Pius XII was no saint

Ten years ago, on a cold winter morning in New York City, the Catholic-Jewish Historical Commission, established to investigate Pope Pius XII’s response to the Holocaust, met for the first time to discuss its future work. I was the only Israeli historian among the six scholars (three Catholics and three Jews) designated by the Vatican and leading Jewish organizations to study this hotly contested issue.

A little under two years later, the project was abandoned as a result of the Holy See’s unwillingness to release materials from its own archives that could help clarify issues that our team of scholars raised in our provisional report. Already at that time, in the last years of Pope John Paul’s pontificate, there were moves afoot to place Pius XII on the fast track to sainthood, but they were probably slowed down by Israeli and Jewish protests and a desire by church authorities to prevent a serious rupture in Catholic-Jewish relations.

At issue was the silence of Pius XII during the Holocaust and his indirect complicity in the Nazi mass murder of Jews. These allegations, which first emerged around 1964, had prompted the Vatican to publish 11 volumes of its own documents (edited by four trusted Jesuit scholars), most of them appearing in the 1970s. It was these documents in Italian, German, French, Latin and English that we were originally asked to review. The million or so unpublished documents from the pontificate of Pius XII (1939–1958) according to the Vatican’s most recent estimate, will only be available in about four years’ time.

It is in this context that we need to see the recent decree on the “heroic virtues” of Pius XII, just signed by Pope Benedict XVI. Most Jews have interpreted this act as yet another signal that the Vatican is determined to beatify the controversial wartime pope — whom some even consider to have been anti-Semitic — regardless of what the historical evidence may indicate.

The sharp response of Jewish leaders to Benedict’s decree prompted the Vatican’s press office director, Father Federico Lombardi, S.J., to release a conciliatory note distinguishing between the historical judgment of Pius XII’s actions (still an open question) and the saintly Christian life he apparently led. In particular, Father Lombardi was concerned to disclaim any notion that this decree was “a hostile act towards the Jewish people,” or an obstacle to Catholic-Jewish dialogue.

Nevertheless, the decree on Pius XII still raises concern not only about the continuing drive to beatify the wartime pontiff but also about the present pope and the state of relations between the Catholic Church and the Jewish people.

Regarding Pius XII, I personally have never seen him either as “Hitler’s pope” (the theory of British historian John Cornwell — a “lapsed” Catholic), or as the “righteous gentile” evoked by Rabbi David Dalin. My own provisional conclusion drawn from the study of thousands of documents is that the mass murder of Jews was fairly low on his list of priorities. Of course, much the same could be said of Roosevelt, Churchill and Stalin, but they did not claim to be the “Vicar of Christ,” or to represent the Christian conscience.

Pius XII strikes me as a polished diplomat far more worried about the Allied bombing of Rome than about the thousand Roman Jews who were being deported by the Germans to their deaths in Auschwitz, virtually under the windows of the Holy See. True, other Roman Jews were discreetly given sanctuary in ecclesiastical establishments in and around Rome after October 1943, but it remains unclear if this was the result of a direct papal instruction.

In some instances we know that Pius XII did try to intervene against Nazi or racist anti-Semitic legislation, but in general this was almost always on behalf of baptized Jews since they were protected by the church as Catholics. Pius’s rare references to the mass murder of the Jews were invariably veiled and very abstract, as if he found it difficult to utter the word itself. Was it fear of further German reprisals? A latent anti-Semitism? Was it his visceral anti-Communism which also led him to hope for a Nazi victory in the East? Or perhaps the desire to spare German Catholics a conflict of conscience between their loyalty to Hitler, the fatherland, or their church? Whatever the reasons, this was hardly heroic conduct.

So why has Benedict XVI chosen to take this step now? Why risk unnecessary damage to Catholic-Jewish relations? My own inclination is to think that the present pope regards Pius XII as a soulmate — both theologically and politically. He shares with the wartime pontiff an authoritarian centralist world-view and a deep distrust of liberalism, modernity, and the ravages of moral relativism. He was 31 years old when Pius XII died in 1958, and already then regarded him as a venerated role model.

Moreover, the German-born Joseph Ratzinger (today Benedict XVI) certainly knew that Pius XII (an aristocratic Roman) was also a passionate Germanophile, surrounded by German aides during and after the war, fluent in the German language, and a great admirer of the German Catholic Church. Not only that, but Ratzinger probably also knows that Pius XII personally intervened after 1945 to commute the sentences of convicted German war criminals. This solicitude for Nazi criminals contrasts sharply with Pius XII ignoring all entreaties to make a public statement against anti-Semitism even after the full horrors of the death camps had been revealed in 1945.

In this context it is profoundly unsettling to think that the ultraconservative Benedict XVI and his entourage can identify so completely with Pius XII as a man of “heroic virtue.” The present pope, no doubt, deplores anti-Semitism, though his statements on the subject have been noticeably less robust than those of his predecessor, John Paul II.

