The negotiations proceeded over six months with constant shuttle diplomacy between the Vatican and Berlin. Hitler spent more time on this treaty than on any other item of foreign diplomacy during his dictatorship.
The Reich Concordat granted Pacelli the right to impose the new Code of Canon Law on Catholics in Germany and promised a number of measures favorable to Catholic education, including new schools. In exchange, Pacelli collaborated in the withdrawal of Catholics from political and social activity. The Catholic Church in Germany had no say in setting the conditions. It was Kaas, chairman of the party but completely in thrall to Pacelli, who bullied the delegates into acceptance.
Again, Pacelli was the prime mover in this tragic Catholic surrender. The fact that the party voluntarily disbanded itself, rather than go down fighting, had a profound psychological effect, depriving Germany of the last democratic focus of potential noncompliance and resistance.
In the political vacuum created by its surrender, Catholics in the millions joined the Nazi Party, believing that it had the support of the Pope. In the future all complaints against the Nazis would be channeled through Pacelli. There were some notable exceptions, for example the sermons preached in by Cardinal Michael von Faulhaber, the Archbishop of Munich, in which he denounced the Nazis for their rejection of the Old Testament as a Jewish text.
The concordat immediately drew the German church into complicity with the Nazis. Even as Pacelli was granted special advantages in the concordat for German Catholic education, Hitler was trampling on the education rights of Jews throughout the country. At the same time, Catholic priests were being drawn into Nazi collaboration with the attestation bureaucracy, which established Jewish ancestry.
Pacelli, despite the immense centralized power he now wielded through the Code of Canon Law, said and did nothing. The attestation machinery would lead inexorably to the selection of millions destined for the death camps. As Nazi anti-Semitism mounted in Germany during the s, Pacelli failed to complain, even on behalf of Jews who had become Catholics, acknowledging that the issue was a matter of German internal policy. Eventually, in January , three German cardinals and two influential bishops arrived at the Vatican to plead for a vigorous protest over Nazi persecution of the Catholic Church, which had been deprived of all forms of activity beyond church services.
Pius XI at last decided to issue an encyclical, a letter addressed to all the Catholic faithful of the world. But there was no explicit condemnation of anti-Semitism, even in relation to Jews who had converted to Catholicism.
Worse still, the subtext against Nazism National Socialism and Hitler were not mentioned by name was blunted by the publication five days later of an even more condemnatory encyclical by Pius XI against Communism.
The encyclical Mit Brennender Sorge , though too little and too late, revealed that the Catholic Church all along had the power to shake the regime. However, Roman centralizing had paralyzed the German Catholic Church and its powerful web of associations.
In the summer of , as Pius XI lay dying, he became belatedly anxious about anti-Semitism throughout Europe. He commissioned another encyclical, to be written exclusively on the Jewish question. The text, which never saw the light of day, has only recently been discovered. It was written by three Jesuit scholars, but Pacelli presumably had charge of the project.
For all its good intentions and its repudiation of violent anti-Semitism, the document is replete with the anti-Jewishness that Pacelli had displayed in his early period in Germany. The Jews, the text claims, were responsible for their own fate. The encyclical was delivered in the fall of to the Jesuits in Rome, who sat on it. To this day we do not know why it was not completed and handed to Pius XI. For all its drawbacks, it was a clear protest against Nazi attacks on Jews and so might have done some good.
But it appears likely that the Jesuits, and Pacelli, whose influence as secretary of state of the Vatican was paramount since the Pope was moribund, were reluctant to inflame the Nazis by its publication.
Pacelli, when he became Pope, would bury the document deep in the secret archives. On February 10, , Pius XI died, at the age of Pacelli, then 63, was elected Pope by the College of Cardinals in just three ballots, on March 2.
Between his election and his coronation he held a crucial meeting with the German cardinals. He decided that that might be going too far. He was going to maintain normal diplomatic relations with Hitler. His style of papacy, for all his personal humility, was unprecedentedly pompous. He always ate alone. Vatican bureaucrats were obliged to take phone calls from him on their knees.
When he took his afternoon walk, the gardeners had to hide in the bushes. Senior officials were not allowed to ask him questions or present a point of view. As Europe plunged toward war, Pacelli cast himself in the role of judge of judges. His first public statement, the encyclical known in the English-speaking world as Darkness over the Earth , was full of papal rhetoric and equivocations.
Then something extraordinary occurred, revealing that whatever had motivated Pacelli in his equivocal approach to the Nazi onslaught in Poland did not betoken cowardice or a liking for Hitler. In November , in deepest secrecy, Pacelli became intimately and dangerously involved in what was probably the most viable plot to depose Hitler during the war.
