If one were only to get their news from mainstream sources and the culture at large this story would make little sense to you. If you believe that Pope Pius XII was “Hitler’s Pope” because some anti-Catholic author wrote it in order to sell books, then you might be shocked to read that Hitler had a plot to kidnap the Pope. According to the UK Telegraph:
Pope Pius XII told senior bishops that should he be arrested by the Nazis, his resignation would become effective immediately, paving the way for a successor, according to documents in the Vatican’s Secret Archives.
The bishops would then be expected to flee to a safe country – probably neutral Portugal – where they would re-establish the leadership of the Roman Catholic Church and appoint a new Pontiff.
That Hitler considered kidnapping the Pope has been documented before, but this is the first time that details have emerged of the Vatican’s strategy should the Nazis carry out the plan.
“Pius said ‘if they want to arrest me they will have to drag me from the Vatican’,” said Peter Gumpel, the German Jesuit priest who is in charge of researching whether Pius should be made a saint, and therefore has access to secret Vatican archives.
Pius, who was Pope throughout the war, told his advisers “the person who would leave the under these conditions would not be Pius XII but Eugenio Pacelli” – his name before he was elected Pontiff – thus giving permission for a new Pope to be elected.
“It would have been disastrous if the Church had been left without an authoritative leader,” said Father Gumpel.
“Pius wouldn’t leave voluntarily. He had been invited repeatedly to go to Portugal or Spain or the United States but he felt he could not leave his diocese under these severe and tragic circumstances.” Vatican documents, which still remain secret, are believed to show that Pius was aware of a plan formulated by Hitler in July 1943 to occupy the Vatican and arrest him and his senior cardinals.
Weird, huh? Why would Adolf Hitler be coming up with a plan to kidnap the Pope if the Pope were on his side? Hmmm…
Rabbi David Dalin wrote in his book “The Myth of Hitler’s Pope: How Pope Pius XII Rescued Jews from the Nazis” that Pope Pius deserves to be recognized as a “righteous Gentile” for his efforts to rescue Jews from the Nazis.
Rabbi Dalin shows that the Catholic Church, under direct orders from Pius XII, sheltered and protected thousands and thousands of Jews.
The truth is that the myth of “Hitler’s Pope” started in 1963 with left-wing German writer Rolf Hochhuth’s fictional play The Deputy, which portrayed Pius XII as indifferent to Jewish suffering. Then the KGB spread the lie to harm the Catholic Church. They did so only after the Pope’s death.
The lie of “Hitler’s Pope” has become pervasive in the culture but the truth can be found. If only one is willing to look. Even a little.
The truth is that Pope Pius was an untiring enemy of the Nazi regime and Hitler knew it and that’s why he wanted to remove him from the papacy.
According to Jimmy Akin:
The Pope’s efforts did not go unrecognized by Jewish authorities, even during the War. The Chief Rabbi of Jerusalem, Isaac Herzog, sent the Pope a personal message of thanks on February 28, 1944, in which he said: “The people of Israel will never forget what His Holiness and his illustrious delegates, inspired by the eternal principles of religion which form the very foundations of true civilization, are doing for us unfortunate brothers and sisters in the most tragic hour of our history, which is living proof of divine Providence in this world.”[17]
Other Jewish leaders chimed in also. Rabbi Safran of Bucharest, Romania, sent a note of thanks to the papal nuncio on April 7, 1944: “It is not easy for us to find the right words to express the warmth and consolation we experienced because of the concern of the supreme pontiff, who offered a large sum to relieve the sufferings of deported Jews. . . . The Jews of Romania will never forget these facts of historic importance.”[18]
The Chief Rabbi of Rome, Israel Zolli, also made a statement of thanks: “What the Vatican did will be indelibly and eternally engraved in our hearts. . . . Priests and even high prelates did things that will forever be an honor to Catholicism.”[19]
It becomes increasingly difficult to honestly believe in the myth of Hitler’s Pope. But something tells me that those who hate the Church will still find a way.
April 22, 2009 at 1:21 pm
My son just did a Church History report on this very topic. Thanks for the new information! He will find it very interesting…but I don’t think he’ll go back and revise his paper, LOL!
April 22, 2009 at 1:37 pm
My eldest wrote a paper on Catholics and the Holocaust. “The Myth of Hitler’s Pope” was required reading. Excellent book and excellent defense of Pope Pius XII. History has been very unkind to Pius XII, but I’m sure he no longer minds.
