Pius XII

Pius XII

The Dark Side

Also by Antony Stockwell (A.S.)

‘A Corrupt Tree’: An Encyclopaedia of Crimes committed by the Church of Rome against Humanity and the Human Spirit.  Volume 1 – The Unholy Popes and the Debasement of Western Civilisation

Volume 2 – The Church’s Hatreds and their Horrendous Consequences – to be published in 2015

Volume 3 – The Church’s Militancy & Terrorism – to be published in 2016

Volume 4 – Alpha and Omega: the Beginning and the End – in preparation

Pius XII

The Dark Side

Antony Stockwell

Scientia ad veritatem via est

Pius XII

The Dark Side

Copyright © 2015 by Antony Stockwell

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Contents

List of Abbreviations

Prologue

Eugenio Pacelli – Lawyer and Diplomat

1.    Eugenio Pacelli – a Deeply Flawed Individual

2.    Eugenio Pacelli – Other Aspects of His Personality

3.    Pacelli and Germany

4.    Pacelli and His Concordats

Pius XII and World War II

5.    Pius and the Dictators

6.    Pius and the War

7.    Pius and the Jews of Europe during the War

8.    Pius’ Knowledge and Silence during the War

9.    Pius’ Priorities during the War

Pius XII post-World War II

10.    Pius’ Support of War Criminals

11.    Pius and the Jews post-Holocaust

12.    Pius post-War

Pius XII’s Continuing Proclivity for War

13.    Pius and the Cold War

14.    Pius and the Vietnam War

Sanctity?

15.    The Death and Life of Pius XII

16.    Pius XII, Saint or Sinner?

Bibliography

Index

Abbreviations

ACDC    Anti-Communist Denunciation Campaign

AES    Affari Ecclesiastici Straordinari

ATCA    Alien Tort Claims Act

BVP    Bayerische Volkspartei

CCP    Catholic Centre Party

CIA    Central Intelligence Agency

CIC    Codex Iuris Canonici

DUI    doctor utriusque iuris

FSIA    Foreign Sovereign Immunities Act

HH    His Holiness

ICJHC    International Catholic–Jewish Historical Commission

IOR    Istituto per le Opere di Religione

IRO    International Refugee Organisation

KGB    Komitet gosudarstvennoy bezopasnosti

Ľudáks    Slovenská ľudová strana

NATO    North Atlantic Treaty Organisation

NCWC    National Catholic Welfare Council

NDH    Nezavisna Dr?ava Hrvatska

NSDAP    Nationalsozialistische Deutsche Arbeiterpartei

NYKP    Nyilaskeresztes Párt-Hungarista Mozgalom

ODESSA    Organisation der Ehemaligen SS-Angehörigen

OSBM    Order of St Basil the Great

PCA    Pontificia Commissione di Assistenza

POW    Prisoner of War

RSHA    Reichssicherheitshauptamt

SJ    Society of Jesus

SS    Schutzstaffel

SS-WVHA    SS-Wirtschafts-Verwaltungshauptamt

Stasi    Staatssicherheit

WPC    World Peace Council

––––

Nil sapientiae odiosus acumine nimio – Nothing is more hateful to wisdom than excessive cunning

Veni, vidi, vici – I came, I saw, I conquered

Bonis nocet quisquis malis pepercit – Whoever spares the bad harms the good

Beati pacifici – Blessed are the peacemakers

Veritas vos liberabit – The truth will set you free

Prologue

As a young child growing up in England during the Second World War, I was subjected to the traumas of Adolf Hitler’s aerial bombardment of my country.

These experiences, and the subsequent newsreels of the emaciated living skeletons, the piles of dead bodies, the gas chambers and the crematoria, left me with an abiding abhorrence of the German Führer and Nazism, and all that they stood for.

Many years later, I resolved to investigate the factors which contributed to the ascendancy of this diabolical man and to his political, military, and genocidal successes.

