Most discerning even semi-educated Catholics I know are frustrated at the abysmal treatment the Church and Church-related issues receive at the hands of the media here in Canada. The Canadian Broadcasting Corporation (CBC), our publicly-funded national broadcaster, has, for many years, been among the worst offenders.
Particularly galling is the fact that the CBC uses my tax dollars to belittle me and my Church.
A case in point is the CBC’s handling of Pope Pius XII and his record during World War II, which as you may remember was a hot news item from early 2002 until around the spring of 2003.
During that time eight new books were published dealing with Pius XII and the Holocaust. Four of them were written in defense of Pius, his life and legacy. Yet those vilifying Pius were the only ones that received attention from the CBC.
The CBC interviewed David Kertzer; author of The Popes Against the Jews, James Carroll, author of Constantine’s Sword: the Church and the Jews; and Gary Wills, which, while ostensibly about his book Why I’m a Catholic, a follow-up to his Papal Sin: Structure of Deceit, included much of the same anti-Catholic themes as the other interviews including condemning references to Pius XII.
I wrote Tony Burman, editor-in-chief of CBC News in March 2003, and suggested he seek balance in the CBC’s coverage by interviewing one or more of the following: Ronald J. Rychlak of the University of Mississippi, author of Hitler, the War and the Pope; the esteemed philosopher Ralph McInerny of Notre Dame, author of The Defamation of Pius XII; or Jewish scholar David Dalin, author of Two Popes and the Jews: Pius XII and John Paul II (forthcoming).
I received a polite letter thanking me for my suggestion and informing me that the CBC always strives for balance and unbiased reporting. Nothing came of my suggestion.
By now the Pius Wars are pretty much spent. As Joseph Bottom explains in his recent article, “The End of the Pius Wars” in the April issue of the journal First Things, that discussion was “a long and arduous struggle, vituperative and cruel, but in the end, the defenders of Pius XII won every major battle. Along the way, they also lost the war.”
That’s because, like the CBC, many major media outlets in the U.S. chose to accommodate only the anti-Pius side of the question. As a result — even though in the intellectual world that cared to keep up with the discussion, the pro-Pius side managed to win all the battles — in the end they lost the war.
Since last I wrote Tony Burman, a great deal of additional documentation on the history of Pius during the war period that has come to light.
From the article mentioned above:
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 Plus 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 Eichmarui'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 Plus 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.
I dare say, in the face of so much new evidence and the scholarly unpacking of books like those by Kertzer, Carroll, and Wills, it’s unlikely that any anti-Pius books will be sitting on top of The New York Times best-seller list at any time in the future.
But the damage has been done. And the CBC, in failing to be host to the other side of the question, has contributed to the widespread conviction among Canadians that Pius XII was a genocidal hater of the Jews; that he was, in the now-famous phrase of John Cornwell’s, Hitler’s Pope. All of which, of course, also leaves Canadians with a very negative impression of the Catholic Church.
What's to be done?
As I say, I realize that Pius XII and his war record is hardly a burning issue any more; it's no longer news. But if there is a conscience at the corporation, perhaps I can float the idea that since so many Canadians depend on the CBC for the straight goods and since the guilt of Pius XII has now been so effectively refuted, they might want to do something about the wrong impression they helped create. What I’m suggesting is that the CBC expiate by finally allowing Canadians to hear the case for the defense.
According to their code of ethics, “The CBC is fully committed to maintaining accuracy, integrity and fairness in its journalism.” If you’re Canadian and agree with me that the CBC has failed to live up to their own ethical guidelines in their handling of the Pius XII issue, please contact the CBC Ombudsman by clicking here.
J. Fraser Field edits the “CERC Bi-Weekly Update,” a free E-Letter on Catholic faith and culture. He is Executive Officer of the Catholic Educator’s Resource Center, an Internet resource library for Catholics.
