One who opposed Pius XII’s policy of silence from within the Vatican was the first American to achieve the rank of nuncio, or papal ambassador, Joseph P. Hurley. As the first biographer of Hurley to have full access to his private archive, the Jesuit priest Charles R. Gallagher recreates the internal debates that went on in St Peter’s over the question of what the Church should say about the Nazis’ maltreatment both of Jews and of Catholic priests. Hurley believed that the Pope should say in public what he thought in private, that Hitler was ‘not only an untrustworthy scoundrel but a fundamentally wicked person’. (According to Gallagher this was ‘the only known time he ever personally expressed disdain for Hitler’.)
Hurley was — possibly rightly — thought of as President Roosevelt’s placeman in the Vatican, which is one of the reasons that his views were not adopted, and this book relates the discussion that took place between Roosevelt and Cardinal Eugenio Pacelli at FDR’s upstate New York home, Hyde Park, in 1936. According to the President’s recollection in 1943, the future Pope — then Vatican secretary of state — had said that the United States was ripe for a Communist take-over. FDR disagreed, saying that in fact the genuine peril was of America going Fascist. ‘No,’ said Pacelli. ‘Yes,’ said Roosevelt. ‘Mr President, you simply do not understand the terrible importance of the Communist movement,’ said Pacelli. ‘You just don’t understand the American people,’ FDR claimed to have replied.
This book also makes the plausible case that in the Twenties, Pacelli originally ‘saw Hitler’s Nazism as merely a political ruse. Aware that Hitler’s earliest ostensible political alliance was with the German Workers’ Party in 1919, Pacelli remained suspicious of Hitler as a politician of the left.’ He certainly told the US consul in Cologne, as late as 1939, that Hitler was not a true Nazi and that he ‘in spite of appearances would end up in the camp of the left-wing Nazi extremists where he began his career’. With such thinking, it is hardly surprising that Pope Pius XII failed to appreciate the true threat that Hitler posed to Christendom, and to respond to it effectively. These two books — both written by devout, lifelong Catholics — will not aid the Pope’s adherents’ hopes for his canonisation.
Comments
KARL ROLEWICZ
July 18th, 2008 1:45pmThat you have made your biased anti-Pius XII comments based on the 'wise with hind-sight' 20-20 vision so common to 'merchant' banker' (rhymes with...)journalists , I am not surprised but that such a respected figure such as Gerard Noel should also sit in judgement with the also 'wise with hindsight' approach is an absolute disgrace.As you yourself say,the Germans would not have stopped their persecution of the Jews by one iota if the Pope had said something but in an unsavvy non-media age he quietly sent out orders that Jews were to be sheltered everywhere possible by Catholic monasteries,nunneries etc. etc..So please no more of this total bull---- about Pope Pius XII WHO WAS PERSONALLY RESPONSIBLE FOR SAVING OF COUNTLESS TENS OF THOUSANDS OF JEWS!...I AM ALSO SURE THAT THE VATICAN CONGREGATION FOR THE CAUSES OF SAINTS DOES NOT NEED ANY ADVICE FROM A VERTICALLY CHALLENGED IDDIOT OF A JOURNALIST!!!
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David Short
July 18th, 2008 1:11pmJews were treated very badly in just about every European country in those days, and many people in Britain even after the war and the knowledge of the death camps didn't care very much.
It was in America where Jewish people could reach their potential, even if that didn't include entry to country clubs.
This article smacks a little too much of judging yesterday's events by today's values.
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Larry
July 18th, 2008 7:15amThe great Winston Churchill didn't mention the Holocaust in his autobiography? Neither did Eisenhower or De Gaulle? How did the greatest crime in Human history not rate a mention by these great Statesmen?
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JohnA
July 17th, 2008 11:04pmThe Pope did not need to excommunicate members of the Nazi Party in 1944: they had already been publicly and lastingly excommunicated by the German Catholic bishops in 1932, before Hitler came to power, and all German Catholics were solemnly forbidden on pain of excommunication to vote for them. Nor do you mention Pius's 1939 pre-War encyclical 'mit brennender Sorge' - 'With vivid anxiety/alarm' - one of the first acts of his papacy, and written in German, not in Latin; although it addresses the problems of the Church in Germany, it also clearly attacks the Nazis' racial and racist policies.
As for fearing in December 1942 that the Church 'might suffer', even by 1939 Pius was well aware that the Catholic Church in Germany had been in grave difficulties since 1933, its churches forcibly closed, many of its members (particularly those associated with the Zentrumspartei) thrown into concentration camps or imprisoned (e.g. the courageously outspoken Dean of Berlin's Catholic Cathedral) for their anti-Nazi sermons. Anything he said across the air waves to a victorious and bloodthirsty Hitler was unlikely to have a calming effect, and as a diplomat, Pius realised that. Many of his actions (or inactions) look pusillanimous by modern papal standards, but they stem from his decision to maintain neutrality, and his disapproval of the punitive allied treatment of Germany after 1918.
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