La croce e la svastica. Il pontificato di Pio XII tra silenzi e complicità

Having ascended the throne of Peter six months before the outbreak of the war, Eugenio Pacelli had the unwelcome surprise of having to face a trial that no other pontiff had ever confronted. And yet he knew practically everything and everyone among the protagonists of that story. Starting with Adolf Hitler, with whom, on 20 July 1933, he had signed the Reichskonkordat. He learned of the slaughter of the Jews from the very beginning, thanks to the network of Catholic prelates and diplomats who kept him constantly informed. More than eight thousand pages of Vatican documents prove this beyond question. Not just today, but for more than forty years. Despite the scale of the massacre under way, no real cry of protest was ever heard from the lips of Pius XII, not least because the word «Jew» had been banned from the official vocabulary. His choices were conditioned not only by the anti-Judaic prejudices with which the Church was steeped, but also by the conviction that Judaism and Bolshevism were two sides of the same coin. Fears that, years later, lay at the foundation of the “tenth” crusade: the one that Pacelli’s Church undertook against atheist and perverse communism. On the echoes of that particular crusade, launched seven hundred years after the last one, hundreds of war criminals of the calibre of Mengele, Eichmann and Pavelić were able to leave Europe with the complicity of priests, monks and bishops. A shameful page of history that hides responsibilities at the highest levels of the Catholic Church, which this book seeks to uncover