Pope Pius XII and the Jews

New York Rabbi David Dalin has proposed that Pope Pius XII be proclaimed "Righteous Among the Nations," the highest award given by the state of Israel to persons who were outstanding in assisting persecuted Jews during World War II. An article published in the latest issue of The Weekly Standard, a conservative U.S. magazine, states: "The Talmud teaches that 'whosoever preserves one life, it is accounted to him by Scripture as if he had preserved the whole world.' More than any other 20th century leader, Pius XII fulfilled this Talmudic dictum, when the fate of European Jewry was at stake. No other Pope had been so widely praised by Jews, and they were not mistaken. Their gratitude, as well as that of the entire generation of Holocaust survivors, testifies that Pius XII was, genuinely and profoundly, a righteous gentile."

Rabbi Dalin maintains that many recently published books have not understood the way in which Pius XII opposed Nazism and all that he did to save Jews from the Holocaust. In this connection, the rabbi refers to a great number of events, documents, declarations and books. "Any fair and thorough reading of the evidence demonstrates that Pius XII was a persistent critic of Nazism. Consider just a few highlights of his opposition before the war. Of the 44 speeches Pacelli gave in Germany as Papal Nuncio between 1917 and 1929, 40 denounced some aspect of the emerging Nazi ideology. In March 1935, he wrote an open letter to the Bishop of Cologne, calling the Nazis 'false prophets with the pride of Lucifer.' That same year, he assailed ideologies 'possessed by the superstition of race and blood' to an enormous crowd of pilgrims at Lourdes."

One of Rabbi Dalin's books, "Religion and State in the American Jewish Experience," was singled out as one of the best academic works of 1997. Ordained in New York, Rabbi Dalin has given several conferences on relations between Christians and Jews in Trinity College, Hartford, Connecticut; George Washington University; and Queens College, New York. He serves on the CCJU's Board of Directors.

Rabbi Dalin concludes his article affirming that "Pius XII was not Hitler's Pope, but the closest Jews had come to having a papal supporter, and at the moment when it mattered most." His article is reprinted with permission here.

__________________

Pope Pius XII and the Jews
By Rabbi David G. Dalin

Even before Pius XII died in 1958, the charge that his papacy had been friendly to the Nazis was circulating in Europe, a piece of standard Communist agitprop against the West. 

It sank for a few years under the flood of tributes, from Jews and gentiles alike, that followed the Pope's death, only to bubble up again with the 1963 debut of The Deputy, a play by a left-wing German writer (and former member of the Hitler Youth) named Rolf Hochhuth. 

The Deputy was fictional and highly polemical, claiming that Pius XII's concern for Vatican finances left him indifferent to the destruction of European Jewry. But Hochhuth's seven-hour play nonetheless received considerable notice, sparking a controversy that lasted through the 1960s. And now, more than 30 years later, that controversy has suddenly broken out again, for reasons not immediately clear.

Indeed, “broken out” doesn't describe the current torrent. In the last 18 months, nine books that treat Pius XII have appeared: John Cornwell's Hitler's Pope, Pierre Blet's Pius XII and the Second World War, Garry Wills's Papal Sin, Margherita Marchione's Pope Pius XII, Ronald J. Rychlak's Hitler, the War and the Pope, Michael Phayer's The Catholic Church and the Holocaust, 1930-1965, Susan Zuccotti's Under His Very Windows, Ralph McInerny's The Defamation of Pius XII, and, most recently, James Carroll's Constantine's Sword.

Since four of these—the ones by Blet, Marchione, Rychlak, and McInerny—are defenses of the Pope (and two, the books by Wills and Carroll, take up Pius only as part of a broad attack against Catholicism), the picture may look balanced. In fact, to read all nine is to conclude that Pius's defenders have the stronger case—with Rychlak's Hitler, the War and the Pope the best and most careful of the recent works, an elegant tome of serious, critical scholarship. 

Still, it is the books vilifying the Pope that have received most of the attention, particularly Hitler's Pope, a widely reviewed volume marketed with the announcement that Pius XII was “the most dangerous churchman in modern history,” without whom “Hitler might never have …been able to press forward.” The “silence” of the Pope is becoming more and more firmly established as settled opinion in the American media: “Pius XII's elevation of Catholic self-interest over Catholic conscience was the lowest point in modern Catholic history,” the New York Times remarked, almost in passing, in a review last month of Carroll's Constantine's Sword. 

