Religion, Rome and The Reich: The Vatican's other dirty secret

21 May 2006 01:01

Religion, Rome and The Reich: The Vatican's other dirty secret

Forget 'The Da Vinci Code', 'God's HQ on earth' has a real ghost in the cupboard - collusion with the Nazis. No wonder then, says Peter Stanford, that the church is hiding papers on the dealings of 'Hitler's Pope', Pius XII

Published: 21 May 2006

As The Da Vinci Code arrives in our cinemas with its lurid accusations of a church cover-up of Jesus's life as a family man, Roman Catholic leaders have been vocal in dismissing the film of Dan Brown's bestseller as unsuitable viewing for believers. Cardinal amongst its sins according to them is its suggestion that a church organisation, Opus Dei, would attempt to manipulate history to fit its beliefs. But that, it was charged last week, is precisely what the Vatican is doing in regard of a much more recent event, the Holocaust.

An unflattering spotlight fell on God's business address on Earth when the German Justice Minister, Brigitte Zypries, announced on Tuesday that her country is finally to open its huge archive of Nazi records on 17 million concentration camp inmates and slave labourers. Germany's belated move to answer the pleas for access to its archives by Holocaust survivors and their families now leaves only the Vatican standing all alone in denying them the chance to read what is in its wartime documents.

You might expect an organisation that - as the bishops have been busy pointing out last week to counter the picture of their church presented in The Da Vinci Code - is dedicated to truth, justice, forgiveness and reconciliation to have been among the first to offer access to its files. And its refusal to open its secret files has only increased suspicion that it has something it wants to cover up - principally evidence of the alleged pro-Nazi sympathies of wartime pope, Pius XII.

In the church's official annals, Pius, who died in 1958, is painted as a saintly shepherd who led his flock with great moral courage in difficult times. For many scholars, though, he is at worst the Devil incarnate, "Hitler's Pope", and at best a coward who refused to speak out against the extermination of Jews, gypsies and homosexuals in gas chambers, even when he had compelling evidence that it was happening, lest his words attract Nazi aggression.


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http://news.independent.co.uk/europe/article549446.ece

The play was translated into English and presented in US in 1964. There was a major controversy over the claims against the pope and the Vatican made by Hochhuth.

One contemporary discussion

http://theologytoday.ptsem.edu/apr1964/v21-1-criticscorner4.htm

The Deputy and Christian Conscience
By James H. Nichols*

HOCHHUTH'S The Deputy is a powerful and passionate arraignment of the honesty and relevance of the Christian church in the modern world. The specific issue is more restricted, an indictment of Pope Pius XII for not speaking out against Nazi atrocities. But the scope of the indictment extends itself in the minds of the hearers to broader dimensions, perhaps, than the author himself had in mind. Here is an unrelenting accusation of the moral bankruptcy of Christianity in one of the great crises of history, and further, the probing challenge to religious faith itself-how can one believe in God in the stench of Auschwitz? The dramatic form is only a vehicle of convenience for a denunciatory sermon. There are conspicuous lapses and failures of artistic realization, but the preacher's passion sustains the needed intensity, and those most grateful for the play feel least like clapping.

Taken as the representative of organized Christianity generally, Protestant as well as Catholic, and as the spokesman of the Christian conscience, the "deputy" of Christ, the Pope, is legitimately pilloried as guilty of betrayal. He stands for all of us well-intentioned, decent, respectable Christians who could not believe what was whispered, who did not want to know what was going on, who had so many institutional interests and responsibilities, political and ecclesiastical, which would certainly suffer if we admitted the truth. Pius XII, the Catholic Church, the Protestant churches, all of us "made the great refusal" even more despicably than the Pope whom Dante placed in hell on that charge. The Pope and the churches which


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* Rolf Hochhuth's drama, The Deputy, which has caused a stir during the past year wherever it has played on the Continent, is now the subject of controversy in this country. Playing to full houses on Broadway, and available in at least two different English texts, the whole tangled ethical question of Christian conscience in the face of evil is being explored afresh in dramatic form. James H. Nichols' a Protestant Observer at Vatican Council II, presents in this brief but perceptive review his initial reactions to the play.


---------------------------------------------------------------- 112 - The Deputy and Christian Conscience?

claim to speak for Christ proved themselves unsafe guides in faith and morals. Can we deny that the Lieutenant Gerstein's and the Father Fontana's were the exceptions, alike in Roman Catholicism and in Protestantism?

more....

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One collection of articles dealing with the controversy is The Storm over The Deputy