Faith: Protestant witness for Pius XII

WASHINGTON, April 2 (UPI) -- If the Catholic Church is smarting over incessant attempts by non-historians to tarnish the image of Pope Pius XII, it can draw comfort from the certainty that the end of the smear campaign is nigh. Real historians will soon refute the likes of Harvard's Daniel Goldhagen and John Cornwell, the author of the scandalous book, "Hitler's Pope."

The Vatican is making it increasingly easier for scholars to research the church's position vis-à-vis the Nazi regime. It has newly indexed documents from the papal nuncio's offices in Munich and Berlin before and during World War II -- that is, documents that were not destroyed by Allied bombing.

One of the most fascinating nuggets of information we can expect from the coming research will doubtless show how much the Vatican and the Lutheran resistance inside Germany have worked in tandem at a time when ecumenism was far from fashionable.

Already Lutheran church historian Gerhard Besier has jumped to Pius's defense by chiding Goldhagen for not even mentioning the fact that the SS "considered the Roman Catholic Church is most dangerous ideological adversary." This was the reason, wrote Besier, why the Nazis "fought 'political Catholicism' with every means at their disposal."

It shows up the shoddy scholarly craftsmanship of the Vatican's detractors that they didn't even bother to study data concerning the interplay between Lutheran martyr Dietrich Bonhoeffer and the pope -- material that has been accessible to the general public for decades:

-- In his celebrated Bonhoeffer biography, the late Rev. Eberhard Bethge recorded the Vatican's crucial role in maintaining a line of communication between the resistance and the British Foreign Office. Bethge was Bonhoeffer's closest friend and, later, his editor.

-- Anti-Nazi diplomat Ulrich von Hassell recorded in 1940 to "what extraordinary lengths (the pope) went to make German interests his own" -- meaning, of course, not the interests of Nazi Germany but of the new Germany that was to emerge after Hitler's overthrow.

It has long been known that Protestant resistance leaders transmitted detailed plans for this post-Nazi Germany via the Vatican to London.

Of course, the intricacy of these ecumenical relations might be too much to ponder for authors bent on demagoguery. Imagine a circuitous storyline like this: A German supreme court justice, Hans von Dohnanyi, finagles it that his brother-in-law, the theologian Bonhoeffer, becomes an agent of Germany's military intelligence service, the Abwehr, which worked against the Nazis.

Imagine that secret agent Bonhoeffer spent many weeks in Ettal Abbey in Bavaria, "in order to study Catholic life from within," and link up with Bavarias's anti-Nazi Catholic network. Imagine then that Bonhoeffer traveled to Rome several times to establish an alliance with the Vatican against the Hitler regime.

Of course this is not the sort of thing you want to hear and read if you are more interested in attacking Christianity on the whole and Catholicism in particular, rather than finding the truth.

But the truth is that when Bonhoeffer and von Dohnanyi were arrested 60 years ago this Thursday, on April, 3, 1943, the police found plans for yet another Bonhoeffer trip to Rome on Dohnanyi's desk. And in those days, German pastors did not travel to Rome to eat noodles on the Piazza Navona.

Before long, most Vatican archives covering the years after 1939 will be available to researchers. This columnist -- not a Roman Catholic -- can't help chortling at the sight we will then be treated to: mud on the mudslingers' face.