The Vatican and the Shoah - WISTRICH, Robert

Robert S. Wistrich

THE VATICAN AND THE SHOAH

The common history of Catholics and Jews over the past two millennia has often been tormented, even excruciating. The beginnings of what has come to represent a sea-change in those relations dates back to the document Nostra Aetate (In Our Time) released by Rome in 1965, which finally lifted the collective burden of deicide from the Jewish people. In fifteen long Latin sentences, the Vatican removed the historic slander that the Jews killed Christ and must forever suffer for this capital crime. These sentences deplored "all hatreds, persecutions, displays of anti-Semitism levelled at any time or from any source

against the Jews." Pope John XXIII, who had inspired the decisions of the Vatican II and Nostra Aetate, was the first pope in history to ask

forgiveness (shortly before his death) for "the curse which we unjustly laid on the name of the Jews." He began the process of reversing the

long-standing Augustinian theology of the Church which regarded Is- rael (in the religious sense) as eternally bearing the mark of Cain for

having rejected and "crucified" Jesus. That momentous step has

opened the door during the past thirty years to a dramatic rethinking of Catholic theology regarding the Jews and Judaism; and, arguably, in the sphere of Jewish-Christian relations more has been achieved in the last three decades than in the previous two thousand years.

These advances, which have continued the historic process inaugu- rated by John XXIII, owe a great deal to the personal commitment of Pope John Paul II-the first non-Italian to sit on St. Peter's Chair for several hundred years. In 1986 he was the first Bishop of Rome to enter a Jewish Synagogue in the Eternal City; on December 30, 1993, as a result of his prodding, the Holy See finally established diplomatic relations with the State of Israel and in 1998, on its fiftieth anniversary, a menorah was lit in its honor in the Vatican itself. The present Pope was also the patron of a concert specially commemorating the Shoah which was held in Rome under Vatican auspices, several years ago.

Under his twenty-year stewardship, the Catholic Church has strengthened its position across all continents, reached out to defend human rights, played a vital role in bringing about the demise of Com- munism and sought to achieve a deeper rapprochement between the great world religions. Nowhere has this new spirit of reconciliation

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84 Robert S. Wistrich

been more apparent than in the redefinition of the Church's relations with the Jews. In March 1998, the Vatican issued a fourteen page document entitled "We Remember: A Reflection on the Shoah" intended, in John Paul II's words, "to heal the wounds of past misunderstandings and injustices" and shape a common future in which "the unspeakable iniquity of the Shoah will never again be possible." In a cover letter to Cardinal Edward Cassidy (President of the Commission for Relations with the Jews, the organization that prepared the text), the Pope stressed that the Shoah "remains an indelible stain on the history of the century that is coming to a close."

In preparation for the Third Christian Millennium, he declared that it was incumbent on the sons and daughters of the Church "to purify their hearts, through repentance of past errors and infidelities," and to examine their own consciences concerning "the responsibility which they too have for the evils of our Time."' This call to "teshouvah "

(the Hebrew word for repentance that is preferred in the Vatican document, as is the term "Shoah" rather than Holocaust) reflects the special intensity of the present Pope's remembrance of the Shoah and his de- termination to reshape Catholic-Jewish relationships for the better. Al- ready in 1990 he evoked for Christians "the heavy burden of guilt for the murder of the Jewish people" as an "enduring call to repentance." In January 1995 he made a resounding call to his listeners "Never again anti-Semitism!" and in October 1997 he reminded Catholics that the Divine Covenant with the Jews is still operative.2

No doubt that Pope John II's bond with the Jews goes back to the days when he was still Karol Wojtyla, a young Pole studying for the priesthood in Cracow, then under wartime German occupation. The macabre conditions of life in those years, the martyrdom of Poles (including several thousand Catholic priests executed by the Germans), and, above all, the Nazi mass murder of the Jews in nearby Auschwitz was part of his daily experience and never forgotten. He was clearly changed by what he witnessed and the fate of the Jews became something central to his consciousness. Indeed, it had a very personal dimension since the young Wojtyla had spent the first eighteen years of his life in Wadowice (a small town about thirty miles from Cracow) where about a quarter of the population were Jews, some of them living in his neighborhood and counted among his friends. When he re- turned in 1948 to Cracow from Rome (after a two year period of study) he discovered that his Jewish friends had vanished and the scale of the Jewish tragedy fully dawned on him.3

Wojtyla had grown up in a country which in the 1930s was still permeated with an anti-Semitism that was openly fostered by the Cath- olic Church. When he was sixteen, the Primate of Poland, Cardinal Hlond, had stigmatized PolishJews in a pastoral letter for their hostility



The Vatican and the Shoah 85

to the Church, for spreading liberalism, atheism, and Communism, for promoting immorality and other vices.4 It was common enough for Polish priests to support the segregation of Jews in schools and universities, and to defend anti-Semitism as an expression of healthy Polish nationalism and self-defense in the name of Poland's Catholic identity. Polish Catholics might deplore German and Austrian anti-Semitic bru- tality, but for many, the Jews in Poland were perceived as an alien threat. Karol Wojtyla appears to have been remarkably free of these prejudices even though at least two of his most admired mentors-Car- dinal Adam Sapieha of Cracow and the martyred Polish priest, Maximi- lien Kolbe-were hardly considered friends of the Jews.5 In 1971, as Cardinal of Father Cracow, Wojtyla would go to Auschwitz to celebrate the beatification of Kolbe, who had sacrificed his life for a fellow pris- oner in the death camp.

Seven years later he was back at Auschwitz again, to celebrate mass-this time as Pope Joannes Paulus II-the first Polish pope in history. It was in memory of that visit that a large, eight-meter-high cruci- fix was erected near the death camp which still stands and is now a source of bitter controversy. The proliferation of crosses put up by militant local Catholics in recent times (which has provoked dismay among Jews) is not the first time that confrontation has erupted over the Auschwitz site. In the 1980s there was the Carmelite nuns affair (the establishment of a convent at Auschwitz for penance and prayer) seen by most Jews as an inappropriate attempt to turn the death camp into a "Christian" graveyard. To many it seemed intolerable that Chris- tian prayers should be said in Auschwitz at all, by those "who could have raised their voices for our brothers and sisters, and did not do so." To his credit, it should be said thatJohn Paul II did try to defuse the conflict (the Carmelite nuns moved in 1993) and to calm the more hot-headed voices among his Polish countrymen.6

There is no doubt that the present Pope is attuned to Jewish sensi- tivities about Auschwitz and this is reflected in the recent Vatican text where the Shoah is described as "a major fact of the history of this century, a fact which still concerns us today." This "unspeakable tragedy" which can leave no one indifferent, least of all the church, with "its very close bonds of spiritual kinship to the Jewish people," is an event that commands not only remembrance but a moral imperative that racist hatred should never again sow such suffering on earth. It is evoked in terms that leave no doubt as to its horror and should act as an effective counterweight to any temptation towards "Holocaust de- nial" or relativism in the Catholic world or beyond.

The Vatican document is also forthright in facing the fact that the Shoah took place "in countries of long-standing Christian civilization"; that "erroneous and unjust interpretations of the New Testament" con-




cerning the "alleged culpability" of the Jews contributed in the past to discrimination, expulsions, and even forced conversions; it acknowl- edges thatJews were sometimes victims of looting and massacres in the "Christian" world (albeit a somewhat vague, nonspecific and minimalist statement). On the other hand, anti-Semitism is unequivocally condemned throughout the text, especially the pseudo-scientific theories of Nordic-Aryan supremacy and the doctrine of "supposedly inferior races" which provided an ideological foundation for Nazi exterminationist policy. Theologically speaking, the Nazi drive to physically up- root the Jewish people (defined as the witness-people to the One God and the Law of the Covenant) is interpreted in the document as "a definite hatred directed at God itself." This attitude is said to have logically held to the rejection of Christianity and to the persecution of the churches.

