Rescuing the Truth: The Holocaust, Christianity, Catholics and Jews
What truth needs rescuing and from what? Truth about the Church and Pius XII needs to replace the falsehoods that Christianity caused the Holocaust and that Pius was "silent" and did nothing to help Jews.
A few years ago, I was a participant at a seminar on the papacy and the Holocaust. The opening speaker charged that the Catholic Church, owing to its historic anti-Judaism, saw the German plan to exterminate the Jews as "desirable." This outrageous claim was followed by a keynote address in which the speaker somehow linked Pius XII to the sex-abuse scandals in Boston. I and others rose to object, pointing to the incontrovertible evidence that disproves the libels such as these commonly accepted at meetings of academic historians.
Afterwards, a woman thanked me for daring to speak out, and asked: "Where are all the great Catholic historians writing hooks and giving addresses answering such attacks?"
Her question points to a phenomenon of the last 40 years. Those few Catholic historians — and even fewer American Catholic historians — who have written about the Church and the Holocaust, with a complete command of the facts, have tended to be ignored. Those supporting the popular misconceptions about the Church and wartime Pope have been widely circulated, praised and quoted in the media and in Catholic circles.
Yet, the neglected Catholic historians were the ones who actually produced the most accurate and impressive work. Within this field, three historians and one document stand out: Christopher Dawson's essential volumes on religious history which emphasize the Jewish roots of Christianity; the pioneering work of the priest-convert Msgr. John Oesterreicher, founder of the Institute for Judeo-Christian Studies at Seton Hall University; Edward Flannery's The Anguish of the Jews, a seminal work on anti-Semitism: and Vatican II's historic document, Nostra Aetate, on non-Christian religions.
But, ironically, the new age inspired by Vatican II brought forth a wave of guilt-ridden Catholics who turned their back on their heritage and began excoriating their Church for past sins, real and imagined. The rebellious atmosphere of the 1960s may have had something to do with it, but whatever the reasons, Catholic historical writing as it touched upon Catholic-Jewish relations and the Holocaust, went into decline. Whereas the earlier generation, represented by Fr. Oesterreicher, viewed the Holocaust as the consequence of a turning away from Christ, the post-Conciliar generation mostly argued that the Holocaust was a product of Christianity itself. Auschwitz — it was argued — may not have been a direct result of the seeds planted by the Gospels and early Church teaching, but there was certainly a connection. Hitler could never have come to power had not Christianity laid the cultural and religious prejudices which he so ruthlessly exploited: so spoke the new Catholic prophets of "truth and candor." Even great saints like St. Maximilian Kolbe, murdered by the Nazis, were accused (falsely) of being caught up in this anti-Semitic tradition. And the bitter irony is that the new writing betrayed Vatican II and men like Oesterreicher, who did so much to bring about Nostra Aetate.
Christian guilt for the Shoah became the reigning academic orthodoxy. Catholic authors like Carl Amery, Friedrich Heer and Rosemary Reuther wrote histories of Catholic-Jewish relations which burned with indignation, foreshadowing the works of James Carroll and Gary Wills. For Catholics, it became acceptable to be ashamed of the Gospel of Christ. And so it remains today — one need only think of the Catholic intelligentsia's embarrassing reaction to Mel Gibson's The Passion of The Christ — with few exceptions.
None of which is to ignore or downplay the grievous sin of anti-Semitism, which has existed for centuries and poisoned the hearts of those who should have known better.
Even if anti-Semitism comes from grave misreadings of the Gospels in times of socio-political disorders, economic collapse, plagues, famines and tyrannical leaders, it will always be anti-Christian.
