THE HIDDEN ENCYCLICAL OF PIUS XI. <i> By Georges Passelecq and Bernard Suchecky</i> .<i> Translated from the French by Steven Rendall</i> .<i> Introduction by Garry Wills</i> .<i> Harcourt Brace: 320 pp., $25</i>

The publication of a document never issued by the leader who commissioned it is normally not very big news in diplomatic history. But it becomes a major publishing event when the text deals with racism and anti-Semitism, when the time of its commission was the late 1930s (when Jim Crow was the law of this land and when Nazi and Fascist racial purity laws turned toward the elimination of the Jews in the Shoah) and when it was the pope who commissioned the text.

For those reasons we should be grateful to Georges Passelecq, a Benedictine monk, and Bernard Suchecky, a Jewish historian. The story they relate in “The Hidden Encyclical of Pius XI” begins in 1937, when an American Jesuit, John LaFarge, wrote “Interracial Justice,” a powerful indictment of American-style apartheid. LaFarge deftly analyzed the anthropological structure of American racism and anticipated the arguments used by Thurgood Marshall and his colleagues at the NAACP Education Defense Fund to overturn the “separate but equal” rule in this country.

LaFarge sent Pope Pius XI a copy of his book, not thinking that this gesture of courtesy would involve him in an important project far beyond his volume’s scope. For 29 years, Achille Ratti had presided over two great scholarly collections, the Ambrosianum in Milan and the Vatican Library, before he became Pius XI in 1922. A librarian and an avid reader, Pius XI studied LaFarge’s important work carefully. LaFarge went to Europe in May 1938 to gain first hand experience of the increasingly tense political situation for the Jesuit-edited journal, America. His travels took him to London and Paris, Hungary and Czechoslovakia, as well as Hitler’s Germany and Mussolini’s Italy.

While attending a general audience in June at the papal summer villa in Castelgandolfo south of Rome, LaFarge had his plans dramatically altered. Hearing of LaFarge’s presence in Rome, Pius XI sent for him and told him in a private audience that his volume on race in America was the “best thing written on the topic” and that he admired LaFarge’s “synthesis of Catholic doctrine, the natural law, and pertinent facts, as well as some practical methods for dealing with the question.” LaFarge found this high praise indeed but was stunned when the pope then “enjoined upon [him] to write the text of an Encyclical for the universal Church, on the topic which he considered most burning at the present time”--racism and anti-Semitism. Throughout the summer of 1938, LaFarge worked secretly in Paris composing this document with the aid of two fellow Jesuits, Gustav Gundlach and Gustave Desbuquois.

In September, LaFarge personally delivered the original French document and English and German versions to the Father General of the Jesuits, Wladimir Ledochowski. Ledochowski apparently played a crucial role in why the encyclical wasn’t published--Passelecq and Suchecky are vague on this and other critical points in their narrative--by delaying its transmission to the pope for several months until Pius XI had become too ill to deal with the issue. It was precisely during this period when Fascist Italy, with the assistance of the Gestapo, began promulgating racial purity laws targeted at Italian Jews. Similar to the infamous Nuremberg Laws, these decrees banned foreign Jews from attending Italian schools at all levels of instruction; exiled Jews from Italian territory; annulled existing “interracial” marriages between Jews and Aryans and forbade them in the future; required Jews to carry an identity card marking them as “belonging to the Jewish race”; excluded Jews from military service and teaching posts; forbade Jewish ownership of real estate and commercial property; and nullified any provision of a will that designated an inheritance to a Jew. As nearly 8,000 Italian Jews were to discover, the road from these decrees led to Auschwitz.

Pius XI made frequent use of encyclicals to clarify the social teaching of the church. His most famous encyclical was the ringing endorsement of the rights of workers in “Quadragesimo Anno” in 1931. In 1937 he issued two encyclicals within five days: “Divini Redemptoris” condemned atheistic communism and “Mit Brennender Sorge” directly rebuked the Nazis for gross violations of the Vatican’s concordat with Germany, such as the closure of Catholic schools, wholesale arrests of priests and other officials and the establishment of a national German state-church with a neo-pagan and racist ideology. Passelecq and Suchecky correctly note the absence of any explicit criticism of Nazi anti-Semitism in this document, which was narrowly confined to the self-interest of the institutional church. An encyclical on racism and anti-Semitism thus would have filled a void in the pontiff’s teaching. But the pope died on Feb. 10, 1939, without issuing the draft encyclical he had asked LaFarge to prepare. According to Cardinal Eugene Tisserant, the draft was on the pope’s desk at the time of his death. The document then disappeared for three decades.

LaFarge went to his grave in 1963 with the secret of his collaboration on this document, which was found in his archives in the late 1960s. At about the same time, a copy of the document was discovered by another American Jesuit, Robert Graham, working in the Vatican Archives on the crucial period of the Second World War. In December 1972 and January 1973, James Castelli broke the story about this “hidden encyclical” in three articles in the National Catholic Reporter, quoting the most interesting parts of the document relating to race and paraphrasing the paragraphs dealing with anti-Semitism. Passelecq and Suchecky’s book contains the full text of this draft encyclical, entitled “Humani Generis Unitas” (The Unity of the Human Race) in English translation.

