Church of Spies & The Lost Mandate of Heaven

Church of Spies: The Pope’s Secret War Against Hitler.  By Mark Riebling, Basic Books, 2015.

 

The Lost Mandate of Heaven: The American Betrayal of Ngo Dinh Diem, President of Vietnam.  By Geoffrey Shaw, Ignatius Press, 2015.

 

Church of Spies and The Lost Mandate of Heaven are both revisionist histories, focusing on a prominent Catholic leader who is the victim of a historiographical bear market.  Pope Pius XII is frequently attacked as being indifferent to the Holocaust, and is commonly smeared as a Nazi sympathizer.  Ngo Dinh Diem is referred to in many history books as being a corrupt and ineffective leader, who persecuted Buddhists and whose government was rife with cronyism. Mark Riebling and Geoffrey Shaw respectively argue that the widespread perceptions are completely incorrect and that a major revision to the standard viewpoint is necessary.

 

Riebling describes a Pope who decided that it was morally right- and necessary– to assassinate Hitler, and his book is devoted to the Pope’s efforts to recruit men to carry out that task.  Based upon recently unsealed documents from the Vatican Archives, Bridge of Spies reads like a thriller, as we learn how the Vatican set up a secret network of agents in order to bring down the Third Reich.

 

Riebling describes Pius XII’s ascension to the papacy, writing that:

 

“As Pacelli prayed in the Vatican crypt, lights burned late at the most feared address in Germany.  The five-floor mansion at 8 Prinz-Albrecht–Strasse, Berlin, had once been an art school.  The Nazis had turned its sculptor’s studios into jail cells.  At the grand front staircase stood two guards with pistols and nightsticks.  On the top floor worked Heinrich Himmler, Reichsführer of the Schutzstaffell (SS), Hitler’s terror corps.  In an adjacent office, Himmler’s Vatican expert toiled at a typewriter, preparing a dossier on the newly elected pope.”

 

Throughout the book, Riebling makes it clear that the theory that the Vatican and Hitler’s Germany were allies is utterly misguided to the point of ludicrousness.  Numerous powerful Nazis are profiled, and revealed to be fierce enemies of the Vatican, pursuing its ultimate destruction.  In the end, though the efforts to assassinate Hitler failed (the reasons for the lack of success form the backbone of this suspenseful narrative), Pope Pius XII clearly took steps to attack Nazism from its very top.  

 

After the war, Pius XII spoke about the need for moral and spiritual renewal: 

 

“The task of this hour is to rebuild the world,” the pope said in a 9 May radio speech, as the guns fell silent in Europe.  “On our knees in spirit before the tombs, before the ravines blackened by blood, before the countless corpses of inhuman massacres, it seems to us that they, the fallen, are warning us, the survivors: Let there arise from the earth, wherein we have been planted as grains of wheat, the molders and masters of a better universe.”

 

The Pope is not the only character in this study.  During the latter portions of the book, most of the attention is devoted to the study is devoted to the spy career of Josef Muller, who was involved in various attempts to bring down Hitler, and suffered many hardships, including imprisonment.  After the war, the spiritual lives and journeys of men like Müller are explored.

 

“At this point in the audience, Müller recalled, the pope became philosophical.  For Christians, nothing in life lacked purpose.  Therefore, he contended, the war must have had some meaning.  Pius himself had struggled to find that meaning in his recent encyclical, Interpreter of Universal Anguish, Müller must have thought about it in his dungeons– his purpose on earth, on why people had to suffer so much.  What did Müller think it all meant?

 

He had learned a lot and unlearned a lot, Müller reflected.  He had unlearned how to hate, because he had experience hatred in all its forms.  He had pondered the uniquely modern power to mobilize mass hatred.  It all boiled down to “collectivism,” he decided.  The good of the group trumped the rights of the individual, regardless of the banners by which men marched.  To guard against this, Europe must find renewal in a concept of personhood that elevated the individual above the herd.  The spirit of early Christianity offered a base on which to build; for Christ had made his subjugated, discarded, rootless disciples feel as inherently good and worthy as the emperors who decided with their thumbs whether they lived or died.  That concept of sacred selfhood, Müller vowed, would shape his own postwar political activities.  “I told Pius of my plans to fashion a new bloc from strong Christians, regardless of denomination, in order to confront collectivism.  That he agreed with this idea brought me great joy.”