The latest statement on the muddled subject of Catholicism and anti-Semitism is Frank Coppa's 400-page tome, The Papacy, the Jews, and the Holocaust. Coppa, a professor of history at St. John's University, got a rocky launching from Catholic University of America Press, with this inaccurate and garbled press release: "In 1963, Helmut Hochhuth's play The Deputy sparked controversy about Pius XII's role during the genocide and the general responsibility of previous popes and the Catholic Church in bringing it about." As any marginally informed historian knows, Hochhuth's first name is Rolf, not "Helmut," and it was not Hochhuth who started the falsehoods about Pius XII; it was Communist propagandists eighteen years earlier who carried out a disinformation campaign aimed at destroying Rome's influence in Poland and Eastern Europe. Hochhuth's play only dramatized Stalin's propaganda.
No author can be blamed for the faults of his publisher, but as one reads The Papacy it becomes clear that the book is deeply mired in misinformation and inaccuracies. The book's jacket says the book is neither rabidly anti-papal nor an apology for the Roman Catholic Church. It may not be, but it is to a considerable degree pretentious and unreliable. Aside from failing to distinguish between defamers and defenders accurately, The Papacy relentlessly knocks the Vatican. It is marred by that ancient bias recently given the name "papal phobia." While Coppa does praise those Popes he believes helped Jews, he almost never resists an opportunity to pillory Eugenio Pacelli, the man who was to become Pius XII.
The book's chief weakness is that it adds nothing new that would help us better understand the huge debate going on for decades. In those same decades there have been literally thousands of works on every aspect of Jewish history: its triumphs, its tragedies, anti-Semitic crusades, enforced ghettoes, inquisitions, expulsions, pogroms, and, of course, the Holocaust (Shoah) itself. These works fill libraries. Invariably, the papacy is depicted as playing a menacing role in these one-sided, repetitious and uninformed studies. So, if an author is going to devote yet another work to "The Papacy, the Jews and the Holocaust," a reader has a legitimate expectation of some fresh answers to old questions, or at least a willingness to challenge the faulty orthodoxies now in place. In tracing the history of papal-Jewish relations from Biblical times to the present, this book repeats the revisionist distortions and expands on already-existing myths and legends. This is particularly true in its treatment of Pius XI (1922-1939) as well as of Pius XII (1939-1958).
Numerous traps confront anyone writing about the life and pontificate of Eugenio Pacelli, and this book falls into almost every one. It trots out the oft-repeated allegations about Pius XII being much weaker than Pius XI, whom Pacelli allegedly tried to restrain while serving as his secretary of state. The book repeats the common inaccuracies that Pacelli was "silent" and largely ineffective during the Nazi Holocaust and showed little interest in advancing Catholic-Jewish relations in the post-War period, unlike the Popes who followed him. All of these charges are demonstrably untrue, and should not be repeated — as the latest research makes clear. The Pius now emerging from the new scholarship is far different from the caricature Coppa presents in his unfortunate new book.
Here's a partial correction of inaccuracies about Pacelli in this volume.
As early as 1921, just two years after the Nazi Party was founded, Eugenio Pacelli, then nuncio to Germany, warned Bavarians not to let the threat of Communism blind them to the evils of Nazism. The only other major spokesman of the time to do so, according to historian Charles Bracelen Flood, was Thomas Mann.
- In 1923, Nuncio Pacelli wrote the Vatican, denouncing the Nazi movement as a grave threat, and noting, with approval, the cardinal of Munich's condemnation of anti-Semitism;
- In 1929, right before he departed for Rome to become cardinal secretary of state, Pacelli was telling Germans that Hitler was a man "completely obsessed," capable of destroying everything in his path, including "trampling on corpses";
- In 1930, his first year as Pius XI's secretary of state, and three full years before Hitler obtained power, Pacelli had an editorial published in the L'Osservatore Romano, declaring: "Belonging to the National Socialist Party of Hitler is irreconcilable with the Catholic conscience";
- In 1934, after the Night of the Long Knives, Pacelli came to the defense of its victims, and backed the family of slain Catholic leader Erich Klausener "100 percent," according to Klausener's son (himself a priest);
- In 1935, before a quarter of a million people at Lourdes, Pacelli denounced those "inspired by a false conception of the world and life . . . possessed by the superstition of race and blood";
- In 1936, while touring America, Pacelli made it a point to meet with two prominent American Jewish officials, promising to renew and reinforce the Holy See's teaching against anti-Semitism;
- On March 3, 1939, the day after Pacelli was elected Pope, A. W. Klieforth, the American consul to Berlin, filed a report with the State Department, revealing how Pacelli, as secretary of state, was issuing stark warnings that Hitler was "an untrustworthy scoundrel" and "fundamentally wicked person." Klieforth further noted that Pacelli "did not believe Hitler capable of moderation, in spite of appearances, and he fully supported the German bishops in their anti-Nazi stand." All of these facts have been thoroughly documented; not one is cited by Coppa.
