Hitler’s Pope

"The history that I have researched and written is the dark and murky side, the underbelly of history. I was really writing about hatred, about French fascism, and time and time again I would come up against the Catholic church – there was nothing much written about why it did what it did and how it got away with what it did. This book gives a history of Pope Pius XII and explains two very important things: how he changed the Vatican into a centre of power and then came to a concordat with Hitler which took away from the Catholic bishops the possibility of fighting Hitler, should any of them have wanted to. He explains the absolute silence of the church when the Holocaust was happening. Yes, I think it would have. But the church was always identified with authoritarian states – it was hostile to democracy and to republican and humanitarian values. It’s very difficult to accept that. But we live at a time now when people are beginning to accept it…with all the child sex abuse scandals. I may sound like a rabid anti-Catholic. But I am not. I’m just telling you what I discovered through studying the history of the Second World War in occupied countries. You see, in France, the church was the only big institution outside the Vichy state itself. Yet in France there was only one cardinal who spoke out about what was happening to the Jews. The others accepted it because they thought that socialism and democracy and freemasonry were evil – they were obsessed with freemasons, the bêtes noires of the Catholic church in the 19th and 20th centuries. I realise it is not a popular route to take and it doesn’t mean that I think all Catholics are bad, but I think one day people will realise that the hierarchy of the Catholic church, in its authoritarian mode at times of crisis in European history, has been a force for evil. It wasn’t. I found it absolutely fascinating. I didn’t find it hard because I felt I was in pursuit of justice. I enjoyed writing and researching my book. You know, some of these old fascists are remarkably peculiar. Sometimes it was hilarious – they’re so vile you have to laugh. It’s a sort of tragi-comedy about evil. I think the history of Europe in the 20th century possibly marked the end of the dominance of Europe. Studying the Second World War is to study a most exceptional civilisation at a time of great change."