God's Bankers: A History of Money and Power at the Vatican

by Gerald Posner

100 Carlo Falconi, The Silence of Pius XII, English translation (Boston: Little, Brown, 1970), 273–75, 307–8.

  101 Cornwell, Hitler’s Pope, 254; Phayer, The Catholic Church and the Holocaust, 34–35, 38.

  102 Williams, The Vatican Exposed, 67; the three priests were Josef Culina, Zvonko Brekalo, and Zvonko Lipovac.

  103 Phayer, The Catholic Church and the Holocaust, 34, n. 14.

  104 Falconi, The Silence of Pius XII, 308.

  105 Branko Bokun, Spy in the Vatican, 1941–45 (London: Vita, 1973), 11.

  106 Through 1941, Bokun tried repeatedly to get the file to Pius, even once trying to hand it to him during a public blessing. The Pope’s advisors blocked Bokun’s efforts to pass the documents. See generally Bokun, Spy in the Vatican; Cornwell, Hitler’s Pope, 255–57.

  107 Phayer, The Catholic Church and the Holocaust, 37.

  108 Aarons, Sanctuary, 62; see also Stevan K. Pavlowitch, Hitler’s New Disorder: The Second World War in Yugoslavia (New York: Columbia University Press, 2008), in which he cites Pavelić bragging to the Italian Foreign Minister that only twelve thousand Jews are still in the territory controlled by the Ustaša; see also Sergio Romano, Giuseppe Volpi: industria e finanza tra Giolitti e Mussolini (Milan: Bompiani, 1979) and Sergio Romano, Giuseppe Volpi et l’Italie moderne: Finance, industrie et état de l’ère Giolittienne à la Deuxième Guerre Mondiale (Rome: Ecole Française de Rome, 1982). Author Ronald Rychlak cites an August 4,1942 letter from Miroslav Freiberger, the chief rabbi of Zagreb, to Pius, in which he thanked the Pope for the “limitless goodness that the representatives of the Holy See and the leaders of the Church showed to our poor brothers.” Rychlak omits, however, the rabbi’s urgent appeal to the Pontiff: “Now, at the moment when the last remnants of our community find themselves in a most crucial situation—at a moment when decisions are being made about their lives—our eyes are fixed upon Your Holiness. We beseech Your Holiness in the name of several thousand women and abandoned children, whose supports are in concentration camps, in the name of widows and orphans, in the name of elderly and the feeble, to help them so that they may remain in their homes and spend their days there, even, if necessary, in the most humble circumstances.” The Vatican responded through a Benedictine Abbot, Giuseppe Ramiro Marcone, who acted as the de facto nuncio to Croatia. The church always did what it could to help the suffering, he told Freiberger, and would continue to do so. Freiberger and his wife died at Auschwitz the following year. See Mordecai Paldiel, Churches and the Holocaust: Unholy Teaching, Good Samaritans, and Reconciliation (Brooklyn, NY: Ktav Publishing House, 2006), 302.

  109 Cornwell, Hitler’s Pope, 283. From 1944 on the Germans were furious at Pius for his failure to explicitly condemn the Allied carpet-bombing of German cities, in which hundreds of thousands of civilians died. It is not clear if Pius’s silence late in the war was due to a shift in his view of who would prevail on the battlefield. See generally Chadwick, Britain and the Vatican, 198–99, 207.

  110 Chadwick, Britain and the Vatican, 193–95; see also Phayer, Pius XII, the Holocaust, and the Cold War, 39–40.

  111 The Minister in Switzerland (Harrison) to the Secretary of State, March 19, 1942, Foreign Relations of the United States, Diplomatic Papers, Europe, 1942 (Washington, DC: U.S. Government Printing Office, 1964), 785–86.

  112 Report by Oliver Lyttelton, MP, on his Period of Office as Minister of State, Oliver Lyttelton, (WP-42-139), 66/23/19, 79–80, Cabinet Papers, National Archives, Kew, UK.

  113 Phayer, The Catholic Church and the Holocaust, 45.

  114 Letter, Robert Leiber to Cardinal Konrad Graf von Preysing, October 28, 1945, Diözesanarchiv Berlin, V/16-4, Collection of Preysing, Berlin.

