Pope Pius XII: Silence in the Din of War
By Rand York+
“Fools,” said I, “You do not know
Silence like a cancer grows
Hear my words that I might teach you
Take my arms that I might reach you”
But my words like silent raindrops fell
And echoed in the wells
Of silence
-Sounds of
Silence by Paul Simon
Rolf Hochhuth was fourteen years old
when the Third Reich fell in 1945. As his world crumbled around him, the young
German sought to bring order to his own internal confusion by studying the
history of Nazi rule in Germany. “Again and again I came to think, ‘What would
you yourself have done if you were old enough to act?’”[1]
Ralph McInery believes Hochhuth’s solution to the shame that he felt as a young
German was to project it onto an old non-German:
“Since history
could not provide him with the Pius XII he wanted, Hochhuth invented one of his
own… In 1963 The Deputy, a sprawling
incoherent play that would have taken seven hours to be acted in its entirety,
burst upon the world. Rolf Hochhuth had found the answer for his own and
everyone else’s guilt. His preposterous thesis was that Pius XII was
responsible for the extermination of the Jews.”[2]
Why
would such a thing find a receptive audience in a world, Jewish and Gentile
alike, that had heaped praise on Pius XII from early in World War II until well
after his death in 1958? Joseph Sobran believes that the times, they were
indeed a’changing:
But during the
late 1960s liberalism changed, moving sharply leftward and adopting the sexual
revolution as part of its agenda. As it embraced abortion, homosexuality, and
radical feminism, subverting the entire Western ethos of the family, it turned
venomously against the Catholic Church, the mother and champion of that ethos.
And liberals, like the Communists before them, found that the surest way to
discredit the Church was to associate her with their devil, Hitler.[3]
The
most recent flurry of academic controversy surrounding Pius XII was ignited
following a papal commission report in 1998 entitled, We Remember: A Reflection on the Shoah. In it, the commission
credited Pius XII with saving hundreds of thousands of Jews in World War II.
The first critical bombshell was dropped one year later with the publication of
Hitler’s Pope by John Cornwell. A
Senior Research Fellow at Jesus College in Cambridge, Cornwell began his
research with the intention of vindicating Pius XII. He was thus granted
extensive access to Vatican archives. At the end of this period of research,
Cornwell say he was in a state of “moral shock,” with his findings leading,
“not to an exoneration, but to a wider indictment.”[4]
Cornwell enjoys a wide reputation as the author of two successful books on
events in the history of the Roman Catholic Church, the other being A Thief in the Night: The Death of Pope John
Paul I, but his scholarship is found wanting by some, as evidenced by this
example from Sobran:
In a key
sentence, Mr. Cornwell himself mischievously inserts the word “deserved”; Pius,
he tacitly admits, did not use it. Citing a 1938 Vatican document, he writes:
“And now, ‘blinded by their dream of worldly gain and material success,’ they
[the Jews] deserved the ‘worldly and spiritual ruin’ that they had brought down
upon themselves.” So Mr. Cornwell is paraphrasing a Vatican paper, apparently a
draft of a papal encyclical that was never issued. Pius himself didn’t even
write the document, but Mr. Cornwell artfully imputes anti-Semitism to it, then
infers that this reflects Pius’s personal attitude. What scholarship! By such
methods you can prove anything you like.[5]
Cornwell’s book had an intended
audience well beyond academia, and so academia was only too eager to respond.
Such responses were not slow in coming and covered an entire spectrum, from
defenders of the pope such as Ronald Rychlak, Ralph McInery, Joseph Bottum,
David Dalin, and Margherita Marchione; to moderates such as Giovanni Miccoli
and Jose Sanchez; to additional critics of the pope such as Susan Zuccotti,
Michael Phayer, and Daniel Jonah Goldhagen.
Goldhagen’s book, A Moral Reckoning: The Role of the Catholic
Church in the Holocaust and Its Unfulfilled Duty of Repair, reveals in its
title Goldhagen’s conclusion that
Christianity in general, and the Catholic Church in particular, are
collectively responsible for anti-Semitism and the horrors of the Holocaust.