Coppa consistently ignores the primary evidence we have from the German foreign archives that Pacelli vigorously protested Nazi crimes under Pius XI. Two thick volumes of these protests, edited by Dieter Albrecht, were published in 1965 and 1969, but they are not listed in Coppa's bibliography. "Now that these Vatican documents have been released," writes Michael O'Carroll, one of Pacelli's best biographers, "the myth of a conciliatory secretary of state restraining the aggressive old Pontiff dissolves into thin air, whence it came." The recently released archives of Pope Pius XI's pontificate (1922-1939) confirm and reinforce these findings, as experts Matteo Luigi Napolitano (see his website: www.vaticanfiles.net) and Thomas Brechenmacher, have shown. In fact, Brechenmacher, in a definitive essay on the new archives, notes Pacelli's early intervention for German Jews, in April 1933 (just months after Hitler obtained power), commenting: "Pacelli was introducing a new political motive that went beyond normal diplomatic guidelines. In Germany an existential threat was emerging to a non-Catholic section of the population whose representatives had turned to the Holy See for help. The head of Vatican policy recognized the legitimacy of this appeal for help; he saw it as part of the Church's 'universal' mission, not only for its own believers, but for all people. Pacelli realized the extent to which the persecution of the Jews had changed the task of the Catholic Church . . . A new dimension was reached that went far beyond the traditional goal of 'mere' representation of interests and self-preservation." ("Pope Pius XI, Eugenio Pacelli, and the Persecution of the Jews in Nazi Germany, 1933-1939: New Sources from the Vatican Archives," in the German Historical Institute Bulletin [London], November, 2005, pp. 17-44 at 26)
The volume under review follows Peter Godman's rushed and inferior work, Hitler and the Vatican, depicting Pacelli as an overanxious and timid bureaucrat, unable or unwilling to face the challenges of the Third Reich — though even Godman is more fair to Pacelli than is Coppa.
Coppa criticizes the acceptance of the 1933 Concordat without providing the context in which it was accepted by Rome. He simply blames all its deficiencies on Pacelli. Dietrich von Hildebrand, the great anti-Nazi Austrian philosopher, provides a much more nuanced critique:
"Many in the Vatican were against this Concordat. Even the Secretary of State Cardinal Pacelli had many objections. But [Franz] von Papen [prominent German diplomat], known as a daily communicant . . . succeeded in convincing the Pope [Pius XI] of the great advantages which this Concordat would bring to the Church in Germany . . . I personally regretted the Concordat for its psychological effect on the Catholics in Germany, and so did many others. But the Concordat itself did not contain any yielding to Nazism — and Germany was at that time still a militarily weak country. It was not yet the dangerous aggressive power that it became in 1938; Hitler was not yet at the head of a strong and powerful state. Germany was still tolerated as a member of the 'League of Nations' in Geneva; the borders of Germany were still the ones defined in the treaty at Versailles; France was still considered the main power of Europe. But as soon as Pope Pius XI saw that Hitler was not respecting the terms of the Concordat, but was trying to enslave the Church in Germany, he raised his voice in the magnificent encyclical, 'Mit Brennender Sorge.' He did not speak in a conciliatory spirit, but he condemned and attacked with holy authority, like a St. Gregory VII." (Satan at Work [The Remnant Press, no date], p. 41)
But Pacelli, the guiding spirit behind Mit Brennender Sorge and its principal author, gets no credit from Coppa for that great encyclical, because whenever he took a firm stand against the Nazis, we are told, he was acting under duress — "under papal orders."