These investigations led me to, amongst others, Eugenio Maria Giuseppe Giovanni Pacelli.

Eugenio Pacelli became Pope Pius XII in 1939, and reigned until his death in 1958.

Pacelli had a legal inclination and education, plus a flair for creating concordats, which he promoted at every opportunity.

He was also deeply involved in international politics – constantly engaging in ‘tortuous diplomacy’. His persistence in this field continued to his very end; whence it was described of him that ‘he was primarily a diplomat.’¹

Indeed, when Cardinal Secretary of State, he was ‘revered as a masterly diplomat.’²

In many ways, his concordats, his convoluted diplomacy, and his political manipulations were disastrous for the world.³

By general consensus, his 1914 Serbian Concordat almost certainly brought on World War I – although some Catholic apologists have denied this.

Pacelli actively supported the many fascist dictators of Europe – Hitler, Tiso, Mussolini, Franco, Salazar, and Pavelić – thus making him also, effectively, a fascist.

As a pronounced, persistent, and tenacious Germanophile, Pacelli was one of the major participants in the rise and influence of Adolf Hitler and National Socialism. His donation of a large cache of Church money to the young, destitute revolutionary Hitler⁴

was followed by the establishment of the Nazi Party the following year.

Hitler’s 1924 book Mein Kampf expressed the virulent anti-Semitism that lay at the heart of his political philosophy.[5]

In it, ‘Hitler never attempted to conceal the fact that his conception of the State was based on force and bloodshed.’[6]

‘It can be stated on unimpeachable authority that … the Nuncio in Germany [Pacelli] read it from cover to cover.’[7]

,[8]

Yet, in 1933, with Hitler’s first concentration camp at Oranienburg having already been opened, Eugenio Pacelli’s Reichskonkordat gave the first ever international recognition of both Adolf Hitler and Nazism.

Fritz Thyssen, a Catholic, was the most important single financial and industrial supporter of Adolf Hitler until 1939. Then, he gave up all his properties in Germany, renounced Hitler, and fled the country. He wrote an article in the Swiss Arbeiter-Zeitung entitled, ‘Pius XII, as Nuncio, brought Hitler to Power.’⁹

,¹⁰

Pius never excommunicated Hitler. He never had ‘Mein Kampf’ placed on the ‘Index of Forbidden Books’; he never publicly criticised the Nazis during the War; he appears to have only ever excommunicated one Nazi; and he never abandoned his prejudice towards, and love of Deutschland and the Germans. He never excommunicated fascists for being fascists. By contrast, the self-proclaimed politically neutral pope threatened to excommunicate Catholics who supported Communism.

Pacelli not only financed the genocidal Ante Pavelić, the ‘Butcher of the Balkans’, in his creation of the iniquitous ‘Roman Catholic Independent State of Croatia’, but, as Pius XII, he also gave his special blessings to the dictator.

After World War II, Ivan Šarić, Archbishop of Sarajevo, the ‘Hangman of the Serbs’, escaped from Croatia, and stayed in the Catholic Bishop’s palace in Klagenfurt, Austria. He then moved to Madrid with the assistance of the Church. There he published a book extolling the virtues of Pius XII.¹¹

,¹²

Apologists claim that Pacelli was not anti-Semitic, but specific historical evidence reveals that he definitely was.¹³

,¹⁴

He took steps that were inimical to the Jews, to their children, and to the memory of those who had been annihilated. He never publicly uttered the word ‘Jew’.

Although denied by many of his advocates, and defended by others, his muteness during the Holocaust is notorious. He maintained this glacial silence on the annihilation of 6 million Jewish men, women and children. Particularly evident during and after 1942, was ‘Pius XII’s scandalous silence on the known facts of the Holocaust’.¹⁵

Neither did Pius actively or effectively condemn the extensive genocides by Catholics in Catholic Croatia and Catholic Slovakia.

