Hitler's Pope - Cornwell's Work

Cornwell's Work

Cornwell's work was the first to have access to testimonies from Pius's beatification process as well as to many documents from Eugenio Pacelli's nunciature which had just been opened under the seventy-five year rule by the Vatican State Secretary archives. Cornwell's work has received both praise and criticism. Eamon Duffy wrote that Cornwell's "gripping and impassioned account" had presented "an indictment that be ignored" and Saul Friedländer that Cornwell had demonstrated how "Pius XII brought the authoritarianism and the centralization of his predecessors to their most extreme stage." Susan Zuccotti's Under His Very Windows: The Vatican and the Holocaust in Italy (2000) and Michael Phayer's The Catholic Church and the Holocaust, 1930–1965 (2000) are critical of both Cornwell and Pius XII. Ronald J. Rychlak's Hitler, the War and the Pope is critical as well but defends Pius XII in light of his own access to recent documents.

Cornwell researched the conduct of Pacelli, both while he served as nuncio to Germany and after he was made Pope; some of Cornwell's principal resources were the Vatican archives. Cornwell stated that he intended his book as a defense of Pius XII but that "nearing the end of my research... he material I had gathered, taking the more extensive view of Pacelli's life, amounted not to an exoneration but to a wider indictment"