Church of Spies

Review by Geoffrey Wawro

Pius XII’s papacy began in March 1939 just as Hitler was annexing the rump of Czechoslovakia and Europe trembled on the brink of war. The familiar view is that Pope Pius, born Eugenio Pacelli, was a prudent man who avoided criticism of the fascist powers until the war was won and it became safe for him to recover his conscience.

Supporters have argued that Pacelli had little choice. He had to remain neutral—to protect German, Italian and all Catholics living under the fascist boot—and he may have seen the Nazis as a lesser evil than the Stalinist USSR.

What is clear is that Pius XII eloquently criticized the Nazi rape of Poland when the war began, but then fell silent for the duration of the war. This is generally put down to timidity.

Riebling, using archives, demonstrates that this conventional view is false. The pope loathed Hitler. He’d led resistance to the Nazi revolution, issuing his encyclical in 1937 Mit brennender Sorge—With Burning Anxiety—and other criticism of the Nazi state when he’d been Pius XI’s Secretary of State. Pacelli bravely went on record against the “neo-paganism” and “pantheistic confusion” of Hitler’s court.

World War II challenged the Catholic church as never before. Hitler planned to squeeze the life out of the church if victorious. He’d signed a Concordat with the Holy See in 1933 merely to reassure German Catholics that he wasn’t all that extreme. But he was. The Führer respected no institutions other than his own. He dabbled in paganism, and when he invaded Poland, he ordered priests exterminated to destroy the Catholic church as a center of resistance.

Riebling’s research reveals the fascinating double-game the pope was actually playing. When Pius XII fell silent, he was secretly leading an espionage campaign to overthrow Hitler that eventually linked conspirators like James Moltke, Admiral Canaris, Dietrich Bonhoeffer and Claus Stauffenberg. Some of the conspirators were Catholic, others, like Moltke and Canaris, were Protestants. They all came to view the Catholic church, with its protected status in Germany and its secret couriers to the Vatican, as perhaps the only reliable base in a nation riddled with spies and informers. The book’s title derives from the fact that the crucial intermediaries were brave German priests—their work carefully detailed throughout—who shuttled back and forth to the Vatican to coordinate the plots.

The book details early conspiracies, like Canaris’ coup planning in 1940 before Hitler’s invasion of France, and culminates with the July 1944 bomb plot at Rastenburg, which was dramatized in the film Valkyrie. The case for a revised view of Pius XII is a good one. Pacelli had been an activist, bold foreign secretary before the war—and was not the sort of man to go limp in the face of Hitler. He fought doggedly behind the scenes, and nurtured resistance inside the Nazi elite.

História / História Geral