After the War, Pius also played a significant, morally reprehensible role by assisting fascist war criminals in escaping justice, and pressuring for pardons or reduced sentences for many of the major Nazis convicted at the post-war trials.

At this time, Istituto per le Opere di Religione (IOR), normally known as the Vatican Bank, engaged in money laundering and investment in restricted military materials. Pius and his nephews were involved in this highly unethical organisation.   

Finally, evidence suggests that Pius XII was one of the main tacit instigators for a pre-emptive atomic strike against the Soviet Union, and was definitely involved in the initiation of the contentious, immoral and destructive Vietnam War.¹⁶

Over all, the pages of history reveal that, notwithstanding his many recognised talents, and his recorded efforts of assistance to many Jews during the Holocaust, Pope Pius XII did have a fundamental dark side¹⁷

that contributed detrimentally to the fate of millions.¹⁸

There have been many books published about this ‘aloof’ and manipulative character. One of the major publications on the dark side of Eugenio Pacelli was the 1999 book Hitler’s Pope: The Secret History of Pius XII by journalist and author John Cornwell.[19]

Other significant works have been The Silence of Pius XII by Carlo Falconi; Pius XII: The Hound of Hitler by Gerard Noel; Michael Phayer’s The Catholic Church and the Holocaust, 1930-1965; and Professor Guenter Lewy’s The Catholic Church and Nazi Germany.

As a rebuff to the views expressed in these and similar critical books, there has been a plethora of works praising Pius XII. For example: Pope Pius XII and World War II: The Documented Truth by Gary Krupp; Margherita Marchione’s Pope Pius XII: Architect for Peace; and Ralph McInerny’s The Defamation of Pius XII.

Generally, these latter publications tend to have a narrow focus on specific aspects of Pius’ activities during the Holocaust and they avoid ‘wider issues’, including many of the negative facets of Pacelli’s life before, throughout, and after World War II.

There have also been many supportive arguments produced by his defenders alleging and promoting reasons why, or why not, Pius did, or did not do what his critics argue that he did, or did not do

Seemingly politically supportive of the published praise and affirmative arguments, Pius XII was pronounced a ‘Servant of God’ by John Paul II in 1990²⁰

, and Benedict XVI declared him ‘Venerable’ in 2009. There is also a deeply controversial move within the Roman Catholic Church to designate Pius XII a ‘Saint’ of the Church.

Notwithstanding this praise, these affirmations, this reverence, and these political activities, Pius XII was, as stated by his private secretary and closest advisor for thirty years, Professor Robert Leiber, SJ, ‘great, yes … a saint, no’.

In summing up the available evidence and in confirmation of this latter assertion, Pacelli was, in the words of John Cornwell, ‘not a saintly exemplar for future generations, but … a deeply flawed human being’.²¹

To pursue these matters further, and in concordance with the general published criticisms of the man, Pius XII: The Dark Side is a widely researched, broad ranging, non-hagiographic, categorised examination of the negative facets and damaging actions and inactions of Eugenio Pacelli.

This book does not discuss principally Pius’ whys and why nots – its brief is simple and specific: to reveal what is known, or can reasonably be inferred, about what Pacelli did or did not do, under the umbrellas of negative action, negative inaction, and negative outcome. The ultimate concerns of this book are Pacelli’s questionable morality, and the significance and consequences of his: overriding obsession with concordats and politics, paranoia of Communism, glacial silence over the Holocaust, and many adverse behaviours.

In summation, this work reveals that the narcissistic Pacelli, although having been exalted as ‘Pastor Angelicus’,²²

was, nevertheless, a seriously blemished, devious, obsessive, legalistic diplomat and politician, who succumbed on many occasions ‘to his own great weaknesses.’²³

Notwithstanding his extensive negative characteristics and actions, Pius XII did have a positive, productive side. This included his output of hundreds of pages of allocutions, messages, and writings. In addition, he issued forty-one encyclicals, including Mediator Dei, Humani Generis, Summi Pontificatus, Ad Apostolorum Principis, and Mystici Corporis Christi.

