J’accuse

Few could deny the extraordinary improvements in Catholic-Jewish relations since the Second Vatican Council of the mid-1960s: The efforts within the Church, led by Pope John XXIII, to abandon what has been referred to as the centuries-old “teachings of contempt” for Jews and to articulate a new respect for Judaism and the Jewish people. Yet notwithstanding these efforts, questions concerning the pope during World War II, Eugenio Pacelli or Pius XII, increasingly stand as an obstacle to further progress and indeed have prompted new disagreements and tensions as both a renewed wave of criticism on the one hand and a campaign to secure his canonization on the other are underway.

To some degree the debate over the conduct of Pacelli during the Holocaust has been conducted on a polemical level ever since the appearance about 40 years ago of “The Deputy,” a sensational play by the German playwright Rolf Hochhuth, that accused the pope of heartlessness and greed in the face of the Jews’ tragedy. Disenchanted Catholic writers--most recently John Cornwell, Garry Wills and James Carroll--have joined the chorus of criticism, arguing that the Vatican’s failure to acknowledge its own moral shortcomings during the Holocaust is symptomatic of what they dislike about the Church today.

Shorty after the appearance of Hochhuth’s play, in an effort to stem this complaint, the Vatican began to publish edited wartime documents--eventually amounting to 11 large volumes of diplomatic correspondence, letters and memorandums--which, the Holy See held, decisively refuted the charges of wartime “silence” and indifference to the plight of Jews and other victims of the war. Needless to say, the appearance of these formidable tomes, edited by four eminent Jesuit scholars and based on a selection of archival holdings, has not succeeded in putting the matter to rest and refuting the charges that the papacy was indifferent to the wartime plight of the Jews or, even worse, that it cooperated with the Nazis. Polemicists remain dissatisfied and assume that incriminating material probably exists and remains hidden; scholars who have used these documents (untranslated and with the bibliographical apparatus in French) naturally enough want to see more; and even those friendly to Pius XII have been thrust on the defensive, reduced to speculating that if the archives were indeed opened to all, they would not yield any more material than is now available for a balanced understanding.

Although the opening of Vatican archives would certainly tell us more than we now know, the decades of research since the end of the war, the documents available and the perspective gained through the passage of time enable historians to produce a more nuanced view than was possible 40 years ago. The appearance of “Under His Very Windows” by Susan Zuccotti, a veteran historian of the Holocaust in France and Italy, and “The Catholic Church and the Holocaust” by Michael Phayer, a specialist in German Catholicism at Marquette University, help carry the analysis to a new level. Both authors present a much more detailed and sophisticated assessment of the official Catholic outlook of the time than most previous works while remaining quite critical of the Church’s leadership. They paint a portrait of a papacy obsessed with its fears of Nazi retaliation and relentless other wartime threats to the Church’s existence, with the result that other concerns were pushed to the periphery. The result is less a story in black and white, and rather a more tangled account replete with shortsightedness, miscalculations, sporadic indifference, half-hearted efforts and failure of the imagination.

Phayer and Zuccotti put to rest some of the sweeping charges of the Vatican’s alleged hostility toward the Jews sometimes advanced in polemical and popular discourses on the subject. There is no evidence of complicity, secret or otherwise, between the Vatican and Hitler’s plan for a final reckoning, let alone the murder of European Jewry. And though particularly in Central and Eastern Europe there were some prelates who acquiesced in a program to persecute and eliminate the Jews, the Vatican opposed Hitler’s policies, not least because the Nazis’ anti-Semitic program challenged the rights of the Church, usually enshrined in diplomatic agreements known as concordats, to define converts from Judaism as Catholics and to maintain church control over such issues as marriage, education and conditions of religious life.

In the face of the Nazis’ voracious appetite to persecute and murder, the Church leadership spoke up regularly on behalf of converts whom it considered Catholics and whom it sought to protect. Throughout the war the Vatican appealed to all parties in the conflict to observe restraint, and the pope regularly expressed his concerns for suffering humanity and the victimization of innocent civilians--including, on two noteworthy occasions during Christmas radio broadcasts, those who were victimized solely because of their “descent.” Within Italy, for example, as Zuccotti documents, Jews benefited substantially from the visits paid to concentration camps by the pope’s emissary to the Italian Fascists, Archbishop Francesco Borgongini Duca, and from the communications afforded by the Vatican Information Service. Toward the end of the war, galvanized finally into bold action with thousands of Hungarian Jews being sent to Auschwitz daily, the pope urged the head of state, Admiral Miklos Horthy, to “do everything in your power to save as many unfortunate people [as possible] from further pain and sorrow,” acting in this case ahead of Franklin Roosevelt and other world leaders.

