“Hitler's Pope”

From the Prologue to the above work:

'[Eugenio] Pacelli [later Pope Pius XII] was responsible for a treaty with Serbia which contributed to the tensions that led to the First World War. Twenty years later he struck an accord with Hitler which helped sweep the Führer to legal dictatorship while neutralizing the potential of Germany's 23 million Catholics (34 million after the Anschluss) to protest and resist. . . .

'In 1933 Pacelli found a successful negotiating partner for his Reich Concordat in the person of Adolf Hitler. Their treaty authorized the papacy to impose the new Church law on German Catholics and granted generous privileges to Catholic schools and the clergy. In exchange, the Catholic Church in Germany, its parliamentary political party, and its many hundreds of associations and newspapers “voluntarily” withdrew, following Pacelli's initiative, from social and political action. The abdication of German political Catholicism in 1933, negotiated and imposed from the Vatican by Pacelli with the agreement of Pope Pius XI, ensured that Nazism could rise unopposed by the most powerful Catholic community in the world – a reverse of the situation sixty years earlier, when German Catholics combated and defeated Bismarck's Kulturkampf persecutions from the grass roots. As Hitler himself boasted in a cabinet meeting on July 14, 1933, Pacelli's guarantee of nonintervention left the regime free to resolve the Jewish question. According to the cabinet minutes, “[Hitler] expressed the opinion that one should only consider it as a great achievement. The concordat gave Germany an opportunity and created an area of trust that was particularly significant in the developing struggle against international Jewry.”* [*From Notes: 'Quoted in S. Friedländer, Nazi Germany and the Jews, Vol. I: The Years of Persecution, 1933-39 (London, 1997), 49; Friedländer's German Source, Der Nationalsozialismus: Dokumente 1933-1945. (Frankfurt am Main, 1957), 130.'] The perception of papal endorsement of Nazism, in Germany and abroad, helped seal the fate of Europe.'

(Hitler's Pope: The Secret History of Pope Pius XII, by John Cornwell; American paperback edition; Penguin Books, 1999, 2000; pp. 4, 6-7).

5

PACELLI AND WEIMAR

'On June 30, 1920, Pacelli presented his credentials to the Reich, the first diplomat to do so under the Weimar government. Thus he became the senior diplomat in the capital, an honor that he was to grace with outstanding charm and distinction. Having warmly welcomed the nuncio, President Friedrich Ebert solemnly announced that his duty was to order, “with the proper authorities, the relations between Church and State in Germany [so] that they correspond to the new situation and to contemporary conditions.” Pacelli responded: “For my part, I will devote my entire strength to cultivating and strengthening the relations between the Holy See and Germany.” (Thirteen years later, Hitler used the self-same phrase, word for word, when he promised an immediate readjustment of relations between Berlin and the Holy See in exchange for the Center Party's acquiescence in the Enabling Act that awarded him dictatorial powers.)'* [*From Notes: 'See Scholder, The Churches and the Third Reich, Vol. I, 62 and 249.'] (ibid. p. 92).

7

HITLER AND GERMAN CATHOLICISM

'Hitler, in fact, had two views on the churches – public and private. In February of 1933 he was to declare in the Reichstag that the churches were to be an integral part of the German national life. Privately, the following month, he vowed to completely “eradicate” Christianity from Germany. “You are either a Christian or a German,” he said. “You cannot be both.”'* [*From Notes: 'Quoted in F. Zipfel, Kirchenkampf in Deutschland, 1933-45 (Berlin, 1965), 9, quoted in M. Housden, Resistance and Conformity in the Third Reich (London, 1997), 46.'] (ibid. pp. 105-106).

'In the spring of 1931, a Catholic Reichstag representative, Karl Trossmann, published a best-selling book entitled Hitler and Rome, in which he described the National Socialists as a “brutal party that would do away with all the rights of the people.” Hitler, he declared, was dragging Germany into a new war, a war that “would only end more disastrously than the last.” Not long after, the Catholic author Alfons Wild published a widely distributed essay entitled “Hitler and Catholicism,” in which he proclaimed that “Hitler's view of the world is not Christianity but the message of race, a message that does not proclaim peace and justice but rather violence and hate.”

'Meanwhile, two Catholic journalists, Fritz Gerlich and Ingbert Naab, excoriated National Socialism in the pages of the Munich-based periodical Der Gerade Weg [The Straight Path], characterizing the movement as a “plague.” In the issue dated July 21, 1932, the writers declared that “National Socialism means enmity with neighboring countries, despotism in internal affairs, civil war, international war. National Socialism means lies, hatred, fratricide and unbounded misery. Adolf Hitler preaches the law of lies. You who have fallen victim to the deceptions of one obsessed with despotism, wake up!”

'This vehement and united front of the Catholic Church in Germany, however, was not at one with the view from inside the Vatican – a view that was being increasingly shaped and promoted by Eugenio Pacelli.' (ibid. p. 110).

The Lateran Treaty and Its Aftermath

'Pius XI and Pacelli realized that no accommodation could be made with Communism, anywhere in the world. In the case of totalitarian movements and regimes of the Right, it was a different matter. In Italy the Holy See had signed a pact with Mussolini in February 1929, foreshadowing Pacelli's 1933 deal with Hitler. Negotiated and drafted by Pacelli's brother, Francesco, and his predecessor as Secretary of State, Pietro Gasparri, the accord, on the face of it and for the time being, ended the antagonisms that had existed between the Holy See and Italy since 1870.