His magisterium included almost 1000 addresses and radio broadcasts. He was the first pope to make use of the radio on an extensive scale. His cryptic 1942 Christmas speech is his most famous. In this, during several tens of thousands of words, he spoke twenty-seven words on what could have been interpreted as a condemnation of the Nazi Holocaust. This prompted a positive reaction from L’Osservatore Romano, namely, that it was evident that the Holy Father’s charity was universal and extended to all races.

Pacelli’s consummate diplomacy received significant praise. For example: ‘in diplomatic astuteness the Nuncio was without an equal.’²⁴

Pius was also deeply concerned with deteriorating human moral standards. To him, dances like the tango were, in his own words, of ‘very evil origin’. He complained about the Miss Europe and Miss Italy beauty competitions, describing them as lewd. He also asked Monsignor Ludwig Kaas to cover up nude statues and pictures in St Peter’s Basilica.

Finally, his unwarranted but persistent faith in the extraordinary political powers of Our Lady of Fátima was exemplary.²⁵

Nonetheless, the accountability of a man who believed that he held ‘primacy over the whole world’ requires that questions be answered.

Ultimately, the questions to be resolved of Pius XII are these. Do his very real positive accomplishments prevail over his multitude of damaging activities and inertias? Are they sufficient to enable him to receive ‘the Divine supernatural gifts’ which would earn him eternal life, and through which he would ‘reign with God in the heavenly fatherland’ as one of ‘His chosen friends and faithful servants’?²⁶

Do they justify his being declared a Saint?

In answering these questions, Pius XII: The Dark Side is swayed by neither persistent ‘papal apologetics pressed into the service of history,’²⁷

nor by the obligations of ideology, but responds to the only valid requirement, namely, that ‘We have an obligation to tell the truth.’²⁸

The truth about the dark side of Pius XII.

Eugenio Pacelli – Lawyer and Diplomat

Nil sapientiae odiosus acumine nimio

1 – Eugenio Pacelli – A Deeply Flawed Individual

Pacelli’s Childhood and Personality

Eugenio Maria Giuseppe Giovanni Pacelli was born in the ‘shadow’²⁹

of the Vatican on 2 March 1876 into a family of intense Catholic piety with a history of ties to the papacy – the ‘Black Nobility’.³⁰

Pacelli was essentially an obsessive intellectual. He had a gift for languages, a prodigious memory, and a superbly developed ability to write periphrastically.

In 1899 he received a degree in theology and a doctor utriusque iuris (DUI) (doctor of civil and canon law).

Gerard Noel was a former editor of the Catholic Herald and vice-president of the Council of Christians and Jews. He has an extensive knowledge of Pacelli, of whom he has painted a devastating psychological portrait. Pacelli was a flawed individual, quite unsuited to his circumstances. He was a hypochondriac and a depressive. He had a mother fixation.³¹

Notwithstanding, the New Catholic Encyclopedia, records that he was ‘a man of … level-headed realism’.³²

Pacelli led a sheltered existence throughout his life. In 1917, at age 41, at the height of World War I, he left his mother and his parental home to take up the new role in Munich of nuncio to Bavaria. On the journey there he occupied two sections of the train, one for himself, the other, a sealed carriage brought especially from Zurich for his specially-permitted, embargoed sixty cases of food.³³

His private compartment ‘had to be specially requisitioned through the Italian state railways.’ Additionally, ‘all the stationmasters from Rome to the Swiss border had been placed on alert in the event that Archbishop Pacelli should require assistance.’³⁴

Eugenio was of a very delicate nature, and, following the end of World War I he left Munich for a tranquil sanatorium run by nuns in the Swiss municipality of Rorschach. ‘His recovery began with a rapport with 24-year-old Sister Maria Pascalina Lehnert’, who became his housekeeper and confidante for the rest of his life.³⁵

