The explosive untold story of the most dangerous churchman in modern history--drawn from secret archives by an award-winning Roman Catholic journalist
Eugenio Pacelli, Pius XII--a man with unprecedented power for good and evil--was pope from 1939 to 1958. Today, still shadowed by his failure to condemn Hitler's Final Solution, he is at the same time nearing canonization. Backed by new research and exclusive access to a wealth of Vatican and Jesuit archives, John Cornwell tells for the first time, in depth, the truth about Pacelli's long career as a Vatican diplomat and the accord between Pacelli and Hitler that helped sweep the Nazis to unhindered power.
Hitler's Pope shows how Pacelli's entire life and career led to this, from a brilliant young Vatican lawyer drafting new papal power for the twentieth century to his 1933 Concordat with Hitler that muzzled protest by Germany's Catholic community, the most powerful in the world. Cornwell's explosive conclusion is that without Pacelli's contribution, Hitler might never have come to power or been able to press forward with the Holocaust.
As searing and provocative as David Wyman's The Abandonment of the Jews or Daniel Goldhagen's Hitler's Willing Executioners, Hitler's Pope conclusively documents Pius XII's anti-Semitism, narcissism, and calamitous mix of political and spiritual ambition--and it shows how many of Pacelli's policies are reasserting themselves today under the reign of John Paul II. It will surely spark a worldwide furor of controversy, both inside and outside the Catholic Church.
"Eugenio Pacelli was not a monster; his case is far more complex, more tragic than that. The interest of his story depends on a fatal combination of high spiritual aspirations in conflict with soaring ambitions for unprecedented power and control."--from the Preface
"Pius XII and the Jews . . . the whole thing is too sad and serious for bitterness."--Thomas Merton
This devastating account of the ecclesiastical career of Eugenio Pacelli (1876-1958), who became Pope Pius XII in 1939, is all the more powerful because British historian John Cornwell maintains throughout a measured though strongly critical tone. After World War II, murmurs of Pacelli's callous indifference to the plight of Europe's Jews began to be heard. A noted commentator on Catholic issues, Cornwell began research for this book believing that "if his full story were told, Pius XII's pontificate would be exonerated." Instead, he emerged from the Vatican archives in a state of "moral shock," concluding that Pacelli displayed anti-Semitic tendencies early on and that his drive to promote papal absolutism inexorably led him to collaboration with fascist leaders. Cornwell convincingly depicts Cardinal Secretary of State Pacelli pursuing Vatican diplomatic goals that crippled Germany's large Catholic political party, which might otherwise have stymied Hitler's worst excesses. The author's condemnation has special force because he portrays the admittedly eccentric Pacelli not as a monster but as a symptom of a historic wrong turn in the Catholic Church. He meticulously builds his case for the painful conclusion that "Pacelli's failure to respond to the enormity of the Holocaust was more than a personal failure, it was a failure of the papal office itself and the prevailing culture of Catholicism." --Wendy Smith
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