Silence of the Vatican: Some Clues

The subject of a dry, scholarly new book is hardly bestseller material--the story behind the draft of a papal encyclical, commissioned nearly 60 years ago by a pope who did not live long enough to publish it. But the book is fueling a persistent and painful debate: Did the Vatican remain silent during the Holocaust and, if so, why?

Publication by Harcourt Brace of “The Hidden Encyclical of Pope Pius XI,” written by two Belgians--a Benedictine monk and a Jewish historian--comes as that haunting question makes headlines. In recent months, a former Roman Catholic priest writing in the New Yorker condemned the church’s wartime pope, Pius XII, for his alleged silence. But a cover story in the independent conservative magazine Inside the Vatican reported he is smoothly on the path to canonization.

Not long ago, the Catholic bishops of France publicly acknowledged, and apologized for, the silence of the church as the Nazis sent French Jews to death camps. The International Jewish Committee for Interreligious Consultation recently asked the Vatican to open its wartime archives in their entirety to scholars.

Late last year, Pope John Paul II said that a new document about the church and the Holocaust--first mentioned to Jewish leaders during the 1987 furor over the pope’s meeting with Austrian President Kurt Waldheim, a former Nazi--is still not ready.

“Now it’s 10 years and we’re waiting,” said Rabbi A. James Rudin, director of interreligious affairs for the American Jewish Committee.

These events underscore the incendiary nature of the “silence” issue more than 50 years after the end of the war. Now the book by Georges Passelecq, the monk, and Bernard Suchecky, the historian, examines the question’s prewar roots. It focuses on Achille Ratti, who in 1922 became Pope Pius XI and under whom Vatican City in 1929 became an independent state.

In 1933, Pius XI made an agreement with the Nazis to protect the church in Germany. And in 1938, in the face of the Nazi threat, he commissioned the draft of an encyclical on the evils of racism and anti-Semitism. The encyclical, with its potential for explaining the church’s conduct during the Holocaust, remained virtually unknown for three decades because, for reasons unknown, his successor, Pius XII, chose not to publish it.

Its story began to emerge in 1967 when Thomas Breslin, a Jesuit seminarian, was readying some papers of the late Rev. John LaFarge for some future biographer. LaFarge’s convictions about the evils of segregation had been shaped while serving predominantly African American rural parishes and, beginning in the ‘20s, he had written extensively on the issue for the Jesuit magazine America. His 1937 book, “Interracial Justice,” a condemnation of segregation, further enhanced his reputation as a Catholic committed to racial reconciliation.

An unassuming man, despite his Harvard education and his family’s friendships with, among others, Theodore Roosevelt, Edith Wharton and Henry James, LaFarge nonetheless sensed the importance of his writings and, Breslin said, “He saved everything.”

Breslin, now 53 and a vice president at Florida International University in Miami, entered the Society of Jesus only a year before LaFarge died, and they never met. He knew LaFarge by reputation but knew nothing about a long document in French that he found among LaFarge’s papers, except that it was clearly important: It was marked as a draft encyclical, the most influential form of communication between popes and the universal church. Nor did Breslin understand the mysterious references to “Fisher Senior” and “Fisher Junior” in an accompanying series of letters.

As Breslin was meditating on the Gospel passage in which Jesus tells Simon (later Peter), a fisherman, to fish for people (proselytize), it dawned on him that Fisher Senior was Pius XI, Fisher Junior his successor.

Breslin worked on the papers into 1968, when he won a history fellowship to the University of Virginia and soon became enmeshed in his studies. But in the summer of 1972, when Breslin was a doctoral candidate, he read an article in the National Catholic Reporter about the recently deceased Cardinal Eugene Tisserant, prefect of the Vatican Library. It reported that, in a break with Vatican protocol, Tisserant’s secretary had taken the cardinal’s papers back to his native France, saying they contained intriguing information.

Those papers contained “two bombshells,” Breslin recalled: The assertion that Pius XI had ordered the drafting of an encyclical against anti-Semitism, and the claim that Mussolini had arranged for the murder of the pope to prevent him from publishing it. Breslin has no inside information about the latter claim--the pope’s death was officially attributed to a heart attack--but, he reasons, if Tisserant was right, and Pius XII knew that his predecessor had been killed, it could help explain his “silence.”

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Pius XII, born Eugenio Pacelli, was a lifelong diplomat accustomed to working quietly in the background as Pius XI’s closest aide.

“If he suspected or knew that there had been a murder . . . if Pius XI could have been murdered, why not Pius XII?” Breslin asked. A few weeks after the National Catholic Reporter ran its Tisserant story, it published a report that the Vatican was moving quickly to deny both of the Tisserant claims. Breslin, “infuriated,” wrote to the newspaper, verifying existence of the draft.

The Catholic Reporter interviewed Breslin and, in December 1972, broke a story that included a small excerpt from the encyclical.

“The Vatican basically kind of pooh-poohed it,” said Breslin, who, for unrelated reasons, had by then left his order before ordination.

