Author Archives: Martina Cucchiara

Review of Gerlinde von Westphalen, Lady Abbess. Benedicta von Spiegel—Politische Ordensfrau in der NS-Zeit

Contemporary Church History Quarterly

Volume 31, Number 1 (Spring 2025)

Review of Gerlinde von Westphalen, Lady Abbess. Benedicta von Spiegel—Politische Ordensfrau in der NS-Zeit. Münster: Aschendorff Verlag, 2022.

By Martina Cucchiara, Bluffton University

In over five hundred pages, this hefty biography traces the life and leadership of Abbess Benedicta von Spiegel, who led the Benedictine abbey of St. Walburg in Eichstätt for nearly twenty-five years, from 1926 until her death in 1950. While the title emphasizes the Nazi period, the strength of the book lies in the rich account of von Spiegel’s entire eventful life that straddled two centuries and included her troubled time in two other cloisters before ultimately settling at St. Walburg.

Born Elisabeth Agnes Wilhelmine Klementine Freiin von Spiegel in January 1874, the young noblewoman grew up in wealth and privilege alongside her eight siblings on the family’s vast estate in East Westphalia. The Catholic von Spiegel family, whose lineage dates to at least the fourteenth century, maintained a close and enduring connection to the Church. In many ways, this book is as much a history of the von Spiegel family as it is a biography of Benedicta von Spiegel. Readers interested in the German aristocracy will gain considerable insights, into not only intimate family relationships revealed through von Spiegel’s extensive personal correspondence, but also the immense influence that the nobility still wielded in twentieth-century Germany and considered their birthright.

At the age of twenty-five, von Spiegel entered the contemplative Benedictine abbey of Maredret in Belgium, where she took vows two years later and received the religious name Benedicta. In 1914, after the outbreak of war, she moved to the German abbey of St. Hildegard in Eibingen in the Rhineland before finally settling at St. Walburg in Bavaria in 1918. Unlike apostolic congregations of Catholic sisters, which focus on teaching, nursing, and social work, nuns like the Benedictines are dedicated primarily to prayer.[1] These communities typically observe more demanding monastic rules than apostolic congregations, including strict claustration. During von Spiegel’s tenure at at St. Hildegard, for example, nuns were prohibited from leaving the cloister even for necessary medical treatment.

During the eighteen years that von Spiegel spent at Maredret and St. Hildegard, she struggled profoundly with her vocation and appeared to experience several extended episodes of mental illness, though any retrospective diagnosis remains uncertain. Additionally, she seems to have faced serious conflicts with the abbess of St. Hildegard, who doubted her religious calling and described her as a burden to the community and as “severely affected” (erheblich belastet) (p. 112). The latter longed to remove her from the abbey. Despite limited documentation, von Westphalen presents a nuanced discussion of these struggles, offering readers rare insight into the inner workings of contemplative cloisters and the deeply personal challenges of an individual nun. Von Spiegel’s extensive correspondence with her spiritual advisors, including her Belgian confessor Columba Marmion, sheds light on how she and her mentors sought to address these crises within the framework of strong mystical beliefs. The letters reference “invisible beings” and, at one point, even suggest the possibility of an exorcism (pp. 78, 81). The author’s exploration of von Spiegel’s deep mystical affinities is a valuable contribution to the scholarship on modern religious women, a field that too often neglects the significance of mysticism, spirituality, and religious experience. Many readers will likely wish to learn more about practices such as the annual rite of the miraculous oil at St. Walburg (Walburgisöl) or the use of the rite of exorcism in the modern Catholic Church.

Von Spiegel’s affinity for mysticism perhaps explains her long and close friendship with the famous stigmatic Therese Neumann of Konnersreuth (1898–1962), whom von Spiegel met some years after her move to the abbey St. Walburg in 1918. There she finally found a permanent home, becoming abbess only eight years after her arrival. The abbey grew considerable under her leadership, not least because she transformed it into a thriving religious community devoted to the fine and decorative arts. Von Spiegel also interpreted the rule of claustration in a very liberal manner and frequently left the cloister to travel or visit friends in the local community. This newfound freedom enabled her to forge close friendships with a circle of Catholic intellectuals in Eichstätt, which included the journalist Fritz Gerlich, the Capuchin priest Ingert Naab, the aristocrat Erich Fürst Waldburg-Zeil, and the theology professors Franz Xaver Wutz and Joseph Lechner. Von Spiegel, an intellectual in her own right who spoke several languages, thrived in this environment. Therese Neumann, who hailed from a modest peasant milieu and lacked a formal education, became an important member of this circle.