April 22, 2009 at 3:39 pm
No, CMR, you got it all wrong! He was only PRETENDING to fear kidnapping and grisly torture to better hide his Nazi sympathies! He tricked all those grateful rabbis with sinister Nazi mind control powers. He was actually going to be transported to the “Eagle’s Nest” to design a battalion of ubermensch Swiss guardsmen!
And… and… nazis! Hitler’s Pope! Albino monks! He’s guilty, I tell ya!
April 22, 2009 at 4:15 pm
Has this been vetted by Ron Howard?
April 22, 2009 at 4:17 pm
I apologize for the accidental anonymous.
But, really, have you cleared this with that great historian Ron Howard?
April 22, 2009 at 7:10 pm
“Hitler Hated Hitler’s Pope?”
Moderate, Pro-Choice Catholics hate God’s Pope, so why not?
April 22, 2009 at 7:32 pm
This story first came out several years ago, when I first remember reading of it. The idea of escape to Portugal was news to me, though. Were they to settle in Fatima, I wonder?
April 22, 2009 at 8:37 pm
Ron Rychlak wrote another really good, extensively researched book refuting this “theory.”
Lots and lots of endnotes, really easy reading.
April 23, 2009 at 1:24 am
Great post about a great pope.
April 23, 2009 at 1:51 am
Back in October of 2008, I mused on the same subject and got accosted by a self proclaimed ex-priest Liberal who demanded that in addition to Dalin’s book I should read both Cornwell’s original and also “A Moral Reckonning” by Daniel Goldhaggen.
He has a whole web site dedicated to demeaning Pius XII and side-by-side comparisons of the books.
The comments ended up being a summary discussion on the evidence with sources like so: If by talking to myself, you mean rejecting unjustified claims by ex-religious Willis and Cornwell, and revisionists Goldhaggen and Hochhuth (1963 "The Deputy"), and rather keeping company with Herzog, Meir, Sharett, Weizmann, Zolli, Lapide, Rychlak, Caroll, de Wohl, Grolier, and about 860,000 rescued Jews, then I don't think that I'll be bored any time soon. I'll even keep company with that liberal bastion the New York Times (Dec. 25, 1941, p. 20 & Dec. 25, 1942, p. 10),the 1996 Grolier Multimedia Encyclopedia (V8.01), and the Israeli consul, Pinchas E. Lapide, in his book, Three Popes and the Jews.
April 23, 2009 at 3:57 am
So, a guy insults you for your position, and implies you can make it up to him by reading three books that he picked out just for you.
Sounds like a keeper.
April 23, 2009 at 12:42 pm
Amazingly, we found Rychlak’s book in our public library. Don’t tell…they might put it in the “discard” pile…
April 23, 2009 at 2:55 pm
Nancy – usually libraries put their discards up for sale. You can own it for a quarter!
April 24, 2009 at 9:07 pm
Wow! And I also heard that the surprise is that Bruce Willis is really a ghost in “The 6th Sense”.
In other words, old news.
April 26, 2009 at 3:33 am
I’m the “ex-priest Liberal who demanded (challenged) that in addition to Dalin’s book I should read both Cornwell’s original and also “A Moral Reckonning” by Daniel Goldhaggen.”
I confess that it was foolish of me to suggest that before conservative Catholics praise Dalin’s book they should read not just HIS critique but the two principle books that he was critiquing.
How foolish of me to have such high expectations of conservatives in general, let alone Catholic conservatives !
April 26, 2009 at 4:42 am
Matthew, you write “Weird, huh? Why would Adolf Hitler be coming up with a plan to kidnap the Pope if the Pope were on his side? Hmmm…”
Why is it that in the conservative world things have to be either black or white, good or bad, right or left, etc.? You can’t seem to handle a range of possiblities beyond TWO. I wonder if most critics of “Hitler’s Pope” have even READ the book, as Cornwell never suggests that Pius was a WILLING ally of Hitler’s. What conservatives seem unable to understand is that there was a multitude of options at the time, from options very helpful to the Nazis to those very helpful to the Jews, with an infinite variety in between. Cornwell points out that Pius could and should have made much better choices than he did, and why.
As for Rabbi Dalin’s opinion that Pope Pius deserves to be recognized as a “righteous Gentile” for his efforts to rescue Jews from the Nazis”, Dalin has no more authority to make such a designation than I do. The Hebrew scholars in Israel have deliberately denied Pius XII that honor, while granting it to 22,000 other Gentiles, because they don’t agree with an American “Rabbi” who is employed by a Catholic institution with 600 ultra-conservative Catholic students that calls itself a “University”.