by Robert P. Lockwood

(book review, 1/2001)

When John Cornwell’s book Hitler’s Pope[1] was released in the United States in 1999 it generated intense media coverage. Cornwell painted Pope Pius XII (1939-1958) as virtually a silent collaborator in the face of Nazi Germany’s “Final Solution.” While the alleged “silence” of Pius XII was central to media coverage, Cornwell’s thesis went deeper than that. There was a reason for the “papal silence” that had little to do with fear or even anti-Semitism (though he broadly hinted that Eugenio Pacelli was at best unsympathetic to Jews throughout his life).

According to Cornwell, Pope Pius XII willingly sacrificed the lives of Jews on the altar of papal power: “Pacelli’s failure to respond to the enormity of the Holocaust was more than a personal failure, it was a failure of the papal office itself and the prevailing culture of Catholicism. That failure was implicit in the rifts Catholicism created and sustained – between the sacred and the profane, the spiritual and the secular, the body and the soul, clergy and laity, the exclusive truth of Catholicism over all other confessions and faith. It was an essential feature of Pacelli’s ideology of papal power, moreover, that Catholics should abdicate, as Catholics, their social and political responsibility for what happened in the world and turn their gaze upward to the Holy Father and, beyond, to eternity.”[2]

Critics generally dismissed Cornwell’s book as sensationalism with little serious or original scholarship. Ronald J. Rychlak in Hitler, the War, and the Pope[3] effectively rebutted most of Cornwell’s major assertions. Cornwell’s aim was to discredit Pius XII, and through him, his successor, Pope John Paul II. Cornwell wrote that Pope John Paul II “has reinstated the ideology of papal power. Pluralism, he believes, can only lead to centrifugal fragmentation; only a strong Pope, ruling from the apex, can save the Church…Pacelli’s monolithic pyramidal model of the Church has once again reasserted itself.”[4]

It was striking that little attention was given to this important conclusion. Cornwell was using the Holocaust to advocate and argue for a particular position within the Church on the role of papal authority. His book was written as an advocacy paper against the leadership of Pope John Paul II within the Church and in favor of a particular so-called liberal vision of how the Church should function. It was surprising that few were struck, particularly Jewish commentators, by this use and abuse of the Holocaust for internal Church debate. In retrospect, it appears blasphemous to the memory of the millions slaughtered by the Nazis.

Similarly, Garry Wills in his recent book Papal Sin uses the Holocaust to score points in an attack on papal authority.[5] Wills’ book is a wide-ranging screed in opposition to myriad Catholic beliefs.[6] Papal Sin refers to what Wills calls the “structures of deceit” that he contends are inherent to the papacy. Wills charges that the Catholic Church exists in a system of lies, falsifications, and misrepresentations meant to artificially prop up papal authority. The whole structure and belief system of the Church, from sacramental and moral theology, to ecclesiology, Marian beliefs and the essential understanding of Christ’s death as atonement for the sins of mankind, are part of a fabricated “structure of deceit” according to Wills. In discussing the Nazis and the Holocaust, he essentially regurgitates Cornwell’s thesis. Wills argues that all the actions of Pope Pius XII during the years of Nazi power were calculated responses meant to defend papal authority. Again, like Cornwell, he uses the Holocaust as a means to put forth a particular anti-papal perspective within the Catholic Church. The horror of the Holocaust is utilized as a tool to make points in an internal Church debate.

The latest author to enter the field of the Church and the Holocaust is James Carroll. A former Paulist priest and award-winning novelist, Carroll’s new book is Constantine’s Sword.[7] Carroll’s stated goal is to present a “history” of the Church and the Jews to show the linkage between Catholic belief and the Nazi Holocaust. “Auschwitz, when seen in the links of causality, reveals that hatred of Jews has been no incidental anomaly but a central action of Christian history, reaching to the core of Christian character. Jew hatred’s perversion of the Gospel message launched a history, in other words, that achieved its climax in the Holocaust, an epiphany presented so starkly it cannot be denied…Because the hatred of Jews had been made holy, it became lethal. The most sacred ‘thinking and acting’ of the Church as such must at last be called into question.”[8]

Cornwell, Wills and Carroll all state that they are practicing Catholics, and such is no doubt the reason all three books found publishers. It is not likely that mainstream publishers would have handled such works that evidenced what in a non-Catholic’s hands would have appeared to be anti-Catholic diatribes. The Catholicity of the authors, to the publishers, gives all three works legitimacy, if you will, that would not exist if the authors were non-Catholics. (And makes the charge of anti-Catholicism, on the surface, easy to refute: how could a book be anti-Catholic if the author is Catholic?). But more to the point, the authors’ Catholic identity gives a fundamental agenda to the collective works. In all three works, the essential issues dealt with are used to lay out an internal agenda within Catholicism. While Cornwell and Wills focus primarily on the role of papal authority, Carroll both includes and expands on that theme to question fundamental Catholic beliefs.

Carroll’s thesis is that the anti-Semitism, which resulted in the Holocaust, is central to Catholic theology and derived from the earliest Christian expressions of belief, namely the Gospel accounts themselves. He concludes his book with a call for a third Vatican Council to make a series of changes in basic Catholic belief that he envisions purging the Church of this alleged fundamental anti-Semitism. We will note these later. However, it is important to understand that fundamentally, Carroll’s purpose is to put forth a laundry list of liberal bromides for Church reform and uses the context of anti-Semitism and the Holocaust to push this reform agenda, as both Wills and Cornwell. As Carroll himself observes, “Human memory is inevitably imprecise, and it is not uncommon for the past to be retrieved in ways that serve present purposes.”[9] That neatly summarizes the whole point of this book. While Carroll may be more astute than Cornwell, and less virulent than Wills, his objectives are the same. Which, again, appears to be bordering on a blasphemous use of the horror of the Holocaust for Church politicking.

Carroll’s book is described as a “history” of the Church and the Jews, but it is a great deal more personal rumination than serious historical, or theological, study. Throughout the book, the reader encounters a young Carroll with his mother, Carroll the student, Carroll’s trials and tribulations as a priest, Carroll the father, Carroll the husband, along with dying friends, childhood buddies, and various pilgrimages throughout Europe. Half of the action seems to take place as Carroll ruminates at various sidewalk cafes or churches.

Carroll’s main sources from a Catholic perspective are disaffected theologians such as Hans Kung and Rosemary Radford Ruether, or Scriptural scholars like John Dominic Crossan from the Jesus Seminar. His primary source on the Church and the Holocaust, for example, is Cornwell’s Hitler’s Pope, which he acknowledges in a footnote to have been “controversial,” but that he had reviewed it favorably. His knowledge – or at least his citation – of mainstream Catholic sources is limited to non-existent. He makes a single apparent reference to the Catechism of the Catholic Church[10] but calls it the “World Catechism.”[11] In its very early development stages some referred to the Catechism project as the “Universal Catechism,” but it was never called the “World Catechism.” And it has been in publication for eight years and a bestseller under the title, the Catechism of the Catholic Church. This is not, therefore, a book that pays much attention to mainstream Catholic theological, scriptural or historical scholarship, nor attempts to portray and interpret Catholic beliefs with any degree of balance.

Constantine’s Sword, at the risk of understatement, is a lengthy book that actually argues little but avers grandly. Like Garry Wills in Papal Sin, Carroll makes assertions, backs them up when possible with assertions of others who share those assertions, then considers the matter settled. He asks is “it possible that the dominant memory of Christianity’s foundational events [reviewer’s note: the New Testament], a memory that features Jesus’ conflict with the Jews and then his followers’ conflict with the Jews…has enshrined a falsehood?” He then cites Crossan that, indeed such is the case and refers to various aspects of the New Testament as the “longest lie.”[12]

Carroll’s goals are worthy: an investigation into the source and history of anti-Jewish acts, atrocities and polemics within the 2000-year history of the Church and within the course of Western civilization. To deny that such a history exists would be to live a lie. Understanding that history, and knowing that it may have been a factor in allowing European Catholics and Protestants to turn a blind-eye toward Nazi atrocities against the Jews is to acknowledge a painful, and indeed horrifying, reality. This was central to the Vatican’s statement on the Shoah[13] and to that part of the papal apology of March 2000. But to make the assertion, as Carroll does (despite a few protestations that the Nazis did, in fact, carry out the “Final Solution,” not the Catholic Church) that Catholic theology, history and belief were fundamental and direct causes of the Holocaust is scurrilous and betrays another agenda more fully spelled-out in the concluding section of Constantine’s Sword when Carroll calls for his Third Vatican Council.

In recent years, of course, it has become part of conventional wisdom that Pius XII was silent in the face of the Holocaust and that the Catholic Church, despite saving more Jewish lives than any other entity at the time, was virtually a collaborator in the “Final Solution.” Why has this essentially baseless charge become accepted as fact? Robert George in an afterword to Rychlak’s Hitler, the War and the Pope, charges bluntly that “the myth that Pius XII was ‘Hitler’s Pope’ lives and breathes on anti-Catholic bigotry. It can do so for the simple reason that anti-Catholicism remains ‘the anti-semitism of the intellectuals’…The defamatory falsehoods…originate in, and are to a large extent sustained as part of, alarger effort to undermine the credibility and weaken the moral and cultural influence of the Catholic Church. Why? Because the Catholic Church – and, within the Church, the institution of the papacy – is the single most potent force on the side of traditional morality in cultural conflicts with communism, utilitarianism, racial individualism, and other major secular ideologies.” ^[14]

It is also necessary to make the Church the cause of the Holocaust because so much of what passes as contemporary enlightened thought and views have their roots not in Catholicism or Christianity, but in the very secular ideologies that laid the true foundation for the Holocaust. So-called enlightened views on euthanasia or abortion, for example, find their philosophical origins in late 19^th century racial eugenics that propagated Hitler’s attack on the Jews. That is a reality the chattering classes want to ignore. To scapegoat the Catholic Church as the cause of the Holocaust makes a secular examination of conscience unnecessary.

The roots of Hitler’s anti-Semitic racist frenzy, and that of European society as a whole, are found not in Catholic belief but in the cultural rejection of Catholic belief in the Enlightenment and pseudo-scientism of the 18^th, 19^th and 20^th centuries. Rather than a continuum from a beginning in the New Testament, rabid racial anti-Semitism was born in the stew of competing 19^th century liberal ideologies of nationalism, racialism and eugenics, ideologies fought almost solely by the Church and that still have impact in the 21^st century. These were the views of the elite and enlightened, who scoffed at the Church and invented a hundred secular legends still with us today to show the Church as the enemy of this new, modern thinking. Carroll, of course, is not ignorant of the impact of these theories or that the Church stood almost alone in opposition to them. To Carroll, however, these theories were merely part of a whole. Though such theories that led to and created the Holocaust were a fundamental rejection of thousands of years of Judaic and Christian thought, Carroll sees them differently. He sees these enlightenment theories as ideas that grew naturally from Christian origins, rather than an outright rejection. One was merely grafted on the other. “If Hitler’s paranoia about Jews was fueled by the grafting of the secular and neo-pagan racism of modernity to the stock of ancient and medieval Jew-hatred, why does that remove Christian history from the center of the story? The stock remains the stock. Modern secularists found a new language with which to slander Jews, but their impulse to do so – here is the point – was as rooted in the mystery of religion as any grand inquisitor’s.”[15] But it is that fundamental premise that is wrong. Hitler’s anti-Semitism was not caused by religious differences between Catholics and Jews, or anti-Jewish outbursts during the First Crusade. His hatred was a fundamental rejection of both Christianity and Judaism. His hatred was of faith in anything but the Aryan race and the German nation-state. His beliefs and his rationalizations derived from the stew of anti-Catholic secularist philosophies, not Catholicism. He did not approach the world with a mode of thinking and belief rooted in the 1,900 years of Western civilization. Rather, he was rooted in the 150 years of elitist and racist thought that had abandoned the Judeo-Christian roots of Western civilization.

Carroll finds the foundation error of Christianity in the construction of the New Testament itself. The Gospels writers, he argues, laid the foundation for anti-Semitism in the very way they wrote the Gospels. They did this, Carroll charges, by de-emphasizing the Roman responsibility for the crucifixion of Jesus in order to placate Roman authorities. The evangelists and New Testament writers also reflected in their scripture a division between the Jesus movement, (Carroll’s general term for nascent Christianity), and Jews who would not accept Jesus. Finally, in a phrase borrowed from Crossan, a “prophecy historicized,”[16] distorted their work. This means that seeing Jesus as the fulfillment of Old Testament prophecies led to outright falsehood about the life, teachings and, in particular, the death and resurrection of Jesus. The charge is that the story of Jesus was re-written and elements “invented” in order to tie Jesus more closely to messianic prophecies from the Old Testament. This is the “longest lie” of the New Testament, according to Carroll.

Of course, this is a far cry from mainstream post-Vatican II biblical scholarship, represented by the late Father Raymond Brown, that generally view the Gospel texts as fairly accurate recollections of the life and teachings of Jesus written by those close to Him in time. Carroll’s sources represent an extremist view of biblical scholarship and he bases his fundamental theory of Scriptural interpretation on the shaky – at best – conclusions of the Jesus Seminar activists. His whole thesis is based on invention and speculation 2,000 years after the fact.

There can be little doubt that a way of reading New Testament scripture could lead to anti-Jewish sentiment or, rather, be an excuse for anti-Jewish sentiment. This certainly happened. However, the roots of Christian-Jewish divisions are more clearly found in both the Christian understanding of who Jesus was – the promised Messiah – and in early Church history where Jews and Christians became deeply divided, than in Scriptural directives. False scriptural interpretation and misunderstanding have often infected Christian life (and was the source of the difficulty in the famous case of Galileo[17]) but that does not mean that Scripture is wrong. It means that the interpretation given by some to Scripture is wrong. As Carroll states at one point, if “Christian Jew-hatred did not originate with the Jew Jesus, no matter how it developed, then it is not essential to Christian faith.”[18] All would agree with that assessment. Unfortunately, Carroll himself does not. He believes that the New Testament is clearly anti-Semitic and, therefore, caused anti-Jewish sentiment which, in turn, eventually evolved into the philosophies that created the Holocaust. Rather than arguing that bad Scriptural interpretation in the past was used by some to declare that all Jews shared the blame in the death of Jesus, Carroll would rather agree that this is the proper meaning of Scripture. He sees anti-Semitism as fundamental to the Christian message as presented in the New Testament.

Carroll centers his discussion of the roots of alleged Catholic anti-Semitism on the Gospel accounts of the passion, death and resurrection of Jesus. “Scholars agree,” Carroll writes, “that within a relatively short period of time, the followers of Jesus had constructed an account of his last days that would become the source of each of the four Gospels’ Passion narratives…Where scholars differ – and this difference is relative to our attempt to name the ultimate source of anti-Jewish contempt – is on the question of whether the Passion story thus told is essentially a historical or literary composition.”[19] Clearly, we will find that Carroll believes that most of the Passion account reflects a “prophesized history” rather than “history remembered.”[20]   The theory goes that the “Jesus movement” of the first century, at war with the Pharisees for control of the “true Israel,” enveloped the Passion narrative in anti-Pharisee myths that would in turn establish an anti-Jewish contempt in Christianity. And so, Carroll dismisses a good part of the historicity of the Gospel accounts and of the whole concept that Jesus died on the cross as a saving act of atonement for mankind. As to the bodily resurrection of Jesus, Carroll is circumspect at best: “Immediately after Jesus’ death, the circle of his friends began to gather. Their love for him, instead of fading in his absence, quickened, opening into a potent love they felt for one another. Their gatherings were like those of a bereft circle, and they were built around lament, the reading of texts, silence, stories, food, drink, songs, more texts, poems – a changed sense of time and a repeated intuition that there was ‘one more member’ than could be counted. That intuition is what we call the Resurrection.” [21]This appears to be an understanding of the Resurrection for the brie and white wine set, rather than a Catholic and Christian understanding.

Constantine’s Sword is a slogging journey through the history of the Church over the two millennia. He touches down here and there when it suits his purpose. For example, while the treatment of the 12^th through the 16^th centuries is endless, he barely touches on the nearly eight hundred years from Constantine to the calling of the First Crusade – which leaves a rather sizeable gap in the alleged causal linkage of anti-Semitism in the Church from the Gospels to the Holocaust.

After meandering quickly through the age of the early Church fathers, Carroll arrives at what he sees as a decisive point: Constantine’s victory at the Milvian Bridge in 312 AD. Briefly, Constantine was battling for eventual control of the Roman Empire. At the Milvian Bridge he would secure control of the Western Empire and, in 324, become sole emperor of the Roman Empire. Before the critical battle of the Milvian Bridge, Constantine claimed to have seen a vision of the Cross, and the Christian symbol was placed on his standards on the day of battle. After his victory, the Edict of Milan was issued ending the persecution of Christians. Ruling until his death in 337 AD, Constantine promoted Christianity as the religion of the Roman state and involved himself closely in internal Church affairs, though he was not actually baptized a Christian until a few days before his death. Though his ending of the Christian persecution was a critical point in Church history, his imperial involvement in Church affairs established a long-standing dispute over the rights of rulers in temporal and ecclesiastical affairs of the Church.

Carroll sees Constantine in a different light. Though his “political impact on Christianity is widely recognized,” Carroll writes, “his role as a shaper of its central religious idea is insufficiently appreciated.” Carroll claims that the “place of the cross in the Christian imagination changed with Constantine.”[22] This would lead, according to Carroll, to a central theological tenet of Catholicism that wrongly focused on the death of Jesus as atonement and reparation for sin. Thus the concept of salvation would come to dominate Christian thinking as the meaning of the life of Jesus, His death on the Cross an act of atonement for sin. This was an intention that Jesus never had, according to Carroll.

At the same time, Constantine’s exercise of authority in the Church, particularly in the name of Christian unity, brought a heretofore unheard of emphasis on defined doctrinal orthodoxy. Church authority (which would evolve into papal absolutism) now entered the Christian scene as well.[23] Constantine, in Carroll’s view, was a very busy man. In any case, Carroll contends that the combination of these theological and legalistic forces centered on Constantine boded ill for the Jews who would be seen as the ones who “killed Christ” on a newly-emphasized cross, and whose failure to recognize their own Messiah was the ultimate heresy, the ultimate insult to Christian evangelization, and made them the first “dissenters” from unity of faith.

All this, of course, sounds a bit like a 16^th Century anti-Catholic tract during the Reformation, or one of Jack Chick’s contemporary pamphlets claiming Catholic descent from a Babylonian mystery religion. The over 275 years after Christ and preceding Constantine showed a steady development of an understanding of a distinct Christian faith as well as the development of a rich community, liturgical and theological life. Concerns over unity of belief are evident in the earliest years of the Church[24] and a bewildering list of various heresies addressed by the Church long pre-date Constantine. The anti-Nicene fathers of the Church, apologists such as St. Justin Martyr, and early theologians such as St. Irenaeus, who described a world wounded by Adam’s sin but healed in Jesus, show an early Church developing an ordered set of beliefs rooted in Christ, distinct liturgy, and an insistence on Christ as the means toward salvation and eternal life. The theological concept of Christ’s atonement for sins was hardly a late-developing concept ingeniously inserted into Catholic life by a theologically illiterate Roman emperor, but is taught directly in the New Testament and in the writings of the early Church fathers. Constantine certainly had a strong impact on the early Church that would last for centuries. But Carroll attributes to him far too much impact in the areas of theology, ecclesiology, doctrinal theology and the Church’s hierarchical structure. These were areas of the Church developing for two centuries prior to Constantine and did not spring fully born from a Roman emperor with only a minimal understanding of the faith he embraced to under gird his Empire.

Carroll’s central thesis is that emphasis on the Cross as both a form of devotion and source for a theological understanding of the Christian message – enhanced by the legend of Constantine’s mother Helena finding the True Cross in Jerusalem – had a devastating impact on Christian self-understanding and on the attitude the Church would develop toward the Jews. Seeing the death of Jesus as central to God’s redemptive plan, the Cross ushered in a “teaching of contempt” toward Jews, a teaching that will lead over the centuries to the Nazi Final Solution. The actual destruction of the Jews once Christianity is backed by Roman imperial power, Carroll contends, is only prevented by the theological intervention of St. Augustine (354-430). Augustine would argue in The City of God that Jews had a specific role in God’s saving plan in that “a continuing Judaism would serve as a source of authenticity for the prophecy-based claims of Christianity.”[25] At the end of the Sixth Century, Pope Gregory the Great would forbid any violence against Jews. Carroll argues that with the foundational theology of contempt established, however, the seeds of anti-Semitism had been planted by the Church, such official proclamations not withstanding.

It can be argued, of course, that the opposite holds true. Racial anti-Semitism had existed in the Roman Empire long before Christianity was a majority faith or even a known faith distinct from Judaism. Particularly with the Jewish Diaspora from the Holy Land throughout the Empire after their revolution was defeated by Roman soldiers in 70 AD and the temple destroyed, the Jews were viewed as a people apart. By the practices tied to their faith that reinforced their separateness from Roman society, the Jewish people were considered a distinct and disliked racial minority. Anti-Jewish attitudes were certainly inherited among Christians as the infant Church more aggressively attracted non-Jews to the burgeoning faith. But to claim that the reason for anti-Jewish attitudes in Western culture was a result of Christian Scripture and Christian theology requires that a history of anti-Semitism older than Christianity be ignored.

The pagan faiths disappeared over the centuries from Constantine to Pope Gregory the Great as the Roman world became essentially Christian. Judaism, however, did not disappear. Carroll suggests that the reason for this is an inherent anti-Semitism within Christianity that required the continued existence of the Jews. The logic doesn’t hold. He blames the Church for a cultural phenomenon that preceded it, and points to confirmation in the fact that the Church tried to limit both the severity and violence of anti-Jewish acts through the intervention of Augustine and the proclamation of Gregory the Great. The Jews survived the first thousand years of Christianity by the strength of their own faith and because the Church did not attempt to forcefully eradicate their faith. If Carroll’s premise was true, or as basic to the Christian faith as he contends, Judaism would have disappeared by Christian force and no “ambivalence” in Christian attitude would have stopped it.

After establishing his central premise – that Christianity is anti-Semitic in its foundational texts and that Constantine by his centralizing notions and “theology of the Cross” formalized anti-Semitism within the Church’s structure and devotion – Carroll proceeds to describe what he sees as a linkage through history of the Church to the Final Solution by portraying anti-Jewish actions in European history. Leaping ahead from Augustine to the Crusades 700 years later, where Jews were violently attacked, (attacks consistently condemned by the popes and the hierarchy), Carroll claims a “miscarried cult of the cross is ubiquitous in this story, from Milvian Bride to Auschwitz. The ‘way of the cross,’ which is another way of saying ‘crusade,’ is the definitive epiphany, laying bear the meaning of what went before and what went after, even to our own time.”[26]

Though Carroll’s book can bend a coffee table at 756 pages, his litany of anti-Jewish incidents in Western history is spotty and lacking historical nuance. He touches on various events within Western history such as the Crusades, the Inquisition, the Plague, the Council of Trent and its aftermath, the French Revolution, the Dreyfus Affair, the Kulturkampf and concludes, actually quite briefly, with the Holocaust. Throughout these diverse and complicated historical trends and events, he sees a theology of the Cross and Church teaching on the atonement as being the dominant factor in generating anti-Jewish violence and anti-Semitic racism. This just doesn’t hold to be the causative factor that Carroll alleges in these complicated events.

Serious historians, for example, acknowledge an upswing in anti-Jewish actions in parts of Europe at the time of the calling for the First Crusade in 1096. The reasons given by historians for this development vary. Some point toward resentment that Jews were primarily the moneylenders of an infant capitalist Europe as the Church taught money lending for interest sinful among Christians. Others point to a growing urbanization that was disrupting old forms of civil life. Still others have pointed to a re-born sense of both evangelization and conformity within society. Led by a stronger papacy, the Church saw its mission to sanctifying the world through a combination of the Church’s need to reform its institutional life, free itself from control by secular lords, and to build a Christian society. There was also the growing fear that, “Those who dissented from belief or behaved in a manner that was explicitly defined as un-Christian appeared no longer as erring souls in a temptation-filled world, but as subverters of the world’s new course…”[27] This certainly played a role in enhancing a view of the Jews as outsiders in the creation of the Christian world.

Carroll, however, attributes the rise in anti-Jewish outbreaks directly with the Crusades and its emphasis on the Cross. While certainly crusading rhetoric involved at times slander of Jews – and violent anti-Jewish outbursts – the era was far more complicated than Carroll’s simplistic notion of cause and effect. Certainly, there was a renewed emphasis on evangelization and religious conformity. But the primary concern of the era for the Church in Europe was internal reform that would lead to spiritual awakening among Christians. Additionally, a stronger papacy would lead to greater protection – rather than a greater threat – for the Jewish population of Europe. The Church and the hierarchy roundly condemned attacks on Jews by the first crusaders. Pope Calixtus III (1119-1124) issued the papal bull Sicut Judaesis that condemned any violence against the Jews, a bull reaffirmed by 20 of his successors. St. Bernard of Clairvaux, who preached the Second Crusade, would speak out forcefully against anti-Jewish violence and is generally held responsible for limiting such incidents. Though Carroll tries to link a stronger papacy with increased anti-Jewish acts, [28] the opposite appears true. A stronger Church and papacy that can influence secular authorities in European history rather than be controlled by secular authorities, the less likely were anti-Jewish outbreaks. (This would be clearly seen in the Reformation where anti-Semitism exploded in Protestant Germany where the local church was under the complete control of local authorities.)

Carroll sees the Fourth Lateran Council of 1215, under Pope Innocent III, as another part of the linkage between the early Church and the Holocaust. Citing Hans Kung’s interpretation, he sees the council as fundamentally changing the situation of the Jews both legally and theologically.[29] The Council was a historic event in Church history, solidifying two centuries of Church reform. The Council “tackled an enormous range of issues, all of them practical: the establishment of orthodox teaching, especially on the sacraments – this was the Council which defined the doctrine of Transubstantiation – new regulations requiring every Christian to get to confession and communion at least once a year, improvements in record-keeping in Church courts…rules for the better discharge of episcopal duties and especially preaching ands catechizing in the language of the people, and reform of the monasteries. Behind much of this the distinctive concerns of the Pope can be detected, and the Council was the high point of the medieval papacy’s involvement with and promotion of the best reforming energies in the Church at large.”[30]

Carroll points out that certain conciliar decrees, however, placed restrictions on Jews and such legislation did isolate the Jewish community more formally. Among the restrictions the Council asked for was a special form of dress so that Jews could be more clearly identified, that Jews should be forbidden to go out during Holy Week and that they be forbidden from holding public office. It is clear that in such anti-Jewish regulations, Church leadership was reflecting some of the worst aspects of contemporary culture. At the same time, it is also clear that any number of such regulations were also intended – from the perspective of the time – to protect Jews from attacks. The Holy Week legislation, for example, was clearly intended for their protection, as Holy Week became in certain areas a time for attacks on Jews.

Carroll was more concerned, however, that this Council clearly showed the “universalist absolutism of Roman Catholic claims” to the teaching of Christ which “is causally related to the unleashing of Catholic anti-Judaism.”[31] In other words, Carroll sees a stronger Church, with a stronger papacy and with certitude of belief as generating anti-Semitism because Jews are “the original dissenters.” Yet, such a causal link is never established. In fact, greater centralization of the Church would generally result in a lessening of anti-Jewish practices. As will be seen in the discussion of the Spanish Inquisition, severe anti-Jewish activities took place more often where papal authority was co-opted by local authorities, or where Church authority had succumbed to secular authority. For example, anti-Jewish actions increased during the Plague years of the 14^th century where Church authority was less effective. “Blood libel” stories had evolved, claiming that Jews would sacrifice Christian children, or that Jews conspired to poison wells. The papacy quickly condemned such stories, but they persisted in different areas by local legend. Carroll’s history consistently shows the opposite of what it intends. Anti-Jewish activities persisted in history despite the Church, rather than because of the Church. When Church authority was weakened, the outbreaks tended to increase. When dangerous racial anti-Semitism would grow in the 19^thCentury, the Church was effectively at its weakest in influencing government or society.

Carroll, of course, does not see the anti-Jewish legislative aspects of the Lateran Council as its most damaging aspects. Papal authority and “Catholic absolutism” are his greater concerns. And most important, he sees the Council as firmly establishing in Catholic thinking the theological concept of Christ’s death as atonement for sin. To Carroll’s thinking, this central Catholic belief is fundamental to anti-Jewish attitudes as the “longest lie” created by New Testament writers. What Carroll does not concede, however, is that central to the concept of Christ’s atonement in Catholic belief is that He died for the sins of all mankind. Proper understanding of that belief means, as has been understood in Catholic doctrine since the days of the early Church fathers, that Christ died because of sin. The concept of “Jewish deicide” – that the Jews “killed” Christ – is contradictory to that essential Catholic belief. Christ died, according to ancient Catholic belief, because of the sins of all, not the actions of a few.

There can be no doubt that ignorance and false Scriptural interpretation helped to create an atmosphere of anti-Judaism within Western society. There was, as Carroll shows, an “ambivalence” toward Jews within Catholic teaching that contributed to anti-Jewish actions. While Church leadership forthrightly condemned violence against the Jews, it tolerated abusive anti-Jewish homilies and pronouncements. Church leadership too often shared in the sentiments of the culture. However, Carroll’s fundamental flaw is in arguing that anti-Semitism was the conscious creation of the Church, rather than a cultural legacy to which many in the Church too often compromised. His claim that a “theology of atonement” generated anti-Semitism is self-contradicting, as such an understanding removed any concept of alleged Jewish “guilt” in the death of Christ by teaching that all mankind was guilty.