Neumann remains of considerable interest to scholars, and von Westphalen dedicates an entire chapter to her friendship with von Spiegel. After experiencing visions and stigmata—the spontaneous appearance of wounds resembling those of Christ—for the first time in 1926, Neumann quickly rose to fame as a Catholic mystic, drawing both admiration and skepticism. Her claim that she neither ate nor drank anything for years, except for a single consecrated host per day, invited considerably suspicion and scorn, especially since she refused to undergo a clinical observation to verify her claim. The author asserts that she has uncovered new evidence proving that Neumann’s close circle of friends and influential churchmen were aware of her fraud regarding her eating habits and even helped to cover it up. The key piece of evidence is a letter from May 1938 written by Joseph Lechner, a confidant of von Spiegel, in which he suggested subjecting Neumann to a controlled clinical observation, albeit under the condition that the results would be sealed and deposited in the Vatican. He writes that the Cardinal Secretary of State and future Pope Pius XII, Eugenio Pacelli, agreed to this arrangement. Von Westphalen notes that this “unattainable so-called proof under lock and key” in the Vatican “would have made Therese Neumann more or less untouchable” (p. 202). Although no direct evidence exists in which von Spiegel and her associates explicitly acknowledged knowing about (and abetting) Neumann’s fraud, the author infers that they actively supported it because “Therese Neumann had long since become a symbol of unwavering Catholic resistance” in Nazi Germany (p. 13).

The theme of resistance is central to von Westphalen’s narrative of von Spiegel’s conduct under Nazism. She argues that the abbess was “political and engaged in the resistance against National Socialism” (p. 9). However, this assertion is problematic, not least because of the lack of a clear definition of resistance. It is evident, however, that von Westphalen does not define resistance as total opposition to the regime that involved concrete actions to bring about its downfall. Von Spiegel’s life certainly was deeply affected by violence when her close friend Fritz Gerlich was arrested in 1933 and later executed during the Röhm Putsch in 1934 for his anti-Nazi writings in the newspaper Der Gerade Weg. However, von Spiegel herself did not take part in these journalistic efforts. Instead, her actions in Nazi Germany were entirely in line with those of Catholic Church leaders at the time who adhered to a cautious and conciliatory policy, which primarily sought to preserve Catholic institutions. From time to time, von Spiegel engaged in what Martin Broszat termed Resistenz, meaning nonconformist behavior that aimed at preserving pre-1933 values without directly confronting the Nazi regime. This was the case during the school struggle in the mid-1930s, when the Bavarian state dismissed women religious teachers from public schools and commenced the closure of Catholic secondary schools. Von Spiegel wrote lengthy (and ultimately futile) protests to Nazi officials, but this was not at all unusual or even all that political.

Moreover, the book’s broad scope makes it difficult to explore certain critical topics in sufficient depth. The foreign-exchange trials of 1935–36, which directly affected von Spiegel and St. Walburg, were pivotal moments in the regime’s campaign against religious congregations and orders. Yet the author devotes less than a page to them. Similarly, von Westphalen cites part of a 1990 local news report claiming that St. Walburg had sheltered “a person persecuted by the SS,” but offers no further context or corroboration (p. 404). Where the book truly excels is in its rich portrayal of von Spiegel’s family history. The detailed accounts of her siblings, nieces, and nephews—each following different paths in the Third Reich—provide a compelling snapshot of one aristocratic Catholic family navigating Nazi Germany. The book’s greatest strength lies in its ability to illuminate the intimate world of one woman and her family, offering a deeply personal lens on history.

