Truths and Myths from the Vatican Files with Michael Knowles

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Considered by some to be one of the most maligned figures in modern history, Pope Pius XII helmed the Catholic Church during the zenith of Nazi Germany.

His alleged silence in the face of atrocities led to the moniker The Silent Pope.

Now, a new documentary series for the Daily Wire called The Pope and the Führer: The Secret Vatican Files of World War II, explores the untold story of Pius.

In this episode, we sit down with the show's host, Michael Knowles, to discuss the controversy at the heart of the series.

I'm Georgia Howe with Daily Wire executive editor John Bickley.

It's Sunday, August 17th, and this is Morning Wire.

History is written by the victors.

But what if the victors got it wrong?

For 80 years, the world has condemned one man as the Pope of Silence, the man who stood by in the face of shocking evil.

But can we trust the popular narrative even after all these years?

This is not just a story about Hitler and the Holocaust.

One of the worst lies ever told about the Catholic Church is what she did or did not do in one of modernity's darkest hours.

Now, for the first time, the Vatican Secret Archive is open, and the truth is far more shocking than the fiction.

Propagandists have peddled one story for decades, but now we can definitively know better.

Joining us now is our dear colleague and producer of this fantastic new series, Michael Knowles.

Michael, thank you so much for coming on.

It's great to be here.

This is my first time on the Morning Wire set.

This is fun.

Don't take that personally.

I know.

It's weird because it's always locked when I try to come in.

It's so strange.

My keto.

It's weird how that happens.

Well, you're here because you just dropped a new docuseries.

For people who haven't heard about it at all, tell us what is it about and what's it called?

The series is called The Pope and the Führer, The Secret Vatican Files of World War II.

And I think I basically told you what it's about, but it's about this figure who is probably the most slandered of any figure of the 20th century.

So you've got the seminal event, the key event of the 20th century is the Second World War.

Pius XII has been maligned as the silent pope, complicit in Hitler's rise.

Some people, some propagandists have called him Hitler's Pope.

They've suggested that he was actually supportive of Hitler and encouraging of the Nazi regime.

And it's not true.

If anything, the church has been too silent in defending him.

So we now have access to the Vatican Secret Archive.

It's now called the Vatican Apostolic Archive.

We have unprecedented access to the real wartime files.

And so we can give the definitive history because we're living in a strange age of revision.

And in part, I think it's because we've been lied to by public authorities on a lot of things, especially coming out of COVID.

So now people are questioning everything.

And the truth actually can be known about certain historical facts.

So the way I view it is we're in this age now where some people hate Pope Pius XII

because he helped Hitler.

And some people love Pope Pius XII because he helped Hitler, supposedly.

But, you know, there's actually a third option, which is the truth.

And the truth is that this man stood firm against the Nazi regime.

He helped many, many Jews and others to escape the atrocities.

But a lot of his work was, in fact, in silence.

Now, Cabot made me promise that we would grill you.

Right.

So what is the argument for him being supportive of the Nazi regime?

Aaron Powell, Jr.: The argument is that he didn't get up and give a daily speech every day on the evils of Adolf Hitler.

Now,

even that, I think, is a sort of unfair charge, because if you go back to the pontificate before Pius XII, Pius XI,

the papal encyclical Mitt Bernander Sorga came out.

And at this point, you watch your mouth.

Yeah, that's right.

At this point, the man who becomes Pope Pius XII, Eugenio Pacelli, he's a top Vatican diplomat.

He's actually a diplomat in Berlin.

And so he's intimately involved in all of this.

And it's unusual.

Even that name, Mitt Bernander Sorga, is unusual because papal encyclicals tend to come out in Latin.

Mitt Bernander Sorga was in German to appeal directly to the German people, had to be

smuggled in and around Germany.

And so even before he rises to take on this continuation of Pius XI's pontificate,

he was well aware of the problem, working hard to stop the rise of Hitler.

And then when Hitler takes power, you also have to put yourself in the historical context.

It's not as though the Pope had the Papal States anymore.

It's not as though this were the Middle Ages and the Pope had armies to command and major temporal power.

After Mussolini and the Lateran Treaty, the Pope is confined to Vatican City.

And that had really been true since the 19th century, since Blessed Pius IX.

So,

you know, he had an obligation to the faithful, of course, but he's, in the Catholic understanding, the vicar of Christ on earth.

He is the head of the universal church.

And so

the relationship between temporal and spiritual authority, that conflict goes all the way back to antiquity.