The Vatican is also very clear about the failure of Western govern- ments (in North and South America as well as Europe) who were "more than hesitant to open their borders to the persecuted Jews" and whose behavior lays "a heavy burden of conscience on them." There is a more halting recognition that many Christians in German-occupied Europe "were not strong enough to raise their voices in protest" during the deportations of Jews to the death camps. This failure is deeply regret- ted. Such errors and failings of Christians in the past represent, however, a "binding commitment" for the future. In its concluding section, the document spells this out by calling on "our Catholic brothers and sisters to renew the awareness of the Hebrew roots of their faith," to recognize Jews as "elder brothers" (well-intentioned if double-edged in traditional Christian theology) and to work for a common future-one in which mutual prejudices will be eradicated.

At first sight these and many other aspects of the document would seem to deserve a warm welcome, especially since the general tone is one of self-questioning, acknowledgement of the traumas of the past, repentance, and a desire for self-purification. So why the sense of disap- pointment, especially among Jews but also in liberal Catholic circles and in the media more generally?7 Partly, this cool reaction may reflect the time-lapse since 1987 when PopeJohn Paul II first promisedJewish organizations he would address the question of the Church and the Shoah in an authoritative document. Not only has the Pope himself made more trenchant statements than those in the Vatican text, but so, too, have Bishops' conferences held in France, Germany, Holland, Switzerland, Poland, and Hungary.

For example, the German Catholic bishops on January 23, 1995 (fifty years after the liberation of Auschwitz) squarely blamed the Church itself and not merely its individual members for its behavior during the Shoah. They pointed to the anti-Jewish attitudes in German




Catholicism as one of the main reasons why "during the years of the Third Reich Christians did not offer resistance to racial anti-Semitism." Some German Catholics, the Conference noted, actually "paved the way for crimes or even became criminals themselves." The German bishops openly admitted that the failures and guilt of that time did have a "church dimension"; that the Catholic Church in Rome and in

Germany had been far too fixated on protecting their own institutions and "remained silent about the crimes committed against Jews and Ju- daism." These honest admissions (duplicated by the French and Polish

bishops) certainly correspond more closely to the findings of historical research than the much more vague, more evasive remarks in the Vati- can text.

Indeed, the record of German Catholics after 1933 was a dismal one which has been exposed, predominantly by Catholic historians, every since the 1960s.8 If the Church hierarchy condemned Nazi ideol-

ogy before Hitler seized power, their warnings faded rapidly after March 1933. Unlike their counterparts in France, Belgium, Italy, or Holland, they appeared to be following rather than guiding their flock.

They even accepted the Nuremberg race laws which forbade intermar-

riage with baptized Jews, in contravention of Catholic doctrine and there were virtually no protests after the Crystal Night pogrom of No- vember 1938.' Worse still, the Catholic church in Germany collabo- rated in helping to establish who was of Jewish descent in the Third Reich (the Protestant churches were no better)-an act that would have fatal consequences for many. Its leaders showed a disastrous naivety in

believing that Hitler wished to uphold Christian morality, family values, and respect the Concordat with Rome. They were slow to grasp the totalitarian, anti-Christian dynamic of National Socialism. Above all, they failed to see that Nazi leaders were impervious to private and individual protests. They did not realize that only determined public opposition, fear of sanctions, and the stirring up of the populace could have any effect upon them. This same mistake was repeatedly made by the Vatican between 1933 and 1945.

"We Remember" briefly mentions three German Catholic bishops in its statement, as examples of resistance to National Socialism. One was indeed a true hero-the Provost of St. Hedwig's Cathedral in Ber- lin, Bernhard Lichtenberg, who died on his way to Dachau in 1943 after having publicly prayed for the Jews. He was a rare exception among the more than twenty million Catholics in Nazi Germany. The other two cases-leading members of the Roman Catholic hierarchy in the Third Reich-were far more ambivalent than the Vatican statement implies. The first, Cardinal Bertram, did indeed oppose National So- cialism before 1933 but afterwards his objections became increasingly timid and inaudible.10 He never spoke out against the regime from the




pulpit and in 1939 sent Hitler a congratulatory telegram for his fiftieth

birthday, which he repeated the following year. Even more astonishing, in May 1945 he celebrated a solemn requiem mass for Adolf Hitler, shortly after his suicide in Berlin. Hardly the stuff of which resistance is made!

The case of Cardinal Michael Faulhaber of Munich, praised by the Vatican for his Advent Sermons of Christmas 1933 (which "clearly expressed rejection of Nazi anti-Semitic propaganda"), is more complex. Faulhaber's series of sermons before overflow crowds in St. Michael's Church (published in 1934 as a book) did defend the Old Testament and the Jewish origins of Christianity against Nazis and volkisch racists.11 No doubt it took some courage at the end of 1933 to remind Germans that Israel before the coming of Christ was a vehicle of Divine Revela- tion; that pre-Christian Judaism was deserving of the highest reverence; that the Hebrew Bible was an indispensable treasure for the German nation and the Christian faith.

But Faulhaber also made it clear that the Covenant with modern, post-Christian Jews had been revoked and that his defense of the Old Testament had no implications regarding the "antagonism to the Jews of today." In 1934 he would indignantly repudiate suggestions made abroad that his sermons constituted a defense of German Jews or a criticism of Nazi policy. Faulhaber undoubtedly had concerns about the violations of the Concordat-some of which may well have influenced the anguished encyclical Mit Brennender Sorge (With Deep Anxiety) of 1937, which was released by Pope Pius XI. But he seems to have been readily convinced by Hitler that the rights of the Catholic Church would be respected and that National Socialism was a vital bulwark against the Bolshevik danger. Faulhaber had no difficulty in supporting the Anschluss with Austria and the occupation of the Sudetenland in 1938, for which he even sent a telegram of thanks to the Fiihrer in the name of the German episcopate.

Similar ambivalences can be found in the policy of Pope Pius XI towards the Third Reich. He had agreed to the Concordat with Hitler (which was designed and signed by his Secretary of State Pacelli-the future Pius XII) and was the first foreign "ruler" to shake his hand and grant him some international legitimacy. In 1933 Pius XI still praised Hitler and spoke of a common struggle against the danger of Russian Bolshevism.12 But his main concern was to maintain and protect Catho- lic institutions and interests within Nazi Germany. It was the failure of this policy which had provoked Mit Brennender Sorge-the one open and public criticism by the Vatican of the National Socialist regime.13 This critique was focused around the concept of "paganism" and it is this category which recurs in the current Vatican statement on the Shoah. It would appear that for Rome in 1998, no less than for Popes Pius XI




and XII in the 1930s and 40s, Nazism was a form of "neo-paganism" which had nothing to do with Christianity and was in fact anti-Chris- tian.14 This claim has caused much scorn from critics who regard it as

apologetic in nature and designed to evade Christian responsibility for the Shoah. Thus it needs to be examined more closely.

What did the Catholic Church mean, then and now, when it used the term paganism and to what extent does this capture an important truth about Nazism? Cardinal Faulhaber in his 1933 sermons had al-

ready warned that the vilkisch and Nazi emphasis on blood, soil, and race insofar as it was exclusivist or called for hatred of other nations was a neo-pagan perversion opposed to universalist Catholic principles. He even declared that such a pagan relapse would be "the beginning of the end of the German nation." Pius XI's encyclical of 1937 voiced similar fears when condemning the idolatrous cult of the nation, the race, the all-powerful State, and the self-deified leader as a complete distortion of Christian belief in a person transcending God.15 Pius XII's first encyclical in 1939 echoes this position yet, like his predecessor, he never once mentioned the word "Jew" or anti-Semitism-though this was the predominant form of racism in Europe during the late 1930s.'6 Paganism was a codeword for the naturalistic world of Nazism with its echoes of pre-Christian primitivism, its cult of vitality and power, and the rights of the strongest in the struggle for survival; paganism also referred to the exaltation of blood and soil, of the Urgermane (the pri- mordial German) and the worship of the Volk; "paganism" referred to the glorification of the master race seeking world domination and to the worship of the Fiihrer as an earthly Messiah in place of Christ."7

There can be little doubt that there were powerful neo-pagan cur- rents in the Third Reich and to that extent some of the criticism of the Vatican document seems misplaced. One can find such tendencies in Himmler's SS with its cultivation of a perfect warrior race of blond, blue-eyed Germanic heroes; in the ideology of the Hitler Youth; in Nordic-Aryan blood mysticism and the ideals espoused in Alfred Ro- senberg's Myth of the Twentieth Century which inter alia denounced the "Semitic-Latin spirit" of Roman Catholicism; in Nazi art and architec- ture; in the velkisch sectarians who dreamed of a new Germanic religion and in many other cultural manifestations of the Third Reich.

