Thoughts on Cornwell

As per Tom's request, below is the response I posted to Cornwell's 180 (of course, I should not have referred to him as a "scholar"; he isn't one, so I have removed the reference):

"I saw this earlier today, and it surprised me. Very few writers ever offer mea culpas on anything. That Cornwell has done so is certainly better than him sticking to his argument despite all the evidence that refutes it. So, in that sense, I commend him for his honesty.

However, let's not take this too far. First, I doubt that Cornwell will return any of the money he made off of his hatchet job (it was on the NY Times Bestseller list for weeks), though perhaps this is understandable and not to be expected.

Second, Cornwell will have to prove in subsequent work that he is not the sloppy, biased, and agenda-motivated "historian" that he has proven himself to be over the last few years. After all, as a Catholic committed to decentralizing the power of the papacy over Catholicism, Cornwell used his book as an obvious, telegraphed bean-ball to the papacy as a historical and contemporary institution, which dovetailed well with its overstated attack on the character and wartime conduct of Pius XII. Cornwell is also primarily responsible for the shelving of the canonization / beatification of Pius XII by John Paul II a few years ago. Will Cornwell now recommend sainthood for Pius XII (I doubt it, and many other scholars of this issue would support efforts to block Pius' beatification)?

Finally, despite Cornwell's about-face, he nevertheless remains a primary culprit in the polarization in academia over Pius XII and over Catholicism and the Holocaust / Nazism in general. Polemics tend to rule in this field, and Cornwell's arguments, by entering the larger public consciousness as the "truth" about "Hitler's Pope" have done more to muddy the public perceptions and scholarly debates about these crucial issues than any other recent book. I, for one, would like to see Cornwell be as aggressive in rectifying the public perceptions of these issues as he was in creating them...

Pius XII certainly should not be given carte blanche by any scholar for his wartime behavior--there are still many questions about some of his decisions and attitudes that excellent scholars are still debating. Pius XII and the long history of Catholicism that undergirded his reign greatly shaped the Catholic responses to the Holocaust (and there were many, on collective and individual levels). Recent research has unearthed sticky issues like Catholic protection of Nazi and sympathizer war criminals in the months after the war (Norm Goda has seen some of this evidence in U.S. Intelligence files, and I have found some in my own research in German and British state and ecclesiastical archives). Pius XII certainly did not match the condemnations of Nazism and anti-Semitism of his predecessor Pius XI, but critical analysis of this complicated man working in catastrophic times deserves more measured and patient analysis than Cornwell and others (on either polarized side of the debate) have shown to date.

Pius XII may or may not deserve to be canonized, but nor did he (and still does not) deserve the libelous label given to him posthumously by a cranky British writer seeking to forward an agenda beyond that of pursuing historical accuracy. I am glad Cornwell has admitted his numerous errors, but the negative effects of his book have had years to ferment in the public mind, and I fear that it will be many years before the needed repairs are completed."