The Strategies of Exculpation
The Pope's defenders engage in a series of exculpatory strategies that divert attention from a considered view of the more significant issues. Not surprisingly, these strategies are the stock-in-trade of those who try to exculpate ordinary Germans from their responsibility for, and participation in, the Holocaust.
The first strategy is direct exculpation. The Pope's defenders deny, delay in time, or underplay his knowledge of the ongoing extermination and its various features. [ But the Truth is that :]The Church's cardinals, bishops, parish priests, and parishioners formed the most extensive information network in Europe. The Allies and Jewish organizations regularly passed on their often considerable knowledge about the unfolding mass murders to Pius XII. Yet his defenders fail to convey all of this. If they would acknowledge that the Pope had access to timely, sometimes immediate, and reliable information, often from multiple sources, about the killings, the camps, the intended fate of the deportees, then the question of why he did not act more quickly, forcefully, and consistently on the Jews' behalf becomes more pressing.
The antisemitism of Pius XII :
The second strategy of Pius XII's defenders is to omit, casuistically conceal, or flatly deny that he was an antisemite and, by extension, that this animus influenced his reactions to the various phases (deprivation of rights, segregation, expulsion, ghettoization, and mass murder) of the Germans� eliminationist onslaught against the Jews. Such dissimulations and denials are exceedingly odd, because the evidence of Pius XII's antisemitism comes from an unimpeachable source: Pius XII. A letter that he wrote describing a scene of "absolute hell" from the Communist insurrection in Munich of April 1919, in the royal palace, is explicit:
. . . �in the midst of all this, a gang of young women, of dubious appearance, Jews like all the rest of them, hanging around in all the offices with lecherous demeanor and suggestive smiles. The boss of this female rabble was Levien's mistress, a young Russian woman, a Jew and a divorcee, who was in charge. And it was to her that the nunciature was obliged to pay homage in order to proceed.
This Levien is a young man, of about thirty or thirty-five, also Russian and a Jew. Pale, dirty, with drugged eyes, hoarse voice, vulgar, repulsive, with a face that is both intelligent and sly.�
This passage is Pius XII's only relatively extensive utterance about Jews, not destined for publication, that has come to light. Recorded in a confidential
letter about a scene that Pacelli had not even witnessed, it bears the stamp of authenticity, an expression of the then-future Pope's views of Jews. That his statement is not just an offhand remark but a concentrated barrage of
antisemitic stereotypes and charges, which also echo the demonological
views of Jews then current in Germany, around Europe, and in the Catholic
Church itself, makes it that much more reasonable to believe that Pacelli's
was not a fleeting opinion, a whimsical lapse into rank antisemitism, but an
abiding sentiment that may be reflected in other similar statements, oral or
written, the evidence of which would have expired with his interlocutors or
would be safely secured in the locked archives of the Vatican.
The elements of Pacelli's antisemitic collage were of the kind that Julius
Streicher would soon offer the German public in every issue of his notorious Nazi newspaper, Der Stiirmer. Implicit in Pacelli's letter is the notion of Judeo-Bolshevism, the virtually axiomatic conviction among Nazis, modern antisemites in general, and within the Church itself that Jews were the principal bearers and even the authors of Bolshevism. The Communist revolutionaries, Pacelli averred in this letter, are "all" Jews. During the Weimar and Nazi period, anti-Communist diatribes and caricatures conflated Jews and Bolsheviks, pictorially depicting Communists with distorted Jewish visages as repulsive, licentious, and blood-lusting. Pacelli's description of the Bavarian Communist insurrectionists reads like a verbal rendition of one of the innumerable Nazi cartoons printed in Germany during Hitler's crusade against Bolshevism.
There was nothing that Pius XII dreaded more than Bolshevism. For him, it was the Antichrist, the ultimate evil that threatened the existence of the Church. Would it be unreasonable to believe that his stance toward the Germans' persecution of the Jews was colored in some measure by his apparent identification of communism with Jews?