His assumption that the Holocaust is rooted solely in anti-Semitism betrays the
Jewish co-option of the event over the decades since the war ended, something
that will be addressed later in this study. The collective guilt implicit in
the title and explicit in the book itself is seemingly challenged early on by
Goldhagen himself, when he states: “The charge of collective guilt hinders
moral inquiry. When it is asserted as a moral fact – that collective guilt
exists – it focuses attention on the collectivity, which divests the individual
of his individuality, of his moral agency, and his individual moral
responsibility.”[6]
Having made the disclaimer, Goldhagen then charges ahead with his assertion
that: “The Church, Pius XII, and bishops and priests across Europe reckoned
morally during the Nazi period and, by and large, decided that allowing or
abetting the Germans’ and their helpers’ persecution of the Jews and even
letting the Jews die was preferable to intervening on their behalf.”[7]
So, Goldhagen has chosen to focus
solely on sins (and more those of omission than commission, at that), and to
ignore the Church’s “good deeds” done in the same context. This approach is
more political than scholarly, in that it fails to allow for sins of omission
to be actually the choices of lesser evils. To insist that the Church be
hysterical rather than smart in its approach to evil is not unlike asking the
Church to emulate President Jimmy Carter when he protested Soviet presence in
Afghanistan by cutting off American grain sales to the USSR (which had no
effect on the Soviets, but was a windfall for the farmers of South America,
Asia, and Europe, at the expense of American farmers), and by refusing to allow
the U.S. Olympic Team to travel to Moscow to compete (giving the USSR twice as
many medals as usual, at the expense of American athletes).
Goldhagen finds anti-Semitism rooted
in the Gospels, in passages such as, “And all the people answered, ‘His blood
be on us and on our children’” (Matthew 27:25) and “By this it may be seen who
are the children of God, and who are the children of the devil” (I John 3:10).[8] It
must be noted here that John in his epistle is differentiating between those
who obey God and those who do not, not between Gentiles and Jews (of which John
was one). Regardless, Goldhagen goes
on to say that it should all be disregarded as in any way authoritative,
because, “These texts were written many decades after Jesus’ death by people
who had no firsthand knowledge of the events of his life but who were embroiled
in the nascent Christian community’s intensive rivalry with Judaism and whose
enmity for Jews was manifest and clearly stated.”[9]
“No firsthand knowledge”? Matthew, Mark, John, Paul, Peter, James, and Jude
were all Jews, and they were all there.
Goldhagen provides no substantiation for his claim; he just makes it, assuming
it is self-evident, and moves on. There is much more in Goldhagen that is
similarly agenda-driven. Sobran offers an interesting summary statement
regarding this: “Pius XII isn’t Goldhagen’s ultimate target; Christianity is…
Goldhagen has produced a monument of intellectual ethnocentrism and paranoid
slander.”[10]
It is worth examining not only a
representative list of authors, but also a comparative list of publishers, with
defenders of Pius being published by such houses as Paulist, St. Augustine’s,
and Our Sunday Visitor; while critics have behind them the power, “of
distribution advertising, and influence enjoyed by Doubleday, Houghton Mifflin,
Knopf, and Viking.”[11]
Sobran also weighs in on this by asking, “Can you imagine a major New York
publisher or magazine welcoming a book in defense of Pius XII?”[12]
Suffice it to say that the power or reach of the publisher is not necessarily
an indication of the value of the argument. Prior to considering these
arguments, some additional historical context is necessary.