When Carroll moves on to discussion of the Inquisition he falls into the historical trap of seeing the Inquisition both as a consistent papal-dominated institution that existed in a clear line from the 13^th century virtually to the mid 20^th century, as he considers his one encounter with the Index of Forbidden Books in the seminary as “my inquisition.”[32]Carroll states that the Inquisition was the means that “Catholic medieval absolutism exacerbated anti-Jewish religious hatred, fueled new levels of violence, and sponsored an even more hysterical conversionism, which, when up against continued Jewish resistance, finally led to modern anti-Semitic racism.”[33]

 To speak of the Inquisition fails to understand that no such individual universal entity existed. The Inquisition as a single unified court system directly responsible to the pope and controlled solely by the papacy is a historical fiction. Even within the Papal States in the 16^th century, the papacy had difficulty maintaining effective control over local inquisitions. The local church in alliance with local secular authority usually controlled inquisitorial courts. Though it began in the 13^th century as a papal-designated juridical system to remove “heresy-hunting” from control of the mob or secular authorities, it evolved rather quickly as a device of the local church and secular authorities to address local, and later national or dynastic goals. There were many inquisitions, rather than a singular “Inquisition.”

The many inquisitions that took place existed sporadically in different regions, at different times, and to meet different local needs. The medieval inquisition barely existed, for example, in Spain and Portugal. For hundreds of years, the inquisition in many places existed only sporadically, if at all. In the 16^th century, it existed primarily in Spain, Portugal, the Papal States and other Italian cities. It existed sporadically – dominated by the state – in France and, early, in England.

Carroll’s argument is that the Spanish Inquisition created “racial” anti-Semitism and, as such, was generated by the Church and linked directly to Nazism. Spanish anti-Semitism was not a religious prejudice, but a racial one. It derived from the success in Spanish culture of Jewish converts to Catholicism and the goal of a racially unified Iberian peninsula, free of the “foreign” Muslims and Jews. In 1391, anti-Jewish riots swept through Spain. More religious than racial – though this has been disputed – these riots led to major forced conversions of Jews to Christianity. These Jewish converts would be called conversos or New Chistians, to distinguish them from traditional Christian families. Theconverso identity would remain with such families for generations.

Converso families were welcomed into a full participation in Spanish society not available to Jews and they would soon become leaders in government, science, business and the Church. Though it was legislated in certain areas that those forced to convert could return to their own religion, many did not. These converso families obviously faced the scorn of those who remained Jews. At the same time, however, over the years the Old Christians saw them as social-climbing opportunists. They claimed that they secretly maintained the faith of their forefathers. It would be complaints about these alleged “secret Jews” that would lead to the establishment of the Spanish Inquisition.[34] Curiously, Carroll argues, with no documentation, that most of these converts remained “secret” Jews. It is a curious argument because it accepts as fact the reason given for Spanish persecution of the Jews. In fact, after a generation, most of these converts were as Catholic as the Old Christians. But racial prejudice against their Jewish ethnic roots remained. They were considered racially apart. The children’s children of these converted Jews were not considered “pure” Spaniards and would become the primary target of the Spanish Inquisition.

Carroll points out that in 1449, the city council of Toledo passed an ordinance decreeing that no converso of Jewish descent may hold office. Pope Nicholas V (1447-1455) responded furiously, excommunicating the drafters of the regulation. He wrote that “all Catholics are one body in Christ according to the teaching of our faith.” The King of Castile, however, formally approved the regulation.

“If the beginning of what we think of as modern antisemitism can be located anywhere, it is here,” Carroll writes. “The shift from religious definition of Jewishness to a racial one is perhaps the most decisive in this long narrative, and its fault lines, reaching into the consciousness of Western civilization, will define the moral geography of the modern age. The Church’s worry, for example, that its very own conversos were corrupting Christians would find a near permanent resonance in the modern European fantasy of Jews as parasites – successful and assimilated, but feeding on the host society. The ultimate example of this image would emerge in Germany, of course, but the fear that led Nazis to regard Jews as bloodsuckers to be excised was anticipated by the Iberian suspicion that Jews were more to be feared as assimilated insiders than as dissenting outsiders.”[35]

It is true that the racial prejudice against Catholic families of Jewish stock was the primary instigator of the Spanish Inquisition. However, it contradicts, rather than confirms, Carroll’s basic thesis that anti-Semitism that led to the horror of the Holocaust came from essential Christian theology. Spanish anti-Semitism was aimed at Jews racially. Religion was used as a club of enforcement to knock ethnic Jews down from the successful heights they had attained as Catholics. But the faith was the excuse, not the cause, of Spanish racial anti-Semitism. And that is why Pope Nicholas, and successor popes, would deplore the actions of the Spanish Inquisition against the conversos. In Rome, it was viewed not as an attempt to root out heresy, but as a means to attack generations of successful coverts.

In March 1492, Queen Isabella and King Ferdinand ordered the expulsion – or conversion – of all remaining Jews in Spain. Many conversos had already fled to Rome and the Papal States where they would be free of persecution. Those who remained Jews fled to Rome as well, known as the most tolerant of European cities toward Jews. The intent of the declaration of expulsion was more religious than racial, as Jewish conversion was certainly the intent, not “the beginning of a strategy of elimination”[36] as Carroll contends. While many Jews fled, a large number converted, thus aggravating the popular picture of secret Judaizers within the Christian community of Spain. Up through 1530, the primary activity of the inquisition in Spain would be aimed at pursuingconversos. The same would be true from 1650 to 1720. While its activities declined thereafter, the inquisition continued to exist in Spain until its final abolition in 1824.

The attacks in Spain on the conversos were viewed as despicable in Rome and condemned by the popes. Italians “felt that Spanish hypocrisy in religion, together with the existence of the Inquisition, proved that the tribunal was created not for religious purity, but simply to rob the Jews. Similar views were certainly held by the prelates of the Holy See whenever they intervened in favor of the conversos. Moreover, the racialism of the Spanish authorities was scorned in Italy, where the Jewish community led a comparatively tranquil existence.”[37]

If there is a connection between the Spanish Inquisition and the Holocaust generated by the German Nazis it is in the racial hatred that motivated both. It is not, however, to be found in a connection between Catholic Spain and Protestant Germany. And it is certainly not to be found in the faith whose leadership spoke out forcefully against the attacks on theconversos, or a theology that argued that conversion knew no racial boundaries.

Carroll leaps from the early Spanish Inquisition to the Council of Trent (1545-1563), called by the Church in response to the Reformation. He points out that the Council had very little to say about the Jews. The Council primarily concerned itself with Church renewal in light of the Reformation and defending clear Catholic teaching in response to Protestant attacks. Among those clear Catholic teachings confirmed, as Carroll points out, was that “responsibility for the death of Jesus belonged to sinners – to all persons, that is, in their having sinned. The old question Who killed Jesus? Was explicitly answered: Human sinners did.”[38] The declaration by Trent was another contradiction of what Carroll asserts throughout his book: that the theology of the atonement created anti-Semitism by blaming Jews for the death of Jesus and led directly to the Holocaust.

But Carroll argues that if “this perception had maintained its firm hold on the moral imagination of Christians, the history of Jews would be quite different. That something else happened, beginning with the Gospels’ own scapegoating of Jews, only proves Trent’s point that ‘we’ are sinners.”[39] Perhaps, however, the exact opposite is true. The thesis that the “Jews killed Jesus” was a popular misinterpretation of the New Testament that the Church taught as wrong in its theology of atonement. If anti-Semitism persisted, it was because it was persistent in the popular imagination, not in the teachings of the Church as Carroll claims. Again, anti-Semitism existed despite essential Church teachings, not because of them, as Carroll charges.

The inquisition in Rome was established during the Reformation period and has generally been regarded by historians as one of the more lax courts. The inquisition court in Rome should not be understood as a universal court, but as one of the inquisition courts within the Papal States. As in most regions, the local Roman court focused primarily on clergy wrongs and on issues of lifestyle – adultery, drunkenness and other forms of impropriety as Rome did not have a racial problem withconversos, [40] and the Inquisition itself had nothing to do with the Jewish population. Pope Paul III (1534-1549) had authorized the inquisition in Rome as a means of protecting the Church there from the influence of the Reformation in 1542. He was a protector of the Jews who banned various anti-Jewish activities. Pope Paul IV (1555-1559), however, had a short but troubled reign. It was Pope Paul IV who established the separate Jewish ghetto in Rome, enforced segregationist regulations on Jews and, mistakenly, affirmed the “blood purity” statute in Toledo that had rightly been condemned by previous pontiffs. Carroll sees both events as a definitive sign of the Church embracing, despite the reforms of Trent, a definitive anti-Semitic stance, particularly in its seeming endorsement of the Spanish racial policy of limpieza de sangre aimed at the conversofamilies of Jewish ethnic heritage. Carroll explains that the “culture-wide trauma of the Reformation was part of what prompted the shift in papal strategy toward the Jews,”[41] a shift that Carroll sees as momentous.

Limpieza de sangre was part of the “blood purity” restrictions on Jews who had converted to Catholicism and limited their ability to hold public office or offices within Spain. This was the ugly racial element that had infected Spanish society. As we have seen, Pope Nicholas V rightly condemned limpieza vociferously. Pope Paul IV as a cardinal “had singlemindely devoted his whole life to reform of the Church…(yet) under Paul IV reform took on a darker more fearful character. Creativity was distrusted as a dangerous innovation, theological energies were diverted into the suppression of error rather than the exploration of truth. Catholicism was identified with reaction…For the rest of the Tridentine era, Catholic Reformation would move between those poles, and it would be the task of the popes to manage the resulting tensions.”[42]Depending on the perspective of the individual pontiff, restrictions on Jewish life within the Roman ghetto would wax and wane. His decision on limpieza, however, was reversed and generally abandoned from Catholic life outside of Spain. A few orders with strong Spanish roots, such as the Jesuits, maintained a form oflimpieza. But no serious student of history would make the claim that this unique Spanish cultural prejudice reflected overall Church practice. Carroll himself recognizes that the anti-Jewish racial theories of the 19^th Century that created the anti-Semitism of the Nazis had no relationship to Spanish limpieza.

Pope Paul IV’s pontificate was short. New popes would reverse his policies – his approval of limpieza was quickly abandoned – and treatment of the local Jewish community in Rome would vary from pontiff to pontiff. Popes would change and policies would change. These policies were generated as papal governance of the Papal States, however, not pronouncements of the universal Church. And what Carroll sees as a continuous linkage was shifting sand. There was no uniform anti-Jewish policy aimed at the local Jewish community from papacy to papacy. The policies reflected the emphasis and mind-set of individuals. However, the different perspectives popes adopted show anything but a continuous chain that is the fundamental thesis of Carroll’s book; nor were there theologically infallible papal statements of defining Catholic belief. The Jewish ghetto in Rome is a dark spot on Church history. The long-held notion that popes must be rulers of an independent Papal States or the papacy would be dominated by secular rulers, while theoretically understandable and with historical roots from earlier centuries, placed popes in the difficult position of holding secular authority. Not a few of them exercised that secular authority poorly. That ended in 1870 when Italian nationalist troops occupied the city as “liberators.” But within a generation after, that nationalist tide would also result in the emergence of Benito Mussolini and the Italian Fascist state.

Carroll marches quickly through the early Enlightenment, represented by Voltaire, touches on Spinoza and the French Revolution, then on to Vatican I (1869-1870) and the declaration of papal infallibility. “Liberalism and modernism,” Carroll writes, “were seen as bearing the fruits of the destruction of civilization itself, and the dark side of the new order would make itself all too clear in the twentieth century. There was much in the new age the Church was right to suspect, so the Catholic strategy of arming the leader of the Church with the spiritual mace of infallibility made some sense.”[43]

His understanding of the definition of papal infallibility as conferred on the papacy in 1870 is not, of course, the definition given by the Council. Vatican I dealt with the office of the papacy and the nature of papal authority because these issues were at the very center of the life of the Church in the 19^th Century. The emergence of the modern liberal states had reconfirmed to many within the Church the vital importance of the ancient belief of the central authority of the bishop of Rome as the successor of St. Peter. There were divisions over such a definition, however. Some argued that it would be inopportune to make such a definition in the turmoil of the 19^th Century, while others wanted papal infallibility applied to virtually everything the pope said or wrote. The accusation is made that a definition of papal infallibility was demanded by Pope Pius IX and forced on an unwilling Council by papal pressure, curial conspiracies, and squelched debate. However, debate went on for months, and the final definition of papal infallibility fell far short of the desires of the “ultramontanes” who wanted an elevated definition of infallibility. The fact was that consensus emerged, except for extremists on each side, which spelled out a definition of papal infallibility clearly in line with Church tradition and the theology of the papacy. The Council proclaimed no new teaching that extended papal authority beyond a point the Church had understood for centuries.

Carroll sees the definition of papal infallibility as a “pivotal event” for his story as “the Church’s relationship to the modern fate of the Jews is entertwined, in a particular way, with efforts to extend the political power of the papacy.”[44] Carroll will therefore lock himself in early to the Cornwell thesis that the sole motivation of Pius XII in World War II was the extension of papal power. At the same time, there is Carroll’s blithe acknowledgement of what was taking place in the 19^th Century: “the dark side of the new order would make itself all too clear in the 20^th century.” That is Carroll’s primary reference to what in fact was going on in European thought in the 19^th Century and what it would lead to in the 20^th Century.

The culture of thought in the 19^th Century – secularism, communism, racialism and nationalism – would lead to the First World War, the Communist revolution in Russia, Stalin’s pogroms, the rise of Fascism and Nazism, World War II and the Holocaust. That is the dark side to which Carroll refers. It also makes a mockery of his essential argument that the anti-Semitism that played its own role in so much of this horror was the creation of the Church, or sustained by the Church. The stew of secular philosophies that led to these 20^th century horrors was a creation of the 19^th century, that had limited roots in the so-called Enlightenment of the 18^th century. These philosophies were definitive breaks with Christian thinking, not evolutions. As Paul Johnson notes, they involved the “birth of the modern” – an entirely new way of viewing self, one’s role in culture, one’s entire mode of thinking and acting. These were not subtle changes or a grafting on to Christianity. These were philosophies that the Church fought against because they were a fundamental break, a fundamental confrontation, with an entire Christian philosophy, theology, culture and worldview. Carroll’s failure to present that adequately in order not to upset his thesis that the Church was to blame for the Holocaust is the fundamental flaw of his book. The fundamental blasphemy is that he would do so in order to put forth a meager list of liberal bromides for alleged Church reform.

Carroll approaches the age of Pius XII and the Holocaust itself after winding his way through the German Kulturkampf and the Dreyfus affair in France. He adds nothing new to his story in either recital. Successful Catholic action in response to the Kulturkampf is seen as setting what could have been a standard in reaction to Hitler, forgetting that Bismarck was not Hitler and the Germany of 1870 was not the Nazi Germany of 1933. The Dreyfus affair – where a Jewish officer in the French army was convicted of treason – was a high-profile case of anti-Semitism within the French army. Carroll uses it to excorciate the French Catholic newspaper “La Croix.” The newspaper, operated by a religious order, engaged in hot anti-Jewish rhetoric during the Dreyfus affair. While Carroll points to this as symbolizing the entrenched nature of Catholic anti-Semitism, it far more reflected a turn-of-the-century Europe where anti-Semitism was increasing as the influence of the Church decreased in the modern secular states and “modern” thought predominated.

The Church and Hitlerism is confined in Carroll’s book to less than 70 pages, about the same length that he gives to his suggestions for Church reform. He begins by restating his essential charge that “(h)owever modern Nazism was, it planted its roots in the soil of age-old Church attitudes and a nearly unbroken chain of Jew-hatred. However pagan Nazism was, it drew its sustenance from groundwater poisoned by the Church’s most solemnly held ideology – its theology.”[45] This is, of course, a gross mis-reading of history. Hitler and Nazism were created by a rampant social Darwinism, an ubiquitous European belief that it was a virtual biological imperative that the lower classes be dominated by their racial superiors, the ideology of imperialism, the birth of scientism that would dispel the “myths” of religion, the campaign to radically excise the Church from public life, the denial of the sacredness of the individual for the good of the State or, as in communism, the good of the class, the creation of the myth of the Nitzsche-like Superman who could undertake any evil for the good of his race, and the replacement of Christianity with neo-paganism. The soil and poisoned groundwater for these Nazi aberrations were the views of 19^th century liberalism that were the conventional wisdom of the times. The Catholic Church – its theology – was viewed as the enemy of this modern thought. The Church was not the progenitor of the beliefs that created Nazism. It was one of the last remaining bulwarks in Europe against it. The Nazis killed the Jews. For reasons of an internal agenda against the Church, Carroll would prefer to dismiss that, like a revisionist who would claim the Holocaust never took place, and shift the blame to the Church for his own agenda.

As noted earlier, Carroll regurgitates the central thesis of Cornwell. Like Cornwell, he sees the revision of Canon Law promulgated in 1917 – in which a young priest Eugenio Pacelli, the future Pius XII was involved – as the motivating factor in the Church’s reaction to the rise of the dictators. According to the theory, papal absolutism was the driving force of Vatican foreign policy. The Vatican would surrender anything – and bargain with the devil himself – in order to gain authority over, for example, the appointment of bishops. He sees the Concordat that Cardinal Pacelli negotiated with Hitler as giving a first blessing and recognition to the regime (which forgets that prior to the concordat, Hitler had concluded a peace agreement with the western powers, including France and Great Britain, called the Four-Power Pact. and a similar agreement was concluded between Hitler and the Protestant churches). Though Carroll dismisses such claims, the Vatican had no choice but to conclude such a concordat, or face draconian restrictions on the lives of the faithful in Germany. Pius XI would explain that it was concluded only to spare persecution that would take place immediately if there was no such agreement. The concordat would also give the Holy See the opportunity to formally protest Nazi action in the years prior to the war and after hostilities began. It provided a legal basis for arguing that baptized Jews in Germany were Christian and should be exempt from legal disabilities. Though the Concordat was routinely violated before the ink was dry, its existence allowed for Vatican protest, and it did save Jewish lives.

Carroll doesn’t really spend much time on the Holocaust itself or a detailed look at the entire World War and how the Church responded.[46]He states that from the onset of Nazism, the “Church, for its part, had come to a decision it would stick with, almost without exception, — that the ‘wretched fate’ of the Jews was unconnected to its own fate, or that of anyone else.”[47] Carroll says such things without any necessity for proving that was the Church’s policy. The first formal protest filed by the Vatican under the concordat was against the Nazi boycott of Jewish businesses. In 1937, Pope Pius XI issued “Mit brennender sorge,” which spoke out forcefully against Nazi racist policy. It assumes that a calculated decision by Pius to work behind the scenes through his papal representatives and through the existing vehicles of the Church to save as many lives as possible was a callous decision to leave Jews to their fate. It assumes that hurling thunderbolts from the Vatican – which all who lived through Nazism understand would have had no possible impact on Hitler – would have accomplished something or saved more lives. This is mere conjecture based on hindsight. None of the critics of Pius have yet been able to put forth a concrete alternative that Pius could have developed to save more lives than were saved by the Church in that period. Throughout the war years, the Church would save more Jewish lives than any entity that existed at the time.

Disagreeing, however, with the tactics of Pius is one thing. Stating that the Church abandoned the Jews does not reflect any kind of reality. Which is one of the most frustrating aspects of Carroll’s entire “history” of the Church and the Jews. It is not history at all, but an amateur’s meditation on various historical events skewed to reflect the prejudices of his own thesis. This is not careful scholarship. This is simply a very long anti-Catholic essay.

Carroll concludes his treatment of the Holocaust by the need to go after the death of Edith Stein, a Jewish convert to Catholicism who was murdered in the Holocaust and declared a saint by Pope John Paul II. Echoing Garry Wills, he sees the canonization of Stein as an attempt by the Church to claim victimhood in the Holocaust and to “reaffirm the religious superiority of Christianity over Judaism.”[48] Like Wills, he can cite no source for this conjecture, or documentation that cites any such reasoning from Church leadership. Or anybody within Catholic circles for that matter. Pope John Paul II stated, which is a fact, that she died at the hands of the Nazis because she was a Jew and a Catholic, in retribution for the Church speaking out against Nazi deportations of the Jews in the Netherlands. The death of Edith Stein – and the death of Maxmillian Kolbe – are the only cases of people slaughtered by the Nazis in the concentration camps that a certain circle within Catholicism feels comfortable publicly degrading.

The last section of Carroll’s book begins immediately after the degradation of the canonization of Edith Stein. This is when we find out the true purpose of Carroll’s lengthy attack on the New Testament and the Christian belief in Christ’s passion and death as atonement for sin. This is why he has attempted to set up the Church as the ultimate cause of the Holocaust, while inventing a simplistic history of the Church as the progenitor of an anti-Semitism that preceded its existence. He sees its essential theology as anti-Semitic, its leadership only interested in power. It allowed the Jews to be slaughtered in the Holocaust because it simply didn’t care, and the Church was wrong – fundamentally – in the very Scriptures of the New Testament that is its heart and soul. If anyone else truly believed this, he or she would abandon the Church. Carroll would rather stick around to argue papal infallibility, women’s ordination and priestly celibacy.

Carroll describes the Second Vatican Council as the “beginning of the long-overdue demise of Constantinian imperial Catholicism, as it had been shaped by a medieval papalism hardened in the fires of the Counter-Reformation…The Church’s failure in relation to Adolf Hitler was only a symptom of the ecclesiastical cancer Pope John was attempting to treat.”[49] This is a ludicrous picture of the intent of the Council and of Pope John XXIII’s view of the Church. Critical to Pope John XXIII’s thinking was that the Church must reach out to the world and not see itself as a faithful remnant that hides from the world. The purpose in John’s mind was to certainly remove liturgical encrustation, defensive theological formulations and aspects of the culture of Catholicism that prevented outreach to the modern world. However, the purpose of such was not to convert the Church to modernism, but for the Church to be better able to evangelize the modern world. This has been the hallmark of the papacy of Pope John Paul II, who as a bishop attending the Council and was a strong supporter of the intent and spirit of Vatican II.

Of course, Carroll – much like Garry Wills – argues that while the Council was a historic beginning, it was undermined by Pope Paul VI, a “devoted factotum to Pius XII.”[50] Of Pope Paul VI: “His was the first effort to turn back the tide of Church reform that the Vatican Council initiated, and that program of medieval restoration has been vigorously continued by Pope John Paul II.” [51]Of course, Carroll argues that hopes were too high for Vatican II. A Church incapable of allowing priests to marry or couples to practice contraception is hardly ready for the reform he demands. He calls for a Third Vatican Council that would address the following agenda:

First, the “offensive character (of the New Testament) is part of what the Church must not only admit but to claim. The anti-Jewish texts of the New Testament show that the Church, even in its first generation, was capable of betraying the message of Jesus, establishing once and for all that ‘the Church as such’ can sin.”[52] The Church must understand the New Testament narratives are invented and that any “Christian proclamation that says that redemption, grace, perfection, whatever you call it, has already come is unbelievable on its face.”[53]

Second, Vatican III will abandon the ethos of Constantinian imperial power and the “primary-enforcing ideas of Roman supremacy and papal infallibility.”[54] The “doctrine of papal infallibility amounts to the low point in the long story of patriarchy, a legitimation of Church exceptionalism, a reversal of the meaning that Jesus gave to ministry, and, finally, an abuse of power.”[55]

Third, Vatican III should initiate a “new Christology” that abandons concepts such as the immortality of the soul, messiahship of Jesus, Christ’s death as atonement for sin, the belief that Jesus is the only means of salvation, as well as the very concept of salvation. (“The coming of Jesus was for the purpose of revelation, nor salvation – revelation, that is, that we are already saved.”[56]) This will allow the Church “to embrace a pluralism of belief and worship, of religion and no religion, that honors God by defining God as beyond every human effort to express God.”[57]

Fourth, the Church in Vatican III will abandon “its internal commitment to methods that undergird totalitarianism”[58] In addition, of course, to abandoning such things as excommunication, bannings, censorship and anathemas, this means the Church must also abandon “the idea that there is one objective and absolute truth, and that its custodian is the Church.”[59] The papal apology, Carroll writes, “did not confront the implications of that still maintained idea of truth” and that universal claims “for Jesus as the one objective and absolute truth” must be abandoned. “Vatican III must retrieve for the Church the deep-seated intuition that mystery is at the core of existence, that truth is elusive, that God is greater than religion.”[60] Bishops should be chosen by the people, the whole clerical caste eradicated, and women ordained (though ordination to exactly what is never clarified).

Fifth, and only after the prior four agenda items are completed, the Church must have a complete act of repentance, a repentance of a “failed and sinful Church.”[61]

Rather clearly, the objective solution Carroll has in mind already exists: Unitarianism.

The five-point agenda for Vatican III is the purpose of Carroll’s book. I do not doubt the sincerity of his horror in the Holocaust, or his disgust at the anti-Jewish history that exists within the history of Western civilization and that members of the Church have been a part of it. But his purpose, clearly, is for “the past to be retrieved in ways that serve present purposes.” Those purposes are Carroll’s five-point agenda for creating a Catholicism that would fit his particular vision. He would do so by undermining the Gospels, dismissing 2000 years of Catholic theology and dismantling the papacy and the priesthood. He would, finally, have a Church that would disconnect from Jesus as the source of truth – that truth can be known, and truth can be evangelized.

Much like Wills found it necessary to re-state that he is Catholic no matter what the positions he holds, Carroll concludes this epic with a personal plea for his Catholicity no matter what he believes. Though confessing his shame about his Catholicity, he confesses as well his own collusion in this historic record of the Church that “sanctified the hatred of the Jews.”[62]Despite that, he states that the “most deadly prospect at this point would be to find myself alienated from the community that has been the focus of my ‘backward glance.’”[63]

Perhaps acknowledging that his central thesis is flawed can relieve those fears. No one can argue that members of the Church throughout the centuries, going to the highest leadership within the Church, engaged and endorsed at times in anti-Jewish words, sentiments and actions. At the very same time, many within the Church officially condemned such actions and it was the very Church leadership that Carroll hopes to be abandoned that was most vociferous in that condemnation. It was not the belief of the Church, the New Testament, the Church centered in Jesus, the understanding that Christ died for the sins of mankind, or the Church belief in an objective and universal truth that persists in Christ, that created the horror of the Holocaust. It was the rejection of those, and the attempt to substitute for Judeo-Christian civilization a secularist pseudo scientism of race, class and nationalism that generated Nazism and the Holocaust. Nazism and the Nazis killed the Jews, and the philosophies that created them still bubble just below the surface. But not in the Catholic Church. Rather, they persist in a vicious secularism and pseudo-scientism that divorces faith from modernity, believes that truth cannot be known, and attempts to convince mankind that it is its own god.

 

SUMMARY POINTS

John Cornwell in Hitler’s Pope, Garry Wills in Papal Sinand now James Carroll in Constantine’s Sword all identify themselves as Catholic. The authors’ Catholic identity gives a fundamental agenda to the collective works. In all three works, the essential issues dealt with are used to lay out an internal agenda within Catholicism. While Cornwell and Wills focus primarily on the role of papal authority, Carroll both includes and expands on that theme to question fundamental Catholic beliefs.

Carroll’s thesis is that the anti-Semitism which resulted in the Holocaust is central to Catholic theology and derived from the earliest Christian expressions of belief, namely the Gospel accounts themselves. He concludes his book with a call for a third Vatican Council to make a series of changes in basic Catholic belief that he envisions purging the Church of this alleged fundamental anti-Semitism.

Carroll’s main sources from a Catholic perspective are disaffected theologians such as Hans Kung and Rosemary Radford Ruether, or Scriptural scholars like John Dominic Crossan from the Jesus Seminar. His primary source on the Church and the Holocaust, for example, is Cornwell’sHitler’s Pope, which he acknowledges in a footnote to have been “controversial,” but that he had reviewed it favorably. His knowledge – or at least his citation – of mainstream Catholic sources is limited to non-existent.

It is necessary to make the Church the cause of the Holocaust because so much of what passes as contemporary enlightened thought and views have their roots not in Catholicism or Christianity, but in the very secular ideologies that laid the true foundation for the Holocaust. So-called enlightened views on euthanasia or abortion, for example, find their philosophical origins in late 19^th century racial eugenics that propagated Hitler’s attack on the Jews. To scapegoat the Catholic Church as the cause of the Holocaust makes a secular examination of conscience unnecessary.

Though theories that led to and created the Holocaust were a fundamental rejection of thousands of years of Judaic and Christian thought, Carroll sees them differently. He sees these enlightenment theories as ideas that grew naturally from Christian origins, rather than an outright rejection. One was merely grafted on the other.

Hitler did not approach the world with a mode of thinking and belief rooted in the 1,900 years of Western civilization. Rather, he was rooted in the 150 years of elitist racist and nationalist thought that had abandoned the Judeo-Christian roots of Western civilization.