Neither Castelli’s articles in 1972 nor the appearance of Passelecq and Suchecky’s book in French in 1995 and in German translation earlier this year raised much of a fuss in the public or with church historians or with those engaged in Jewish-Christian dialogue. The text poses serious questions that will now have to be faced with rigorous honesty. For example, why did Ledochowski delay the transmission of the document to the pope for nearly three months? Or why--after Pius XI’s emotional audience with Belgian pilgrims in 1938 during which he wept when he said: “Anti-Semitism is a deplorable movement, a movement in which we, as Christians, must have no part. . . . We are spiritually Semitics”--did the pope not confront Fascist Italy when it began in the fall of that year to follow the pattern of Nazi anti-Semitic racism? Or why did the Vatican Secretary of State, Cardinal Eugenio Pacelli, who succeeded Pius XI as Pope Pius XII on Feb. 15, 1939, fail to use the analysis of racism and anti-Semitism in the draft encyclical after the full horror of the Holocaust became clear?

Perhaps this English translation will spark more serious conversation on the many questions that this book raises but does not resolve. It needs restatement, in light of the crumbling of the Berlin Wall and the events of 1989, that any attempt to understand the complexity of the 1930s is doomed to failure without some comprehension of the overwhelming fear of communism that gripped virtually all leaders, spiritual and temporal, in the West at the time. This does not condone the complicity of these leaders in the terrible events of World War II, most notably the slaughter of the Jews, but it does help situate their times more carefully than Passelecq and Suchecky have done in their narrative.

The authors illustrate how difficult it is to form ineluctable and unambiguous conclusions even over events so recent. On the one hand, they suggest that no document, “even an encyclical, would have sufficed to overturn the [anti-Semitic] mentalities and attitudes of the faithful, the clergy, or even the hierarchy.” But they also conclude that “it is unfortunate that this encyclical project was never carried through to completion” if only because the draft “asserted that Christianity was incompatible with racism and anti-Semitism, and condemned the particular attacks on the natural rights of Jews.”

Within the brief compass of his 24-page introduction, historian Garry Wills does more to set in context and assess this document than Passelecq and Suchecky do in 167 pages of text, which is long on useless and irrelevant details (such as LaFarge’s travel budget) and short on critical analysis and interpretation. And Wills states more clearly than the authors all the major flaws of the draft encyclical from the perspective of current thinking about Jewish-Christian relations.

As early as a 2nd century sermon by Melito of Sardis, some Christians have fueled a vicious hatred of Jews by holding them responsible for the death of Jesus. Christian participation in anti-Semitism erupted into violence with synagogue burnings in the 5th century and with slaughter of Jews in France, the Rhineland and Jerusalem at the time of the Crusades in the 11th and 12th centuries. The Second Vatican Council formally repudiated the deicide charge in 1965, noting that “what happened in the passion [of Jesus] cannot be blamed upon all the Jews then living, without distinction, nor upon the Jews of today.” And Pope John Paul II put the point more strongly in 1986 when he wrote: “No valid theological justification could ever be found for acts of discrimination or persecution against Jews. In fact, such acts must be held to be sinful.”

Wills explains that in the light of current biblical scholarship, the death of Jesus is not so much the responsibility of the Romans (who had exclusive jurisdiction over the death penalty in Judea at the time), or even of some of the Jewish leaders in Jerusalem (who rejected the teaching authority of Jesus). Rather, writes Wills (citing John Milton and Cardinal Newman), “The teaching that Christ died because of all of us is older, broader, stronger and better founded than the folk theology that blames Jews.”

Not many Gentiles, Catholic or Protestant, were willing to rescue Jews from the death camps. These brave few (compared to the millions who died) are known as “righteous Gentiles” within Judaism, and are memorialized at Yad Vashem, the Holocaust Memorial in Jerusalem, the Simon Wiesenthal Museum of Tolerance in Los Angeles and at the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington. According to Primo Levi, a Holocaust survivor who became the principal Italian Jewish writer about the Shoah, “Whoever sheltered or simply assisted a Jew risked terrifying punishment. . . . [A] few thousand Jews survived through the entire Hitlerian period, hidden in Germany and Poland in convents, cellars and attics by citizens who were courageous, compassionate and, above all, sufficiently intelligent to observe for years the strictest discretion.”

In 1975, Johannes Nota, a Dutch Jesuit, was so critical of the flawed theology in the LaFarge document (which repeats the charge that “the Jewish people put to death their Savior”) that he wrote “God be praised that this draft remained only a draft!” I disagree. However mistaken the theological opinions of the draft encyclical now seem six decades later, the mere fact that this document clearly condemned anti-Semitism in 1938 as incompatible with Christianity would surely have emboldened at least one more German or Polish Catholic to rescue at least one more Jew.

A famous rabbinical text, Talmud Sanhedrin, teaches: “One who destroys a single life, it is as though he has destroyed the world; and one who saves a single life, it is as though he has saved the world.” There is an important theological truth about the unity of the human race in this Hebraic hyperbole. But even if Pius XI couldn’t have saved the world in 1938, a bold statement addressing the evil of racism would have awakened many American Catholics to the moral duty of overcoming racial discrimination in this country. And a text noting that “the struggle for racial purity ends by being uniquely the struggle against the Jews,” and describing the Nazi and Fascist laws targeted at Jews as “systematic cruelty” and a “flagrant denial of human rights” meriting strong “censure by the Holy See” likewise would have elicited greater courage from all people to resist the atrocity of the Final Solution.