But if the Nazis were pagans, they were also "baptised Christians" throwing off an unwanted Judeo-Christian legacy in the name of their new-found political religion.'8 Dialectically speaking, their "neo-pagan" Christophobia could not have existed without Christianity and this is what the Vatican document overlooks. This was not only apparent in Nazi manipulation of Christian symbols, liturgy and ritual in their mass politics or in the borrowings of Christian vocabulary scattered in the rhetoric of Hitler, Goebbels and other leaders of the Third Reich.'9 It




was, above all, true of Nazi anti-Semitism-which the Vatican statement wishes to separate at all costs from Christian anti-Judaism. On this

point Rome would have been better advised to take its example from the Drancy statement of the French bishops on October 2, 1997, ex-

pressing contrition for the silence of the Church's pastors in face of the racist laws of the Vichy government during the Second World War. True, the French bishops did not propose a direct cause-and-effect link between the widespread Christian anti-Jewish feelings in prewar Eu-

rope and the Shoah; but unlike Rome, they did admit "the role, indi- rect if not direct, in the process which led to the Shoah which was

played by commonly held anti-Jewish prejudices, which Christians were

guilty of maintaining." The French bishops acknowledged that one cannot completely separate modern anti-Semitism from stereotypes that were stamped by the Catholic (and later the Protestant) traditions on the theology, the preaching, the liturgy, the folklore, and the art em- bedded in a Christian culture.20

Unfortunately, the Vatican text does precisely that when it removes

any Christian responsibility for modern anti-Semitism, which it insists on defining as essentially "sociological" and political, based on "a false and exaggerated nationalism," pseudo-scientific race theories, excessive fears of social change and exaggerated ideas of Jewish influence. All of these factors did indeed play an important role but they presupposed a cultural and ideological framework that was created by centuries of Christian theology and popular myth. Yet the document has nothing to say about the Christology developed by the fathers of the Church and its demonization of the Jews; about the adversos judaeos polemical literature over centuries; the negative stereotypes of the Jews as Satan (or agents of the Devil), as Anti-Christ, as Judas, not to mention Ahas- verus-the wanderingJew of Christian legend-condemned to eternal ex- ile and divine punishment. There is not a word about the prominent churchmen (bishops, monks, priests, friars) who at different times lit the flames of confessional hatred from the Middle Ages to the modem era.

Nor is there anything about Innocent III and the Lateran Council which ordered Jews to wear the yellow badge and distinct garb; or about the sixteenth century popes (Paul III, IV, and V) who confined Jews to ghettos in Rome and the Papal states; not to mention later popes who reinforced such segregationist legislation. This long history of Christian anti-Judaism and anti-Semitism has been thoroughly docu- mented by Catholic as well as Protestant and Jewish scholars, so it is surprising to see it not taken into account in a statement of repentance, even if only in passing.

Of course, the Nazis transmuted the medieval Christian demonol- ogy into a modern, pseudo-biological key which was neither "pagan" nor purely "Christian." But one has only to examine a typically Nazi




anti-Semitic rag like Julius Streicher's Der Stiirmer to find traditional Christian motifs everywhere. There is the Crucifixion ("Golgotha has not yet been revenged" as a typical headline), the image of the eternally cursed people; the usurious Jew squeezing the poor peasant dry; the Jew as the "devil in human disguise" and of course, the ritual murderer of Christian children. Nazism radicalized and secularized these popular Christian stereotypes even as it began to turn against the ethical substance of Christianity with growing ferocity.21

Hitler was himself careful to publicly disguise the full extent of his

contempt for the "effeminate pity-ethics" of Judeo-Christianity, which he saw as completely antithetical to the strong "heroic belief in God in nature, God in our people, in our destiny, in our blood." Outwardly he sought, at least until 1937, to adopt a Christian mantle in seeking church support for his crusade against Jewry and international Bolshe- vism. In his wartime Table Talk, the mask is removed and the mass murder of European Jews is significantly accompanied by sometimes nightly ravings against Judeo-Christianity.22 Karl Marx is presented as the heir of St. Paul whose monotheistic creed was regarded by Hitler as deeply subversive, egalitarian and pacifist, disguising the Jewish will to world domination. Bolshevism is therefore the illegitimate child of Christianity and both were to be execrated as diabolical creations of the revolutionary Jew.

The Bolsheviks sought to destroy the western world and human civilisation just as their Christian ancestors had undermined the might and the culture of the Roman Empire. Martin Bormann (Hitler's clos- est aide at the end of the war) summed up the connection in 1944 when he said that Nazi doctrine was "anti-Jewish in excelsis, for it is both anti-Communist and anti-Christian."23 This was a view shared by many other Nazi leaders, including Himmler and Goebbels (both lapsed Catholics like Hitler), Darre, Rosenberg, and Ley. The Vatican document is not mistaken to assume that the ideology of these men was profoundly anti-Christian; nor is it wrong to insist that there is a distinction between Christian and Nazi anti-Semitism-a difference that might be compared to that between an uncomfortable and a lethal

fever.2 Nor can one deny the fact that the "Final Solution" had no Christian precedent.

But there is little consolation to be drawn from the fact that Ausch- witz was not preprogrammed in the logic of Christianity. For when one examines the behavior of the Vatican and the Church hierarchy in Europe during the Shoah, the results are not encouraging to say the least. True, there were some brave churchmen whose light shone in the general darkness. There was Archbishop Saliage of Toulouse who denounced the tragic spectacle of the deportations; his statements and those of Cardinal Gerlier of Lyon and the bishop of Marseille were a




turning-point in the summer of 1942 when the deportations of French Jews began and public opinion turned against Vichy's collaborationist policy. (This had been preceded by a long silence during which neither the French hierarchy nor the Vatican protested Vichy's racial laws ex- cluding the Jews.)25 There was the papal nuncio in Budapest, Angelo Rotta, who ceaselessly prodded the Primate of Hungary to pressure his government to stop the deportations of Hungarian Jewry to Auschwitz in the summer of 1944. Rotta's own letter to Horthy condemning the war against the Jews was the first official public protest against the "Final Solution" by a representative of the Pope.

Another remarkable churchman who did much to save Jewish lives was the Archbishop of L'viv in the Ukraine, the Metropolitan Andrei Sheptyts'kyi, who witnessed the massacre of Jews in his city by Ukraini- ans as well as Germans. It was no easy matter to denounce such killings in the highly charged nationalist and anti-Semitic atmosphere of the Ukraine in 1942-3, caught between the German hammer and the Bol- shevik anvil.26

None of these examples is mentioned in the Vatican document (and there are others) though reference is made to the many acts of Christian charity and rescue during the Shoah. Instead, "We Remem- ber" makes a point of twice mentioning Pope Pius XII in a positive light-initially for his encyclical of October 20, 1939, "Summi Pontifica- tus," warning against theories that denied the unity of the human race-and secondly for what he did "personally or through his representatives to save hundreds of thousands of Jewish lives." This statement, which upset many Jews, was also critically noted by non-Catholic commentators." It even prompted questions in the Israeli Parliament with the Foreign Minister being asked to try and oppose the beatification process of Pope Pius XII.28

In the United States, there were some strong Catholic reactions. Patrick J. Buchanan, for example, denounced all criticism of Pius XII as motivated by anti-Catholicism and moral blackmail. He blamed left- wing critics of America and Rome, the "twin pillars of Western civilization against Bolshevism" ever since the 1950s. Like the Vatican document, he also cited Jewish testimonies of gratitude to Pius XII for his efforts to rescue Jews in their darkest hour.29 Other Catholic voices quoted The New York Times of December 25, 1941 which had praised the wartime Pope as "a lonely voice in the silence of darkness envelop- ing Europe this Christmas."so3 (They invariably contrasted this praise with the same newspaper's negative assessment of Pius XII and the Vatican document of 1998.) Kenneth Woodward, in a Newsweek article (March 30, 1998) went so far as to deny that Pius XII was silent during the Shoah, or that he did little to help Jews, or that he was pro-Ger- man-all these claims being branded as "monstrous calumnies."s' Ed-




ward Cassidy, the Cardinal responsible for "We Remember," appeared to agree with Woodward for, in a generally conciliatory appearance before the American Jewish Committee in May 1998, he remarked that Pius XII had been unjustly denigrated."3 On the Jewish side, there was general surprise and some shock that Pius XII should be positively de- picted as someone who actively fought racism and anti-Semitism. The negative image of the Pope as a man who showed almost criminal weak- ness in face of the Shoah had been created in 1963 by a non-Jewish German playwright, Rolf Hochhuth in his semi-documentary play, The

