ITALY: Two newly-discovered documents indicate a personal antipathy towards the Nazis on the part of Pope Pius XII. One was found among recently disclosed private papers of Joseph Kennedy, US ambassador to Britain from 1938 to 1940, and father of President Kennedy.
In 2000 a book, Hitler's Pope: The Secret History of Pius XII by John Cornwell, argued that Pius's seeming moral torpor during the rise of the Nazi party in Germany and later during the second World War amounted to affirmation of Hitler.
Pius (then Cardinal Eugenio Pacelli) had been papal nuncio in Germany from 1920 to 1929. He was Vatican secretary of state from 1930 to 1939 when he became Pope.
An article based on the documents appears in the September 1st issue of America, a Jesuit-produced national Catholic weekly magazine circulated in the US.
The first document, a 1939 US State Department report from Mr Alfred Klieforth, then US consul general in Berlin, described a 1937 three-hour meeting "to discuss the situation in Germany" with Cardinal Pacelli. Mr Klieforth recalled in the report that the cardinal "opposed unilaterally every compromise with National Socialism". He (the cardinal) "regarded Hitler not only as an untrustworthy scoundrel but as a fundamentally wicked person. He did not believe Hitler capable of moderation, in spite of appearances, and he fully supported the German bishops in their anti-Nazi stand," he said.
The second document, discovered by Mr Gallagher among Joseph Kennedy's diplomatic papers in the John F. Kennedy Library, had not been seen for 65 years. It is a report prepared by Cardinal Pacelli and given to Ambassador Kennedy on April 19th, 1938, with permission to pass "these personal private views of mine on to your Friend", understood to be a reference to President Franklin D. Roosevelt. It is also believed that British prime minister Mr Neville Chamberlain saw this report.
According to the America article by Charles Gallagher, in the document/report "Pacelli made clear that the Nazi programme struck at the 'fundamental principle of freedom of the practice of religion', and indicated the emergence of a new Nazi Kulturkampf against the Church. Sounding beleaguered and perhaps a bit frightened, Pacelli expressed the view that the church 'at times felt powerless and isolated in its daily struggle against all sorts of political excesses from Bolsheviks to the new pagans arising among the young 'Aryan' generation.' Nevertheless, he assured Kennedy that any political compromise with the Nazi regime was 'out of the question'."
The day after he became Pope, Pius met Kennedy, who later wrote to Washington that the new pope held "a subconscious prejudice that has arisen from his belief that Nazism and Fascism are pro-pagan, and as pro-pagan they strike at the roots of religion."