In this Holy Cross of Menzingen nun he found a surrogate mother who ruled his household and his papacy as a result of ‘an intimate relationship’ that ‘was chaste but thoroughly unhealthy.’³⁶

Pacelli was also an ascetic and a prude. The loose morals of the Roaring Twenties challenged his asceticism. He inveighed not only against ‘the perverse propaganda of nudism,’ but also against the notion that gymnastics, sport, and swimming should be taught in coeducational classes. To Pacelli, dances like the tango were, in his own words, of ‘very evil origin’, which threatened good morals and shame.³⁷

Additionally, Catholic morality must ‘unconditionally condemn … tendentious exposures and accentuations of physical forms, because … they emanate from a cynical and pragmatic conception of life and tend to engender concupiscence.’³⁸

Pacelli also ‘firmly believed that all correct interpretations of reality (and not only of faith) could be based only in the Roman magisterium.’³⁹

Pacelli and the Code of Canon Law

Pacelli possessed a theological-bureaucratic constriction with which he conceived relations between the Church and the World.⁴⁰

Having this mindset, he trained as, and became a talented canon lawyer. He was a co-recompiler of the Catholic Church’s 1917 Codex Iuris Canonici (CIC) (Code of Canon Law).⁴¹

Pope Benedict XV proclaimed this Code. Through its rules it was intended to concentrate Church authority purely in the person of the pope. Rigorous centralisation was to be the way of the future.⁴²

The CIC ‘reflects the ultramontanism and the decisions of the First Vatican Council of 1870.’ It legalised ‘a Church of the pope instead of a Church of the bishops.’⁴³

Pacelli made it ‘his life’s work to translate the letter and spirit of the CIC into practice, especially in Germany.’⁴⁴

Pacelli’s actions in this regard have provided the means whereby changes have been implemented that have in many ways proved disastrous for the Church, for its esteem, and for its laity.

It has been said that the proper role of religion is not the imposition of the forceful dominion of canon law. In this context Martin Luther validly pointed out that compendia of canon law ‘say nothing about Christ’. Luther noted, even then, that the Vatican ‘exalts its own ordinances above the commands of God’.

Pacelli and the Lambs

Hubert Wolf, in his book Pope and Devil: The Vatican’s Archives and the Third Reich, points out that in the final analysis, all of a nuncio’s:

ecclesiastic and political activities are aimed at ensuring that the lambs entrusted to his care by Rome ‘are kept from poisoned pastures’ and led safely to the sweet waters of eternal life. From the Roman perspective, and according to the new canon law of 1917, the bleating lambs bore no responsibility of their own in churchly matters; the shepherd and his sharp-eyed herding dogs were responsible for holding the flock together, protecting the flock from predators, and keeping them on the straight and narrow.

Consequently, Eugenio Pacelli was principally concerned with protecting the Roman Catholic laity from the demands of the modern world with all its supposedly demonic temptations including:

fallacious ideologies propagated by Socialism, liberalism, and free-masonry. In Germany, of course, it also included Protestantism.⁴⁵

Tutelary Pacelli and Father Coughlin

Charles Edward Coughlin, commonly known as Father Coughlin, was a controversial Canadian priest who was one of the first social commentators to use radio to reach a mass audience. His listeners numbered up to thirty million.

On 5 November 1954, Father Coughlin told of his being silenced by Eugenio Pacelli in 1936:

Small as I was, it was necessary to silence my voice even though I must be smeared as an anti-Semite, as a pro-Nazi and a bad priest, when really all I was, outside of trying to be a Christian and an American, was an anti-Bolshevik, anti-Nazi and anti-warmonger … Needless to say, the smear was effective, and I was eliminated by devious ways and means – all indirect yet more effective than were these ways and means direct.

