Pius XII & Adolf

John Zmirak at Taki's Magazine posts a fine piece, Hitler’s Deadliest Enemy: Pius XII.

I spent much of winter 2006 butting heads with a cantankerous nun. Thankfully, it happened via email, and in no way resembled the battles with hirsute radical feminists in stretch jeans that ate up most of my high school years. No, I contended with a solidly orthodox battle-ax who is still the most distinguished biographer of Pope Pius XII. We had no differences of principle--unless you count “My every word is sacred even when it’s completely disorganized and redundant” as a principle. And it ended badly--when the publisher backed me up on my insistence that the book be readable, she yanked it and gave it to a more compliant house. I’m sure some people have bought it. For a penance, some of them may have read it.

But I learned a lot from the exercise--especially about Pope Pius XII. Because that wet, shaggy dog of an MS contained an amazing quantity of facts about the events of World War II. They combine with what I’ve learned from other sources to offer an excellent answer to Richard Spencer’s blog of yesterday. In his blog, Richard makes the excellent point that my own reasons for celebrating the utter and complete extirpation of the satanic National Socialist regime, and the presence of U.S. forces to prevent an equally evil Stalin from swallowing the Mother Continent, were not those that motivated Franklin Delano Roosevelt. No doubt this is true. I’m not a Roosevelt biographer, or even an admirer. His own bias toward mild socialism no doubt made him found the Soviet system less repulsive than the Nazi. (His vice president, after all was Henry Wallace, not Joseph Kennedy.)

It was not Franklin Roosevelt who saw the real issues at stake in the confrontation between Hitler and Stalin, over the supine bodies of the crumbling democracies of Europe. It was Eugenio Pacelli, later Pius XII. Keep reading …