In this book small mistakes multiply: errors about Pacelli accumulate and cascade off one another like a rising torrent. Describing Kristallnacht, the outburst of Nazi violence against Jews in November 1938, the author writes: "Pius XI, possibly constrained by the secretariat of state, did not personally denounce the barbarism." The fact is that the pogrom was extensively described — and decried — in the Vatican's newspaper, widely read and quoted throughout the world; moreover, when Lord Rothschild organized a meeting to protest the racial persecutions, Cardinal Pacelli sent a letter of solidarity in the name of Pius XI and the Catholic Church. The statement was read publicly at the meeting, and is documented in the Holy See's eleven-volume Actes et Documents du Saint Siege relatifs a la Seconde Guerre Mondiale (Volume 6, pp. 12-13 and 539).
Commenting on Pius XI's famous condemnation of anti-Semitism in 1938, Coppa asserts: "His comment that Catholics were spiritually Semites was deleted by the editors of L'Osservatore Romano under Pacelli's direction, and other Catholic papers in Italy followed suit." The reader is not told that because Benedict XV's World War I comments had been skewed by the hostile Italian press, the official Catholic press in Italy had strict instructions only to publish official, pre-announced addresses of the pontiff. Pius XI's "Spiritually we are all Semites" of September 6, 1938, was a spontaneous, heartfelt outburst before a group of pilgrims. Thus, it was not printed as an official address. The policy had nothing to do with "Pacelli's direction"; it was Catholic policy long before he became secretary of state.
Further, the statement was given the widest circulation both in Italy and abroad, thanks to Pacelli, who was in charge of releasing "unofficial" news to the press. The Tablet of London and, subsequently, the New York Times, highlighted it. Pinchas Lapide notes that shortly after Pius XI made his comments, Pacelli himself "in another public address in Rome . . . repeated Pius XI's dictum: 'It is impossible for a Catholic to be an anti-Semite; spiritually, all of us are Semites.'" In an interview with me, (retired) Archbishop Phillip Hannan, a student of the North American College in Rome at the time, asserted that Pius XI's words were taught to the seminarians of that time, and that the widely-admired Cardinal Pacelli upheld that teaching. (For further descriptions of Pius XI's and Cardinal Pacelli's forceful opposition to Nazism, see the archbishop's memoirs, Rome: Living Under the Axis [St. Andrew's Productions, 2003]).
So deep is the bias in Coppa's volume that it repeats canards that have long since been discredited. Coppa tells us that Pius XI secretly commissioned a "hidden encyclical" against anti-Semitism right before his death and that Pacelli, on becoming Pope, deliberately suppressed this document that condemned Jew-hatred. In fact, as Ronald Rychlak has established, there is not a shred of proof that Pius XII ever saw, much less knowingly suppressed, any part of the "hidden encyclical" — which, in any event, existed in three contradictory drafts, was never finalized, and itself contained anti-Jewish passages. Had it been published, it would have put the modern papacy on record as accepting the worst stereotypes about Jews and Judaism. It was a seriously flawed work-in-progress. Coppa claims that in the days leading up to World War II, Pius made useless appeals on behalf of peace, carefully avoiding any words that might offend the Germans, thus angering the anti-Nazi alliance. Contrast that with what acclaimed wartime reporter William Shirer wrote at the time the Nazis invaded Poland (September 1, 1939):
"On August 24, President Roosevelt had sent urgent telegrams to Hitler and to the president of Poland urging them to settle their differences without resort to arms. In Berlin, at least, there seemed something absurd in the appeal, for the president of Poland was not threatening war; only the Nazi dictator was. Nevertheless, the Pole replied. Hitler did not. So the American president got off another urgent message to the Fuhrer. No response either. On the twenty-fourth the pope, broadcasting to the world, also had urgently called for peace, beseeching 'by the blood of Christ . . . the strong [to] hear that they may not become weak through injustice.' At least publicly more courageous than the American president, the Pope was pointing the finger at Hitler.'" (20th Century Journey, Volume II, The Nightmare Years: 1930-1940 [Little, Brown and Company, 1984], p. 434)
