by Richard C. Lukas

(Catalyst 7/2002)

Nowhere is the politicization of history and its practitioners more evident than in the recent writings of a number of historians of the Holocaust era. The temptations of glitz, glamour and money seem to have influenced some historians to sensationalize their subjects to get noticed by the media.

Instead of writing history as it really is—filled with complexity and nuance—these historians offer us morality plays. They consist of monocausal interpretations of complicated subjects with the lines of good and evil sharply etched. Too often they allow their biases, prejudices and personal histories to blemish the integrity of their craft.

Today it is intellectually acceptable to target certain individuals and groups for the death of five to six million Jews. Pope Pius XII, once widely praised by Jewish leaders and communities, has now become the most conspicuous target of a number of pope bashers, who have created a quasi-historical genre of their own. The writings of John Cornwell and David Kertzer are distinguished by their obsession to depict the Papacy in the worst possible light. In his highly publicized tome, Hitler’s Willing Executioners, Daniel Goldhagen wants us to believe that ever since the nineteenth century, the German nation wanted to eliminate the Jews. According to this bizarre interpretation, Hitler was almost an incidental chapter in the history of the Holocaust. Is it now historically acceptable to place collective responsibility on the entire German people that was once employed by anti-Semites against the Jews? It is the same Goldhagen who was allowed by the editors of the New Republic to write an article that suggests there is a moral equivalence between the Roman Catholic Church and the Nazi party. Theologian Michael Novak perceptively observed:

“The reason Goldhagen is quite guilty of the charge of anti-Catholicism lies in the breadth and passion of the smears he spreads across a broad history, the distortion and hysteria of his tone, the extremity of his rage and the lack of proportion in his judgments.”

No people have been more viciously stereotyped than the Poles. Forgetting that the Poles were Hitler’s first victims and that the Nazi-established killing laboratory in Poland would later be used against the Jews and other groups, writers have sought to stereotype the Poles as a nation of willing collaborators with the Nazis in the genocide of the Jews. Despite the fact that Poland ranks first among the nations of the world which rendered help to the Jews during the Holocaust, the Polish role in aiding Jews has been largely ignored or denigrated.

A highly-touted book, Neighbors, by Jan T. Gross, claims that Polish Catholics in the village of Jedwabne in northeastern Poland were entirely responsible for killing their Jewish neighbors while the Germans allegedly remained passive bystanders. Even though relations between the two groups had been good before the war, Gross presents a tableau of hundreds of Catholic Poles mindlessly slaughtering Jews because now, quite suddenly, they despised them and lusted after their property.

Gross, who is a Jewish sociologist, never proves his claim. He prefers to rely on questionable evidence and fails to investigate German archives to substantiate his grave allegation. Despite the fact that Neighbors raised more questions than it answered, it is testimony to the enduring power of the stereotype that the National Book Foundation nominated the book for an award.

There is strong evidence, which Gross denies, that the Germans, not the Poles, were the organizers and major executors of the massacre. Only a few Poles, a small criminal element, were involved in the crime. In an interview published in Inside the Vatican, Dr. Tomasz Strzembosz, Poland’s leading authority on the history of eastern Poland, described Gross’s book as “a journalistic work, written without [a] serious scientific basis.”

It isn’t too surprising that books that sensationalize and distort serious and controversial subjects receive uncritical acceptance by members of the popular media who themselves have internalized the stereotypes of particular individuals and groups. Even respected university publishers have been complicit in printing volumes which do not meet the rigors of historical scholarship and are more akin to propaganda than history.

What we have is the worst kind of revisionism, which treats history like a loose-leaf notebook. Historians remove the pages which disagree with their opinions and substitute those which support their views. Much of the historiography of the Holocaust era reveals a kind of Gresham’s law where bad history drives out good history, making it difficult for even professional historians to determine where sensationalism, propaganda and matyrology ends and history begins. History becomes a major casualty and the integrity of the historical profession is seriously compromised.

There are criminals in every society, including our own. No people have a monopoly on good; no people have a monopoly on evil. Do we further the interests of history by defining a nation by its worst elements? Historians have succeeded in unearthing the evils of the Holocaust era. But they have been far less conscientious and resourceful in revealing to us the thousands of heroes and heroines in all countries of German-occupied Europe who took enormous risks in helping others during the Nazi era.

Many years ago, Rabbi Harold Schulweis remarked that we need heroes and heroines, these exemplars of good, to teach us and our children about goodness. We need them as a counterweight to the evil of Nazism and what it perpetrated upon Jews and gentiles. Historian Istvan Deak echoed the same sentiments in the pages of the New York Review of Books, “We ought to celebrate, more than ever, such heroes, whether Polish saviors of Jews, Jewish ghetto fighters, Bulgarian bishops and politicians, Jehovah’s Witnesses, or Polish guerillas, who stood up for their beliefs and died fighting the worst tyrannies in modern history.” Historians need to ask themselves today why are the names of Bormann, Himmler, Heydrich, Goebbels and other Nazis universally known and reviled while most of the names of the Christian saviors of Jews have been forgotten?

Among the hundreds of thousands of men and women who should be celebrated for their courage and goodness is Irena Sendler, an extraordinary Polish Catholic woman, who did not have the benefit of the diplomatic position of a Raoul Wallenberg or the financial resources of an Oskar Schindler.

After the Germans forced the Jews of the Polish capital into the Warsaw Ghetto, Sendler brought food, money and medicine to the Jewish people. Wearing an armband with the Star of David to show her solidarity with Warsaw’s Jews, she obtained documents from the city’s social welfare department to enable her to move freely within the ghetto without interference from the Germans and Jewish police. Approximately 3,000 Jews received help from Sendler.

Even more remarkable and dangerous was Sendler’s work for Zegota, a unique clandestine organization, organized in December, 1942, which assisted thousands of Jews who fled the Ghetto to avoid being transported to the German death camps. Risking automatic execution if they were caught by the Germans, Zegota operatives found shelter, provided food and medical assistance and gave forged documents to Jews under their care.

The primary focus of Zegota’s work was to save as many Jewish children as possible. Zegota officials recognized that Irena Sendler was the best qualified person for the daunting task. This fearless woman was largely responsible for saving the lives of 2,600 Jewish children.

Sendler, who had several close calls in her ceaseless efforts to avoid the Gestapo, was finally arrested in October, 1943. Confined to the infamous Pawiak Prison where she was brutally tortured, Sendler expected to be shot by the Germans. But thanks to a well-placed bribe by a Zegota official to a Gestapo officer, Sendler’s life was spared. After her release from prison, Sendler lived like the Jewish children she has rescued—in hiding. Still wearing the scars of her beatings by the Germans, the elderly Sendler lives today in obscurity in Warsaw. She deserves her historian and her Spielberg to tell the world her compelling story of sacrifice, courage and goodness.

In time the extremist, sensationalist accounts of Pope Pius XII, the Catholic Church and the Poles during World War II will be winnowed out and more credible interpretations will remain to explain their respective places in modern history. Perhaps a younger generation of historians will discover the rich resources, as yet largely untapped, of the good people who stood up for their beliefs against totalitarianism and celebrate their remarkable lives.

We will finally get what we should have had all along—history that is custom fit in an off-the-rack world.

Dr. Richard C. Lukas is a retired professor of history. He has taught at universities in Florida, Ohio, and Tennessee and is the author of seven books.

His book, The Forgotten Holocaust, went through several editions, including a Polish one, and is now considered a classic. His Did the Children Cry? won the Janusz Korczak Literary Award, sponsored by the Anti-Defamation League and the Kosciuszko Foundation.

Both volumes, published by Hippocrene, are available in paperback.

by Father Benedict J. Groeschel, C.F.R.

(Catalyst 6/2002)

This question is one that is often heard by those involved in proposing the causes of Servants of God for beatification or canonization. It is asked even more frequently since Pope John Paul II has become known as the pope who has canonized the most saints in history.

Because I am the promoter of the cause of the Servant of God Cardinal Terrence Cooke, the beloved Archbishop of New York who died in 1983, I am vitally interested in this question: “Why more saints?” November, the month of All Saints, is a good time to consider this question.

Holiness and the Spirit 
The first reason that we have saints is because the Holy Spirit has guided the Church since its earliest days to identify among its members those who can serve as models in following the path of Christ. The saints are guides to holiness. They illustrate how the grace of God takes hold in the life of a poor sinner and turns that person into—well—a saint.

Since the very early days of the Church, Christians have been advised to pray to the martyrs and other saints and not for them—to use the words of Saint Augustine. All Christian Churches which existed before the Protestant Reformation always invoked the saints and still call upon them today asking for their intercession.

Holy Example 
For example, in the case of Cardinal Cooke there are many reports of assistance that people believe they have received from God through his intercession. In some cases of physical cure these reports may eventually be examined as part of the process of evaluating miraculous favors through his intercession. Some of these cases are astonishing. Although this aspect of the process of beatification is the one that receives the most popular attention, it is, in fact, the good example of living the Christian life by the Servant of God in his particular time in history that is really most important. For instance, in a time of theological upheaval and social unrest, Cardinal Cooke gave an example of humble, patient, and faithful commitment to the Gospel and to all the people of the flock that he served and, in fact, to all the people of New York. For this reason the whole city appeared to go into mourning during his final days and at his funeral. One particular incident comes to mind. I was recovering from heart surgery and took a taxi to the Cardinal’s funeral. The Jewish taxi driver spoke very directly to me as I got out of the cab. He said, “My wife and I knew the Cardinal. It made no difference to him that we were Jewish. Everyone was the same to him. Mark my words, Father—the Cardinal was a saint.”

That simple remark sums up a heroic life of suffering terminal cancer in silence for years, of patience with severe and unjustified criticism, of prayer and a deep devotion to Christ and Our Lady at a time of great disedification when many lost their way. Amazingly, Cardinal Cooke worked at least sixteen hours a day, seven days a week for nine years with terminal cancer. He never complained. In fact, a bishop close to him said, “He never even yawned.”

Holy Heroes 
Here was an ordinary though talented man who accepted an extraordinary responsibility and did his very best. When I first spoke to the members of the congregation, or office, in Rome that oversees the causes of the Servants of God, they reminded me that we are not seeking to prove that Cardinal Cooke was perfect but rather that he was heroic. He was. I’ve been privileged to know three or four people who are likely to be canonized. I can say that the example of the heroic virtue of Father Solanus Casey O.F.M. CAP., Mother Teresa, Father Walter Ciszek, S.J., and Cardinal Cooke taught me more than anything I ever studied in books. To know the saints and Servants of God is to see the Gospel come alive in one’s own time. Our times certainly need this example and that is the answer to the question, “Why do we need more saints?”

For more information please write to Sister Rose Patrice Sasso, O.P., Cardinal Cooke Guild, 1011 First Avenue, New York City, NY 10022.

Father Benedict Groeschel, C.F.R., is the Director of the Office for Spiritual Development of the New York Archdiocese and a founding member of the Franciscan Friars of the Renewal.

This article appeared in the Magnificat prayer book.

by Thomas Reeves

(Catalyst 6/2002)

When American history textbooks mention Archbishop Fulton J. Sheen at all, it is briefly and in connection with the allegedly “feel good” Christianity of the 1950s. To some Americans, Sheen was merely a glib, superficial television performer and pop writer who blossomed briefly on the national scene and rapidly disappeared.

Many orthodox Catholics have a clearer understanding of Sheen, for more than a dozen of his books remain in print, several anthologies of his writings are for sale, and his television shows and tapes continue to be popular. The Eternal Word Television Network regularly features Sheen videotapes. Moreover, an effort is underway, formally inaugurated by the late Cardinal O’Connor of New York, to have the Archbishop canonized.