The plot centered on a group of antiNazi generals committed to returning Germany to democracy. The coup might spark a civil war, and they wanted assurances that the West would not take advantage of the ensuing chaos. Pius XII agreed to act as gobetween for the plotters and the Allies. Had his complicity in the plot been discovered it might have proved disastrous for the Vatican and for many thousands of German clergy.
As it happened, leaders in London dragged their feet, and the plotters eventually fell silent. The episode demonstrates that, while Pacelli seemed weak to some, pusillanimity and indecisiveness were hardly in his nature. The victims were forced to dig their own graves before being hacked to death with axes. The local priest was forced to recite the prayers for the dying while his son was chopped to pieces before his eyes. Then the priest was tortured.
His hair and beard were torn off, his eyes were gouged out. Finally he was skinned alive. Throughout the war, the Croat atrocities continued. By the most recent scholarly reckoning, , Orthodox Serbs and 27, Gypsies were massacred; in addition, approximately 30, out of a population of 45, Jews were killed.
Despite a close relationship between the Ustashe regime and the Catholic bishops, and a constant flow of information about the massacres, Pacelli said and did nothing. In fact, he continued to extend warm wishes to the Ustashe leadership. The Vatican and the local bishops approved of mass conversion in Croatia even though it was the result of fear rather than conviction , because they believed that this could spell the beginning of a return of the Orthodox Christians there to papal allegiance.
Pacelli was not a man to condone mass murder, but he evidently chose to turn a blind eye on Ustashe atrocities rather than hinder a unique opportunity to extend the power of the papacy. Pacelli came to learn of the Nazi plans to exterminate the Jews of Europe shortly after they were laid in January The deportations to the death camps had begun in December and would continue through All during , Pacelli received reliable information on the details of the Final Solution, much of it supplied by the British, French, and American representatives resident in the Vatican.
On March 17, , representatives of Jewish organizations assembled in Switzerland sent a memorandum to Pacelli via the papal nuncio in Bern, cataloguing violent anti-Semitic measures in Germany and in its allied and conquered territories.
Apart from an intervention in the case of Slovakia, where the president was Monsignor Josef Tiso, a Catholic priest, no papal initiatives resulted.
During the same month, a stream of dispatches describing the fate of some 90, Jews reached the Vatican from various sources in Eastern Europe. On June 16, , Harold Tittmann, the U. In the following weeks the British, American, and Brazilian representatives to the Vatican tried to persuade Pacelli to speak out against the Nazi atrocities. But still he said nothing. In September , President Franklin Roosevelt sent his personal representative, the former head of U.
Steel Myron Taylor, to plead with Pacelli to make a statement about the extermination of the Jews. Taylor traveled hazardously through enemy territory to reach the Vatican. Still Pacelli refused to speak. On December 24, , having made draft after draft, Pacelli at last said something.
It was not merely a paltry statement. The chasm between the enormity of the liquidation of the Jewish people and this form of evasive language was profoundly scandalous. He might have been referring to many categories of victims at the hands of various belligerents in the conflict.
Clearly the choice of ambiguous wording was intended to placate those who urged him to protest, while avoiding offense to the Nazi regime. But these considerations are overshadowed by the implicit denial and trivialization. Hitler himself could not have wished for a more convoluted and innocuous reaction from the Vicar of Christ to the greatest crime in history.
It has linear, symmetrical plan, almost in the shape of a cross. In the apse, is the simple white sarcophagus on a travertine base, following the pontiff's wish, with the inscription PIUS P. XII on the front and the monogram of Christ on the lid.
A gracious fresco of the Virgin with Child was placed above the sarcophagus in The fresco, generally attributed to Pietro Vannucci called il Perugine or to his school, comes from the sacristy of the old basilica.
To provide ventilation, in the vault of the chapel is an oculus with with a bronze grid dated Source Getty. Perhaps equally mysterious is why Vatican officials allowed Riccardo Galeazzi-Lisi, reportedly notorious for his incompetence, to oversee the embalming of the man who led the Catholic Church through the darkest days of the 20th century. In , when Pius ascended to the papacy, he made the Italian eye doctor his personal physician.
Whatever the case, the Vatican swiftly paid for its mistake. In October , as the pontiff lay dying from a long illness in Castel Gandolofo, just south of Rome, the doctor had struck a deal with French newsweekly Paris Match to provide exclusive photos of his holy patient on his deathbed. After the corpse exploded during the procession, Galeazzi-Lisi and Nuzzi were forced to re-embalm Pius overnight. Then there was the infamous embalming. Requiring no injections or incisions, the procedure called for the application of various oils and resins to deoxidize the body, and for a cellophane sheet to be wrapped around the cadaver for almost 24 hours.
As it turned out, that was a mistake. But it was too late: Decomposition had already started, and when the body was finally displayed in St. That marked the end of the road for Galeazzi-Lisi. Galeazzi-Lisi died in at As for the lessons learned?
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