Carroll believes that the New Testament is clearly anti-Semitic and, therefore, caused anti-Jewish sentiment that, in turn, eventually evolved into the philosophies that created the Holocaust. Rather than arguing that bad Scriptural interpretation in the past was used by some to declare that all Jews shared the blame in the death of Jesus, Carroll would rather agree that this is the proper meaning of Scripture. He sees anti-Semitism as fundamental to the Christian message as presented in the New Testament.

Carroll dismisses a good part of the historicity of the Gospel accounts and of the whole concept that Jesus died on the cross as a saving act of atonement for mankind. As to the bodily resurrection of Jesus, Carroll is circumspect at best.

Constantine certainly had a strong impact on the early Church that would last for centuries. But Carroll attributes to him far too much impact in the areas of theology, ecclesiology, doctrinal theology and the Church’s hierarchical structure. These were areas of the Church developing for two centuries prior to Constantine and did not spring fully born from a Roman emperor with only a minimal understanding of the faith he embraced to under gird his Empire.

Carroll blames the Church for a cultural phenomenon that preceded it, and points to confirmation in the fact that the Church tried to limit both the severity and violence of anti-Jewish acts through the intervention of Augustine and the proclamation of Gregory the Great. The Jews survived the first thousand years of Christianity by the strength of their own faith and because the Church did not attempt to forcefully eradicate their faith. If Carroll’s premise was true, or as basic to the Christian faith as he contends, Judaism would have disappeared by Christian force and no “ambivalence” in Christian attitude would have stopped it.

Pope Calixtus III (1119-1124) issued the papal bull Sicut Judaesis that condemned any violence against the Jews, a bull reaffirmed by 20 of his successors. St. Bernard of Clairvaux, who preached the Second Crusade, would speak out forcefully against anti-Jewish violence and is generally held responsible for limiting such incidents. Though Carroll tries to link a stronger papacy with increased anti-Jewish acts, the opposite appears true. A stronger Church and papacy that can influence secular authorities in European history rather than be controlled by secular authorities, the less likely were anti-Jewish outbreaks.

Carroll’s history consistently shows the opposite of what it intends. Anti-Jewish activities persisted in history despite the Church, rather than because of the Church. When Church authority was weakened, the outbreaks tended to increase. When dangerous racial anti-Semitism would grow in the 19^th Century, the Church was effectively at its weakest in influencing government or society.

There can be no doubt that ignorance and false Scriptural interpretation helped to create an atmosphere of anti-Judaism within Western society. There was, as Carroll shows, an “ambivalence” toward Jews within Catholic teaching that contributed to anti-Jewish actions. While Church leadership forthrightly condemned violence against the Jews, it tolerated abusive anti-Jewish homilies and pronouncements. Church leadership too often shared in the sentiments of the culture. However, Carroll’s fundamental flaw is in arguing that anti-Semitism was the conscious creation of the Church, rather than a cultural legacy to which many in the Church too often compromised.

It is true that the racial prejudice against Catholic families of Jewish stock was the primary instigator of the Spanish Inquisition. However, it contradicts, rather than confirms, Carroll’s basic thesis that anti-Semitism that led to the horror of the Holocaust came from essential Christian theology. Spanish anti-Semitism was aimed at Jews racially. Religion was used as a club of enforcement to knock ethnic Jews down from the successful heights they had attained as Catholics. But the faith was the excuse, not the cause, of Spanish racial anti-Semitism.

The attacks in Spain on the conversos were viewed as despicable in Rome and condemned by the popes. Italians, Henry Kamen has written, “felt that Spanish hypocrisy in religion, together with the existence of the Inquisition, proved that the tribunal was created not for religious purity, but simply to rob the Jews. Similar views were certainly held by the prelates of the Holy See whenever they intervened in favor of the conversos. Moreover, the racialism of the Spanish authorities was scorned in Italy, where the Jewish community led a comparatively tranquil existence.”

The thesis that the “Jews killed Jesus” was a popular misinterpretation of the New Testament that the Church taught as wrong in its theology of atonement. If anti-Semitism persisted, it was because it was persistent in the popular imagination, not in the teachings of the Church as Carroll claims. Again, anti-Semitism existed despite essential Church teachings, not because of them, as Carroll charges.

Treatment of the local Jewish community in Rome would vary from pontiff to pontiff. Popes would change and policies would change. These policies were generated as papal governance of the Papal States, however, not pronouncements of the universal Church. And what Carroll sees as a continuous linkage was shifting sand. There was no uniform anti-Jewish policy aimed at the local Jewish community from papacy to papacy. The policies reflected the emphasis and mind-set of individuals. However, the different perspectives popes adopted show anything but a continuous chain that is the fundamental thesis of Carroll’s book.

The fact was that at the First Vatican Council consensus emerged, except for extremists on each side, which spelled out a definition of papal infallibility clearly in line with Church tradition and the theology of the papacy. The Council proclaimed no new teaching that extended papal authority beyond a point the Church had understood for centuries.

The stew of secular philosophies that led to these 20^thcentury horrors was a creation of the 19^th century, that had limited roots in the so-called Enlightenment of the 18^thcentury. These philosophies were definitive breaks with Christian thinking, not evolutions. As Paul Johnson notes, they involved the “birth of the modern” – an entirely new way of viewing self, one’s role in culture, one’s entire mode of thinking and acting. These were not subtle changes or a grafting on to Christianity. These were philosophies that the Church fought against because they were a fundamental break, a fundamental confrontation, with an entire Christian philosophy, theology, culture and worldview. Carroll’s failure to present that adequately in order not to upset his thesis that the Church was to blame for the Holocaust is the fundamental flaw of his book.

Carroll regurgitates the central thesis of Cornwell. He sees the revision of Canon Law promulgated in 1917 – in which a young priest Eugenio Pacelli, the future Pius XII was involved – as the motivating factor in the Church’s reaction to the rise of the dictators. According to the theory, papal absolutism was the driving force of Vatican foreign policy. The Vatican would surrender anything – and bargain with the devil himself – in order to gain authority over, for example, the appointment of bishops.

Though Carroll dismisses such claims, the Vatican had no choice but to conclude such a concordat, or face draconian restrictions on the lives of the faithful in Germany. Pius XI would explain that it was concluded only to spare persecution that would take place immediately if there was no such agreement. The concordat would also give the Holy See the opportunity to formally protest Nazi action in the years prior to the war and after hostilities began. It provided a legal basis for arguing that baptized Jews in Germany were Christian and should be exempt from legal disabilities. Though the Concordat was routinely violated before the ink was dry, its existence allowed for Vatican protest, and it did save Jewish lives.

Carroll assumes that a calculated decision by Pius to work behind the scenes through his papal representatives and through the existing vehicles of the Church to save as many lives as possible, was a callous decision to leave Jews to their fate. It assumes that hurling thunderbolts from the Vatican – which all who lived through Nazism understand would have had no possible impact on Hitler – would have accomplished something or saved more lives. This is mere conjecture based on hindsight. None of the critics of Pius have yet been able to put forth a concrete alternative that Pius could have developed to save more lives than were saved by the Church in that period. Throughout the war years, the Church would save more Jewish lives than any entity that existed at the time.

Disagreeing with the tactics of Pius is one thing. Stating that the Church abandoned the Jews does not reflect any kind of reality. Which is one of the most frustrating aspects of Carroll’s entire “history” of the Church and the Jews. It is not history at all, but an amateur’s meditation on various historical events skewed to reflect the prejudices of his own thesis.

Echoing Garry Wills, Carroll sees the canonization of Stein as an attempt by the Church to claim victimhood in the Holocaust and to reaffirm the religious superiority of Christianity over Judaism. Like Wills, he can cite no source for this conjecture, or documentation that cites any such reasoning from Church leadership. Pope John Paul II stated, which is a fact, that she died at the hands of the Nazis because she was a Jew and a Catholic, in retribution for the Church speaking out against Nazi deportations of the Jews in the Netherlands. The death of Edith Stein – and the death of Maxmillian Kolbe – are the only cases of people slaughtered by the Nazis in the concentration camps that a certain circle within Catholicism feels comfortable publicly degrading.

Critical to Pope John XXIII’s thinking was that the Church must reach out to the world and not see itself as a faithful remnant that hides from the world. The purpose in John’s mind was to certainly remove liturgical encrustation, defensive theological formulations and aspects of the culture of Catholicism that prevented outreach to the modern world. However, the purpose of such was not to convert the Church to modernism, but for the Church to be better able to evangelize the modern world. This has been the hallmark of the papacy of Pope John Paul II, who as a bishop attending the Council, was a strong supporter of the intent and spirit of Vatican II.

The five-point agenda for Vatican III is the purpose of Carroll’s book. One cannot doubt the sincerity of his horror in the Holocaust, or his disgust at the anti-Jewish history that exists within the history of Western civilization and that members of the Church have been a part of it. But his purpose, clearly, is for “the past to be retrieved in ways that serve present purposes.” Those purposes are Carroll’s five-point agenda for creating a Catholicism that would fit his particular vision. He would do so by undermining the Gospels, dismissing 2000 years of Catholic theology and dismantling the papacy and the priesthood. He would, finally, have a Church that would disconnect from Jesus as the source of truth – that truth can be known, and truth can be evangelized.

It was not the belief of the Church, the New Testament, the Church centered in Jesus, the understanding that Christ died for the sins of mankind, or the Church belief in an objective and universal truth that persists in Christ, that created the horror of the Holocaust. It was the rejection of those, and the attempt to substitute for Judeo-Christian civilization a secularist pseudo scientism of race, class and nationalism that generated Nazism and the Holocaust.

 

by William A. Donohue

(Catalyst 11/2001)

The war on Pius XII hit a new low when Commentary magazine published a piece by Kevin Madigan in its October issue. In the article,

“What the Vatican Knew About the Holocaust, and When,” Madigan argues, “The Vicar of Christ knew enough, but did not care enough, to speak more forcefully or to act more courageously than he did.” Madigan teaches the history of Christianity at the Harvard Divinity School.

Did not care enough? When a charge of this magnitude is made, convincing proof is demanded. On this score, Madigan offers not one scintilla of evidence. Indeed, his charge is slanderous.

Madigan is right to say that Pius XII knew during the war what was happening to Jews. Though the pope was not “silent,” I will not contest Madigan’s charge that he did not speak out in a “forceful” manner. What is being contested is Madigan’s ability to read the pope’s mind: Madigan impugns the pope’s character by concluding that the Holy Father just didn’t care.

For the sake of argument, let’s assume that Madigan is right about the pope’s motive. If it is fair to conclude that an uncaring attitude explains why Pius XII didn’t speak out more forcefully, then it should be fair to conclude that this motive applies equally to everyone else who acted in a similar manner. Take, for example, the reaction of American Jews.

When Hitler took over in 1933, he wasted no time showing his hatred for Jews. American Jewish leaders quickly got together to discuss public demonstrations against Hitler. Plans were made for an anti-Hitler parade in New York on May 10, 1933. But then the American Jewish Committee and B’nai B’rith put out a joint statement condemning “public agitation in form of mass demonstrations.” They feared it would only “inflame” matters. So there was silence.

In 1935, the Nuremberg race laws were enacted effectively stripping Jews of all civil rights. And what was the reaction of American Jews? Led by Rabbi Stephen Wise of the American Jewish Congress, they worked against legislation that would make it easier for Jews to emigrate to the U.S. from Germany.

November 9-10, 1938, will always be remembered for Kristallnacht, the “Night of Broken Glass.” Hitler’s Storm Troopers in Berlin went on a rampage killing Jews, entering their homes, destroying their businesses, burning synagogues, etc. American Jewish leaders were shaken by these revelations but they nonetheless eschewed a “forceful” approach.

Indeed, on November 13 and December 13, at a meeting of the General Jewish Council, all the major Jewish organizations assembled to discuss their options. The American Jewish Congress, American Jewish Committee, B’nai B’rith and the Jewish Labor Committee debated what to do about immigration reforms that would alleviate the plight of German Jews. In the end, they said, “at least for the time being, nothing should be done with regard to this matter.” In addition, all of these Jewish organizations went on record saying, “there should be no parades, demonstrations or protests by Jews.”

As Madigan correctly points out, it was in August 1942 when Gerhard Riegner of the World Jewish Congress notified his colleagues in London and New York of an “alarming report” depicting plans to exterminate Jews. But there is little evidence that this galvanized the Jewish leaders to act more courageously (the public was of yet unaware of the news). Indeed, the major Jewish organizations even failed to lobby on behalf of a bill sponsored by Rep. Emanuel Celler that would have made it easier for Jewish refugees to emigrate from France to the U.S. during Nazi persecution. The bill died in committee.

The news that Hitler had gone on a rampage against Jews was released by the State Department in November 1942 via Rabbi Wise; he was the head of the World Jewish Congress and the American Jewish Congress. Jewish-owned newspapers like the New York Times and the Washington Post treated the news with aplomb. For example, the Times reported that 2 million Jews had been killed in the Nazi extermination campaign. It placed the story on p. 10 surrounded by ads for Thanksgiving Day turkeys.

This enfeebled reaction of the New York Times was not an anomaly. It not only buried other stories of Nazi terror, the total number of editorials it ran criticizing the Nazis in the years 1941, 1942 and 1943 was nine (three each year). Even worse, when the Nazis arrested a cousin of Arthur Sulzberger, the Times chief instructed his Berlin bureau chief to do “nothing.” Sulzberger said he didn’t want to antagonize the Nazis (sound familiar?). The cousin, Louis Zinn, was so despondent that when he left prison he hanged himself.

I could go on but the point is obvious. Or is it? The point I want to make is that there were plenty of good reasons why Jews weren’t more vocal. Any change in immigration quotas for one country surely would have raised serious moral questions regarding what to do about other countries where Jews were suffering. Would asking for special treatment anger other Americans at home? Was there not the specter of rising anti-Semitism at home? Wasn’t it realistic to think that if protests mounted in the U.S. that the plight of Jews might only get worse in Europe?

In hindsight, perhaps the reasons Jews gave for not speaking up more forcefully are unpersuasive. But if someone today were to conclude that Jewish inaction was a function of not caring enough, I would conclude that the accuser is anti-Semitic. This is why I believe Madigan’s charge that Pius XII didn’t care what was happening to the Jews is so scurrilous.

There were plenty of good reasons why the pope did not use the bully pulpit. For one thing, many prominent Jews begged him not to stir the pot. Moreover, the pope knew that the Nazis were monitoring every word he said very closely and that is why he wanted to avoid making a bad situation worse. Here is what he said in June 1943: “Every word from Us in this regard to the competent authorities, every public allusion, should be seriously considered and weighed in the very interest of those who suffer so as not to make their position even more difficult and more intolerable than previously, even though inadvertently and unwillingly.” These are not the words one would expect from someone who just didn’t care.

Even in 1964, in the wake of Hochhuth’s wretchedly anti-Catholic play, “The Deputy,” the ADL said, “A formal statement [on the part of the pope] would have provoked the Nazis to brutal retaliation and would have substantially thwarted further Catholic action on behalf of Jews.”

Like many other critics of Pius XII these days, Madigan assumes that the pope had some magical powers to deter Hitler. Historian William D. Rubinstein sheds important light on this issue: “In all likelihood—a likelihood probably amounting to a near certainty—Hitler would have paid no heed whatever to any pronouncement on the Jews made by the Vatican (which had denounced Nazi anti-semitism before the war began).” Rubinstein also considers other measures that might have been taken. “Theoretically,” he says, “and in hindsight, the Pope might have excommunicated all Catholic members of the SS (or of the Nazi Party) although the only likely effect of such a pronouncement would have been that the Nazis denounced the Pope as an agent of ‘Judeo-Bolshevism’ and an imposter.”

Sir Martin Gilbert, one of the most noted historians in Europe and an expert on World War II, provides a mature understanding of how we can realistically judge the behavior of Pius XII. The test for the pope, he says, “was when the Gestapo came to Rome in 1943 to round up the Jews.” Gilbert writes, “And the Catholic Church, on his direct authority, immediately dispersed as many Jews as they could.” Which is why only 17 percent of Italy’s Jews perished. This figure not only stacks up well against what happened in other European countries, it reflects something else: more Jews were saved proportionately in Catholic countries than Protestant countries. This explains why Hitler biographer John Toland said that as of 1943, “The Church, under the Pope’s guidance, had already saved the lives of more Jews than all other churches, religious institutions and rescue organizations combined, and was presently hiding thousands of Jews in monasteries, convents and Vatican City itself.”

But Madigan will have none of it. He knows he can’t deny that Catholics saved hundreds of thousands of Jewish lives, so the best he can do is say the pope had nothing to do with it. Madigan says the pope “permitted” Catholics to rescue Jews; Pius also “allowed” Catholic properties to shelter Jews.

This is a remarkable conclusion, but it is not unusual among the critics of Pius XII. Susan Zuccotti, in her book, Under His Very Window, takes the same position. English historian Owen Chadwick disposes of this view rather handily. Zuccotti, he says, acknowledges the heroic acts of priests, monks and nuns. But as Chadwick observes, “She keeps emphasising that these courageous and life-risking endeavors were carried out without any instruction, order, encouragement, from the Vatican.” Chadwick sees the hole in the argument: “But why should they have been? The most bull-on-the-breakfast-table papist does not demand an order from the Pope before a Christian needs to behave like a decent person when faced by murder.”

One final comment. Isn’t it strange that the same Pius XII who is routinely painted as an autocrat is now described as someone who simply bows to the wishes of the faithful? If he was the authoritarian that his critics say he was, then someone needs to explain his accommodating behavior in these instances. Either that or stop with the propaganda.

 

by Robert P. Lockwood

(1/2001)

When John Cornwell’s book Hitler’s Pope[1] was released in the United States in 1999 it generated intense media coverage. Cornwell painted Pope Pius XII (1939-1958) as virtually a silent collaborator in the face of Nazi Germany’s “Final Solution.” While the alleged “silence” of Pius XII was central to media coverage, Cornwell’s thesis went deeper than that. There was a reason for the “papal silence” that had little to do with fear or even anti-Semitism (though he broadly hinted that Eugenio Pacelli was at best unsympathetic to Jews throughout his life).

According to Cornwell, Pope Pius XII willingly sacrificed the lives of Jews on the altar of papal power: “Pacelli’s failure to respond to the enormity of the Holocaust was more than a personal failure, it was a failure of the papal office itself and the prevailing culture of Catholicism. That failure was implicit in the rifts Catholicism created and sustained – between the sacred and the profane, the spiritual and the secular, the body and the soul, clergy and laity, the exclusive truth of Catholicism over all other confessions and faith. It was an essential feature of Pacelli’s ideology of papal power, moreover, that Catholics should abdicate, as Catholics, their social and political responsibility for what happened in the world and turn their gaze upward to the Holy Father and, beyond, to eternity.”[2]

Critics generally dismissed Cornwell’s book as sensationalism with little serious or original scholarship. Ronald J. Rychlak in Hitler, the War, and the Pope[3] effectively rebutted most of Cornwell’s major assertions. Cornwell’s aim was to discredit Pius XII, and through him, his successor, Pope John Paul II. Cornwell wrote that Pope John Paul II “has reinstated the ideology of papal power. Pluralism, he believes, can only lead to centrifugal fragmentation; only a strong Pope, ruling from the apex, can save the Church…Pacelli’s monolithic pyramidal model of the Church has once again reasserted itself.”[4]

It was striking that little attention was given to this important conclusion. Cornwell was using the Holocaust to advocate and argue for a particular position within the Church on the role of papal authority. His book was written as an advocacy paper against the leadership of Pope John Paul II within the Church and in favor of a particular so-called liberal vision of how the Church should function. It was surprising that few were struck, particularly Jewish commentators, by this use and abuse of the Holocaust for internal Church debate. In retrospect, it appears blasphemous to the memory of the millions slaughtered by the Nazis.

Similarly, Garry Wills in his recent book Papal Sin uses the Holocaust to score points in an attack on papal authority.[5] Wills’ book is a wide-ranging screed in opposition to myriad Catholic beliefs.[6] Papal Sin refers to what Wills calls the “structures of deceit” that he contends are inherent to the papacy. Wills charges that the Catholic Church exists in a system of lies, falsifications, and misrepresentations meant to artificially prop up papal authority. The whole structure and belief system of the Church, from sacramental and moral theology, to ecclesiology, Marian beliefs and the essential understanding of Christ’s death as atonement for the sins of mankind, are part of a fabricated “structure of deceit” according to Wills. In discussing the Nazis and the Holocaust, he essentially regurgitates Cornwell’s thesis. Wills argues that all the actions of Pope Pius XII during the years of Nazi power were calculated responses meant to defend papal authority. Again, like Cornwell, he uses the Holocaust as a means to put forth a particular anti-papal perspective within the Catholic Church. The horror of the Holocaust is utilized as a tool to make points in an internal Church debate.

The latest author to enter the field of the Church and the Holocaust is James Carroll. A former Paulist priest and award-winning novelist, Carroll’s new book is Constantine’s Sword.[7] Carroll’s stated goal is to present a “history” of the Church and the Jews to show the linkage between Catholic belief and the Nazi Holocaust. “Auschwitz, when seen in the links of causality, reveals that hatred of Jews has been no incidental anomaly but a central action of Christian history, reaching to the core of Christian character. Jew hatred’s perversion of the Gospel message launched a history, in other words, that achieved its climax in the Holocaust, an epiphany presented so starkly it cannot be denied…Because the hatred of Jews had been made holy, it became lethal. The most sacred ‘thinking and acting’ of the Church as such must at last be called into question.”[8]

Cornwell, Wills and Carroll all state that they are practicing Catholics, and such is no doubt the reason all three books found publishers. It is not likely that mainstream publishers would have handled such works that evidenced what in a non-Catholic’s hands would have appeared to be anti-Catholic diatribes. The Catholicity of the authors, to the publishers, gives all three works legitimacy, if you will, that would not exist if the authors were non-Catholics. (And makes the charge of anti-Catholicism, on the surface, easy to refute: how could a book be anti-Catholic if the author is Catholic?). But more to the point, the authors’ Catholic identity gives a fundamental agenda to the collective works. In all three works, the essential issues dealt with are used to lay out an internal agenda within Catholicism. While Cornwell and Wills focus primarily on the role of papal authority, Carroll both includes and expands on that theme to question fundamental Catholic beliefs.

Carroll’s thesis is that the anti-Semitism, which resulted in the Holocaust, is central to Catholic theology and derived from the earliest Christian expressions of belief, namely the Gospel accounts themselves. He concludes his book with a call for a third Vatican Council to make a series of changes in basic Catholic belief that he envisions purging the Church of this alleged fundamental anti-Semitism. We will note these later. However, it is important to understand that fundamentally, Carroll’s purpose is to put forth a laundry list of liberal bromides for Church reform and uses the context of anti-Semitism and the Holocaust to push this reform agenda, as both Wills and Cornwell. As Carroll himself observes, “Human memory is inevitably imprecise, and it is not uncommon for the past to be retrieved in ways that serve present purposes.”[9] That neatly summarizes the whole point of this book. While Carroll may be more astute than Cornwell, and less virulent than Wills, his objectives are the same. Which, again, appears to be bordering on a blasphemous use of the horror of the Holocaust for Church politicking.

Carroll’s book is described as a “history” of the Church and the Jews, but it is a great deal more personal rumination than serious historical, or theological, study. Throughout the book, the reader encounters a young Carroll with his mother, Carroll the student, Carroll’s trials and tribulations as a priest, Carroll the father, Carroll the husband, along with dying friends, childhood buddies, and various pilgrimages throughout Europe. Half of the action seems to take place as Carroll ruminates at various sidewalk cafes or churches.

Carroll’s main sources from a Catholic perspective are disaffected theologians such as Hans Kung and Rosemary Radford Ruether, or Scriptural scholars like John Dominic Crossan from the Jesus Seminar. His primary source on the Church and the Holocaust, for example, is Cornwell’s Hitler’s Pope, which he acknowledges in a footnote to have been “controversial,” but that he had reviewed it favorably. His knowledge – or at least his citation – of mainstream Catholic sources is limited to non-existent. He makes a single apparent reference to the Catechism of the Catholic Church[10] but calls it the “World Catechism.”[11] In its very early development stages some referred to the Catechism project as the “Universal Catechism,” but it was never called the “World Catechism.” And it has been in publication for eight years and a bestseller under the title, the Catechism of the Catholic Church. This is not, therefore, a book that pays much attention to mainstream Catholic theological, scriptural or historical scholarship, nor attempts to portray and interpret Catholic beliefs with any degree of balance.

Constantine’s Sword, at the risk of understatement, is a lengthy book that actually argues little but avers grandly. Like Garry Wills in Papal Sin, Carroll makes assertions, backs them up when possible with assertions of others who share those assertions, then considers the matter settled. He asks is “it possible that the dominant memory of Christianity’s foundational events [reviewer’s note: the New Testament], a memory that features Jesus’ conflict with the Jews and then his followers’ conflict with the Jews…has enshrined a falsehood?” He then cites Crossan that, indeed such is the case and refers to various aspects of the New Testament as the “longest lie.”[12]

Carroll’s goals are worthy: an investigation into the source and history of anti-Jewish acts, atrocities and polemics within the 2000-year history of the Church and within the course of Western civilization. To deny that such a history exists would be to live a lie. Understanding that history, and knowing that it may have been a factor in allowing European Catholics and Protestants to turn a blind-eye toward Nazi atrocities against the Jews is to acknowledge a painful, and indeed horrifying, reality. This was central to the Vatican’s statement on the Shoah[13] and to that part of the papal apology of March 2000. But to make the assertion, as Carroll does (despite a few protestations that the Nazis did, in fact, carry out the “Final Solution,” not the Catholic Church) that Catholic theology, history and belief were fundamental and direct causes of the Holocaust is scurrilous and betrays another agenda more fully spelled-out in the concluding section of Constantine’s Sword when Carroll calls for his Third Vatican Council.

In recent years, of course, it has become part of conventional wisdom that Pius XII was silent in the face of the Holocaust and that the Catholic Church, despite saving more Jewish lives than any other entity at the time, was virtually a collaborator in the “Final Solution.” Why has this essentially baseless charge become accepted as fact? Robert George in an afterword to Rychlak’s Hitler, the War and the Pope, charges bluntly that “the myth that Pius XII was ‘Hitler’s Pope’ lives and breathes on anti-Catholic bigotry. It can do so for the simple reason that anti-Catholicism remains ‘the anti-semitism of the intellectuals’…The defamatory falsehoods…originate in, and are to a large extent sustained as part of, alarger effort to undermine the credibility and weaken the moral and cultural influence of the Catholic Church. Why? Because the Catholic Church – and, within the Church, the institution of the papacy – is the single most potent force on the side of traditional morality in cultural conflicts with communism, utilitarianism, racial individualism, and other major secular ideologies.” ^[14]

It is also necessary to make the Church the cause of the Holocaust because so much of what passes as contemporary enlightened thought and views have their roots not in Catholicism or Christianity, but in the very secular ideologies that laid the true foundation for the Holocaust. So-called enlightened views on euthanasia or abortion, for example, find their philosophical origins in late 19^th century racial eugenics that propagated Hitler’s attack on the Jews. That is a reality the chattering classes want to ignore. To scapegoat the Catholic Church as the cause of the Holocaust makes a secular examination of conscience unnecessary.

The roots of Hitler’s anti-Semitic racist frenzy, and that of European society as a whole, are found not in Catholic belief but in the cultural rejection of Catholic belief in the Enlightenment and pseudo-scientism of the 18^th, 19^th and 20^th centuries. Rather than a continuum from a beginning in the New Testament, rabid racial anti-Semitism was born in the stew of competing 19^th century liberal ideologies of nationalism, racialism and eugenics, ideologies fought almost solely by the Church and that still have impact in the 21^st century. These were the views of the elite and enlightened, who scoffed at the Church and invented a hundred secular legends still with us today to show the Church as the enemy of this new, modern thinking. Carroll, of course, is not ignorant of the impact of these theories or that the Church stood almost alone in opposition to them. To Carroll, however, these theories were merely part of a whole. Though such theories that led to and created the Holocaust were a fundamental rejection of thousands of years of Judaic and Christian thought, Carroll sees them differently. He sees these enlightenment theories as ideas that grew naturally from Christian origins, rather than an outright rejection. One was merely grafted on the other. “If Hitler’s paranoia about Jews was fueled by the grafting of the secular and neo-pagan racism of modernity to the stock of ancient and medieval Jew-hatred, why does that remove Christian history from the center of the story? The stock remains the stock. Modern secularists found a new language with which to slander Jews, but their impulse to do so – here is the point – was as rooted in the mystery of religion as any grand inquisitor’s.”[15] But it is that fundamental premise that is wrong. Hitler’s anti-Semitism was not caused by religious differences between Catholics and Jews, or anti-Jewish outbursts during the First Crusade. His hatred was a fundamental rejection of both Christianity and Judaism. His hatred was of faith in anything but the Aryan race and the German nation-state. His beliefs and his rationalizations derived from the stew of anti-Catholic secularist philosophies, not Catholicism. He did not approach the world with a mode of thinking and belief rooted in the 1,900 years of Western civilization. Rather, he was rooted in the 150 years of elitist and racist thought that had abandoned the Judeo-Christian roots of Western civilization.

