The pope is at it again. In a speech before the Queen of England last week, Pope Benedict xvi carefully revised the history of what led up to the scourge of Nazism during World War ii. He said, “Even in our own lifetime, we can recall how Britain and her leaders stood against a Nazi tyranny that wished to eradicate God from society and denied our common humanity to many, especially the Jews, who were thought unfit to live” (emphasis mine throughout).

But was it really a godless society in Germany that led to the Nazi atrocities? Benedict, who was a registered member of Hitler Youth at 14 and served in the Germany Army at 16, said he recalled the regime’s attitude toward religion and Christian pastors “who spoke the truth in love, opposed the Nazis and paid for that opposition with their lives.”

But did the Vatican-led Christian community even provide any opposition to the forces of anti-Semitism and mass murder?

Benedict concluded, “As we reflect on the sobering lessons of the atheist extremism of the 20th century, let us never forget how the exclusion of God, religion and virtue from public life leads ultimately to a truncated vision of man and of society ….”

Of course, it was actually the inclusion of “God” and religious ideology that provided the Nazi regime its greatest source of inspiration. Adolf Hitler himself was a deeply religious man and wanted to be seen as a religious figure.

“We are not a movement—rather we are a religion,” Hitler said about his regime (Robert G.L. Waite, The Psychopathic God: Adolf Hitler).

“Christ was the greatest early fighter in the battle against the world enemy, the Jews,” Hitler said in 1926. “The work that Christ started but could not finish, I—Adolf Hitler—will conclude” (John Toland, Adolf Hitler). He even said he learned from the Jesuit order “above all.”

While other influences, like social Darwinism, might have contributed to Nazi doctrine, this fact remains: Most Nazis believed in God and claimed to be doing the work of God.

And to suggest that the Vatican stood against Hitler’s psychopathic religion is yet another blatant attempt to revise the historical record.

The Vatican was actually Nazism’s chief enabler.

Pope Pius xii, the World War ii-era pope, is the man responsible for negotiating the Reich Concordat with Adolf Hitler in 1933. Among other things, the agreement called on God to bless the German Reich and ordered German bishops to swear allegiance to the Nazi regime. For Hitler’s fledgling Nazi movement, the concordat effectively removed all political opposition in Germany. According to cabinet meeting minutes from July 14, 1933, Hitler considered the German-Vatican pact a “great achievement”—particularly “in the developing struggle against international Jewry.”

Years later, during his pontificate, Pius was well aware of Hitler’s Final Solution. Throughout 1942, Jewish groups and Allied officials had repeatedly urged him to publicly condemn the Nazi savagery. Under intense pressure from the Allies, Pius used a December 1942 radio address to vaguely refer to the many thousands who “sometimes only by reason of their nationality or race are marked down for death or gradual extinction.”

Pius’s strongest “objection” to Hitler’s genocidal rampage failed to even mention the Führer by name and drew no reference to Nazis or Jews.

Then, in October 1943, ten months after the radio address, 365 of Hitler’s SS troops entered Rome’s old ghetto and started arresting Italian Jews. They rounded up more than a thousand Jews and transported them to a building called Collegio Militare—which was less than a half mile from the Vatican. Pius was one of the first to be made aware of the Jewish arrests. The Jews were kept at the holding center for two days—right under the Vatican’s nose—before boarding cattle cars to Auschwitz, where 80 percent of them were murdered within a week.

Two years ago, in defending the man who did nothing to stop the slaughter of Italian Jews, Pope Benedict said of Pius and the Jews: “Wherever possible he spared no effort in intervening in their favor either directly or through instructions given to other individuals or to institutions of the Catholic Church.”

Another huge revision of history.

Even after the war, Pius’s Vatican provided cover for Nazi criminals seeking to escape prosecution for war crimes.

None of this history has stopped Benedict from clearing the path for Hitler’s pope to become a saint. Last year, after facing intense criticism for Benedict’s decree about Pius’s “heroic virtues,” a Vatican spokesman answered the pope’s critics by referring to a statement made by his predecessor, John Paul ii: “[T]he church does not celebrate the specific historical decisions he may have made, but rather points to him as someone to be imitated and venerated because of his virtues, in praise of the divine grace which shines resplendently in them.”

In other words, the Vatican has no problem at all when it comes to airbrushing Pius’s dubious acts out of the history books. Or those of other popes, for that matter. The Vatican, after all, has a long and sordid history of being associated with discrimination, bigotry and violence—even mass murder.

Pope Benedict’s Glasgow speech merely represents the Vatican’s most recent attempt to rewrite its own troubled history as something it wants us to believe is much more heroic and virtuous than it is.