  115 Phayer, The Catholic Church and the Holocaust, 45–46.

  116 Coppa, Controversial Concordats, 163–65, 177; see also Phayer, The Catholic Church and the Holocaust, 67–81. Some German bishops cited what happened in Holland in 1942 as a reason not to act. There, bishops issued a condemnation of Nazi racial policies and deportations. The Germans responded by accelerating the roundup of Jews, sending some twenty thousand to their death in Auschwitz. Among them was Edith Stein, a Carmelite nun who had converted from Judaism before the war (she was canonized in 1998). After the war, Pius’s personal aide and housekeeper, Pascalina Lehnert, claimed that Pius had intended to publicly condemn Nazi atrocities but had destroyed his handwritten statement in the Vatican kitchen after the Nazi response in the Netherlands made him fear the consequences of such a denunciation. According to Pascalina, the Pope said, “I now think that if the letter of the bishops has cost the lives of 40,000 persons, my own protest, that carries an even stronger tone, could cost the lives of perhaps 200,000 Jews.” She told that story for the first time in 1968, twenty-six years after it allegedly happened. She disclosed it during her testimony before the beatification tribunal completing Pius’s first stage toward sainthood. Pascalina never explained how Pius supposedly knew that the Dutch Jews had been gassed. Their ultimate fate was only confirmed from Nazi records after the war. In any case Maria Conrada Grabmair, a domestic worker who was there that evening, testified that she had seen Pius burn some papers but did not know what was in them, nor did she hear him say anything. Pius’s nephew also testified before the beatification tribunal. While he also could not confirm Pascalina’s account, he said his uncle should be credited for doing more than merely staying silent during the war. He claimed that in the middle of the night, in the Papal chapel, Pius often performed a customized type of exorcism to cast the devil out of Hitler. See also Pascalina Lehnert, Pio XII il privilegio di servirlo, trans. Marola Guarducci (Milan: Rusconi, 1984), 148-49.

  117 Alexander, The Triple Myth, 102. Accompanying Stepinac on his trip to Pius was Father Krunoslav Draganović, one of Bishop Ivan Saric’s personal secretaries. Draganović would play an important postwar role in helping Ustašans charged with war crimes evade justice. See Chapter 12, The Ratline. Also Phayer, The Catholic Church and the Holocaust, 169.

  118 See “Fate of the Wartime Ustaša Treasury,” Report of U.S. State Department, June 2, 1998, 2–4; see also, Alexander, The Triple Myth, chapter 8, “The Disenchantment,” 88–106; Rychlak, Hitler, the War, and the Pope, 304; Phayer, The Catholic Church and the Holocaust, 31–40 and Pius XII, the Holocaust, and the Cold War, 11–12. Although Stepinac was convicted of war crimes in 1946 by the communist government that came to power in the reassembled Yugoslavia, the Vatican maintained he was the victim of a Soviet-inspired witch-hunt against church officials. He died in 1960 while still under house arrest.

  119 Carroll, Constantine’s Sword, 230–31; Robert S. Wistrich, “Reassessing Pope Pius XII’s Attitudes Toward the Holocaust,” Jerusalem Center for Public Affairs, October 19, 2009.

  120 Carroll, Constantine’s Sword, 231.

  121 Carlo Falconi, The Popes in the Twentieth Century: From Pius X to John XXIII (Boston: Little, Brown, 1968), 260.

  122 Although Pius did not authorize any condemnation of the civilian murders, he was so pleased with the Nazi invasion of the Soviet Union that he allowed Archbishop (later Cardinal) Celso Constantini, the Secretary of the Congregation of the Propagation of the Faith, to give a speech in which the cleric praised German troops as “brave soldiers” locked in a war with “Satan’s deputies.” The Allies pleaded with the Pope to tone down any language that might convert the German aggression into an anticommunist crusade that generated support among the Catholic faithful: Memorandum, Reports for the Month of June 1941 for the Dominions, July 21, 1941 (WP-R-41-48), 68/8/48, 50–51, Cabinet Papers, National Archives, Kew, UK.

