Dark Mysteries of the Vatican (9 page)

In April 2003, Elizabeth W. Green wrote in the
Harvard Crimson
that Harvard had produced “a steady stream of leaders in Opus Dei for nearly half a century, and over the past 40 years, at least three of those holding the highest position of authority within Opus Dei’s U.S. branch were Harvard graduates.” She asserted, “While Harvard students and graduates associated with the group say joining Opus Dei was the best thing they’ve ever done with their lives, others call it a dangerous trap, cult-like in its methods” that were “threatening in its caustic interpretation of Catholicism.”

At the University of Notre Dame in South Bend, Indiana, reporter Janice Flynn in
The Observer
online said in October 2004, “Students have taken an array of paths through Opus Dei. Some have deepened their spiritual lives. Others have had emotionally distressing experiences. All have been profoundly affected by the influence of Opus Dei while at Notre Dame.”

Writing in the October/November 2004
Washington Monthly
, Paul Baumann observed, “Many Catholics in Europe and in the United States regard the movement as politically reactionary, extreme in its spiritual and worldly ambition, and devious. The group’s manner of ‘recruiting,’ especially of college students, has been criticized as overbearing or worse. There is even an organization, the Opus Dei Awareness Network, dedicated to exposing the group’s methods. But Opus Dei has its admirers, who see it as a defender of traditional moral values, especially of the family, as well as a providential source of evangelical enthusiasm, orthodoxy, and unquestioned loyalty to Rome. Chief among those admirers was John Paul II, who presided over the speedy canonization of the movement’s founder. Critics, however, saw Escrivá’s 2002 canonization as a sure sign of the organization’s ill-gotten wealth and malign influence.”

After the death of John Paul II, as 115 cardinals met in conclave to name a successor, Opus Dei members knew there was no guarantee he would treat Opus Dei with the favor Pope John Paul II had bestowed upon it. “Their basic concern is that they might actually end up among the big losers,” said John Allen, correspondent for the
National Catholic Reporter
. But the men and women within Opus Dei insisted its future was secure. A spokesman dismissed the possibility a new pope would turn against it. Opus Dei’s vision of involving laypeople further in the Church, he said, “is part of the DNA of the Church,” and part of the reason for John Paul’s backing. At stake was the influence of an organization that Allen estimated had assets worth $2.8 billion worldwide and $344.4 million in the United States.

New York Newsday
staff correspondent Matthew McAllister noted, “If Opus Dei appears murky and alien to the world, that’s partly because some of its practices can come across as throwbacks to the Middle Ages.”

Noting that Opus Dei had flourished under John Paul II, David Yallop, author of
In God’s Name: An Investigation into the Murder of Pope John Paul I
, wrote that if Benedict XVI is not a member of Opus Dei, he is everything Opus Dei adherents could wish a Pope to be. One of Benedict XVI’s first acts as pontiff was to go to the tomb of Escrivá, pray, and bless a statue of him. He subsequently granted Opus Dei the status of personal prelature in Benedict’s reign, retaining Opus Dei’s status in which, Yallop noted, one becomes answerable only to the Pope and God.

Critics of Opus Dei also allege that it has connections with right-wing and pro-Nazi movements in Europe. Nothing in the recent history of the papacy has been more controversial than public and secret deals before and after World War II between Adolf Hitler’s Nazi Germany and the Vatican.

O
n September 21, 2006, The
Catholic News Agency
(CNA) in Rome reported that “documents emerging from the Vatican’s archives demonstrated that Cardinal Eugenio Pacelli, the future Pope Pius XII, defended anti-Nazi clergy and censured priests who expressed admiration for Adolf Hitler.

The CNA said, “German church historian Hubert Wolf told the Associated Press that the recorded minutes of Vatican meetings held in the late 1930s show that the ailing Pope Pius XI greatly relied on Cardinal Pacelli, then Secretary of State, to enforce his Pontificate’s stance against Nazism and Fascism.”

According to Wolf, the Pope (Pius XI) would “just make a blessing and say ‘our secretary of state will find a solution.’”