In preparing America’s Bishop: The Life and Times of Fulton J. Sheen (Encounter Books, 2001) I discovered a brilliant, charismatic, and holy man who has been underestimated by historians, largely overlooked by the contemporary mass media, and forgotten by too many Catholics. Indeed, I came to the conclusion that Fulton J. Sheen was the most important Catholic of twentieth century America.

Sheen was born in tiny El Paso, Illinois, in the north central part of the state, in 1895. His father was a modestly prosperous farmer in the Peoria region, his mother a hard-working and popular farm wife and mother of four boys. The Sheen children were gifted with high intelligence (one, Tom, had a photographic memory), trained to work hard (for most of his life Fulton would work a nineteen hour day, seven days a week), and encouraged to advance themselves through education. The parents also stressed the importance of their Catholic faith. The Sheen boys went to parochial schools, and the family attended church regularly and said the Rosary together nightly.

Fulton excelled in his school work from the start, and was an extremely popular youngster. Rather short (five foot seven) and slim, he was unable to compete effectively in athletics and so poured his energy into becoming a skilled collegiate debater. His beautiful speaking voice, penetrating eyes (inherited from his mother), pleasing personality, and outstanding academic preparation proved effective in competitions.

From Fulton’s earliest years, there seemed to be a consensus of opinion in the family that he would become a priest. After graduating from St. Viator College in Bourbonnais, Illinois, he went to seminary in St. Paul, Minnesota. From there he went to the Catholic University of America in Washington, D.C. to earn a doctorate in philosophy. After ordination in 1919 and receiving two degrees from CUA in 1920, Sheen went to the prestigious Louvain University in Belgium. Here he earned a Ph.D. in philosophy with the highest distinction and was invited to try for a “super doctorate,” the agrege en Philosophie. He was the first American ever to receive such an offer. Sheen earned the honor in 1925, again passing with the highest distinction. He transformed his dissertation into a prize-winning book and won the respect and admiration of G. K. Chesterton, among others.

After a brief and successful stint in a slum church in Peoria (a test given by his bishop to see if he would be obedient), Sheen became an instructor at Catholic University. He was to remain on the CUA faculty, teaching philosophy and theology, from 1926 until 1950.

While proving to be a popular professor, Sheen’s interests were primarily off-campus. After writing two scholarly books, he began publishing a lengthy list of more or less popular books and articles that would earn him honors and praise throughout the country. In 1928, he went on the “Catholic Hour,” a nationally broadcast radio program. He quickly became the program’s most popular preacher and for more than two decades was asked to preach during Lent and at Holy Days. Vast quantities of letters and financial donations poured in on “Catholic Hour” officials whenever Sheen spoke.

Sheen was soon in demand throughout the country and Western Europe as a preacher, retreat leader, and teacher. He preached annually at St. Patrick’s Cathedral, where he packed the huge church and received much attention in the press.

Francis Cardinal Spellman of New York, one of the most powerful figures in the Roman Catholic Church, took Sheen under his wing after World War II, and in 1948 invited him to join a world-wide tour and assume the bulk of the journey’s preaching duties. The two men greatly appreciated each other’s talents (the Cardinal was a superb administrator and fund-raiser), and in 1950 Spellman had Sheen named to head the American branch of the Society for the Propagation of the Faith, the Church’s principal source of missionary funds. The appointment came with a miter, and in 1951, Sheen was consecrated in Rome. Sheen flung himself into his new duties, revealing his great skill as a fund-raiser. He continued to produce books, articles, and newspaper columns at an astonishing rate, and accepted invitations to preach throughout the country and across the world. Sheen’s personal success at winning converts—the list included writer Clare Boothe Luce, industrialist Henry Ford II, and ex-Communist Louis Budenz—attracted national attention. Unmentioned in the press were the thousands of average Americans who came into the Church because of Sheen’s efforts.

When, in 1951, the Archdiocese of New York decided to enter the world of television, Sheen was a natural choice to appear on screen. The initial half-hour lectures were broadcast on the tiny Dumont Network, opposite big budget programs by comedian Milton Berle, “Mr. Television,” and singer-actor Frank Sinatra. No one gave Sheen a chance to compete effectively. Soon, however, Sheen took the country by storm, winning an Emmy, appearing on the cover of Time magazine, and entering the “most admired” list of Americans. In its second year, “Life Is Worth Living” moved to the ABC Network and had a sponsor, the Admiral Corporation.

Sheen’s talks, delivered in the full regalia of a bishop, were masterful. He worked on each presentation for 35 hours, delivering it in Italian and French to clarify his thoughts before going on television. He at no time used notes or cue cards, and always ended on time. The set was a study with a desk, a few chairs, and some books; the only prop was a blackboard. A four-foot statue of Madonna and Child on a pedestal was clearly visible. Sheen’s humor, charm, intelligence, and considerable acting skill radiated throughout the “Live Is Worth Living” series, captivating millions eager to hear Christian (only indirectly Catholic) answers to life’s common problems.

Some of Sheen’s talks and writings dealt with Communism, which the Bishop, a student of Marxism and a personal friend of FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover, thought a dire threat to the nation and the world. But at no time did Sheen appear with or praise Senator Joe McCarthy (he had little use for politicians of any stripe) or directly support the Second Red Scare, which swept through the country during the early 1950s.

Sheen was also a student of Freud, and was consistently critical of Freudian psychology. Sheen’s best-selling book, Peace Of Soul, presented his views on the subject forcefully. At about the same time, the bishop wrote a powerful book on the Virgin Mary, The World’s First Love, followed a few years later by an equally impressive Life of Christ.

For all of his concerns about worldly issues, Sheen was above all a supernaturalist, who fervently believed that God is love, that miracles happen, and that the Catholic Church best taught the divinely revealed truths about life and death. As he put it inPeace Of Soul, “nothing really matters except the salvation of a soul.”

Still, Sheen was not a plaster saint. Vanity was a constant problem for him, and he knew it. As both priest and bishop, Sheen lived and dressed well and enjoyed the publicity he received in the media and the applause of adoring crowds. Perhaps more serious was an offense that was not discovered until twenty years after his death: while a young teacher at Catholic University, in order to expedite his academic career, he invented a second doctorate for himself.

Sheen could also be difficult at times when his authority was challenged. In the early 1950s, he and Cardinal Spellman, a very proud man, engaged in a bitter feud largely over the dispersal of Society funds. The struggle led to a private audience before Pius XII, who sided with Sheen. In a rage, Spellman terminated Sheen’s television series, made him a local outcast, and drove him from the Archdiocese. In 1966, Sheen became the Bishop of Rochester.

Bishop Sheen had been an active participant in the Vatican II sessions in Rome and thoroughly endorsed the reforms that followed. He tried to make his diocese the bridge between the old and new Catholicism, enacting sweeping reforms and making headlines in the process. Without administrative skills, Sheen alienated many in Rochester, and in 1969 he resigned and returned to New York.

During the last decade of his life, while battling serious heart disease, Sheen continued at a breathtaking pace to travel, speak, and write. During the course of his more than 50 year career in the Church, he wrote 66 books and countless articles. No other Catholic figure of the century could match his literary productivity. (Book royalties and television fees went almost exclusively to the Society. Sheen estimated that he gave $10 million of his own money to the organization he headed.)

In October, 1979 Sheen met John Paul II in the sanctuary of St. Patrick’s Cathedral. Thunderous applause greeted their embrace. The Pope privately told the 84-year-old Archbishop that he had been a loyal son of the Church. Nothing could have been more pleasing for Fulton Sheen to hear. He died on December 9, in his chapel before the Blessed Sacrament.

Thomas C. Reeves is a fellow at the Wisconsin Policy Research Institute and the author of several books, including A Question of Character: A Life of John F. Kennedy. His latest book, America’s Bishop, is the definitive biography of Archbishop Fulton J. Sheen. It is published by Encounter Books.

by David Reinhard

(Catalyst 5/2002)

I think the Roman Catholic Church has turned the corner on its priest sexual abuse scandal. Yes, turned the corner.

True, the stories about pedophile priests—the crimes and cover-ups—will fill the news and fuel the outrage of Catholics, non-Catholics and anti-Catholics for some time to come. The courts, civil and criminal, will continue to mete out some measure of justice in these cases for a good while.

And commentators of all stripes, faiths and motivations will offer their opinions on what ails the Catholic priesthood. But, in recent weeks, the church has finally moved to right itself, and not because of any recent statements from the Vatican or American bishops, welcome as they may be. I’ve seen the first fitful steps at two churches in Portland [Oregon], and I’m sure many other Catholics have witnessed the same thing at their churches. It happens when a priest breaks from discussing the daily scripture readings and devotes his homily to today’s all-too-routine headlines. It happens when a priest marshals the courage and grace to speak about the unspeakable—a priest’s sexual abuse of children, what Philadelphia’s Cardinal Anthony J. Bevilacqua calls “the most depraved of moral aberrations.”

How difficult it must be for these priests to address this with their congregations, particularly with altar boys or girls and other youngsters in attendance. It must be uncomfortable as, well, hell. Certainly, it is for the most faithful Catholics.

But silence will not suffice. Screening out unfit candidates for the priesthood and maintaining zero-tolerance for priests who have sex with minors—a category that extends beyond pedophilia, which is about adult sexual attraction to prepubescent children—are important. It’s encouraging that most dioceses have taken action. But sometimes talk is as important as action, particularly when the actions have occurred in the church’s bureaucratic warrens and within secret legal settlements.

Facing this scandal head-on—finally speaking about the unspeakable—is, I think, vital for the priests and their parishioners, not to mention the church. Priests and parishioners need each other now more than ever. Their responses to the scandal are probably not so different.

That became clear—painfully and comfortingly—on a recent day when Father Paul Peri stood in the center aisle at St. Michael’s in downtown Portland and poured out his heart. He wanted to talk about the proverbial elephant in the living room, the Catholic topic everyone and no one was discussing at church services. So he talked to the congregation.

He talked about how sad he was for the victims of this abuse. He talked about how angry he was at those who had brought shame on the church and, yes, the media’s hyping this story out of proportion. He talked about the shame he feels and his worry that this scandal will turn away men seeking the priesthood. He talked, as well, about the priests he knows.

They’re probably not so different from the 40,000 other priests across the nation. They get up each day, celebrate Mass, teach and minister to the poor, the lonely, the dispossessed. They’re not without sin, but they are without scandal. They live in the light, not the darkness. Yet they are not the public face of the Catholic clergy these days—Boston’s defrocked priest John Geoghan is—and the scandal of this maddening reality was Peri’s own cross to bear this Lent.

He ended on an upbeat note that day, but it was not Peri’s hopeful words that seemed to move his flock. It was the mere discussion of “the issue” and the fact that his feelings—his sorrow, anger, shame, and frustration—mirrored their own. Did the tears come from witnessing Peri’s pain or from a relief that our common scandal was brought out of the darkness and into the light?

Parishioners, of course, cannot know what it means to be a priest these scandal-filled days. If you’re a priest, how does anyone know you haven’t molested a child? How do you defend yourself against suspicions when the crime itself occurs in private? You almost have to prove something didn’t happen; you almost have to prove a negative.

It’s an impossible burden that makes an often lonely calling lonelier. In the current atmosphere, the clerical collar becomes a kind of choker. As one priest told me, “You stand up there and feel people who don’t know you suspect you of being a child molester.”

