UNITED STATES
National Catholic Reporter
by Joan Chittister on May. 16, 2012 From Where I Stand
This month, it was the Leadership Conference of Women Religious that bishops were concerned about. Before that, it was Catholic Charities in the United States. Then it was Caritas, the church’s umbrella organization for the coordination of international charity. And now it is the Girl Scouts. Each of them has been curtailed, “investigated” or put in some kind of canonical receivership because of their reputed lack of orthodoxy on sexual issues or because of association with other groups that, according to the bishops, have the same problem. And all of that in the face of the sex abuse debacle of the church itself, still to be resolved, never monitored, and totally closed to outside investigation.
The question is, Where has all this energy for empirical destruction come from in a church now projecting its own serious problems with sexual issues onto everything that moves?
In his new book, Pius XII: The Hound of Hitler, noted historian Gerard Noel traces the history of this pope’s “Great Design.” The material starts with the rise of the young canon lawyer Eugenio Pacelli to a position of power in the Vatican. It winds its way through Pacelli’s election as Pius XII and the suppression by Pacelli himself of Germany’s Catholic Centre Party and even Catholic social action groups in pre-WWII Germany, the only bodies in Germany strong enough to have checked the rise of Nazism. It concludes with the rise of another man, Adolf Hitler, whose reach for power matched his own but whose rise his very Concordats assured.
Pacelli rose to power, Noel explains, on the arm of a canon law degree in a church still smarting from the loss of the Papal States and the consequent unification of Italy. Pacelli dreamed of using a system of Concordats — particular legal agreements with the major powers in Europe — to restore the quasi-imperial power that went with the temporal power and wealth the Papal States had assured. Pacelli’s life goal became the centralization of the church, the control of all its organizations. Under Pacelli, law became the power of the church; the Gospel, its victim.
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