Notes:

[1] Benedictine nuns follow the Rule of St. Benedict (6th century). Their communities are typically autonomous and focus on contemplative life and liturgical prayer within a cloistered setting. Catholic sisters usually follow the rule of St. Augustine. They usually practice limited or no enclosure and are dedicated to apostolic work in their communities, including teaching, nursing, and social work. See: Relinde Meiwes, “Arbeiterinnen des Herrn”. Katholische Frauenkingregationen im 19. Jahrhundert (Frankfurt: Campus, 2000), 52–67.

Review of David I. Kertzer, The Pope at War. The Secret History of Pius XII, Mussolini, and Hitler

Contemporary Church History Quarterly

Volume 30, Number 4 (Winter 2024)

Review of David I. Kertzer, The Pope at War. The Secret History of Pius XII, Mussolini, and Hitler (New York: Random House, 2022). ISBN: 978-0812989946.

By Martina Cucchiara, Bluffton University

With his monograph The Pope at War. The Secret History of Pius XII, Mussolini, and Hitler David I. Kertzer—who has published extensively on the Italian state and the Vatican’s relations with Jews—has added his critical voice to the longstanding controversy surrounding the papacy of Pius XII (r. 1939–1958). There is no shortage of biographers who have attempted to understand the pope’s (in)actions during World War II and the Holocaust, but according to Kertzer, “a crucial piece of the puzzle has long been missing,” because the Vatican has only recently (in March 2020, to be exact) unsealed the archive of Pius XII’s papacy (p. xxix). Making extensive use of this and numerous other European collections, Kertzer writes that “The Pope at War offers readers the first full account of these events” (p. xxx). What follows is an unsparing and detailed narrative of Pope Pius XII’s moral failure in Europe’s darkest hour.

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The monograph opens—somewhat unusually, and reminiscent of a play—with a “Cast of Characters” that offers brief biographies of key figures in this history. Even at this early stage, Kertzer is blunt in his assessment of many members of the Curia as unprepared for and unequal to the momentous tasks before them. Divided into four parts, the book begins with the final months of the dying Pius XI’s papacy when, for a brief moment, it appeared that the Vatican might issue a condemnation of Fascism and Nazism. The encyclical died along with Pius XI on 10 February 1939; the ascendence of the Vatican’s Secretary of State, Eugenio Pacelli, to the papacy followed on 2 March 1939. The seasoned diplomat Pacelli, now Pope Pius XII, immediately shifted to a conciliatory approach toward Germany and Italy when “he instructed the Vatican newspaper, L’Osservatore Romano, to end all criticism of the German government” (p. 27).

The new pope’s first major test of his moral leadership came only two days after his coronation, on 14 March 1939, when Germany invaded Czechoslovakia. Immediately, the new pontiff faced considerable pressure to denounce the German invasion but, setting the tone for his wartime papacy, Pius XII remained silent (p. 33). Kertzer makes clear that Pius XII did not remain silent because he was “Hitler’s Pope,” as John Cornwell’s 1999 monograph by the same name claimed. The pontiff had nothing but disdain for Hitler and the Nazis, and in his dealings with them, his first priority was the protection of the institutional Catholic Church in Germany. This is not a new argument. What Kertzer adds is new evidence of secret negotiations between Pius XII and Hitler, in which Prince Philipp von Hessen represented the latter. The prince was both a very close friend of Hitler and the son-in-law of Italy’s King Victor Emmanual. The two men met for the first time on 11 May 1939 to discuss ways for improving the situation of the Catholic Church in Nazi Germany. Eager to reach an agreement, the pope assured the prince, “‘The German people are united in their love for their Fatherland. Once we have peace, the Catholics will be loyal, more than anyone else’” (p. 62). In this and subsequent meetings, von Hessen dangled the possibility of a rapprochement between the Vatican and Germany before the pope. Nothing came of it, of course, and the situation of the Church in Germany continued to deteriorate. The pope nonetheless clung to his conciliatory approach and refused to criticize either Nazi Germany or Fascist Italy, even in the face of the extreme violence of World War II and the brutal persecution and mass murder of Jews in the Holocaust.