Carroll finds the foundation error of Christianity in the construction of the New Testament itself. The Gospels writers, he argues, laid the foundation for anti-Semitism in the very way they wrote the Gospels. They did this, Carroll charges, by de-emphasizing the Roman responsibility for the crucifixion of Jesus in order to placate Roman authorities. The evangelists and New Testament writers also reflected in their scripture a division between the Jesus movement, (Carroll’s general term for nascent Christianity), and Jews who would not accept Jesus. Finally, in a phrase borrowed from Crossan, a “prophecy historicized,”[16] distorted their work. This means that seeing Jesus as the fulfillment of Old Testament prophecies led to outright falsehood about the life, teachings and, in particular, the death and resurrection of Jesus. The charge is that the story of Jesus was re-written and elements “invented” in order to tie Jesus more closely to messianic prophecies from the Old Testament. This is the “longest lie” of the New Testament, according to Carroll.

Of course, this is a far cry from mainstream post-Vatican II biblical scholarship, represented by the late Father Raymond Brown, that generally view the Gospel texts as fairly accurate recollections of the life and teachings of Jesus written by those close to Him in time. Carroll’s sources represent an extremist view of biblical scholarship and he bases his fundamental theory of Scriptural interpretation on the shaky – at best – conclusions of the Jesus Seminar activists. His whole thesis is based on invention and speculation 2,000 years after the fact.

There can be little doubt that a way of reading New Testament scripture could lead to anti-Jewish sentiment or, rather, be an excuse for anti-Jewish sentiment. This certainly happened. However, the roots of Christian-Jewish divisions are more clearly found in both the Christian understanding of who Jesus was – the promised Messiah – and in early Church history where Jews and Christians became deeply divided, than in Scriptural directives. False scriptural interpretation and misunderstanding have often infected Christian life (and was the source of the difficulty in the famous case of Galileo[17]) but that does not mean that Scripture is wrong. It means that the interpretation given by some to Scripture is wrong. As Carroll states at one point, if “Christian Jew-hatred did not originate with the Jew Jesus, no matter how it developed, then it is not essential to Christian faith.”[18] All would agree with that assessment. Unfortunately, Carroll himself does not. He believes that the New Testament is clearly anti-Semitic and, therefore, caused anti-Jewish sentiment which, in turn, eventually evolved into the philosophies that created the Holocaust. Rather than arguing that bad Scriptural interpretation in the past was used by some to declare that all Jews shared the blame in the death of Jesus, Carroll would rather agree that this is the proper meaning of Scripture. He sees anti-Semitism as fundamental to the Christian message as presented in the New Testament.

Carroll centers his discussion of the roots of alleged Catholic anti-Semitism on the Gospel accounts of the passion, death and resurrection of Jesus. “Scholars agree,” Carroll writes, “that within a relatively short period of time, the followers of Jesus had constructed an account of his last days that would become the source of each of the four Gospels’ Passion narratives…Where scholars differ – and this difference is relative to our attempt to name the ultimate source of anti-Jewish contempt – is on the question of whether the Passion story thus told is essentially a historical or literary composition.”[19] Clearly, we will find that Carroll believes that most of the Passion account reflects a “prophesized history” rather than “history remembered.”[20]   The theory goes that the “Jesus movement” of the first century, at war with the Pharisees for control of the “true Israel,” enveloped the Passion narrative in anti-Pharisee myths that would in turn establish an anti-Jewish contempt in Christianity. And so, Carroll dismisses a good part of the historicity of the Gospel accounts and of the whole concept that Jesus died on the cross as a saving act of atonement for mankind. As to the bodily resurrection of Jesus, Carroll is circumspect at best: “Immediately after Jesus’ death, the circle of his friends began to gather. Their love for him, instead of fading in his absence, quickened, opening into a potent love they felt for one another. Their gatherings were like those of a bereft circle, and they were built around lament, the reading of texts, silence, stories, food, drink, songs, more texts, poems – a changed sense of time and a repeated intuition that there was ‘one more member’ than could be counted. That intuition is what we call the Resurrection.” [21]This appears to be an understanding of the Resurrection for the brie and white wine set, rather than a Catholic and Christian understanding.

Constantine’s Sword is a slogging journey through the history of the Church over the two millennia. He touches down here and there when it suits his purpose. For example, while the treatment of the 12^th through the 16^th centuries is endless, he barely touches on the nearly eight hundred years from Constantine to the calling of the First Crusade – which leaves a rather sizeable gap in the alleged causal linkage of anti-Semitism in the Church from the Gospels to the Holocaust.

After meandering quickly through the age of the early Church fathers, Carroll arrives at what he sees as a decisive point: Constantine’s victory at the Milvian Bridge in 312 AD. Briefly, Constantine was battling for eventual control of the Roman Empire. At the Milvian Bridge he would secure control of the Western Empire and, in 324, become sole emperor of the Roman Empire. Before the critical battle of the Milvian Bridge, Constantine claimed to have seen a vision of the Cross, and the Christian symbol was placed on his standards on the day of battle. After his victory, the Edict of Milan was issued ending the persecution of Christians. Ruling until his death in 337 AD, Constantine promoted Christianity as the religion of the Roman state and involved himself closely in internal Church affairs, though he was not actually baptized a Christian until a few days before his death. Though his ending of the Christian persecution was a critical point in Church history, his imperial involvement in Church affairs established a long-standing dispute over the rights of rulers in temporal and ecclesiastical affairs of the Church.

Carroll sees Constantine in a different light. Though his “political impact on Christianity is widely recognized,” Carroll writes, “his role as a shaper of its central religious idea is insufficiently appreciated.” Carroll claims that the “place of the cross in the Christian imagination changed with Constantine.”[22] This would lead, according to Carroll, to a central theological tenet of Catholicism that wrongly focused on the death of Jesus as atonement and reparation for sin. Thus the concept of salvation would come to dominate Christian thinking as the meaning of the life of Jesus, His death on the Cross an act of atonement for sin. This was an intention that Jesus never had, according to Carroll.

At the same time, Constantine’s exercise of authority in the Church, particularly in the name of Christian unity, brought a heretofore unheard of emphasis on defined doctrinal orthodoxy. Church authority (which would evolve into papal absolutism) now entered the Christian scene as well.[23] Constantine, in Carroll’s view, was a very busy man. In any case, Carroll contends that the combination of these theological and legalistic forces centered on Constantine boded ill for the Jews who would be seen as the ones who “killed Christ” on a newly-emphasized cross, and whose failure to recognize their own Messiah was the ultimate heresy, the ultimate insult to Christian evangelization, and made them the first “dissenters” from unity of faith.

All this, of course, sounds a bit like a 16^th Century anti-Catholic tract during the Reformation, or one of Jack Chick’s contemporary pamphlets claiming Catholic descent from a Babylonian mystery religion. The over 275 years after Christ and preceding Constantine showed a steady development of an understanding of a distinct Christian faith as well as the development of a rich community, liturgical and theological life. Concerns over unity of belief are evident in the earliest years of the Church[24] and a bewildering list of various heresies addressed by the Church long pre-date Constantine. The anti-Nicene fathers of the Church, apologists such as St. Justin Martyr, and early theologians such as St. Irenaeus, who described a world wounded by Adam’s sin but healed in Jesus, show an early Church developing an ordered set of beliefs rooted in Christ, distinct liturgy, and an insistence on Christ as the means toward salvation and eternal life. The theological concept of Christ’s atonement for sins was hardly a late-developing concept ingeniously inserted into Catholic life by a theologically illiterate Roman emperor, but is taught directly in the New Testament and in the writings of the early Church fathers. Constantine certainly had a strong impact on the early Church that would last for centuries. But Carroll attributes to him far too much impact in the areas of theology, ecclesiology, doctrinal theology and the Church’s hierarchical structure. These were areas of the Church developing for two centuries prior to Constantine and did not spring fully born from a Roman emperor with only a minimal understanding of the faith he embraced to under gird his Empire.

Carroll’s central thesis is that emphasis on the Cross as both a form of devotion and source for a theological understanding of the Christian message – enhanced by the legend of Constantine’s mother Helena finding the True Cross in Jerusalem – had a devastating impact on Christian self-understanding and on the attitude the Church would develop toward the Jews. Seeing the death of Jesus as central to God’s redemptive plan, the Cross ushered in a “teaching of contempt” toward Jews, a teaching that will lead over the centuries to the Nazi Final Solution. The actual destruction of the Jews once Christianity is backed by Roman imperial power, Carroll contends, is only prevented by the theological intervention of St. Augustine (354-430). Augustine would argue in The City of God that Jews had a specific role in God’s saving plan in that “a continuing Judaism would serve as a source of authenticity for the prophecy-based claims of Christianity.”[25] At the end of the Sixth Century, Pope Gregory the Great would forbid any violence against Jews. Carroll argues that with the foundational theology of contempt established, however, the seeds of anti-Semitism had been planted by the Church, such official proclamations not withstanding.

It can be argued, of course, that the opposite holds true. Racial anti-Semitism had existed in the Roman Empire long before Christianity was a majority faith or even a known faith distinct from Judaism. Particularly with the Jewish Diaspora from the Holy Land throughout the Empire after their revolution was defeated by Roman soldiers in 70 AD and the temple destroyed, the Jews were viewed as a people apart. By the practices tied to their faith that reinforced their separateness from Roman society, the Jewish people were considered a distinct and disliked racial minority. Anti-Jewish attitudes were certainly inherited among Christians as the infant Church more aggressively attracted non-Jews to the burgeoning faith. But to claim that the reason for anti-Jewish attitudes in Western culture was a result of Christian Scripture and Christian theology requires that a history of anti-Semitism older than Christianity be ignored.

The pagan faiths disappeared over the centuries from Constantine to Pope Gregory the Great as the Roman world became essentially Christian. Judaism, however, did not disappear. Carroll suggests that the reason for this is an inherent anti-Semitism within Christianity that required the continued existence of the Jews. The logic doesn’t hold. He blames the Church for a cultural phenomenon that preceded it, and points to confirmation in the fact that the Church tried to limit both the severity and violence of anti-Jewish acts through the intervention of Augustine and the proclamation of Gregory the Great. The Jews survived the first thousand years of Christianity by the strength of their own faith and because the Church did not attempt to forcefully eradicate their faith. If Carroll’s premise was true, or as basic to the Christian faith as he contends, Judaism would have disappeared by Christian force and no “ambivalence” in Christian attitude would have stopped it.

After establishing his central premise – that Christianity is anti-Semitic in its foundational texts and that Constantine by his centralizing notions and “theology of the Cross” formalized anti-Semitism within the Church’s structure and devotion – Carroll proceeds to describe what he sees as a linkage through history of the Church to the Final Solution by portraying anti-Jewish actions in European history. Leaping ahead from Augustine to the Crusades 700 years later, where Jews were violently attacked, (attacks consistently condemned by the popes and the hierarchy), Carroll claims a “miscarried cult of the cross is ubiquitous in this story, from Milvian Bride to Auschwitz. The ‘way of the cross,’ which is another way of saying ‘crusade,’ is the definitive epiphany, laying bear the meaning of what went before and what went after, even to our own time.”[26]

Though Carroll’s book can bend a coffee table at 756 pages, his litany of anti-Jewish incidents in Western history is spotty and lacking historical nuance. He touches on various events within Western history such as the Crusades, the Inquisition, the Plague, the Council of Trent and its aftermath, the French Revolution, the Dreyfus Affair, the Kulturkampf and concludes, actually quite briefly, with the Holocaust. Throughout these diverse and complicated historical trends and events, he sees a theology of the Cross and Church teaching on the atonement as being the dominant factor in generating anti-Jewish violence and anti-Semitic racism. This just doesn’t hold to be the causative factor that Carroll alleges in these complicated events.

Serious historians, for example, acknowledge an upswing in anti-Jewish actions in parts of Europe at the time of the calling for the First Crusade in 1096. The reasons given by historians for this development vary. Some point toward resentment that Jews were primarily the moneylenders of an infant capitalist Europe as the Church taught money lending for interest sinful among Christians. Others point to a growing urbanization that was disrupting old forms of civil life. Still others have pointed to a re-born sense of both evangelization and conformity within society. Led by a stronger papacy, the Church saw its mission to sanctifying the world through a combination of the Church’s need to reform its institutional life, free itself from control by secular lords, and to build a Christian society. There was also the growing fear that, “Those who dissented from belief or behaved in a manner that was explicitly defined as un-Christian appeared no longer as erring souls in a temptation-filled world, but as subverters of the world’s new course…”[27] This certainly played a role in enhancing a view of the Jews as outsiders in the creation of the Christian world.

Carroll, however, attributes the rise in anti-Jewish outbreaks directly with the Crusades and its emphasis on the Cross. While certainly crusading rhetoric involved at times slander of Jews – and violent anti-Jewish outbursts – the era was far more complicated than Carroll’s simplistic notion of cause and effect. Certainly, there was a renewed emphasis on evangelization and religious conformity. But the primary concern of the era for the Church in Europe was internal reform that would lead to spiritual awakening among Christians. Additionally, a stronger papacy would lead to greater protection – rather than a greater threat – for the Jewish population of Europe. The Church and the hierarchy roundly condemned attacks on Jews by the first crusaders. Pope Calixtus III (1119-1124) issued the papal bull Sicut Judaesis that condemned any violence against the Jews, a bull reaffirmed by 20 of his successors. St. Bernard of Clairvaux, who preached the Second Crusade, would speak out forcefully against anti-Jewish violence and is generally held responsible for limiting such incidents. Though Carroll tries to link a stronger papacy with increased anti-Jewish acts, [28] the opposite appears true. A stronger Church and papacy that can influence secular authorities in European history rather than be controlled by secular authorities, the less likely were anti-Jewish outbreaks. (This would be clearly seen in the Reformation where anti-Semitism exploded in Protestant Germany where the local church was under the complete control of local authorities.)

Carroll sees the Fourth Lateran Council of 1215, under Pope Innocent III, as another part of the linkage between the early Church and the Holocaust. Citing Hans Kung’s interpretation, he sees the council as fundamentally changing the situation of the Jews both legally and theologically.[29] The Council was a historic event in Church history, solidifying two centuries of Church reform. The Council “tackled an enormous range of issues, all of them practical: the establishment of orthodox teaching, especially on the sacraments – this was the Council which defined the doctrine of Transubstantiation – new regulations requiring every Christian to get to confession and communion at least once a year, improvements in record-keeping in Church courts…rules for the better discharge of episcopal duties and especially preaching ands catechizing in the language of the people, and reform of the monasteries. Behind much of this the distinctive concerns of the Pope can be detected, and the Council was the high point of the medieval papacy’s involvement with and promotion of the best reforming energies in the Church at large.”[30]

Carroll points out that certain conciliar decrees, however, placed restrictions on Jews and such legislation did isolate the Jewish community more formally. Among the restrictions the Council asked for was a special form of dress so that Jews could be more clearly identified, that Jews should be forbidden to go out during Holy Week and that they be forbidden from holding public office. It is clear that in such anti-Jewish regulations, Church leadership was reflecting some of the worst aspects of contemporary culture. At the same time, it is also clear that any number of such regulations were also intended – from the perspective of the time – to protect Jews from attacks. The Holy Week legislation, for example, was clearly intended for their protection, as Holy Week became in certain areas a time for attacks on Jews.

Carroll was more concerned, however, that this Council clearly showed the “universalist absolutism of Roman Catholic claims” to the teaching of Christ which “is causally related to the unleashing of Catholic anti-Judaism.”[31] In other words, Carroll sees a stronger Church, with a stronger papacy and with certitude of belief as generating anti-Semitism because Jews are “the original dissenters.” Yet, such a causal link is never established. In fact, greater centralization of the Church would generally result in a lessening of anti-Jewish practices. As will be seen in the discussion of the Spanish Inquisition, severe anti-Jewish activities took place more often where papal authority was co-opted by local authorities, or where Church authority had succumbed to secular authority. For example, anti-Jewish actions increased during the Plague years of the 14^th century where Church authority was less effective. “Blood libel” stories had evolved, claiming that Jews would sacrifice Christian children, or that Jews conspired to poison wells. The papacy quickly condemned such stories, but they persisted in different areas by local legend. Carroll’s history consistently shows the opposite of what it intends. Anti-Jewish activities persisted in history despite the Church, rather than because of the Church. When Church authority was weakened, the outbreaks tended to increase. When dangerous racial anti-Semitism would grow in the 19^thCentury, the Church was effectively at its weakest in influencing government or society.

Carroll, of course, does not see the anti-Jewish legislative aspects of the Lateran Council as its most damaging aspects. Papal authority and “Catholic absolutism” are his greater concerns. And most important, he sees the Council as firmly establishing in Catholic thinking the theological concept of Christ’s death as atonement for sin. To Carroll’s thinking, this central Catholic belief is fundamental to anti-Jewish attitudes as the “longest lie” created by New Testament writers. What Carroll does not concede, however, is that central to the concept of Christ’s atonement in Catholic belief is that He died for the sins of all mankind. Proper understanding of that belief means, as has been understood in Catholic doctrine since the days of the early Church fathers, that Christ died because of sin. The concept of “Jewish deicide” – that the Jews “killed” Christ – is contradictory to that essential Catholic belief. Christ died, according to ancient Catholic belief, because of the sins of all, not the actions of a few.

There can be no doubt that ignorance and false Scriptural interpretation helped to create an atmosphere of anti-Judaism within Western society. There was, as Carroll shows, an “ambivalence” toward Jews within Catholic teaching that contributed to anti-Jewish actions. While Church leadership forthrightly condemned violence against the Jews, it tolerated abusive anti-Jewish homilies and pronouncements. Church leadership too often shared in the sentiments of the culture. However, Carroll’s fundamental flaw is in arguing that anti-Semitism was the conscious creation of the Church, rather than a cultural legacy to which many in the Church too often compromised. His claim that a “theology of atonement” generated anti-Semitism is self-contradicting, as such an understanding removed any concept of alleged Jewish “guilt” in the death of Christ by teaching that all mankind was guilty.

When Carroll moves on to discussion of the Inquisition he falls into the historical trap of seeing the Inquisition both as a consistent papal-dominated institution that existed in a clear line from the 13^th century virtually to the mid 20^th century, as he considers his one encounter with the Index of Forbidden Books in the seminary as “my inquisition.”[32]Carroll states that the Inquisition was the means that “Catholic medieval absolutism exacerbated anti-Jewish religious hatred, fueled new levels of violence, and sponsored an even more hysterical conversionism, which, when up against continued Jewish resistance, finally led to modern anti-Semitic racism.”[33]

 To speak of the Inquisition fails to understand that no such individual universal entity existed. The Inquisition as a single unified court system directly responsible to the pope and controlled solely by the papacy is a historical fiction. Even within the Papal States in the 16^th century, the papacy had difficulty maintaining effective control over local inquisitions. The local church in alliance with local secular authority usually controlled inquisitorial courts. Though it began in the 13^th century as a papal-designated juridical system to remove “heresy-hunting” from control of the mob or secular authorities, it evolved rather quickly as a device of the local church and secular authorities to address local, and later national or dynastic goals. There were many inquisitions, rather than a singular “Inquisition.”

The many inquisitions that took place existed sporadically in different regions, at different times, and to meet different local needs. The medieval inquisition barely existed, for example, in Spain and Portugal. For hundreds of years, the inquisition in many places existed only sporadically, if at all. In the 16^th century, it existed primarily in Spain, Portugal, the Papal States and other Italian cities. It existed sporadically – dominated by the state – in France and, early, in England.

Carroll’s argument is that the Spanish Inquisition created “racial” anti-Semitism and, as such, was generated by the Church and linked directly to Nazism. Spanish anti-Semitism was not a religious prejudice, but a racial one. It derived from the success in Spanish culture of Jewish converts to Catholicism and the goal of a racially unified Iberian peninsula, free of the “foreign” Muslims and Jews. In 1391, anti-Jewish riots swept through Spain. More religious than racial – though this has been disputed – these riots led to major forced conversions of Jews to Christianity. These Jewish converts would be called conversos or New Chistians, to distinguish them from traditional Christian families. Theconverso identity would remain with such families for generations.

Converso families were welcomed into a full participation in Spanish society not available to Jews and they would soon become leaders in government, science, business and the Church. Though it was legislated in certain areas that those forced to convert could return to their own religion, many did not. These converso families obviously faced the scorn of those who remained Jews. At the same time, however, over the years the Old Christians saw them as social-climbing opportunists. They claimed that they secretly maintained the faith of their forefathers. It would be complaints about these alleged “secret Jews” that would lead to the establishment of the Spanish Inquisition.[34] Curiously, Carroll argues, with no documentation, that most of these converts remained “secret” Jews. It is a curious argument because it accepts as fact the reason given for Spanish persecution of the Jews. In fact, after a generation, most of these converts were as Catholic as the Old Christians. But racial prejudice against their Jewish ethnic roots remained. They were considered racially apart. The children’s children of these converted Jews were not considered “pure” Spaniards and would become the primary target of the Spanish Inquisition.

Carroll points out that in 1449, the city council of Toledo passed an ordinance decreeing that no converso of Jewish descent may hold office. Pope Nicholas V (1447-1455) responded furiously, excommunicating the drafters of the regulation. He wrote that “all Catholics are one body in Christ according to the teaching of our faith.” The King of Castile, however, formally approved the regulation.

“If the beginning of what we think of as modern antisemitism can be located anywhere, it is here,” Carroll writes. “The shift from religious definition of Jewishness to a racial one is perhaps the most decisive in this long narrative, and its fault lines, reaching into the consciousness of Western civilization, will define the moral geography of the modern age. The Church’s worry, for example, that its very own conversos were corrupting Christians would find a near permanent resonance in the modern European fantasy of Jews as parasites – successful and assimilated, but feeding on the host society. The ultimate example of this image would emerge in Germany, of course, but the fear that led Nazis to regard Jews as bloodsuckers to be excised was anticipated by the Iberian suspicion that Jews were more to be feared as assimilated insiders than as dissenting outsiders.”[35]

It is true that the racial prejudice against Catholic families of Jewish stock was the primary instigator of the Spanish Inquisition. However, it contradicts, rather than confirms, Carroll’s basic thesis that anti-Semitism that led to the horror of the Holocaust came from essential Christian theology. Spanish anti-Semitism was aimed at Jews racially. Religion was used as a club of enforcement to knock ethnic Jews down from the successful heights they had attained as Catholics. But the faith was the excuse, not the cause, of Spanish racial anti-Semitism. And that is why Pope Nicholas, and successor popes, would deplore the actions of the Spanish Inquisition against the conversos. In Rome, it was viewed not as an attempt to root out heresy, but as a means to attack generations of successful coverts.

In March 1492, Queen Isabella and King Ferdinand ordered the expulsion – or conversion – of all remaining Jews in Spain. Many conversos had already fled to Rome and the Papal States where they would be free of persecution. Those who remained Jews fled to Rome as well, known as the most tolerant of European cities toward Jews. The intent of the declaration of expulsion was more religious than racial, as Jewish conversion was certainly the intent, not “the beginning of a strategy of elimination”[36] as Carroll contends. While many Jews fled, a large number converted, thus aggravating the popular picture of secret Judaizers within the Christian community of Spain. Up through 1530, the primary activity of the inquisition in Spain would be aimed at pursuingconversos. The same would be true from 1650 to 1720. While its activities declined thereafter, the inquisition continued to exist in Spain until its final abolition in 1824.

The attacks in Spain on the conversos were viewed as despicable in Rome and condemned by the popes. Italians “felt that Spanish hypocrisy in religion, together with the existence of the Inquisition, proved that the tribunal was created not for religious purity, but simply to rob the Jews. Similar views were certainly held by the prelates of the Holy See whenever they intervened in favor of the conversos. Moreover, the racialism of the Spanish authorities was scorned in Italy, where the Jewish community led a comparatively tranquil existence.”[37]

If there is a connection between the Spanish Inquisition and the Holocaust generated by the German Nazis it is in the racial hatred that motivated both. It is not, however, to be found in a connection between Catholic Spain and Protestant Germany. And it is certainly not to be found in the faith whose leadership spoke out forcefully against the attacks on theconversos, or a theology that argued that conversion knew no racial boundaries.

Carroll leaps from the early Spanish Inquisition to the Council of Trent (1545-1563), called by the Church in response to the Reformation. He points out that the Council had very little to say about the Jews. The Council primarily concerned itself with Church renewal in light of the Reformation and defending clear Catholic teaching in response to Protestant attacks. Among those clear Catholic teachings confirmed, as Carroll points out, was that “responsibility for the death of Jesus belonged to sinners – to all persons, that is, in their having sinned. The old question Who killed Jesus? Was explicitly answered: Human sinners did.”[38] The declaration by Trent was another contradiction of what Carroll asserts throughout his book: that the theology of the atonement created anti-Semitism by blaming Jews for the death of Jesus and led directly to the Holocaust.

But Carroll argues that if “this perception had maintained its firm hold on the moral imagination of Christians, the history of Jews would be quite different. That something else happened, beginning with the Gospels’ own scapegoating of Jews, only proves Trent’s point that ‘we’ are sinners.”[39] Perhaps, however, the exact opposite is true. The thesis that the “Jews killed Jesus” was a popular misinterpretation of the New Testament that the Church taught as wrong in its theology of atonement. If anti-Semitism persisted, it was because it was persistent in the popular imagination, not in the teachings of the Church as Carroll claims. Again, anti-Semitism existed despite essential Church teachings, not because of them, as Carroll charges.

The inquisition in Rome was established during the Reformation period and has generally been regarded by historians as one of the more lax courts. The inquisition court in Rome should not be understood as a universal court, but as one of the inquisition courts within the Papal States. As in most regions, the local Roman court focused primarily on clergy wrongs and on issues of lifestyle – adultery, drunkenness and other forms of impropriety as Rome did not have a racial problem withconversos, [40] and the Inquisition itself had nothing to do with the Jewish population. Pope Paul III (1534-1549) had authorized the inquisition in Rome as a means of protecting the Church there from the influence of the Reformation in 1542. He was a protector of the Jews who banned various anti-Jewish activities. Pope Paul IV (1555-1559), however, had a short but troubled reign. It was Pope Paul IV who established the separate Jewish ghetto in Rome, enforced segregationist regulations on Jews and, mistakenly, affirmed the “blood purity” statute in Toledo that had rightly been condemned by previous pontiffs. Carroll sees both events as a definitive sign of the Church embracing, despite the reforms of Trent, a definitive anti-Semitic stance, particularly in its seeming endorsement of the Spanish racial policy of limpieza de sangre aimed at the conversofamilies of Jewish ethnic heritage. Carroll explains that the “culture-wide trauma of the Reformation was part of what prompted the shift in papal strategy toward the Jews,”[41] a shift that Carroll sees as momentous.

Limpieza de sangre was part of the “blood purity” restrictions on Jews who had converted to Catholicism and limited their ability to hold public office or offices within Spain. This was the ugly racial element that had infected Spanish society. As we have seen, Pope Nicholas V rightly condemned limpieza vociferously. Pope Paul IV as a cardinal “had singlemindely devoted his whole life to reform of the Church…(yet) under Paul IV reform took on a darker more fearful character. Creativity was distrusted as a dangerous innovation, theological energies were diverted into the suppression of error rather than the exploration of truth. Catholicism was identified with reaction…For the rest of the Tridentine era, Catholic Reformation would move between those poles, and it would be the task of the popes to manage the resulting tensions.”[42]Depending on the perspective of the individual pontiff, restrictions on Jewish life within the Roman ghetto would wax and wane. His decision on limpieza, however, was reversed and generally abandoned from Catholic life outside of Spain. A few orders with strong Spanish roots, such as the Jesuits, maintained a form oflimpieza. But no serious student of history would make the claim that this unique Spanish cultural prejudice reflected overall Church practice. Carroll himself recognizes that the anti-Jewish racial theories of the 19^th Century that created the anti-Semitism of the Nazis had no relationship to Spanish limpieza.

Pope Paul IV’s pontificate was short. New popes would reverse his policies – his approval of limpieza was quickly abandoned – and treatment of the local Jewish community in Rome would vary from pontiff to pontiff. Popes would change and policies would change. These policies were generated as papal governance of the Papal States, however, not pronouncements of the universal Church. And what Carroll sees as a continuous linkage was shifting sand. There was no uniform anti-Jewish policy aimed at the local Jewish community from papacy to papacy. The policies reflected the emphasis and mind-set of individuals. However, the different perspectives popes adopted show anything but a continuous chain that is the fundamental thesis of Carroll’s book; nor were there theologically infallible papal statements of defining Catholic belief. The Jewish ghetto in Rome is a dark spot on Church history. The long-held notion that popes must be rulers of an independent Papal States or the papacy would be dominated by secular rulers, while theoretically understandable and with historical roots from earlier centuries, placed popes in the difficult position of holding secular authority. Not a few of them exercised that secular authority poorly. That ended in 1870 when Italian nationalist troops occupied the city as “liberators.” But within a generation after, that nationalist tide would also result in the emergence of Benito Mussolini and the Italian Fascist state.

