Riconversione e Ricostruzione

Abstract This article focuses on German-Vatican debates on the Reichskonkordat after 1945. For this purpose, it explores newly available documents in the Vatican Apostolic Archive from the West German Nunciature in Bonn. Thereby, this essay retraces how the Catholic Church followed German political discourses and how it sought to influence public debates. While Konrad Adenauer and the Christian-Democratic Party aimed to preserve the Reichskonkordat, which had been negotiated by Eugenio Pacelli in 1933, an inner-German opposition began to question the role that the Church had played in the Nazi regime. Already in the 1950s, a diverse alliance of Social Democrats, liberals and Protestant intellectuals accused both the Vatican and members of Adenauer’s government to have supported Nazism in order to establish a form of ‚clerical fascism‘. While these accusations were often of polemical nature, they initiated a profound re-calibration of church-state relations, showing the limits of both Adenauer’s political ambitions and the visions of Pius XII to re-establish a Catholic dominance in postwar culture.