Coppa asserts that Pius XII "never did condemn" anti-Semitism explicitly during his pontificate. But two sentences before that assertion, he acknowledges that Summi Pontificatus, Pius XII's first encyclical, published just weeks after the beginning of World War II, condemned racism and totalitarianism, stressed the unity of the human race, and taught "that in Christ there is neither Gentile nor Jew." If that is not a clear-cut condemnation of anti-Semitism, what is? Moreover, Pius XII did indeed raise his voice "explicitly" on behalf of Jews throughout the war — notably in his confrontational meeting with Germany's foreign minister, Ribbentrop (March, 1940); in the pages of L'Osservatore Romano, through bishops and nuncios and official protests; and in a 1944 public appeal for Jews, recorded by his lead biographer:
"'For centuries,' he said, referring to the Jews, 'they have been most unjustly treated and despised. It is time they were treated with justice and humanity. God wills it and the Church wills it. St. Paul tells us that the Jews are our brothers. Instead of being treated as strangers they should be welcomed as friends." (Eugenio Pacelli: Pope of Peace by Oscar Halecki [Farrar, Straus and Young, Inc. revised edition, 1954], p. 357)
Coppa also leaves unmentioned Pius' "explicit" wartime condemnations of Hitler, Nazism and anti-Semitism issued over Vatican Radio (which I heavily document in The Pius War, an anthology briefly mentioned by Coppa, but never, apparently, read). The Nazis so hated Vatican Radio that they arrested and even executed German citizens caught listening to it. Coppa completely ignores these "martyrs of the airwaves," who are proof that the Holy See was not only anti-Nazi, but outspokenly so. He does not refer to the testimony of Robert M.W. Kempner, deputy prosecutor at Nuremberg, who asserted that Pius XII did vigorously protest the Final Solution ("the archives of the Vatican, of the diocesan authorities and of [Germany's] Foreign Ministry, contain a whole series of protests — direct and indirect, diplomatic and public, secret and open").
But the misinterpreted wartime statement of French Cardinal Eugene Tisserant — "I am afraid history will reproach the Holy See for following a policy of convenience for itself, and not much more" — is reported without any reference to the fact that Tisserant emphatically stated that his words were directed against certain members of the Curia, not Pius XII. After certain historians tried to misuse his statement, Tisserant made clear that he thought Pius had guided the Church "with invincible strength."
Predictably, Coppa repeats familiar claims that Pius was obsessed with Communism at the expense of opposing Nazism. This is flatly contradicted by Pius' support for America's lend-lease program to Russia, as well as the testimony of Jesuit Father Paolo Dezza, who, speaking of a 1942 meeting with Pius, wrote: "Also on this occasion the falsity of those who say that he kept silent wishing to support the Nazis against the Russians and the Communists appears very clear; and I recall that he said to me: 'Yes, the Communists are a danger, but at this moment the Nazi danger is greater still'" — comments the Pope repeated to the Hungarian premier, who recorded: "He [Pius XII] finds incomprehensible all that which Germany does with regard to the Church, the Jews, and the people in the occupied territories . . . He is quite aware of the terrible dangers of Bolshevism, but he feels that in spite of the Soviet regime, the soul of the large masses of Russian people has remained more Christian than the soul of the German people." Coppa suggests that the Vatican-based diplomats, Francois Charles Roux (of France) and Harold Tittmann (from America) were exasperated with Pius' wartime conduct, but I have interviewed the sons of both men who told me just the opposite: Their fathers thought Pius XII was "a hero," a "saint," a "man of steel."
It is now known that Pius XII took part in several plots to overthrow Hitler (a fact Coppa mentions only in passing, and without mentioning the fact, divulged by conspirator Joseph Mueller, that Pius based his public conduct largely on the counsel of the anti-Nazi German resistance). Hitler returned the favor: He planned to kidnap, deport and possibly murder the pope.