That is what I think the propagandists have honed in on, is they say, well, this man tried to find a way diplomatically to mitigate Hitler's rise.

And to them, I would ask, first of all, what was the alternative?

And two,

what came of that?

What was the fruit of that?

And the fruit of that was saving.

tens of hundreds of thousands really of people's lives.

Trevor Burrus, Jr.: And how did they do that?

What did the smuggling efforts look like to get Jews out of Germany?

Well, there's Urbi at Urbi.

You know, there's what Pius was able to do in Rome, and there's what Pius was able to do throughout Europe.

And so in Rome, he was working very hard to get Jews in particular to not be loaded onto the boxcars.

And he was largely successful at that.

He was largely successful at protecting Rome's Jewish population.

Then in Germany, there were multiple attempts to

take out Hitler.

The most famous one is, of course, Operation Valkyrie didn't work.

But

there were networks of spies and informants.

The Vatican was really a meeting grounds for a lot of this information.

But even

so, look, you had hundreds of thousands of people who were saved because of the work of the Catholic Church and up to the pontificate.

But

he also was speaking.

He also was writing.

He also had moral clarity.

He also had radio addresses.

He also.

So

I think of all the calumnies, of all of the historical figures that have been slandered, with Pius XII, it's the most preposterous.

And it's no surprise because the Second World War was a war in large part between two enemies of the church, the communists and the Nazis.

So when the belligerents were largely made up of the enemies of the church, it's no wonder that the church was so maligned.

In terms of the initial public statements, was there a fear from the Pope that he's actually putting Catholics at risk in Germany?

Or was that part of the equation?

Of course.

I mean, you know, again, going back to antiquity, because the church does not measure her time in days and weeks or years, but in centuries and millennia, of course, you know, the shepherd has a responsibility to his flock.

He also had to deal with clergy and even bishops.

who were a little more open to the Nazi regime.

So one in particular who comes up is Bishop Hudahl.

Bishop Hudahl, who in his own way, actually, I think, has been somewhat unfairly maligned.

Hudahl famously wrote a book that's been called A Defense of Nazism.

It's really not that.

The Vatican, and we can see this in some of the files, understood that Bishop Hudall was not the most balanced person in the world.

But what Hudall's book was attempting to do was pull whatever good can come out of the Nazi movement out of it and get rid of the bad stuff.

So he condemned explicitly the racial laws and the cruelty and the sins.

Now, you can say, well, that was a stupid strategy that never was going to work.

But even there, you know, it shows you the difficult position that the Pope is in when he even has to corral priests and bishops and make sure that everyone is seeing with great moral clarity that Pius XII possessed what exactly was going on.

Now, one document that you highlighted in the first episode of the series was that in some letter or something, Hitler referred to the Pope as, or Pope Pius Pius as his number one enemy or his personal enemy.

But tell us a bit about that and why he identified the Pope as his enemy.

Well,

there have been attempts to rehabilitate Hitler as some kind of Christian or something.

And I think it's ridiculous when...

I'm going to ask you about that, too.

Yes.

I mean, look,

Hitler was right when he said that the Pope was his enemy, you know, give the devil his due.

Hitler had an idolatrous ideology of the state as being above everything else.

And so you heard the church understand that the crooked cross, the cracked cross of the Nazi swastika would perish and the cross of Christ would remain.

These two ideologies were incompatible.

They were incompatible

for many reasons, because of the racial cruelty, but ultimately because Hitler recognized that the chief threat to his power, to his Reich,

was the church.

And that's been true for tyrants also going all the way back to antiquity.

So one thing that the Nazis tried to do was to create their own version of Christianity, positive Christianity, a Christianity that ultimately would be subservient to the state.

Many tyrants, many states have tried to do that over the years,

but that was never going to work.

And so Hitler saw it clearly.

Pius saw it clearly.

There might have been some confusion in between, but these two great men, a protagonist and antagonist of the war,

in their their own way, they understood what the stakes were.

Yeah.

Well, you may have already addressed all you want to say on this topic, but you do hear people making connections today between Christian nationalism and Nazism.

And just wondering, what do you think the connection is there?

Or is that just completely propaganda at this point?

Well,

no, the connection is that

heresy is choosing.

I don't need to tell a scholar such as Mr.

Bickley here that, you know, it comes from the Greek word for choice.

So often, Chesterton wrote wonderfully about this and more eloquently than I will speak,

often what a heresy is, is not the promotion of a vice to the exclusion of virtue.