At Yad Vashem last summer he expressed no personal regret as a German for the unspeakable horrors of the Shoah, even though he had once been a member of the Hitler Youth. True, he had little choice in the matter. However, he was disturbingly vague about the truly monstrous German role in the Holocaust. Earlier in 2009, Benedict also showed remarkably poor judgment (to put it charitably) in reinstating an unrepentant Holocaust-denying British bishop into the mainstream Catholic Church, an action he only retracted after worldwide Jewish and Catholic protests.

These mistakes appear to follow a pattern and may even indicate a regression from the real progress in Catholic-Jewish relations under Benedict’s predecessor. One can only hope they are not irreversible since the stakes are high and no sane person can be interested in undermining the bridges across the abyss that have been so painstakingly constructed.

Robert S. Wistrich is director of The Vidal Sassoon International Center for the Study of Anti-Semitism at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem and the author of A Lethal Obsession: Anti-Semitism from Antiquity to the Global Jihad (Random House, January 2010).

You wrote:

“What is your take on this?”

I remember when that happened and I say, “Nonsense!” to the author’s understanding of events.

“Did they (The authority and governmental functions associated with the papacy) restrict information that was needed to base a just decision or not?”

No, they in fact decided to hurry up the release of documents. What most people do not understand is that there is a formal process to how an archive releases documents. There were a total of TWO archivists! TWO! And they not only had to handle all the usual archive requests but they had to sepcially go through hundreds of boxes of documents to satiate these few blowhards. In the end, every document archived had shown that Pius XII was a hero.

“If they restrict information was it for a reason or not?”

There was no restriction. There were simply documents not yet ready to be viewed by the public (i.e. they were not yet catalogued, recorded, etc.).

“Or was it just a witch hunt in your opinion and needed no further information?”

I can’t say it was a witch hunt. The documents archived have all shown that Pius did everything he knew how to save people from being murdered by the Nazis.

“The Vatican has been collecting evidence of Pope Pius XII’s assistance to Jews in Italy, which will be opened in 2013 when its cataloguing efforts are complete.”
http://www.catholicnewsagency.com/news/jesuits_archive_adds_to_evidence_showing_pius_xii_to_be_greatest_hero_of_world_war_ii/

and this is the shocking part from that article:

The documents studied by the foundation are under the control of the Jesuits. *****Krupp said the Vatican archives are sealed because canon law requires cataloguing to be completed, though the process has been accelerated by papal order.*****

However, the archives of the papacy of Pope Pius XI have been completed and contain much information relevant to the work his successor did until 1939.

*****“Of the critics who have accused Pius XII, nobody has come to the Vatican archives to see what was open until 1939, which represents a great percentage of his public life.”*****

Krupp said that *****German historian Michael Hesemann has been investigating the open archives. Each time he enters the archive, Krupp said, he comes out with an “astounding” document about Pius XII fighting anti-Semitism or saving Jewish lives.*****

*****“This information is so readily available, but nobody has gone to look,” he said, saying historians and critics of Pius XII’s pontificate do not have to wait for the sealed archives to open when they have “so much material they can look at.”

“That’s the disappointing part.”*****

End paste

Disappointing? I would say it’s scandalous!

Look at the second photo here and you’ll get an idea of how massive some of the Vatican archives are: http://asv.vatican.va/en/arch/access_1881.htm

The rest of that previous article is very informative (in more ways than one!):

Krupp told CNA that PTWF’s purpose is to address non-theological obstacles between religions, and allegations surrounding Pope Pius XII have been “one of greatest obstacles.”

“I put in two years of investigation before deciding to take this project on,” he said. He advised people to go to the archives of the New York Times or the Palestinian Post and search on the keywords “Pope” and “Jews” from 1939 to 1958.

“You will not find one negative article about this man,” he said, speaking of Pius XII. “If he was such an evil ‘Hitler’s Pope,’ you would find so much negativity.

“This man hated Hitler, despised him, and Hitler felt the same way about him.

“A final solution was planned for the Catholics as well as the Jews and the Vatican knew about this, he said, pointing to recent revelations about the Vatican’s plans to set up a papacy-in-exile in Portugal in the event of Pope Pius XII’s detention by the Nazis.

The evidence, he said, was “against every belief that Pius was anti-Semitic” and caused him to change his mind.

*****“I was angered because I grew up hating him. This discovery was a personal affront to me because I trust historians to report history correctly. When a historian makes a mistake like this, it’s like a moral sin,” Krupp told CNA.

“This man was actually the greatest hero of World War II. He saved more Jews than any other religious leaders combined.*****

“Even under threat of being kidnapped and killed, he tried to stop the arrest of Roman Jews. He managed to save all Jews of Rome except 1,000. In one day he hid 6,000 Jews, supported and fed them.

“This black legend will end,” Krupp continued, saying the documents would provide a “flood” of new information that will create an “absolute 180 degree turn” in the Pope’s reputation among his detractors.

“There are too many anti-Semites already. We don’t need to invent anti-Semites where none exist.”

Krupp told CNA that the KGB used Rolf Hochhuth’s play The Deputy to smear Pius XII as a silent bystander in the Holocaust. He said one historian has called the play “The greatest character assassination of the twentieth century.”

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