Mark Riebling > Quotes

“Judging Pius by what he did not say, one could only damn him. With images of piles of skeletal corpses before his eyes; with women and young children compelled, by torture, to kill each other; with millions of innocents caged like criminals, butchered like cattle, and burned like trash—he should have spoken out. He had this duty, not only as pontiff, but as a person. After his first encyclical, he did reissue general distinctions between race-hatred and Christian love. Yet with the ethical coin of the Church, Pius proved frugal; toward what he privately termed “Satanic forces,” he showed public moderation; where no conscience could stay neutral, the Church seemed to be. During the world’s greatest moral crisis, its greatest moral leader seemed at a loss for words.

But the Vatican did not work by words alone. By 20 October, when Pius put his name to Summi Pontficatus, he was enmeshed in a war behind the war. Those who later explored the maze of his policies, without a clue to his secret actions, wondered why he seemed so hostile toward Nazism, and then fell so silent. But when his secret acts are mapped, and made to overlay his public words, a stark correlation emerges. The last day during the war when Pius publicly said the word “Jew” is also, in fact, the first day history can document his choice to help kill Adolf Hitler.”
― Mark Riebling, Church of Spies: The Pope's Secret War Against Hitler

“In rural Bavaria, there were already flickers of revolt. When party bosses removed crucifixes from rural schools, pious women launched a wave of civil disobedience. Often they marched together to replace a crucifix after a Mass for a fallen soldier. In the village of Velburg, five hundred women pushed into the mayor’s house, pinned him down as he reached for his pistol, and forced his wife to hand over the classroom keys. Women rallied their husbands in other villages, where the public squares filled with peasants brandishing pitchforks. Perceiving “a front of psychological resistance” and “almost a revolutionary mood,” the Bavarian government restored the crosses.26 Unarmed women had faced down the world-conquering Nazis. The episode inspired and shamed the Ettal plotters. They now felt compelled to spearhead direct action within Germany itself.”
― Mark Riebling, Church of Spies: The Pope's Secret War Against Hitler

“A fear of state power structured Church thought: the Caesars had killed Peter and Paul, and Jesus. The pope therefore did not have one role, but two. He had to render to God what was God’s, and keep Caesar at bay.”
― Mark Riebling, Church of Spies: The Pope's Secret War Against Hitler

“We are what we think. To change how people act, we must change what they believe.”
― Mark Riebling

“do not fear Peter [the pope], but his secretary scares me.”30”
― Mark Riebling, Church of Spies: The Pope's Secret War Against Hitler

“Catholics drew on a different tradition. Following Aquinas, Jesuit theologians considered political violence not only sometimes allowable, but even necessary.”
― Mark Riebling, Church of Spies: The Pope's Secret War Against Hitler

“The Vatican remained the crossroads in the plot to kill Hitler: all roads truly led to Rome, to the desk with a simple crucifix overlooking the fountains on St. Peter’s Square.”
― Mark Riebling, Church of Spies: The Pope's Secret War Against Hitler

“Never in all history,” pronounced one ecclesiastical historian, “had a Pope engaged so delicately in a conspiracy to overthrow a tyrant by force.” A wartime US intelligence officer would term the pope’s quick consent to act as a conspirational intermediary “one of the most astounding events in the modern history of the Papacy.”
― Mark Riebling, Church of Spies: The Pope's Secret War Against Hitler

“Church teaching stated the conditions under which citizens could kill tyrants. Catholic doctrine permitted capital punishment; and though a priest himself could not shed blood, a Christian knight could wield the sword of justice at the bidding of a priest.”
― Mark Riebling, Church of Spies: The Pope's Secret War Against Hitler

“WHEN THE POPE AROSE THE NEXT MORNING, HE HAD MADE UP HIS mind. He would engage the German military resistance and encourage a conservative counterrevolution. He would serve as secret foreign agent for the resistance—presenting and guaranteeing its plans to the British. He would partner with the generals not just to stop the war, but to eliminate Nazism by removing Hitler.”
― Mark Riebling, Church of Spies: The Pope's Secret War Against Hitler

“Asked what kind of government Germany should work toward, Pius answered, according to Leiber’s notes: “Any government without Hitler.”
― Mark Riebling, Church of Spies: The Pope's Secret War Against Hitler

“WHEN THE POPE AROSE THE NEXT MORNING, HE HAD MADE UP HIS mind. He would engage the German military resistance and encourage a conservative counterrevolution. He would serve as secret foreign agent for the resistance—presenting and guaranteeing its plans to the British.”
― Mark Riebling, Church of Spies: The Pope's Secret War Against Hitler

“Twelve secret presses printed the text in Germany. A clandestine network of couriers carried copies to every parish. Catholic youth used backpack caravans and hiked through the Bavarian Alps, the Black Forest, and along the Rhine. Altar boys pedaled bicycles at night. High school athletes ran across barley farms. Nuns rode motorcycles to remote villages. In church confessional booths, the couriers delivered their cargo to priests. The priests locked the text in their tabernacles, and on Palm Sunday, they read it from every pulpit in the Reich.29”
― Mark Riebling, Church of Spies: The Pope's Secret War Against Hitler

“Yet the Reich cardinals had urged Pacelli to avoid confrontation. Speaking out had only worsened conditions for the Church in the Reich, they said. Whatever he did against Hitler, he would do in the shadows.”
― Mark Riebling, Church of Spies: The Pope's Secret War Against Hitler

“Hitler, who held office legally but ruled unjustly, had become an oppressor. He therefore fell into the class of evildoers whom—as Aquinas and some Jesuit theologians argued—citizens could assassinate.33”
― Mark Riebling, Church of Spies: The Pope's Secret War Against Hitler

“Though Pius acted discreetly, he did not hide Hitler's attack plan under the proverbial bushel basket. During the second week of January 1940, a general fear gripped Western diplomats in rome as the pope's aides warned them of the German offensive, which Hitler had just rescheduled for the 14th. On the 10th, a Vatican prelate warned the Belgian ambassador at the Holy See, Adrien Nieuwenhuys, that the Germans would soon attack in the West. ...

Pius had in fact already shared the warning, while shielding the source. On 9 January, Cardinal Maglione directed the papal agent in Brussels, Monsignor Clemente Micara, to warn the Belgians about a coming German attack. Six days later, Maglione sent a similar message to his agent in The Hague, Monsignor Paolo Giobbe, asking him to warn the Dutch.

That same month, Pius made a veiled feint toward public protest. He wrote new details on Polish atrocities into Radio Vatican bulletins. But when Polish clergy protested that the broadcasts worsened the persecutions, Pius recommitted to public silence and secret action.”
― Mark Riebling

“burns. I regard this as a confirmation of the task imposed upon me by Providence. The circle of these usurpers is very small and has nothing in common with the spirit of the German Wehrmacht and, above all, none with the German people. It is a gang of criminal elements, which will be destroyed without”
― Mark Riebling, Church of Spies: The Pope's Secret War Against Hitler