It's the promotion of one virtue to the exclusion of all of the others.

So patriotism is good.

That's actually a virtue.

It's an extension of filial piety.

However, when we make an idol out of the state, we fall into statism, which ignores the other virtues and which in itself becomes vicious.

And so even ethnos, even having an affinity for people who look like you, you know, or have a shared kind of culture and history, that's not wrong in itself.

What is wrong is when you make an idol out of that to the exclusion of the other virtues.

And so

what the commonality that people draw is they say, well, Christian nationalism and national socialism draw on kinds of love of nation.

Yes, the difference, though, is that

Christian nationalism, or let's just say a Christian understanding of nationalism, puts nation in its proper place.

And its proper place place cannot be above all other considerations, but it has to understand man as a political animal, as a social creature, but as a spiritual creature as well, who's

who we have homes on this earth.

You know, we come from a family, we live in homes, we have a home country, but we're also pilgrim wayfarers and we're going to the eternal home, which is not going to be found in this dust.

Yeah.

Now, in 2020, the Washington Post reported that there were these newly opened Vatican archives and that they found evidence supposedly that World War II, a World War II era pope knew about the mass killing of Jews from his own sources, but kept that matter from the U.S.

government.

They also issued

somewhat of an apology for like providing succor for

Nazi soldiers.

What did you make of that,

of those documents that supposedly have an apology?

Yeah, it's a bunch of nonsense.

I mean,

the one controversial area for a sort of apology would be the rat lines.

And this once again involves Bishop Hudall, who's probably the most prominent of the bishops who were seen to be sympathetic to Nazism.

And I don't mean to paper over it.

I mean, these are very legitimate historical controversies that don't really touch on Pius XII, who, again, to accuse Pius XII of withholding information or intelligence.

First of all, he was a chief diplomat, and he's one of the great heroes of saving the victims of World War II, so spare me.

But one can see all of the important documents in the series, The Pope and the Fuhrer.

But on the rat lines, giving succor to the Nazi war criminals, even that, I think, could be understood as

coming from at least a good place, at least a good intention, which is that the war was over and Hudall, in perhaps his mistaken understanding of ethics and morality, said, well, okay.

These people are now escaping their own persecution, and I'm going to allow them, or I'm going to facilitate their fleeing to Latin America.

Didn't turn out very well for a lot of the Nazi war criminals.

But even that, I think it's reductive and unfair to say that this man was a Hitler fanatic,

even someone like Hudall, because you can read him in his own words.

And this is what I think a lot of this comes down to.

It is not possible to look at the documents in the Vatican secret archive, and even documents that we knew about decades ago.

It is not possible to read.

Pius XII in his own words or read testimony about documents that actually no longer exist because, as the Vatican knew going back to Pius XI, the fascist government was tapping all the phone lines so everything that they were communicating was was being intercepted by the axis uh it's not possible to read what they said and

hear what they said and come to the conclusion that the vatican was in any way sympathetic toward nazism it it's not not possible and on the point of the fascists intercepting the cables it's also important to remember that the vatican had had its territory stolen by the italian state which was in control of hitler's chief one of Hitler's chief allies.

And so even down to the point that there were questions about Pius XI's death, the event that precipitated Pius XII rising to the seat of Peter, because

the doctor for Pius XI

was a relative of Mussolini's mistress.

I had never heard that before, and I saw it in the first episode.

Floretta.

It's kind of amazing.

You know, one of the things, and this is, again, this is not an apologist perspective, but the fog of the 1930s.

Yeah.

It's hard for us with the clarity of

the events playing out and we get to look back at them in history and see where all this was going.

It's very clear to us how evil Nazism is, of course, but how you can't trust Hitler, that he was always playing the game, it was always going to be war, all that stuff.

But it was, I think a lot of people in the 30s leading up to the beginning of World War II and even into the beginning stages of it could not believe how evil.

how evil Hitler was and how many people were following such an overtly evil force.

It can't, if this many people back it in Germany, this is at a reasonable.

50 million Frenchmen can't be wrong.

In fact, 50 million Frenchmen are always wrong.

And

in the case of the Second World War, they mostly just lay down and let the tanks come in.

But the other aspect of the context of the 30s that people can't really understand today, and in part this is because of propaganda that occurred during the Second World War, is the evil of communism.

So you have in Germany, throughout Europe, rampant communism.

You have immediately preceding the Second World War, you have the communists almost conquering Iberia.