Curiously, nearly everyone pressing this line today—from the ex-seminarians John Cornwell and Garry Wills to the ex-priest James Carroll—is a lapsed or angry Catholic. For Jewish leaders of a previous generation, the campaign against Pius XII would have been a source of shock. During and after the war, many well-known Jews—Albert Einstein, Golda Meir, Moshe Sharett, Rabbi Isaac Herzog, and innumerable others—publicly expressed their gratitude in Pius. In his 1967 book Three Popes and the Jews, the diplomat Pinchas Lapide (who served as Israeli consul in Milan and interviewed Italian Holocaust survivors) declared Pius XII “was instrumental in saving at least 700,000, but probably as many as 860,000 Jews from certain death at Nazi hands.” 

This is not to say that Eugenio Pacelli—the powerful churchman who served as nuncio in Bavaria and Germany from 1917 to 1929, then as Vatican secretary of state from 1930 to 1939, before becoming Pope Pius XII six months before World War II began—was as much a friend to the Jews as John Paul II has been. Nor is it to say that Pius was ultimately successful as a defender of Jews. Despite his desperate efforts to maintain peace, the war came, and, despite his protests against German atrocities, the slaughter of the Holocaust occurred. Even without benefit of hindsight, a careful study reveals that the Catholic Church missed opportunities to influence events, failed to credit fully the Nazis' intentions, and was infected in some of its members with a casual anti-Semitism that would countenance—and, in a few horrifying instances, affirm—the Nazi ideology. 

But to make Pius XII a target of our moral outrage against the Nazis, and to count Catholicism among the institutions delegitimized by the horror of the Holocaust, reveals a failure of historical understanding. Almost none of the recent books about Pius XII and the Holocaust is actually about Pius XII and the Holocaust. Their real topic proves to be an intra-Catholic argument about the direction of the Church today, with the Holocaust simply the biggest club available for liberal Catholics to use against traditionalists. 

A theological debate about the future of the papacy is obviously something in which non-Catholics should not involve themselves too deeply. But Jews, whatever their feelings about the Catholic Church, have a duty to reject any attempt to usurp the Holocaust and use it for partisan purposes in such a debate—particularly when the attempt disparages the testimony of Holocaust survivors and spreads to inappropriate figures the condemnation that belongs to Hitler and the Nazis. 

The technique for recent attacks on Pius XII is simple. It requires only that favorable evidence be read in the worst light and treated to the strictest test, while unfavorable evidence is read in the best light and treated to no test. 

So, for instance, when Cornwell sets out in Hitler's Pope to prove Pius an anti-Semite (an accusation even the pontiff's bitterest opponents have rarely leveled), he makes much of Pacelli's reference in a 1917 letter to the “Jewish cult”—as though for an Italian Catholic prelate born in 1876 the word “cult” had the same resonances it has in English today, and as though Cornwell himself does not casually refer to the Catholic cult of the Assumption and the cult of the Virgin Mary. (The most immediately helpful part of Hitler, the War and the Pope may be the 30-page epilogue Rychlak devotes to demolishing this kind of argument in Hitler's Pope.) 

The same pattern is played out in Susan Zuccotti's Under His Very Windows. For example: There exists testimony from a Good Samaritan priest that Bishop Giuseppe Nicolini of Assisi, holding a letter in his hand, declared that the Pope had written to request help for Jews during the German roundup of Italian Jews in 1943. But because the priest did not actually read the letter, Zuccotti speculates that the bishop may have been deceiving him—and thus that this testimony should be rejected. 

Compare this skeptical approach to evidence with her treatment, for example, of a 1967 interview in which the German diplomat Eitel F. Mollhausen said he had sent information to the Nazis' ambassador to the Vatican, Ernst von Weizsacker, and “assumed” that Weizsacker passed it on to the Church “officials.” Zuccotti takes this as unquestionable proof that the Pope had direct foreknowledge of the German roundup. (A fair reading suggests Pius had heard rumors and raised them with the Nazi occupiers. Princess Enza Pignatelli Aragona reported that when she broke in on the Pope with the news of the roundup early on the morning of October 16, 1943, his first words were: “But the Germans had promised not to touch the Jews!”) 