This has been a season of suffering for the Catholic clergy and laity. You hear or read the stories of clerical sexual abuse, as well as reports that molester-priests were shuffled from one parish to another. You’re outraged on almost every level. You know this goes on in other institutions. The news is full of reports of sexual abuse in other religions and helping professions. There’s scant evidence that pedophilia is any more prevalent in the Catholic Church than in the larger population.

But the gap between the church’s moral teaching and these acts—the hideous behavior and the church hierarchy’s apparent tolerance of it—is great. It makes the church a natural and legitimate target of special outrage. You know these pedophile priests are a relative handful of men who’ve served in the priesthood over the years. You know these cases most often go back decades when pedophilia was seen more as a moral failing—”go and sin no more”—than an intractable psychological pathology.

But you also know that a single instance of sex abuse is one too many, particularly when it’s committed by an alleged man of God and facilitated by the church’s actions; particularly when it alienates a young person or family from God’s love.

If Peri’s homily put the current scandal in human context, Father Emmerich Vogt’s homily a few days later at Portland’s Holy Rosary Priory placed today’s news in a historical and cultural context.

This is not the first time that scandal has rocked the church. In fact, said Vogt, the church was born in the scandal of Judas. “Judas priests” have been with the church throughout history and continue to this day—not only in today’s pedophile priests, but in priests and other religious figures who soft-pedal the church’s moral teaching on abortion, homosexuality, adultery, illegitimacy and pornography. Even the papacy has had its scandal. Pope Alexander VI’s four illegitimate children in the 15th century are but one example.

This certainly isn’t the first time Catholics have been called on to speak out against scandalous clerical behavior. As Vogt noted, St. Francis de Sales was asked to do so in his day. “Those who commit these types of scandals are guilty of the spiritual equivalent of murder,” said the 17th-century bishop. Their terrible example destroys the faith of others in God.

The church might be a divine institution, but it’s filled with imperfect humans who are inevitably products of their time and culture. And look at our era’s sexed-up atmosphere. What should we expect? Our priests come from our culture’s families. Vogt said it’s mystifying to witness a secular culture that celebrates or tolerates all of today’s degradation now zeroing in on the church’s sex scandal.

Yes, the stories of abusive priests command attention. Nobody’s more eager to bring justice to these priests than the parishioners who love their church and children, or the priests who are unfairly tarred.

But, as a Catholic, the attention often seems outsized to me. Is the church being singled out for special scrutiny here? Is it because the church has resisted the postmodern moral order? Is it because the church maintains an unshakable belief in absolute truth and opposes all of today’s media-friendly hobbyhorses—abortion, relaxed sexual mores and all the rest? Is it because there are many other agendas at work?

What else to conclude when Catholics and non-Catholics offer up as fixes such things as ending priestly celibacy or opening the Catholic priesthood to women? In New Jersey, an Orthodox rabbi will soon go to trial on charges of groping two teen-age girls. In South Carolina, a Baptist minister is serving a 60-year prison sentence for sexually abusing 23 children. In Maryland, a former Episcopal priest was convicted recently of molesting a 14-year-old boy. In Portland, the Mormon Church announced last fall a $3 million settlement in a lawsuit brought by a man claiming he was abused by a high priest in the early 1990s. Celibacy and the all-male clergy didn’t lead to the sins of these religious leaders.

And yet, however disproportionate the current targeting of the Catholic Church may be, this sad reality remains: Some Catholic priests violated their vows and their parish’s children, and the hierarchy didn’t respond in the best interests of its children. Priests and parishioners together must say, “Enough.” Today’s Judas priests must find no sanctuary in the Catholic Church.

Past scandal, Vogt assured his flock, has always produced good men and women to renew the church. We’ve seen the first stirrings of this in places like St. Michael’s, Holy Rosary and other parishes across the country.

Yes, the sex-with-minors scandal is infuriating, depressing and embarrassing. But there’s worse to endure. As St. Francis de Sales also said about scandal in the church, “While those who give scandal are guilty of the spiritual equivalent of murder, those who take scandal—who allow scandals to destroy their faith—are guilty of spiritual suicide.”

Yes, the church will have to carry this cross well beyond Lent. But Catholics are ever a hopeful people who believe in the redemptive power of suffering. We are, this day reminds us, an Easter people.

David Reinhard is an associate editor for the Oregonian newspaper. This article originally appeared in the March 31 edition of the Sunday Oregonian.

by Russell Shaw

(book review, Catalyst 4/2002)

In the last several years the culture war against the Catholic Church has been extended to a new battleground—the writing of history. It is not the first time this has happened, since it has long been known that he who gets to tell the story of the past his way can reasonably hope to shape the future. Think of the “Black Legend” concocted against colonial Spain. Still, it would be hard to think of any previous era that witnessed a more concentrated attack on Catholicism in the pages of newly penned historical or pseudo-historical works than this one has.

It is a notable feature of this assault on the Church that some of its leading figures are themselves Catholics. Among these are John Cornwell (Hitler’s Pope: The Secret History of Pius XII, Viking, 1999), Garry Wills (Papal Sin: Structures of Deceit, Doubleday, 2000), James Carroll (Constantine’s Sword: The Church and the Jews, Houghton Mifflin, 2001), Thomas Cahill (Pope John XXIII, Viking, 2002), and others. Quotations suggest the flavor of their historiography. Wills, dismissing the dogma of the Immaculate Conception, says it implies that the Virgin Mary’s “very flesh was…like kryptonite, unable to die.” Cahill, raging against Pope St. Pius X for his campaign against Modernism, tosses off the line, “He may have been clinically paranoid.” Say one thing for these Catholic writers, they’ve got class.

Why has this been happening? A simple desire to fill in unexplored gaps in the history of the Church, admit mistakes, and correct failings would commendable. That is the intention underlying Pope John Paul II’s program of “purification of memory,” which has included such welcome steps as setting the record straight on the mishandling of the Galileo case and on the Holy Office’s condemnation of a number of propositions attributed to the innovative religious founder and theologian Antonio Rosmini-Serbati (1797-1855) but now acknowledged not to be his. Honesty like this regarding embarrassments out of the past is praiseworthy and constructive.

But the new revisionists have more in view than setting the record straight. In fact, they have an agenda. It is to reinterpret the record in line with their own progressive ideology, defame historical figures whom they dislike, and use the resulting caricature of the Church of the past as a club against the Church of the present in order to pave the way for the Church of the future. Cornwell candidly predicts a “cataclysmic schism” in the near future between Catholic traditionalists seeking to uphold a Church modeled on the “pyramidal” model associated with Pius XII and progressives like himself who seek to promote the ascendancy of a decentralized, pluralistic, democratized model of the Church. In this struggle books like his—and Wills’s and Carroll’s and Cahill’s—are meant to play an important part. To take just one example: When a writer like Cahill assails Pius X on the subject of Modernism, it is because he thinks Modernism’s relativizing, psychologizing religious vision is correct and hopes it will prevail.

Against this background it is a distinct relief to turn to H.W. Crocker’s new one-volume popular history of Catholicism Triumph (Prima Publishing, 2001). The book’s subtitle says it all: “The Power and the Glory of the Catholic Church.” Along with being history, this is an unabashed love song to Catholicism, written by a Catholic convert author who has worked as a journalist, speechwriter, and book editor.

To get the feel of it, compare Crocker’s version of certain historical events with their treatment by the Catholic revisionists.

Here is Cahill on the Cathars (Albigensians), the bizarre, body-hating sect of Manichean origin which provoked a bloody military struggle in southern France in the thirteenth century: “The Albigensians held austere beliefs not unlike those of the Franciscans.” And here is Crocker: “The Albigensians were a sort of Pro-Death League, opposed to marriage, children, and pregnancy (a calamity for which abortion was recommended); and if one could not follow a Pauline path of celibacy, the next best thing was fornication that did not perpetuate the species.” Cahill is talking nonsense, while Crocker, despite the somewhat breezy style, has got it right.

Here is Wills on Blessed Pius IX’s Syllabus of Errors: “Though the Pope thought of each stage of this campaign [the definition of the Immaculate Conception, the Syllabus, Vatican Council I] as dealing out punishment to the diabolical schemes of modernity, the Syllabus was nearly a knockout blow delivered to himself. He was lucky that some took it as a joke…” Here is Crocker: “[Pius IX’s] most memorable contribution was The Syllabus of Errors (1864), which targeted liberalism—and its spin-offs communism and socialism—in a list of eighty mistaken ideas….The Syllabus of Errors is a consistent attack on the power of the state and on the idea, which is explicitly condemned, that might makes right. In the context of twentieth-century politics, these are the striking passages.” Wills is mouthing the politically correct progressive line, a tired cliche by now; Crocker has something new and interesting to say.

Note that Blessed Pius IX is a favorite whipping-boy for the revisionists. His unpardonable sin from their point of view was his outstanding success in the religious sphere (though certainly not the political). “His religious achievements were enormous,” Crocker writes; he did more than anyone else to create the doctrinally, devotionally, and structurally strong Catholic system of modern times that flourished up to the 1960s and that the progressives now seek to destroy.

Triumph is not a perfect book. The style, though certainly readable, now and then is a mite too breezy. In its eagerness to present the Church in a good light, moreover, the book leaves out some important elements of the story: e.g., the “Donation of Constantine,” a forged document, probably of the fifth century, which supposedly showed Constantine bestowing entitlements on Pope Sylvester and which played an important part in the endless pope-emperor, church-state wrangles of the Middle Ages. We still lack an entirely adequate replacement for Philip Hughes’s A Popular History of the Catholic Church (Macmillan, 1953). In this regard, it should be noted that Crocker’s aim in part is to provide an alternative to Thomas Bokenkotter’s widely circulated A Concise History of the Catholic Church(Image Books, 1990), which Crocker describes as “focused on liberal Catholicism.”

Like the well-known elephant in the living room, there is one issue—or, perhaps, cluster of issues—standing head and shoulders above the rest in the recent writing of revisionist histories of Catholicism. It is the role of Pope Pius XII and the Catholic Church in regard to the Nazi Holocaust during World War II. The Catholic revisionists invariably talk about it—Cornwell and Carroll produced entire books on the subject—and lately they have been joined by Jewish writers.

Surely the most egregious of the latter up to now is Daniel Jonah Goldhagen, who in the January 21 issue of The New Republic devoted a long review-article (well over half the magazine) to accusing the Pope and the Church of anti-Semitism. He is author of a book published by Knopf called Hitler’s Willing Executioners: Ordinary Germans and the Holocaustand of a forthcoming volume with the ominous title A Moral Reckoning: The Catholic Church During the Holocaust and Today. It should be a pip.

Goldhagen is not simply angry but over the edge. Anti-Semitism among European Catholics and other Christians deserves serious study, but invective is no help. In one casual aside—a comparatively mild one at that—the author calls the Catholic Church “a self-proclaimed authoritarian institution, seeking ever more to clamp down on its members.” Elsewhere he dismisses the New Testament account of Jesus’ death as fiction. (Jews had no hand in it, you see.) If a Catholic writer attacked Judaism as Goldhagen attacks Catholicism, he would correctly be called an anti-Semite; if Goldhagen attacks the Catholic Church this way, what does that make him (and The New Republic too)?