Deputy.33 Historical works from the 1960s onwards, including those of Guenther Lewy, Saul Friedlander, Friedrich Heer, Carlo Falcone, John Morley, and others had reinforced the somewhat one-sided picture of a Pope who preferred diplomacy to moral and humanitarian impera- tives; who did not regard Hitler's war as unjust; who preferred Nazism to Stalinism; who seemed to have forgotten that he was not just another Head of State but the "Vicar of Christ"; who was ready to accom- modate almost any regime provided it respected church property; and who did not judge it opportune to tell the people the truth about the massacres of Jewry. Most shocking of all, was the seeming serenity of the Vatican and its representatives, strictly adhering to business as usual, while Europe was morally and spiritually collapsing around them. In this context, the Pope's silence about the murder of Jews, gypsies, Poles, or Serbs seemed best understood as signalling the bank- ruptcy of a certain kind of Vatican Realpolitik which had in fact lost touch with reality!34

No doubt some suspects of this harsh picture need to be modified, though by no means everything. It would certainly be wrong to present Pius XII as approving of Nazism and there is no evidence that he was anti-Semitic, though he never objected to the substance of the anti- Jewish laws passed in France, Hungary, Croatia, Slovakia, and other Catholic countries, before the "Final Solution." Pius XII, like his predecessor, opposed racist anti-Semitism but he shared the traditional Cath- olic view of modern Jewry as an "element of decomposition" in western culture.35 He would have had difficulty identifying with John Paul II's benevolent perception of Judaism and the need to return to the "He- brew" roots of Christianity.

At the same time Pius XII could not accept the Nazi and racist onslaught on baptized Jews (which flagrantly contradicted Catholic dogma and the efficacy of the sacraments) any more than he could condone the gassing or murder ofJews.36 Where he had some leverage, as in Catholic Slovakia and Hungary, he did try to intervene to halt deportations and mass killing. In Slovakia he ordered bishops to inter- cede with President Tiso (himself a Catholic priest) as well as with Prime Minister and Minister of the Interior."7 While the interventions




led to a temporary respite and did save the lives of some baptized Jews, they were ultimately not successful. His open letter to Hungary's Re- gent, Admiral Horthy, on June 25, 1944, to do everything in his power to "save as many unfortunate people as possible from further pain and sorrow" did have some initial effect due to the international context and the changing fortunes of war. The Pope's message, as usual, was couched in discreet, diplomatic language unlike the far blunter Ameri- can warning to Horthy, but it did have some importance in a predominantly Catholic country. Again, the results proved to be meager.

The same was true of Croatia, only here the conduct of the Vatican and its representatives appears to have few redeeming features. The ruler of the Croatian Fascist puppet state, Ante Pavelic, the Poglavnik (Leader), was a pious Catholic and his fanatical followers were meticu- lous in the performance of their religious duties. The Croatian Church was a pillar of the regime which was viewed in the Vatican as a de- fender of Catholicism and the West against the threat posed by Com- munist heresy. Rome did not intervene to protest against the savagely cruel actions of the Ustashe Croatians against Orthodox (Christian) Serbs or the murder of Croatian Jewry. There is no evidence that the Pope voiced disapproval of such brutalities in his meetings with Us- tashe leaders. True, behind the scenes his representative and the Cro- atian Archbishop Stepinac acted (in vain) to prevent further murders and the latter sent a trenchant letter to Pavelic in March 1943 that did save the lives of some baptized Jews and mixed families. Yet here, as elsewhere, the Vatican did not oppose the basic injustice of the anti- Semitic laws (which removed the Jews from social, economic and cultural life) or condemn local monks and friars involved in murderous actions against Serbs, Jews or gypsies.38

Such passivity cannot be excused on the grounds of ignorance of what was happening. Vatican documents show that Rome had abun- dant information and knew that Jews were being exterminated in Po- land and elsewhere in Europe, at the latest from the middle of 1942. Nor can one explain Pius XII's silence and failure to provide clear moral guidance by indifference to human suffering or personal cow- ardice. He was neither insensitive nor lacking in courage to stand up for what he believed in. This is illustrated by the insistence with which he instructed papal nuncios to intervene on behalf of baptised Jews against government ordinances which refused to recognise them as Catholics. Similarly, he insisted on the exclusive right of the Catholic church to solemnize marriages (including "non-Aryan" Catholics) which brought him and his predecessor into conflict with Mussolini's racist legislation in Italy.39

Pius XII was by no means regarded as pro-Nazi by the Germans. He had been Pius XI's Secretary of State during the early years of the




Third Reich and contributed to formulating the sharp encyclical of 1937 against totalitarian state doctrines and the gross Nazi infringe- ments of the Concordat. Though he had never denounced racist anti- Semitism in public, unlike Pius XI (who told Belgian pilgrims in Rome on September 20, 1938 that "spiritually, we are all Semites"), the Ger- mans assumed that they were of one mind.40 Gestapo and Sicherheits- dienst (SD) documents show that in 1939, upon his election as Pope, they regarded him as tending more to the western democracies than the totalitarian states. Moreover, they were concerned by the enthusias- tic support which his election generated among World Jewry. Again, when Pius XII did make his single oblique reference to the Holocaust in a Christmas message of 1942, the Germans immediately interpreted it as a criticism of their genocidal policy and a statement on behalf of the Jews.4' The Western Allies, on the other hand, felt that the Pope had not gone nearly far enough.

Since much has been made of this statement by apologists determined to show that he was not "silent," it is worth noting that the Pope devoted all of one sentence to deploring the fact that "hundreds of thousands of people, through no fault of their own and solely because of their nation or race, have been condemned to death or progressive extinction." With all due allowance for the abstract style of papal documents, there is no explicit reference either to Jews or Nazis, though the latter with the clarity of their paranoid world-view, saw in it proof that the Pope himself was part of the Jewish world-conspiracy!

The Germans must have been relieved that Pius XII did not permit himself even such a minimalist statement when they occupied Rome in October 1943 and deported all the Jews they could find in the Eternal City to Auschwitz. This "Aktion" happened virtually beneath the windows of the Vatican and no voice was raised in anger as the oldest Jewish community in Europe was loaded into boxcars for gassing in the East. True, the Pope did give instructions that convents, seminaries, and buildings in Vatican City be quietly opened to offer refuge and safety to those Roman Jews who managed to escape the manhunt. On the other hand, something was surely wrong when his Secretary of State Cardinal Maglione (who shared responsibility for Vatican foreign policy during the Shoah with Pius XII) could tell the German Ambassa- dor in Rome in October 1943, that the Holy See did not want "to give to the German people the impression that it has done or wished to do the least thing against Germany during this terrible war."42'43 These words of reassurance meant that Nazi Germany had nothing to fear from the Vatican when it was deporting Roman Jews to their deaths.