Two decades after penning his antisemitic letter, Pacelli, then Vatican Secretary of State, either wrote or supervised the writing of a papal encyclical, Mit brennender Sorge, "With Burning Concern." It is often presented erroneously as evidence of the Church's, Pacelli's, or Pius XI's antipathy to Nazism, or as a sweeping condemnation of Nazism. The encyclical did object in clear and ringing language to violations of the Concordat, particularly the treatment of religion in Germany. In six sentences of its forty-three paragraphs it refers to race. Its objection to the doctrine of race is not that it is false or inherently pernicious, but only that some would have race take precedence over the teachings of Christianity. Race, no different from "time, space, [and] country," is too restrictive a basis for morality, which only God's universally valid commandments can supply. The encyclical was not a general condemnation of Nazism itself. It never once mentioned Nazism by name. It pointedly made clear that its objections revolved around the narrow though important "systematic antagonism raised between national education and religious duty." But it also urged the young in Germany, in the canonical idiom of the Nazi regime itself, to embrace the new Germany: "No one would think of preventing the youth of Germany from establishing a true ethnic community (Volksgemeinschaft) in a noble love of freedom and unshakable fidelity to the Fatherland.' Pacelli knew that, to German ears, the Volksgemeinschaft would by definition exclude Jews, because according to common belief and usage among Ger mans, and according to the well-known Nazi Party Program issued in 1920, "No Jew may be a member of the Volk."
The encyclical did seek to educate the German people about Nazism's religious transgressions and about its raising of race above the universal commands of religion. In such an encyclical a friend of the Jews, or at least a non-antisemite, would have condemned Germany's intensive persecution of its Jews. Pacelli did not. He defended the Old Testament against the Nazis' charge that it was a Jewish book, but he couched the encyclical's explanation in explicitly antisemitic terms, presenting it as an anti-Jewish book that reveals "the story of the chosen people, bearers of the Revelation and the Promise, repeatedly straying from God and turning to the world." Its value lies in "the luminous splendor of the divine light revealing the saving plan which finally triumphs over every fault and sin."
Pacelli's gratuitous affirmation of the sinfulness of the "straying from God" Jews could only strengthen the prevailing antisemitism among the many Germans who held that Jews should in some way be eliminated at least from German society. As if to drive home his point at a moment when Germans were subjecting Jews to a fierce persecution, he reminded Germans of "a people that was to crucify" Jesus, referring to the Jews corporately, as a people, as Jesus' "torturer." To ensure the maximum exposure and effect of this encyclical on religious practice (which also shows how little afraid Pacelli was of criticizing the regime's practices publicly), it was read from every German pulpit on Palm Sunday, 1937.
These expressions of Pius XII's obvious antisemitic sentiments combined with his oversight and repeated approval during the Nazi period of the publication of vicious antisemitic polemics in the Jesuit journal Civilta cattolica (see pp. 82-85), and his failure during the time of maximum danger for the Jews to countermand the deep-rooted antisemitism of the Church leave no doubt that he was an antisemite.
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Why should this be astonishing? He had been brought up and lived his entire adult life in this profoundly antisemitic establishment of the Church, an institutional culture centrally animated by the belief, based in its holy Scripture, that Jews were Christ-killers and also by the notion that Jews were responsible for many of the perceived evils of modernity. It would have been noteworthy had he managed to remain free of anti-Jewish prejudice.
Do Pius XII's remarks mean that the character of his antisemitism was the same as Hitler's? Of course not. There are many kinds of antisemitism, and they vary enormously in their foundations, the nature of their charges, and their intensities. Does Pius XII's antisemitism mean that he necessarily approved of every aspect of the Germans' persecution of the Jews? Of course not. But does it mean that his prejudices against Jews must be investigated in depth, and that their influence on his actions must be central to any evaluation of his conduct regarding the eliminationist persecution of the Jews? Of course it does. This would include not just why he chose to act or remain inactive with each new German initiative against the Jews but also why, in light of the obviously injurious, even murderous, consequences of antisemitism, he did not decree an end to antisemitic expression and practice from the Church or among Catholics (particularly among German Catholics, whose antisemitism in its demonology was often scarcely different from the Nazis'), and prevent its further dissemination by Church officials.
