Hate Mail - I'm Accused Of Covering Up For Pius XII

One of the truisms of post-WWII leftism, at least since the 1960s, when I became politically aware was that Pope Pius XII had been a virtual collaborator with the Nazis and was just about anything that the Western left wanted to claim he was.  I will forego making this an article about the typically dishonest play, The Deputy,  which played such a huge role in that propaganda effort and which became such a cause célèbre of the cheap type that theatrical causes célèbres generally are, which celebrities want to be associated with. I will note that Rolf Hochhuth, the author of the play has taken that tiny little baby step that so many a secular, especially anti-religious lefty has into neo-Nazism, becoming a supporter of David Irving (free speech, donchaknow) and making Holocaust denial statements which, when that got too hot, he took back.  All anti-religious secularists, if they stay in it long enough, end up supporting murderers of that class. 

It was one of those truisms that I reviewed after finding out so many others were either based in exaggerations, misrepresentations, lies and fictions, that I looked into and found to be composed of all four of those.  Oddly, I can not think of too many of the lefty journalists who have fact checked their automatic and rote assumptions on the issue.  Nor, for that matter, have the right-wingers who hold Pius XII to be entirely blameless when there was quite a bit in his past that provided fodder for the anti-Catholic smear mongers to use.

I'll interject here that the Vatican elite, from Pope down, was largely to blame for the success of that propaganda effort because of their centuries long habit of secrecy and pretending that they were above such things.  The idiocy of pretending that in the modern era that they could get by on practices that were more successful in the world of gangster monarchs and the gangster depravity that reigned in the Italian city states is still an ongoing result of having such an insular, isolated, intellectually incestuous leadership of the Roman Catholic Church.   I will also remind you that one of Good Pope St. John XXIII's overall intentions of Vatican II would be to open the windows and let sunlight and air into the stale, moldy church he inherited from Pius XII, shutting those windows and curtains has been an increasing effort since St. John XXIII's death, even the relatively liberal Paul VI papacy was a retreat from his efforts.


Anyway, literally anything could be said against Pius XII and you could get away with it, the post-war intelligentsia were largely anti-Catholic, anyway.  That was certainly true in the English speaking world, certainly on the secular left which was very much influenced by Soviet propaganda and the propaganda spread by, not only its actual agents but its wider circle of influence. 

And, don't get me wrong, I am no great fan of Pius XII, who was a deeply flawed person, in some ways a short sighted diplomat in the period before he became Pope.  When the book that called him "Hitler's Pope" was published, one of the critics of Pius XII pointed out that it was was more accurate to call him "Hitler's Cardinal" because of his support for the Nazis in the 1920s as a reaction against the communism which had just taken over what was fast developing into the Soviet Union.   To which I will add that Cardinal Pacelli, as he then was, was hardly alone in making that mistake.  There was widespread enthusiasm for  Nazism and various fascists among the anti-communists of the time, even many of those who would become the foremost opponents of Nazism as it developed both before and, especially, after it gained power in Germany, were enthusiastic supporters of the Nazis at the time when that charge against the future Pope is most accurate.  As I've noted before, no less an expert in the issue than Susanna Heschel has said there was a world of difference between someone who chose to become a Nazi in 1930 before their intentions became totally clear (some of whom stopped being or supporting Nazis later) and those who became Nazis in 1937 when it was obvious what they intended to do.  There are later lefties who you can add to that list, including many Communists who, even after 1937 became immediate if temporary supporters of the West making peace with Hitler, including some who probably loved the anti-Pius propaganda of the 50s and after.  I would love to be able to interview someone like Lee Hayes or Dalton Trumbo on that and to look at their records from the time of the Hitler-Stalin pact. 