Kertzer relentlessly makes the argument of the moral bankruptcy of the pope’s leadership in example after example of his refusal to speak out. As the Germans rampaged through Catholic Poland, perpetrating unspeakable crimes against civilians, including members of the clergy, Pius XII remained silent. This silence cannot be explained by a lack of accurate intelligence. At no time did the Vatican lack detailed information about German atrocities, including the genocide against Jews. Defenders of Pius XII have argued that it is anachronistic and thus impossible to judge him by the standards of our time in which the defense of universal human rights is paramount. This, they argue, was not the case in 1940, when the Church’s salvific mission dictated that the pope had to do everything in his power to protect the faithful’s access to the sacraments. Kertzer rejects this argument. He shows that the controversy over of the pope’s timidity and silence during the war and genocide did not commence in the postwar period. Rather, as early as the fall of 1939, after the Polish ambassador had appealed in vain to Pius XII to speak out against German atrocities in Poland, the British envoy to the Vatican, Richard Osborne, lamented that the pontiff “has carried caution and impartiality to a point approaching pusillanimity and condonation…the Pope’s silence seems hard to explain and defend” (p. 88). The Allied ambassadors and envoys to the Vatican would repeat this statement in their reports in many different reiterations and with increasing exacerbation for the duration of the war. Pius XII also was pressured to speak out against Germany from members of his own curia, including the French cardinal Eugène Tisserant, who complained to the archbishop of Paris in 1940 that “I fear that history will have much to reproach the Holy See for in having adopted a policy of convenience for itself and not much more… It is sad in the extreme, above all when one has lived under Pius XI” (p. 90). Kertzer makes the case that the pope’s silence was not the expected or acceptable conduct of a pontiff at the time but was instead driven by his personality in direct opposition to many who beseeched him to act differently and courageously.

By 1942, the pressure on the pope to speak out became enormous. In his twenty-four-page Christmas message that year, he finally decried the death of “’hundreds of thousands of [innocent] people… solely because of their nation or their race’” (p. 258). Although this speech is often cited as proof of Pius XII’s vocal protest against genocide, Kertzer dismisses this assertion. Rather, he concludes that the speech was in line with his previous convoluted, cautious, and ambiguous statements, all of which accomplished little. The following year, the German occupation of Rome in September 1943 and the subsequent round-up of Roman Jews put the pope’s “policy of not criticizing the Nazis’ ongoing extermination of Europe’s Jews to an excruciating test” (p. 363). Kertzer argues that the Vatican made only feeble attempts to intervene diplomatically to aid Catholics of Jewish heritage, but even those interventions often came too late. Pius XII’s action on behalf of Rome’s Jews have been the focus of much research, including research on the rescue and hiding of Jews in Catholic convents, and here and throughout the monograph, The Pope at War could have benefitted from a deeper engagement with the extant historiography on the topic.

Attempting to explain the pope’s appeasement of Germany and Italy, Kertzer argues that, prior to 1942, when it appeared that the Axis powers were winning the war, he sought ways for the Church to function within this new reality. The seat of the Holy See was, after all, in Rome and at the heart of Fascism. Whereas Kertzer does a good job describing the fraught history between the Vatican and Nazi Germany, this is not the book’s main strength. The Pope at War is as much the story of Mussolini as it is of Pope Pius XII. Kertzer shows his deep expertise and knowledge of the papacy and Fascist Italy and excels in rendering—often in excruciating detail—the intertwined stories of the vainglorious, pompous dictator and the timid, ascetic pontiff who used, disdained, and resented each other in equal measure. In writing this detailed history of the collaboration between the Italian Fascist government and the Vatican, Kertzer seeks to correct a postwar history of Fascist Italy and the papacy which, he argues, all too quickly forgot their close collaboration with each other—and with Germany. In this history, “All the efforts the pope made to avoid antagonizing Hitler and Mussolini are wiped from view. His role as primate of the Italian church, presiding over a clergy that was actively supporting the Axis war, is likewise forgotten” (p. 464). This is an overstatement, as there already exists a robust and critical historiography on the subject, but The Pope at War no doubt enriches the scholarship on Fascist Italy and adds ample fuel to the ongoing controversy surrounding Pius XII’s papacy.