  123 Conclusion, Confidential Annex (WM-43-114), 65/39/10, 47, Cabinet Papers, National Archives, Kew, UK. U.S. Intelligence intercepted a 1941 church cable expressing concerns that a priest known only as Father Hoffman, who supposedly worked for the Gestapo and was also a prior of a large Benedictine monastery, had penetrated the Vatican. See NNO32947, September 29, 1941, RG 59, IWG (Nazi war crimes working group), FBI Se
cret Intercepts, NARA.

  124 See generally “Le president de la Unione delle comunità israelitiche Alatri au cardinal Maglione,”(interpretation over the failure of the church to reply to a plea for help in August 1941 from the Union for the Israelite Community of Altari), Vol. 8, 250, Records and Documents of the Holy See Relating to the Second World War, ADSS.

  125 Le métropolite de Léopol des Ruthènes Szeptyckyj au pape Pie XII (Szeptycyki to Pius XII), August 29–31, 1942, (Vatican City: Liberia Editrice Vaticana, 1965–1981), Vol. 3B, Doc. 406, 625, ADSS. Three years earlier Szeptycyki had asked Pius in vain for permission to kill himself as a sign of protest against the Nazi crimes. Pius ignored that entreaty. In his August 1942 letter, he also informed the Pope that the Nazis had killed or rounded up “hundreds of thousands of Christians.” The Pope’s response two weeks later congratulated Szeptycyki on the fiftieth anniversary of his ordination as a priest and empathized over the hard time that “pastors” were undergoing in Russia. There was no mention of the Jews or the Nazi murders.

  126 See generally “La Nonciature en Italie au Ministère des affaires étrangères,” 8, Doc. 276, 431, Records and Documents of the Holy See Relating to the Second World War, ADSS; John F. Morley, Vatican Diplomacy and the Jews During the Holocaust (New York: Ktav, 1980), 136–37; Phayer, The Catholic Church and the Holocaust, 47–48.

  127 Sereny, Into That Darkness, 139.

  128 Memorandum of Sir R. Geoffrey A. Meade, British Foreign Office, August 12, 1942, Foreign Office collection, National Archives, Kew, UK, cited in Chadwick, Britain and the Vatican, 209.

  129 Harold Tittmann, Taylor’s assistant, had remained in Rome when hostilities broke out and found sanctuary inside Vatican City. He was joined by D’Arcy Osborne and other diplomats who had stayed behind. Some envoys, like Taylor, had returned to their native countries and conducted diplomacy from a distance, only occasionally visiting Rome. Since the Vatican did not have an airport, Mussolini’s government—as a courtesy to the church—had to approve each of Taylor’s landings and departures.

  130 Harold Tittmann to the U.S. State Department, Memo No. 114, September 15, 1942, Myron C. Taylor Papers (also available at the Harry S. Truman Library, Independence, MO); also listed as The Minister in Switzerland (Harrison) to the Secretary of State, August 3, 1942, Foreign Relations of the United States, Vol. 3, 1943, 926–28, NARA; Chadwick, Britain and the Vatican, citing diary of D’Arcy Osborne, 204–5.

  131 See Memorandum, Mr. Myron Taylor’s visit to Rome, Anthony Eden, October 13, 1942 (WP-42-466), 66/29/46, 228–32, Cabinet Papers, National Archives, Kew, UK; Blet, Pius XII and the Second World War, 159.

  132 Riccards, Vicars of Christ, 135. Although Pius did not excommunicate either Hitler or Mussolini, when the Western powers asked him after the war to do so to communist leaders, he obliged with a 1949 decree that excommunicated all of them from the church. And in 1955 he did the same to Juan Perón, not because the Argentine dictator was pro-Nazi and provided safe haven to war criminals, but because Perón had introduced a divorce law, banned religious education in schools, and issued an edict that the Catholic Feast of Corpus Christi was no longer a national holiday. See generally Records of the German External Assets Branch of the U.S. Allied Commission for Austria (USACA), Section 1945–1950 in USACA Semi-Monthly Flash Reports 15 January–31 July 1949, No. 21–34, File 28, Roll 113, 3–4, NARA.

