In a handful of other worlds”particularly conservative Catholic ones”the essay did quite well. But those were the worlds that hardly needed it. For people of that persuasion, the omnipresent assault on Pius XII drives them toward the worst possibilities for their communities: a dread that rampant anti-Catholicism is shortly to unleash itself upon them, a hunger to flee to small fellowships of the saved and away from the corruption of the public square, an embracing of a self-image as victims, and a belief that a dark cloud rests over the sum of modern times. “Even a Jewish writer”and a rabbi, too”sees the slander for what it is,” they say. And thereby they confirm, for those whom the essay only angered, that David Dalin let himself be used as a Jew to advance a sectarian Catholic agenda (mine, presumably, although my friends have had the courtesy not to say that to my face). And so the whole coil curls up around itself once more, and we get no forwarder. Perhaps a book that collected the best reviews would help. However large it personally looms, the part played by David and me was small. The attempt to sift through the endless stream of books about Pius XII in recent years was actually carried out by indefatigable reviewers in dozens of magazines and journals, responding to the texts one by one. The controversy also motivated additional research, and new material now seems to arrive every week. As far as I can tell, all this recent information tells in favor of Pius XII. A recently discovered 1923 letter to the Vatican from Eugenio Pacelli, then nuncio to Germany, for instance, denounces Hitler’s putsch and warns against his anti-Semitism and anti-Catholicism. A document from April 1933, just months after Hitler obtained power, reveals how Pacelli (then secretary of state) ordered the new German nuncio, Cesare Orsenigo, to protest Nazi actions.
Meanwhile, newly examined diplomatic documents show that in 1937 Cardinal Pacelli warned A. W. Klieforth, the American consul to Berlin, that Hitler was “an untrustworthy scoundrel and fundamentally wicked person,” to quote Klieforth, who also wrote that Pacelli “did not believe Hitler capable of moderation, and . . . fully supported the German bishops in their anti-Nazi stand.” This was matched with the discovery of Pacelli’s anti-Nazi report, written the following year for President Roosevelt and filed with Ambassador Joseph Kennedy, which declared that the Church regarded compromise with the Third Reich as “out of the question.”Archives from American espionage agencies have recently confirmed Pius XII’s active involvement in plots to overthrow Hitler. A pair of newly found letters, written in 1940 on the letterhead of the Vatican’s Secretariat of State, give Pius XII’s orders that financial assistance be sent to Campagna for the explicit purpose of assisting interned Jews suffering from Mussolini’s racial policies. And the Israeli government has finally released Adolf Eichmann’s diaries, portions of which confirm the Vatican’s obstruction of the Nazis’ roundup of Rome’s Jews.
There’s more, a regular flow of new material. Intercepts of Nazi communications released from the United States’ National Archives include such passages as “Vatican has apparently for a long time been assisting many Jews to escape,” in a Nazi dispatch from Rome to Berlin on October 26, 1943, ten days after the Germany’s Roman roundup. New oral testimony from such Catholic rescuers as Monsignor John Patrick Carroll-Abbing, Sister Mathilda Spielmann, Father Giacomo Martegani, and Don Aldo Brunacci insists that Pius XII gave them explicit orders and direct assistance to help persecuted Jews in Italy. The posthumous publication this year of Harold Tittmann’s memoir, Inside the Vatican of Pius XII , is particularly interesting, for in it the American diplomat reveals, for the first time, that Pius XII’s wartime conduct drew upon advice from the German resistance.