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17 J. Church & St. 63 (1975)
The Pope's Pact with Hitler: Betrayal of Self-Defense

handle is hein.journals/jchs17 and id is 71 raw text is: The Pope's Pact With Hitler:
Betrayal or Self-Defense?
JOHN JAY HUGHES
In the historical appendix to his celebrated play, The
Deputy, Rolf Hochhuth describes the .Concordat concluded in
July 1933 between the Holy See and the German Reich as an
eternal league between an authoritarian state and an authori-
tarian church directed by the Vatican bureaucracy. Behind the
treaty, according to Hochhuth, stood not the Pope, but the
Vatican bureaucracy and its leader, Pacelli, who only post
festum-with an eye to future historians, imputed nobler motives
to the conclusion of the Concordat.' This version of the affair is
sharply contradicted by the confidential report sent at the time to
the British Foreign Office by its minister to the Holy See, Sir R.
H. Clive, who pointed out that a concordat... does not imply
mutual respect, still less affection. His report cited an anonymous
English Jesuit who had written: A concordat represents the com-
promise, outside matters of principle, which the church enters into
with a government which does not, fully or freely, recognize her
entire claims to independence and autonomy. Clive reported that
Hitler's initial overtures had been cooly received at the Vat-
ican, which had changed its mind only when Hitler offered
unexpectedly generous concessions concerning church rights and
when the demise of the Catholic political parties in Germany
(which had been founded to protect those rights) had made
written guarantees of such rights a matter of urgency. From the
JOHN JAY HUGHES (B.A., Harvard University; S.T.B., General Theological
Seminary; Th.D., University of Mfinster) is Adjunct Professor of 'History, St. Louis
University, St. Louis, Missouri. He is the author of Absolutely Null and Utterly Void:
The Papal Condemnation of Anglican Orders, 1896 (1968); Stewards of the Lord:
A Reappraisal of Anglican Orders (1970) ; Man for Others: Reflections on Christian
Priesthood (1970); and Zur Frage der anglikanischen Weilhen: Eim Modellfall fest-
gefahrener Kontroverstheologie (1973). Hughes has written numerous articles for
such journals as American Ecclesiastical Review, Anglican Theological Review, Jewish
Quarterly Review, Journal of Ecumenical Studies, and Theological Studies and has
translated two German theological books into English. A minister to Protestant
Episcopal parishes in New Jersey and Arizona during 1953-59, he entered the Roman
Catholic Church in 1960 and became in 1968 the first former Anglican priest to be
ordained conditionally to the Roman Catholic priesthood without repudiation of Angli-
can orders.
1. Rolf Hochhuth, The Deputy (New York: Grove Press, 1964), p. 296. Hochhuth
relies in part on the views of the last leader of the Catholic Center party in Germany,
Heinrich Briining. Cf. fn. 42 below.

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