Overview

A firm and final indictment of Pope Pius XII's scandalous wartime silence and its consequences. Backed by a wealth of new research, John Cornwell tells for the first time the story of the World War II career of Eugenio Pacelli, the man who was Pope Pius XII, arguably the most dangerous churchman in modern history. In the first decade of the century, as a brilliant young Vatican lawyer, Pacelli helped shape a new ideology of unprecedented papal power in Germany. In 1933 Hitler became his negotiating partner, an agreement was arranged that granted religious and financial payments to the Catholic Church in exchange for their withdrawal from social and political privillage, ensuring the rise of Nazism.

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9780140266818

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Reviews

Based on extensive research into hitherto secret Vatican and Jesuit archives, this book conclusively shows that Pope Pius XII (1939-58), currently a candidate for canonization by the Roman Catholic church, was a secret anti-Semite who assisted Hitler's rise to power and who later in private denied and trivialized the Holocaust. The Pope, Eugenio Pacelli, a career church lawyer and diplomat and sometime Papal Nuncio to Germany, devoted his entire career, says John Cornwell, to creating a new ideology of Papal power which he hoped one day to impose on the Catholic bishops. To this end he cynically concluded an 'alliance with the Devil' - a secret treaty with Hitler under which Germany's 23 million Catholics, the largest and most powerful Catholic community in the world at the time, were to be instructed by Rome to withdraw from political opposition to Hitler in return for Hitler agreeing to the Pope's right to impose Canon Law on German Catholics. As if that were not enough, Pacelli also secretly got the Catholic Centre party in Germany to vote for the Enabling Act giving Hitler absolute power in 1933. These moves took place in the full knowledge of how they would jeopardize the eventual survival of the German Jews and go far to explain Pacelli's long and hitherto puzzling silence about the Holocaust despite the huge influence that he wielded as Pope during the war years. This damning indictment of so prominent a figure is a serious embarrassment to the Roman Catholic church and will, says the author, himself a devoted Catholic, profoundly affect the power struggle that is going on in the church today between reactionaries and liberals. Recommended. (Kirkus UK)

Author Information

John Cornwell is an award-winning journalist and author. His Hitler's Pope- The Secret History of Pius XII was a world bestseller. He has written on scientific issues for a number of periodicals, including New Scientist and the Sunday Times Magazine. His book of the 1995 Prozac trial, Power to Harm- Mind, Murder and Drugs on Trial, was widely acclaimed, and he is the editor of a trilogy of science books- Nature's Imagination, Consciousness and Human Identity and Explanations. He is Director of the Science and Human Dimension Project at Jesus College, Cambridge, and a member of the Department of History and Philosophy of Science at Cambridge University.

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