The First World War left Central
Europe, and especially Germany, economically shattered and saddled with the
burden of paying for the entire war. The 1919 Treaty of Versailles, in which
the victorious Allies extracted such extreme punishment of Germany that even
the United States objected to it, was characterized by Pope Benedict XV as a
“consecration of hatred” and a “perpetuation of war.”[13]
The Vatican was explicitly barred by the Allies from the peace process, after
having put forth its own comprehensive peace plan in 1917, which was rejected
out of hand by the Allies, but engaged and countered by the Kaiser. It fell to
the young, freshly minted papal nuncio to Germany, Monsignor Eugenio Pacelli,
to present that Vatican peace proposal to the Kaiser.[14]
Thus did the man who would become Pope Pius XII begin his service as papal
nuncio to Germany, a job he kept for twelve years. Pacelli did his job so well
that in 1929, Pope Pius XI brought him back to Rome to become the Vatican
Secretary of State.[15]
Pius XI, who had succeeded Benedict
XV as pope in 1922, became Pacelli’s mentor in international diplomacy,
especially the Vatican’s relations with the rest of Europe. With regard to Nazi
persecution of the Jews, which began following Hitler’s ascendancy to power in
1933, Pius XI made it clear that Christianity and anti-Semitism were mutually
exclusive, declaring in 1938 that, “Spiritually, we are all Semites.”[16]
Pacelli’s extensive background as Secretary of State and virtual hand-picked
successor to the outspoken and fearless Pius XI (who once left the Vatican for
the seclusion of Castle Gandolfo in order to avoid having to meet Hitler, who
was on a state visit to Rome),[17]
should have prepared the future Pius XII well for the challenges that lay
ahead.
How well prepared was Pius XII and
what did he do? To some extent, it is arguable that Pius XII was thrown into
the deep end of the pool when he acceded to the chair of St. Peter in 1939, the
same year that Germany’s invasion of Poland became the final spark touching off
the conflagration of World War II. He was, however, well prepared. He may have
been in the deep end, but he knew how to swim, and he was well versed not only
in the issues at hand, but was also widely traveled and knew many of the key
players personally. He knew the issues and the players well enough to defer to
his German bishops and permit them to act as the Catholic front line in the
delicate struggle to minimize the harm the Nazis might do to the innocent.[18]
In this decision, he was following in the footsteps of his predecessor, Pius
XI, who deferred to the German bishops on the question of how to respond to the
Communists in Germany.[19]
The decision to give the greater influence to the local bishops was a
recognition by the pope of just how delicate the task was. As early as 1936,
any Catholics determined by the Nazis to be “recalcitrant” were treated just as
severely as were the Jews.[20]
It is important to remember that Jews were just one of many groups to be
targeted by Hitler. Jews themselves stressed this point repeatedly in trying to
persuade a reluctant America to enter the war.[21]
By the time the war was over, Jews made up about 10% of some 50 to 60 million
victims of a worldwide holocaust.[22]
Violent spasms, large and small, rocked the planet. The “Rape of Nanking” cost
an estimated 300,000 Chinese civilian lives in that one city alone, and some
700,000 Serbian Orthodox Christians were slaughtered in Croatia.[23]
Allied bombing of the Japanese mainland cost hundreds of thousands of Japanese
lives, and the Nazis killed Gypsies and others with the same ruthless
efficiency they used on Jews.
In this atmosphere, what should a
pope do? Referring to Vatican protests of Nazi atrocities, the Oxford Dictionary of Popes notes: “What
remains clear is that the veiled or generalized language traditional to the
curia was not a suitable instrument for dealing with cynically planned world
domination and genocide.”[24]
True enough. The Allied war machine was the suitable instrument for that. This
does not mean, however, that Pius XII either was or should have been silent.
Justo Gonzalez sees Pius XII’s strategy as one of neutrality which, “was
achieved at the cost of silence in the face of Nazi atrocities against the
Jews,” and which was born out of a desire, “to protect the church at all
costs.”[25]
The pope’s “silence” has become what Sobran calls a “Virtual Truth – a
falsehood repeated so often that it becomes futile to refute it.”[26]
Perhaps Pius XII’s most famous and
most dangerous statement came in his Christmas broadcast of 1942. Remember that
Pius himself was a head of state, with no army other than a dapper little band
of Swiss guards, on an island in a sea of Fascism.[27]
In his Christmas address to the world Pius XII had this to say: “Mankind owes
that vow (to reestablish a just society) to the hundreds of thousands of
persons who, without any fault on their part, sometimes only because of their
nationality or race, have been consigned to death or to a slow decline.”[28]
When President Franklin Roosevelt asked him to be more specific and condemn
Hitler, Pius replied that, “if he did so, he would also have to condemn Stalin.