You know, you have a Spanish civil war that pits communists against monarchists and Catholics and fascists and this kind of assemblage of people.

And communism is an avowed enemy of the church that predates fascism that the church has been dealing with at this point, you know, since the 19th century.

But it's an overt enemy.

I mean, it's an open enemy.

Yes.

Right.

As opposed to the early stages of Nazi propaganda propaganda where they they tried to downplay a lot of this these elements and even even even hitler and this is again in episode one hitler downplays the jew part yes when he's yeah when he's openly campaigning and starting to gain leadership roles he he also downplays his his aversion to the church now this comes out more clearly later on but uh you know He's a pretty crafty politician, that Hitler.

And

the situation in Europe was awful.

Again, something else we haven't mentioned is we're dealing with the aftermath of the First World War.

So

you've got

a terrible problem in Europe.

And then if you put yourself in the position of the Vatican with, in my view, apostolic authority, divinely instituted authority, great moral clarity, but also looking at political realities, there is a war that is breaking out between two people that want to see you destroyed.

And so given that context, when you see

baptismal certificates given to Jews en masse to have them avoid being shipped off to the camps, to allow them to escape to other countries, including in Latin America.

One criticism is, well, why didn't the Vatican issue more?

Put yourself in the political situation.

Had the Vatican just given a carte blanche of baptismal certificates to every single Jew in Europe,

you save no one.

You save no one because it's not as though Pius XII is sitting on his throne, you know, up in the sky.

He has Mussolini breathing down his neck right around the corner.

He's got Hitler breathing down his neck not so far away.

And

Hitler had a plan.

I mean,

when we say that people were downplaying Hitler's seriousness

early on in the rise of the Nazis,

that is true from a popular understanding.

But Hitler kind of always knew what he was about.

And so

You know,

the Germans are known for their efficiency.

And

with Pius XII, the fact that the Vatican was able to do as much good as it was, to me, that's the real story, which has been inverted

by other enemies of the church.

Obviously, there's a lot of defense of Pius XII in this for a good reason because he's been painted in such a negative light.

But what are the lessons?

to take away from this in terms of the things he should have done, that he could have done more of?

Maybe he should have been more public in some key moments.

Did you have some moments you felt like legit, this is a legitimate qualm you can have with him in this particular instance or maybe trends in terms of how he led through this period?

No, really.

I don't.

I mean, I don't really have a criticism of him.

I have criticisms of other bishops.

I have criticisms of some of the clergy or even some of the laity.

I have, with retrospect,

the ability to look back and say, well, you know, had church teaching been clearer before, say, Mitt Bernander Sorga, you know, fine.

But you're dealing with such a tumultuous period, such a period of massive change in the teens, 20s, and 30s, that I think even that is sort of an unfair criticism.

The takeaway lesson for me, though, is

the uneasiness of living in a fallen world,

aiming at spiritual Jerusalem in a world of political powers and principalities and powers, because

it's astounding to me in many ways that the church could have walked this via media.

The church really had the Nazis' numbers from the beginning and was able to maintain that moral clarity and surreptitious clarity, you know, down to the scavi all the way up to attempting to save people around Rome and around the rest of Europe, even amidst all the intense political pressure to pick a side.

But

you don't actually.

A lot of people think that we have to pick a side between the brown shirts and the red shirts and the black shirts in Italy.

You don't.

You don't.

You can pick the white cassock of the Holy Church.

You strike me as pretty eloquent.

You should, I don't know, have your own podcast or something.

You know, that's a great idea.

I really

appreciate that.

Daily Wire will green light stuff.

It takes a few years.

That's good because I told years ago, I, you know, when I met Ben Shapiro, he told me my check would be arriving in the mail any day now.

That was in

2015.

So it's covered, man.

I'll check with the account department or something.

Yeah, okay.

Well, Michael, thank you so much for coming on.

And now we know who our Catholicism expert's going to be.

Andrew Clavin.

Great.

Great.

Thank you for having me.

It's great to be in here.

So fun, man.

Wow.

Let's do it again.

I walk by this place all the time.

All you got to do is host a whole other documentary series.

You can come back on.

Who should we do next?

I don't know.

John XXIII?

Paul VI?

That's somebody.

Oh, yeah.

Yeah.

I don't know if it's Urban II.

That'd be cool.

Urban II.

Okay.

Let's do it.

That was Michael Knowles discussing his new Daily Wire documentary series, The Pope and the Fuhrer, The Secret Vatican Files of World War II.

and this has been a weekend edition of Morning Wire.