With this dual standard, recent writers have little trouble arriving at two pre-ordained conclusions. The first is that the Catholic Church must shoulder the blame for the Holocaust: “Pius XII was the most guilty,” as Zuccotti puts it. And the second is that Catholicism's guilt is due to aspects of the Church that John Paul II now represents. 

Indeed, in the concluding chapter of Hitler's Pope and throughout Papal Sin and Constantine's Sword, the parallel becomes clear: John Paul's traditionalism is of a piece with Pius's alleged anti-Semitism; the Vatican's current stand on papal authority is in a direct line with complicity in the Nazis' extermination of the Jews. Faced with such monstrous moral equivalence and misuse of the Holocaust, how can we not object? 

It is true that during the controversy over The Deputy and again during the Vatican's slow hearing of the case for his canonization (ongoing since 1965), Pius had Jewish detractors. In 1964, for example, Guenter Lewy produced The Catholic Church and Nazi Germany, and in 1966, Saul Friedlander added Pius XII and the Third Reich. Both volumes claimed that Pius's anti-communism led him to support Hitler as a bulwark against the Russians. 

As accurate information on Soviet atrocities has mounted since 1989, an obsession with Stalinism seems less foolish than it may have in the mid-1960s. But, in fact, the evidence has mounted as well that Pius accurately ranked the threats. In 1942, for example, he told a visitor, “The Communist danger does exist, but at this time the Nazi danger is more serious.” He intervened with the American bishops to support lend-lease for the Soviets, and he explicitly refused to bless the Nazi invasion of Russia. (The charge of overheated anti-communism is nonetheless still alive: In Constantine's Sword, James Carroll attacks the 1933 concordat Hitler signed for Germany by asking, “Is it conceivable that Pacelli would have negotiated any such agreement with the Bolsheviks in Moscow?”—apparently not realizing that in the mid-1920s, Pacelli tried exactly that.) 

In any case, Pius had his Jewish defenders as well. In addition to Lapide's Three Popes and the Jews, one might list A Question of Judgment, the 1963 pamphlet from the Anti-Defamation League's Joseph Lichten, and the excoriating reviews of Friedlander by Livia Rotkirchen, the historian of Slovakian Jewry at Yad Vashem. Jeno Levai, the great Hungarian historian, was so angered by accusations of papal silence that he wrote Pius XII Was Not Silent (published in English in 1968), with a powerful introduction by Robert M. W. Kempner, deputy chief U.S. prosecutor at Nuremberg. 

In response to the new attacks on Pius, several Jewish scholars have spoken out over the last year. Sir Martin Gilbert told an interviewer that Pius deserves not blame but thanks.  Michael Tagliacozzo, the leading authority on Roman Jews during the Holocaust, added, “I have a folder on my table in Israel entitled ‘Calumnies Against Pius XII.'…Without him, many of our own would not be alive.” Richard Breitman (the only historian authorized to study U.S. espionage files from World War II) noted that secret documents prove the extent to which “Hitler distrusted the Holy See because it hid Jews.” 

Still, Lapide's 1967 book remains the most influential work by a Jew on the topic, and in the thirty-four years since he wrote, much material has become available in the Vatican's archives and elsewhere. New oral-history centers have gathered an impressive body of interviews with Holocaust survivors, military chaplains, and Catholic civilians. Given the recent attacks, the time has come for a new defense of Pius—because, despite allegations to the contrary, the best historical evidence now confirms both that Pius XII was not silent and that almost no one at the time thought him so. 

In January 1940, for instance, the Pope issued instructions for Vatican Radio to reveal “the dreadful cruelties of uncivilized tyranny” the Nazis were inflicting on Jewish and Catholic Poles. Reporting the broadcast the following week, the Jewish Advocate of Boston praised it for what it was: an “outspoken denunciation of German atrocities in Nazi Poland, declaring they affronted the moral conscience of mankind.” The New York Times editorialized: “Now the Vatican has spoken, with authority that cannot be questioned, and has confirmed the worst intimations of terror which have come out of the Polish darkness.” In England, the Manchester Guardian hailed Vatican Radio as “tortured Poland's most powerful advocate.” 