  133 Coppa, Controversial Concordats, 175; Cornwell, Hitler’s Pope, 288–90; Phayer, The Catholic Church and the Holocaust, 49, 39.

  134 “A Summary of the Conversations Between His Holiness Pope Pius XII and Myron Taylor, Personal Representative of the President of the United States of America to His Holiness Pope Pius XII at Vatican City, September 19, 22, 26, 1942,” 25, Vatican: Taylor, Myron C.: Report on 1942 trip (i467) Index, Box 52, Franklin Roosevelt Presidential Library, Hyde Park, NY.

  135 “Memorandum of His Holiness Pope Pius XII re Prisoners of War,” September 26, 1942, 25, Vatican: Taylor, Myron C.: Report on 1942 trip (i467) Index, Box 52, Franklin Roosevelt Presidential Library, Hyde Park, NY; see also Pope Pius to Myron Taylor, 7001/42, 723, ADSS, cited and reprinted in Margherita Marchione, Pope Pius XII: Architect for Peace (Mahwah, NJ: Paulist Press, 2000), 240.

  136 See generally “Informal Notes of Myron Taylor,” September 27, 1942, 49, Vatican: Taylor, Myron C.: Report on 1942 trip (i467) Index, Box 52, Franklin Roosevelt Presidential Library, Hyde Park, NY.

  137 “Strictly Personal Memorandum, Giving Summary of Considerations Expressed by H. E. Monsignor Tardini, in Conversation with H.E. Mr. Myron C. Taylor,” September 26, 1942, 73, Vatican: Taylor, Myron C.: Report on 1942 trip (i467) Index, Box 52, Franklin Roosevelt Presidential Library, Hyde Park, NY.

  138 The translator for the Taylor-Maglione talks was an American priest, Walther Carroll, who was stationed at the Vatican. Several days after the meetings, Carroll used his hurriedly scribbled notes to write a detailed account.

  139 Cornwell, Hitler’s Pope, 290; see generally Friedländer, Nazi Germany and the Jews.

  140 Chadwick, Britain and the Vatican During the Second World War, 214, citing Maglione to Taylor, Vol. 5, September 1942, ADSS, 705, 721.

  141 Notes of Montini, memo from Myron Taylor, 7247/42, Vatican City, September 27, 1942, ADSS; see also Blet, Pius XII and the Second World War, 159–60.

  142 Telegram from the Minister in Switzerland (Harrison) to the Secretary of State, October 16, 1942, United States Department of State, Foreign Relations of the United States, “Diplomatic Papers,” Europe, 1942 (Washington, DC: U.S. Government Printing Office, 1964), 777.

  143 Typical of the type of on-the-ground information available to the Vatican were the accounts of the Ustašan atrocities sent by Croatia’s Monsignor Vlatko Maček to both the Catholic Episcopate in Croatia and to an OSS source in Switzerland. “L’Episcopat Catholique en Croatie: Son point de vue à l’égard du raceme-Son attitude à l’égard e la persecution des Orthodoxes-Son activité charitable,” RG 226, Entry 210, Box 94, Proj. 974345, NARA. Phayer, The Catholic Church and the Holocaust, 43; Pius did issue some public statements about the ravages of war during 1942. For instance, in May, he bemoaned the deaths of innocent civilians. He was not talking about the Jews, but rather the Allied air raids over Japan and Germany that resulted in thousands of civilian deaths. See Rychlak, Hitler, the War, and the Pope, 170.

  144 Between 1965 and 1981, the Vatican published an eleven-volume set of documents about World War II and Pius XII. Four Jesuit historians compiled the documentation (Actes et Documents du Saint Siège relatifs à la Seconde Guerre Mondiale, Le Saint Siège et la guerre en Europe–ADSS). Although most historians acknowledge ADSS as an important historical contribution, some shortcomings are also notable. Michael Phayer, an American professor who has written two acclaimed books about Pius XII and World War II, has criticized the ADSS document release as “critically flawed because of its many omissions.” For instance, no documents of the German bishops were published; the private papers of the Nazi sympathizer Bishop Alois Hudal were not unsealed; few papers from Eastern Europe, the center of the death camps, were included. Berlin’s Bishop Konrad von Preysing’s letters to Pius in 1943 and 1944 were missing. It is not clear whether those are still in the Vatican’s archives or were destroyed after the war. Some critical documents given to the Vatican during the war from the Polish representative in exile to the Holy See were added only after historian Gitta Sereny noted their absence. See generally Phayer, The Catholic Church and the Holocaust, xvii; see also Sereny, Into That Darkness, 329, 334. As for the frequency of the meetings between Pius and Leiber, see Chadwick, Britain and the Vatican, 187.