The nature of the relationship between antisemitic belief and anti-Jewish action is complex. Its explanation is open to disagreement. But two other things are beyond disagreement: that those who sidestep this central issue are de facto engaging in an exculpatory enterprise; and that, until the Vatican opens all its archives to all researchers-which it steadfastly refuses to do, attacking those who wish to learn the truth-much that might shed further light on the character of Pius XII's antisemitism and on how it affected his actions (and, more broadly, on the Church and its clergy) will remain hidden.
Pius XII's defenders attempt to exonerate him of antisemitism and to represent him as a friend of the endangered Jews who did everything that he believed possible to help them. Yet this depiction of him is riddled with weaknesses. Why, as a moral or practical matter, did Pius XII intervene in Germany on behalf of Catholics who had converted from Judaism but not on behalf of Jews? His defenders have no good answer. Why, as a moral or practical matter, did he cause Mit brennender Sorge, the fiery encyclical protesting the treatment of religion in Germany, to be read from pulpits across the country, but not similarly denounce the persecution of the Jews, either then or when the mass murder began? Again, there is no good answer.
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Why, as a moral or practical matter, did he protest the Germans' invasion of Belgium, the Netherlands, and Luxembourg, with separate telegrams to sovereigns of each (and printed in large type on the front page of the Vatican's official daily newspaper, L'Osservatore Romano) but not the German slaughter of the Jews? No good answer. Why, as a moral and practical matter, did he speak out publicly on behalf of the suffering Poles, but not of Jews? (On the instructions of Pius XII, Vatican Radio broadcast this in January 1940: "Conditions of religious, political, and economic life have thrown the Polish people, especially in those areas occupied by Germany, into a state of terror, of degradation, and, we dare say, of barbarism. . .. The Germans employ the same methods, perhaps even worse, as those used by the Soviets.") Why, as a moral or practical matter, did Pius XII not direct all ecclesiastic personnel to defend and to help save Jews? Why, as a moral or practical matter, did he not lift a finger to forfend the deportation of the Jews of Rome or of other regions in Italy by denouncing this publicly and instructing his priests and nuns to give the hunted Jewish men, women and children sanctuary? Why, as a moral or practical matter, did Pius XII excommunicate all Communists in the world in 1949, including millions who never shed blood, but not excommunicate a single German or non-German who served Hitler � or even the Catholic-born Hitler himself-as the million-fold willing executioners of the Jewish people? To all of these questions there is no good answer.
To the extent that any of these questions are addressed (generally, they are ignored), the answers proffered by Pius XII's defenders form a third strategy to complement the first two of directly exculpating him and denying his antisemitism: inventing constraints. They claim without convincing evidence that he chose not to do more on behalf of Jews because he had to maintain the Vatican's neutrality, so as not to endanger the Church. Yet his demonstratively public condemnation of the Germans' invasion of Belgium, Luxembourg, and the Netherlands, and other acts, reveals this to be false. (I return to this claim below.) They also assert, perversely, that had Pius XII made concerted efforts to save Jews-as the critics maintain he should have done-then he would have ended up only hastening more Jewish deaths. In 1963, no less a personage than the close wartime confidant of Pius XII, Cardinal Giovanni Battista Montini, shortly before his election as Pope Paul VI, made this argument: "An attitude of protest and condemnation [of the persecutions of the Jews] . . . would have been not only futile but harmful." But the cardinal's claim was not an argument at all. It was an imperious assertion, dismissing the need for further inquiry: "that is,'' the future Pope declared, "the long and the short of the matter."
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