Any fair and thorough reading of the evidence demonstrates that Pius XII was a persistent critic of Nazism. Consider just a few highlights of his opposition before the war: 

·     Of the 44 speeches Pacelli gave in Germany as papal nuncio between 1917 and 1929, 40 denounced some aspect of the emerging Nazi ideology.

·     In March 1935, he wrote an open letter to the bishops of Cologne calling the Nazis “false prophets with the pride of Lucifer.”

·     That same year, he assailed ideologies “possessed by the superstition of race and blood” to an enormous crowd of pilgrims at Lourdes. At Notre Dame in Paris two years later, he named Germany “that noble and powerful nation whom bad shepherds would lead astray into an ideology of race.”

·     The Nazis were “diabolical,” he told friends privately. Hitler “is completely obsessed,” he said to his long time secretary, Sister Pascalina. “All that is not of use to him, he destroys,…this man is capable of trampling on corpses.” Meeting in 1935 with the heroic anti-Nazi Dietrich von Hildebrand, he declared, “There can be no possible reconciliation” between Christianity and Nazi racism; they were like “fire and water.”

·     The year after Pacelli became secretary of state in 1930, Vatican Radio was established, essentially under his control. The Vatican newspaper, L'Osservatore Romano, had an uneven record, though it would improve as Pacelli gradually took charge (extensively reporting Kristallnacht in 1938, for example). But the radio station was always good—making such controversial broadcasts as the request that listeners pray for the persecuted Jews in Germany after the 1935 Nuremberg Legislation.

·     It was while Pacelli was his predecessor's chief adviser that Pius XI made the famous statement to a group of Belgian pilgrims in 1938 that “anti-Semitism is inadmissible; spiritually we are all Semites.” And it was Pacelli who drafted Pius XI's encyclica, Mit brennender Sorge, “With Burning Concern,” a condemnation of Germany among the harshest ever issued by the Holy See. Indeed, throughout the 1930s, Pacelli was widely lampooned in the Nazi press as Pius XI's “Jew-loving” cardinal, because of the more than 55 protests he sent the Germans as the Vatican secretary of state.

 To these must be added highlights of Pius XII's actions during the war: 

·     His first encyclical, Summi Pontificatus, rushed out in 1939 to beg for peace, was in part a declaration that the proper role of the papacy was to plead to both warring sides rather than to blame one. But it very pointedly quoted St. Paul—“there is neither Gentile or Jew”—using the word “Jew” specifically in the context of rejecting racial ideology. The New York Times greeted the encyclical with a front-page headline on October 28, 1939: “Pope Condemns Dictators, Treaty Violators, Racism.” Allied airplanes dropped thousands of copies on Germany in an effort to raise anti-Nazi sentiment.

·     In 1939 and 1940, Pius acted as a secret intermediary between the German plotters against Hitler and the British. He would similarly risk warning the Allies about the impending German invasions of Holland, Belgium, and France.

·     In March 1940, Pius granted an audience to Joachim von Ribbentrop, the German foreign minister and the only high-ranking Nazi to bother visiting the Vatican. The Germans' understanding of Pius's position, at least, was clear: Ribbentrop chastised the Pope for siding with the Allies. Whereupon Pius began reading from a long list of German atrocities. “In the burning words he spoke to Herr Ribbentrop,” the New York Times reported on March 14, Pius “came to the defense of Jews in Germany and Poland.”

·     When French bishops issued pastoral letters in 1942 attacking deportations, Pius sent his nuncio to protest to the Vichy government against “the inhuman attacks and deportations of Jews from the French-occupied zone to Silesia and parts of Russia.” Vatican Radio commented on the bishops' letters six days in a row—at a time when listening to Vatican Radio was a crime in Germany and Poland for which some were put to death. (“Pope Is Said to Plead for Jews Listed for Removal from France,” the New York Times headline read on August 6, 1942. “Vichy Seizes Jews; Pope Pius Ignored,” the Times reported three weeks later.) In retaliation, in the fall of 1942, Goebbels's office distributed ten million copies of a pamphlet naming Pius XII as the “pro-Jewish Pope” and explicitly citing his interventions in France.

·     In the summer of 1944, after the liberation of Rome but before the war's end, Pius told a group of Roman Jews who had come to thank him for his protection: “For centuries, Jews have been 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. They should also be welcomed as friends.”