 

Notably, though Riebling addresses the work of Pius XII’s detractors, he largely ignores many of the works produced by the Pope’s supporters.  For example, Rabbi David G. Dalin, author of The Myth of Hitler’s Pope, is nowhere to be found in the bibliography.  Furthermore, Riebling spends virtually no time exploring how Pope Pius XII’s public image, which was widely positive in the years immediately following the war, took a public relations bath after a communist-sponsored misinformation campaign, including the widely-produced play The Deputy, which presented Pius XII as frigidly indifferent to the plight of Jews, and was the crucial event that savaged the Pope’s reputation.  Riebling’s analysis of the situation is therefore incomplete– it gives a compelling picture of the Pope’s heretofore unknown actions in attempting to covertly bring down the Nazis, but it only provides a sliver of a glimpse into what shaped public opinion of the Pope.

 

Furthermore, Riebling criticizes Pius XII early in the book for not openly speaking out against Nazism.  This is a valid point, since the Pope’s open criticisms might have been a powerful rallying point for the Allies.  Yet Riebling needs to do more to explain why he believes that this approach would have been better overall than the Pope’s chosen tactic of bringing down Hitler through more secret methods.  Pius XII acted as he did because he was concerned that open verbal attacks would lead to a Nazi invasion of Vatican City, and harsher words could potentially endanger the clergy in Nazi-controlled areas.  Riebling needed to provide further justification for his assessment of the Pope’s strategy.

 

Like Pius XII, Ngo Dinh Diem has been treated negatively by many historians.  When studying the Vietnam War, textbooks and monographs are mostly dismissive and contemptuous towards Diem, who was seen as a particularly ineffective and untrustworthy leader.  Shaw’s image of Diem as a sensitive, devout, intelligent, decent man is therefore a flat-out denunciation of the portrait of Diem commonly found in Vietnam War studies.  Throughout the book, Shaw attacks many of President Kennedy’s military advisors as being ridiculously misguided and misinformed, with a completely skewed perception of Diem and a misplaced sense of surety in their own perceptions.  About the only group that receives even harsher criticism from Shaw are the reporters who covered Vietnam through their own tinted lenses and preconceived narratives, which proved disastrous for Diem’s reputation.

 

In a recent interview for Mercator.net, Shaw discussed the historiographical implications of his work:

 

“MercatorNet: Most Americans believe that Diem was inept, corrupt and deeply unpopular. Was that true?

Geoffrey Shaw: Americans have been poorly served by this description of Ngo Dinh Diem. The above portrait was created for public consumption mostly by young reporters (in their 20s) who had little experience of the world at large, no expertise in Southeast Asia and a desire for sensational stories.

 

As New York Times reporter David Halberstam admitted after the death of Diem, he and his colleagues had created popular political fiction so as to sell papers. Their spin also served the purpose of Averell Harriman, an American senior diplomat with tremendous influence over President Kennedy, who had an intense dislike for and a lack of confidence in Diem.

The real Diem was so admired by patriotic Vietnamese of all stripes (including many Communists) that he was considered a prize to be won over; Viet Cong leader Ho Chi Minh tried this at least once, and Vo Nguyen Giap on many occasions.

 

Diem’s devotion to his country was so ardent that the French colonial rulers of Vietnam jailed him a few times for his refusal to play by their rules. They kept releasing him because of his talent for governing villages, and then provinces, was superior to that of any other Vietnamese in their administration. Early in his civil service career (his mid-20s) he earned the Mandate of Heaven amongst Vietnamese peasant farmers. This title is granted to leaders who exhibit the civic and personal virtues valued by Confucius.

 

As for his credentials as a war-time leader, when his first government of Vietnam was formed, the French and the Americans urged him to reach a live-and-let-live accommodation with some powerful South Vietnamese militarized sects, the most notorious of these being the Binh Xuyen, a military formation of gangsters and river-pirates. But Diem ordered his fledgling army to root them out.” (http://www.mercatornet.com/articles/view/the-man-who-held-the-mandate-of-heaven/17285#sthash.k6fr1Fvk.dpuf)

 

Throughout the book, Shaw debunks each of the standard allegations against Diem, ranging from corruption to mistreatment of Buddhists, drawing upon assorted sources ranging from government documents to contemporaneous accounts.  Just as interesting is the look into the dysfunctionality of the Kennedy foreign policy team, which sometimes appears to have been drawing conclusions out of thin air and tainted newspaper reports.  Continually, Shaw contends that Diem was a pious and deeply religious man whose faith permeated every action.

 

Both Church of Spies and The Lost Mandate of Heaven make the point that sometimes what “everybody knows” is wrong.  They also show how history is not a static discipline, but a process by which views are challenged, restructured, and revised.  

 

 

–Chris Chan