Carroll marches quickly through the early Enlightenment, represented by Voltaire, touches on Spinoza and the French Revolution, then on to Vatican I (1869-1870) and the declaration of papal infallibility. “Liberalism and modernism,” Carroll writes, “were seen as bearing the fruits of the destruction of civilization itself, and the dark side of the new order would make itself all too clear in the twentieth century. There was much in the new age the Church was right to suspect, so the Catholic strategy of arming the leader of the Church with the spiritual mace of infallibility made some sense.”[43]

His understanding of the definition of papal infallibility as conferred on the papacy in 1870 is not, of course, the definition given by the Council. Vatican I dealt with the office of the papacy and the nature of papal authority because these issues were at the very center of the life of the Church in the 19^th Century. The emergence of the modern liberal states had reconfirmed to many within the Church the vital importance of the ancient belief of the central authority of the bishop of Rome as the successor of St. Peter. There were divisions over such a definition, however. Some argued that it would be inopportune to make such a definition in the turmoil of the 19^th Century, while others wanted papal infallibility applied to virtually everything the pope said or wrote. The accusation is made that a definition of papal infallibility was demanded by Pope Pius IX and forced on an unwilling Council by papal pressure, curial conspiracies, and squelched debate. However, debate went on for months, and the final definition of papal infallibility fell far short of the desires of the “ultramontanes” who wanted an elevated definition of infallibility. The fact was that consensus emerged, except for extremists on each side, which spelled out a definition of papal infallibility clearly in line with Church tradition and the theology of the papacy. The Council proclaimed no new teaching that extended papal authority beyond a point the Church had understood for centuries.

Carroll sees the definition of papal infallibility as a “pivotal event” for his story as “the Church’s relationship to the modern fate of the Jews is entertwined, in a particular way, with efforts to extend the political power of the papacy.”[44] Carroll will therefore lock himself in early to the Cornwell thesis that the sole motivation of Pius XII in World War II was the extension of papal power. At the same time, there is Carroll’s blithe acknowledgement of what was taking place in the 19^th Century: “the dark side of the new order would make itself all too clear in the 20^th century.” That is Carroll’s primary reference to what in fact was going on in European thought in the 19^th Century and what it would lead to in the 20^th Century.

The culture of thought in the 19^th Century – secularism, communism, racialism and nationalism – would lead to the First World War, the Communist revolution in Russia, Stalin’s pogroms, the rise of Fascism and Nazism, World War II and the Holocaust. That is the dark side to which Carroll refers. It also makes a mockery of his essential argument that the anti-Semitism that played its own role in so much of this horror was the creation of the Church, or sustained by the Church. The stew of secular philosophies that led to these 20^th century horrors was a creation of the 19^th century, that had limited roots in the so-called Enlightenment of the 18^th century. These philosophies were definitive breaks with Christian thinking, not evolutions. As Paul Johnson notes, they involved the “birth of the modern” – an entirely new way of viewing self, one’s role in culture, one’s entire mode of thinking and acting. These were not subtle changes or a grafting on to Christianity. These were philosophies that the Church fought against because they were a fundamental break, a fundamental confrontation, with an entire Christian philosophy, theology, culture and worldview. Carroll’s failure to present that adequately in order not to upset his thesis that the Church was to blame for the Holocaust is the fundamental flaw of his book. The fundamental blasphemy is that he would do so in order to put forth a meager list of liberal bromides for alleged Church reform.

Carroll approaches the age of Pius XII and the Holocaust itself after winding his way through the German Kulturkampf and the Dreyfus affair in France. He adds nothing new to his story in either recital. Successful Catholic action in response to the Kulturkampf is seen as setting what could have been a standard in reaction to Hitler, forgetting that Bismarck was not Hitler and the Germany of 1870 was not the Nazi Germany of 1933. The Dreyfus affair – where a Jewish officer in the French army was convicted of treason – was a high-profile case of anti-Semitism within the French army. Carroll uses it to excorciate the French Catholic newspaper “La Croix.” The newspaper, operated by a religious order, engaged in hot anti-Jewish rhetoric during the Dreyfus affair. While Carroll points to this as symbolizing the entrenched nature of Catholic anti-Semitism, it far more reflected a turn-of-the-century Europe where anti-Semitism was increasing as the influence of the Church decreased in the modern secular states and “modern” thought predominated.

The Church and Hitlerism is confined in Carroll’s book to less than 70 pages, about the same length that he gives to his suggestions for Church reform. He begins by restating his essential charge that “(h)owever modern Nazism was, it planted its roots in the soil of age-old Church attitudes and a nearly unbroken chain of Jew-hatred. However pagan Nazism was, it drew its sustenance from groundwater poisoned by the Church’s most solemnly held ideology – its theology.”[45] This is, of course, a gross mis-reading of history. Hitler and Nazism were created by a rampant social Darwinism, an ubiquitous European belief that it was a virtual biological imperative that the lower classes be dominated by their racial superiors, the ideology of imperialism, the birth of scientism that would dispel the “myths” of religion, the campaign to radically excise the Church from public life, the denial of the sacredness of the individual for the good of the State or, as in communism, the good of the class, the creation of the myth of the Nitzsche-like Superman who could undertake any evil for the good of his race, and the replacement of Christianity with neo-paganism. The soil and poisoned groundwater for these Nazi aberrations were the views of 19^th century liberalism that were the conventional wisdom of the times. The Catholic Church – its theology – was viewed as the enemy of this modern thought. The Church was not the progenitor of the beliefs that created Nazism. It was one of the last remaining bulwarks in Europe against it. The Nazis killed the Jews. For reasons of an internal agenda against the Church, Carroll would prefer to dismiss that, like a revisionist who would claim the Holocaust never took place, and shift the blame to the Church for his own agenda.

As noted earlier, Carroll regurgitates the central thesis of Cornwell. Like Cornwell, he sees the revision of Canon Law promulgated in 1917 – in which a young priest Eugenio Pacelli, the future Pius XII was involved – as the motivating factor in the Church’s reaction to the rise of the dictators. According to the theory, papal absolutism was the driving force of Vatican foreign policy. The Vatican would surrender anything – and bargain with the devil himself – in order to gain authority over, for example, the appointment of bishops. He sees the Concordat that Cardinal Pacelli negotiated with Hitler as giving a first blessing and recognition to the regime (which forgets that prior to the concordat, Hitler had concluded a peace agreement with the western powers, including France and Great Britain, called the Four-Power Pact. and a similar agreement was concluded between Hitler and the Protestant churches). Though Carroll dismisses such claims, the Vatican had no choice but to conclude such a concordat, or face draconian restrictions on the lives of the faithful in Germany. Pius XI would explain that it was concluded only to spare persecution that would take place immediately if there was no such agreement. The concordat would also give the Holy See the opportunity to formally protest Nazi action in the years prior to the war and after hostilities began. It provided a legal basis for arguing that baptized Jews in Germany were Christian and should be exempt from legal disabilities. Though the Concordat was routinely violated before the ink was dry, its existence allowed for Vatican protest, and it did save Jewish lives.

Carroll doesn’t really spend much time on the Holocaust itself or a detailed look at the entire World War and how the Church responded.[46]He states that from the onset of Nazism, the “Church, for its part, had come to a decision it would stick with, almost without exception, — that the ‘wretched fate’ of the Jews was unconnected to its own fate, or that of anyone else.”[47] Carroll says such things without any necessity for proving that was the Church’s policy. The first formal protest filed by the Vatican under the concordat was against the Nazi boycott of Jewish businesses. In 1937, Pope Pius XI issued “Mit brennender sorge,” which spoke out forcefully against Nazi racist policy. It assumes that a calculated decision by Pius to work behind the scenes through his papal representatives and through the existing vehicles of the Church to save as many lives as possible was a callous decision to leave Jews to their fate. It assumes that hurling thunderbolts from the Vatican – which all who lived through Nazism understand would have had no possible impact on Hitler – would have accomplished something or saved more lives. This is mere conjecture based on hindsight. None of the critics of Pius have yet been able to put forth a concrete alternative that Pius could have developed to save more lives than were saved by the Church in that period. Throughout the war years, the Church would save more Jewish lives than any entity that existed at the time.

Disagreeing, however, with the tactics of Pius is one thing. Stating that the Church abandoned the Jews does not reflect any kind of reality. Which is one of the most frustrating aspects of Carroll’s entire “history” of the Church and the Jews. It is not history at all, but an amateur’s meditation on various historical events skewed to reflect the prejudices of his own thesis. This is not careful scholarship. This is simply a very long anti-Catholic essay.

Carroll concludes his treatment of the Holocaust by the need to go after the death of Edith Stein, a Jewish convert to Catholicism who was murdered in the Holocaust and declared a saint by Pope John Paul II. Echoing Garry Wills, he sees the canonization of Stein as an attempt by the Church to claim victimhood in the Holocaust and to “reaffirm the religious superiority of Christianity over Judaism.”[48] Like Wills, he can cite no source for this conjecture, or documentation that cites any such reasoning from Church leadership. Or anybody within Catholic circles for that matter. Pope John Paul II stated, which is a fact, that she died at the hands of the Nazis because she was a Jew and a Catholic, in retribution for the Church speaking out against Nazi deportations of the Jews in the Netherlands. The death of Edith Stein – and the death of Maxmillian Kolbe – are the only cases of people slaughtered by the Nazis in the concentration camps that a certain circle within Catholicism feels comfortable publicly degrading.

The last section of Carroll’s book begins immediately after the degradation of the canonization of Edith Stein. This is when we find out the true purpose of Carroll’s lengthy attack on the New Testament and the Christian belief in Christ’s passion and death as atonement for sin. This is why he has attempted to set up the Church as the ultimate cause of the Holocaust, while inventing a simplistic history of the Church as the progenitor of an anti-Semitism that preceded its existence. He sees its essential theology as anti-Semitic, its leadership only interested in power. It allowed the Jews to be slaughtered in the Holocaust because it simply didn’t care, and the Church was wrong – fundamentally – in the very Scriptures of the New Testament that is its heart and soul. If anyone else truly believed this, he or she would abandon the Church. Carroll would rather stick around to argue papal infallibility, women’s ordination and priestly celibacy.

Carroll describes the Second Vatican Council as the “beginning of the long-overdue demise of Constantinian imperial Catholicism, as it had been shaped by a medieval papalism hardened in the fires of the Counter-Reformation…The Church’s failure in relation to Adolf Hitler was only a symptom of the ecclesiastical cancer Pope John was attempting to treat.”[49] This is a ludicrous picture of the intent of the Council and of Pope John XXIII’s view of the Church. Critical to Pope John XXIII’s thinking was that the Church must reach out to the world and not see itself as a faithful remnant that hides from the world. The purpose in John’s mind was to certainly remove liturgical encrustation, defensive theological formulations and aspects of the culture of Catholicism that prevented outreach to the modern world. However, the purpose of such was not to convert the Church to modernism, but for the Church to be better able to evangelize the modern world. This has been the hallmark of the papacy of Pope John Paul II, who as a bishop attending the Council and was a strong supporter of the intent and spirit of Vatican II.

Of course, Carroll – much like Garry Wills – argues that while the Council was a historic beginning, it was undermined by Pope Paul VI, a “devoted factotum to Pius XII.”[50] Of Pope Paul VI: “His was the first effort to turn back the tide of Church reform that the Vatican Council initiated, and that program of medieval restoration has been vigorously continued by Pope John Paul II.” [51]Of course, Carroll argues that hopes were too high for Vatican II. A Church incapable of allowing priests to marry or couples to practice contraception is hardly ready for the reform he demands. He calls for a Third Vatican Council that would address the following agenda:

First, the “offensive character (of the New Testament) is part of what the Church must not only admit but to claim. The anti-Jewish texts of the New Testament show that the Church, even in its first generation, was capable of betraying the message of Jesus, establishing once and for all that ‘the Church as such’ can sin.”[52] The Church must understand the New Testament narratives are invented and that any “Christian proclamation that says that redemption, grace, perfection, whatever you call it, has already come is unbelievable on its face.”[53]

Second, Vatican III will abandon the ethos of Constantinian imperial power and the “primary-enforcing ideas of Roman supremacy and papal infallibility.”[54] The “doctrine of papal infallibility amounts to the low point in the long story of patriarchy, a legitimation of Church exceptionalism, a reversal of the meaning that Jesus gave to ministry, and, finally, an abuse of power.”[55]

Third, Vatican III should initiate a “new Christology” that abandons concepts such as the immortality of the soul, messiahship of Jesus, Christ’s death as atonement for sin, the belief that Jesus is the only means of salvation, as well as the very concept of salvation. (“The coming of Jesus was for the purpose of revelation, nor salvation – revelation, that is, that we are already saved.”[56]) This will allow the Church “to embrace a pluralism of belief and worship, of religion and no religion, that honors God by defining God as beyond every human effort to express God.”[57]

Fourth, the Church in Vatican III will abandon “its internal commitment to methods that undergird totalitarianism”[58] In addition, of course, to abandoning such things as excommunication, bannings, censorship and anathemas, this means the Church must also abandon “the idea that there is one objective and absolute truth, and that its custodian is the Church.”[59] The papal apology, Carroll writes, “did not confront the implications of that still maintained idea of truth” and that universal claims “for Jesus as the one objective and absolute truth” must be abandoned. “Vatican III must retrieve for the Church the deep-seated intuition that mystery is at the core of existence, that truth is elusive, that God is greater than religion.”[60] Bishops should be chosen by the people, the whole clerical caste eradicated, and women ordained (though ordination to exactly what is never clarified).

Fifth, and only after the prior four agenda items are completed, the Church must have a complete act of repentance, a repentance of a “failed and sinful Church.”[61]

Rather clearly, the objective solution Carroll has in mind already exists: Unitarianism.

The five-point agenda for Vatican III is the purpose of Carroll’s book. I do not doubt the sincerity of his horror in the Holocaust, or his disgust at the anti-Jewish history that exists within the history of Western civilization and that members of the Church have been a part of it. But his purpose, clearly, is for “the past to be retrieved in ways that serve present purposes.” Those purposes are Carroll’s five-point agenda for creating a Catholicism that would fit his particular vision. He would do so by undermining the Gospels, dismissing 2000 years of Catholic theology and dismantling the papacy and the priesthood. He would, finally, have a Church that would disconnect from Jesus as the source of truth – that truth can be known, and truth can be evangelized.

Much like Wills found it necessary to re-state that he is Catholic no matter what the positions he holds, Carroll concludes this epic with a personal plea for his Catholicity no matter what he believes. Though confessing his shame about his Catholicity, he confesses as well his own collusion in this historic record of the Church that “sanctified the hatred of the Jews.”[62]Despite that, he states that the “most deadly prospect at this point would be to find myself alienated from the community that has been the focus of my ‘backward glance.’”[63]

Perhaps acknowledging that his central thesis is flawed can relieve those fears. No one can argue that members of the Church throughout the centuries, going to the highest leadership within the Church, engaged and endorsed at times in anti-Jewish words, sentiments and actions. At the very same time, many within the Church officially condemned such actions and it was the very Church leadership that Carroll hopes to be abandoned that was most vociferous in that condemnation. It was not the belief of the Church, the New Testament, the Church centered in Jesus, the understanding that Christ died for the sins of mankind, or the Church belief in an objective and universal truth that persists in Christ, that created the horror of the Holocaust. It was the rejection of those, and the attempt to substitute for Judeo-Christian civilization a secularist pseudo scientism of race, class and nationalism that generated Nazism and the Holocaust. Nazism and the Nazis killed the Jews, and the philosophies that created them still bubble just below the surface. But not in the Catholic Church. Rather, they persist in a vicious secularism and pseudo-scientism that divorces faith from modernity, believes that truth cannot be known, and attempts to convince mankind that it is its own god.

 

SUMMARY POINTS

John Cornwell in Hitler’s Pope, Garry Wills in Papal Sinand now James Carroll in Constantine’s Sword all identify themselves as Catholic. The authors’ Catholic identity gives a fundamental agenda to the collective works. In all three works, the essential issues dealt with are used to lay out an internal agenda within Catholicism. While Cornwell and Wills focus primarily on the role of papal authority, Carroll both includes and expands on that theme to question fundamental Catholic beliefs.

Carroll’s thesis is that the anti-Semitism which resulted in the Holocaust is central to Catholic theology and derived from the earliest Christian expressions of belief, namely the Gospel accounts themselves. He concludes his book with a call for a third Vatican Council to make a series of changes in basic Catholic belief that he envisions purging the Church of this alleged fundamental anti-Semitism.

Carroll’s main sources from a Catholic perspective are disaffected theologians such as Hans Kung and Rosemary Radford Ruether, or Scriptural scholars like John Dominic Crossan from the Jesus Seminar. His primary source on the Church and the Holocaust, for example, is Cornwell’sHitler’s Pope, which he acknowledges in a footnote to have been “controversial,” but that he had reviewed it favorably. His knowledge – or at least his citation – of mainstream Catholic sources is limited to non-existent.

It is necessary to make the Church the cause of the Holocaust because so much of what passes as contemporary enlightened thought and views have their roots not in Catholicism or Christianity, but in the very secular ideologies that laid the true foundation for the Holocaust. So-called enlightened views on euthanasia or abortion, for example, find their philosophical origins in late 19^th century racial eugenics that propagated Hitler’s attack on the Jews. To scapegoat the Catholic Church as the cause of the Holocaust makes a secular examination of conscience unnecessary.

Though theories that led to and created the Holocaust were a fundamental rejection of thousands of years of Judaic and Christian thought, Carroll sees them differently. He sees these enlightenment theories as ideas that grew naturally from Christian origins, rather than an outright rejection. One was merely grafted on the other.

Hitler did not approach the world with a mode of thinking and belief rooted in the 1,900 years of Western civilization. Rather, he was rooted in the 150 years of elitist racist and nationalist thought that had abandoned the Judeo-Christian roots of Western civilization.

Carroll believes that the New Testament is clearly anti-Semitic and, therefore, caused anti-Jewish sentiment that, in turn, eventually evolved into the philosophies that created the Holocaust. Rather than arguing that bad Scriptural interpretation in the past was used by some to declare that all Jews shared the blame in the death of Jesus, Carroll would rather agree that this is the proper meaning of Scripture. He sees anti-Semitism as fundamental to the Christian message as presented in the New Testament.

Carroll dismisses a good part of the historicity of the Gospel accounts and of the whole concept that Jesus died on the cross as a saving act of atonement for mankind. As to the bodily resurrection of Jesus, Carroll is circumspect at best.

Constantine certainly had a strong impact on the early Church that would last for centuries. But Carroll attributes to him far too much impact in the areas of theology, ecclesiology, doctrinal theology and the Church’s hierarchical structure. These were areas of the Church developing for two centuries prior to Constantine and did not spring fully born from a Roman emperor with only a minimal understanding of the faith he embraced to under gird his Empire.

Carroll blames the Church for a cultural phenomenon that preceded it, and points to confirmation in the fact that the Church tried to limit both the severity and violence of anti-Jewish acts through the intervention of Augustine and the proclamation of Gregory the Great. The Jews survived the first thousand years of Christianity by the strength of their own faith and because the Church did not attempt to forcefully eradicate their faith. If Carroll’s premise was true, or as basic to the Christian faith as he contends, Judaism would have disappeared by Christian force and no “ambivalence” in Christian attitude would have stopped it.

Pope Calixtus III (1119-1124) issued the papal bull Sicut Judaesis that condemned any violence against the Jews, a bull reaffirmed by 20 of his successors. St. Bernard of Clairvaux, who preached the Second Crusade, would speak out forcefully against anti-Jewish violence and is generally held responsible for limiting such incidents. Though Carroll tries to link a stronger papacy with increased anti-Jewish acts, the opposite appears true. A stronger Church and papacy that can influence secular authorities in European history rather than be controlled by secular authorities, the less likely were anti-Jewish outbreaks.

Carroll’s history consistently shows the opposite of what it intends. Anti-Jewish activities persisted in history despite the Church, rather than because of the Church. When Church authority was weakened, the outbreaks tended to increase. When dangerous racial anti-Semitism would grow in the 19^th Century, the Church was effectively at its weakest in influencing government or society.

There can be no doubt that ignorance and false Scriptural interpretation helped to create an atmosphere of anti-Judaism within Western society. There was, as Carroll shows, an “ambivalence” toward Jews within Catholic teaching that contributed to anti-Jewish actions. While Church leadership forthrightly condemned violence against the Jews, it tolerated abusive anti-Jewish homilies and pronouncements. Church leadership too often shared in the sentiments of the culture. However, Carroll’s fundamental flaw is in arguing that anti-Semitism was the conscious creation of the Church, rather than a cultural legacy to which many in the Church too often compromised.

It is true that the racial prejudice against Catholic families of Jewish stock was the primary instigator of the Spanish Inquisition. However, it contradicts, rather than confirms, Carroll’s basic thesis that anti-Semitism that led to the horror of the Holocaust came from essential Christian theology. Spanish anti-Semitism was aimed at Jews racially. Religion was used as a club of enforcement to knock ethnic Jews down from the successful heights they had attained as Catholics. But the faith was the excuse, not the cause, of Spanish racial anti-Semitism.

The attacks in Spain on the conversos were viewed as despicable in Rome and condemned by the popes. Italians, Henry Kamen has written, “felt that Spanish hypocrisy in religion, together with the existence of the Inquisition, proved that the tribunal was created not for religious purity, but simply to rob the Jews. Similar views were certainly held by the prelates of the Holy See whenever they intervened in favor of the conversos. Moreover, the racialism of the Spanish authorities was scorned in Italy, where the Jewish community led a comparatively tranquil existence.”

The thesis that the “Jews killed Jesus” was a popular misinterpretation of the New Testament that the Church taught as wrong in its theology of atonement. If anti-Semitism persisted, it was because it was persistent in the popular imagination, not in the teachings of the Church as Carroll claims. Again, anti-Semitism existed despite essential Church teachings, not because of them, as Carroll charges.

Treatment of the local Jewish community in Rome would vary from pontiff to pontiff. Popes would change and policies would change. These policies were generated as papal governance of the Papal States, however, not pronouncements of the universal Church. And what Carroll sees as a continuous linkage was shifting sand. There was no uniform anti-Jewish policy aimed at the local Jewish community from papacy to papacy. The policies reflected the emphasis and mind-set of individuals. However, the different perspectives popes adopted show anything but a continuous chain that is the fundamental thesis of Carroll’s book.

The fact was that at the First Vatican Council consensus emerged, except for extremists on each side, which spelled out a definition of papal infallibility clearly in line with Church tradition and the theology of the papacy. The Council proclaimed no new teaching that extended papal authority beyond a point the Church had understood for centuries.

The stew of secular philosophies that led to these 20^thcentury horrors was a creation of the 19^th century, that had limited roots in the so-called Enlightenment of the 18^thcentury. These philosophies were definitive breaks with Christian thinking, not evolutions. As Paul Johnson notes, they involved the “birth of the modern” – an entirely new way of viewing self, one’s role in culture, one’s entire mode of thinking and acting. These were not subtle changes or a grafting on to Christianity. These were philosophies that the Church fought against because they were a fundamental break, a fundamental confrontation, with an entire Christian philosophy, theology, culture and worldview. Carroll’s failure to present that adequately in order not to upset his thesis that the Church was to blame for the Holocaust is the fundamental flaw of his book.

Carroll regurgitates the central thesis of Cornwell. He sees the revision of Canon Law promulgated in 1917 – in which a young priest Eugenio Pacelli, the future Pius XII was involved – as the motivating factor in the Church’s reaction to the rise of the dictators. According to the theory, papal absolutism was the driving force of Vatican foreign policy. The Vatican would surrender anything – and bargain with the devil himself – in order to gain authority over, for example, the appointment of bishops.

Though Carroll dismisses such claims, the Vatican had no choice but to conclude such a concordat, or face draconian restrictions on the lives of the faithful in Germany. Pius XI would explain that it was concluded only to spare persecution that would take place immediately if there was no such agreement. The concordat would also give the Holy See the opportunity to formally protest Nazi action in the years prior to the war and after hostilities began. It provided a legal basis for arguing that baptized Jews in Germany were Christian and should be exempt from legal disabilities. Though the Concordat was routinely violated before the ink was dry, its existence allowed for Vatican protest, and it did save Jewish lives.

Carroll assumes that a calculated decision by Pius to work behind the scenes through his papal representatives and through the existing vehicles of the Church to save as many lives as possible, was a callous decision to leave Jews to their fate. It assumes that hurling thunderbolts from the Vatican – which all who lived through Nazism understand would have had no possible impact on Hitler – would have accomplished something or saved more lives. This is mere conjecture based on hindsight. None of the critics of Pius have yet been able to put forth a concrete alternative that Pius could have developed to save more lives than were saved by the Church in that period. Throughout the war years, the Church would save more Jewish lives than any entity that existed at the time.

Disagreeing with the tactics of Pius is one thing. Stating that the Church abandoned the Jews does not reflect any kind of reality. Which is one of the most frustrating aspects of Carroll’s entire “history” of the Church and the Jews. It is not history at all, but an amateur’s meditation on various historical events skewed to reflect the prejudices of his own thesis.

Echoing Garry Wills, Carroll sees the canonization of Stein as an attempt by the Church to claim victimhood in the Holocaust and to reaffirm the religious superiority of Christianity over Judaism. Like Wills, he can cite no source for this conjecture, or documentation that cites any such reasoning from Church leadership. Pope John Paul II stated, which is a fact, that she died at the hands of the Nazis because she was a Jew and a Catholic, in retribution for the Church speaking out against Nazi deportations of the Jews in the Netherlands. The death of Edith Stein – and the death of Maxmillian Kolbe – are the only cases of people slaughtered by the Nazis in the concentration camps that a certain circle within Catholicism feels comfortable publicly degrading.

Critical to Pope John XXIII’s thinking was that the Church must reach out to the world and not see itself as a faithful remnant that hides from the world. The purpose in John’s mind was to certainly remove liturgical encrustation, defensive theological formulations and aspects of the culture of Catholicism that prevented outreach to the modern world. However, the purpose of such was not to convert the Church to modernism, but for the Church to be better able to evangelize the modern world. This has been the hallmark of the papacy of Pope John Paul II, who as a bishop attending the Council, was a strong supporter of the intent and spirit of Vatican II.

The five-point agenda for Vatican III is the purpose of Carroll’s book. One cannot doubt the sincerity of his horror in the Holocaust, or his disgust at the anti-Jewish history that exists within the history of Western civilization and that members of the Church have been a part of it. But his purpose, clearly, is for “the past to be retrieved in ways that serve present purposes.” Those purposes are Carroll’s five-point agenda for creating a Catholicism that would fit his particular vision. He would do so by undermining the Gospels, dismissing 2000 years of Catholic theology and dismantling the papacy and the priesthood. He would, finally, have a Church that would disconnect from Jesus as the source of truth – that truth can be known, and truth can be evangelized.

It was not the belief of the Church, the New Testament, the Church centered in Jesus, the understanding that Christ died for the sins of mankind, or the Church belief in an objective and universal truth that persists in Christ, that created the horror of the Holocaust. It was the rejection of those, and the attempt to substitute for Judeo-Christian civilization a secularist pseudo scientism of race, class and nationalism that generated Nazism and the Holocaust.

 

by Robert P. Lockwood

Pope Pius XII (1939-1958), as Secretary of State to Pius XI and as pope, faced Nazi Germany with a remarkable consistency. The Nazis considered him an implacable foe,(1) and he was hailed both during and after World War II as the strongest voice – often the only voice – speaking out in Europe against the Nazi terror.(2) The Church under his leadership is credited with saving more Jewish lives in the face of the Holocaust than any other agency, government or entity at the time.(3)  Pius’ combination of diplomatic pressure, careful but sustained criticism while maintaining an essential Vatican neutrality in war-torn Europe, as well as direct action through his nuncios and the local Church where possible, saved what some have estimated as 860,000 Jewish lives.(4) If that estimate is accurate by only half, it remains a historic effort for a Church fighting without weapons against the most horrific campaign of genocide the world had yet seen.

Yet, in the face of this clear historical record, Pope Pius XII has come under attack since his death. Beginning with Rolf Hocchuth’s The Deputyin 1963, a revisionism set-in  Pius five years after his death and a new picture of Pius was created.(5) Accused of an alleged “silence” in the fact of the Holocaust, critics have gone further, insinuating that he may have been a crypto-Nazi sympathizer. In John Cornwell’s Hitler’s Pope(6) he is portrayed as an anti-Semitic, silent bystander to the Holocaust.

In an afterword to Ronald J. Rychlak’s masterful defense of Pius XII,Hitler, the War and the Pope (7), Robert P. George examines this defamation of Pius XII. George sees two sources for this new myth: “anti-Catholic bigots and anti-papal Catholics have a large stake in preserving the myth that Eugenio Pacelli was ‘Hitler’s Pope.’ The myth is of enormous utility in their continuing efforts to undermine the credibility of the Catholic Church and the teaching authority (magisterium) exercised by the Pope and the bishops in communion with him…(The myths) originate in, and are to a large extent sustained as part of a larger effort to undermine the credibility and weaken the moral and cultural influence of the Catholic Church. Why? Because the Catholic Church – and, within the Church, the institution of the papacy – is the single most potent force of traditional morality in cultural conflicts with communism, utilitarianism, radical individualism, and other major secular ideologies.”