'According to the terms of the Lateran Treaty, Roman Catholicism became the sole recognized religion in the country. . . . The Powerful democratic Catholic Popular Party (the Partito Popolare), in many respects similar to the Center Party in Germany, had been disbanded and its leader, Don Luigi Sturzo, exiled. Catholics had been instructed by the Vatican itself to withdraw from politics as Catholics, leaving a political vacuum in which the Fascists thrived. In the March elections following the Lateran Treaty, priests throughout Italy were encouraged by the Vatican to support the Fascists, and the Pope spoke of Mussolini as “a man sent by Providence.”' (ibid. p. 114).

'A few days after the signing of the Lateran Treaty, Hitler wrote an article for the Völkischer Beobachter [The Racial Observer, the official newspaper of the Nazi party], published on February 22, 1929, warmly welcoming the agreement. “The fact that the Curia is now making peace with Fascism,” he wrote, “shows that the Vatican trusts the new political realities far more than did the former liberal democracy with which it could not come to terms.” Turning to the German situation, he rebuked the Center Party leadership for its recalcitrant attachment to democratic politics. “By trying to preach that democracy is still in the best interests of German Catholics, the Center Party . . . is placing itself in stark contradiction to the spirit of the treaty signed today by the Holy See.”' (Ibid. p. 115).

* * *

'By late December [1931], the Pope [Pius XI] was repeating the suggestion to Baron von Ritter, the Bavarian envoy to the Holy See: that a cooperation between the Church in Germany and the National Socialists “perhaps only temporarily and for specific purposes” would “prevent a still greater evil.”'* [*From Notes: 'Report from Ritter to Munich, December 20, 1931, cited in Scholder, The Churches and the Third Reich, Vol. I, 154.'] (ibid. p. 125).

* * *

REAPPRAISALS:

On 26 July 1914, Baron von Ritter, the Chargé d' Affaires of Bavaria at the Holy See, had written to his Government:

“The Pope [Pius X] approves of Austria's harsh treatment of Serbia. He has no great opinion of the armies of Russia and France in the event of a war against Germany. The Cardinal Secretary of State does not see when Austria could make war if she does not decide to do so now.”

(Bayerische Dokumente zum Kriegsausbruch [Bavarian Documents on the Outbreak of War] III, p. 206; as cited in the Vatican Against Europe, by Edmond Paris; The Wickliffe Press [Protestant Truth Society] edition, 1993; p. 47).

* * *

During the first Balkan war the Oesterreichs Katholische Sonntags Blatt expressed the following sentiments:

“Our ideal is not to perpetuate European Turkey, but to bring the Balkan Peninsula into the possession of Catholic Austria and the Catholic Church. . . . Just as a violent storm refreshes and cleanses the oppressive atmosphere, so we hold when it once comes to real war the moral and economic gain to Europe will in the end be very great. The social democracy is not yet strong enough to prevent a war. As a result of the emotional pressure of a European war it will break to pieces with its millions of casual followers, and under the same pressure modern liberalism will also break down. It will not hurt Europe if its conditions are for once well shaken up.”

(As cited in, The Inside Story of Austro-German Intrigue, or, How the World War Was Brought About, by Joseph Goricar, Formerly of the Austro-Hungarian Foreign Service, and Lyman Beecher Stowe; published Garden City New York, Doubleday, Page & Company, 1920; pp. 94-95).

* * *

“One might wonder for what motive the Catholic Church evinces herself so bellicose at an epoch when she is governed by a chief [Pope Pius X] who is truly a saint, imbued with veritably apostolic ideas. The answer is very simple. The Pope and the Curia see in Serbia the ravaging malady that little by little penetrated the Monarchy to the marrow, and which, in time, would end by disintegrating it.

“Despite all the other experiments attempted by the Curia in the course of the last decade, Austria-Hungary is and remains the Catholic State par excellence, the strongest rampart of the Faith which stands in our day for the Church of Christ. The fall of this rampart would signify for the Church the loss of its solidest prop; in the conflicts with the Orthodox Church she would see her most powerful champion struck down.

“Hence, just as for Austria-Hungary there is an immediate necessity of self-preservation to expel from its organism, even by force if need be, the dissolving malady, there is also for the Catholic Church an indirect necessity of doing or approving everything that would serve to attain that end.

“In this light, a harmony between the apostolic sentiment and the war spirit can easily be confirmed.”

(Despatch of 29 July, 1914, from Count Palffy, Austrian Chargé d' Affaires at the Vatican, to Count Berchtold, Austrian Minister of Foreign Affairs; as cited in: Contemporary Italy: Its Intellectual and Moral Origins, by Count Carlo Sforza; Frederick Muller Ltd., London, 1946; p. 154).

* * *

“[T]he Papacy, distressed by the ebbing of its strength . . . will hate Orthodoxy worse than Scepticism, and will endeavour to persuade mankind that they cannot be Christians unless they are Papists, and thus will do the Dragon's work, and promote Infidelity.”

(From: Lectures on the Apocalypse; Critical, Expository, and Practical; Delivered Before the University of Cambridge by Chr. Wordsworth, D.D., Canon of Westminster; Formerly Fellow of Trinity College, Cambridge; Third Edition; London: Francis & John Rivington, St. Paul's Church Yard, and Waterloo Place, 1852; pp. 387-388).