To say Pius XII was anti-Semitic is a laughable charge, and the evidence offered for it is correspondingly laughable. From the end of World War II until years after his death in 1958, Jews universally praised him as a friend who worked hard to help Jews during the war. The campaign against him began in 1963 with Rolf Hochhuth’s play The Deputy. Its caricature of a venal pope bore no relation to fact, but the campaign has continued ever since, with Cornwell’s dishonest volume of 1999 marking a new escalation. Now the floodgates are open. The boldness of this project is astonishing. The ultimate target of these critics, it now is clear, is not what some Catholics did in the past but what Catholics believe in the present. The only way for Catholics to appease them would be to abandon the faith.

Crocker calls the attack on Pope Pius and the Church a “backhanded compliment.” No one asks why Protestants or Anglicans or the Orthodox did not do more to help Jews; rather, as he points out, echoing Arnold Toynbee, in such world crises “only one Christian voice and one Christian institution” really count—the voice of the pope, the institution called “the Church.” Triumph may not be a history book for the ages, but here and now it is something almost as good: a book of uncommon decency and much common sense.

Russell Shaw is a writer and journalist in Washington, D.C. His latest book is Ministry or Apostolate: What Should the Catholic Laity Be Doing? (Our Sunday Visitor, 2002).

by Robert P. Lockwood

(2/2000)

The debate over the use of public funds to assist in the education of Catholic schoolchildren has a long – and sometimes violent – history in the United States. While Catholics themselves have been divided on the necessity of such assistance and where it might lead, the issue itself has been a flash point for public, legislative and judicial anti-Catholicism for over 150 years.

While many assume prohibition of aid to Catholic schools or voucher programs to Catholic school parents to be a question of constitutional interpretation of the First Amendment Establishment Clause, the history of Catholic school funding questions is essentially rooted in America’s unhappy history of anti-Catholicism. Unfortunately, that anti-Catholic heritage has become entrenched in judicial interpretations and public policy. The point of this report is not to argue whether specific proposals for vouchers, tuition assistance, or direct aid to Catholic schools are good – or bad – public policy. However, it is the point that forbidding aid to Catholic school children or to the parents of Catholic school children is, no matter how such actions might be interpreted, a remnant of 19th century anti-Catholic and anti-immigrant prejudices.

Catholic schools began in the United States as a reaction against a growing publicly-funded school system that was essentially Protestant. In 1839, the American Bible Society announced its intention to make certain that the Bible was read in every classroom in America.1 There was no disagreement in a country that was essentially Protestant. It was widely – virtually universally – held that education without a religious foundation in the Bible was no education at all. As Horace Mann of Massachusetts, the so-called “father” of the public school system wrote, “Our system earnestly inculcates all Christian morals. It welcomes the religion of the Bible; and in receiving the Bible, it allows it to do what is allowed by no other system – to speak for itself.”2

The Bible – specifically the King James Version – was seen in Protestant America as a universal document that stood above doctrinal divisions within Protestantism. Therefore, use of Scripture in public schools would be viewed as “non-sectarian,” meaning that interpretation of the Bible would not be prejudiced toward a specific Protestant denomination. The public schools would not be Presbyterian or Congregationalist. However, use of the King James translation of the Bible accepted by all Protestants – and with underlying Protestant assumptions – would be the foundation of the public school system.

This became a key understanding in establishing very early in the history of American public schools the definition of “sectarian.” Today, when the word “sectarian” is used in a political or judicial environment, the connotation is religion in general. “Sectarian” would not have that meaning in the 19th century and in the development of the public school system and the laws – as well as the judicial interpretation – that derived from it. In that development, the word sectarian did not refer to a general Protestant outlook. It would mean, in the beginning, sects within Protestantism. Very quickly, however, sectarian would be narrowed to take on a more specific definition as the debate over public school funding began: Catholic.

The New York City Common Schools3

The evolution of the debate over school funding into an anti-Catholic movement was established in the battle over the “common schools” in New York City that began in 1840. The New York City schools at that time were funded by the state through the Public School Society. The Public School Society was “a benevolent association formed in 1805 to care for the instruction of children unable to attend religious or private schools.” A primary goal of the Society was “to inculcate the sublime truths of religion and morality contained in Holy Scriptures” and to assure that Bible exercises were included in the schools it controlled.4

By 1840, the Public School Society dominated the New York City schools by controlling the allocation of the common school fund allocated from the state of New York. Ascribing to its definition of “sectarian,” the Public School Society funded schools that were generically “Christian.” These were “common” schools sharing in the “common” understanding of Protestant Christianity, rather than those operated by a specific Protestant congregation. The Public School Society would not fund schools sponsored by churches explaining, that “if religion be taught in a school, it strips it of one of the characteristics of a common school…no school can be common unless all the parents of all religious sects…can send their children to it…without doing violence to their religious beliefs.” Yet, the difficulty was that the schools they did fund were and had to be generically Protestant. It was accepted as a matter of fundamental pedagogy that a general Protestant understanding of Scripture and devotional life within the schools was central to the curriculum and to normal education. As such, the schools were subtle – and not very subtle – tools for evangelizing the growing Irish Catholic immigrant population to Protestantism.

Within the common schools in New York City – and elsewhere – daily scripture readings from the King James Version of the Bible were required. Prayers, songs and general religious instruction at odds with Catholic belief were the norm. Anti-Catholic sentiments extended throughout the curriculum with references to deceitful Catholics, murderous inquisitions, vile popery, Church corruption, conniving Jesuits and the pope as the anti-Christ of Revelation common place.5 In the face of such bigotry within the common schools, Catholic parishes had begun to develop their own Catholic schools in response. By 1840 in New York City, approximately 5,000 children attended eight Catholic schools. But at least 12,000 more Catholic children either attended no school, or were enrolled in the common schools where their faith was insulted daily.6

The firestorm began when William H. Seward, the newly elected governor of the state addressed the issue in a legislative message delivered in January, 1840. He recommended the “establishment of schools in which (immigrants) may be instructed by teachers speaking the same language with themselves and professing the same faith.”7 In response, Catholic schools in New York City petitioned the common council for a share of the state school fund distributed through the Public School Society. The Society answered with a message that resonates with today’s rhetoric. It argued that by funding Catholic schools, money would be dissipated and that “sectarian” Catholic education would replace the common schools. The common council agreed and the Catholic petition was denied.

It was then that Bishop John Hughes of New York stepped into the picture. “Dagger John” as he was aptly called had been named coadjutor bishop under the ailing John DuBois in 1838 and he would formally succeed to the See in 1842. But by 1840, Bishop Hughes was in command and would take a far more confrontational approach to the question of school funding than his predecessor.8 Blasting the Public School Society for corrupting Catholic children, Hughes submitted a renewed petition demanding Catholics be given a portion of the state funds for schooling. “The petition was answered by both the Public School Society and the Methodist churches of New York, the trustees of the society insisting once more that their teachings were non-sectarian and the Methodist clergy using the excuse to attack the Catholic version of Scripture as upholding the murder of heretics and an unqualified submission to papal authority.”9 In response, the Common Council scheduled a debate on the issue for late October, 1840. At the debate, Hughes represented the Catholic schools and spoke for three hours. The Protestant response covered two days and dealt primarily in anti-Catholic vitriol rather than the issues at hand. “Catholics were represented as irreligious idol worshippers, bent on the murder of all Protestants and the subjugation of all democracies. ‘I do say,’ one minister told the sympathetic galleries, ‘that if the fearful dilemma were forced upon me of becoming an infidel or a Roman catholic, according to the entire system of popery, with all its idolatry, superstition, and violent opposition to the Holy Bible, I would rather be an infidel than a papist.’”10

The parameters of the debate were set and would be adhered to virtually to our own day. On the one hand, Catholics had been forced to set up their own schools because of the overwhelmingly Protestant nature of the public school system. As a result, they wanted a share of the public funding set aside for the general education of children. On the other hand, the public school system viewed itself as the only educational instrument for the “common” culture of America, a culture in the 19th century that was decidedly Protestant. The tools of argument in either case would be to employ anti-Catholic rhetoric and to equate “sectarian” with the Catholic schools.

In January 1841, the Catholic position was rejected overwhelmingly by the common council. Catholics had been put into a difficult position. In the public mind, Catholics appeared to be opposed to reading the Bible, rather than reading the King James Version with its decidedly anti-Catholic slant. It was an incomprehensible position to the 19th century Protestant mind and reinforced two centuries of anti-Catholic prejudice. “They demand of Republicans to give them funds to train up their children to worship a ghostly monarch of vicars, bishops, archbishops, cardinals, and Popes! They demand of us to take away our children’s funds and bestow them on subjects of Rome, the creatures of a foreign hierarchy!”11 This would echo the lament 150 years later in an Indiana daily newspaper over the voucher issue with an editor complaining that his taxes would be used “to teach papal infallibility.”12

Bishop Hughes continued to press the issue and with the support of Governor Seward (after a demonstration of Catholic strength at the voting booth) a bill was passed in the state legislature in 1842 which effectively ended the Public School Society’s monopoly on New York City public education. Riots ensued and the home of Bishop Hughes would be stoned. Yet it was a phyrric victory for Bishop Hughes. Even under the new legislation, control of the public schools effectively remained in Protestant hands through the school boards. When protests were made that reading of the Bible be prohibited as “sectarian,” a new board of education dominated by Protestants responded that the King James Bible was simply not a sectarian book. Reading of the King James Version of the Bible would continue in those schools where Catholics did not hold political power; and Catholic schools would continue to be denied funding as sectarian institutions.

While rocks were thrown, violence was minimal in New York. Such was not the case in Philadelphia. In 1843, Bishop Francis Patrick Kenrick of Philadelphia asked the local school committee to excuse Catholic students from reading the King James Version and from daily Protestant exercises. When the school committee allowed Catholic students in the common schools to be allowed to read their own translation of the Bible, nativists claimed that this was merely the first step to an outright ban on Bible reading in the schools. With a growing anti-Irish sentiment already strong in the city, the dispute erupted in a violent series of riots in 1844 that saw the bishop flee the city, 13 people killed and five Catholic churches burned to the ground.13

The Know Nothings and the Development of Blaine Amendments

“As the Catholic population in the United States grew, ‘sectarian’ took on an even more precise, and more pejorative, meaning. In response to the waves of Catholic immigration in the 19th century, Nativist groups such as the anti-immigrant Know Nothing Party grew in size and political power. These groups sought to insure the ascendancy of their view of the common religion of the United States in the common schools and keep out ‘sectarian’ competition, enacting measures such as requiring the reading of the King James Bible in public schools, and enacting measures barring any public funds to sectarian schools.”14

The popular appeal of the Know Nothing Party prior to the Civil War was based on a growing anti-immigrant and anti-Catholic sentiment, fueled in no small part by the public school question. Catholics were considered illiterate and ignorant Irish immigrants. They were viewed as bible-burners eager to rob the public till to pass on their superstitious beliefs to a new generation. The Know Nothing Party combined nativism, anti-Catholicism, temperance and anti-slavery into a potent political force that would dominate in Northern state houses in the late 1850s. The remnant of the movement after the Civil War would coalesce in the Republican party and promote legislative attacks on Catholic schools that remained in force for a long time.15

As the Know Nothings gained power, they took particular aim at Catholic schools. In the 1854 elections in Massachusetts, they secured complete dominance in both houses and won the governor’s office. “The Know Nothings adopted an amendment to the Massachusetts Constitution barring any part of the common school fund to be ‘appropriated to any religious sect for the maintenance exclusively of its own school.’ The amendment’s proponents were open about their motives: ‘Sir, I want all our children of our Catholic and Protestant population, to be educated together in our public schools. And if gentlemen say that the resolution has a strong leaning towards Catholics, and is intended to have special reference to them, I am not disposed to deny that it admits of such interpretation. I am ready to say to our fellow Catholic citizens: You may come here and meet us on the broad principles of civil and religious liberty, but if you cannot meet us upon this common ground, we do not ask you to come.’”16