At the center of this book is the Pope's public reaction to the Nazis' extermination of Jews. Coppa asserts that Pius "was unwilling to go beyond general condemnations of violence and brutality" in his Christmas addresses. But the evidence contradicts the accuracy of this claim. Tittmann's posthumously-published memoir (Inside the Vatican of Pius XII [Doubleday, 2004]) reveals that Pius, asked by the Allies in 1942 for a new condemnation of the Third Reich, offered to "explicitly" condemn the Nazis, but when the Allies found out that Pius would likewise condemn Soviet atrocities, the Western Allies, aligned with Russia at the time, decided to drop their request: more "explicit" condemnations were not necessary — Stalin's support for the war against Hitler was judged more important.
Furthermore, it is misleading to pretend that Pius' principled words against the extermination of people based upon their race were lost on anyone. Charles Pichon, a wartime correspondent listed in Coppa's bibliography but never quoted, wrote of Pius' Christmas addresses during the Holocaust: "The pontifical texts condemned most clearly the anti-Semitic persecutions." As a result, and as captured German archives prove, the Nazis denounced Pius as the "mouthpiece of the Jewish war criminals" who was "clearly speaking on behalf of the Jews." Similarly inaccurate is Coppa's assertion that the Poles begged Pius to denounce Nazi war crimes in Poland, but that he refused. The truth is that Pius sent condemnations of Hitler's atrocities to Polish bishops to be read publicly, but it was the bishops who chose not to release them, fearing Nazi reprisals. Even the ex-priest and Vatican critic Carlo Falconi has pointed this out.
Coppa recounts how Jacques Maritain asked the Pope to publicly condemn anti-Semitism in July 1946, but was allegedly rebuffed, and thus left "deeply disappointed." Coppa comments: "Had Pius issued the public condemnation of anti-Semitism in 1946 that Maritain urged . . . his legacy would probably have been different." This is misleading, to say the least. Pius had condemned hatred of the Jews throughout the war — for which Maritain praised him, noting that these statements "had won for him the gratitude of the Jews and all those who care for the human race." This concern continued after the war ended. Pius, addressing a Jewish audience on November 29, 1945, decried "the abyss of dissension, hatred, and mania for persecution [which] has swallowed up innumerable victims . . . the Catholic Church and her real children know how to rise above the narrow and arbitrary limits drawn by human selfishness and race hatred." On August 3, 1946 — less than a month after Maritain made his request — Pius XII explicitly condemned "fanatical anti-Semitism" to a group that needed to hear that most — the Judeo-phobic Supreme Arab Committee on Palestine. The text of his speech, given wide publicity, was published on the front page of L'Osservatore Romano — not that this would affect Pius' "legacy" among those unwilling to consider all available evidence.
The tendentious assault is tireless. A letter from Edith Stein, St. Theresa Benedicta of the Cross, is misused to assail the papacy, with no indication that Stein was a strong supporter of the Holy See. The false allegation that Pius instructed French authorities to keep baptized Jewish children "even . . . from their own families" is repeated. And there is no mention that competent scholars have shown the charge was totally without merit.
One final instance of this tirade against Pius. Coppa writes: "Before his death, John XXIII had allegedly read Rolf Hochhuth's The Deputy, which renewed his determination to proceed with the transformation of Christian-Jewish relations." How does one know that John read Hochhuth's vicious political diatribe in the last stages of his fatal illness? Coppa learned it by reading James Carroll's error-laden Constantine's Sword, where the bitter former priest imagines John XXIII on his deathbed condemning Pius XII. Rychlak, in Righteous Gentiles, has this to say about Carroll's fantasy: "No eyewitness has ever come forward to support that story. The postulator of John XXIII's cause for canonization, Fr. Luca De Rosa, OFM, states that the story is 'absolutely untrue.' He adds that Pope John was in fact 'full of admiration and devotion' for Pius XII. Archbishop Loris Capovilla, formerly private secretary to Pope John, also categorically denies that Pope John ever said any such thing, calling it 'a lie.'"