As ever, prudence was the rationale for this policy. The same prudence, discretion, and tact which are reflected in all the communica- tions of Pius XII and Cardinal Maglione concerning the fate of Jews




threatened with death. There has been no lack of defenders of this line of conduct, claiming that public denunciations of atrocities against the Jews would have served no purpose. On the contrary, it is said, it would most probably have worsened their plight-difficult though it may be to imagine any fate worse than the Shoah. Most frequently cited in this connection are the tragic results of the public protest of Catholic bishops in Holland, who, following a papal communication to them, had condemned the deportation of Dutch Jews to the East. In retaliation, the Nazis also deported the baptised Jews, whom they had not hitherto touched. This is said to have dissuaded Pius XII from repeating the experience.44

Whether it was really the best interests of Jews which determined the Pope's policy in this matter or other factors connected more with the Church's own concerns, must remain an open question. Until the Vatican archives are opened to independent, critical investigation-as many scholars have requested-we may never know the answer. Even then, one must assume that conflicting interpretations of his behavior will persist. As things stand now, however, the Vatican should not be surprised that many remain sceptical about the claim in the most recent document that Pius XII saved hundreds of thousands of Jewish lives.45 What we do know is that privately and discreetly through his many diplomatic channels, he did act to save Jews, particularly those who were baptized. It is also clear that the Vatican had only very lim- ited influence on German policy though the possible effects of an unequivocal and very specific public denunciation by the Pope of its genocidal actions are now impossible to gauge. Catholics constituted over 40 percent of the population of the greater German Reich and an over- whelming majority of citizens in countries like France, Belgium, Italy, Poland, Lithuania, Hungary, Slovakia, and Croatia where the "Final Solution" was carried out.

Would Hitler's excommunication or the call to Catholics to refuse to carry out "criminal orders" or serve in the Wehrmacht have had any positive results? Perhaps not a great deal of impact, but it would have at least have encouraged those Catholics in occupied countries like France, Belgium, and Holland who did oppose the deportations or those as in Italy (or Poland) who sought to hide Jews regardless of the danger of German reprisals. Millions of Catholics around the world might have welcomed a more unequivocal moral position from the Pope and not only on the fate of the Jews. It is often forgotten that Polish Catholics were bitterly disappointed when Pius XII (standing on his political "neutrality") refused to assign guilt when the Germans invaded Poland in an act of aggression. Despite Polish pleas to intervene, the Pope could not bring himself to openly denounce the execu-




tions of more than 3,000 Polish Catholic priests by the Nazis during the war.

Though Pius XII refused officially to bless Hitler's war against the Soviet Union, he may well have hoped for a German victory in the East as late as 1943-at a time when the mass extermination of Jews (whose details were well known to the Vatican) was gathering apace. His pref- erence for Hitler over Stalin (one shared by his predecessor, by Cardi- nal Maglione and other top Vatican officials) was predicated on the assumption that there would still be a place for Roman Catholicism in the Nazi New Order-but none whatsoever under Soviet Communism. When one adds Pius XII's passionate love of Germany and of German culture (he had been papal nuncio there during the Weimar era) to his ideological anti-Communism, then his "silence" becomes more com- prehensible, though hardly more appetizing. Moreover, by the standards of Realpolitik, it was a complete failure. Hitler, far from being the saviour of the West against Bolshevism, brought Stalin's armies into the heart of Europe with disastrous results for the church and the peoples of eastern Europe. No one should know this better than John Paul II, whose Catholic faith was steeled under a postwar Communist regime in Poland.

It is therefore curious that the Vatican, and a substantial part of Catholic opinion, should feel such a strong need to defend Pius XII's record at all costs. This defense often seems exaggerated to the outside observer, refuting arguments that no serious person is making. No one is blaming Pius XII or the Catholic Church for the Holocaust, or even suggesting that the Pope could have single-handedly stopped the slaughter. Nor can one retrospectively demand that he should have worn the martyr's crown and sacrificed his life. Nor can one reasonably object to his efforts to seek peace or dismiss the value of his quiet diplomacy where it did save Jewish lives and those of other victims of the Nazis. But it is more than disappointing to find how little if any moral outrage or public courage was displayed by the Vatican when it came to the fate of the Jews. The least one can say is that this discretion did not raise the moral standing of the Church.

The failure at the top highlights, if anything, the heroism of those ordinary Catholics (and Protestants) who hid, rescued, or saved Jews at great personal risk. The present Pope has paid tribute on a number of occasions to such actions and they deserve to be remembered and honored. It is therefore bizarre that "We Remember" should insist in its act of contrition that the Church as an institution remains blameless, while ordinary Christians must do penance for their sins of omission or worse. Throughout the Vatican document the distinction between the Church per se and its members is rigidly maintained. Even if one




accepts that in traditional Catholic theology the Church is the "bride of Christ" and "the heavenly Jerusalem," divinely ordained and therefore without sin, surely this teaching cannot be seriously proposed as an unalterable dogma over fifty years after the Shoah. If the Church and the Papacy still claim that kind of infallibility, then one wonders who

exactly is offering repentance and for what sin? Are the faithful being called upon to make their "examination of conscience" independently of an infallible Church that has floated through nearly two millennia of history like some kind of spotless Platonic ideal? Are ordinary rank- and-file Catholics to be held to more stringent moral standards than those who in the past set the policy of the Church? Do the sins committed by Catholics during the Shoah belong only to the flock and not to the shepherd?

It is difficult to imagine that this is the intention of the document, though it sometimes reads that way. However difficult or painful it may be, true repentance does require an admission that the leadership of the Church made errors and failed to uphold its self-proclaimed position as a guardian of morality. Genuine contrition must avoid as much as possible blurring the line between apologia and apology or hedging recognition of guilt with too many qualifications. This applies to Prot- estants, Jews, and Muslims as much as it does to Catholics and it is no less true in settling moral accounts between nations.

It is no less important to recognize the tremendous progress that has been made in the Jewish-Christian dialogue for which "We Remem- ber," whatever its flaws, represents as a significant landmark. The traditional anti-Judaism of the Catholic Church-one of the background factors that made the Shoah possible-has been greatly eroded. Judaism is no longer regarded in enlightened Catholic circles as the old enemy to be subjugated or denigrated but as an authentic, living religion with whom dialogue and co-operation are a vital interest. This "special rela-

tionship" which Pope John Paul II has particularly emphasized, has

many aspects-some traditional and some more contemporary. It is

simply a fact that Christianity (Catholic, Protestant, or Orthodox) cannot be fully grasped without understanding its Jewish roots. The Vati- can document itself stresses this point as well as recalling the Jewish origins of Jesus, Mary, the Apostles, and so much of the Church's

teaching. Pope John Paul II has in the past two decades given a consistent

lead in this direction. In his writings, homilies, and speeches on Jewish themes he has unequivocally denounced anti-Semitism as well as em- phasizing how much Judaism and Christianity have in common with each other.46 Much of the warmth and understanding he has shown in

pursuing the Christian-Jewish dialogue can, as we have already indi- cated, be traced back to his personal friendships and positive experi-




ence of Jewish life in Poland before 1939.47 One can hardly exaggerate the significance of the Pope's insistence that the Old Covenant with the People of Israel has never been revoked by God; that Jews and Christians are "called to be a blessing for the world"; and his accep- tance of the centrality of Israel as a land and a nation, when speaking of the Jews as a group. Under the auspices of John Paul II, the Catholic Church has reaffirmed that it does have a special relationship with the Jewish people who are to be regarded fraternally-as "elder brothers." The Church has indeed repudiated any notion that the Jews are to be seen as a "cursed" people.

But these milestones have not been able to remove all the conten- tious issues that continue to bedevil Catholic-Jewish relationships. Even during his epochal visit to the Jewish Synagogue of Rome in 1986, John Paul II's remembrance of the "high price in blood" paid by the local Jewish community during World War II was somewhat selective. He recalled that the Holy See had thrown open Vatican City "to offer refuge and safety to so many Jews of Rome being hunted by their persecu- tors" but ignored Pius XII's public silence as Roman Jews were being deported to Auschwitz.48 It was left to the president of the Rome Jewish community, Professor Giacomo Saban, to quietly hint at this fact and to mention the dark centuries during which John Paul II's papal prede- cessors had ghettoised and discriminated against Jews.

Such omissions pale, however, in comparison with the controversy provoked by the Pope's elevation of converts from Judaism to the highest honors that the Church can bestow. Thus, on May 1, 1987, John Paul II beatified Dr. Edith Stein, a German Jewess, philosopher, con- vert, and Carmelite nun in a huge ceremony held in a football stadium in Cologne. The Pope told the assembled crowd: "Today, we greet in profound honor and holy joy a daughter of the Jewish people, rich in wisdom and courage, who gave her life for genuine peace.49 He insisted that her baptism was "by no means a break with her Jewish heritage" but the life of "this heroic follower of Christ was illuminated by the Cross."

