Editorial: Cornwell' s popes
COMMONWEAL Cornwell's popes Afront-page story in the Sunday, October 17 New York Times alerted readers to the arrest of thirteen Iranian Jews accused of spying for Israel. The prospect of show...
...Joseph Goebbels stated the Nazi plan plainly in his diary: "Once we have power we will never give it up...
...In that context, Cornwell argues that Pacelli could have prevented Hitler from attaining absolute power...
...Nor will Cornwell's claim to have uncovered proof of Pius's life-long anti-Semitism stand up to much scrutiny...
...On the other hand, if the quiet negotiations of Iran's Jewish community save the thirteen, the wisdom of exercising prudence and pursuing diplomacy in the face of lethal hostility will be vindicated...
...The prospect of show trials designed to inflame anti-Israel feeling among Iran's fundamentalist Muslim majority now threatens that nation's small but venerable Jewish community...
...On the face of it, the situation presents rather stark choices...
...Although such intractable moral tradeoffs are not necessarily exculpatory, it is important to keep them in mind when trying to evaluate the accuracy of John Cornwell's best-selling Hitler's Pope: The Secret History of Pius XII (Viking...
...Corn-well's widely commented upon book is for the most part a familiar, if compelling, redramatization of the longstanding accusations about Pius's "silence" during the Holocaust...
...They will have to carry our dead bodies out of the ministries...
...As our reviewer John Morley observes (page 27), Cornwell both exaggerates Pius's power and influence (even accusing him of helping to start World War I!) and refuses to contexrualize historically the choices Pacelli faced as Vatican secretary of state and subsequently as pope...
...Those debilitating flaws, however, did Commonweal 5 November 5,1999...
...It will not redefine "the entire history of the twentieth century," as advertisements claim...
...If the Iranian Jews are convicted on trumped-up charges and hanged by Iran's "revolutionary" court, those who publicly protested the arrests may be accused of having indeed made "matters worse...
...But to place the ultimate blame for Hitler's coming to power on Pius's ascetical shoulders is an almost absurdly simplistic reading of events...
...But the idea that the Vatican, or German Catholics liberated from the Vatican's malign influence, could have stopped Hitler after his appointment as chancellor in January 1933 is as novel a reading of history as it is false...
...Human-rights groups outside of Iran have suggested that the charges have been trumped up for political reasons," the Times ominously reported...
...If quiet diplomacy fails, however, those who advocated such a course may well be charged with complicity or worse in the state's crimes...
...Pius's determination to put the interests of the institutional church before virtually all other considerations has long been documented, and Cornwell offers little new here...
...None of Germany's major institutions, including the Catholic church, can escape responsibility for the collapse of the Weimar Republic...
...The author's most sensational accusation is that Eugenio Pacelli—elected pope in 1939—cut a deal in March 1933, whereby he silenced Catholic political opposition to the Nazis in return for Hitler signing a concordat with the Vatican...
...In Iran, spokesmen for Jewish organizations have mostly avoided discussing the case, saying that protests from Jews, here or abroad, would only make matters worse...
Vol. 126 • November 1999 • No. 19