“As one might expect with an organization created to decrease the political influence of immigrants and Catholics, Know Nothing office holders devoted the bulk of their energies to the implementation of their nativist agenda. And because Know Nothings believed that the surest method for guaranteeing the supremacy of Protestant values in America lay in promoting Protestantism in the public schools, educational matters occupied a significant portion of their legislative agenda. Addressing Catholic attempts to end the use of the Protestant King James Bible in schools, Massachusetts Know Nothing lawmakers enacted a law requiring students to read that version of the Scripture every day. That legislature also approved an amendment to the state constitution that barred the use of state funds in sectarian schools. This, Know Nothings hoped, would make parochial schools financially unfeasible, forcing the children of Catholics to learn ‘American’ customs in the public schools.”17 One curious aspect of the Know Nothing legislation in Massachusetts was that it prohibited racial discrimination. Though laudable, “blacks were Protestant and native-born and posed no threat to the predominant Protestant curriculum that Know Nothings found so important.”18

In their anti-Catholic zeal, the Know Nothings of Massachusetts also passed a “nunnery inspection” law that included Catholic schools. Committees were to investigate certain unnamed “practices” allegedly taking place within these Catholic institutions, a common enough belief based on decades of popular anti-Catholic literature boldly proclaiming immoral activity and “white slavery” conditions in convents. “The so-called Nunnery Committee undertook three special investigations – one at Holy Cross College in Worcester, another in a school run by the Sisters of Notre Dame in Lowell, and a third at a school in Roxbury operated by nuns of the same order. The investigation at Roxbury was particularly offensive, as some two dozen men suddenly appeared at the school, announced they were on state business, and proceeded to tramp through the building. They poked into closets, searched cellars, intimidated nuns, frightened the children—and found nothing incriminating.”19 When newspapers protested, the Committee responded that surprise visits were necessary because “priests imprisoned young nuns in convents against their will.”20

In the era after the Civil War, anti-Catholic fervor over the school question coalesced in the movement to legislate so-called Blaine amendments into state constitutions. It would be these amendments that codified the nativist identification of “sectarian” with Catholic. These amendments would not be applied to Protestant religious activities in public schools.

President Ulysses S. Grant (1868-1876) was well known for his Know Nothing sympathies and had belonged to the party prior to the Civil War. His vice presidents, Schulyer Colfax and Henry Wilson, had been leading members of the Know Nothings.21 In 1875, President Grant called for a Constitutional amendment that would mandate free public schools and prohibit the use of public money for sectarian schools. (An interesting proposal in that it assumed that the Constitution as written would not ban the use of public funds for sectarian schools.) It was clear that Grant’s concern was rooted in his anti-Catholicism, fearing a future with “patriotism and intelligence on one side and superstition, ambition and greed on the other” which he identified with the Catholic Church. Grant called for public schools “unmixed with atheistic, pagan or sectarian teaching.”22 The assumption would be that these free public schools would be Protestant in nature and that no public funds would be used for sectarian – Catholic – schools.

Senator James G. Blaine of Maine had proposed such an amendment to the Constitution in 1874. It read, in part: “No money raised by taxation in any State for the support of public schools, or derived from any public source, nor any public lands devoted thereto, shall ever be under the control of any religious sect, nor shall any money so raised or land so devoted be divided between religious sects or denominations.”23

The amendment was defeated in 1875 but would be the model incorporated into 34 state constitutions over the next three decades. They have come down to us today. “Thirty-one states presently have Blaine amendments, or amendments derived from the Blaine formula, in their constitutions forbidding state aid to Catholic schools.”24 These “Blaine amendments” are clearly illegal under the Federal constitution. Drafted on the basis of anti-Catholic prejudice, they are aimed at a single class of citizens. The “protestant paranoia fueled by waves of Catholic immigration to the U.S. beginning in the mid-nineteenth century, cannot form the basis of a stable constitutional principle. And the stability of the principle has been undermined by the amelioration of those concerns. From the advent of publicly supported, compulsory education until very recently, aid to sectarian schools primarily meant aid to Catholic schools as an enterprise to rival publicly supported, essentially Protestant schools.”25

Historian David O’Brien concluded that with the Blaine amendments to state constitutions, “the outcome of the great Bible war, then, was forecast in the New York fight four decades earlier: the secularization of public education and the ban on aid to church-sponsored schools.”26 But the reality in the 19th century and virtually the first half of the twentieth century was far different. As noted above, the New York battle did not end Bible reading or Protestant services in public schools in New York City. Long after states adopted Blaine Amendments – well into the 20th century – public schools routinely conducted such services and identified themselves by a generically Christian environment. They would only begin to become secularized, and then only in urban America, in the 1930s with the influx of the new professional public educators inculcated with the teaching philosophy of John Dewey. Even at that point, the impetus for such secularization came from the teaching community and not through judicial or legislative mandate.

Blaine Amendments themselves were squarely aimed at Catholic schools and never interpreted to apply to public schools that were viewed as legitimately Protestant and reflecting that “Protestant hegemony.” “Court decisions of the late 19th and early 20th century demonstrate well the targets of Blaine Amendments. They routinely held that the prohibition on funding ‘sectarian’ schools did not prohibit funding public schools that were religious, only schools with religions that conflicted with the common Protestant hegemony. As one court observed, ‘It is said that the King James Bible is proscribed by Roman Catholic authority; but proscription cannot make that sectarian which is not actually so.”27 That ruling was by a Colorado court in 1927. In a 1903 Nebraska court ruling it was stated that state constitutional prohibition against sectarian instruction “cannot, under any canon of construction which we are acquainted, be held to mean that neither the Bible, nor any part of it, from Genesis to Revelation, may be read in the educational institutions fostered by the state.”28

In general, the Courts paid little attention to Catholic schools themselves. As long as the Church was not attempting to secure the use of public funds, the schools were left alone by the judiciary. However, in 1922 the state of Oregon, under Ku Klux Klan pressure, passed a law requiring that all children between the ages of eight and sixteen attend the public schools. The law was challenged by the nuns who operated Catholic schools in Oregon. The case ultimately made it to the Supreme Court. It declared the law unconstitutional. If nothing else, it guaranteed that at least Catholic schools were allowed to exist as it affirmed “the liberty of parents and guardians to direct the upbringing and education of children under their control.”29 In 1949, Father William McManus appeared before the House Committee on Education and argued that “every school to which parents may send their children in compliance with the compulsory education laws of the State is entitled to a fair share of the tax funds.” He stated that in accordance with the 1925 decision in Oregon, parental rights of choice in education had to be both respected and protected.30

After World War II Catholics had once again begun to seek public aid for schools while, concurrently, the public schools themselves began the movement from essentially Protestant entities to secular institutions. The secularization of public schools in the second half of the 20th century is not germane to this report except to note that this was not simply a result of mandates from the courts. For well over a century, courts had routinely ruled in favor of the generally Protestant nature of the free public school system and assumed that the meaning of “sectarian” referred specifically to Catholic schools. The secularization of public schools was far more a result of new educational theories and the judicial activism of later courts.

In the post-war years, the Supreme Court began to move aggressively to apply the Establishment Clause to issues of school funding and to base their findings on the “sectarian” nature of the entities involved. In Everson v. Board of Education in 1947, the Court upheld the constitutionality of a New Jersey law allowing free school bus transportation for parochial school students. Yet the Everson decision was critical. “For the first time, the Supreme Court read into the due process clause of the Fourteenth Amendment the First Amendment’s non-establishment clause.” While the busing statute was upheld because the primary beneficiary was the children, opinions “in the case set the direction for the future.”31 In applying the Establishment Clause, the Court moved quickly to complete the secularization of public schools so enamored by the new class of professional educators. At the same time, the “sectarian” – or Catholic – nature of a private institution was the determining factor in rejecting any public aid, even when such aid was directed to the children or the parents.

Following the Everson precedent in 1971, the Supreme Court addressed the issue of aid to Catholic schools – or Catholic educators, parents and children – as a violation of the establishment clause. The Court used the notion of “sectarian” from legislation drafted in a period of virulent anti-Catholicism and applied it directly to the issue. In a series of rulings on the issue, the Supreme Court would go so far as to reference essentially nativist, anti-Catholic material in defining the pervasively sectarian nature of Catholic schools. In Lemon vs. Kurtzman, where the court struck down state legislation permitting supplementary salary payments to parochial school teachers, Justice William Douglas quoted Loraine Boettner’s Roman Catholicism, a virulently anti-Catholic book. (Among quotes in Boettner’s book: “The lesson of history is that Romanism means the loss of religious liberty and the arrest of national progress.”) Justice Douglas’ concurrence in Lemon vs. Kurtzman reads like a Know Nothing commentary: “In the parochial schools Roman Catholic indoctrination is included in every subject. History, literature, geography, civics and science are given a Roman Catholic slant. The whole education of the child is filled with propaganda. That, of course, is the very purpose of such schools…That purpose is not so much to educate, but to indoctrinate and train, not to teach Scripture truths (emphasis added) and Americanism, but to make loyal Roman Catholics.”31 Justice Douglas was essentially making the same arguments as the Public School Society of New York in the 19th century.32

Following these 1971 decisions, courts utilized the nearly farcical procedure of focusing questions of public aid through the prism of the visible sectarian nature of the Catholic institution in question. Crucifixes on walls, mission statements involving faith, even trophies from Catholic sports leagues publicly displayed became part of judicial evidence. In December, 1999, Judge Solomon Oliver, Jr. declared a four-year-old voucher test in Cleveland, Ohio unconstitutional. He called the program “government-supported religious indoctrination” because of the 56 schools involved in the program, many are Catholic. He cited in his ruling that a mission statement in one Catholic school involved the objective to “communicate the gospel message of Jesus.” Another school asked students to “contribute a nominal amount for membership in the Society for the Propagation of the faith.”33

As noted in the 1999 amicus curiae brief to the Supreme Court by the Becket Fund for Religious Liberty, the “origins of the inquiry into a school’s ‘sectarian’ character are found not in the history of the establishment clause, but in a dark period in our history when bigotry against immigrants – particularly Catholic immigrants – was a powerful force in state legislatures. To policy-makers in the mid-19th century, ‘sectarian’ did not mean the same thing as ‘religious.’ It was instead an epithet applied to those who did not share the ‘common’ religion taught in the publicly funded common schools.” “Sectarian” meant Catholic and, as the amicus curiae brief concludes, “It is an unhelpful analytical category and an epithet with a reprehensible past.”34