“The archives, which spanned from 1922 to 1939, may offer answers into a controversy surrounding the cardinal who later became Pope, and who had been accused by some historians of failing to do enough to protect Jews during the Holocaust. The Vatican has insisted that Pius XII used discreet diplomacy that saved thousands of Jews.” Much is known about the relationship between Pope Pius XII and the Nazis, but many believed that the Vatican archives contain documents and other evidence that would prove to be an embarrassment to the Church.

In the Vatican’s official annals Pius XII, “who died in 1958, is painted as a saintly shepherd who led his flock with great moral courage in difficult times. For many scholars he was at worst the Devil incarnate, ‘Hitler’s Pope,’ and at best a coward who refused to speak out against the extermination of Jews, gypsies and homosexuals in gas chambers, even when he had compelling evidence that it was happening, lest his words attract Nazi aggression.”

In 2006, the British publication
The Independent
stated, “Month by month, year by year, more evidence emerges from other sources about where the Vatican’s sympathies lay in the Second World War.” What was known was “that in 1933, as the Vatican representative in Germany, the future Pius XII had agreed to a treaty with Hitler, whose authoritarian tendencies he admired, to close down the Catholic-dominated Center Party, one of National Socialism’s staunchest opponents. This treaty was based on the Vatican’s 1929 agreement with Mussolini, the Italian fascist leader. On being elected Pope in 1939, Pius XII suppressed a document denouncing Hitler that was titled
Mit brennender sorge
(
With Deep Anxiety
) that Pius XI had been writing on his deathbed. Throughout the war, Pius XII made no public condemnation of the Holocaust, except for a single ambiguous sentence in a 26-page Christmas message of 1942.

“Among various disputed accusations made against him were that he had done nothing to protect the Jews of Rome as the Nazis and Italian fascists carted them away to gas chambers…. that he forbade monasteries and convents to shelter Jews trying to escape the Nazis; that he allowed the Church to profit from looted goods taken from the Nazis’ victims; and that he turned a blind eye to the assistance given by Catholic religious orders, notably in Croatia, to help Nazi war criminals escape to start new lives in Latin America,” using what was called “the Rat line.”

The Church vigorously denied all these charges, but historians argued that without access to the Vatican’s wartime archives there could be no independent verification of the Vatican’s claim that Pius XII was free from the stain of sin.

In 1999, British author John Cornwell’s book,
Hitler’s Pope
, “alleged that Pius [XII] was seemingly prepared to put up with any Nazi atrocity because he saw Hitler as a good bulwark against the advance across Europe of godless communism from Russia.” He wrote that the future Pope “displayed anti-Semitic tendencies early on, and that his drive to promote papal absolutism inexorably led him to collaboration with fascist leaders. Cornwall convincingly depicted Cardinal Secretary of State Pacelli pursuing Vatican diplomatic goals that crippled Germany’s large Catholic political party, which might otherwise have stymied Hitler’s excesses…. Pacelli’s failure to respond forcefully to the Nazis was more than a personal failure, said Cornwell, it was a failure of the papal office itself.”

Apparently to counter Cornwell’s book, the “Church agreed to allow access to a joint panel of six Jewish and Catholic experts, appointed by the Vatican and the International Jewish Committee for Inter-religious Consultation. By July 2001, the Jewish members of the group had resigned, quoting the ‘lack of a positive response’ from the Vatican.”

In 2003, the Vatican announced it would permit “limited examination” of the documents related to Pius XII in the reading rooms of the Secret Vatican Archives and the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith. “Jewish leaders and scholars expressed considerable disappointment…. Pope John Paul II [was determined] to beatify Pius, who according to the Vatican did all he could to save lives, but did not take more public actions for fear of further endangering the Jews and Catholics in the Nazi-occupied countries…. The Vatican…maintained it would open the archives once they were put in order, it said the Pope had decided to open the archives ‘to put an end to unjust and ungrateful speculation.’…

“John Paul II was the only one with the authority to open the archives and to release selected documents on ties between the Vatican and the Germans from 1922 to 1939, when the man who later became Pius XII was the Vatican’s ambassador to Germany. Among the first of the wartime documents to be released, according [to the Vatican,] would be those dealing with Pius XII’s ‘charity and assistance’ for those who were prisoners of war. ‘We want historians to know the great activities of charity and assistance by Pius XII toward many prisoners and other war victims, including those of any nation, religion and race,’ the statement read.”

