Hitler's Pope.

The New York Times recently ran an obituary for the Reverend Mario Zicarelli, a seventy-eight-year-old Italian-born Catholic priest who served several parishes in the New York metro area. Zicarelli was occasionally in hot water with the New York archdiocese because he was a strong champion of public rather than parochial schools.

He held that tax aid for denominational schools violated the constitutional principle of church-state separation and warned his parishioners not to regard parochial schools as refuges from integration. Such a stance was really not all that unusual. During the period of Italian immigration to the United States around the turn of the century, a great many Italian-American Catholics preferred public to parochial schools.

Zicarelli also disagreed with his church's officials on birth control and abortion. "I don't think the Catholic church has any business meddling in sex," he declared in 1974. When asked for advice on sexual matters, he urged parishioners to consult their own consciences and make up their own minds.

Zicarelli exemplifies the fact that Catholicism is not now and never has been monolithic, as too many non-Catholics believe and as the present pontiff wishes were truth. In reality, Catholicism has an authoritarian head and structure in front of a huge, unruly mass of independent thinkers--most of whom make their own moral choices, send their kids to public schools, attend services and donate to their church infrequently, and vote, at least in this decade, for a president who opposes vouchers and supports abortion rights. The Kennedys are more representative than the Cardinal O'Connors.

Now comes Hitler's Pope, a book published in October 1999 by Viking and excerpted at length in the October 1999 Vanity Fair. Author John Cornwell is an English Catholic writer who set out to refute the view--popularized by German writer Rolf Hochhuth in his 1963 play Der Stellvertreter (The Deputy)--that Eugenio Pacelli, Pope Pius XII, didn't do all he could to stop or mitigate the Holocaust. After being granted access to archival material in the Vatican and exploring German sources regarding Pacelli's activities in Germany during the 1920s and 1930s, including his dealings with Hitler, Cornwell found himself "in a state of moral shock" by mid-1997:

   The material I had gathered amounted not to an exoneration but to an
   indictment more scandalous than Hochhuth's. The evidence was explosive. It
   showed for the first time that Pacelli was patently, and by the proof of
   his own words, anti-Jewish. It revealed that he had helped Hitler to power
   and at the same time undermined potential Catholic resistance in Germany.
   It showed that he had implicitly denied and trivialized the Holocaust,
   despite having reliable knowledge of its true extent. And, worse, that he
   was a hypocrite, for after the war he had retrospectively taken undue
   credit for speaking out boldly against the Nazis' persecution of the Jews.

Cornwall also makes the point that, "more than any other Vatican official of the century, [Pacelli] had promoted the modern ideology of autocratic papal control, the highly centralized, dictatorial authority he himself assumed March 2, 1939, and maintained until his death in October 1958." (In this he paved the way for the authoritarianism of the present pope, who seems determined to erase, if possible, the modernizing and liberalizing effects of Vatican Council II and the papacy of John XXIII.) Cornwall further explores Pacelli's dealings with Hitler and the Nazis, his lack of sympathy for the plight of German Jews, his undercutting of the German Catholic Center (Zentrum) Party, his disdain for blacks, and his "doing nothing" about the Croatian Ustashe atrocities against Jews, Gypsies, and Orthodox Serbs.

Pacelli, as a Vatican diplomat, papal secretary of state, and then pope, was just one man--though a very powerful one. Millions of other Catholics--German, Polish, French, English, American, Canadian--put on uniforms and risked and gave their lives to roll back Hitler's armies and liberate his conquests. (It should be noted that it was an old Catholic priest who photographed for the world to see the German bombers attacking the defenseless city of Guernica during the Spanish Civil War--an atrocity that the pious Spanish dictator Francisco Franco tried to blame on the Republican Loyalists.)

All this shows that it is important to distinguish between "leaders" and their nominal "followers," between popes and ordinary Catholics, between the Pat Robertsons and Jerry Falwells and ordinary Baptists like Bill Clinton, Al Gore, and others in the religious rank and file. As Alfred Korzybski emphasized long ago, the map is not the territory. And the pope is not the people or the church.

As we move toward a new millennium, we need to avoid careless, inaccurate pigeonholing and be especially wary of all who claim infallibility or support the Fuhrerprinzip (leadership principle). Cooperation across the lines that once divided people is the key to forming those alliances that make social reform possible.

Edd Doerr is president of the American Humanist Association and executive director of Americans for Religious Liberty.