Scraps of evidence in favor of Pius XII are occasionally offered in this study, but very soon withdrawn. There is faint praise for Pius, but so faint that it is hardly praise. Coppa's sources for disparaging the Pope are uniformly unreliable. The book relies heavily on critics like David Kertzer, Susan Zuccotti, John Cornwell and the conspiracy-mongering The Vatican Exposed: Money, Murder and the Mafia, to exhume outright falsehoods like the claim that the papacy aided and abetted Nazi war criminals.
As the book nears its conclusion, one is relieved to be escaping this wearying collection of misrepresentations only to find Coppa's climatic allegation. Pius' successors are presented as engineering a sharp and decisive break with Pius. Granted, there is a considerable cultural fault line between Pius and his successors — John XXIII, Paul VI and John Paul II — but each of them revered Pius. They recognized that Pius had taken steps along the path toward rapprochement with the Jewish community that they would each in his own way continue. Pius XII's pontificate was the beginning of a great reconciliation.
At Christmas 1949, Pius implored Catholics and Jews to forge a spiritual alliance against militant atheism, a theme he had introduced in his first encyclical, Summi Pontificatus, issued ten years earlier (1939). In 1957, just a year before his death, Pius XII delivered a heartfelt address to the American Jewish Committee, moving the New York Times to run this headline: "Pontiff Deplores Racial Injustices; He Tells U.S. Jewish Group That He Supports Its Fight for the Rights of Man." According to Monsignor Oesterreicher, it was Pius XII who laid the groundwork for Nostra Aetate (indeed, Pius's personal confessor, Augustine Cardinal Bea, was one of its architects).
Other than Sacred Scripture and the early Church Fathers, no other Catholic source is quoted as frequently by the Council as Pius XII. Contrary to what Coppa would have us believe, Pius XII's successors had the highest regard for him. John Paul II actually called him a "great Pope" (a title recently repeated by Pope Benedict XVI), and told a Jewish community in Miami in 1987: "I am convinced that history will reveal ever more clearly and convincingly how deeply Pius XII felt the tragedy of the Jewish people, and how hard and effectively he worked to assist them during the Second World War."
A number of Catholic historians have recognized Pius' stature. In 2002, Jose Sanchez published Pius XII and the Holocaust: Understanding the Controversy, which concluded: "Most of the Pope's critics tend to extremism, while defenders tend toward moderation." Two Jesuit historians, Vincent Lapomarda and Gerald Fogarty, have produced model works of scholarship on the Church's record under the Nazis. Lapomarda, who coordinates the Hiatt Collection of Holocaust Materials at the College of the Holy Cross, is the author of a classic work, The Jesuits and the Third Reich [Edwin Mellen Press, revised and updated, 2005] and maintains his own Holocaust web page. Fogarty, an expert on diplomatic and papal archives, has delivered a series of addresses on the Vatican and the Nazis, defending Pius XII, and is expected to publish his findings soon. Professor Patrick Gallo, a specialist of modern Italian history at New York University, has published three scholarly books praising Pius XI and Pius XII. Gallo's colleague at NYU, Professor Stewart Stehlin, a leading authority on the Vatican's relationship with Germany, recently delivered a major address in support of Pius XII. Hosted by the German Historical Institute in London, it was heavily attended, and was covered by the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung (3/30/06), Germany's leading paper. The article was followed by an open letter to the editor (4/8/06) calling for the canonization of Pius XII.
And on that score, a major conference was recently held in Rome on Pius XII, with top-flight European scholars and Vatican prelates in attendance, hailing the wealth of new scholarship on his behalf. Pointing to the thousands of pages of documentation the Holy See has gathered in support of Pius XII, Fr. Peter Gumpel, of the Congregation for the Causes of Saints, stated that the cause of the wartime pontiff is "well-advanced."