On August 13, 2003, reporter Laurie Goldstein of the
New York Times
reported that “diplomatic documents recently brought to light by a Jesuit historian indicated that while serving as a diplomat, the future pope expressed strong antipathy to the Nazi regime in private communication with American officials. One document was a confidential memorandum written in April 1938 from Cardinal Pacelli, who said…that compromise with the Nazis should be out of question.” The other is a report by an American consul general relating that in a long conversation in 1937, Cardinal Pacelli called Hitler ‘a fundamentally wicked person’ and ‘an untrustworthy scoundrel.’

“Historians who saw the documents said they bolstered the view that the man who became Pope Pius XII was not a Nazi sympathizer, and was in fact convinced that the Nazis were a threat to the church and the stability of Europe. But the historians agreed that the documents in no way explained or exonerated Pius XII’s inaction in the face of the Holocaust.” Neither document “mentioned the persecution of Jews that was well under way when they were written. The documents were described by Charles R. Gallagher, a Jesuit historian at St. Louis University, in an article in the Sept. 1 issue of
America
, the Jesuit weekly. Gallagher, 38, was a former police officer who was a nonordained Jesuit studying to be a priest. He said he came across them [the documents] while researching a biography about another more obscure papal diplomat….

“Mr. Gallagher said in an interview that he hoped the documents would illustrate that as a diplomat, Cardinal Pacelli made his case against the Nazis in private, to other diplomats. ‘I wouldn’t go so far as to say that these documents exonerate him,’ he said. ‘What I think these findings might help to dispel is the impression that this pope was, as others have called him, ‘Hitler’s Pope.’

“Mr. Gallagher found the Pacelli memorandum among the diplomatic papers of Ambassador Joseph P. Kennedy that were housed at the John F. Kennedy Presidential Library in Boston. Joseph Kennedy…served as ambassador to England from 1938 to 1940. Ambassador Kennedy received the memorandum in April 1938 when he met in Rome with Cardinal Pacelli, who was then the Vatican’s secretary of state…. The Cardinal also wrote that the church at times felt powerless and isolated in its daily struggle against all sorts of political excesses from the Bolsheviks to the new pagans arising among the young Aryan generations. He wrote that ‘evidence of good faith’ by the Nazi regime was ‘completely lacking’ and that ‘the possibility of an agreement’ with the Nazis was ‘out of question for the time being.’”

Although the Vatican archives section dealing with the years of Pius XII’s papacy had not yet been opened to historians in 2008, “in a speech to representatives from the US-based Pave the Way Foundation during their visit to his summer residence, Castel Gandolfo, [Pope Benedict XVI] said…that Pius XII ‘spared no effort, wherever it was possible, to intervene (for Jews either) directly or through instructions given to individuals or institutions in the Catholic Church.’”

Benedict said Pius XII, “had to work ‘secretly and silently’ to ‘avert the worst and save the highest number of Jews possible,’…repeating assertions made by Vatican experts in the past. The Pope also said Pius XII was thanked by Jewish groups during and after the war for saving the lives of thousands of Jews. He cited a meeting the leader of the Roman Catholic Church had in the Vatican in November 1945 at which 80 death camp survivors ‘thanked him personally for his generosity.’” Benedict also said “further investigation would reinforce ‘the historical truth, overcoming all remaining prejudice.’”

Benedict’s defense came as the process begun by Pope John Paul II of canonizing Pius XII continued, and a few days before the fiftieth anniversary of Pius XII’s death in 1958. Born in Rome in 1876, Eugenio Pacelli became a priest and obtained his first assignment as a “curate at Chiesa Nuova, the church where he had served as an altar boy. While there, he taught catechism to children…. At the same time he pursued his studies for a doctorate in Canon Law and Civil Law…and he added doctorates in Philosophy and in Theology.” In 1904, he “became a Papal Chamberlain with the title of Monsignor and one year later a Domestic Prelate….

