Sir, - In his review of John Cornwell's book Hitler's Pope, Dr Dermot Keogh quite rightly accuses the author of rash judgement on the basis of shallow historical research. In brief, Cornwell couldn't see the spiritual wood for the political trees.
In times of unrest, the Vatican may sometimes need to make deals with tyrants to protect the rights of its subjects. In the politically tumultuous period 19201945, the Vatican was faced with two fearsome powers in international communism and Hitler's National Socialism, but considered communism to be the principal menace loose in the world.
That being the case, it was open to friendly relations with the Fascists after their assumption of power in Italy in 1922. When Hitler came to power in 1933, the Vatican had similar hopes for an anti-Communist regime that would make domestic peace with the Church.
At first, it appeared that events would unfold as in Italy, and the Concordat of 1933 with Hitler reinforced this hope. But the Nazis found various ways of undercutting the Catholic position without formally repudiating the Concordat. Moreover, Nazi publications were openly anti-Christian and constantly heaped abuse on the Pope and Catholic clergy in general.
The Nazi-Vatican hostility led, in 1937, to the bitter Papal encyclical, Mit Brennender Sorge. Issued in German rather than the usual Latin, it was among the strongest attacks that the Vatican had ever made on a specific state. At that time, Cardinal Pacelli, who became Pope Pius XII in 1939, was the Vatican Secretary of State. The encyclical was written under his supervision, so he hardly fits the description of "Hitler's Pope".
As regards the allegation of anti-Semitism and the late Pope's "silence" on the Jewish Holocaust, it is manifestly ludicrous that the author of the above encyclical on the Nazi tyranny would remain silent in the face of a genocidal crime on such a horrendous scale as the Holocaust had that diabolic plan been officially confirmed.
In the autumn of 1942, neither British nor the American intelligence agencies had any knowledge of Jewish gassings or massacres except for rumours, although Holocaust propaganda was in existence in Poland in the spring of 1942.
Vatican documents suggest that the Vatican had some access to Jews in Poland, not only Polish Jews but Italian Jews who were deported after the German occupation of Rome on September 8th, 1943. Also the editors of Volume 9 of Actes et documents (on the subject of war victims in 1943) note that friends and relatives of deported Jews were known to have later received mail from them, that the members of the Dutch resistance who were in constant contact with the Jews of their country reported simply that the deportees were enlisted for work in the camps, while the aged were sent to ghettos and that the Jewish leaders in Rome were unaware of any extermination programme. This is confirmed by many letters received by the Vatican which today form a thick dossier in the archives. There is no mention of brutal extermination. - Yours, etc.,
Patrick J. Carroll, Lady Lane House, Waterford.