He concluded:

You are entirely free to print whatever I have written for I have no fears from any man living in so far as I have arrived at the point where it is better to serve the truth than it is to follow misdirected diplomats.⁴⁶

,⁴⁷

Pacelli the Disastrous Paranoiac, Diplomat and Politician

Hitler, Stalin, and Pacelli were all paranoiacs. Pacelli’s great fear and obsession was Soviet Communism. This paranoia⁴⁸

persisted before, during, and after the Second World War. It led to several fatal consequences on the world’s stage.

Baron Avro Manhattan was, in those times, the world’s foremost authority on Roman Catholicism in politics. He described Pacelli as a cunning politician and a brilliant diplomat, whose tortuous diplomacy was his forte. Professor Michael Phayer referred to Pius’ ‘fixation on diplomacy,’ while Peter Godman cited the ‘spirit of diplomatic legalism … congenial to his character.’⁴⁹

Accordingly, at the beginning of World War II, Pius ‘decided to separate diplomatic from moral matters,’ and ‘retreated from the ethical sphere.’⁵⁰

During his career, Pacelli acquired impeccable skills in using veiled language. He assessed every word he spoke or wrote with caution. His utterances were outstanding achievements of finesse, cast in a web of elegantly circumlocutious ambiguity. He never lost either these skills or this periphrastic habit.⁵¹

Pertinently, Antonio Cardinal Bacci (1885-1971) pointed out that:

Vatican diplomacy was born one sad evening in Jerusalem, in the atrium of the highest priest, when Peter the apostle, warming himself by the fire, came across a young maid who, with finger pointed, asked, ‘Are you not also a follower of the Galilean?’ and Peter gave a start and responded, ‘No, I don’t know what you are talking about.’ This was a diplomatic answer with which neither faith nor spirit was compromised.⁵²

Above all, however, Pacelli was a politician – who has been summed up as ‘a manipulator of statesmen and nations.’⁵³

His life could aptly be summarised as ‘Pacelli was politics’. His was an ‘advocacy of the primacy of politics over the purity of doctrine.’⁵⁴

Disastrously influencing the history of the world during his political career, there were nine key elements to his Weltanschauung:

a detestation of Catholic democratic parties – as inimical to papal authority;

the expansion of the pope’s and the Holy See’s international political influence;

a strong belief in the power of concordats to bring about his desired changes in the relationship of the Holy See with individual states;

a long held desire for the expansion of the Roman Catholic faith, especially among Eastern Orthodox ‘schismatics’;

a significant anti-Semitism;

a paranoid anti-Communism which demanded the subordination of international Catholic and Jewish survival interests with the intention of defeating his perceived threat to his Church by Bolshevism;

a persistent support of fascist governments, however malign, as bulwarks against this chronically perceived threat of Bolshevism;

a claimed neutrality, which he breached on many significant occasions;

the physical preservation of the Vatican as the seat of institutional Catholicism at all costs.⁵⁵

,⁵⁶

The Paris Peace Conference was the meeting of the Allied victors of World War I to set the peace terms for Germany and other defeated nations. It took place in Paris in 1919, and involved diplomats from more than 30 countries. In his book, Behind the Dictators, L H Lehmann states that:

It is not generally known that the reasons which led the Allies to exclude the pope [Benedict XV] from the Peace Conference after the First World War were connected with the activities of Monsignor Eugenio Pacelli, later Pope Pius XII.⁵⁷

These reasons related to the Papal States, otherwise known as the ‘States of the Church’, which consisted of the civil territory that for over 1100 years (754-1870) ‘acknowledged the pope as temporal ruler.’

Under Giuseppe Garibaldi, Rome was captured on 20 September 1870. A plebiscite was held the following October, at which the populace was overwhelmingly in favour of the Kingdom of Italy. Accordingly, Rome and Latium were united with the Kingdom.

