Hitler and the Vatican: Inside the Secret Archives that Reveal the New Story of the Nazis and the Church

From Publishers Weekly
While he purports to defend the Vatican against "polemics" and "moralists," Godman's account of the Vatican's failure to oppose Hitler, based on recently released documents, is in some ways as damning as Goldhagen's A Moral Reckoning. He focuses on the 1930s and two men, Pope Pius XI and his secretary of state, Eugenio Pacelli, the future Pope Pius XII. Neither man comes off well, bound as they were by legalisms, propriety and an almost obsessive desire to maintain the facade of reciprocity embodied in the Vatican's Concordat with Nazi Germany. Both fully recognized that Nazism was incompatible with Christian doctrine, and therein lies the real tragedy of Godman's well-told tale. While Godman, a Vatican scholar and member of the Church's Committee for the Archives of the Holy Office, paints portraits of two tormented but indecisive men, other culprits are the ineffective papal delegate in Berlin, Cardinal Orsenigo, and the Austrian bishop Alois Hudal. This is also a study of the structural and institutional inertia of the Vatican. Caught between the dual threats of Nazism and Bolshevism, popes, German bishops and Vatican authorities failed to articulate a single, coherent, theologically sound and politically savvy condemnation of National Socialism. Like Pius XI's "hidden encyclical" denouncing racism, two highly specific condemnations of Nazism, drafted in 1935 and 1936, were never promulgated for diplomatic and political reasons. One can only read these documents (included as appendixes I and II) with a heartrending sense of what might have been. Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.


From Booklist
Drawing on archival sources, many of which have only recently become available, Godman presents a thorough, evenhanded picture that challenges simple descriptions of Pius XII as "Hitler's Pope." Neither flattering nor sensational, Godman's is a complex portrait of a human institution, made up of persons with a variety of mixed motives, in a difficult political context. Godman shifts attention to the papacy of Pius XI and locates failure to clearly condemn National Socialism in a politics of caution, diplomacy, and anticommunism rather than sympathy. He depicts Austrian bishop Alois Hudal, a member of the Holy Office (known as the Inquisition, 1542-1908), as an appeaser and anti-Semite who became the Nazi Party's "court theologian." Eugenio Pacelli, the career diplomat who became Pius XII, is depicted as suffering "a martyrdom of patience." Convinced that the Vatican could have spoken earlier and more forcefully against the Nazi racism, Godman commendably focuses on a measured presentation of evidence that equips careful readers to make informed judgments about the period and meaningful conclusions about its significance today. Steven Schroeder
Copyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved


Book Description
For years, the policies of the Catholic Church during the rise and terribly destructive rule of the Nazis have been controversial. Pope Pius XII has been attacked as "Hitler's Pope," an anti-Semitic enabler who refused to condemn Nazism, much less urge Catholics to resist the German regime. The Church has been accused of standing by while the Nazis steadily revealed their evil designs. Yet all such arguments have been based only on sketchy evidence. The Vatican has kept its internal workings secret and locked away from scrutiny. Until now. In February 2003, the Vatican opened its archives for the crucial years of the Nazi consolidation of power, up until 1939. Peter Godman, thanks to his long experience in Vatican sources and his reputation as an impartial, non-Catholic historian of the Church, was one of the first scholars to explore the new documents. The story they tell is revelatory and surprising and forces a major revision of the history of the 1930s. It is a story that reveals the innermost workings of the Vatican, an institution far more fractured than monolithic, one that allowed legalism to trump moral outrage. Godman's narrative is doubly shocking: At first, the Church planned to condemn Nazism as heretical, and drafted several variations of its charges in the mid-1930s. However, as Mussolini drew close to Hitler, and Pope Pius XI grew more concerned about communism than fascism, the charge was reduced to a denunciation only of bolshevism. The Church abandoned its moral attack on the Nazis and retreated to diplomacy, complaining about treaty violations and delivering weak protests while the horrors of religious persecution mounted. As Godman demonstrates, the policies of Pius XII were all determined by his predecessor, Pius XI. The Church was misled not so much by "Hitler's Pope" as by a tragic miscalculation and a special relationship with the Italian government. Mussolini toyed with the Church, even proposing that Hitler be excommunicated. Yet in the end, when presented with further evidence of Nazi depredations, Pius XI could only comment, "Kindly God, who has allowed all this to happen at present, undoubtedly has His purpose." Reproducing the key Church documents in full and quoting verbatim conversations between Pius XI and his bishops, Hitler and the Vatican is the most extraordinary look inside the secretive Vatican ever written.


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Controversy over the Roman Catholic Church's alleged "silence" about the crimes of Nazism shows no sign of being settled, despite the overly optimistic subtitle of this flawed but revealing history. Godman, a Vatican scholar who has taught most recently at the Univ. of Rome, was the first allowed to see the archives of the Roman Inquisition, the Vatican body in charge of faith and morals, where debates on the Nazis occurred. Materials related to these deliberations were considered so dangerous that in 1940 they were moved to the US to avoid falling into Axis hands. In contrast to John Cornwell's sensational but shoddy Hitler's Pope, Godman absolves Pope Pius XII of anti-Semitism. Yet he finds the papacy fallible in formulating a strategy as Hitler and Mussolini cast ever-larger shadows across Europe. The roots of the problem, Godman suggests, lay not in the papacy of Pius XII but in that of his predecessor, Pius XI. As cardinal-Secretary of State, Pius XII (then known as Eugenio Pacelli) hewed to the line set by his mentor, "in that spirit of diplomatic legalism appropriate to his role and congenial to his character." The real advance here lies in the depiction of the Vatican, a bureaucracy riven with competing agendas that not even the pope could wholly master. By 1935, angered by the Nazis' flagrant violations of a concordat, their use of eugenics, and their racism, Pius XI secretly commissioned a pair of German Jesuits to prepare a condemnation that listed 47 heretical propositions of the regime. But the document ended up watered down in a wider condemnation that linked Nazism with Communism and Fascism as "errors of the age"-and even that was shelved because the German bishops wereuncertain how to react to Hitler's mix of lies and threats. Although Godman has uncovered important new information on the behind-the-scenes maneuverings between Rome and Berlin, he does not always present it with clarity. Worse, he stops in 1939, just before Pacelli succeeded Pius XI, so that the wartime action and inaction of the Vatican that have ignited opprobrium are undiscussed. While critical of the papacy, a more balanced treatment of its policy than Cornwell's-though a longer, more intensive treatment is still in order. Agent: Raphael Sagalyn/Sagalyn Literary Agency


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