Hitler and the Vatican: Inside the Secret Archives That Reveal the New Story of the Nazis and the Church

From Publishers Weekly While he purports to defend the Vatican against "polemics" and "moralists," Godman's account of the Vatican's failure to oppose Hitler, based on recently released documents, is in some ways as damning as Goldhagen's A Moral Reckoning. He focuses on the 1930s and two men, Pope Pius XI and his secretary of state, Eugenio Pacelli, the future Pope Pius XII. Neither man comes off well, bound as they were by legalisms, propriety and an almost obsessive desire to maintain the facade of reciprocity embodied in the Vatican's Concordat with Nazi Germany. Both fully recognized that Nazism was incompatible with Christian doctrine, and therein lies the real tragedy of Godman's well-told tale. While Godman, a Vatican scholar and member of the Church's Committee for the Archives of the Holy Office, paints portraits of two tormented but indecisive men, other culprits are the ineffective papal delegate in Berlin, Cardinal Orsenigo, and the Austrian bishop Alois Hudal. This is also a study of the structural and institutional inertia of the Vatican. Caught between the dual threats of Nazism and Bolshevism, popes, German bishops and Vatican authorities failed to articulate a single, coherent, theologically sound and politically savvy condemnation of National Socialism. Like Pius XI's "hidden encyclical" denouncing racism, two highly specific condemnations of Nazism, drafted in 1935 and 1936, were never promulgated for diplomatic and political reasons. One can only read these documents (included as appendixes I and II) with a heartrending sense of what might have been. Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved. From