 This absorption of the Papal States into the Kingdom of Italy was described by the Catholic League for Religious and Civil Rights as ‘an act of raw piracy no matter how positively the outcome was viewed by the world and history’, and it confirmed that the pope excommunicated those involved in ‘the seizure’.⁵⁸

Matthias Erzberger⁵⁹

was for years a leading member of the Deutsche Zentrumspartei (German Catholic Centre Party) (CCP). It was with him that Pacelli engaged in the negotiations that deeply shocked Italy’s liberal Government, and which counted largely for its opposition to the Holy See’s participation in the Peace Conference. These negotiations favoured the Central Powers.⁶⁰

Pacelli and Erzberger had for months planned a secret German proposal to reconstitute a Papal State in Rome with internationally guaranteed access to the sea. It constituted a direct violation of Italy’s sovereign territory.⁶¹

It confirmed, along with later actions, that Pacelli’s persistent claims to neutrality were fictitious.

During the inter-war years, when Germany was a democratic republic, many of the clergy and some of the religious orders favoured the liberal, secularising spirit. They formed the mainstay of the Catholic Centre Party, which was to become the last impediment to Hitler’s rise to power. In the Reichstag the CCP had the potential support of around 27 million German Catholics. Between 1919 and 1933, five CCP members served as chancellors in ten ruling cabinets of the Weimar Republic.

As Cardinal Secretary of State, Eugenio Pacelli had the opportunity to formulate the foreign policy of the Holy See. He ‘detested Catholic democratic parties as inimical to papal authority.’⁶²

Consequently, during the negotiations for the Reichskonkordat with Adolf Hitler, following his ‘urgent prompting’, Pacelli acquiesced to the dissolution of the CCP – the last element of German liberalism.

That the CCP dissolved itself voluntarily rather than mandatorily ‘conveyed an impression of Catholic endorsement of Hitler in the eyes of the world.’⁶³

It removed the last obstacle to Hitler’s ascension to power, and also deprived the Catholic laity and clergy in Germany of any voice in political matters.⁶⁴

These events reveal ‘a colluding appeasement that dignified the Nazi regime in the eyes of the world.’⁶⁵

,⁶⁶

By contrast, the New Catholic Encyclopedia records that ‘Cardinal Pacelli regretted very much this party’s dissolution of itself’.⁶⁷

During those times, much space in the Catholic press was devoted to praising the Catholic ‘Corporate State’, in which all political power was concentrated in the hands of Catholic priests.⁶⁸

,⁶⁹

Writing in The Catholic Gazette of April 1937, Mr A Raven Thompson wrote:

One can no longer deny that the Corporate State is so far the nearest thing to the ideals of the Popes that the modern world can offer.⁷⁰

Fritz Thyssen was the most important single financial and industrial supporter of Adolf Hitler until 1939. He gave up all his properties in Germany in that year, when his conscience moved him to renounce Hitler and flee the country. He wrote an article in the Swiss Arbeiter-Zeitung (Workers’ Paper) entitled, ‘Pius XII, as Nuncio, brought Hitler to Power.’⁷¹

,⁷²

In this article he plainly stated what the aim of the Hitler-Vatican plan was:

The idea was to have a sort of Christian Corporate State organised according to the classes, which would be supported by the Churches – in the West by the Catholic, and in the East by the Protestant – and by the Army.⁷³

Consequently, by his actions, Pius was, in the words of John Cornwell, ‘an ideal church leader for Hitler’s purposes.’⁷⁴

In the first half of the twentieth century the Catholic Church was willing to accept the loss of political liberties that followed the accession to power of fascist movements, so long as they served as a bulwark against Communism. Both Pius XI and Pius XII courted and showed considerable benevolence to both fascist Italy and Nazi Germany. On 14 July 1937, Eugenio Pacelli stated, in a session of the Congregation for Extraordinary Ecclesiastical Affairs:

It is useful for the Holy See to place itself in the Fascist bloc, which consists largely of Italy and Germany …’⁷⁵