  145 For more information see http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0035177/.

  146 Cornwell, Hitler’s Pope, 271; John O’Hanlon, The Life of St. Malachy O’Morgair, Bishop of Down and Connor, Archbishop of Armagh (Memphis, TN: General Books LLC, 2013), 111–12.

  147 Cornwell, Hitler’s Pope, 270–71.

  148 “
A film is being made here,” D’Arcy Osborne wrote in his diary on July 31,1942, “for world distribution . . . I cannot say how I deplore this. It is like Hollywood publicity.” Separately Osborne wrote that the “Pope’s silence is deafening” about “the German crimes.” Osborne’s diary was the only personal memoir of any of the diplomats stationed at the Vatican that survived the war intact. He took it with him when he returned to England. The other diplomats had burned their files at the request of the Vatican Secretary of State when the Nazis occupied Rome in 1943: Cornwell, Hitler’s Pope, 285; see also Chadwick, Britain and the Vatican, 210–11.

  149 John Evangelist Walsh, Bones of St. Peter: The First Full Account of the Apostle’s Tomb (New York: Doubleday, 1982), 17; Pallenberg, Inside the Vatican, 231–33; Kaas and Pius had become friends when the Pope—then Pacelli—served as the Nuncio to Germany during the 1920s. Pacelli had lobbied for Kaas’s appointment as a monsignor. Mother Pascalina said the duo were “extremely close.” Kaas selected for his team two Jesuits, Engelbert Kirschbaum and Antonio Ferrua; the Vatican’s then current architect, Bruno Appolonj-Ghetti; and an anthropology professor, Enrico Josi, who held the title Inspector of the Catacombs. See also Paul Hoffman, The Vatican’s Women: Female Influence at the Holy See (New York: St. Martin’s Griffin, 2003), Kindle edition, location 822 of 2992.

  150 Pallenberg, Inside the Vatican, 232–33; see also Walsh, Bones of St. Peter.

  151 Walsh, Bones of St. Peter, 27.

  152 Pallenberg, Inside the Vatican, 235–36. When Kaas died in 1952, he was initially buried at the Vatican’s Campo Santo cemetery. But Pius had him reinterred in the crypt of St. Peter’s Basilica, making Kaas the only monsignor buried near virtually all of the twentieth-century Popes; see also Walsh, Bones of St. Peter, 57–58.

  153 Robert Katz, The Battle for Rome: The Germans, the Allies, the Partisans, and the Pope, September 1943–June 1944 (New York: Simon & Schuster, 2003), 54. Katz relied on new testimony and freshly released documentation for his book, which was received to widespread critical acclaim on its publication. Katz charged that Pius XII had advance warning—nineteen hours—of the Nazi massacre of civilians at the Ardeatine Caves. Katz’s evidence that Pius had known and failed to act was circumstantial. The Vatican condemned the book. The late Pope’s sister and niece sued Katz in Rome. Italian law allows surviving relatives to sue for defamation and libel. A Roman judge ruled in the family’s favor, concluding that, “Robert Katz wished to defame Pius XII, attributing to him actions, decisions and sentiments which no objective face and no witness authorized him to do.” The court fined Katz and gave him a thirteen-month suspended jail sentence. Some pro-Vatican historians, such as Professor Ronald Rychlak, contend that the court ruling means “Someone truly interested in the truth about Pius XII would [be] dissuaded from relying on any of Katz’s work.” This author believes that while the evidence presented by Katz about Pius’s foreknowledge of the massacre is circumstantially persuasive, it is not conclusive. However, the remainder of his book is thoroughly researched and reported. Any citations to Katz’s work are separate to those portions from any issue about whether Pius may have known beforehand that the Nazis were about to kill Romans.