Kornberg on Godman, 'Hitler and the Vatican: Inside the Secret Archives That Reveal the New Story of the Nazis and the Church'

H-German Kornberg on Godman, 'Hitler and the Vatican: Inside the Secret Archives that Reveal the New Story of the Nazis and the Church'

Review published on Saturday, October 1, 2005

Peter Godman. Hitler and the Vatican: Inside the Secret Archives that Reveal the New Story of the Nazis and the Church. New York: Free Press, 2004. xvi + 282 pp. $27.00 (cloth), ISBN 978-0-7432-4597-5.

Reviewed by Jacques Kornberg (Department of History, University of Toronto)Published on H- German (October, 2005)

The Vatican and National Socialism: Between Criticism and Conciliation

Peter Godman of the University of Rome, a scholar who has studied the Catholic Church, was one of the first people granted permission to mine the recently opened archives of the Supreme Congregation of the Holy Office for the pontificate of Pius XI (1922-39). In keeping with the times, the Holy Office currently bears the less forbidding name of the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith; it was once known as the Universal Inquisition. Headed by bishops and cardinals, the Congregation pronounces on doctrine in matters of faith and morals.

Godman contrasts his own "behind the scenes" view based on a close reading of the Holy Office documents, with the "hot air of speculation" hanging over the works of John Cornwell and Daniel Goldhagen. There is some truth to his claim, but he sets expectations too high when he professes to open a window into "the thoughts and motives" of those who made policy (p. xv). All we have of Pius XI and his Secretary of State, Cardinal Pacelli, are office memos, public statements, protocols of meetings, reports of papal audiences, and letters to bishops; we will always have to stake out some educated guesses about their thoughts and motives.

Still, in my view, Godman, to his credit, has resolved some contentious issues. The evidence he has amassed makes clear that higher circles in the Vatican, including Pius XI and his Secretary of State Cardinal Pacelli, regarded Nazism as a menace to civilization, and saw no affinities between the Church and Nazism in a common authoritarianism, or even anti-communism. Pius XI's one-time praise of Hitler's anti-Bolshevism in March, 1933, was an aberration (p. 8). Moreover, the Nazi persecution of the Jews was seen as nothing short of barbaric (pp. 8, 67-70). But this sentiment did not mean that the Vatican was to take a militant stand against National Socialism or against the persecution of the Jews. Godman defines the Vatican stance as "a course between criticism and conciliation," and he makes clear that this was Vatican policy from the fateful year of 1933 (p. 16). Thus, we cannot reduce Vatican policy to personalities, as so much of the literature on Pius XII does; we cannot pose Pius XI as a thundering antagonist of National Socialism, against Pius XII, the cautious accommodator and timid appeaser. Vatican policy was of a piece from 1933-45. Indeed, the pattern was set in June, 1933, by the then-retired Secretary of State Cardinal Pietro Gasparri: "I am of the opinion that Hitler's Party corresponds to nationalist feeling in Germany. Therefore a politico- religious struggle in Germany over Hitlerism must be avoided at all costs" (p. 7).

How does Godman make his case that Vatican policy veered between "criticism and conciliation," and how is Vatican policy to be explained? His account begins in 1934, when the Holy Office commissioned two German Jesuits to prepare a report on National Socialist ideology, for the purpose of condemning it. Coming from the Holy Office, such a condemnation, binding in matters of faith and morals, and signed by the pope, would have branded National Socialism a heresy (pp. 4, 61). The Jesuits' report was presented to the Holy Office in 1935, only to be watered down, and finally take the form, two years later, of the more equivocal and less wide-ranging papal encyclicalMit brennender Sorge. The original report of the Jesuits listed forty-seven propositions to be condemned: these included nationalism, expansionism, militarism, racism, the totalitarian state, and violations of natural and divine law, such as forced sterilization (pp. 172-193). Though Nazi antisemitism was not mentioned, Godman argues that the report went far beyond merely protecting the Church, to support universal human rights "and the duty of its defense by the papacy" (p. 89).

The Jesuit report was presented to the Holy Office in 1935. The temporizing pace of Vatican deliberations was such that in 1936 the Holy Office asked Dominican consultants to comment on the report by the Jesuits. The Dominicans reduced the forty-seven Jesuit propositions to twenty-five, and softened their wording. Worried about "difficulties with governments," they omitted the Jesuit condemnation of the "racial state." In addition, the new report was a condemnation of both Communism and National Socialism, effectively weakening its denunciation of the latter. Godman argues that the condemnation of both "totalitarianisms" must be seen against the background of the Spanish Civil War, in which clergy were massacred by the Spanish republican government, supported by the Soviets, while Italy and Germany intervened militarily in support of the anti-Communist Franco. On the plus side, the Dominican report upheld "the law of justice and love toward all races, by no means excluding the "Semitic race" (pp. 103-104, 129, 194-199). Jews were thus mentioned for the first time.

