 priests could be suspected of immorality though the Reich had imprisoned for examination 915 (including lay brothers), ordered a pamphlet to be read from pulpits on the "Sunday of Youth." This was the Church’s reply to a tirade three weeks ago by Propaganda Minister Dr. Paul Joseph Goebbels who, as a onetime star pupil of Jesuit priests, perhaps felt specially qualified to speak about the "general shocking decadence of morals” among the German priesthood.
Night before the pamphlet was to be read, Munich’s most popular Catholic priest, Father Rupert Mayr, who lost both legs fighting for the Fatherland and has fearlessly lashed Nazi propaganda, was arrested. This did not prevent young Catholics all over Germany from flocking to their churches on "Sunday of Youth." Hitler Youth Groups were at the churches to meet them, to jeer and catcall from outside while the Catholic pamphlet was being read from the pulpits. The pamphlet made no attempt to deny the charges of immorality—"Weakness and sin have always walked alongside the Church in its passages through the centuries—" but attacked the government for unscrupulously exploiting the .2% of scandal it had found.
In Munich after services some priests led their congregations out to defy the noisy Hitler Youth. Fist fights ensued, ten more priests were bundled into jail. In Cologne 60,000 Catholics thronged the Cathedral Square, wildly cheered Cologne’s anti-Nazi Archbishop, Joseph Cardinal Schulte.
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