Intrigued, Passelecq decided to investigate, but had made little progress when, in 1987, he began working with Suchecky on a scholarly history of the encyclical that was to become their book. Breslin gave them microfilm of the draft encyclical and accompanying documents but, with little church cooperation, the two were unable to uncover much more.

What they have done is develop background that helps put the encyclical in context. This includes other public statements by Pius XI, including a 1937 encyclical, “Mit Brennender Sorge” (“With Burning Sorrow”), written in German and read from every Catholic pulpit in the Nazi Reich. It denounced anyone who “exalts race, or the people, or the State, or a particular form of State . . . and divinizes them to an idolatrous level.” But the encyclical’s primary concern was not racism, but Nazi violations of the 1933 concordat, or agreement, between the Vatican and the Reich.

In later years, critics of Pius XII would call him a Germanophile who cozied up to the Nazis. But Eugene Fisher, associate director of the Secretariat for Ecumenical and Interreligious Affairs, National Conference of Catholic Bishops, points out that the pope had sent him to Germany to protect the church’s interests there and enforce the concordat.

What caused Pius XI “burning sorrow” was the violation of that concordat. Passelecq and Suchecky emphasize that “Mit Brennender Sorge” was neither a broad-brush condemnation of Nazism nor an expression of solidarity with its victims. “Neither was it a protest against anti-Semitism and the persecution of the Jews in Germany, which the text does not mention at all,” the book says.

In 1938, the Italian government began imposing racial legislation on Jews. In response, Pius XI publicly denounced anti-Semitism as “a deplorable movement, a movement in which we, as Christians, must have no part.” That same year, he privately commissioned drafting of his encyclical on racism. The man he chose for the task: John LaFarge. His instructions: Just say “what you would say if you yourself were pope.”

LaFarge and three other Jesuits worked through the oppressive heat of Paris in the summer of 1938. They called their draft “Humani Generis Unitas” (“The Unity of the Human Race”) and late in 1938 LaFarge went to Rome to deliver it. But a few weeks later, on Feb. 9, 1939, Pius XI died.

The draft deplored “a struggle for racial purity” that clearly targeted the Jews and its “systematic cruelty.” But it condoned “the authentic basis of the social separation of the Jews from the rest of humanity,” based on religious differences, and cited “the spiritual dangers to which contact with Jews can expose souls.”

With its “theology of condemnation,” it was severely flawed, said Eugene Fisher, key advisor to America’s Catholic bishops on relations with the Jews, and allowed for “restrictions on Jews that we would never allow in this country.”

“It’s probably just as well that it never did get out,” Fisher said, as it would have impeded Catholic-Jewish dialogue and probably would not have impacted the course of history.

Others argue that publishing the encyclical would only have enraged the Germans and brought further reprisals against Jews, as happened in the Netherlands when Catholic bishops spoke out.

But the American Jewish Committee’s Rudin argues, “If one person had been saved, then it would have been worth it. And how much more angry would it have made the German Nazis?”

Had either Pius XI or Pius XII published it, Breslin believes, it might have injected confusion into Nazi ranks and “saved hundreds of thousands, or millions, of people’s lives.”

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In tapping LaFarge to draft the encyclical, Pius XI had bypassed the Polish-born Jesuit superior general, Wladimir Ledochowski. Breslin suggests that Ledochowski “deliberately delayed it getting to [the pope’s] desk,” possibly hoping to keep the Germans friendly to the church as a bulwark against Bolshevism.

It is possible, too, that because of this delay Pius XI was finally just too ill to deal with it. But it seems clear that, when Eugenio Pacelli became Pius XII, he knew of the draft; he used some of its language in his first encyclical on the unity of human society.

Whatever Pius XII’s reasons for keeping the encyclical a secret, there was little public criticism of him until the early ‘60s. His supporters contend that it is a question of attempting to find a culprit.

Indeed, at his death in 1958, Pius XII was praised by Jewish leaders, including Israeli Prime Minister Golda Meir.

In his 1967 book, “Three Popes and the Jews,” Israeli diplomat / journalist Pinchas Lapide wrote that “no pope in history has ever been thanked more heartily by Jews for having saved or helped their brethren in distress.”

Lapide pointed out that when Israele Zolli, wartime chief rabbi of Rome, converted to Catholicism, he took the name Eugenio, presumably in gratitude for Pius XII’s wartime succor to Jewish refugees. He estimates that Catholics saved as many as 800,000 Jews from the Nazis; others dispute the figure. But another book claims that Zolli converted to Catholicism out of pique after being removed from the chief rabbi post.

The controversy surrounding Pius XII seems likely to continue. There are Vatican documents still protected by its policy of waiting 75 years to make them public.

The American Jewish Committee, still waiting for that new Vatican document on the church and the Holocaust, wants the Vatican’s wartime archives made available to teams of Jewish and Catholic scholars.

“That would put an end to all the charges and countercharges that are swirling,” the AJC’s Rudin said. “It’s time for a final reckoning.”