In October 1998 Edith Stein was duly canonized by the Vatican with all the pomp and grandeur that the Roman Catholic Church re- serves for its saints-the first Jewess to receive such honors since the time of the Virgin Mary! The response of Jewish organizations to this move was largely negative. Edith Stein had been born to a German Jewish Orthodox family in Breslau, had converted in 1922 and eleven years later assumed the name of Teresa Benedicta a Cruce (Teresa, Blessed of the Cross). On August 2, 1942 she would be arrested in Holland and deported by the Nazis from her convent to Auschwitz where she died a week later. Jewish reactions to her canonization (the Pope had also declared that her saint's day should become an annual




commemoration of the Holocaust) were not only conditioned by the traditional Jewish distaste for converts to Christianity. As many Jews pointed out, Edith Stein had been martyred because she was "racially a Jew" (according to the Nuremberg race laws of the Nazi regime) not as a consequence of her Catholic faith. To claim her as a Catholic martyr of the Holocaust did violence to the facts; and if this action was designed to show respect for the Shoah, why do this by sanctifying a

person who had chosen to leave Judaism? How could she legitimately symbolize the Jewish martyrs of the Holocaust?

For many Jews, this smacked once again of efforts by the Vatican to "Christianize" the Shoah-to transform it into the "Golgotha of the contemporary world"-to use the Pope's own terminology of twenty years ago. It raised once more the spectre of rival and antagonistic memorializations of Auschwitz,50 exacerbated in recent years by the epi- demic of crosses planted at the site of the death camp by militant Pol- ish Catholics. True, this did not have the approval and encouragement of the Vatican, but both Rome and the Polish government have had difficulty in quelling such expressions of Polish Catholic nationalism- designed to claim Auschwitz as being, above all, the site of Polish martyrdom.

In the United States, too, there are also militant Catholic voices to be heard, that lay claim to the crown of supreme victimhood. A lengthy advertisement in The New York Times (April 1999) by the Catholic League for Religious and Civil Rights, recalls that apart from six million Jews, there were five million "others" who were also killed, "most of whom were Catholic." This figure includes three million Polish Cath- olics and the impression is thereby created that they were murdered by the Nazis not because they were Poles but as apart of a systematic planned war against Catholics because of their faith.5" Hitler and other leading Nazis are presented as if they had deliberately targeted Catho- lics for mass killing, which is historically quite misleading, not to say false.

The other side of this propaganda offensive is to repeatedly em- phasize the "unfair accusations being levelled today against Pope Pius

XII." This point has even been raised by Cardinal Edward Cassidy, who has stated that "persons very dear to the Catholic faithful have been condemned without proof"-almost certainly a reference to Pope Pius XII. As the Vatican's top liaison official to the Jews, one cannot imagine that he would have made such remarks without prior consultation with Pope John Paul II. Cassidy also expressed forceful criticism of Jewish organizations (in particular, the World Jewish Congress) for being "involved in a systematic campaign to denigrate the Catholic Church" and for casting aspersions on the Vatican and the present Pope. Recent




publications of the World Jewish Congress claiming the Church was involved in conspiracies after World War II to help the Nazis escape Europe seem to have especially aroused the Vatican's anger, along with the severe criticism of "We Remember.""52 Cardinal Cassidy also re- buked Jewish groups for not responding to his proposal to assemble a Jewish-Catholic team of scholars to jointly study the twelve published volumes of Vatican wartime records. In December 1999, a Historical Commission of six such scholars (three Catholics and three Jews)-of whom the present author was one-was created in New York with the blessing of the Vatican itself. In October 2000, our group presented a preliminary report to Rome that called for opening the archives in order that we could pursue our work more thoroughly. Since then, there has been complete silence from the Vatican Secretariat of State.53 There appears to be a concerted effort in some Catholic scholarship today, with regard to Pope Pius XII, to insist that he did not bow to Nazis and Fascists and consciously took the more courageous path of direct action, thereby saving many hundreds of thousands of Jewish lives. This militant position, pioneered by the late Reverend Robert A. Graham (an American Jesuit scholar entrusted by the Vatican with edit- ing its wartime documents) not only exculpates Pius XII from any fault but even eulogizes him as one of the greatest benefactors and rescuers of Jews during World War II.54 Small wonder that the present Pope and the Vatican seem determined to place Pius XII on the fast track to sainthood. Whether the Jewish-Catholic dialogue would survive in- tact the implementation of such a controversial policy is an open question.

Despite these continuing tensions, no impartial observer can deny the sincerity of Pope John Paul II's resolution to push forward Jewish- Christian dialogue in the context of preparations for the third millennium. In a general audience (May 5, 1999) in Rome, the Pope hailed "the vivid dialogical dimension strongly present in contemporary neo- Jewish literature" that had deeply influenced the philosophy and theology of the twentieth century. He also stressed the "long period of salva- tion history which Christians and Jews can view together," the debt of the Church to "the liturgical wealth of the Jewish people," the "intrinsic value of the Old Testament" and the imperative that "the seeds in- fected with anti-Judaism and anti-Semitism will never again take root in human hearts." No less significantly, he looked to Jerusalem as "the symbolic place of the eschatological pilgrimage of peoples united in their praise of the Most High."55 In April 2000, during a memorable pilgrimage to Israel, Palestine, and the Holy City of Jerusalem, he expressed his deep pain at the horrors of the Shoah while visiting Yad Vashem. But it was his wonderful gesture of placing a note in the crev-




ice of the western wall of the ancient Jewish Temple asking forgiveness for all the wrong done to the Jewish people, that will remain engraved in its memory as a positive symbol of his pontificate.

HEBREW UNIVERSITY OF JERUSALEM

NOTES

1. All quotations are taken from the text of Pope John Paul's cover letter to "My Venerable Brother," Cardinal Edward Idris Cassidy, dated March 12, 1998. The full text of the Vatican Document (dated March 16, 1998) which includes the Pope's letter, was released in Rome by the Commission for Reli-

gious Relations with the Jews. 2. See John Paul's Address to the October 1997 Vatican Symposium on

"The Christian Roots of Anti-Judaism," L'Osservatore Romano, November 1, 1997, p. 6.

3. For this and other information about his early life, see the controversial article by James Carroll, "The Silence" in The New Yorker, April 7, 1997. Carroll, a liberal Catholic, is especially critical of Papal claims to absolutism and infalli-

bility. See his recent book, Constantine's Sword: The Church and the Jews (Boston, 2001).

4. For a discussion of the background to Cardinal Hlond's 1936 Pastoral Letter and of Polish Catholic anti-Semitism in general, see Ronald Modras, The Catholic Church and Antisemitism in Poland, 1933-1939, (Oxford, 1994), pp. 315, 345-346.

5. For information on Sapieha (who ordained Karl Wojtyla as a priest in Cracow) and on Kolbe-the founder of the Knights of the Immaculate in Rome-see Modras, ibid., The Catholic Church and Antisemitism in Poland pp. 41-42, 63-64, 398-399. To what extent Kolbe was an anti-Semite can be ar-

gued but not his militant struggle in Poland against atheism, freemasonry, sec- ularism, and the corrupting influence of "modernist" Jewry.

6. Monty Penkower, "Auschwitz, the Papacy, and Poland's 'Jewish Prob- lem,'" Midstream, Vol. 36, No. 6 (August-September 1990), pp. 14-19 and Geoffrey Wigoder, "The Affair of the Carmelite Convent at Auschwitz," Survey of Jewish Affairs (London, 1990), pp. 187-204 for two Jewish views of the dis- pute.

7. For a variety of critical responses see the following: The New York Times (editorial) March 18, 1998; David Rosen, "Not good enough," The Jerusalem Post, March 20, 1998; Alan Dershowitz, "Too Little," ibid., March 31, 1998; "With Burning Anxiety," The New Republic, April 6, 1998. See also A. James Rudin (National Interreligious Affairs Director of the American Jewish Com- mittee-henceforth AJC) "Holocaust Statement lacks feel of contrition" in Port- land Press Herald (Maine), April 4, 1998. Rudin repeated some of his strictures in the presence of Cardinal Cassidy at the AJC's 92nd Annual Meeting on May 15, 1998 in New York City.