The worst thing that Pius XII did when he was still Pacelli, the Vatican diplomat was to come to the infamous concordat with the Nazis, something which he and Pius XI as well as German bishops and Cardinals, priests, nuns and many lay people, almost immediately came to see was an agreement the Nazis had no intention of living up to.  Pacelli probably didn't see what he did as a concordat with the Nazis but with the German government, which happened to have the Nazis as the majority party but which, I suspect, he believed would not hold as was common in European politics.  The concordat was reached very fast, about eight months after the Nazis came to power through the nominally democratic process.  It was such a fast negotiation because Pacelli had been trying, for years, to come to such an agreement with the Wiemar government, seeking to protect the rights and interests of Catholic institutions, organizations and political parties but which that fabled Government of Germany would not reach.  One has to wonder what would have happened if they had reached such an agreement, it's not unlikely that the Nazis would have been squeezed out of the success they enjoyed as a result of the failures of the fabled Wiemar government.

The history of immediate violations of the agreement with the Vatican led to dozens of condemnations and protests, many of them directly from Pacelli led to him and Pius XI issuing the German language Mit Brennender Sorge which was one of the first condemnations of the Nazi state issued by a world power in March 1937.  By that time the hidden intentions of the Nazis were a lot clearer than they were the first year they were in power, as is often the case with the worst governments. 

Now it looks clear that Pacelli (Pius XII) and Pope Pius XI and other bishops and cardinals should have understood what the Nazis were intending, and the charge that they went into the period with their eyes open.  But that's from after seeing what they were intending to do.  I doubt that if the German people, even many of those who voted for the Nazis in the 1932 election, had a very good idea of what they were planning, even many Nazis relatively close to power didn't know the extent to which the Nazis would go.  I have not had a chance to research the brother of Reinhard Hydrich, Heinz, who AS AN SS OFFICER, after his brother's assassination found documents that informed him of the Final Solution.  He was so horrified that he started helping Jews escape to Sweden before he was discovered by the Gestapo and he ended up committing suicide to avoid being captured.  Or at least that's the little I've found out, so far.  He was far from the only Nazi, not only those with associations with Hitler's inner circle or even members of some of the most infamous branches of the Nazi government who, when they found how evil it was, opposed it.  Even in its last years, such as Kurt Gurstein.   There were lots who defected far earlier in the Nazi gangster regime.

There are lots of other reasons that Pius XII isn't my favorite Pope* though I have found that many, perhaps most of the political accusations against him are unrealistically simplistic and, for that reason, more false than true and others are simply lies.  Some of them very likely told on behalf of the Soviet government in the post-war period, some of them cooked up in the anti-Catholicism of the British and American pseudo-left. 

It's still an absurdity that the records the Vatican holds in that regard haven't been opened up entirely, something which Pope Francis is trying to correct. 

*  The list of things I don't like that he did internally in the Catholic church is a long one, his declaration of the bodily assumption of Mary, only the second official "infallible" papal teaching is one of the milder ones.  The other "infallible" teaching was the "immaculate conception" of Mary by the first of the unfortunate Pius popes in recent centuries, the crack-pot Pius IX.   

I'm not a fan of the modern Pius popes, no.s 9-12 (Pius X! yeeeesh!).  In fact, I'm not a fan of most of them, no more than I am of most American presidents.  

The list of terrible presidents produced under American democracy and the American Constitution is a lot longer than the good ones.  If the sins of the bad popes discredits Catholicism (or Christianity) you would have to conclude that all of the sins of the bad presidents were due to democracy(so defined) and the American Constitution (so secularly worshiped).   I wish I could remember who the escaped slave was who pointed out that Black people had been enslaved under the Constitution that the Lincoln administration sought to preserve.  I've become rather an apostate on the kind of faith in the CON-STI-TU-TION!  as the great Barbara Jordan declared so memorably (not to mention the friggin' founders).  But I am all in favor of government of, by and for, The People who are endowed with rights by their Creator.  This Constitution business has proven to be not only unreliable but the enemy of equal democracy.  Its inflexibility and its dangerous and repulsive enablement of slavery and oligarchy and its 18th century poetic vagueness have been to blame for many of our most dangerous dangers.  It is almost impossible to effectively reform it.  It's become too oppressive, too deadly to the SPIRIT,  as such fixed law does.  I have never found The Gospel and the Prophets to be so and only on some few points of The Law can that be sustained. And it's a boon to humanity as compared  to the modern scientific secular, anti-religious, anti-Christian governments, left and right.