SUMMARY POINTS

• The history of Catholic school funding questions is essentially rooted in America’s unhappy history of anti-Catholicism
• Catholic schools began in the United States as a reaction against a growing publicly-funded school system that was essentially Protestant
• The King James version of the Bible was viewed as a universal document that stood above doctrinal divisions within Protestantism and could not be considered “sectarian”
• The term “sectarian” referred initially to sects within Protestantism
• Sectarian would be narrowed to refer to Catholics
• “Common schools,” the forerunner of the public schools, were meant to provide a “common” understanding shared by Protestant Christianity
• A general Protestant understanding of Scripture and devotional life within the schools was central to the curriculum in the “common schools”
• Anti-Catholic sentiments extended throughout the curriculum of the “common schools”
• Catholic schools were refused funding because they were defined as “sectarian”
• As Catholics had been forced to set up their own schools because of the overwhelmingly Protestant nature of the common school system, they requested a fair share of the public funding set aside for education
• The public school system viewed itself as the only educational institution for the “common culture” which was defined as Protestant
• Public funding of Catholic schools was attacked primarily through anti-Catholic rhetoric and by defining Catholic schools as “sectarian”
• The Know Nothing Party enacted legislation that would guarantee the supremacy of Protestant values in the public schools and deny funding to Catholic schools in order to make them financially unfeasible
• After the Civil War, anti-Catholic sentiment coalesced in the movement to legislate so-called Blaine amendments within the states. Within three decades, 34 states had passed Blaine amendments to their constitutions
• Blaine amendments codified the nativist identification of “sectarian” with Catholic
• Blaine amendments would not be applied to Protestant religious activities in public schools
• Blaine amendments are clearly illegal under the Federal constitution as they were drafted on the basis of anti-Catholic prejudice and aimed at a specific class of citizens
• Aid to sectarian schools primarily meant aid to Catholic schools as an enterprise to rival publicly-supported, essentially Protestant schools
• Court decisions of the late 19th and early 20th century clearly demonstrate that Catholic schools were the target of Blaine amendments and public schools were expected to be part of the Protestant hegemony
• When the Supreme Court began to apply the Establishment Clause to the issue of public aid to Catholic schools, it utilized the notion of sectarian derived from legislation drafted in a period of virulent anti-Catholicism
• The origins of the inquiry into a school’s “sectarian” character are found not in the history of the Establishment Clause, but in a dark period in our history when bigotry against Catholic immigrants was a powerful force in state legislatures
• “Sectarian” is an unhelpful analytical category and an epithet with a reprehensible past

 FOOTNOTES

1Ray Allen Billington, The Protestant Crusade 1800-1860, a study of the origins of American nativism (Quadrangle Books, 1964) p.143

2David O’Brien, Public Catholicism (Macmillan Publishing Company, 1989). Cited on p. 44

3The most detailed discussion of the controversy over the New York City Common Schools is in Billington’s The Protestant Crusade. Direct quotes from primary sources in this discussion of the New York City controversy are from citations in The Protestant Crusade.

4 Billington, p. 143.

5 Billington, p. 144-145.

6 O’Brien, p. 45.

7 William H. Seward, Works. Cited in Billington.

8 Richard Shaw, John DuBois: Founding Father (U.S. Catholic Historical Society, 1983), pp. 165-173.

9 Billington, p. 147

10 American Protestant Vindicator, November 11, 1840. Cited in Billington.

11 Ibid, August 5, 140. Cited in Billington.

12 The Journal Gazette, Fort Wayne, IN

13 O’Brien, p. 47

14 Amicus Curiae brief in Guy Mitchell, et al v. Mary L. Helms in the Supreme Court of the United States (No. 98-1648). Brief of the Becket Fund for Religious Liberty as amicus curiae in support of petitioners, p. 3. Citations following will be identified as Becket Fund.

15 Tyler Anbinder, Nativism and Slavery, The Northern Know Nothings & the Politics of the 1850s (Oxford University Press, 1992) pp. 246-278.

16 Cited in Becket Fund, p. 10

17 Anbinder, p. 136

18 Ibid, p. 136

19 Thomas H. O’Connor, Boston Catholics, A History of a Church and Its People(Northeastern University Press, 1998) p. 96

20 Anbinder, p. 137

21 Ibid, p. 274-275

22 O’Brien, p. 106

23 O’Brien, p. 106

24 Robert P. Lockwood (ed.) Anti-Catholicism in American Culture (Our Sunday Visitor, 2000) p. 35

25 Lupu, The Increasingly Anachronistic Case Against School Vouchers, 13 Notre Dame J. of Law, Ethics & Pub. Pol. 375, 386 (1999). Cited in Becket Fund.

26 O’Brien, p. 107

27 Becket Fund, p. 4

28 Ibid, p. 4

29 See Documents of American Catholic History, John Tracy Ellis (Macmillan, 1956) pp. 635-638.

30James Hennesey, S.J., American Catholics, A History of the Roman Catholic Community in the United States (Oxford University Press, 1981) p. 297

31 Ibid, p. 299

31 Mark J. Hurley, The Unholy Ghost, Anti-Catholicism in the American Experience(Our Sunday Visitor, 1992) p 187.

32For an excellent analysis of the current state of school voucher and funding questions see Joseph P. Viteritti, Choosing Equality, School Choice, the Constitution and Civil Society (Brookings Institute Press, Washington D.C.)

33 Columbus Enquirer, “Vouchers unconstitutional, judge rules,” by Michael Hawthorne. December 21, 1999

34 Becket Fund, p. 23

by Sr. Margherita Marchione, M.P.F.

(Catalyst 1/2002)

An extraordinary new book, a scholarly compedium of vital historical documents, Pius XII and the Second World War: According to the Archives of the Vatican (Paulist Press, 1999) by Father Pierre Blet, S.J., greatly expands our knowledge of what Pope Pius XII did to help victims of Nazi oppression in Europe during World War II. The author of this essential work is one of a team of four Jesuit historians who edited the Vatican documents published from 1965-1981 in 12 volumes.

Blet’s book is a summary, not only of the Vatican’s assistance to all Nazi victims but it also counters many of the accusations launched against Pius XII, as it carefully establishes the historical record of his compassion and heroism, and documents his opposition to all totalitarian movements, especially Nazism.

Addressing the prelates of the Roman Curia (December 24, 1939), Pius XII stated that in order to establish world peace with order and justice, it was necessary (1) to assure each nation, whether large or small, its right to life and independence; (2) to free nations from the burden of an arms race through a mutually agreed upon, organic, and progressive disarmament; (3) to rebuild and create international institutions while bearing in mind the weaknesses of previous ones; (4) to recognize, especially in the interests of European order, the rights of ethnic minorities; (5) to recognize above all human laws and conventions “the holy and immovable divine law.”

In his letters to the bishops, Pius XII spoke out in favor of a peace “with justice for all and for each of the belligerents, [a peace] that need not be ashamed when measured by Christian principles and, for this reason, a peace carrying in itself the guarantee of security and of time” (Letter to Cardinal Faulhaber, January 18, 1940).

Pope Pius XII’s was aware that his messages were not reaching the German episcopate. In a message to the German bishops, dated August 6, 1940, he allows us to understand his position: “After seeing and experiencing during the years of Our work in Germany how harshly the German people had to suffer the continuing and humiliating effects of their defeat, and after Ourselves witnessing the way in which the previous peace treaty’s lack of proper balance has brought forth as a fatal consequence the contrasts whose elimination by violent means has the earth tremble today, We can only express our ardent hope that when the war ends, at a time known only by Providence, the eyes of the victorious will be opened to the voice of justice, equity, wisdom, and moderation, without which no peace treaty, no matter how solemn its ratification may be, can last and can have the happy consequences desired by all people.”

When Germany began its war with Russia, Pius XII did not change his position. His work on behalf of peace increased in intensity. He worked “for a merciful peace which protects against violence and injustice, which brings together and reconciles, which establishes for all former belligerents without exception supportable relations and the possibility of a prosperous development” (February 24, 1942). On March 1, 1942, he wrote: “Whereas Our Christmas radio message found a strong echo in the world, indeed beyond the circle of Christianity, We learn with sadness that it was almost completely hidden from the German Catholics.”

Pius XII reminded Germany and Soviet Russia of their responsibilities: “Your conscience and your sense of honor should lead you to treat the people of occupied territories with a spirit of justice, of humanity, and with broadness of outlook. Do not impose any burden upon them that you have judged or would judge to be unjust if you were in a situation like theirs … . Above all, keep in mind that God’s blessing or curse upon your own country may depend on your conduct toward those who, because of the fortunes of war, have fallen under your power.”

Pius XII did not want to provoke reprisals against the Church in Germany. In keeping with Vatican protocol, he delegated the task of speaking out to the bishops. He explained to Cardinal Preysing (April 30, 1943): “We give to the pastors who are working on the local level the duty of determining if and to what degree the danger of reprisals and of various forms of oppression occasioned by episcopal declarations—as well as perhaps other circumstances caused by the length and mentality of the war—seem to advise caution to avoid greater evil despite alleged reasons urging the contrary.”

Writing to the archbishop of Cologne (March 3, 1944), Pius XII spoke about “the superhuman effort necessary to keep the Holy See above the quarrels of the parties, and the confusion, almost impossible to unravel, between political and ideological currents, between violence and law (incomparably more so in the present conflict than in the last war) to the extent that it is extremely difficult to decide what must be done: reserve and prudent silence, or resolutely speaking out and vigorous action.”

The Vatican’s Holy Office had issued a formal decree on March 25, 1928, condemning anti-Semitism: “Moved by Christian charity, the Holy See is obligated to protect the Jewish people against unjust vexations and, just as it reprobates all rancour and conflicts between peoples, it particularly condemns unreservedly hatred against the people once chosen by God; the hatred that commonly goes by the name of anti-Semitism.”

Blet’s book reveals that Pius XII applied this teaching and spoke out repeatedly against the outrages of Nazism by exhorting his representatives to oppose the racial laws and to intervene on behalf of persecuted Jews.

The Pontiff was aware that speaking out explicitly against Hitler’s purges would have aggravated the Führer’s anger and accelerated the Nazi efforts to exterminate the Jews, a concern borne out by the Nazi retaliation that included the martyrdom of Edith Stein shortly after the Dutch Bishops denounced Hitler.

Personally and through his representatives, Pius XII employed all the means at his disposal to save Jews and other refugees during World War II. As a moral leader and a diplomat forced to limit his words, he privately took action and, despite insurmountable obstacles, saved hundreds of thousands of Jews from the gas chambers. The Pope was loved and respected. Of those mourning his death in 1958, Jews—who credited Pius XII with being one of their greatest defenders and benefactors in their hour of greatest need—stood in the forefront.

In his War Memories de Gaulle reports on his impressions during a meeting the following month: “Pius XII judges everything from a perspective that surpasses human beings, their undertakings and their quarrels. … His lucid thought focuses on the consequences: the outbreak of ideologies identified with Communism and Nationalism in a large part of the world. His inspiration reveals to him that only Christian faith, hope, and charity, even if they be submerged for a long time and everywhere, can overcome these ideologies. For him everything depends on the policy of the Church, on what it does, on its language, on the way it conducts itself. This is why the Pastor has made the church a domain reserved to himself personally and where he displays the gifts of authority, of influence, of the eloquence given him by God. Pious, compassionate, political—in the highest meaning these can assume—such does this pontiff and sovereign appear to me because of the respect that he inspires in me.”

Father Blet, former professor of Ecclesiastical History at the Gregorian University in Rome, stated that “the monumental work of 12 volumes of documentation include all the official documents in which the Jewish communities, the Rabbis of the world, and other refugees, thank Pope Pius XII and the Catholic Church for all the help and work in their favor. … The Pope was conscious of what he had accomplished to prevent the war, to alleviate its sufferings, to reduce the number of its victims, everything he thought he could do. The documents, insofar as they allow one to probe the human heart, come to the same conclusion.”

Sister Margherita Marchione is the author of Yours Is a Precious Witness: Memoirs of Jews and Catholics in Wartime Italy and Pius XII: Architect for Peace.

by Ronald Rychlak

(Catalyst 1/2002)

Remember John Cornwell? In his last book, Hitler’s Pope, he claimed that he was a loyal, practicing Catholic who had the highest regard for Pope Pius XII and wanted to write a book defending him. He said he received special access to secret archives due to his previous writings defending the Church. He said he spent months on end in a dungeon-like room studying the documents. Ultimately he was left in a state of moral shock and concluded that Pius XII was the ideal Pope for Hitler’s evil plans. This claim was repeated in virtually all of the early reviews, and it helped makeHitler’s Pope somewhat of a best-seller.