Roosevelt withdrew the request.”[29]
Pius XII had constantly to choose his words carefully, and still they could
become lost in the cacophony of war, becoming the silent raindrops of Paul
Simon’s Sounds of Silence.
There was also the danger of
speaking out without adequate documentation. Michael Marrus notes: “Historians
of the Holocaust regularly distinguish between having “information” and having
“knowledge” of the murder of European Jews.[30]
Giovanni Montini, later to become Pope Paul VI, was an assistant to Pius XII
during this time, and he put it this way: “The Holy See… could not control the
exactness of all the news it received… The Holy See did not, however, miss any
opportunity to intervene and help the Jews every time it could.”[31]
St. James teaches: “If one of you
says to them, ‘Go in peace, be warmed and filled,’ without giving them the
things needed for the body, what does it profit? So faith by itself, if it has
no works, is dead” (James 2:16-17). There are words, and there is action. We
have touched briefly on the words of Pius XII. We now turn to his actions.
It is remarkable that so many of
today’s scholars, Jewish and otherwise, choose to overlook the myriad
testimonies of Pius XII’s own contemporaries, Jewish and otherwise. In one case
the two happen to be the same entity: The
New York Times. While the NYT of
today laments that Pius XII failed to do his part to stop Hitler, the NYT of the war years printed story after
story telling of the pope’s successful efforts to stop French Jews from being
deported (1942), of Catholic leaders hiding Jewish children in France (1943),
of German bishops resisting the Nazis (1943), of sheltering the Jews of Italy
in basilicas, convents, and even in the Vatican itself (1943).[32]
Among Pius XII’s contemporaries, the following is a brief but representative
listing of comments:
·
Israeli
diplomat Pinchas Lapide: “The Catholic Church under the pontificate of
Pius XII was instrumental in saving at
least 700,000, but probably as many as 860,000 Jews from certain death at Nazi
hands.”[33]
·
Albert
Einstein: “Only the Church stood squarely across the path of Hitler’s campaign
for suppressing the truth. Only the Church protested against the Hitlerian
onslaught on liberty.”
·
Dr.
Alexander Shafran, chief rabbi of Romania: “In our worst hours of trial, the
generous aid and noble support of the Holy See… has been decisive.”
·
The
American Jewish Welfare Board: “We have received reports from our military
chaplains in Italy of the aid and protection to Italian Jews by the Vatican…
From the bottom of our hearts we send you the assurances of undying gratitude.”
·
Isaac
Herzog, chief rabbi of Jerusalem: “I thank the Pope and the Church from the
bottom of my heart for all the help they have afforded.”
·
Moshe
Sharett, leading Zionist: “I told [Pius XII] that my first duty was to thank
him, and through him, the Catholic Church… for all they had done in the various
countries to rescue Jews, to save children.”
·
Raffaele
Cantoni, Jewish Welfare Committee of Italy: “The Catholic Church and the papacy
have given proof that they saved as many Jews as they could.”
·
London’s
Jewish Chronicle: “A word of sincere
and earnest appreciation is due from Jews to the Vatican for its intervention
in Berlin and Vichy on behalf of their tortured co-religionists in France.”[34]
Perhaps the most authoritative and
ringing endorsement of all came from Israel Zolli, chief rabbi of Rome during
the war. Many Jews converted to the Catholic faith during the war in an attempt
to escape the reach of the Nazis. Not so, Zolli. He worked closely with Pius
XII, but remained a Jew in order to maintain his connection with his people at
a critical time. It was after the war ended that Zolli converted, along with
his wife. Not only did he convert when such an act would no longer do him any
practical good, but he was so impressed with and grateful for Pius XII that he
took Pius’s name, Eugenio, as his own. Sobran notes that, “It’s inconceivable
that Zolli would have honored Pius by taking his name if he had thought that
Pius was in any way favorable to Hitler.”[35]
And one would think that Zolli would be in a quite personal position to know.