As these and hundreds of other examples are disparaged, one by one, in recent books attacking Pius XII, the reader loses sight of the huge bulk of them, their cumulative effect that left no one, the Nazis least of all, in doubt about the Pope's position.

A deeper examination reveals the consistent pattern. Writers like Cornwell and Zuccotti see the Pope's 1941 Christmas address, for example, as notable primarily for its failure to use the language we would use today. But contemporary observers thought it quite explicit. In its editorial the following day, the New York Times declared, “The voice of Pius XII is a lonely voice in the silence and darkness enveloping Europe this Christmas…. In calling for a ‘real new order' based on ‘liberty, justice, and love,'…the Pope put himself squarely against Hitlerism.” 

So, too, the Pope's Christmas message the following year—in which he expressed his concern “for those hundreds of thousands who, without any fault of their own, sometimes only by reason of their nationality or race, are marked down for death or progressive extinction”—was widely understood to be a public condemnation of the Nazi extermination of the Jews. Indeed, the Germans themselves saw it as such: “His speech is one long attack on everything we stand for…He is clearly speaking on behalf of the Jews…He is virtually accusing the German people of injustice toward the Jews, and makes himself the mouthpiece of the Jewish war criminals,” an internal Nazi analysis reads. 

This Nazi awareness, moreover, had potentially dire consequences. There were ample precedents for the Pope to fear an invasion: Napoleon had besieged the Vatican in 1809, capturing Pius VII at bayonet point; Pius IX fled Rome for his life after the assassination of his chancellor; and Leo XIII was driven into temporary exile in the late nineteenth century. 

Still, Pius XII was “ready to let himself be deported to a concentration camp, rather than do anything against his conscience,” Mussolini's foreign minister railed. Hitler spoke openly of entering the Vatican to “pack up that whole whoring rabble,” and Pius knew of the various Nazi plans to kidnap him. Ernst von Weizsacker has written that he regularly warned Vatican officials against provoking Berlin. The Nazi ambassador to Italy, Rudolf Rahn, similarly describes one of Hitler's kidnapping plots and the effort by German diplomats to prevent it. General Carlo Wolff testified to having received orders from Hitler in 1943 to “occupy as soon as possible the Vatican and Vatican City, secure the archives and the art treasures, which have a unique value, and transfer the Pope, together with the Curia, for their protection, so that they cannot fall into the hands of the Allies and exert a political influence.” Early in December 1943, Wolff managed to talk Hitler out of the plan. 

In assessing what actions Pius XII might have taken, many (I among them) wish that explicit excommunications had been announced. The Catholic-born Nazi had already incurred automatic excommunication, for everything from failure to attend Mass to unconfessed murder to public repudiation of Christianity. And, as his writing and table-talk make clear, Hitler had ceased to consider himself a Catholic—indeed, considered himself an anti-Catholic—long before he came to power. But a papal declaration of excommunication might have done some good. 

Then again, it might not. Don Luigi Sturzo, founder of the Christian Democratic movement in wartime Italy, pointed out that the last times “a nominal excommunication was pronounced against a head of state,” neither Queen Elizabeth I nor Napoleon had changed policy. And there is reason to believe provocation would, as Margherita Marchione puts it, “have resulted in violent retaliation, the loss of many more Jewish lives, especially those then under the protection of the Church, and an intensification of the persecution of Catholics.” 

Holocaust survivors such as Marcus Melchior, the chief rabbi of Denmark, argued that “if the Pope had spoken out, Hitler would probably have massacred more than six million Jews and perhaps ten times ten million Catholics, if he had the power to do so.” Robert M. W. Kempner called upon his experience at the Nuremberg trials to say (in a letter to the editor after Commentary published an excerpt from Guenter Lewy in 1964), “Every propaganda move of the Catholic Church again Hitler's Reich would have been not only ‘provoking suicide,'…but would have hastened the execution of still more Jews and priests.” 

This is hardly a speculative concern. A Dutch bishops' pastoral letter condemning “the unmerciful and unjust treatment meted out to Jews” was read in Holland's Catholic churches in July 1942. The well-intentioned letter—which declared that it was inspired by Pius XII—backfired. As Pinchas Lapide notes: “The saddest and most thought-provoking conclusion is that whilst the

Previous Page    Back to Articles    Next Page