Tell A Lie Big Enough

John Julius Norwich has become the latest purveyor of calumnies against that great Pope, Pius XII.

June’s beatification of the three anti-Nazi martyr-priests of Lübeck has raised the matter of the obvious non-beatification of their Protestant companion, the first Protestant pastor to be executed by that regime, and who unlike the three priests received no aid whatever from his ecclesial body. I am told that there are Arians in the Roman Matyrology, although I do not know who they are. There are certainly adherents of the Angevin Schism among canonised Saints, and it is not unheard of for Eastern Catholics to dedicate churches to the Saints of their schismatic histories. One cannot help feeling that the Church ought to recognise those validly baptised persons who have suffered and died, and who continue to do so, alongside their Catholic neighbours in the Armenian Genocide, in the Holy Land, in Lebanon, in Egypt, in Turkey, in Iraq and elsewhere.

And the more concentration of the Church’s real history during the War, the better. As someone once said, “Tell a lie big enough...” In fact, Pius XII was first ever called “Hitler’s Pope” by John Cornwell, in his 1999 book of that name, a thinly disguised liberal rant against John Paul II with the ‘thesis’ that the future Pius XII, while a diplomat in Germany, could have rallied Catholic opposition and toppled Hitler. Pure fantasy, like the origin of the whole “Pope supported Hitler” craze: the 1963 play The Deputy by Rolf Hochhuth, who was later successfully prosecuted for suggesting that Churchill had arranged the 1944 air crash that killed General Sikorsky.

Pius XII directly or indirectly saved between 8500 and 9600 Jews in Rome; 40,000 throughout Italy; 15,000 in the Netherlands; 65,000 in Belgium; 200,000 in France; 200,000 in Hungary; and 250,000 in Romania. This list is not exhaustive, and the Dutch figure would have been much higher had not the Dutch Bishops antagonised the Nazis by issuing the sort of public denunciation that Pius is castigated for failing to have issued.

After the War, Pius was godfather when the Chief Rabbi of Rome became a Catholic, and was declared a Righteous Gentile by the State of Israel, whose future Prime Minister (Moshe Sharrett) told him that it was his “duty to thank you, and through you the Catholic Church, for all they had done for the Jews.” When Pius died in 1958, tributes to him from Jewish organisations had to be printed over three days by The New York Times, and even then limited to the names of individuals and their organisations. All of this is contained in works of serious scholarship by Margherita Marchione, Ralph McInerny, Ronald J Rychlak, and others, most recently the superlative Rabbi Professor David G Dalin.

Colonel Claus Schenk, Count von Stauffenberg, recently given the full Tom Cruise treatment, was a devout Catholic, with close dynastic connections to the Bavarian Royal House of Wittelsbach that Jacobites would have on the Thrones of England, Scotland and Ireland, and to the family of Saint Philip Howard, martyred Earl of Arundel. In Austria, Hitler ordered the murder of the Chancellor, Englebert Dolfuss, who defended, on the borders of Italy and Germany, Catholic Social Teaching and what remained of the thoroughly multiethnic Hapsburg imperial ethos (to this day, numerous German, Magyar and Slavic names are found throughout the former Austria-Hungary) against both the Communists and the Nazis. In the same tradition was Blessed Franz Jägerstätter.

Examples of Catholic anti-Nazism could be multiplied practically without end. The more Catholic an area was, the less likely it was to vote Nazi, without any exception whatever. Not least, the present Pope’s Maths teacher sent him to get the Hitler Youth form, and then just kept it on file for him. “Thus was I able to escape it.” In other words, he was never in it. Have you got that? He was never in it.

Quite how relations came to deteriorate so far between the Church and those now screaming falsehood and abuse on this score could then be a subject of examination. And who knows, we might then be permitted to move on to some setting of the record straight about the torrent of falseood and abuse relating to sex between men and teenage boys, a torrent emanating from those at least turn a blind eye to, and who not uncommonly engage in, sex between men and teenage boys?

Still, anything to support organised shakedowns, often by people whose records would otherwise cause their testimony to be laughed out of court, against the Catholic Church. Why? You and I know the answers to that one, dear reader. But imagine if the whole world were caused to know.