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Hitler's Pope and Papal Sin
Hitler's Pope
John Cornwell
New York, Viking, 1999
430 pp.
ISBN 0670886939
More about this book
Papal Sin
Garry Wills
New York, Doubleday, 2000
326 pp.
ISBN 0385494106
More about this book
In this, the Roman Catholic Church's Jubilee Year, the lionization of Pope John Paul II appears unstoppable. The current Pontiff, now 80, is universally recognized as a vigorous global ambassador for the Vatican and charismatic religious leader with appeal beyond the Catholic faithful. Most noteworthy on the world stage has been John Paul's role in the fall of communism through his aggressive support of the Polish Solidarity movement, and his ecumenical outreach, especially to the Jews. This Pope has given official Vatican recognition to Israel, and has expunged the last vestiges of the theology of contempt by acknowledging Judaism as an independent faith worthy of reverence.
 Two recent books throw aspersions at the official story. In Hitler's Pope by British journalist, John Cornwall, the current Pope's initiatives to depoliticize the Church, while furthering concentration of the Church's authority in the Vatican, continues a process undertaken by John Paul's' authoritarian predecessor, Pius XII. Garry Wills' startling assault on the contemporary Vatican, Papal Sin, implicates John Paul II in the "structures of deceit" sustained by the papacy for the past 150 years.
Cornwall received access to previously unseen Vatican archives with the intent to exonerate Pius XII for the calumny of having ignored the plight of European Jews as six million were herded into the Nazi killing factories. His discoveries caused Cornwall to reverse his thesis and pen a scathing attack on the actions and character of Eugenio Pacelli who occupied the papal throne from 1939 to 1958.
Pacelli was a scholarly but vacillating figure who distrusted Western democracy, and feared Bolshevism more than he did the Nazis. The central motif of Pacelli's career, both as the Vatican Secretary of State and later Pope, was his initiative to concentrate the power of the Church in the papacy. He executed this aim through the establishment of a long series of Vatican concordats with whatever powers that be, whether with Serbia during World War I, the German States prior to the Second World War, and finally with the Third Reich, in face to face bargaining with Hitler. The basis for these treaties was canon law, which Pacelli as its chief architect in his early career, had codified.
Pacelli's power grabbing could not have been more catastrophic for Germany, and the War's most hapless victims. The price to be paid for the Vatican's control over the appointment of bishops and the administration of Catholic schools was the total destruction of local Catholic political activity. What followed was the emasculation of Germany's Catholic Center Party in the early 1930s, a crucial democratic counterweight to the rise of Nazism. Many historians concur that had Pacelli not destroyed the Center Party, Hitler's consolidation of power might never have occurred. Pacelli's role as "Hitler's Pope" ensured that whatever Catholic resistance to Fascism arose, would be isolated and impotent. The way was clear for the Nazi gangster regime to pursue genocide and the virtual conquest of Europe.
Cornwall's final chapter traces a fretful line from Pius XII to the current Pontiff. According to the author:
[John Paul II] represents a striking contrast with Pacelli's accommodation with Hitler and the suppression of political Catholicism in the 1930s. And yet there are deep contradictions in Wojtyla's papacy, taken in the round. Advocate and enabler of social and political activism in Poland in the 1970s and 1980s, he has emerged a traditionalist autocrat as despotic in his management of the Church as Pacelli ever was. Cornwall cites among John Paul's autocratic moves destroying Liberation Theology in Latin America, imposing orthodoxy on indigenous expressions in Africa and Asia, humiliating Catholic theologians such as Hans Kung and Edward Schillebeeckx, suppressing the progressive voices of women, gays and prochoicers. He closes by noting John Paul's longing for the canonization of Pius XII.
 Papal Sin, by historian Garry Wills, traverses a broader canvass. Wills' customary prodigious scholarship is fully evident. Surprising is his departure from his usual measured argumentation. Papal Sin is an acerbic attack on the Vatican, made more compelling by Wills' standing as a devoted churchgoing Roman Catholic. His exposé on the alleged mendacious character and utterances of the Vatican is as startling as it is courageous.
Wills, whose Catholic heroes are John Henry Newman and St. Augustine, depicts a papacy mired in "structures of deceit" issuing from its cowardly inability to admit that it has ever been wrong. Papal sclerosis has resulted in distorting history and doctrinal dishonesty. All the Catholic commonplaces, from birth control and abortion, to Mariology, and the rejection of women and gays, are subject to Wills' keen and cutting analysis. Contemporary papal doctrine in each instance is shown to be based primarily on political considerations and matters of propriety while sidestepping biblical faithfulness and Catholic tradition.
One of the Vatican's most poignant distortions involves John Paul II's aggressive pursuit of the canonization of Edith Stein, and his portrayal of Stein as a Catholic martyr who gave her life for the Church during the Holocaust. In Wills' words, "…it becomes clear that Stein is very useful for maintaining the argument…that the church was more with the persecuted than with the persecutors during the Holocaust."
Stein was the brilliant scion of an orthodox Jewish family who converted to Catholicism and become a Carmelite nun. The Vatican's claim that she died for her Catholic faith, rather than for being a Jew, Wills contends, was ludicrous. To be a martyr it must established that one's persecutors displayed an odium fidei against the Catholic religion. Yet no such distinctive hatred could be found. Moreover, when the guards came to the Dutch convent where Stein and her sister Rose, also a convert, were staying, only they, the two Jews, were taken to Auschwitz, while the remaining nuns were spared. To be a martyr one must die as a witness for the faith, but as Wills states, Stein attempted to escape her fate!
"…she left notes at the train stops to the death camp asking for aid from the Swiss Consulate and offering to pay for it. There was nothing questionable about doing anything so sensible if she was just fleeing antiJewish hatred. If, however, it meant refusing to bear witness for the faith, it would be somewhat less admirable -- a bit like trying to bribe your way out of the company of Christians about to face the lions in the arena. She clearly did not think it was hatred of the Catholic faith that would be on the minds of her murderers." A miracle was needed to complete the canonization process. The Vatican found one in the late 80s when a young girl in Boston overdosed on a bottle of Tylenol and veered toward coma. The girl was named Benedicta, Stein's Catholic name, and the family prayed mightily to Benedicta for the girl's recovery. She pulled through and the required miracle was at hand.In a New Yorker article published last year, Dr. Michael Shannon, a toxicologist specializing in Tylenol overdose in children and who worked with the patient, said, "I have seen the complications that Benedicta had. They happen sometimes. But it doesn't change the fact that ninety nine percent of the time children with Tylenol overdoses fully recover."
It should be emphasized that Cornwall and Wills take aim at the Papacy and not the Church. Their broadest goal is to restore what they see as the Church's moral and spiritual influence, corrupted by the seductions of political power and selfprotection. These two rigorously researched books are recommended not only for those concerned with the state of Catholicism, but for people interested in the growing reach of religious power in today's world. For those buoyed by sunny thoughts of religion's benign influence in a world ostensibly starving for religious guidance,Hitler's Pope and Papal Sins come as sobering correctives.
Joseph Chuman is the leader of the Ethical Culture Society of Bergen County, New Jersey, and Visiting Professor of Religion at Columbia University. He has written for The New York Times, The Bergen Record and numerous magazines of opinion.
Hitler's Pope
John Cornwell
New York, Viking, 1999
430 pp.
ISBN 0670886939
More about this book
Papal Sin
Garry Wills
New York, Doubleday, 2000
326 pp.
ISBN 0385494106
More about this book
Printable copy of this review
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