Later, in 1939, Pius XII supported the French fascist front, Action Française.⁷⁶

Much has been written about Pius’ involvement with these aggressors in World War II. For example:

Pius XII strongly supported right wing dictatorships. He cooperated with the Japanese from their invasion of Manchuria onward, consecrated Fascism in Italy, Nazism in Germany, and Phalangism in Spain, inspired the sordid dictatorships in South America, was intimately associated with the Germans, Italians and Japanese in setting the world aflame in the Second World War.⁷⁷

,⁷⁸

Pacelli as Pope

On 2 March 1939, at age 62, Eugenio Pacelli was elected Pope.

Thence, in the press ‘the eyes looking heavenward in the staged photos, the pointed prayer hands, all contributed’ to how a pope should look.⁷⁹

In a break from the traditional Italian control, following his election Pius XII surrounded himself with Jesuits and international clergy. He employed Jesuit advisors: Robert Leiber, Augustin Bea, and Sebastian Tromp. He also supported the elevation of Francis Spellman⁸⁰

from a minor to a major role in the Church.

Pius’ perspective of his Church was that it constituted:

that authority established by God to see to a just order and to direct the consciences and actions of men along the path to their true and final destiny ... [It has to fulfil this mission] in the front line, in the midst of the struggle that rages between truth and error, virtue and vice ...⁸¹

Pius’ politics were intended to effect this just order. Gerard Noel argues that it was Pius’ combination of spectacularly bad political judgement and deeply damaged psyche that made him such a disaster as the wartime pope.⁸²

As time went by, Pius, considering himself a man of destiny sent by God to save the world, came increasingly to inhabit a world of fantasy. In this he saw himself as a demigod – a man superior to other men, the supreme arbiter of events. ‘He was a sort of spiritual megalomaniac.’⁸³

This led, inevitably, to his ‘Great Design’ (see below).

Pius’ magisterium (teaching authority) included almost 1000 addresses and radio broadcasts. His 41 encyclicals include the extensive Mediator Dei on liturgical reform, and Humani Generis (1950) ‘Concerning Some False Opinions Threatening to Undermine the Foundations of Catholic Doctrine’, in which he urged caution in uncritically adopting modern scientific teachings without reference to the traditions of the Church.⁸⁴

,⁸⁵

It commenced by stating:

Disagreement and error among men on … religious matters have always been a cause of profound sorrow to … the true and loyal sons of the Church …

If anyone examines the state of affairs outside the Christian fold, he will easily discover the principle trends that not a few learned men are following. Some imprudently and indiscreetly hold that evolution, which has not been fully proved even in the domain of natural sciences, explains the origin of all things, and audaciously support the monistic and pantheistic⁸⁶

opinion that the world is in continual evolution … Such fictitious tenets of evolution which repudiate all that is absolute, firm and immutable …⁸⁷

Pius’ ‘Great Design’, and his Creeping Infallibility

John Cornwell points out that ‘The ideology of papal primacy, as we have known it within living memory, is an invention of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.’⁸⁸

In the furtherance of this invention, Pius’ ‘Great Design’ was conceived as a Roman Catholic Church of unquestioned dominance ‘governing almost every aspect of human existence.’⁸⁹

This ‘One True Church’ would be the most powerful body in human society. God’s law, as interpreted by this One True Church, would be understood and accepted as never before.

Giuseppe Cardinal Siri, who knew Pacelli as Secretary of State, has revealed that Pacelli had a grand plan on which he had reflected long before he became pope⁹⁰

– he ‘was in favor of strong government of the Church from its center.’⁹¹

The Great Design envisaged the establishment of a virtual world theocracy. Such a notion was not something that is written anywhere in Holy Scripture.⁹²

It envisaged a pyramid of power, with most of the world’s Catholics powerless at the base, and the pope at the apex making decisions on behalf of all.

One of the disastrous consequences of this papal