Pius History: The Facts Behind the Pius Trilogy by Declan Finn
My rating: 4 of 5 stars
Finn follows up his Pius trilogy with discussion of matters too long for footnotes. The "Hitler's Pope" slander is thoroughly and trenchantly debunked... don't write anything about the subject without reading this!
“There are some immediately obvious problems with this “proof” that Pacelli helped Hitler to power. First, there was no Reich in the 1920s. Hitler was not in power then; there is also a problem of how a Papal concordat would have prevented the rise to power of the Nazi party when the infamous 1933 elections saw the overwhelming majority of the Weimar Republic vote against freedom by voting either Nazi or Communist. It is also difficult to imagine how Pacelli could have foreseen the worth of a failed Austrian painter in the early 1920s, soon to be in the jail from which he would write Mein Kampf, and then prevented the signing of the concordat (this is, of course, assuming that the concordat would have made a difference one way or the other). Second, when the concordant was signed, Eugenio Pacelli was then Papal Secretary of State, so it was left to the German bishops to “submit” to Hitler, and even then, Pacelli was not overly happy about it—he is said to have exclaimed “Why did the bishops have to meet the government halfway?”[184] This also ignores that the Catholic Church had made concordats with the three most Catholic German states of Bavaria, Prussia, and Baden, and the Hitler pursued a concordat in an attempt to seek international recognition,[185] and harassed the Catholics of Germany in order to get one[186] in what some have called “Nazi terror against the German Catholics."
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