8. For example, Gordon Zahn, German Catholics and Hitler's Wars. A Study




in Social Control (New York, 1962) and Friedrich Heer, Der Glaube des Adolf Hitler. Anatomie einer politischen Religiositat (Munich, 1968).

9. For a recent summary of the complicities of German Catholics (and Protestants) in the Third Reich, see John Weiss, Ideology of Death. Why the Holo- caust Happened in Germany (Chicago, 1996), pp. 350-356.

10. On Cardinal Bertram, see Rudolf Lill, "Zum Verhalten des deutschen Katholizismus gegeniiber den Juden in der Zeit der Weimarer Republik," in

Judaism and Christianity under the Impact of National Socialism (1919-1945), ed. Otto Dov Kulka and Paul Mendes-Flohr, published by the Historical Society of Israel (June, 1982), pp. 103-130 and Chris Manus, "Roman Catholicism and the Nazis: A review of the attitude of the Catholic Church during the persecutions of the Jews in Hitler's Europe," in Remembering for the Future. Jews and Christians During and After the Holocaust (Oxford, 1988), pp. 93-108. For the broader picture see inter alia, John S. Conway, The Nazi Persecution of the Churches under Hitler (London, 1968); and Ernst Helmreich, The German Churches under Hitler (Detroit, 1979).

11. On the other hand, on July 24, 1933, Faulhaber sent a personal letter to Hitler, praising him for having achieved in six months what German parlia- ments and political parties had failed to do in sixty years-namely to sign a Concordat with the Church. The letter ended: "God preserve the Reich Chan- cellor for our people." See Friedrich Heer, God's First Love. Christians and Jews over Two Thousand Years (London, 1970), p. 309 for a highly critical view of the

Papacy and official Catholic behavior before, during and after the Holocaust- written by a dissident Austrian Catholic.

12. Heer, ibid., p. 369. 13. For a full account of Pius XI's opposition to fascist and Nazi racialism

(while continuing to espouse traditional Catholic prejudices against Jews and Judaism) see Georges Passelecq and Bernard Suchecky, The Hidden Encyclical of Pius XI (New York, 1997). This book was originally published in France in 1995. For the 1937 encyclical, see Heinz-Albert Raem, Pius XI und der National- sozialismus: Die Enzyklika "Mit Brennender Sorge" vom 14 Marz 1937 (Paderborn, 1979). Still useful for the Italian dimension is the older study by Daniel A.

Binchy, Church and State in Fascist Italy (London, 1940). 14. The denunciation of "paganism" by the Papacy intensified after the

Rome-Berlin axis of 1936. It was, of course, inclusive of Bolshevism-seen by Popes Pius XI and XII, as the supreme threat to the Roman church in the 1930s. There was no difference between the two Popes when it came to de- nouncing Nazi myths of blood and race. See Peter C. Kent, "A Tale of Two Popes: Pius XI, Pius XII and the Rome-Berlin Axis," Journal of Contemporary History, Vol. 23 (1988), p. 594.

15. The 1937 encyclical deplored attempts by totalitarian regimes to divi- nize concepts like race, nation, and state, turning them into an "idolatrous cult." Such idolatry or statolatry was a perversion and falsification of "the order of things created and commanded by God." See Peter Matheson, ed, The Third Reich and the Christian Churches (Grand Rapids, Michigan, 1981), p. 69.

16. The 1939 encyclical Summi Pontificatus apparently took over some parts of an unpublished encyclical, prepared for Pius XI, by two Jesuit priests-the American, Father John La Farge, and the German Catholic theologian, Gustav




Gundlach. This "hidden" encyclical (written in 1938) was particularly insistent on the incompatibility of racism with Catholic doctrine. Nevertheless, even this text avoided direct reference to the anti-Semitic legislation against Jews (and their persecution) by Nazi Germany and Fascist Italy. Pius XII shared the thrust of the "hidden" encyclical's emphasis on "the unity of the human race" but the document is decidedly equivocal about the Jews. See Passelecq and Suchecky, The Hidden Encyclical, pp. 115-122, 138-151, and 246-259 for Vatican re-

sponses in the 1930s to Nazi and fascist racism. For the anti-Jewish tone of the

Jesuit periodical La Civilta Cattolica (published in Rome) in this period, see The Hidden Encyclical, pp. 123-137. Also Frederick Brown, "The Hidden Encycli- cal," The New Republic, April 15, 1996, pp. 27-31. A good overview is provided by Michael R. Marrus, "The Vatican on Racism and Anti-Semitism, 1938-1939: A New Look at a Might-Have-Been," Holocaust and Genocide Studies, Vol. 7, No. 3, (Winter 1997), pp. 378-395.

17. For an examination of Nazi "paganism" and attitudes to Christianity, see Robert Wistrich, Hitler's Apocalypse, Jews and the Nazi Legacy (New York, 1985), pp. 136-153.

18. Franklin H. Littell, "Christian Antisemitism and the Holocaust," inJuda- ism and Christianity, Kulka and Mendes-Flohr, eds., p. 462.

19. See Uriel Tal, "Nazism as a Political Faith," The Jerusalem Quarterly (Spring, 1980), No. 15, pp. 79-90.

20. For the facts about French Catholic attitudes in this period, see Michael R. Marrus, "French Churches and the persecution of Jews in France, 1940- 1944," in Remembering for the Future, pp. 307-346. Also Michael R. Marrus and Robert O. Paxton, Vichy France and the Jews (New York, 1983), pp. 197-203.

21. For a few examples of the considerable literature on this topic, see James Parkes, The Conflict of the Church and the Synagogue (Cleveland, 1961); Pierre Pierrard, Juifs et Catholiques Frangais (Paris, 1970); Rosemary Ruether, Faith and Fratricide (New York, 1974); Hyam Maccoby, The Sacred Executioner: Human Sacrifice and the Legacy of Guilt (London, 1982); Alan Davies, ed., Anti- semitism and the Foundations of Christianity (New York, 1979); Gavin Langmuir, History, Religion and Antisemitism (Berkeley, 1990); and Robert S. Wistrich, Anti- semitism. The Longest Hatred (London, 1992).

22. Wistrich, Hitler's Apocalypse, p. 149. 23. H.R. Trevor-Roper (ed.) Hitler's Table Talk, 1941-1994 (London, 1973),

p. 722. 24. Milton Himmelfarb, "No Hitler, No Holocaust," Commentary (March

1984), pp. 37-43. 25. Marrus, "French Churches," pp. 316, 318, 320-4. Initially, the Catholic

hierarchy supported P6tain's revolution nationale, hoping that it would lead to the re-christianization of France. According to P6tain's ambassador in Rome, L6on Berard, the Vatican had no objection to Vichy's racist anti-Jewish laws as long as they were applied with '"justice and charity" (a contradiction in terms, one might have thought!). There was no condemnation from Rome of the fundamental injustice behind such discriminatory legislation. Indeed, the Vati- can appeared to find the numerus clausus imposed in France (and other Cath- olic lands after 1939) on Jews to be acceptable-a policy of exclusion which eliminated them from the army, the civil service, the universities, the free pro-




fessions and of course, from public life. Church opposition in France only seriously began with the deportations of French Jews in the summer of 1942.

26. See Shimon Redlich, "Metropolitan Andrei Sheptys'kyi, Ukrainians and Jews during and after the Holocaust," in Remembering for the Future, pp. 197- 206.

27. See Peter Steinfels, "Beliefs," The New York Times, March 21, 1998, also Thomas O'Dwyer "Vatican's struggle to save the church's soul," The Jerusalem Post, March 20, 1998 and Paul Elie, "John Paul's Jewish Dilemma," The New York Times Magazine, April 26, 1998, pp. 34-39.

28. Liat Collins, "MKs oppose beatification of Pope Pius XII," The Jerusalem Post, April 1, 1998. What is evident from the controversy is the degree to which more than thirty years after Vatican II, Pius XII's role between 1939 and 1945 still remains a pivotal issue in any discussion of Christian complicity in the Holo- caust and a source of mutual bitterness. See Commentary, June/July 1999, letters.

