Pius XII, the real reasons for a false trial.

By advancing the process of beatification of Pius XII, Benedict XVI revived the controversy over his action during the war. But it is always the same arguments that are brandished against him.

                                                Berlin, 1927. Before becoming Pius XII, Mr Pacelli 

was a nun in Germany and secretary of state to his predecessor, Pius XI, author of an encyclical                                                                          denouncing Nazism.

 Cardinal Pacelli was out of luck. His pontificate was that of totalitarianism. Pius XII had to face both Nazi and Soviet monsters. That was his destiny. He had not been trained for this. He had been a close collaborator of Benedict XV who, during the First World War, and in spite of an obvious Germanophilia, kept the balance approximately equal between the two camps.

He was a man of the nineteenth century. It was the product of a theological and diplomatic school. He thought he could reconnect with the Matoise dwellings of the Church. Applying a policy desired by Pius XI, he negotiated with Hitler - and tried to do the same with the Soviets - what his distant predecessor had forged with Napoleon: a concordat. A compromise that would respect the authority of secular power, but safeguard Catholic populations and the practice of worship. He did not immediately understand that he was dealing with new barbarians for whom the treaties were only "paper rags."

Pius XII was not of the temper of a prophet who, in the Jewish tradition, thunders and thunders, in the name of God, against the abuses of power. To a German cardinal who came to him for advice, he replied, "Martyrdom is not decreed from Rome." He had no sympathy for the Führer, whom he compared to the devil, and was even said to be trying to exorcise in secret. He had been the principal editor, under Pius XI, of the famous encyclical Mit Brennender Sorge, which had condemned Nazism. But if he opened the doors of the Vatican wide to persecuted Jews, he was also obsessed with the security of Catholics under the German boot. The call of the Dutch bishops against the persecution of the Jews had provoked the fury of the Nazi military against the Dutch Catholics, and had not saved a single Jew.

But Pius XII was fighting on two fronts. The other great totalitarianism of the century haunted him. Yet he was careful not to tank the Russians as long as they faced Hitler. It was only after the end of the war that he relentlessly fought communism. It was a very difficult fight to fight. Many progressive Catholics were seduced by the new Rome. Pius XII ends up condemning the working priests, to stop the bleeding towards the Party. Communism was a thousand lenarisms without dogma; a universalism without God; a paradoxical and diabolical humanism that held man for nothing. A religion of substitution. Pius XII fought him relentlessly.

To do so, he encouraged the building of the Common Market around France, Germany, and Italy, all led in the 1950s by Christian Democrats, De Gasperi, Adenauer, and Schuman. This was the time when Gaullists and Communists blamed cannon against "Vatican Europe." It is in this context that we must appreciate the creation of the play Le Vicaire, in 1963. It would change the posthumous fate of Pius XII.

Before this play, he is the man to whom the greatest Israeli leaders, Golda Meir and Ben Gurion, paid tribute. He is the friend of the Jews, the man who dared, even in secret words, to evoke the great Jewish misfortune, where Roosevelt, Churchill, or de Gaulle said nothing. The great rabbi of Rome, Israel Zolli, then converted to Catholicism and was baptized with the first name of Eugenio, like that Pacelli who saved his life. Admittedly, at the time, some Roman Jews resented Zolli, whom they blamed for accepting the pope's hospitality without caring about the tragic fate of the Nazi-ravaged Roman Jewish community. But no one suspects Pius XII of colluding with Hitler, though some are irritated to see some congregations protect the Nazi escape to South America.

After this play, Pius XII became, in the collective imagination, "the Pope of Hitler." The personality of the play's author, the German Rolf Hochhuth, is highly controversial. He is suspected of having been manipulated by the USSR secret services at the time. In any case, their methods are recognized. Since the Third International, in the 1930s, the method of communist propaganda has always been the same: to demonize the adversary, one must treat him as a fascist and a Nazi. To destroy the Christian tradition, it must be Nazized. To make Pius XII pay for his anti-communist commitment, it must be digitized. Pius XII, "the Pope of Hitler", is the equivalent of CRS-SS. In 2002, Costa-Gavras made a film: Amen.

The thesis is firmly established in the media. Hence the virulent campaign when Benedict XVI advances the process of beatification of Pius XII. If the Roman curia believed to escape the media lynching by linking this cause to that of the popular John Paul II, the operation was failed. We wonder about the motivations of Benedict XVI. First, the theologian pope pays homage to another great theologian, who greatly inspired his youth. Then, above all, this beatification enters into the long-term strategy of reconciliation and reunification of all the branches scattered through the history of Christianity. Pius XII was the last pope before Vatican II. To pay him homage is to honor the traditionalist sensibility of which Benedict XVI initiated the reintegration into the family.