Hitler' s Pope
Cornwell, John
BOOKS Pacelli's prosecutor John F. Morley O ne approaches with skepticism and apprehension a work whose author describes his "moral shock" at the very subject about whom he is writing....
...This may well be true, but Gumpel's task, and I say this with admiration for his dedication and years of research, is to do all in his power to promote the cause of someone whom he calls a "saint...
...But Pacelli and Pope Pius XI viewed conCommonweal 2 7 November5, 1999...
...Peter Gumpel, S.J., the postulator for the beatification of Pius XII, has already severely criticized Cornwell not only for the thesis of his book, but also for overlooking many pertinent sources...
...Nevertheless, this is a fascinat~g book which enlightens while it enrages, accuses while it challenges, offends while it searches for truth...
...The major fault, perhaps, of Cornwell's book is precisely this inability or unwillingness to understand the sitz-im-Ieben, the reaMife situation in which Pacelli was raised, taught, and pursued his ecclesiastical career...
...True, the concordat, as others before it, contributed immensely to the centralization of power in the Vatican...
...Cornwell's portrait of the young PaceIli's impressive but rather conventional piety lies at the heart of the book...
...Cornwell's research includes sources as diverse as the beatification tes6mony for Pope Pius XII, Vatican archives up to the year 1922 dealing with Pacelli's early career in Germany, and a variety of governmental and scholarly studies concerning the 1933 concordat between the Holy See and Nazi Germany...
...This high clericalism may appear foreign or negative to us now, but such retroactive judgments, evaluating the past with the benefit of hindsight, are not historically or intellectually tenable...
...There is no author or historian who can write totally objectively, and such an antiseptic approach would not be desirable in any case...
...Pacelli's spiritual life was individualistic and subjective...
...Inner-directed with an emphasis on withdrawal from society...
...Comwell gives the mistaken impression that this severe priestly spirituality was somehow unique to Pacelli and thereby had grave consequences for his governance of the church...
...It is rare, however, that any author reveals the level of his bias even before the reader takes up the book but this is what John Cornwell does in Hitler's Pope: The Secret History of Pius XII...
...That this spirituality became part of Pacelli's entire attitude toward life is indisputable, but why should it have been otherwise...
...For example, Cornwell does not seem to understand the awe in which most Catholics held their local bishops, to say nothing of the adulation directed toward cardinals and the pope himself...
...But it was hardly unique...
...Such feelings are exacerbated by a tendentious title which, on one hand, characterizes Pope Pius XII as some kind of subservient ally or stooge of Adolf Hitler, and, on the other, with its reference to "secret history," reduces itself to the level of a supermarket tabloid...
...But those of us trained in seminaries before Vatican Coundl II will readily recognize it...
...Cornwell makes much of the anachronistic quality of this approach to spiritual formation...
...Many of us were taught in similar fashion...
...If one is biased, so also is the other...
...In a similar fashion, the author imputes malevolence to Pacelli's attempts to bring the prerogatives and relationships of the individual German states, and later the Reich itself, into conformity with the 1917 Code of Canon Law...
...It is perhaps Comwell's most damning allegation that Pacelli, then the Vatican's secretary of state, was instrumental in making a deal whereby the Catholic Center Party, then the only political obstacle to Hitler's oneparty rule, would disband in exchange for concessions made to the Holy See in the concordat...
Vol. 126 • November 1999 • No. 19
