Papst und Teufel. Die Archive des Vatikan und das Dritte Reich (review)

Critics of Pope Pius XII have demanded for years that the Vatican archives for his pontificate be opened, so that his role during the Holocaust can be clarified. In 2003 Pope John Paul II ordered a partial opening of the archives from the pontificate of Pius XI (1922-39). In February 2006 Pope Benedict XVI opened the entire archive for Pius XI's pontificate: some 100,000 separate files containing up to 1000 pages each. Although they contain thousands of documents from and about Eugenio Pacelli (from 1939, Pope Pius XII), nuncio in Munich and Berlin from 1917 until 1930 and thereafter papal secretary of state, his critics have shown little interest. One of those to do so (although not the first) is Hubert Wolf, professor of modern church history at the University of Münster.

Wolf takes his title from Pius XI, who said in May 1929 that, to save a single soul, he would be ready to negotiate with the devil himself (p. 7).Wolf adopts an often irreverent style that, although it may offend the pious, should enhance credibility with readers keenly aware of the Church's human side. One example: Describing the behavior of popes as "prisoners of the Vatican from the end of the Papal State in 1870 until its restoration in miniature through the Lateran Pacts of 1929, he writes that, during this period, the papal blessing "to the city and the world," formerly given on major feasts from the outside loggia of St. Peter's basilica, was imparted only within the building "so that the Italian 'robbers of the Church State' would not get any of it" (p. 8).

Appointed papal nuncio to Bavaria in May 1917, Pacelli's first task was to present Pope Benedict XV's peace proposal to the government of the German kaiser, Wilhelm II. Anticipating that this initiative would fail, Cardinal Pietro Gasparri, Pacelli's patron and papal secretary of state, tried to prevent Pacelli's appointment as nuncio, lest his star pupil be discredited at the start of his diplomatic career. When Gasparri's fears were confirmed, Pacelli was "traumatized," Wolf writes, and took the failure as confirmation of his mentor's belief in the need for the Holy See's "absolute neutrality in political and military conflicts" (p. 54). This makes his subsequent limited and secret cooperation with the German opposition to Adolf Hitler at the start of World War II the more remarkable.

Wolf devotes fifty pages to the oft-cited condemnation of racial anti-semitism by the Roman Holy Office in 1928. This came about through the efforts of the Friends of Israel, a Catholic reform movement with widespread hierarchical support, including membership by nineteen cardinals, to facilitate Jewish conversions, in part by purging the reference to "the perfidious Jews" in the Good Friday liturgy. The proposal was approved by the Congregation for Rites, only to founder on the outraged opposition of Cardinal Raphael Merry del Val, the prefect of the Holy Office and militant hammer of heretics since the antimodernist campaign of Pope Pius X. Insisting on the maintenance of the Church's traditional religious anti-Judaism, based on the accusation that Jews were guilty of deicide, Merry del Val convinced Pope Pius XI that changing the Good Friday prayer would be a betrayal of the Catholic faith and forced leading members of the Friends of Israel to make humiliating retractions of their request. The condemnation of racial antisemitism was issued as a cover for the Church's reiteration of religious anti-Judaism. This chapter makes for painful reading today.

The heart of the book is Wolf's examination of the connections between the German bishops' modification of their previous condemnations of National Socialism, following Hitler's declaration of March 23, 1933, that he intended to make "the two Christian confessions the foundation of [his] work of national renewal" (p. 188); the Center Party's subsequent consent...