Long-buried Vatican files reveal a new and shocking indictment of World War II’s Pope Pius XII: that in pursuit of absolute power he helped Adolf Hitler destroy German Catholic political opposition, betrayed the Jews of Europe, and sealed a deeply cynical pact with a 20th-century devil.
One evening several years ago when I was having dinner with a group of students, the topic of the papacy was broached, and the discussion quickly boiled over. A young woman asserted that Eugenio Pacelli, Pope Pius XII, the Pope during World War II, had brought lasting shame on the Catholic Church by failing to denounce the Final Solution. A young man, a practicing Catholic, insisted that the case had never been proved.
Raised as a Catholic during the papacy of Pius XII—his picture gazed down from the wall of every classroom during my childhood—I was only too familiar with the allegation. It started in 1963 with a play by a young German named Rolf Hochhuth. Der Stellvertreter (The Deputy), which was staged on Broadway in 1964, depicted Pacelli as a ruthless cynic, interested more in the Vatican’s stockholdings than in the fate of the Jews. Most Catholics dismissed Hochhuth’s thesis as implausible, but the play sparked a controversy which has raged to this day…