He would not need to consult archives.
Pope Pius XII had the formidable
task of applying a simple concept in a complex situation. The command is
simple: “You shall love your neighbor as yourself” (Leviticus 19:18; Matthew
19:19; 22:39). The situation was complex: World War II was the most complicated
and horrific conflagration the world has ever known. The difficulty of the
present controversy surrounding the words and deeds of Pius XII lies in the
very inscrutability such studies face. More questions seem to be raised than
answered. But the consistency of Pius XII was in his intrepid determination to
be of the most help and to do the least harm in every given situation.
When fearful
martyrdom came to our people, the voice of the pope was raised for its victims.
The life of our times was enriched by a voice speaking out about great moral
truths above the tumult of daily conflict.” – Golda Meir[36]
©2013
Rand York
Bibliography
Bottum,
Joseph & David G. Dalin (eds.). The
Pius War: Responses to the Critics of Pius XII. New York: Lexington, 2004.
Cheetham,
Nicolas. Keepers of the Keys. New
York: Charles Scribner’s, 1982.
Cornwell,
John. Hitler’s Pope. New York:
Viking, 1999.
Godman,
Peter. Hitler and the Vatican: Inside the
Secret Archives that Reveal the New Story of the Nazis and the Church. New
York: Free Press, 2004.
Goldhagen,
Daniel Jonah. A Moral Reckoning: The Role
of the Catholic Church in the Holocaust and Its Unfulfilled Duty of Repair.
New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2002.
Gonzalez,
Justo L. The Story of Christianity,
Volume 2: The Reformation to the Present Day. San Francisco: HarperCollins,
1985.
Kelly,
J.N.D. The Oxford Dictionary of Popes.
Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1986.
Lapide,
Pinchas E. Three Popes and the Jews.
New York: Hawthorn, 1967.
McInery,
Ralph. The Defamation of Pius XII.
South Bend, IN: St. Augustine’s Press, 2001.
Phayer,
Michael. The Catholic Church and the
Holocaust, 1930-1965. Indianapolis: Indiana University Press, 2000.
Pope Pius XII and the Holocaust. (Nihil Obstat
& Imprimatur). A Catholic Response, 1998. http://users.binary.net/polycarp/piusxii/html
Rittner,
Carol & John K. Roth (eds.). Pope
Pius XII and the Holocaust. London: Leicester University Press, 2002.
Sanchez,
Jose M. Pius XII and the Holocaust:
Understanding the Controversy. Washington: Catholic University of America
Press, 2002.
Schoenberg,
Shira. Pope Pius XII and the Holocaust.
Jewish Virtual Library, 2007. http://www.jewishvirtuallibrary.org/jsource/anti-semitism/pius.html
Sobran,
Joseph. Amnesia at the Paper of Record.
Sobran’s, November 2000. http://www.sobran.com/columns/1999-2001/001116.shtml
Sobran,
Joseph. Changing the Story. Sobran’s,
May 2000. http://www.sobran.com/columns/1999-2001/000502.shtml
Sobran,
Joseph. The Church and Jewish Ideology.
Sobran’s, May 1999.
Sobran,
Joseph. The Cross and the Swastika.
Sobran’s, February 2002. http://www.sobran.com/columns/2002/020205.shtml
Sobran,
Joseph. For the Record. Sobran’s,
August 2001.
Sobran,
Joseph. The Friends of Uncle Joe.
Sobran’s, April 2000.
Sobran,
Joseph. Hitler’s Pope? Sobran’s,
September 1999.
Sobran,
Joseph. Imperfect Contrition.
Sobran’s, May 2000.
Sobran,
Joseph. In Defense of Bob Jones.
Sobran’s, March 2000
Sobran,
Joseph. The Paper of Record’s Memory
Hole. Sobran’s 2001.
Sobran,
Joseph. Smearing a Pope. Sobran’s,
March 2000.