George hints at an often understated but important aspect to the revisionism concerning Pius XII: his anti-communism and his image as a Cold War pontiff. John Cornwell’s book on Pope Pius XII and the Holocaust, Hitler’s Pope was an amateur’s hatchet job that exploited the Holocaust to attack the papacy of Pope John Paul II. Cornwell is a self-described Catholic who sees a strong papacy as standing in the way of his own vision of proper Church reform. The Holocaust is simply a weapon to be used by Cornwell in this inter-Church debate.(8) Editorials in the New York Times tend toward the more surreal, anti-Catholic position, lumping in the alleged silence of Pope Pius XII with a laundry list of complaints about Catholicism: the Church’s refusal to ordain women, its opposition to abortion, and its teaching on homosexuality.(9)

An additional, critical source of the myth of Pius as Holocaust collaborator comes from certain students of history who loathed Pius for his anti-communism. This was an important aspect that served Hocchuth’s interpretation.  Popular in the late 1950s through the 1970s, this school of revisionist historians saw anti-communism as a dangerous threat, and all tainted by it deserving nothing but approbation. Pius certainly fit such a category.

Michael Phayer, professor of history at Marquette University, has authored a new book on the Catholic response to the Holocaust. Phayer seems particularly affected by that “anti-anti-communism” school of thought on Pope Pius XII. He assumes “papal silence,” and attributes it primarily to a fear of communism. In The Catholic Church and the Holocaust, 1930-1965 (10)  Phayer states that his purpose is to go beyond the issue of the silence of Pope Pius XII to explore how the Church in various countries, and through various individual Catholics, responded to the Holocaust, and how that response eventually led to the Church’s official rejection of anti-Semitism during the Second Vatican Council. Yet throughout the book, he paints Pope Pius XII as a meek pontiff unwilling to engage the Nazis. He states that Pius was motivated by the hope that he could secure a negotiated peace that would leave a powerful Germany as a European defense against an aggressive communist Soviet Union.

Yet, Phayer does not examine the allegation of silence on the part of Pope Pius XII, but merely accepts it as a given, bowing to contemporary conventional wisdom rather than the historical record of what was accomplished for Jews by Pius and the Church during the horror of theShoah. In doing so, Phayer does not present a prosecutor’s case for Pius’ alleged silence, nor for his motives in being silent. Instead, he assumes that silence and postulates motives to fit that alleged reality, without proving that such motives existed.

Though Phayer’s book shows serious professional historical study and background on the events of World War II, it has similarities to Cornwell’s screed. Phayer’s prejudices against Pius determine the scholarship he brings to bear on the issue. Phayer’s book requires a more serious response than one would give to Cornwell’s ravings. Yet, it is a deeply flawed work that will play its own role in the ongoing slander of Pope Pius XII.

Phayer does not portray Pius XII as a Nazi sympathizer, or as a closeted anti-Semite. But for a book that he claims is meant to go beyond the debate over the alleged papal silence, his indictment of Pius is draconian. He claims that Pius “did little for Jews in their hour of greatest need.”(11) While acknowledging that working through his papal nuncios he was able to save Jewish lives, his “greatest failure…lay in his attempt to use a diplomatic remedy for a moral outrage.”(12) At the same time, he charges that the “image that emerges of Pope Pius is that of a pontiff whose deep concern about communism and the intact physical survival of the city of Rome kept him from exploring options on behalf of the Jewish people.”(13) He charges that in the immediate post-war period the Vatican under Pius XII consciously assisted Nazi war criminals to escape and “worked against U.S. policies that sought to make German society responsible for the murder of the Jews.”(14) Why? To maintain a strong Germany in response to the communist threat, and to keep unsullied the enhanced image of the Church in Europe as a result of its actions during the War. While Phayer spends a small portion of his book presenting heroic stories of individual Catholics who engaged in rescue work, he returns consistently to the theme of a silent, almost cowardly Pope Pius XII, whose only desire was to limit communist expansion, even if it meant ignoring the plight of the Jews. Yet while Phayer states this case, he never makes it. He over relies on Nazi interpretation of Vatican action, as well as the editorial opinion of secondary sources rather than documentation.

Phayer argues that if Pius XI had lived five more years, Church reaction would have been different to the Holocaust and to Nazi Germany.(15) While that is unknowable, of course, and Pius XI was certainly a different personality than Pius XII, Phayer ignores or downplays the important role played by Cardinal Pacelli in determining Vatican reaction to the Nazis in the 1930s. Phayer cites a series of events under Pius XI that he interprets as signaling a new direction that would be reversed under Pius XII. He notes, for example, the 1937 encyclical of Pope Pius XI, Mit brenneder sorge, which condemned racism and idolatry of the State. He makes no mention that it was the future Pius XII, Cardinal Eugenio Pacelli, who drafted the encyclical.(16) In 1938, Phayer describes how Cardinal Theodore Innitzer of Vienna was called to Rome for a dressing-down after he publicly welcomed the Nazi Anschluss of Austria, a rebuke distributed throughout Vatican diplomatic channels. He does not mention that it was Cardinal Pacelli who summoned Cardinal Innitzer to Rome and told him he must retract his statement.(17) Finally, he notes that when Hitler visited Rome on an official visit to Benito Mussolini’s Fascist Italy, “the pope snubbed the dictators by leaving the city.”(18) He fails to mention that Cardinal Pacelli departed with the pontiff.

Clearly, the future Pope Pius XII had a strong hand in the development of the Holy See’s attitude toward both the Nazi movement and its anti-Semitic policies during the pontificate of Pius XI. There was no difference in substance between the two pontificates in addressing Nazism and anti-Semitism. The differences in approach between the two pontificates, such as they were, centered on the fact that within six months of the election of Pope Pius XII, Germany invaded Poland and Europe was at war.

Throughout Phayer’s book, he suggests that Cardinal Pacelli’s work on the 1933 Concordat between Hitler and the Holy See “linked the Vatican with the new Nazi regime” and its maintenance became an obsession with Pius XII, thus limiting his ability – or desire – to protest the treatment of the Jews.(19) The concordat was concluded at a time when the Vatican was forced to deal with the reality of Hitler’s rise to power. In June 1933 Hitler had signed a peace agreement with the western powers, including France and Great Britain, called the Four-Power Pact. At the same time Hitler expressed a willingness to negotiate a statewide concordat with Rome. The concordat was concluded a month later, preceded by both the Four-Power Pact and a similar agreement concluded between Hitler and the Protestant churches. The Church had no choice but to conclude such a concordat, or face draconian restrictions on the lives of the faithful in Germany. Pope Pius XI explained that it was concluded only to spare persecution that would take place immediately if there was no such agreement. The concordat would also give the Holy See the opportunity to formally protest Nazi action.  For example, it provided a legal basis for arguing that baptized Jews in Germany were Christian and should be exempt from legal disabilities. Though the Nazis routinely violated the Concordat before the ink was dry, its existence allowed for Vatican protest, and it did save Jewish lives. The first protest filed with the Nazi government under the terms of the concordat concerned the Nazi government-sponsored boycott of Jewish businesses.(20)

Phayer cites as another example of the laxity of Pius XII the case of Bishop Alois Hudal – the “Brown Bishop” – an Austrian Nazi sympathizer. Phayer states that even with his well-known anti-Semitism and pro-Nazi sympathies, Hudal “won an appointment as the rector of the Collegia del Anima in Rome, the school of theology for Austrian seminarians. There he remained throughout the Nazi era acting on occasion as an intermediary between Pius XII and Nazi occupational forces, and, after the war, helping Holocaust perpetrators to escape justice.”(21) Rather than winning his appointment, Hudal was in Rome to be kept on ice. Though he claimed influence in Vatican circles, both the curia and the pope ignored him. Even the Nazis dismissed Hudal as having no influence. (He could not even influence his seminarians that embarrassed Hudal by making themselves absent during Hitler’s state visit to Italy in 1938.) Pius XII did use him once, to serve as an intermediary with the Germans to halt the arrest of Jews during the Nazi occupation of Rome.(22) Though Hudal may have personally assisted Nazis to escape after the war, there is no connection between him and the Holy See, or that Pius XII had any knowledge of such actions. Phayer cites no documentation or source other than anti-papal conjecture.(23)

He charges that Pope Pius XII contributed by his silence in the Nazi slaughter of Catholics in occupied Poland, particularly from 1939 to 1941. Yet, Phayer himself acknowledges that Vatican Radio was the first to inform the world of the depths of the Nazi atrocities in Poland just months after its occupation through broadcasts in January, 1940, broadcasts given at the direction of Pope Pius XII.(24) Phayer alleges that the broadcasts were suspended in the face of German threats on the Vatican. The Nazis did protest and make veiled threats, but they were hinting at retaliation on the helpless Poles, not the Vatican itself. For a short time, Vatican Radio ceased comment on the Polish situation, though this was done over concern with how the British were altering and re-broadcasting Vatican reports as propaganda.(25) By the following January, Vatican Radio was continuing its vociferous critique of German atrocities in Poland.

Pius XII had raised the issue of Poland in Easter and Christmas messages, in articles in the Vatican newspaper, L’Osservatore Romano, as well as in the first encyclical of his pontificate, Summi Pontificatus. The Vatican also refused to cooperate with the German demand to control the appointment of bishops in occupied Poland. In a March 1940 confrontation with Joachim von Ribbontrop, Hitler’s foreign minister, Pius XII read to him in German a detailed report on Nazi atrocities in Poland aimed at both the Church and the Jews. That meeting received in depth coverage in the New York Times. The nuncio to Germany was also instructed by Pius repeatedly, as Phayer himself notes, “to plead for better treatment of Polish priests and lay people.”(26) Yet, Phayer proclaims papal silence and complains that Pius XII chose a diplomatic rather than a moral approach, without citing what that moral approach would have been, or how it could have been feasible or successful in the face of Nazi aggression.

Phayer raises the  complaint that Pius would not join in a public statement from the allies in 1942 condemning Nazi atrocities in Poland. He states that Pius XII would not join in the statement, quoting a British diplomat at the time, because he was determined to act as a mediator between Germany and the Allies to end the war. The real reason was that this would be an official statement of the Allied governments and it was impossible for Pius XII, representing a neutral state, to join the effort. However, in his annual Christmas message of 1942, Pius XII condemned totalitarian regimes and mourned the victims of the war, “the hundreds of thousands who, through no fault of their own, and solely because of their nation or race, have been condemned to death or progressive extinction.” He called on Catholics to shelter any and all refugees. The statement was loudly praised in the Allied world. In Germany, it was seen as the final repudiation by Pius XII of the Nazis: “(H)e is virtually accusing the German people of injustice toward the Jews, and makes himself the mouthpiece of the Jewish war criminal.” Oddly, Phayer claims that this Christmas message was not understood and that “no one, certainly not the Germans, took it as a protest against the slaughter of the Jews.”(27) He states this despite the negative German reaction and Allied praise for the statement. A prominent Christmas Day 1942 editorial in the New York Times stated: “No Christmas sermon reaches a larger audience that the message Pope Pius XII addresses to a war-torn world at this season…When a leader bound impartially to nations on both sides condemns as heresy the new form of national state which subordinates everything to itself…when he assails violent occupation of territory, the exile and persecution of human beings for no other reason than race or political opinion…the ‘impartial judgment’ is like a verdict in a high court of justice.”(28)

Phayer makes a number of broad statements that are at best open to contrary interpretation, and at worst seem to misstate the facts. He claims that a private audience  between Croatian Fascist leader Ante Pavelic and Pius XII, and the appointment of a nuncio, was a victory for Fascist Croatia.(29) However, Pius XII refused to greet Pavelic as a head of state and formal recognition was never extended. Pavelic left Rome in an insulted rage, rather than “satisfied” as Phayer contends.(30) The Vatican refused to recognize an independent state of Croatia and did not receive a Croatian representative. The pope’s representative in Croatia, Archbishop Marcone, would work tirelessly in defense of the Croatian Jews.

Phayer states that the Vatican  “refrained from promoting a separate Italian peace with the Allies because it would necessarily weaken Germany.”(31) Pius had, in fact, pressed Mussolini to negotiate a separate peace and advised the Badoglio regime that succeeded him to do so as well.(32)  Phayer cites an underling’s memo to von Ribbentrop that the only obstacle to a “loyal relationship between the church and National Socialism is the latter’s euthanasia and sterilization policies. The murder of Jews was left out of the equation.”(33) He seems to take at face value Nazi interpretations of the position of the Vatican as, in fact, the Vatican’s position.

He states that while Archbishop Roncalli, the future Pope John XXIII, engaged in the rescue of many Jews, he quotes another historian who states that may have done so without Vatican orders and “possibly even against them.” (34) This would make Archbishop Roncalli a liar as he clearly stated that as nuncio he acted solely at the direction of Pope Pius XII.

Phayer charges that the Vatican had prior knowledge of the German roundup of 1,200 Jews in Rome on October 16, 1943 and did nothing to forewarn them.(35) He relies for this charge on self-serving German diplomatic explanations, and then makes the preposterous case that it was the German diplomatic corps that “saved” Roman Jews. Throughout Italy, Jews were hidden by the Church. When it seemed certain that German troops would soon occupy the city, Pius helped Jews to evacuate and to hide. Many of those not evacuated, about 5,000, were in hiding in Church buildings when 60,000 Nazi troops occupied Rome. On October 16, the Nazis initiated a roundup of the Jews not in hiding. There is no evidence that Pius had specific prior knowledge, or concealed such knowledge. Reason dictated, of course, that such a raid could happen at any moment. There was little ignorance of what the Nazis were capable of doing to the Jewish community. The Germans had invaded the main Roman synagogue a month earlier and secured a list of Jewish families.

Immediately upon being notified of the German seizure, Pius demanded that the arrests be halted. He even used Bishop Hudal as a go-between to bring an end to the arrests.  The Nazis stopped large-scale roundups and the Jews in hiding in Rome were protected.

The central thesis in Phayer’s book is that Pius refused to speak out against the Holocaust and sought a negotiated peace because he wanted a strong Germany to face down the threat of Soviet communism. Yet, nowhere in the book does Phayer cite documented statements of Pope Pius XII to support that assertion. Though he charges (36) that Pius wanted the Soviet Union abandoned by the Allies in order to free up Germany to destroy the Soviet Union, the source for such a conclusion seems to be Nazi wishful-thinking than documented Vatican positions. “Pius XII did not change his position when Germany began its war with Russia, and he never spoke, even by means of allusion, about a ‘crusade’ against Bolshevism or a ‘holy war.’” (37)

Which is not to argue that Pope Pius XII was unrealistic concerning Stalin’s Russia. He was certainly more realistic about Stalin’s intentions that were the U.S. and Great Britain during the war. During Stalin’s rule from 1928 to 1953, historians estimate that he was responsible for at least 20 million deaths. His all-out war against religion, and the Catholic Church in particular, was well know to Pius XII. Yet there is no case for arguing that Pius modified positions against Germany, or refused to speak out on the Holocaust, to somehow prop up Germany and divide the Allies. While anti-papal historians consistently assign that motive to Pius, there is no documented evidence of such a policy. But much is known to the contrary. It is known, for example, that Pius intervened to assure American supplies to the Soviet Union. When some American Catholics raised the issue that giving such supplies was aiding communism, the Holy See assured them that assistance to the Russian people unjustly attacked by Nazi Germany was appropriate. Pius also acceded to an American request not to publicly raise Stalin’s past persecution of the Church after he joined the Allied cause. As cited in Hitler, the War and the Pope (38)  Pius wrote to Myron C. Taylor, Roosevelt’s personal representative to the pope: “(A)t the request of President Roosevelt, the Vatican has ceased all mention of the Communist regime.. But this silence that weighs heavily on our conscience, is misunderstood by the Soviet leaders who continue the persecution against churches and the faithful. God grant that the free world will one day not regret my silence.” As Rychlak noted, ironically, “he would later come to be attacked for a different silence.”

Historians such as Phayer assume this anti-Soviet strategy because of Pius’ concern over the Allied demand for complete and total German surrender. Pius did make clear his belief that failing to attempt to negotiate a peace and demanding complete and total German surrender would only prolong the war and the killing. But that was his reason for the position, a position one would expect from the Vicar of Christ in any war. Certainly, it was not a position without merit. It can be argued – and has been argued – that peace could have been obtained earlier with many lives saved if the Allies had not demanded an unconditional surrender, but rather the removal of Hitler and his Nazi cronies. Many share the view that this did, indeed, both prolong the war and help keep Hitler in power to the very end. Others argue, of course, that the hope for a negotiated peace was simply impossible as Hitler remained in absolute control until his death in a Berlin bunker. In any case, the papal position was viable. And there was nothing in such a papal position that implied anything more than the desire to save lives. To see the papal call for a negotiated peace as either a grandiose ploy on the part of the pontiff to set himself up as the great peacemaker of Europe, as Phayer contends, or to maintain a strong Germany as a bulwark against the Soviet Union, as Phayer also contends, is to invent motives that are historically undocumented.

There are elements in Phayer’s book that are interesting and worthy. He outlines well what the Church – and individual Catholics – were able to accomplish in rescuing Jews. He makes clear that the Church did not sit by idly as the Jews were taken to slaughter. Of particular interest is his overview of what the Church did and did not do within Nazi Germany itself. He points out that there were those within the Church who were able to accomplish more than many assume within Nazi Germany in defense of the Jews, though he cannot help but add that they went “further than Pius XII.”

Rather than “go beyond” the issue of Pius XII as he claims to be the intent of his book, Phayer returns to Pius repeatedly. “To the extent that Pope Pius chose to intervene at all, he did so through intermediaries, the nuncios, rather than by responding to the Holocaust publicly from Rome. In other words, when the pope chose to deal with the murder of Jews, he did so through diplomatic channels rather than through a moral pronouncement such as an encyclical.” (39) But that is precisely the point. First, there was no absolute “papal silence” on the Holocaust. Pius XII spoke carefully, certainly, but the Holy See and its representatives condemned Nazism and its atrocities long before any governments raised the issue. Yet Pius XII was primarily concerned with saving lives rather than high-minded pronouncements that would have accomplished little.

As outlined in the Catholic League’s research paper on Pius XII and as exhaustively detailed in Rychlak’s definitive work, Hitler, the War and the Pope and Pierre Blet’s Pius XII and the Second World War, work behind the scenes and at the scenes through the papal nuncios was more effective than issuing public statements from the safety of the Vatican. As Phayer himself acknowledges, there was little the Holy See could do to force the Nazis to end their campaign for a “Final Solution.” But Pius could save lives. Dramatic anti-Nazi gestures could have severely limited, if not ended altogether, the Church’s capability to save lives, particularly in Germany and the Axis satellite states. The Jewish lives saved by actions of the Church under the direction of Pius XII accomplished what no other agency, government or entity at the time was able to accomplish. Phayer claims that if Pius XII had issued a formal bombshell, more lives would have been saved. He does not, however, explain how that could have been accomplished and it appears to be wishful conjecture.

Phayer concludes that immediately after the war, the Holy See under Pius XII attempted to undercut Allied efforts to prosecute German war criminals and to provide the means for Nazis to escape Europe. As the Soviet threat grew more ominous, Pius was perceived to be “uncannily wise to western statesman. Only he had followed a pro-German course consistently.” (40) Finally, Phayer states that because of Pius, the Church would not address the issue of anti-Semitism for years after the war had ended. It would only be after his death at the Vatican Council that the Church would squarely address the issue.

That Pius followed a consistently pro-German course during the war is simply wrong. From the outset of the War, Pius was on shaky ground maintaining the semblance of Vatican neutrality as he clearly and consistently led the Church in a position that supported the defeat of Hitler. Nazi authorities over and over again described Pope Pius XII as the enemy of the Reich, and Hitler went so far is to plot his kidnapping.(41) There is no evidence, of course, that the Holy See aided in an organized way the escape of Nazis. While individual Catholics supplied help, and certain Nazis hid their identities and used Holy See-sponsored refugee services to escape, charges that there was any kind of general policy of Vatican assistance to German war criminals have been completely debunked. Phayer believes that Pius encouraged consistently encouraged clemency for Nazi war criminals as part of his strategy for maintaining a strong Germany. Some German bishops intervened for specific acts of clemency. German bishops would complain about the defamation of all the German people over the actions of the Nazis, yet the Holy See was relatively mute on the issue, though it did oppose in certain cases direct executions. Pope Pius’ personal representative to postwar Germany and liaison to the Allied military authorities, Bishop Aloysius Muench of the United States, advised the Vatican not to intervene and, for the most part, this was the policy that was followed.

Concerning the issue of anti-Semitism, the Church had never endorsed the racial anti-Semitism of the Nazis. As early as 1928, when the Nazi part was still in its infancy, the Church had condemned anti-Semitism. The Church, certainly spurred by the horror of the Holocaust, moved to eliminate religious anti-Jewish sentiments that existed within Catholic theology and devotional life. When the Second Vatican Council issuedNostra Aetate, its powerful declaration against anti-Semitism, it is impossible to argue that this somehow contradicted the papacy of Pope Pius XII. Theological and Scriptural studies encouraged by Pius, as well as the very atmosphere of his pontificate and that of Pius XI, were the foundations for Nostra Aetate. The bishops who supported the statement, including a young Polish prelate, Karol Wojtyla, were for the most part those raised to the episcopacy during his pontificate.

Pius was praised throughout the war and throughout his pontificate for the actions he took in defense of Jews during the war. The actions of the Church in the face of Nazism greatly enhanced its image in the post-war world. Phayer’s primary contentions in this book – that Pius XII was pro-German, placed an anti-Communist agenda ahead of both concern for the Jews and the defeat of Nazi Germany – are not supported by any documented evidence. Most important, no case is built for an alternative strategy by Pope Pius XII that could have saved more Jewish lives. The Church under Pius saved more Jews from the Holocaust than any other entity in that terrible time. That is the undeniable fact that critics of Pius, whatever their motivation, must answer. Phayer does not.

For a complete understanding of the role of Pope Pius XII in World War II, we strongly recommend Ronald Rychlak’s Hitler, the War and the Pope(Our Sunday Visitor Press, $19.95 plus shipping and handling. Call 1-800-348-2440). While there are a few good sections in Michael Phayer’s book, his overall treatment of Pius XII is prejudiced and unconvincing.

SUMMARY POINTS

· Pius XII’s combination of diplomatic pressure, careful but sustained criticism while maintaining an essential Vatican neutrality in war-torn Europe, as well as direct action through his nuncios and the local Church where possible, saved what some have estimated as 860,000 Jewish lives. If that estimate is accurate by only half, it remains a historic effort for a Church fighting without weapons against the most horrific killing machine the world had yet seen. Yet in the years after his death, a myth of Pius as a “silent collaborator” in the Holocaust has grown.

· A critical source of the myth of Pius XII as Holocaust collaborator comes from certain students of history who loathed Pius for his anti-communism. Popular in the late 1950s through the 1970s, this school of revisionist historians saw anti-communism as a dangerous threat, and all tainted by it deserving nothing but approbation. Pius certainly fit such a category.

· In The Catholic Church and the Holocaust, 1930-1965 (Indiana University Press 2000) Michael Phayer states that his purpose is to go beyond the issue of the silence of Pope Pius XII to explore how the Church in various countries, and through various individual Catholics, responded to the Holocaust, and how that response eventually led to the Church’s official rejection of anti-Semitism during the Second Vatican Council. Yet throughout the book, he paints Pope Pius XII as a meek pontiff unwilling to engage the Nazis. He states that Pius was motivated by the hope that he could secure a negotiated peace that would leave a powerful Germany as a European defense against an aggressive communist Soviet Union.

· Phayer does not present a case for Pius’ alleged silence, nor for his motives in being silent. Instead, he assumes that silence and postulates motives to fit that alleged reality, without proving that such motives existed.

· Phayer claims that Pius “did little for Jews in their hour of greatest need.” While acknowledging that working through his papal nuncios he was able to save Jewish lives, his “greatest failure…lay in his attempt to use a diplomatic remedy for a moral outrage.”

· Phayer argues that if Pius XI had lived five more years, Church reaction would have been different to the Holocaust and to Nazi Germany. While that is unknowable, of course, and Pius XI was certainly a different personality than Pius XII, Phayer ignores or downplays the important role played by Cardinal Pacelli in determining Vatican reaction to the Nazis in the 1930s.

· The future Pope Pius XII had a strong hand in the development of the Holy See’s attitude toward both the Nazi movement and its anti-Semitic policies during the pontificate of Pius XI. There was no difference in substance between the two pontificates in addressing Nazism and anti-Semitism. The differences in approach between the two pontificates, such as they were, centered on the fact that within six months of the election of Pope Pius XII, Germany invaded Poland and Europe was at war.

· Phayer suggests that Cardinal Pacelli’s work on the 1933 Concordat between Hitler and the Holy See “linked the Vatican with the new Nazi regime” and its maintenance became an obsession with Pius XII, thus limiting his ability – or desire – to protest the treatment of the Jews. The concordat was concluded at a time when the Vatican was forced to deal with the reality of Hitler’s rise to power. The Church had no choice but to conclude such a concordat, or face draconian restrictions on the lives of the faithful in Germany. The concordat also gave the Holy See the opportunity to formally protest Nazi action. Its existence allowed for Vatican protest and it did save Jewish lives. The first protest filed with the Nazi government under the terms of the concordat concerned the Nazi government-sponsored boycott of Jewish businesses.

· Phayer states that Bishop Alois Hudal, an Austrian Nazi sympathizer,  “won an appointment” as rector of the Collegia del Anima in Rome, the school of theology for Austrian seminarians. There he remained throughout the Nazi era acting on occasion as an intermediary between Pius XII and Nazi occupational forces, and, after the war, helping Holocaust perpetrators to escape justice.” Rather than winning his appointment, Hudal was in Rome to be kept on ice. Though he claimed influence in Vatican circles, both the curia and the pope ignored him. Even the Nazis dismissed Hudal as having no influence. Though Hudal may have personally assisted Nazis to escape after the war, there is no connection between him and the Holy See, or that Pius XII had any knowledge of such actions. Phayer cites no documentation or source other than anti-papal conjecture.

· He charges that Pope Pius XII contributed by his silence in the Nazi slaughter of Catholics in occupied Poland, particularly from 1939 to 1941. Yet, Phayer himself acknowledges that Vatican Radio was the first to inform the world of the depths of the Nazi atrocities in Poland just months after its occupation through broadcasts in January, 1940, broadcasts given at the direction of Pope Pius XII.

· Phayer raises the complaint that Pius would not join in a public statement from the allies in 1942 condemning Nazi atrocities in Poland. The reason was that this would be an official statement of the Allied governments and it was impossible for Pius XII, representing a neutral state, to join the effort. However, in his annual Christmas message of 1942, Pius XII condemned totalitarian regimes and mourned the victims of the war, “the hundreds of thousands who, through no fault of their own, and solely because of their nation or race, have been condemned to death or progressive extinction.” The statement was loudly praised in the Allied world. In Germany, it was seen as the final repudiation by Pius XII of the Nazis.

· Phayer states that the Vatican  “refrained from promoting a separate Italian peace with the Allies because it would necessarily weaken Germany.” Pius had, in fact, pressed Mussolini to negotiate a separate peace and advised the Badoglio regime that succeeded him to do so as well.

· He states that while Archbishop Roncalli, the future Pope John XXIII, engaged in the rescue of many Jews, he quotes another historian who states that he may have done so without Vatican orders and “possibly even against them.” This would make Archbishop Roncalli a liar as he clearly stated that as nuncio he acted solely at the direction of Pope Pius XII.

· Phayer charges that the Vatican had prior knowledge of the German roundup of 1,200 Jews in Rome on October 16, 1943 and did nothing to forewarn them. He relies for this charge on self-serving German diplomatic explanations, and then makes the preposterous case that it was the German diplomatic corps that “saved” Roman Jews. Immediately up on being notified of the German seizure, Pius demanded that the arrests be halted. He even used Bishop Hudal as a go-between to bring an end to the arrests.  The Nazis stopped large-scale roundups and the Jews in hiding in Rome were protected.

· Though he charges that Pius wanted the Soviet Union abandoned by the Allies in order to free up Germany to destroy the Soviet Union, the source for such a conclusion seems to be Nazi wishful-thinking than documented Vatican positions. Pius XII did not change his position when Germany began its war with Russia, and he never spoke, even by means of allusion, about a “crusade” against Bolshevism or a “holy war.”

· There was nothing in the papal position for a negotiated peace that implied anything more than the desire to save lives. To see the papal call for a negotiated peace as either a grandiose ploy on the part of the pontiff to set himself up as the great peacemaker of Europe, as Phayer contends, or to maintain a strong Germany as a bulwark against the Soviet Union, as Phayer also contends, is to invent motives that are historically undocumented.

· There are elements in Phayer’s book that are interesting and worthy. He outlines well what the Church – and individual Catholics – were able to accomplish in rescuing Jews. He makes clear that the local Church did not sit by idly as the Jews were taken to slaughter. Of particular interest is his overview of what the Church did and did not do within Nazi Germany itself. He points out that the Church was able to accomplish more than many assume within Nazi Germany in defense of the Jews.

· Phayer states: “To the extent that Pope Pius chose to intervene at all, he did so through intermediaries, the nuncios, rather than by responding to the Holocaust publicly from Rome. In other words, when the pope chose to deal with the murder of Jews, he did so through diplomatic channels rather than through a moral pronouncement such as an encyclical.”  But that is precisely the point. First, there was no absolute “papal silence” on the Holocaust. Pius XII spoke carefully, certainly, but the Holy See and its representatives condemned Nazism and its atrocities long before any governments raised the issue.

· Pius XII was primarily concerned with saving lives rather than high-minded pronouncements that would have accomplished little. Working behind the scenes and at the scenes through the papal nuncios was more effective than issuing public statements from the safety of the Vatican. As Phayer himself acknowledges, there was little the Holy See could do to force the Nazis to end their campaign for a “Final Solution.” But Pius could save lives. Dramatic anti-Nazi gestures could have severely limited, if not ended altogether, the Church’s capability to save lives, particularly in Germany and the Axis satellite states.