Before long a number of problems developed with Cornwell’s story. First came a statement from the Vatican denying that Cornwell had been granted any special privileges. As he has since admitted, the archives that he saw were not secret. They were from the years 1912-1922 and therefore contained nothing about Hitler, the Nazis, or the Holocaust. Moreover, as he has now also admitted, Cornwell spent no more than three weeks doing archival work, not “months on end.”

The rooms, by the way, are not dungeon-like.

It also seems that, contrary to his self-promoting claims, Cornwell was not really out to defend Pius when he started the project. He had previously written comments critical of Pius XII, calling him “totally remote from experience, and yet all-powerful–a Roman emperor”; and an “emaciated, large-eyed demigod.” He had also written of “Pius XII’s silence on Nazi atrocities.” In fact, far from having defended the Church in his previous writings, to the extent they dealt with religious matters at all, Cornwell’s writings were critical of Catholic doctrine and the Catholic Church. Often he was openly hostile.

In 1989, Cornwell described himself as a “lapsed Catholic for more than 20 years.” In 1993 he declared that human beings are “morally, psychologically and materially better off without a belief in God.” He also said that he had lost his “belief in the mystery of the real presence of Christ in the Eucharist.” As late as 1996, Cornwell called himself a “Catholic agnostic,” who did not believe in the soul as an immaterial substance. This undisputed evidence (which is never mentioned in Hitler’s Pope) conflicts with his claim to have been a devout Catholic convinced of Pius XII’s sanctity when he started that project in the early 1990s.

When commentators pointed to the numerous inconsistencies in his story, Cornwell ignored their legitimate arguments and instead played the part of a victim – a wounded, deeply offended Christian who has had his personal faith questioned. He elaborates on this response in his new book, Breaking Faith: The Pope, the People and the Fate of Catholicism. The book is an amalgam of personal theology, Church history, preachy sermonizing, and predictions about the future. Of central importance to the author, however, is his explanation that although he left the Church as a young man and became a serious critic, a “miracle happened” in 1989, causing him to return to his faith.

In the first few pages of Breaking Faith, Cornwell explains why it is so important to him that he be recognized as a bonafide Catholic. He is an acknowledged critic of the Catholic Church, and “there is a world of difference between an authentic believing Catholic, writing critically from within, and a ‘Catholic bashing’ apostate who lies about being a Catholic in order to solicit an unwarranted hearing from the faithful.”

Although Cornwell assures us throughout the book that he is an “authentic believing Catholic,” his expressed faith is not in the Catholic Church of Pope John Paul II. He picks up where the last chapter of Hitler’s Pope left off: with an open attack on the papacy and the current Pontiff. One need go no further than the prologue to read: “John Paul is leaving the Catholic Church in a worse state than he found it.”

Cornwell argues that there has been a fundamental breakdown in communications between hierarchy and laity and that this was brought on by John Paul’s authoritarian rule. “Bullying oppression,” he writes, is driving people away from the Catholic Church. He blames virtually all of the Church’s modern problems on “the harsh centralized rules of Wojtyla’s Church.” He calls the Pope a “stumbling block” for “progressive Catholics and a vast, marginalized faithful.”

Cornwell warns that if a conservative Pope succeeds John Paul II, the Church could face a “sectarian breakup.” He argues that: “under a conservative pope the situation will deteriorate and expand rapidly, pushing greater numbers of Catholics toward antagonism, despair and mass apostasy.”

Cornwell’s evidence for a looming sectarian breakup is found in the decline in vocations and attendance at Mass, along with opinion surveys suggesting that many Catholics have difficulty with Church teachings on contraception, abortion, divorce, and homosexuality. In fact, he cites so many opinion surveys that at points it interrupts the flow of the book. The most serious problem with these surveys, however, is the way he uses them.

Consider, for example, the survey cited on page 254 of Breaking Faith. Here we are told that 65% of American Catholic respondents “hoped for a Pope who would permit the laity to choose their own bishops,” and 78% “supported the idea” of the Pope having some lay advisors. Cornwell ominously reports that “for such a large proportion [of American Catholics] to challenge the authority of the Pope is remarkable.”

There is nothing remarkable here at all. These are innocuous findings. I have some priest-friends that I would like to see made bishops, and I assume that the Pope does listen to some lay advisors. Depending on how the survey questions were phrased (which is left unclear by Cornwell), my opinions might well have turned up in the numbers cited above, but I would certainly not be challenging the Pope’s authority.

Pope John Paul II is one of the most loved and respected men in the world, as opinion polls (unmentioned by Cornwell) continually show. Cornwell, however, uses only those polls suggesting that many American Catholics resist certain teachings. He interprets this as resistance to Papal authority, and the only solution that makes sense to him is to weaken the papacy and change the Church teachings. That, however, is not the Catholic way.

The very night that I finished reading Breaking Faith, I read an essay on John Henry Newman, one of the great Christian thinkers of the 1800s, who was made a cardinal by Pope Leo XIII in 1879. One passage of the essay seemed almost to leap off of the pages: “Newman would not have condemned any view more strongly than the one holding that opinion polls decide the truth. Nothing would have shocked him more than the thought that the faithful and not the Magisterium decide what is to be believed.”

Obviously, Cornwell is no Newman. He does not accept the Church as the repository of revealed truth. His prescription would turn the Catholic Church into a simple reflection of modern culture. What a sorry church that would be.

Regarding the current state of affairs in the Catholic Church, recent statistics suggest that the decline in vocations may be starting to turn around. Still, the problems identified by Cornwell do merit careful attention. A much better book dealing with some of these same issues, but written from a truly Catholic perspective, is Joseph Varacalli’s Bright Promise, Failed Community: Catholics and the American Public Order(Lexington Books). Varacalli concludes that the real problem is “secularization from within.” By this he means that too many Catholic academics, intellectuals, and opinion leaders have been embarrassed by the Catholic subculture. His solution calls for us to embrace Church teaching, not change it. Too bad that his book has not been given the attention that Cornwell’s books have received.

Finally, while I hate to involve myself in this story, I must do so in order to clear up a false implication about certain Vatican officials. When Hitler’s Pope was released, my book, Hitler, the War, and the Pope, was at the publisher and ready for publication. Because of the controversy, however, we delayed printing the book until I could travel to Rome and review the documents that Cornwell said had left him in a state of moral shock.

Representatives of the Congregation for the Causes of Saints provided me with office space and the documents that Cornwell had seen. They asked me to determine whether he had been fair. As I explained in my book and in these pages, (Catalyst, Cornwell’s Errors: Reviewing Hitler’s Pope, December 1999), nothing in those files could lead an honest person into a state of moral shock. His claim was a fabrication.

Cornwell now writes that I spent my time in Rome studying – at the request of the Jesuits in the Congregation for the Causes of Saints – materials pertinent to his life. It implies that the Holy See has a thick file on John Cornwell, and that they shared it with me (their “favorite trial lawyer,” to quote Cornwell) so that I could discredit him. That is so far from the truth as to be delusional.

The only information I have about John Cornwell came from his books, his articles, or interviews that he gave to the press. I took those statements and contrasted them with what he was saying at the time to promote his book. There were so many inconsistencies that they could not have been the result of honest mistakes.

Today, even most critics of Pope Pius XII realize that they have to distance themselves from the deeply-flawed Hitler’s Pope. Those who are honestly concerned about the future of the Catholic Church are similarly well advised to keep their distance from Cornwell’s new book, Breaking Faith.

by Sr. Margherita Marchione, M.P.F.

(Catalyst 1/2002)

An extraordinary new book, a scholarly compedium of vital historical documents, Pius XII and the Second World War: According to the Archives of the Vatican (Paulist Press, 1999) by Father Pierre Blet, S.J., greatly expands our knowledge of what Pope Pius XII did to help victims of Nazi oppression in Europe during World War II. The author of this essential work is one of a team of four Jesuit historians who edited the Vatican documents published from 1965-1981 in 12 volumes.

Blet’s book is a summary, not only of the Vatican’s assistance to all Nazi victims but it also counters many of the accusations launched against Pius XII, as it carefully establishes the historical record of his compassion and heroism, and documents his opposition to all totalitarian movements, especially Nazism.

Addressing the prelates of the Roman Curia (December 24, 1939), Pius XII stated that in order to establish world peace with order and justice, it was necessary (1) to assure each nation, whether large or small, its right to life and independence; (2) to free nations from the burden of an arms race through a mutually agreed upon, organic, and progressive disarmament; (3) to rebuild and create international institutions while bearing in mind the weaknesses of previous ones; (4) to recognize, especially in the interests of European order, the rights of ethnic minorities; (5) to recognize above all human laws and conventions “the holy and immovable divine law.”

In his letters to the bishops, Pius XII spoke out in favor of a peace “with justice for all and for each of the belligerents, [a peace] that need not be ashamed when measured by Christian principles and, for this reason, a peace carrying in itself the guarantee of security and of time” (Letter to Cardinal Faulhaber, January 18, 1940).

Pope Pius XII’s was aware that his messages were not reaching the German episcopate. In a message to the German bishops, dated August 6, 1940, he allows us to understand his position: “After seeing and experiencing during the years of Our work in Germany how harshly the German people had to suffer the continuing and humiliating effects of their defeat, and after Ourselves witnessing the way in which the previous peace treaty’s lack of proper balance has brought forth as a fatal consequence the contrasts whose elimination by violent means has the earth tremble today, We can only express our ardent hope that when the war ends, at a time known only by Providence, the eyes of the victorious will be opened to the voice of justice, equity, wisdom, and moderation, without which no peace treaty, no matter how solemn its ratification may be, can last and can have the happy consequences desired by all people.”

When Germany began its war with Russia, Pius XII did not change his position. His work on behalf of peace increased in intensity. He worked “for a merciful peace which protects against violence and injustice, which brings together and reconciles, which establishes for all former belligerents without exception supportable relations and the possibility of a prosperous development” (February 24, 1942). On March 1, 1942, he wrote: “Whereas Our Christmas radio message found a strong echo in the world, indeed beyond the circle of Christianity, We learn with sadness that it was almost completely hidden from the German Catholics.”

Pius XII reminded Germany and Soviet Russia of their responsibilities: “Your conscience and your sense of honor should lead you to treat the people of occupied territories with a spirit of justice, of humanity, and with broadness of outlook. Do not impose any burden upon them that you have judged or would judge to be unjust if you were in a situation like theirs … . Above all, keep in mind that God’s blessing or curse upon your own country may depend on your conduct toward those who, because of the fortunes of war, have fallen under your power.”

Pius XII did not want to provoke reprisals against the Church in Germany. In keeping with Vatican protocol, he delegated the task of speaking out to the bishops. He explained to Cardinal Preysing (April 30, 1943): “We give to the pastors who are working on the local level the duty of determining if and to what degree the danger of reprisals and of various forms of oppression occasioned by episcopal declarations—as well as perhaps other circumstances caused by the length and mentality of the war—seem to advise caution to avoid greater evil despite alleged reasons urging the contrary.”

Writing to the archbishop of Cologne (March 3, 1944), Pius XII spoke about “the superhuman effort necessary to keep the Holy See above the quarrels of the parties, and the confusion, almost impossible to unravel, between political and ideological currents, between violence and law (incomparably more so in the present conflict than in the last war) to the extent that it is extremely difficult to decide what must be done: reserve and prudent silence, or resolutely speaking out and vigorous action.”