“In 1908, Pacelli attended the Eucharistic Congress in London. The 32-year-old priest was by that time well embarked on what would become a nearly 40-year career of brilliant diplomatic service for the Church. From 1904 to 1916, he was a research aide in the Office of the Congregation of Extraordinary Ecclesiastical Affairs where he assisted Cardinal Pietro Gasparri in the crucial task of clarifying and updating canon law. In 1910, Monsignor Pacelli was again back in London where he represented the Holy See at the Coronation of King George V.

“In 1911, Pope Pius X appointed Pacelli Undersecretary for Extraordinary Ecclesiastical Affairs. This department of the Secretariat of State, negotiated terms of agreements with foreign governments that would allow the Church to carry out its teaching mission. In 1912, he was appointed Secretary. Two years later, he became Secretary of the Congregation of Extraordinary Ecclesiastical Affairs.”

When Pius X died in 1914, Pope Benedict XV appointed Monsignor Pacelli as Papal Nuncio to Bavaria, Germany. Before assuming the post, “he was consecrated a Bishop by Pope Benedict XV in the Sistine Chapel (May 13, 1917). He was then elevated to the rank of Archbishop and went to Germany to present his credentials to Ludwig III, King of Bavaria on May 28, 1917. American newspaper correspondent Dorothy Thompson, wrote: ‘Those of us who were foreign correspondents in Berlin during the days of the Weimar Republic were not unfamiliar with the figure of the dean of the diplomatic corps. Tall, slender, with magnificent eyes, strong features and expressive hands, in his appearance and bearing Archbishop Pacelli looked every inch what he was, a Roman nobleman, of the proudest blood of the Western world. In knowledge of German and European affairs and in diplomatic astuteness, the Nuncio was without an equal.’…

“On June 22, 1920, Pacelli became the first Apostolic Nuncio to Germany. Four years later, March 29, 1924, he signed a concordat with Bavaria which was ratified by its Parliament on January 15, 1925. It determined the rights and duties of the Church and the government in respect to each other. After concluding the concordat with Bavaria, Pacelli was able to succeed with Prussia and Baden.…After some time in Munich, the Apostolic Nuncio’s residence was transferred to Berlin.”

“The Lateran Treaty of 1929 established formal relations between Italy and the Vatican. Following the example of Mussolini, Adolf Hitler initiated a concordat. This is a strictly defined legal agreement between two governments intended to preserve the freedom of the Church to teach and minister to the faithful.”

On February 7, 1930, Pacelli “was appointed Secretary of State and became the archpriest of the Vatican Basilica.” In this capacity, he “negotiated with the Germans to protect the rights of Catholics.” Traveling widely, including an historic visit to the United States in 1936, he was seen by more people and was the most accessible Pope in the history of the papacy up to his pontificate.

In an encyclical
Mit brennender sorge
, condemning anti-Semitism, Pius XI said, “None but superficial minds could stumble into concepts of a national God, of a national religion; or attempt to lock within the frontiers of a single people, within the narrow limits of a single race, God, the Creator of the universe, King and Legislator of all nations before whose immensity they are ‘as a drop of a bucket’ (Isaiah XI. 15). The encyclical prepared under the direction of Cardinal Pacelli, then Secretary of State, was written in German for wider dissemination in that country. It was smuggled out of Italy, copied and distributed to parish priests to be read from all of the pulpits on Palm Sunday, March 21, 1937…. An internal German memo dated March 23, 1937, stated that the encyclical was ‘almost a call to do battle against the Reich government.’ The encyclical,
Mit brenneder sorge
, was confiscated, its printers were arrested and presses seized….

“Cardinal Pacelli returned to France in 1937, as Cardinal-Legate, to consecrate and dedicate the new basilica in Lisieux during a Eucharistic Congress and made another anti-Nazi statement. He again presided (May 25–30, 1938) at a Eucharistic Congress in Budapest.”