Word: pius
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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...suggests why, three weeks before its publication and a week before the appearance of a long excerpt in Vanity Fair, a Vatican theologian had already branded Hitler's Pope a "shameful libel." Cornwell, a practicing Catholic, says he originally enlisted "on the side of all these chaps in believing Pius had had a really bad deal" at his critics' hands. But research into the lightly trod territory of Pius' decades-long German involvement before his papacy left Cornwell in a state of "moral shock," he says. "The material I had gathered amounted not to an exoneration but to an indictment...
...apple in Cornwell's tale of sin is papal power. Pius, born Eugenio Pacelli, hailed from a family of Vatican loyalists dedicated to tightening Rome's rein on its semi-independent European churches. As a diplomat in Germany, he pursued the long-term goal of a church-state pact granting Rome near total control over its Teutonic flock. No German leader would sign--until Hitler...
Cornwell also revives previously discounted charges of anti-Semitism. He produces two letters, the more disturbing of which purportedly offers Pius' description of a revolutionary in 1919: "a Jew. Pale, dirty, with drugged eyes, hoarse voice, vulgar, repulsive, with a face that is both intelligent and sly." The "secret antipathy," writes Cornwell, helped prevent Pius from finding "in the isolation of the Jews a parallel with Christ alone on Golgotha" and thus helped prevent him from finding a voice to defend them...
...letter. A similar tendentiousness, he says, mars Cornwell's whole work: "He ignores a great deal of material which doesn't fit his theory and makes grave accusations without supplying the evidence." Blet was one of four Jesuits who compiled the official 12-volume record of Pius' war years from Vatican archives. He too has a new book: a useful summary titled Pius XII and the Second World War. Blet maintains that the 1933 pact was "practically imposed by Hitler." And papal power was hardly its only carrot: "The Nazis offered such good conditions that it would have been crazy...
...feud over Pius is likely to intensify as he moves closer to sainthood; his beatification could occur by next year. Jewish groups are increasingly hostile to it, and the Vatican is increasingly resentful of their critiques. But debate should be welcome. It illuminates previously neglected episodes in the life of this prospective saint. And it alerts us to flaws in the received version, as when, defending Pius against Cornwell last week, at least one cleric reached again for the story of the Dutch reprisals...