The Vatican’s Holy Office had issued a formal decree on March 25, 1928, condemning anti-Semitism: “Moved by Christian charity, the Holy See is obligated to protect the Jewish people against unjust vexations and, just as it reprobates all rancour and conflicts between peoples, it particularly condemns unreservedly hatred against the people once chosen by God; the hatred that commonly goes by the name of anti-Semitism.”

Blet’s book reveals that Pius XII applied this teaching and spoke out repeatedly against the outrages of Nazism by exhorting his representatives to oppose the racial laws and to intervene on behalf of persecuted Jews.

The Pontiff was aware that speaking out explicitly against Hitler’s purges would have aggravated the Führer’s anger and accelerated the Nazi efforts to exterminate the Jews, a concern borne out by the Nazi retaliation that included the martyrdom of Edith Stein shortly after the Dutch Bishops denounced Hitler.

Personally and through his representatives, Pius XII employed all the means at his disposal to save Jews and other refugees during World War II. As a moral leader and a diplomat forced to limit his words, he privately took action and, despite insurmountable obstacles, saved hundreds of thousands of Jews from the gas chambers. The Pope was loved and respected. Of those mourning his death in 1958, Jews—who credited Pius XII with being one of their greatest defenders and benefactors in their hour of greatest need—stood in the forefront.

In his War Memories de Gaulle reports on his impressions during a meeting the following month: “Pius XII judges everything from a perspective that surpasses human beings, their undertakings and their quarrels. … His lucid thought focuses on the consequences: the outbreak of ideologies identified with Communism and Nationalism in a large part of the world. His inspiration reveals to him that only Christian faith, hope, and charity, even if they be submerged for a long time and everywhere, can overcome these ideologies. For him everything depends on the policy of the Church, on what it does, on its language, on the way it conducts itself. This is why the Pastor has made the church a domain reserved to himself personally and where he displays the gifts of authority, of influence, of the eloquence given him by God. Pious, compassionate, political—in the highest meaning these can assume—such does this pontiff and sovereign appear to me because of the respect that he inspires in me.”

Father Blet, former professor of Ecclesiastical History at the Gregorian University in Rome, stated that “the monumental work of 12 volumes of documentation include all the official documents in which the Jewish communities, the Rabbis of the world, and other refugees, thank Pope Pius XII and the Catholic Church for all the help and work in their favor. … The Pope was conscious of what he had accomplished to prevent the war, to alleviate its sufferings, to reduce the number of its victims, everything he thought he could do. The documents, insofar as they allow one to probe the human heart, come to the same conclusion.”

Sister Margherita Marchione is the author of Yours Is a Precious Witness: Memoirs of Jews and Catholics in Wartime Italy and Pius XII: Architect for Peace.

by Ronald Rychlak

(Catalyst 12/2001)

A couple of years ago, when critics charged that Pope Pius XII had shown a callous indifference to the plight of the Jews, the common refrain was that if only he had been more outspoken on behalf of the Jews, like his predecessors, thousands of more lives might have been saved. The traditional view of Popes is that they defended the life and safety of Jews, even when some Catholics were not as Christian as they should have been.

Now, along comes a book by David Kertzer, The Popes against the Jews, in which he argues that far from being defenders of Jewish people, Popes of the 19^th and early 20^th centuries, up until (and implicitly including) Pius XII were actually anti-Semites who paved the way for the Holocaust. Nowhere in his book is he able to document any modern Pope making any explicit statement in support of anti-Semitism, but he attempts to re-write history by focusing on a handful of issues taken out of context and without a full exploration of the evidence. The result, as Rabbi David Dalin recently wrote in The Weekly Standard: “is both false and unpersuasive.”

Kertzer says he was motivated to write his book after reading the 1998 Vatican document, We Remember: A Reflection on the Shoah. That statement explained the difference between anti-Judaism, of which the Vatican admitted “Christians have also been guilty,” and the racial anti-Semitism embraced by the Nazis. This latter evil contradicts core Catholic beliefs, and the Church has always condemned it.

The difference is illustrated in Kertzer’s discussion of Pope Pius IX and Edgardo Mortara (which took place when slavery was still legal in the United States). This Jewish boy was baptized by a Catholic servant, removed from his family, and brought up by the Pope. Church rules prevented the Christian child from returning to his family (though they were allowed to visit and could have converted to have him returned). It seems very harsh today, but it was not racial anti-Semitism. There was no hatred here. Edgardo and Pius developed a father-son relationship, and the boy grew up to become a priest. Kertzer seems not to understand that such a result would have been unthinkable for an anti-Semite.

Discussing Pope Benedict XV, Kertzer overlooks the most significant, direct piece of evidence. In 1916, American Jews petitioned Benedict on behalf of Polish Jews. The response was as follows:

“The Supreme Pontiff…. as Head of the Catholic Church, which, faithful to its divine doctrines and its most glorious traditions, considers all men as brothers and teaches them to love one another, he never ceases to indicate among individuals, as well as among peoples, the observance of the principles of the natural law, and to condemn everything that violates them. This law must be observed and respected in the case of the children of Israel, as well as of all others, because it would not be comformable to justice or to religion itself to derogate from it solely on account of divergence of religious confessions.”

Kertzer fails to mention this express papal condemnation of anti-Semitism, which was published in the Jesuit Journal Civilta Cattolica — though he does seem to quote every anti-Jewish comment published by that journal.

Benedict was succeeded by Pope Pius XI who was decidedly supportive of Jews. In 1928, the Vatican under his leadership issued a statement that was cited by rescuers during the Holocaust. It said that the Church “just as it reproves all rancours in conflicts between peoples, to the maximum extent condemns hatred of the people once chosen by God, the hatred that commonly goes by the name of anti-Semitism.” In November 1931, the chief rabbi of Milan thanked the Pope for his appeals against anti-Semitism and his continuing support for Italy’s Jews.

In 1937, Pius issued the papal encyclical Mit brennender Sorge. This encyclical still stands as one of the strongest condemnations of any national regime that the Holy See has ever published. Kertzer reports that Mit brennender Sorge contains no explicit reference to anti-Semitism. His citation for this: the much discredited Hitler’s Pope by John Cornwell. It causes one to seriously question Kertzer’s qualifications as an historian.

Mit brennender Sorge strongly condemned the neo-paganism of Nazi theories. It stated in part that:

“Whoever exalts race, or the people, or the State, or a particular form of State, or the depositories of power, or any other fundamental value of the human community… whoever raises these notions above their standard value and divinizes them to an idolatrous level, distorts and perverts an order of the world planned and created by God.”

Pius went on with further condemnations of racial theories:

“None but superficial minds could stumble into concepts of a national God, of a national religion; or attempt to lock within the frontiers of a single people, within the narrow limits of a single race, God, the Creator of the universe, King and Legislator of all nations….”

No one who read this document at the time had any illusion about the gravity of these statements or their significance.

On September 6, 1938, in a statement which – though barred from the Fascist press – made its way around the world, Pius XI said:

“Mark well that in the Catholic Mass, Abraham is our Patriarch and forefather. Anti-Semitism is incompatible with the lofty thought which that fact expresses. It is a movement with which we Christians can have nothing to do. No, no, I say to you it is impossible for a Christian to take part in anti-Semitism. It is inadmissible. Through Christ and in Christ we are the spiritual progeny of Abraham. Spiritually, we are all Semites.”

This statement was made while the most powerful nation in Europe had an officially anti-Semitic government and was poised only a few hundred miles to the north of Rome. Everyone understood their significance, especially the victims. In January 1939, The National Jewish Monthly reported that “the only bright spot in Italy has been the Vatican, where fine humanitarian statements by the Pope have been issuing regularly.”

So how does Kertzer try to convert Pope Pius XI, a celebrated champion of the Jews, into an anti-Semite? In imitation of John Cornwell (a quote from whom appears on Kertzer’s cover) he has found a previously published letter, noted some uncomfortable language within it, and attempted to use it to smear the reputation of a good and holy man.

Monsignor Achille Ratti, the future Pius XI, served as papal nuncio to Poland after World War I. In one of his reports back to Rome he stated: “One of the most evil and strongest influences that is felt here, perhaps the strongest and the most evil, is that of the Jews.” To Kertzer, this brands him evermore as an anti-Semite.

In point of fact, Ratti had been sent to a largely Catholic nation with instructions to report back to Rome on any significant developments. It so happens at that time there was a significant threat of a Communist revolution. Many of the leaders of this movement were Jewish. Ratti was reporting on what he saw, but he was no anti-Semite.

Even in the early years, Ratti was known to be on good terms with the Jews. As a young priest in Milan he learned Hebrew from a local rabbi. He enjoyed warm relations with Italian Jewish leaders in the early years of his priesthood. During his tenure in Poland, amid Europe’s largest Jewish population, he saw anti-Semitic persecution. This led the future pope to denounce anti-Semitism and make it clear “that any anti-Semitic outbursts would be severely condemned by the Holy See.”

Instructed by Pope Benedict to direct the distribution of Catholic relief in postwar Poland, Ratti provided funds to impoverished Jews who had lost their homes and businesses. Whereas Kertzer asserts that Ratti only met once with Poland’s Jews, and studiously tried to avoid them, better scholars have documented that he greeted and assisted Jews all throughout his three-year stay in Poland.

Kertzer’s other attempts to smear the papacy are similarly lacking in balance. He devotes three chapters to the ancient charge that during the Passover, Jews ritually murdered Christian children, to get their blood. This “blood libel” was not an invention of the Popes, nor for that matter of Catholics, but Kertzer implies that being duped by a fabrication is as bad as inventing it, and he makes very little mention of the numerous papal condemnations of the blood libel charge. Moreover, Kertzer charges Fr. August Rohling with being one of the primary causes of anti-Semitic agitation in the Austrian empire during the 1880s, but he gives no mention of the Vatican’s rebuke of Rohling for furthering the blood libel.

Kertzer charges that there was a Vatican “campaign” to popularize the infamous, anti-Semitic Protocols of the Elders of Zion. His evidence for this is that a French priest tried to do that in the 1920s. Of course Kertzer ignores that another French priest, Fr. Pierre Charles, SJ, wrote an article in the 1930s thoroughly debunking the forgery and that Fr. Leslie Walker, S.J. devoted much of his work to exposing the Protocols as a historical fraud. In fact, according to the Boston Pilot, September 1942, “again and again the charge that there exists an organized Jewish conspiracy against Christian civilization has been proved by Catholic scholars to be an impious forgery.”

Discussing the treason trial of Alfred Dreyfus, Kertzer’s emphasizes the French Catholics who contributed to the persecution of an innocent man, but he fails to mention the Papacy’s opposition to this anti-Semitic campaign. In a book about Papalanti-Semitism, this is a rather serious oversight. What we do get about Pope Leo XIII is buried in a footnote: two years before this case developed, Leo came out strongly defending Jews and opposed to anti-Semitism.

The truth is that the papacy stands out as the one of the few protectors of Jews during the period Kertzer examines. Selective evidence and crabbed interpretations cannot change that fact. Those who want to know more about this history are advised to consult a booklet published by the American Bishops entitled: Catholics Remember the Holocaust, which contains the full text of the Vatican’s 1998 Shoah document, statements from various episcopal conferences, and Cardinal Cassidy’s clarification and response to those (like Kertzer) who misread and misinterpret this important document.