Church of Spies: The Pope's Secret War Against Hitler

Apparently he wasn't "Hitler's Pope" after all. Pius XII has long been criticized for his lack of action against Hitler's Germany. While his failure to help out in the plight of the Jews is greatly exaggerated, his silence had more to do with the fact that he was protecting a ring of spies who were attempting to assassinate Hitler.

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Through the Second World War and for more than a decade after, the pope and the Catholic Church were understood to have been opponents of the Nazis, working against them as much as secrecy and non-violence would allow. You can see that older attitude in, for instance, the way the von Trapp family turn to the Church to help them escape from Austria in Rodgers and Hammerstein’s 1959 Broadway musical, The Sound of Music. But the publication of Rolf Hochhuth’s 1963 play, The Deputy, and more than a little anti-Catholic agit-prop from the Soviets, led to a reversal in public opinion—Pius XII and the Church were now commonly thought to have been silent about the Holocaust and unhelpful to the Allies.

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In his new book, Church of Spies: The Pope’s Secret War Against Hitler, Riebling again emerges from the archives of secret documents to remove one of the props of the complaint against Pius XII. It appears that one of the things Pius was protecting in his careful public statements was a ring of spies and a set of anti-Nazi conspirators determined to assassinate Hitler.

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