It was 1937 when Pius XI finally decided to act, issuing the the more equivocal and less wide-ranging encyclical Mit brennender Sorge. The encyclical emphasized the German government's violations of the Concordat, hence the rights of the Church, and gave racism and human rights less emphasis. In addition, Godman argues: "the forthright language of condemnation traditional in papal censures ... [was] replaced by ... circumlocution" (pp. 142-147). Furthermore, the encyclical had been preceded by two days by another, Divini Redemptoris, a condemnation of Communism which was more blunt than Mit brennender Sorge. In a final move, Pius XI ordered the rectors of Catholic universities and seminaries to refute the "ideology of blood and race" and the subordination of the individual to the state. This was a far more low-level condemnation than a decree by the Holy Office or even an encyclical; it was Pius's way of expressing disapproval of Hitler without attacking him directly (pp. 158-159). Four long years had passed between Pius's commission to the Jesuits and the issuing of Mit brennender Sorge, a sign of how guarded and hesitant the Vatican was from the very beginning.

Pope Pius XI and Cardinal Pacelli, his Secretary of State, uttered plenty of strong words against National Socialist ideology, but they hardly did so when it counted. Thus in April, 1935, Cardinal Pacelli condemned "the superstition of race and blood." But in September, 1935, when the racist, Nuremberg decrees were issued, not a peep was heard from the Vatican. In an audience with Belgium Catholics in September, 1938, Pius XI declared: "antisemitism is inadmissible. We are spiritually Semites." Two months later, Pius XI responded to the November pogrom--synagogues set afire, cemeteries desecrated, almost a hundred Jews murdered, twenty thousand put in concentration

Citation: H-Net Reviews. Kornberg on Godman, 'Hitler and the Vatican: Inside the Secret Archives that Reveal the New Story of the Nazis and the Church'. H-German. 09-30-2014. https://networks.h-net.org/node/35008/reviews/44390/kornberg-godman-hitler-and-vatican-inside-secret-archives-reveal-new Licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 3.0 United States License. 2 H-German camps--with utter silence (p. 163). The Vatican did not lose its voice only when it came to Jews, for it had nothing to say about the 1933 law authorizing the compulsory sterilization of the "hereditarily ill," even though the law violated Catholic doctrine (p. 37). Silence reigned when four prominent Catholic lay leaders were assassinated in June, 1934, during the "Night of the Long Knives," though a month earlier, in a note to the German government, Secretary of State Pacelli had denounced "the false and deceptive message of the new materialism of race" (pp. 73-74).

Why were the strong words coupled with a weak response to Nazi outrages? For one, Godman sees papal power as far less absolute than many think, evident in Pius XI's lapses of indecisiveness about policy towards National Socialism, and also in his fear of having his authority weakened by issuing thundering condemnations, and then being ignored by German Catholics (pp. 166-167). Tactically, diplomatic protests to the German government were limited to violations of Church rights set out in the 1933 Concordat, even with the knowledge that Hitler treated the Concordat with the same derision as any other treaty (p. 134). The great fear and inhibiter of the Vatican was that it would be seen to provoke Hitler to terminate the Concordat. There was good reason to fear this effect, as Hitler escalated attacks on the Church whenever he felt provoked (pp. 139, 161, 163). I will argue in a forthcoming book that the Vatican did not dare place German Catholics in the dilemma of having to choose between the Church and the regime, for the Vatican feared it would lose the faithful if it treaded outside the bounds of the Concordat. Godman is right to say that the Vatican thought first of all, of its pastoral role, of providing Catholics with the instruments of salvation (p. 7). Pastoral care trumped upholding the moral law. Long-held theological and ecclesiological assumptions drove this policy. Laying bare these assumptions is outside the scope of Godman's book.

While Godman's book is on papal policy toward National Socialism, he devotes a great deal of space to the Austrian bishop Alois Hudal, who sought a synthesis of Catholicism and National Socialism. I was not persuaded that the effort was well spent, for Hudal provided nothing more than a sideshow to the main lines of Vatican policy. Aside from that, Godman's book is a welcome corrective to the single-minded preoccupation with Pope Pius XII as arch conciliator of Nazi Germany. Indeed, by the time Pius XII became pope in 1939, the risks of crossing Hitler were much greater than they had been under Pius XI. The similarities, not the differences between Pius XI and Pius XII, are important. The awesome office of the papacy, the oldest continuous institution in Europe, founded by divine fiat-- Pius XII was the 257th pope or vicar of Christ--tends to trump personality and drive its incumbents to the one overriding goal of institutional survival.

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Citation: Jacques Kornberg. Review of Godman, Peter, Hitler and the Vatican: Inside the Secret Archives that Reveal the New Story of the Nazis and the Church. H-German, H-Net Reviews. October, 2005. URL: http://www.h-net.org/reviews/showrev.php?id=11205

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