[1] Ralph McInery. The Defamation of Pius XII. (South Bend, IN: St. Augustine’s Press,
2001) 156.
[2] Ibid. 158
[3] Joseph Sobran. The
Paper of Record’s Memory Hole. Sobran’s 2001. http://www.sobran.com/issuetexts/2001-01.htm
[4] John Cornwell. Hitler’s
Pope. (New York: Viking, 1999) viii.
[5] Joseph Sobran. Hitler’s
Pope? Sobran’s, September 1999. http://www.sobran.com/columns/1999-2001/990914.shtml ¶3-4.
[6] Daniel Jonah Goldhagen. A Moral Reckoning: The Role of the Catholic
Church in the Holocaust and Its Unfulfilled Duty of Repair. )New York:
Alfred A. Knopf, 2002) 9.
[7] Ibid. 15.
[8]
The second passage comes from an epistle, not a gospel. Rather than pointing to
this as scholastic ignorance, we will give Goldhagen the benefit of the doubt
and assume that he is intentionally including the entire New Testament under
the single heading: “Gospels.”
[9]
Goldhagen. Op. cit. 21.
[10] Joseph Sobran. The
Cross and the Swastika. Sobran’s, February 2002. http://www.sobran.com/columns/2002/020205.shtml ¶5, 13.
[11] Joseph Bottum & David G. Dalin (eds.). The Pius War: Responses to the Critics of
Pius XII. (New York: Lexington, 2004) 2.
[12] Joseph Sobran. Hitler’s Pope? Op. cit. ¶6.
[13] Cheetham,
Nicolas. Keepers of the Keys. (New
York: Charles Scribner’s, 1982) 277.
[14] Ibid. 276.
[15] Ibid. 286.
[16] Ibid. 289.
[17] Ibid. 284.
[18] Michael Phayer. The
Catholic Church and the Holocaust, 1930-1965. (Indianapolis: Indiana
University Press, 2000) 76. Jose M. Sanchez. Pius XII and the Holocaust: Understanding the Controversy.
(Washington: Catholic University of America Press, 2002) 166.
[19] Peter Godman. Hitler
and the Vatican: Inside the Secret Archives that Reveal the New Story of the
Nazis and the Church. (New York: Free Press, 2004) 39.
[20]
Cheetham. Op. cit. 284.
[21] Joseph Sobran. Changing the Story. Sobran’s, May 2000. http://www.sobran.com/columns/1999-2001/000502.shtml ¶8.
[22] Joseph Sobran. Smearing a Pope. Sobran’s, March 2000. http://www.sobran.com/columns/1999-2001/000328.shtml ¶8-9.
[23]
Cheetham. Op. cit. 289.
[24] J.N.D. Kelly. The
Oxford Dictionary of Popes. (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1986) 319.
[25] Justo L. Gonzalez. The
Story of Christianity, Volume 2: The Reformation to the Present Day. (San
Francisco: HarperCollins, 1985) 347-348.
[26] Sobran. The Cross and the Swastika. Op.
cit. ¶4.
[27] Carol Rittner
& John K. Roth (eds.). Pope Pius XII
and the Holocaust. (London: Leicester University Press, 2002) 48.
[28]
Sanchez. Op. cit. 57.
[29] Sobran, Joseph. The
Friends of Uncle Joe. Sobran’s, April 2000. http://www.sobran.com/friends.shtml ¶3.
[30]
Rittner & Roth. Op. cit. 47.
[31] Ibid. 48.
[32] Joseph Sobran. Amnesia
at the Paper of Record. Sobran’s, November 2000. http://www.sobran.com/columns/1999-2001/001116.shtml ¶6-8.
[33] Pinchas E. Lapide. Three
Popes and the Jews. (New York: Hawthorn, 1967) 214-215.
[34] Sobran, Joseph. For
the Record. Sobran’s, August 2001. http://www.sobran.com/forrecord.shtml (entire article).
[35] Sobran. Hitler’s Pope? Op. cit. ¶9-13.
[36] Rittner
& Roth. Op. cit. 212.
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