NEVER LET THE FACTS GET IN THE WAY OF DEMAGOGUERY:

Protestant witness for Pius XII (Uwe Siemon-Netto, 4/2/2003, UPI)

If the Catholic Church is smarting over incessant attempts by non-historians to tarnish the image of Pope Pius XII, it can draw comfort from the certainty that the end of the smear campaign is nigh. Real historians will soon refute the likes of Harvard's Daniel Goldhagen and John Cornwell, the author of the scandalous book, "Hitler's Pope."

The Vatican is making it increasingly easier for scholars to research the church's position vis-a-vis the Nazi regime. It has newly indexed documents from the papal nuncio's offices in Munich and Berlin before and during World War II -- that is, documents that were not destroyed by Allied bombing.

One of the most fascinating nuggets of information we can expect from the coming research will doubtless show how much the Vatican and the Lutheran resistance inside Germany have worked in tandem at a time when ecumenism was far from fashionable.

Already Lutheran church historian Gerhard Besier has jumped to Pius's defense by chiding Goldhagen for not even mentioning the fact that the SS "considered the Roman Catholic Church is most dangerous ideological adversary." This was the reason, wrote Besier, why the Nazis "fought 'political Catholicism' with every means at their disposal."

It shows up the shoddy scholarly craftsmanship of the Vatican's detractors that they didn't even bother to study data concerning the interplay between Lutheran martyr Dietrich Bonhoeffer and the pope -- material that has been accessible to the general public for decades:

-- In his celebrated Bonhoeffer biography, the late Rev. Eberhard Bethge recorded the Vatican's crucial role in maintaining a line of communication between the resistance and the British Foreign Office. Bethge was Bonhoeffer's closest friend and, later, his editor.

-- Anti-Nazi diplomat Ulrich von Hassell recorded in 1940 to "what extraordinary lengths (the pope) went to make German interests his own" -- meaning, of course, not the interests of Nazi Germany but of the new Germany that was to emerge after Hitler's overthrow.

It has long been known that Protestant resistance leaders transmitted detailed plans for this post-Nazi Germany via the Vatican to London.

Of course, the intricacy of these ecumenical relations might be too much to ponder for authors bent on demagoguery.

This slander would not be quite so vile if Pius had at least been acquiescent, but to portray him as an accomplice of Hitler when he was in fact one of the few major European figures to work against him is especially despicable. Posted by Orrin Judd at April 3, 2003 8:39 PM