Despite these efforts, both books make the case that the Vatican was far from the model of benevolence suggested by its defenders, including some Jews who embraced such a view of the Holy See immediately after the war. There is no convincing indication, as Zuccotti energetically documents, that the Vatican ever urged clerics in Italy or elsewhere in Europe specifically to shelter Jews--and indeed the Vatican relentlessly refrained even from pronouncing the word “Jews” throughout the entire war. Though the failure explicitly to denounce the Holocaust may have been understandable to avoid retaliation, at least so long as Rome was under Fascist or Nazi control, the pope was seemingly reluctant for other reasons to refer to the persecution of the Jews except in the most vague expressions in formal diplomatic language. Cautious, balanced and preoccupied with what he believed was possible to achieve, the pope and his emissaries energetically defended the prerogatives of the Church, strove mightily to spare Italy and in particular Rome from the ravages of war and championed the cause of Catholics throughout Europe. Jews who appealed to the Holy See were received politely but usually came away disappointed.

What explains this remarkable reticence, prompting even a sympathetic and measured historian such as Phayer to observe that during this period, “the ethical credibility of the papacy fell to its lowest level in modern times”? To put the matter into context, one must observe, as do both authors, that there were Catholics everywhere who acted courageously on behalf of Jews in need. Phayer details the heroic actions of people like the tireless German activist Gertrud Luckner, who approached the outskirts of Auschwitz itself in her humanitarian efforts to assist Jews before being arrested by the Gestapo in 1943. Zuccotti abundantly documents the spontaneous humanitarianism of Catholics in Italy, of both high and low station, who--possibly believing that the pope would approve--sheltered desperate Jews. There were obvious differences between the Vatican and these numerous Catholic rescuers, however.

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Trained and seasoned over a long career in the Vatican’s civil service, and particularly its diplomatic corps, Pius XII understood his fundamental task as being the preservation and the promotion of the institutions of the Church, particularly when it was gravely threatened. From the outset of the conflict, when the Vatican proclaimed its neutrality, Pius strained every effort to maintain his church’s constantly threatened independence, to preserve its limited ability to act in a Europe torn apart by war, to continue, wherever possible, to administer the sacraments and to stand ready to bring warring parties together and settle their conflict with one another. Obsessed with the danger of communism--reasonably enough, given the threat that Stalin’s regime posed to the survival of the Catholic Church--the pope did not, even privately, support the unconditional triumph of the Allies over the Axis powers. Tragic, but of relatively small import compared to these strategic priorities, was the suffering of the victims, for whom the authors suggest there was only so much that could be done.

“Suffering was regrettable,” writes Zuccotti, capturing well this mentality, “but, compared with the vast expanse of eternity, insignificant, except insofar as it opened the gates of heaven for the faithful.”

What Zuccotti suggests is that the Vatican was scarcely driven by specifically anti-Jewish motives, as is sometimes contended by critics of the pope. When it came to the Jews, Pius XII most often preferred to defer to local authorities, assuming that they knew best what to do. He took shelter in sorrowful generalities, exuded caution and counseled his representatives across Europe to evaluate for themselves the risks they took.

“Regarding pronouncements by the bishops, we leave it to local senior clergymen to decide if, and to what degree, the danger of reprisals and oppression, as well as perhaps other circumstances caused by the length and psychological constraint of war may make restraint advisable . . . in order to avoid greater evils,” he wrote to a much more resolute colleague, Bishop Konrad Preysing of Berlin, adding pointedly: “This is one of the reasons why We limit ourselves in Our proclamations.” Somewhat later, he told the College of Cardinals much the same thing: “Every word directed by Us to the competent authorities [to ease suffering] and every public reference, have to be seriously pondered and measured by Us in the interest of those who suffer, in order not to make, even unintentionally, their situation more grave and insupportable.” It is pointless to make the case now, as some have tried to do, that this was woefully shortsighted. There is simply no way of knowing what a more vigorous intervention would have accomplished. The pope almost certainly believed that he was on the right track, that his cautious and diplomatic approach was the only way to preserve the integrity of the Church in the grave crisis.

It is important for us now to understand the perspective the Vatican had of the Jewish issue at the time. Had its prerogatives been respected when it came to the rights of converts and the Church’s autonomy, the Vatican would have had little quarrel with much of the anti-Jewish legislation of the Nazis or that of collaborationist regimes like Vichy France, for example. But these views seem not to have driven Vatican policy. In an otherwise persuasive analysis, Zuccotti insufficiently appreciates how the Vatican’s reluctance to extend itself and take risks on behalf of Jews was mirrored by its reluctance to do so on all sorts of other matters. The pope did not protest directly against the Nazis’ campaigns of forcible sterilization and, later, euthanasia in Germany, this despite the fact that these were grave assaults on Catholic doctrine.

The Vatican similarly failed, the reader learns, to speak out boldly on behalf of the African victims of poison gas, dropped on civilians by the Italian air force during its war in Abyssinia; failed to denounce the Germans’ murder of hundreds of Polish priests as part of a genocidal war against their country; and remained silent in the face of the massacre of Orthodox Serbs, slaughtered by a regime that thought of itself as Catholic, whose leader, Ante Pavelic, even visited the pope.

Reading these troubling and accusatory books, one has a sense of how far the Catholic world has come since the postwar era, particularly for Phayer, whose book carries the story from the wartime period to the changes begun by Pope John XXIII. No doubt, as that transformation began, and as it continues to our own day, the delayed impact of the Holocaust becomes ever more apparent.