Even more telling to Catholic-Jewish relations are those Jewish historians who have labored brilliantly to set the record straight. In a valuable anthology, Essays on Anti-Semitism [Conference on Jewish Relations, 1946], published right after the war, and still better than most books on the subject, Salo W. Baron, eminent Jewish scholar from Columbia University, wrote these words of caution: "It is hoped that the essays included in the present volume will promote the necessary understanding of the history and psychology of anti-Semitism by both Jews and non-Jews. While the available literature on anti-Semitism can easily fill entire libraries, there are few dispassionate, scholarly studies which can give guidance to a serious student of the problem." The first essay of the volume is a contribution by Koppel S. Pinson, an authority on the Nazi era, in which he documents the actions and statements of the Holy See, declaring: "We may agree or disagree with the general lines of political policy of the Vatican. But this much is undisputed fact: never has the papacy spoken in such unmistakable terms against racialism and anti-Semitism as in the words and deeds of the present pope, Pius XII, and his predecessor Pius XI."
Michael Tagliacozzo, a survivor of the Nazi round-up of Rome's Jews, has emerged as the leading supporter of Pius XII's life-saving reaction to the round-up, the subject of much misinformation. Thanks to Rabbi David Dalin, Catholics have been reminded of the positive philo-Semitic tradition within the Church, which has existed for centuries and often been fostered by the papacy. In a recent interview with Sir Martin Gilbert (Inside the Vatican, August 2003), one of the most acclaimed Holocaust scholars and historians in the world, I asked him to summarize Christianity's record during the Holocaust. He said that he has "never minimized the complicity of individual Christians, or the role of Christian anti-Semitism, or the betrayal of Christian rescuers by their fellow Christians." He then went on to praise the record of Pius XII and to endorse the Holy Sees 1998 statement, We Remember: A Reflection on the Shoah. That statement reminded the world: 'During and after the war, Jewish communities and Jewish leaders expressed their thanks for all that had been done for them, including what Pope Pius XII did personally or through his representatives to save hundreds of thousands of Jewish lives."
Said Gilbert: "That is certainly correct. Hundreds of thousands of Jews, saved by the entire Catholic Church, under the leadership and with the support of Pope Pius XII, would, to my mind, be absolutely correct."
In another interview with UPI, Gilbert, upon the publication of his work, Never Again: A History of the Holocaust [Universe, 2000], wondered why so many Christians and Catholics were rushing to condemn their own heritage and engaging in a mad rush to ''apologize" themselves into irrelevance.
While there were certainly bad Christians and collaborators during the Holocaust, he said, "they were the exception and not the rule: "It's somehow a mistake he said, "to associate a long Christian tradition to convert Jews and other persecutions with what we call the Holocaust, which was conceived and carried out by people who certainly were not Christians and were hostile to every Christian value and were abhorrent to churches and to many devout Christians . . ."
He noted that Christians were among the first victims of Nazis. "One of the things I try to bring out in my book is that the Christian Churches took a very powerful stand . . . Even the dependent German churches that struggled to maintain their independence and were actually destroyed took a very strong stand . . . At every stage of the Holocaust, the Church had no hesitation. In every [occupied] country you have extremists who collaborated]. In the main, these extremists had already been denounced by the mainstream politics of the country and by the churches."
Gilbert noted that it was individual Christian leaders in each country who exercised or failed to exercise their moral leadership, and in the main most did so.
On the question of Pope Pius XII Gilbert said: ''Rather than being indignant about what the Pope didn't do, I try to find out what the Catholic Churches and churchmen and Pacelli himself actually did do . . . So the test for Pacelli was when the Gestapo came to Rome in 1943 to round up Jews. And the Catholic Church, on his direct authority, immediately dispersed as many Jews as they could."
He noted that thousands of Jews were saved in this way. "If the [current] Pope has to apologize, perhaps someone could also thank him. In fact, my book does thank him for what the Vatican did to save Jewish lives (Catholic World News Brief, May 24, 2000)
William Doino is an American scholar and researcher.
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