· The Jewish lives saved by actions of the Church under the direction of Pius XII accomplished what no other agency, government or entity at the time was able to accomplish. Phayer claims that if Pius XII had issued a formal bombshell, more lives would have been saved. He does not, however, explain how that could have been accomplished and it appears to be wishful conjecture.

· That Pius followed a consistently pro-German course during the war is simply wrong. From the outset of the War, Pius was on shaky ground maintaining the semblance of Vatican neutrality as he clearly and consistently led the Church in a position that supported the defeat of Hitler. Nazi authorities over and over again described Pope Pius XII as the enemy of the Reich, and Hitler went so far is to plot his kidnapping.

· There is no evidence that the Holy See aided in an intentional and organized fashion the escape of Nazis. While individual Catholics supplied help, and certain Nazis hid their identities and used Holy See-sponsored refugee services to escape, charges that there was any kind of general policy of Vatican assistance to German war criminals have been completely debunked.

· When the Second Vatican Council issued Nostra Aetate, its powerful declaration against anti-Semitism, it is impossible to argue that this somehow contradicted the papacy of Pope Pius XII. Theological and Scriptural studies encouraged by Pius, as well as the very atmosphere of his pontificate and that of Pius XI, were the foundations for Nostra Aetate. The bishops who supported the statement, including a young Polish prelate, Karol Wojtyla, were for the most part those raised to the episcopacy during his pontificate.

· Pius was praised throughout the war and throughout his pontificate for the actions he took in defense of Jews during the war. Phayer’s basic contentions in this book – that Pius XII was pro-German, placed an anti-Communist agenda ahead of both concern for the Jews and the defeat of Nazi Germany – are not supported by any documented evidence. No case is built for an alternative strategy by Pope Pius XII that could have saved more Jewish lives. The Church under Pius saved more Jews from the Holocaust than any other entity in that terrible time. That is the undeniable fact that critics of Pius, whatever their motivation, must answer. Phayer does not.

· For a complete understanding of the role of Pope Pius XII in World War II, we strongly recommend Ronald Rychlak’s Hitler, the War and the Pope(Our Sunday Visitor Press, $19.95 plus shipping and handling. Call 1-800-348-2440). While there are a few good sections in Michael Phayer’s book, his overall treatment of Pius XII is prejudiced and unconvincing.

FOOTNOTES

1) Hitler, the War and the Pope, by Ronald J. Rychlak (Our Sunday Visitor 2000) p. 95 for Nazi reaction to Cardinal Eugenio Pacelli as Secretary of State. The German ambassador to the Holy See, Diego von Bergen, spoke to the College of Cardinals on February 16, 1939 after the death of Pius XI and issued a “veiled warning against the election of Cardinal Pacelli.” P. 107.
2) New York Times, December 25, 1942
3) Adolf Hitler, John Toland (Ballantine Books, 1984) p. 549
4) Estimating the exact number of Jews assisted by the Church during the Holocaust virtually impossible. By its very nature, this kind of work did not involve the keeping of records. In Three Popes and the Jews (Hawthorn Books 1967), Pinchas E. Lapide estimated 860,000 Jewish lives were saved by Church action.
5) The Deputy, by Rolf Hochhuth  (The John Hopkins University Press, 1997)
6) Hitler’s Pope, by John Cornwell (Viking Press, 1999)
7) Rychlak, p. 310
8) Cornwell, pp. 360-371
9) New York Times, March 14, 2000 editorial
10) The Catholic Church and the Holocaust, 1930-1965, by Michael Phayer (Indiana University Press 2000)
11) Phayer, p. xi
12) Ibid, p. xii
13) Ibid, p. xv
14) Ibid, p. xvi
15) Ibid, p. xv
16) Curiously, Phayer somewhat dismisses Mit brennender sorge as failing directly to condemn Hitler or National Socialism. But considering that the encyclical was written in German, rather than Latin, smuggled into Germany for printing and distribution on Palm Sunday, referred to by the Nazis as “almost a call to do battle against the Reich government,” that printers who had made copies and those caught distributing it were arrested, it would seem that it was rather clear who and what the encyclical targeted.
17) Rychlak, p. 101-102
18) Phayer, p. 2
19) Ibid., p. 4
20) See Rychlak, pp. 57-64
21) Phayer, p. 12
22) Nothing Sacred: Nazi Espionage Against the Vatican, 1939-1945, by David Alvarez and Robert A. Graham, SJ (Frank Cass Publishers 1997) pp. 98-100
23) Phayer, p. 166
24) Ibid., p. 25
25) Rychlak, p. 156
26) Phayer, p. 27
27) Ibid., p. 49
28) New York Times, December 25, 1942
29) Phayer, p. 44
30) Rychlak, p. 304.
31) Phayer, p. 59
32) Rychlak, p. 198-199
33) Phayer, p. 59
34) Ibid., p. 86
35) Ibid., pp. 98-100
36) Ibid., p. 59
37) Pius XII and the Second World War, by Pierre Blet (Paulist Press 1999) p. 63
38) Rychlak, p. 164
39) Phayer, p. 82
40) Ibid., p. 161
41) Rychlak, pp. 265-266

by Ronald Rychlak

(Catalyst 12/2000)

The role of Pope Pius XII during the 1930s and World War II has become a matter of international intrigue. Like most governments, the Vatican, keeps its records closed until after the death of all involved. The files are now open up through 1922. However, due to interest in this era, Pope Paul VI commissioned four Jesuit priests to collect, edit, and publish official documents of the Holy See relating to World War II.

The documents were assembled from 1965 through 1981 and published in 11 volumes (in 12 books) under the title: Actes et Documents du Saint Siege Relatifs a la Seconde Guerre Mondiale. These documents reveal that the Vatican, under Pius XII’s direction, did a great deal to assist Jews attempting to flee Nazi persecution. Unfortunately, these volumes have been all but ignored by most historians.

Last year, Edward Cardinal Cassidy, president of the Pontifical Commission for Religious Relations with the Jews, and Seymour Reich, of the International Jewish Committee for Interreligious Consultation, put together an international six-member (three Catholics and three Jews) study group to study the documents.

Unfortunately, several of the members of this group had already publicly expressed negative opinions about Pope Pius XII. Just after the committee was named, one of the members (Robert Wistrich of Hebrew University) said: “Pius XII did not perform in a way that reflects any credit on the Vatican or on the Catholic church…. He wound up in a position where he was complicit in German policy.”

Perhaps more troubling is that from the very beginning, the study group rejected its charge to read the documents. They demanded access to the entire Vatican archives and made it quite clear that they did not want to be limited to the published volumes. Professor Wistrich, for instance, told the press that to read the volumes without having access to the archives would be “a farce.” Leon Feldman, Emeritus Professor of History at Rutgers University and “Jewish coordinator” for the study group said he thought there was a “smoking gun” in the archives and that was the reason the Vatican kept the archives closed.

This attitude, in addition to being a direct rejection of the committee‘s charge, was a slap at the Holy See and the four Jesuits who compiled the documents over the period of 16 years. It also reveals a total lack of understanding about how the Vatican operated during the war.

During the war, when the Nazis occupied Rome, paperwork was dangerous to create and far too dangerous not to destroy. Thus, records did not survive. Fr. Gerald Fogarty of the University of Virginia and a member of the study group gave an example: “In the spring of 1940 there was an attempt to oust Hitler by a group of generals who later tried to surrender to the English. The negotiations took place with the Vatican‘s mediation and the knowledge of Pius XII. However, there are no documents on this case in the Vatican.” Documents confirming this event appear only in British archives.

By the same token, if there were evidence to be had showing bad faith on the part of Pius XII, it would show up in archives from other nations. Nevertheless, the study group‘s conviction that hidden documents are in the archives has clearly shaped its work.

The group traveled to Rome on October 23-26, to meet with Vatican officials and answer some questions. At least two weeks before the trip they sent 47 questions ahead so that the Congregation for the Causes of Saints and other officials at the Vatican could prepare answers.

Fr. Peter Gumpel, SJ, relator of the cause of Pius XII, worked for two weeks preparing answers to those questions. He declined offers of assistance from myself and others because he thought the questions were to be kept confidential. He prepared 47 separate dossiers, with extensive documentation.

Gumpel expected to have about three days to go over these questions with the group. Instead he met with them for only a few hours. He presented evidence relating to 10 of the questions, but when they left he had 37 unopened files.

While the meetings in Rome were still taking place, the study group‘s “interim report” was published in its entirety on the International B‘nai B‘rith Association‘s website. It was later reported that group member Bernard Suchecky, of the Free University of Brussels, had leaked the report to the French newspaperLe Monde.

The Associated Press called the interim report “explosive.” The New York Times said the 47 questions expressed the dissatisfaction of the six panel members with Vatican records. Le Monde of Paris said they pointed to failures of the Pope and Church.

Fr. Gumpel was justifiably outraged. Not only had the group denied him the opportunity to present all of the evidence that he had worked so hard to prepare, but the report as published was identical to the 47 questions that had been sent to him two weeks earlier. In other words, the study group had not used any of his detailed information to modify the report or their questions.

“I find the conduct of the international, historical Judeo-Catholic commission disloyal to the Holy See, academically unacceptable and incorrect,” Father Gumpel said. “If they wished to have a wide discussion, and give us the possibility to provide exhaustive answers to each question, the time fixed by them was insufficient.” He speculated as to the group‘s purpose: “Did they wish to influence public opinion against Pius XII and the Church? This has happened precisely when we Catholics are making all kinds of efforts to improve relations with the Jewish world… I find this conduct disloyal and dishonest,” he concluded.

Why was Fr. Gumpel so upset? A review of the interim report provides the answer. The primary thrust of the report was a demand for full access to the Vatican archives. However, while they were demanding more documents, members of the study group had not even each read all of the volumes from the Acts and Documents collection. They had assigned themselves only two volumes each to study (although Prof. Wistrich did ask for a third). Moreover, none of the Jewish can members read Italian, which is the most common language in the collection. As such, they had to rely on translators.

One would have assumed that these scholars were selected because they were relatively familiar with these documents. Apparently that was not the case. It seems that no one owned a copy of the volumes. For a while, the group could not locate any copy of volume 6. Moreover, they were surprised by what they found in the documents. Member Eva Fleischner of Montclair University said: “I was staggered when I read the documents. It is obvious that the Holy See was informed of the Holocaust very early.”

Prof. Fleischner should not have been “staggered.” Anyone familiar with the documents knows that the Vatican was well informed. The real question is how the early reports were received. Many Allies discounted these reports. For our purposes, however, the interesting fact is that Prof. Fleischner apparently had never previously read the documents.

Having only two or three volumes each, being unfamiliar with them, and having difficulty reading those that they did have led to serious confusion for the study group. In fact, the questions contained in the interim report suggest that the study group did not do its homework.

A typical example is question number 44, which asks about a report commissioned by the Vatican to explain its policy regarding Poland. In an accusatory tone, the group asked whether such a report was ever prepared and whether the Holy See could produce a copy of it.

I own a copy of this document (as I own a full set of the Acts and Documents collection). Another copy may be found in the New York Public Library. It is entitled “Pope Pius and Poland,” and it was published by The America Press in 1942. Carrying the Imprimatur of Cardinal Francis J. Spellman, it is a documentary outline of papal pronouncements and relief efforts on behalf of Poland since March 1939. It originally sold for a dime. It should not have been hard for the study group to find a copy.

The group also asked about the Vatican‘s reaction to Kristallnacht (“The Night of the Broken Glass”) in November 1938. That night, the Nazis destroyed 1,400 synagogues and stores belonging to Jewish citizens in Germany and Austria. This question (like the one about papal encyclical Mit brenender Sorge) is not really about WWII or Pope Pius XII‘s pontificate. This took place under Pope Pius XI. Nevertheless, the atrocity was duly reported as such in the Vatican‘s newspaper, L‘Osservatore Romano. One would have expected the scholars in this study group to have at least have been aware of this fact.

The real outrage of the interim report is that the questions are worded more like accusations, with charges that are impossible to answer. The Holy See is asked to disprove negative charges. They ask whether the Pope gave thanks for things before they took place, and whether the testimony of numerous witnesses, all of who support one another, can be confirmed in some other manner. They expect to find documents that do not exist. They raise questions about the veracity of four Jesuit priests who compiled 11 volumes of documents, without themselves even having each read the 11 volumes.

The point of this study group was to raise the level of the discussion. By engaging in speculation, they have accomplished the opposite. They have increased the heat, not the light, and they did this precisely because they failed to carry out a simple mandate: read the documents.

 

by Ronald Rychlak

(11/2000)

A Response to:

The Vatican and the Holocaust: A Preliminary Report by the International Catholic-Jewish Historical Commission

By Professor Ronald J. Rychlak, author of Hitler, the War and the Pope(Our Sunday Visitor, 2000)

In October 2000, the International Catholic-Jewish Historical Commission released to great publicity a “preliminary report” of its investigation into the actions of Pope Pius XII and the role of the Vatican in responding to the horror of the Nazi Holocaust during World War II. The committee‘s report was presented to the Holy See’s Commission for Religious Relations with the Jews and the International Jewish Committee for Interreligious Consultations. Below, Professor Ronald J. Rychlak responds to the committee’s questions based on his research for Hitler, the War and the Pope (Our Sunday Visitor 2000).

          For the most part, the Committee asked in their questions for additional documentation, assuming that the documentation on these matters as supplied in the 11-volume set of documents assembled from 1965 through 1981 (Actes et Documents du Saint Siege relatifs a la seconde guerre mondiale — ADSS) are lacking, or that more documentation exists. The Committee also asked in many cases for “confirmation” to questions where numerous witnesses have already supplied testimony. The questions concerning additional documentation when documentation already exists are not dealt with below, as well as questions asking for documents that may not exist within the Vatican archives. Additionally, Professor Rychlak has combined redundant or similar questions to answer together.

       The questions from the committee are repeated in bold face followed by Professor Rychlak’s response. Editing for clarification is included in certain of the questions and is printed in lightface. Professor Rychlak begins with an overall response, then deals with questions singularly or combined:

I have set forth many of the 47 questions drafted by the committee and a number of points in response.  In some cases, my responses are not full answers because there can be no answer to many of these questions.  In too many of the questions, the Holy See is asked to disprove negative charges. They ask, for example, whether Pope Pius XII gave thanks for matters before they took place or whether the testimony of numerous witnesses, all of who support one another, can be confirmed. Under those conditions, what further confirmation would be acceptable? The committee also seems to expect to find documents that do not exist.  Additionally, they raise questions about the veracity of four Jesuit priests who compiled the 11 volumes of documents, without themselves having each read the 11 volumes.

          The point of this committee according to Dr. Eugene Fisher, who was one of the coordinators of the project representing the National Conference of Catholic Bishops of the United States, was to raise the level of the discussion.  I think the committee has accomplished the opposite. The study group has – from the very beginning – rejected its charge.  This interim report is a polemic aimed at the Holy See and Pope Pius XII. It has raised the heat of the debate, not the level of it.

Questions and Responses:

#2.   In 1938, after the Kristallnacht pogrom, only one prominent German prelate, Bernhard Lichtenberg, rector of Saint Hedwig’s cathedral in Berlin, had the courage to condemn the outrages publicly. (Cardinal Eugenio) Pacelli (the future Pope Pius XII) was given a detailed report by the papal nuncio in Berlin but there appears to have been no official reaction by the Vatican. This issue is especially important because Archbishop Amleto Cicognani, Apostolic Delegate to the United States certainly informed the Vatican of the public broadcast of the American bishops= condemnation of Kristallnacht. Do the archives reveal internal discussions among Vatican officials, including Pacelli, about the appropriate reaction to this pogrom?

Point:

Pope Pius XI had issued a strong condemnation of Hitler only a few days before the infamous Kristallnacht of November 1938.  On October 21, in one of his last public appearances, Pius XI personally attacked Hitler, likening him to Julian the Apostate (Roman Emperor Flavius Claudius Julianus), who attempted to “saddle the Christians with responsibility for the persecution he had unleashed against them.”

Following Kristallnacht, for three days the Vatican’s official newspaper, L’Osservatore Romano, ran a series of articles reporting on the anti-Semitic atrocities.  For instance, such an article ran on November 13, under the headline “Dopo le manifestazioni antisemite in Germania” (After the manifestation of anti-Semitism in Germany).

The same month that Kristallnacht took place in Germany, racial laws in Italy were tightened with passage of the “law for the defense of the Italian race.”  That law prohibited interracial marriages involving Italian Aryans, and declared that such marriages would not be recognized.  Civil recognition of Church marriages had been one of the most important aspects of the Lateran Treaty, and this seemed a clear breach, despite Benito Mussolini’s attempts to argue otherwise. Pope Pius XI was the first official to file a protest, but he had no influence with the Fascists or the Nazis. His protests, however, may have been part of the reason why Italians were never very willing to enforce racial laws.   In addition, Vatican leaders set the example of helping Jews.  Pursuant to the orders of Cardinal Pacelli, and with the agreement of Jewish leaders, the Torah and other Jewish ritual objects were removed from synagogues and transported for safe-keeping by Church officials.

# 4.  A substantial part of Volume 6 (of the ADSS) is devoted to the aborted efforts to obtain Brazilian visas for Catholics of Jewish origin. Numerous questions have been raised concerning the failure of this project. In addition, it is known that a part of the money destined for the refugees came from funds raised by the United Jewish Appeal in the United States.  Is there further documentation as to why this money was allocated to the attempted rescue of converted Jews rather than to Jews?

Point:

The Vatican provided papers indicating Latin American citizenship to many Jews in occupied France. When the papers were discovered to be illegal, the Latin American countries withdrew recognition of them.  This made the Jews subject to deportation to the concentration camps.  Pursuant to a request from the Union of Orthodox Rabbis of the United States and Canada, and working in conjunction with the International Red Cross, the Vatican contacted the countries involved and urged them to recognize the documents, “no matter how illegally obtained.”

#5.  From the outbreak of the war, appeals rained down upon the Vatican for help on behalf of the population of Poland, brutally victimized in a cruel and bloodthirsty occupation. And from the earliest days of the fighting, observers, ranging from the exiled Polish government to the British and French ambassadors to the Vatican, recounted the opinion of many Catholic Poles, both inside and outside Poland, that the Church had betrayed them and that Rome was silent in the face of their national ordeal. Is there any further documentation beyond what is already in the volumes concerning deliberations within the Vatican with regard to these insistent appeals on behalf of the Poles?

Point:

On January 19, 1940 Pope Pius told Msgr. Giovanni Battista Montini, the future Pope Paul VI, that Vatican Radio must broadcast a report on the conditions of the Catholic Church in German-occupied Poland.  The first report, broadcast in German, took place on January 21. Two days later, in England, the Manchester Guardian reported: “Tortured Poland has found a powerful advocate in Rome…. [Vatican Radio has warned] all who care for civilization that Europe is in mortal danger.”  On January 26, Vatican Radio broadcast in English that “Jews and Poles are being herded into separate ghettos, hermetically sealed and pitifully inadequate.”  The story was reported in the January 23 edition of the New York Times under the headline: “Vatican Denounces Atrocities in Poland; Germans Called Even Worse than Russians.”  (A separate story in that same edition of theTimes reported that a Soviet newspaper had labeled Pius the “tool of Great Britain and France.”)  The Vatican report confirmed that “the horror and inexcusable excesses committed on a helpless and a homeless people have been established by the unimpeachable testimony of eyewitnesses.”  This same month, Pope Pius XII ordered the publication of a large volume (565 pages) of eyewitness accounts of the German efforts to crush the Church.

These broadcasts created a great deal of controversy.  In the West, newspapers editorialized that Vatican Radio had set forth “a warning to all who value our civilization hat Europe is under a mortal danger.”  The Germans, on the other hand, sent a representative to the Holy See to file a protest and warn that such broadcasts could lead to “disagreeable repercussions.”  According to John Cornwell, Vatican Radio “attracted a flow of protest implying that the Holy See was continuously breaking the terms of the Reich Concordat” by its reporting on events in Poland.  In fact, the Germans ultimately decided that due to the hostile and anti-German attitude of the Vatican’s press and radio, Catholic priests and members of religious orders in occupied Poland would be prohibited from leaving that country.

Pius had condemned German abuses in his first encyclical,Summi Pontificatus, and he was behind the radio broadcasts of Vatican radio. While he wanted to be more outspoken, he decided to personally maintain a lower profile because he thought that was his duty.  On February 20, 1940, Pius wrote: “When the Pope would like to shout out loud and clear, holding back and silence are unhappily what are often imposed on him; where he would like to act and help, it is patience and waiting (that are imposed on him).”  Nevertheless, it was clear by now that the Church was strongly opposed to Hitler’s National Socialism.  On January 26, an American Jewish newspaper reported: “The Vatican radio this week broadcast an outspoken denunciation of German atrocities in Nazi [occupied] Poland, declaring they affronted the moral conscience of mankind.”  This same month, the United Jewish Appeal for Refugees and Overseas Needs donated $125,000 to help with the Vatican’s efforts on behalf of victims of racial persecution.  This was reported in the Jewish Ledger (Hartford, Conn), on Jan. 19, 1940, which called it an “eloquent gesture” which “should prove an important step in the direction of cementing bonds of sympathy and understanding” between Jews and Catholics.

#6.On November 23, 1940, Mario Besson, Bishop of Lausanne, Fribourg, and Geneva, sent a letter to Pope Pius XII expressing deep concern at the grave conditions of thousands of prisoners, including Jews, in concentration camps in southwest France.  In his report he pressed for a public appeal by the Pope against the persecutions and a more active Catholic defense of the rights of all the victims. We know that it must have been taken seriously by the Vatican, especially since its observations were confirmed by the papal nuncio to Switzerland, Archbishop Filippo Bernardini, who forwarded Besson’s message to the Pope. The subsequent responses by Luigi Maglione, Secretary of State, also indicate that he considered it worthy of attention, and he certainly would have discussed it with the Holy Father. Is there any evidence that Pius XII, Maglione or any other high Vatican official considered, then or subsequently, responding in the manner requested by Besson?

# 20 In August and September 1942, there were vigorous protests against the deportations of Jews from France by Archbishop Saliège of Toulouse, Bishop Théas of Montaubon, and Cardinal Gerlier of Lyons.  According to The New York Times, in an article published 10 September 1942, the Pope “sent to Marshal Pétain(Henri Philippi Petain of the Nazi puppet Vichy government in “unoccupied” France) a personal message in which he intimated his approval of the initiative of the French Cardinals and Bishops on behalf of the Jews and foreigners being handed over to the Germans. It is understood the Pope asked the French Chief of State to intervene.” Is there confirmation in the Vatican archives of this news account?

Point:

From the very first day the opposition between the orientation of the Vichy government and the thought of Pius XII was evident.  Shortly after the Germans took over, Pius XII sent a secret letter to Catholic bishops of Europe entitled Opere et Caritate (“By Work and By Love”).  In it, he instructed the bishops to help all who were suffering racial discrimination at the hands of the Nazis.  They were instructed to read the letter in their Churches in order to remind the faithful that racism is “incompatible with the teachings of the Catholic Church.”

From the summer of 1941 on, foreign Jews were rounded up and deported from Vichy with the full cooperation of Vichy officials.  Eventually, some 40,000 citizens were murdered and 60,000 more deported to concentration camps for “Gaullism, Marxism or hostility to the regime.”  One hundred thousand others were deported on racial grounds.

The highest dignitaries of the Church immediately denounced the deportations and the treatment of Jews.  As reported by The Tablet (London), on July 10 Pope Pius XII “spoke with exceptional decisiveness against the over-valuation of blood and race.”  Nuncio Valeri contacted Pétain, demanding that the deportations end.  Pétain reportedly said: “I hope that the Pope understands my attitude in these difficult circumstances.”  The nuncio replied: “It is precisely that which the Pope cannot understand.”  Vatican Radio condemned “this scandal… the treatment of the Jews.”

The Papal Secretary of State, Cardinal Maglione, told the French Ambassador to the Vatican “that the conduct of the Vichy Government toward Jews and foreign refugees was a gross infraction” of the Vichy Government’s own principles, and was “irreconcilable with the religious feelings which Marshal Pétain had so often invoked in his speeches.”  A French Jesuit priest, Fr. Michel Riquet, who was imprisoned for his work in support of Jews later said: “Throughout those years of horror when we listened to Vatican Radio and the Pope’s messages, we felt in communion with the Pope, in helping persecuted Jews and in fighting Nazi violence.”

On July 16, 1942, at 3:00 in the morning, French police officers spread out through Paris, rounded up 13,000 Jews, and locked them in a sports facility known as the Vélodrome d=Hiver.  The French bishops issued a joint protest that stated:

“The mass arrest of the Jews last week and the ill-treatment to which they were subjected, particularly in the Paris Vélodrome d’Hiver, has deeply shocked us.  There were scenes of unspeakable horror when the deported parents were separated from their children.  Our Christian conscience cries out in horror.  In the name of humanity and Christian principles we demand the inalienable rights of all individuals.  From the depths of our hearts we pray Catholics to express their sympathy for the immense injury to so many Jewish mothers.”

At the direction of Pope Pius XII, the protests from French bishops were broadcast and discussed for several days on Vatican Radio.  Never, however, did mere words deter the Nazis from their goals.  In fact, the statements of protest from Catholic leaders in France angered Pierre Laval of the Vichy leadership, and he reaffirmed his decision to cooperate in the deportation of all non-French Jews to Germany.

On August 6, 1942, a New York Times  headline proclaimed: “Pope is Said to Plead for Jews Listed for Removal from France.”  Some writers have questioned this protest, but it is confirmed in a telegram sent from the German ambassador to France. Ambassador Abetz in Paris to the Office of Foreign Affairs, dated August 28, 1942, Akten Zur Deutschen Auswärtigen Politik, 1918-1945, Series E, Band III, Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht in Göttingen (1974) no. 242 (discussing a protest from the Nuncio regarding the treatment of the Jews, instructions from the Archbishop of Toulouse telling priests “to protest most vehemently from the pulpit against the deportation of the Jews,” and Laval’s protest to the Vatican).  Three weeks later, a headline in the New York Times told the story: “Vichy Seizes Jews; Pope Pius Ignored.”

The Pope issued a formal protest to Pétain, instructed the nuncio to issue another protest, and recommended that religious communities provide refuge to Jewish people.  In fact, the American press reported that the Pope protested to the Vichy government three times during August 1942, but Vichy officials tried to keep this from the public.  This same month, Archbishop Jules Gérard Saliège, from Toulouse, sent a pastoral letter to be read in all churches in his diocese.  It said: “There is a Christian morality that confers rights and imposes duties…. The Jews are our brothers.  They belong to mankind.  No Christian can dare forget that!”  L’Osservatore Romano praised Saliège as a hero of Christian courage, and as soon as the war was over, Pope Pius XII named him a cardinal.

According to the Geneva Tribune of September 8, 1942, Vichy ordered the French press to ignore the Pope’s protest concerning the deportation of Jews.  Despite this order, word spread rapidly due to the courageous attitude of members of the French resistance, who knew that they had the blessing of Rome.

The Canadian Jewish Chronicle, referring to Vichy leader Pierre Laval, ran the following headline on September 4, 1942: “Laval Spurns Pope: 25,000 Jews in France Arrested for Deportation.”  In an editorial dated August 28, 1942, The California Jewish Voicecalled Pius “a spiritual ally” because he “linked his name with the multitude that are horrified by the Axis inhumanity.”  In a lead editorial, The Jewish Chronicle (London) said that the Vatican was due a “word of sincere and earnest appreciation” from Jews for its intervention in Berlin and Vichy. The editorial went on to say that the rebuke that Pius received from “Laval and his Nazi master” was “an implied tribute to the moral steadfastness of a great spiritual power, bravely doing its manifest spiritual duty.”  The Tablet (London), quoting an article from The Jewish Chronicle, reported that “Catholic priests have taken a leading part in hiding hunted Jews, and sheltering the children of those who are under arrest or have been deported to Germany.”

Late in June, 1943, the Vatican Radio warned the French people that “he who makes a distinction between Jews and other men is unfaithful to God and is in conflict with God’s commands.”  The impact of any statement, however, was limited.  A censorship order to the press said, “No mention is to be made of the Vatican protest to Marshal Pétain in favor of the Jews.”

As it did in other nations, the Church in France helped produce thousands of false documents that were used to deceive the Germans, and special efforts were made to protect Jewish children.  Working with Jewish groups, French Christian organizations saved an estimated 7,000 Jewish children in France.  At one point, a force of Protestant and Catholic social workers broke into a prison in Lyon and “kidnapped” ninety children who were being held with their parents for deportation.  The parents were deported the next day.  The children were sheltered in religious institutions under the protection of Cardinal Pierre Gerlier with the assistance of Father Pierre Chaillet, a member of the cardinal’s staff.  When Cardinal Gerlier refused an order to surrender the children, Vichy leaders had Father Chaillet arrested.  He served three months in a “mental hospital” before being released.   On April 16, 1943, the Australian Jewish Newsran an article quoting Cardinal Gerlier to the effect that he was simply obeying Pius XII’s instruction to oppose anti-Semitism.