29. Patrick J. Buchanan, "The Smearing of Pius XII," New York Post, April 1, 1998. Buchanan quoted, among other witnesses, the Chief Rabbi of Rome, Israel Zolli (who on February 13, 1945 converted, with his wife, to Roman Catholicism and took the name of "Eugenio," which was Pius XII's Christian name) but also the Chief Rabbi of Bucharest. His prime witness (as in other Catholic apologias) was Golda Meir-then Foreign Minister of Israel-who ca- bled Rome on Pius XII's death, recalling that the pope's voice had been raised for Jewish victims in their hour of need. For Buchanan it was evident that Pius XII has not only been libelled but that left-wing anti-Catholics have engaged in a "Big Lie" of vast proportions, in vilifying him.

30. Examples include the regular letters and advertisements in the Ameri- can press of William A. Donahue (President of the Catholic League for Reli- gious and Civil Rights), those of New York lawyer Kevin Doyle (e.g. his letter to The New York Times, March 22, 1998) and the indefatigable Sister Margherita Marchione of Morristown, New Jersey. See Paul Elie, "John Paul's Jewish Di- lemma," p. 37.

31. See Kenneth L. Woodward, "In Defense of Pius XI," Newsweek, March 30, 1998, p. 35. Woodward maintained that in "choosing diplomacy over protest Pius XII had his priorities right." Apparently, those who think differently and believe that the wartime pope failed to live up to his role as "Vicar of Christ" are "revisionist" historians!

32. Remarks by Cardinal Cassidy to the American Jewish Committee, Breakfast Plenary, held in Washington D.C., May 15, 1998, relating to the Vati- can document.

33. On Hochhuth, see the interesting assessment of the controversy by Hannah Arendt, "Le vicaire, ou silence coupable?" (23 Fevrier 1964) in Han- nah Arendt, Auschwitz etJerusalem (Paris, 1991), pp. 221-231.

34. See Guenther Lewy, The Catholic Church and Nazi Germany (New York, 1965). Saul Friedlander, Pius XII and the Third Reich (New York 1966) and Carlo Falconi, The Silence of Pius XII (London, 1970). Also John F. Morley, Vatican Diplomacy and the Jews during the Holocaust (New York, 1980). All these accounts critical of Vatican policy during the war years. For an apologetic defense, see Anthony Rhodes, The Vatican in the Age of the Dictators 1922-1945 (London, 1973).




35. For an insight into the thinking behind Catholic anti-Judaism in the 1930s, see Passelecq and Suchecky, The Hidden Encyclical, pp. 123-137.

36. For Vatican policy on baptized Jews, see Morley, Vatican Diplomacy, pp. 196-197, 201. Fascist and Nazi policy against intermarriage and the conversion of Jews to Catholicism struck at the exclusive sacramental structure of the Church. The Vatican could not accept the rationale of racial laws without deny- ing its core doctrines and conversionary ambitions.

37. See Livia Rothkirchen, "The Stand of the Churches vis-a-vis the persecution of the Jews of Slovakia," in Judaism and Christianity, Kulka and Mendes- Flohr, eds., pp. 273-286.

38. On the complicity of the Vatican in the Ustashe regime, see Menachem Shelah, "The Catholic Church in Croatia, the Vatican and the murder of the Croatian Jews," in Remembering for the Future, pp. 266-280. Nevertheless, it should be noted that the Germans began to see the Vatican as an obstacle to their exterminationist policy in the Balkans from mid-1942 and the Archbishop of Croatia as a "friend of the Jews" as well as being hostile to National Social- ism. See Jonathan Steinberg, All or Nothing. The Axis and the Holocaust 1941-43 (London, 1991), pp. 79-80.

39. Meir Michaelis, "The Current Debate over Fascist Racial Policy" in Rob- ert S. Wistrich and Sergio della Pergola (eds.), Fascist Anti-Semitism and the Ital- ian Jews (Jerusalem, 1995), pp. 86-93. Michaelis takes an extremely charitable view of Pius XII's policy.

40. Pius XI's comments are cited by Anthony Rhodes, op.cit., p. 339. He declared that anti-Semitism was "incompatible" with the lofty thought that Abraham was the Patriarch and forefather of Catholics. Anti-Semitism was "a movement with which we Christians can have nothing to do. No, I say to you it is impossible for a Christian to take part in anti-Semitism. It is inadmissible. Through Christ and in Christ we are the spiritual progeny of Abraham." This was the most unequivocal statement on the subject by any pope before the Holocaust but unfortunately it was not published by the Vatican newspaper and had no authoritative, official status.

41. For SD reports on the churches, see Heinz Boberach, Berichte des SD und der Gestapo iiber Kirchen und Kirchenvolk in Deutschland 1939-1944 (Mainz, 1971). These reports are used by Donald J. Dietrich to argue that in the eyes of the German security services, the Catholic church did resist Nazism more than is often assumed. See his article "Catholic Resistance in the Third Reich," in Holocaust and Genocide Studies, Vol. 3, No. 2 (1988), pp. 171-186.

42. See Morley, Vatican Diplomacy, p. 194. 43. Ibid, p. 206. 44. Anthony Rhodes, Vatican in the Age of the Dictators, pp. 344-345. 45. There are no reliable figures on this topic and as long as the Vatican

does not permit free, independent, and critical access to the relevant archives, speculation rather than solid facts will dominate the discussion. One of the highest figures given was that of the Israeli historian Pinchas E. Lapide (a for- mer Israeli consul in Italy) in his book The Last Three Popes and the Jews (Lon- don, 1967) who claimed that the Catholic Church had saved about 800,000 Jews from certain death during the Shoah. This is far from being accepted by a consensus of historians and lacks any empirical basis.




46. See Pope John Paul II, Spiritual Pilgrimage. Texts on Jews and Judaism 1979-1995 (New York, 1995) edited by Eugene J. Fisher and Leon Klenicki.

47. Darcy O'Brien, The Hidden Pope (New York, 1998) provides a moving account of Karol Woytyla's friendship with his Jewish classmate from Wado- wice, Jerzy Kluger, which has continued to the present day. Kluger survived the war and lives in Rome, where he still periodically meets with the Pope.

48. John Paul II, Spiritual Pilgrimage, p. 62. 49. Henri Tincq, L'Etoile et la Croix. Jean-Paul II-Isragl: l'explication (Paris,

1993), pp. 151-162 for the background to the Edith Stein affair. 50. Ibid., pp. 163-220 for the Pope's relationship to the memory of Ausch-

witz and the international controversy over the Carmelite nuns. 51. "Remembering the Holocaust's Five Million 'Others,"' signed William

A. Donahue, President. The New York Times, April 23, 1999, p. A25. 52. "Catholic-Jewish Ties Hit Choppy Waters," Jewish Week (New York)

March 19, 1999. 53. Jewish groups have long demanded access to the Vatican's archives to

better study its actions during the Holocaust, but this has been refused. On the current situation, see the interview with me in Der Spiegel (Hamberg) 14

April 2001, pp. 64-66. 54. Margherita Marchione, Yours is a Precious Witness. Memoirs of Jews and

Catholics in Wartime Italy (Mahwah, NewJersey, 1997) is a good example of this literature. In her prologue, she admits that her book is not an historical analy- sis but "an apologia in defence of Pope Pius XII, who could not take a public stand against the Nazis without endangering the lives of other human beings." The focus in Marchione's book is on the rescue of Italian Jews but the credit for these noble actions is given exclusively to the Catholic Church-not a position most historians would share. Much more critical views can be found in Giovanni Miccoli, I Dilemmi e i Silenzi di Pio XII. Vaticano, Seconda Guerra Mondi- ale e Shoah (Milano, 2000); Michael Phayer, The Catholic Church and the Holo- caust, 1930-1965 (Bloomington, Indiana, 2000); Susan Zuccotti, Under His Very Windows: the Vatican and the Holocaust in Italy (Bloomington, Indiana, 2001); and in my forthcoming book, Hitler and the Holocaust (New York, 2001).

55. Pope John Paul II, general audience in Rome, May 5, 1999. See L'Osser- vatore Romano, May 5, 1999.



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