#7.  In August 1941 the French head of state, Marshal Philippe Pétain, asked the French ambassador to the Holy See, Léon Bérard, to ascertain the views of the Vatican on the collaborationist Vichy government’s efforts to restrict the Jews through anti‑Jewish legislation. The response came, reportedly from Giovanni Montini, substitute Secretary of State, and Domenico Tardini, Secretary of the Congregation of Extraordinary Ecclesiastical Affairs, who stated that there was no objection to these restrictions so long as they were administered with justice and charity and did not restrict the prerogatives of the Church. Was the Pope consulted on this matter? Are there any additional materials in the archives regarding this issue that are not contained in the ADSS?

Point:

In the July-August 1999 issue of Commentary, Robert S. Wistrich (a member of the committee) made reference to a memorandum sent from the French ambassador to the Vatican back to the Vichy leaders, the so-called “Bérard Report.”  Wistrich used that memorandum to argue that the Vatican originally supported Vichy’s anti-Semitic legislation, and when the “Vatican’s posture shifted” and it started opposing anti-Semitic legislation, it was disregarded by Vichy leaders because of this earlier report.  I later wrote him with the details set forth below.

De Lubac has two chapters about the Bérard Report in his book,Christian Resistance to Anti-Semitism:  Memories from 1940-1944.  De Lubac explains that Pétain was being pressured by the Catholic hierarchy in France to abandon the anti-Semitic laws, and Bérard wanted a statement from the Vatican that he could use to silence French Catholics.  Thus, in a letter dated August 7, 1941, he asked for a report on the Holy See’s attitude towards the new legislation.

The response came in a long memorandum, dated on September 2, from Léon Bérard, French ambassador to the Holy See.  The key phrase is as follows: “As someone in authority said to me at the Vatican, he will start no quarrel with us over the statute for the Jews.” The ambassador was assured that “the Holy See had no hostile intention.” He was persuaded that it did not wish to “seek a quarrel.”

Rather than providing the official position of the Holy See, Bérard cited the above-mentioned “someone in authority,” and also gave a long justification for that position, based on Church history, including the writings of St. Thomas Aquinas.  It seems highly suspect for a diplomatic report to go into historic Church teaching rather than relying on diplomatic sources.  Moreover, the historic discussion omitted many more recent authoritative statements on anti-Semitism.  Authoritative statements, however, would not have served Pétain’s purposes.

It is certainly reasonable to conclude that Bérard drafted this memorandum to meet Pétain’s needs, not to reflect the Church’s actual position.  As De Lubac says, “[i]f the ambassador had been able to obtain from any personage at all in Rome a reply that was even slightly clear and favorable, he would not have taken so much trouble to ‘bring together the elements of a well-founded and complete report’ obviously fabricated by himself or by one of his friends.”

Bérard’s report was dated Sept. 2, 1941.  On September 13, at a reception at the Parc Hotel in Vichy, the apostolic nuncio, Bishop Valerio Valeri, criticized the anti-Semitic legislation. Pétain, citing the Bérard Report, replied that the Holy See found certain aspects of the laws­ a bit harsh, but it had not on the whole found fault with the laws.  Valeri replied that the Holy See had made clear its opposition to racism, which was at the basis of this legislation.  Pétain then suggested that the nuncio might not be in agreement with his superiors.

Bishop Valeri immediately wrote the Vatican’s Secretary of State, Cardinal Maglione, and asked for more information.  Then, around September 26, Valeri called upon Pétain and was shown Bérard’s report­.  The nuncio judged it to be “more nuanced” than Pétain had led him to believe, and he gave Pétain a note concerning the “grave harms that, from a religious perspective, can result from the legislation now in force.”  Pétain replied that he too disagreed with some of the anti-Jewish laws, but that they had been imposed under pressure from the Germans.

On September 30, Valeri wrote to Maglione, enclosing a copy of the Bérard Report.  He explained the conversation at the Parc Hotel as follows: “I reacted quite vigorously, especially because of those who were present [ambassadors from Spain and Brazil].  I stated that the Holy See had already expressed itself regarding racism, which is at the bottom of every measure taken against the Jews….”

The Secretary of State wrote back on ­October 31 explaining that Bérand had made exaggerations and deductions about Vatican policy that were not correct.  He fully approved of the note that Valeri had given to Pétain and encouraged him to continue efforts designed to at least tone down the rigid application of the anti-Semitic laws.  Actes et Documents, vol. 8, no. 189.  Valeri then drafted a note of protest that he sent to Pétain.

As such, it is clear that if Pétain ever thought that Bérard’s accounting of the situation was legitimate, the “shift” in the Vatican’s position was immediately brought to his attention.  As De Lubac concludes, “from the very first day… the opposition between the orientation of the Vichy government and the thought of Pius XII was patent.”

#8.  In Romania, where Catholics were a small but significant minority, both the local Catholic authorities and the Vatican clung to the concordat of 1929 as defining the relationship between the Church and the dictatorial regime of Marshal Ion Antonescu. During 1940 and 1941, as persecution of the Jews intensified, the Vatican received a stream of communications from the nuncio, Archbishop Andrea Cassulo, relaying the strain that the anti‑Jewish laws put upon what the Church saw as its prerogatives among others, the protection of the civil and religious rights of Catholics who had converted from Judaism. Cassulo repeatedly reported on his efforts to secure the “freedom of the Church” by insisting upon the need to exempt converts from anti‑Jewish laws, their rights to attend schools and vocational institutions. Did Cassulo or his interlocutors in the Vatican view these interventions as the only practical means by which a blanket of protection, or at least some protection, might be extended to Jews who were not converts? Are there any further documents to elucidate this issue?

#31.  During the war the Vatican followed its traditional policy that Jews who had converted to Catholicism were full members of the Church, and therefore entitled to its protection. This protection was sometimes guaranteed by concordats, thereby according to the Church the means by which to intervene in specific and general cases. Was the recourse to such interventions derived purely from considerations of efficacy or were there moral or other considerations that were discussed among Vatican officials? Was there a broad strategy, policy guidelines, or theological discussions among Vatican officials to determine what principles should be applied to such interventions on behalf of converted Jews?

#32.  In the repeated interventions against the application of racial laws and appeals on behalf of some of the deportees that appear in these volumes, the emphasis upon “non‑Aryan Catholics” or converted Jews is striking to the contemporary reader. This is all the more so because of the lasting resentment, among Jews, of the Church’s promotion and encouragement of such conversions. From the standpoint of the Vatican, of course, the purported reasons for this emphasis are threefold: first, what the Church understood as its responsibility to look after its own; second, that the Vatican did not believe that Jewish organizations took care of Jewish converts to Catholicism; and third, the claim that it was only in the cases of this particular class of “Jews” that the Vatican had locus standi with aggressive and dictatorial regimes and hence some prospect of success. To what degree was the latter a rationale for inattention to Jews qua Jews? And how accurate was it to refer, as many regularly do, to interventions on behalf of “Jews” when that term frequently connoted baptized Jews? Are there any documents that would clarify this ambiguous use of terminology?

#46.  In countries in which Vatican representatives clashed with the local authorities over the application of racial laws, there are repeated references to conversions. Governments, occupation authorities, nuncios, the Secretariat, and local Churches all raised questions about the sincerity of these conversions. Were such conversions a means to avoid the disabilities of discriminatory laws, regulations, and even worse, deportation and murder? To anyone familiar with the wartime persecution of the Jews, and this must include Vatican officials whose voices are represented here, such questions may appear cruel, or at best naïve. In light of certain Church officials issuing false identity papers to unconverted Jews, were such Vatican expressions of concern that conversions be “sincere” intended to hold persecuting and even murderous officials at bay? Or were these rather a genuine reflection of the priorities of the Church jealously guarding the integrity of its sacramental life, especially baptism, and unhesitatingly promoting, even in the midst of the Holocaust, what it felt to be its apostolic mission for the souls put in its care? Are there any documents that could shed light on this issue?

Point:

Many Jews were quickly converted for the purpose of avoiding Nazi persecution.  Undoubtedly Church leaders would have been glad to welcome converts to Christianity.  However, in a great many more cases, false baptismal documents were provided so that Jewish people could avoid persecution, even though they had not actually converted. This indicates compassion for the human suffering, regardless of religion.

Sometimes Church officials were embarrassed about how quickly they would convert Jews to Catholicism for the purpose of avoiding persecution.  One small church in Budapest averaged about four or five conversions a year before the occupation.  In 1944, those numbers shot up dramatically.  Six were converted in January, 23 in May, 101 in June, over 700 in September, and over 1,000 in October.  Three thousand Jews became Catholics at this one small church in 1944.  The Nazi occupying forces soon recognized that these conversions were being done only to avoid deportation, so they started persecuting the “converts.”  Since it no longer assured protection, the flood of conversions dried up.

The Catholic Church was so open to Jewish converts that some have argued that during the war this was the Church’s primary interest.  In a Papal Allocution of October 6, 1946, Pope Pius addressed the charge that the Church had engaged in “forced conversions.”  He found the best evidence to be a memorandum, dated January 25, 1942, from the Vatican Secretariat of State to the Legation of Yugoslavia to the Holy See.  The Pope read from that document:

“According to the principles of Catholic doctrine, conversion must be the result, not of external constraint, but of an interior adherence of the soul to the truths taught by the Catholic Church.

“It is for this reason that the Catholic Church does not admit to her communion adults who request either to be received or to be readmitted, except on condition that they be fully aware of the meaning and consequences of the step that they wish to take.”

A slant on this claim relates to children, particularly those under the age of six.  The surest way to protect such young children from the Nazis was by actually baptizing and indoctrinating them, in case they were ever challenged.  This practice could create resentment among some surviving Jews, especially when Christian clergy encouraged the children to adopt this outward behavior.  This probably varied from location to location, but the evidence suggests that most clergy did not undertake these conversions lightly.

In fact, classes were established to let the children study their own religion.  (In parts of France and Belgium, Church officials forbade the actual baptism of Jewish children. Outward appearances were thought sufficient to deceive the Nazis.  Even when parents requested the baptism, it was recognized that this was simply a matter of duress.)

During the winter of 1943-44, the Jewish Agency in Jerusalem, under the patronage of the High Commander for Palestine, sponsored a memorial evening to recognize and honor the Pontiff’s efforts on behalf of Jewish children.  Dignitaries from throughout the city, including the apostolic delegation, were in attendance.

The Secretary General of the World Jewish Congress reported on a meeting with Pius XII after the war to thank him for helping hide Jewish children.  Pius promised to cooperate with returning the children to their communities.  Chief Rabbi Herzog of Palestine also announced that he had the Vatican’s promise of help in bringing “converted” Jewish children back into the Jewish fold.  In 1964, Dr. Leon Kubovitzky, who directed this project, reported that there were almost no cases of Catholic institutions resisting the return of Jewish children.

#11.The Cardinal Archbishop of Krakow, Adam Sapieha, in a letter of February 1942 to the Pope, vividly described the horrors of the Nazi occupation, including the concentration camps that destroyed thousands of Poles. However, neither in this nor in any other communication to Rome, of which we are aware, did Sapieha make any specific reference to the Jews. Nor, to the best of our knowledge, did the Vatican ever request any information on the subject from him. Yet Sapieha undoubtedly knew what was happening in Auschwitz, which was within his archdiocese. Was there any unpublished communication of Sapieha to Rome in which he alluded to the fate of the Jews? Can the archives tell us more regarding the interaction on this and related matters between the Vatican and Polish church leaders?

Point:

Early in the war, Sapieha had asked the Pope for a forceful statement, but he later changed his mind and recalled his letter.  Sapieha worked to help Jews escape Nazi persecution.  After the war, Pius made Sapieha a cardinal.

In 1943, a bishop wrote a memo from London urging the Pope to intervene in the matter, but it was then retracted by Adam Sapieha, the Archbishop of Krakow, who was still in Poland.

Certain Polish bishops, exiled in London, called for stronger statements by the Pontiff.  Those who remained in Poland like Archbishop Sapieha, however, urged him not to speak.

On June 2, 1943 (the feast day of St. Eugenio),  in an address to the cardinals which was broadcast on Vatican Radio and clandestinely distributed in printed form within Poland, the Pope, at the request of Polish Archbishop Sapieha, expressed in new and clear terms his compassion and affection for the Polish people and predicted the rebirth of Poland.

“No one familiar with the history of Christian Europe can ignore or forget the saints and heroes of Poland… nor how the faithful people of that land have contributed throughout history to the development and conservation of Christian Europe.  For this people so harshly tried, and others, who together have been forced to drink the bitter chalice of war today, may a new future dawn worthy of their legitimate aspirations in the depths of their sufferings, in a Europe based anew on Christian foundations.”

Archbishop Sapieha wrote from Kracow that: “the Polish people will never forget these noble and holy words, which will call forth a new and ever more loyal love for the Holy Father… and at the same time provide a most potent antidote to the poisonous influences of enemy propaganda.”  He also said that he would try to publicize the speech as much as possible by having copies printed, if the authorities would permit it.

Bishop Stefan Sapieha of Kracow wrote a letter to Pius, dated October 28, 1942, in which he said: “It displeases us greatly that we cannot communicate Your Holiness’ letters to our faithful, but it would furnish a pretext for further persecution and we have already had victims suspected of communicating with the Holy See.”  Pius would later cite this experience in a letter to Bishop Preysing of Berlin:

“We leave it to the [local] bishops to weigh the circumstances in deciding whether or not to exercise restraint, ad maiora mala vitanda [to avoid greater evil].  This would be advisable if the danger of retaliatory and coercive measures would be imminent in cases of public statements by the bishop.  Here lies one of the reasons We Ourselves restrict Our public statements.  The experience We had in 1942 with documents which We released for distribution to the faithful gives justification, as far as We can see, for Our attitude.”

#12.On 18 May 1941, Pope Pius XII received the head of the Croation fascist state, Ante Pavelic. While the Vatican had received Pavelic as an individual Catholic, not as head of state, there were political implications as a result of this reception. Before his reception, the Yugoslav minister to the Holy See brought to the Vatican’s attention Pavelic’s involvement in committing atrocities against the Serbs and protested the reception of Pavelic in any capacity because he was the head of an “illegitimate” puppet state.  Subsequently, Pavelic’s regime was responsible for the massacre of hundreds of thousands of Serbs, Jews, gypsies, and partisans. It is not known how the Pope reacted to these atrocities. Are there any archival materials that can illuminate this issue?

#13.Many unanswered questions also surround the Archbishop of Zagreb, Aloysius Stepinac, beatified in 1999. While in 1941 he initially welcomed the creation of a Croatian state, he subsequently condemned atrocities against Serbs and Jews and established an organization to rescue Jews. Are there any archival documents or materials from the beatification process that can illuminate this matter?

Point:

Croatia came into being during the war.  On March 25, 1941, Italy, Germany, and Yugoslavia signed an agreement bringing Yugoslavia into the Axis.  Two days later, a group of Serbian nationalists seized control of Belgrade and announced that they were siding with the Allies.  As a result, Hitler invaded Yugoslavia.  Croat Fascists then declared an independent Croatia. The new Croat government was led by Ante Pavelic and his supporters, the Ustashe.

There had been a long history of hatred in this part of the world between Croats (predominantly Catholic) and Serbs (mainly Orthodox). The Ustashi government exacted revenge against the Serbs for years of perceived discrimination. According to some accounts, as many as 700,000 Serbs were slaughtered.  Among the charges against the Catholic Church in Croatia are that it engaged in forcible conversions, that Church officials hid Croat Nazis after the war, that Nazi gold made its way from Croatia to the Vatican, and that Catholic leaders in Croatia supported the governments brutality toward the Serbs.

While some of these charges are recent in origin (and from suspect sources), there is no credible evidence that the Pope or the Vatican behaved inappropriately.  For instance, the Vatican expressly repudiated forcible conversions in a memorandum, dated January 25, 1942, from the Vatican Secretariat of State to the Legation of Yugoslavia to the Holy See (addressing conversions in Croatia).  In August of that year, the Grand Rabbi of Zagreb, Dr. Miroslav Freiberger, wrote to Pius XII expressing his “most profound gratitude” for the “limitless goodness that the representatives of the Holy See and the leaders of the Church showed to our poor brothers.” [Actes et Documents, vol. VIII, no. 441.  See also id. vol. VIII, no. 537 (report on Vatican efforts to alleviate the sad conditions of the Croatian Jews); id. vol. VIII, no. 473 (efforts to find sanctuary for Croatian Jews in Italy); id. vol. VIII, no. 557 (insistence on “a benevolent treatment toward the Jews”).]  In October, a message went out from the Vatican to its representatives in Zagreb regarding the “painful situation that spills out against the Jews in Croatia” and instructing them to petition the government for “a more benevolent treatment of those unfortunates.”  In December 1942, Dr. Freiberger wrote again, expressing his confidence “in the support of the Holy See.”

The Cardinal Secretary of State=s notes reflect that Vatican petitions were successful in getting a suspension of  “dispatches of Jews from Croatia” by January 1943, but Germany was applying pressure for “an attitude more firm against the Jews.”  Maglione went on to outline various steps that could be taken by the Holy See to help the Jews.  Another instruction from the Holy See to its unofficial representatives (since there were no diplomatic relations) in Zagreb directing them to work on behalf of the Jews went out on March 6, 1943.  On September 24, 1943, Alex Easterman, the British representative of the World Jewish Congress, contacted Msgr. William Godfrey, the apostolic delegate in London and informed him that about 4,000 Jewish refugees from Croatia were safely evacuated to an island in the Adriatic Sea.  “I feel sure that efforts of your Grace and of the Holy See have brought about this fortunate result,” wrote Easterman.

Croatian Archbishop Alojzij Stepinac originally welcomed the Ustashi government, but after he learned of the extent of the brutality, and after having received direction from Rome, he condemned its actions. [The British Minister to the Holy See during the war years, Sir Francis D’Arcy Osborne, wrote that Stepinac always acted according to the “well-intended dictates of his conscience.”]  A speech he gave on October 24, 1942, is typical of many that he made refuting Nazi theory:

“All men and all races are children of God; all without distinction.  Those who are Gypsies, Black, European, or Aryan all have the same rights…. for this reason, the Catholic Church had always condemned, and continues to condemn, all injustice and all violence committed in the name of theories of class, race, or nationality.  It is not permissible to persecute Gypsies or Jews because they are thought to be an inferior race.”

The Associated Press reported that “by 1942 Stepinac had become a harsh critic” of that Nazi puppet regime, condemning its “genocidal policies, which killed tens of thousands of Serbs, Jews, Gypsies and Croats.”  He thereby earned the enmity of the Croatian dictator, Ante Pavelic.

Although Cornwell argues that the Holy See granted de factorecognition to the Ustashi government, in actuality the Vatican rebuked Pavelic and refused to recognize the Independent State of Croatia or receive a Croatian representative. [Actes et Documents, vol. IV, no. 400 (“Pavelic is furious… because… he is treated worse by the Holy See than the Slovaks”).]  When Pavelic traveled to the Vatican, he was greatly angered because he was permitted only a private audience rather than the diplomatic audience he had wanted.  He might not even have been granted that privilege, but for the fact that the extent of the atrocities that had already begun were not yet known.

#14.On several occasions Konrad von Preysing, Bishop of Berlin, had vainly appealed to the Pope to protest specific Nazi actions, including those directed at the Jews. On 17 January 1941 he wrote to Pius XII, noting that “Your Holiness is certainly informed about the situation of the Jews in Germany and the neighboring countries. I wish to mention that I have been asked both from the Catholic and Protestant side if the Holy See could not do something on this subject, issue an appeal in favor of these unfortunates.” This was a direct appeal to the Pope, which bypassed the nuncio. What impression did von Preysing’s words make on Pius XII; what discussions if any, took place about making such a public appeal as the German bishop requested, and was any further information about Nazi anti‑Jewish policy sought?

Point:

Pius always was close to Preysing, but beginning in 1942, he really began to follow Preysing=s lead.  Preysing, of course, was a recognized opponent of Nazism.  Not only did the Pope send a message congratulating Preysing for his defense of the rights of all people, he also took Preysing’s advice when selecting episcopal candidates, avoiding those whom Preysing felt were sympathetic toward the Nazis.

In April 1943, Pius wrote encouraging Preysing to continue his work on behalf of the Jews:  “For the non-Aryan Catholics as well as for Jews, the Holy See has done whatever was in its power, with charitable, financial and moral assistance….  Let us not speak of the substantial sums which we spent in American money for the fares of emigrants…. We have gladly given these sums, for these people were in distress…. Jewish organizations have warmly thanked the Holy See for these rescue operations…. As for what is being done against non-Aryans in the German territories, we have said a word in our Christmas radio message.  The mention was short, but it was understood.”

#15.On 6 March 1943, von Preysing asked Pius XII to try and save the Jews still in the Reich capital, who were facing imminent deportation which, as he indicated, would lead to certain death: “The new wave of deportations of the Jews, which began just before 1 March, affects us particularly here in Berlin even more bitterly. Several thousands are involved: Your Holiness has alluded to their probable fate in your Christmas Radio Broadcast. Among the deportees are also many Catholics. Is it not possible for Your Holiness again to intervene for the many unfortunate innocents? It is the last hope for many and the profound wish of all right‑thinking people.” On 30 April 1943, the Pope indicated to von Preysing that local bishops had the discretion to determine when to be silent and when to speak out in the face of the danger of reprisals and pressures. Although he felt that he had to exercise great prudence in his actions as Pope, he made it clear that he felt comforted that Catholics, particularly in Berlin, had helped the “so‑called non‑Aryans” (sogenannten Nichtarier). He particularly singled out for “fatherly recognition” Father Lichtenberg, who had been imprisoned by the Nazis and who would die shortly afterwards. Are there earlier examples in the archives of the Pope’s solicitude for Father Lichtenberg or any reference to the bishops’stand against the persecution of the Jews going back to 1938? Is there any evidence of discussion in the Vatican regarding the deportations from Berlin?

Point:

Shortly after Austria was annexed, the Archbishop of Vienna, Cardinal Theodor Innitzer, met with Hitler and, based on outward appearances and a German radio broadcast, he welcomed theAnschluss. [The report, translated into English, was sent to Ambassador Joseph P. Kennedy by Cardinal Pacelli, who strongly disassociated it from the Vatican’s position.]  Austrian bishops also issued a public statement praising the achievements of Nazism.  This was in accord with much of the feeling throughout Austria, where the German troops had been greeted as heroes rather than conquerors.  Vatican Radio, however, immediately broadcast a vehement denunciation of these actions, and Pacelli ordered the Archbishop to report to Rome. [Internal German records reflect that Nazi leadership wanted to “encourage Cardinal Innitzer and the Austrian bishops in their patriotic attitude.”]

Before meeting with the Pope, Innitzer met with Pacelli, who had been outraged by the German cardinal.  This has been called one of the “most tempestuous” meetings of the whole pontificate.  Pacelli made it clear that Innitzer had to retract his statements.  He was made to sign a new statement, issued on behalf of all of the Austrian bishops, which provided: “The solemn declaration of the Austrian bishops on 18 March of this year was clearly not intended to be an approval of something that was not and is not compatible with God=s law.” The Vatican newspaper also reported that the bishops’ earlier statement had been issued without approval from Rome.

A German official in Rome, who saw Innitzer shortly after his meetings, reported: “I have the impression that the Cardinal, who seemed very exhausted from the conversations in the Vatican, had had a hard struggle there.” The same official reported later the same day that the retraction of the earlier statements “was wrested from Cardinal Innitzer with pressure that can only be termed extortion.”  Before long, however, Innitzer was recognized as a true enemy of the Nazis.

#17.The Pope’s reply to von Preysing did not give a specific commitment to make any public appeal for the Jews. But on 2 June 1943, just over a month later, the Pope in a speech to the Sacred College of Cardinals did elusively refer to those “destined sometimes, even without guilt on their part, to exterminatory measures.” This was the second and last occasion on which Pope Pius XII would make any (indirect) reference to the Holocaust during the war years. Its proximity in time to his reply on 30 April 1943 to von Preysing suggests that there may have been a connection, though once again only a closer investigation of the Vatican archives could reveal whether this was the case. What unpublished documents regarding the Pope’s speech and his reply to von Preysing do the archives contain?

Point:

The question refers to the Pope’s speech to the College of Cardinals as his “second and last” reference to the Holocaust. There are so many statements that he made. Let us start with an encyclical from that same month (June 1943), Mystici Corporis Christi (“On the Mystical Body”).  It was an obvious attack on the theoretical basis of National Socialism.

In Mystici Corporis Christi, Pius wrote: “the Church of God… is despised and hated maliciously by those who shut their eyes to the light of Christian wisdom and miserably return to the teachings, customs and practices of ancient paganism.” He wrote of the “passing things of earth,” and the “massive ruins” of war, including the persecution of priests and nuns.  He offered prayers that world leaders be granted the love of wisdom and expressed no doubt that “a most severe judgment” would await those leaders who did not follow God’s will.

Pius appealed to “Catholics the world over” to “look to the Vicar of Jesus Christ as the loving Father of them all, who… takes upon himself with all his strength the defense of truth, justice and charity.”  He explained, “Our paternal love embraces all peoples, whatever their nationality or race.”  Christ, by his blood, made the Jews and Gentiles one “breaking down the middle wall of partition… in his flesh by which the two peoples were divided.”  He noted that Jews were among the first people to adore Jesus.  Pius then made an appeal for all to “follow our peaceful King who taught us to love not only those who are of a different nation or race, but even our enemies.”  As Pinchas E. Lapide, the Israeli consul in Italy, wrote: “Pius chose mystical theology as a cloak for a message which no cleric or educated Christian could possibly misunderstand.”

In June, Vatican Radio followed up with a broadcast that expressly stated: “He who makes a distinction between Jews and other men is unfaithful to God and in conflict with God’s commands.”  On July 28, 1943, a Vatican Radio broadcast further reported on the Pope’s denunciation of totalitarian forms of government and support for democratic ideals.  It said:

“The life and activities of all must be protected against arbitrary human action.  This means that no man has any right on the life and freedom of other men.  Authority… cannot be at the service of any arbitrary power.  Herein lies the essential differences between tyranny and true usefulness….  The Pope condemns those who dare to place the fortunes of whole nations in the hands of one man alone, a man who as such, is the prey of passions, error and dreams.”

Adolf Hitler’s name was not used, but there was no doubt to whom the Pope was referring.

Jewish organizations had taken note of Pius XII’s efforts, and they turned to him in times of need.  In June, Grand Rabbi Herzog wrote to Cardinal Maglione on behalf of Egyptian Jews expressing thanks for the Holy See’s charitable work in Europe and asking for assistance for Jews being held prisoner in Italy.  The Rabbi, in asking for assistance, noted that Jews of the world consider the Holy See their “historic protector in oppression.” The following month he wrote back thanking Pius for his efforts on behalf of the refugees that “had awoken a feeling of gratitude in the hearts of millions of people.”  On August 2, 1943, the World Jewish Congress sent the following message to Pope Pius:

“World Jewish Congress respectfully expresses gratitude to Your Holiness for your gracious concern for innocent peoples afflicted by the calamities of war and appeals to Your Holiness to use your high authority by suggesting Italian authorities may remove as speedily as possible to Southern Italy or other safer areas twenty thousand Jewish refugees and Italian nationals now concentrated in internment camps… and so prevent their deportation and similar tragic fate which has befallen Jews in Eastern Europe.  Our terror-stricken brethren look to Your Holiness as the only hope for saving them from persecution and death.”

Later that same month, Time magazine reported: “…no matter what critics might say, it is scarcely deniable that the Church Apostolic, through the encyclicals and other Papal pronouncements, has been fighting totalitarianism more knowingly, devoutly, and authoritatively, and for a longer time, than any other organized power.”

In September, a representative from the World Jewish Congress reported to the Pope that approximately 4,000 Jews and Yugoslav nationals who had been in internment camps were removed to an area that was under the control of Yugoslav partisans.  As such, they were out of immediate danger.  The report went on to say:

“I feel sure that the efforts of your Grace and the Holy See have brought about this fortunate result, and I should like to express to the Holy See and yourself the warmest thanks of the World Jewish Congress.  The Jews concerned will probably not yet know by what agency their removal from danger has been secured, but when they do they will be indeed grateful.”

In November, Rabbi Herzog again wrote to Pius expressing his “sincere gratitude and deep appreciation for so kind an attitude toward Israel and for such valuable assistance given by the Catholic Church to the endangered Jewish people.”  Jewish communities in Chile, Uruguay, and Bolivia also sent similar offers of thanks to the Pope.

August 1944 was the month when a group of Roman Jews came to thank Pius for having helped them during the period of Nazi occupation.  In response, the Pontiff reaffirmed his position: “For centuries, Jews have been unjustly treated and despised.  It is time they were treated with justice and humanity.  God wills it and the Church wills it.  St. Paul tells us that the Jews are our brothers.  They should also be welcomed as friends.”

Similar acts and statements continued throughout the war.  Details can be found in my book.

#21.Casimir Papée, the Polish ambassador to the Holy See, on 28 April 1943, sent Maglione an extract from a Zurich newspaper, describing the martyrdom of many Polish priests interned at Dachau. He reminded the Cardinal of the sentiments awakened among all civilized and Christian nations by German cruelty in the occupied territories adding: “My colleagues and I never failed to draw Your Eminence’s attention to these painful facts.” In concluding his letter, Papée asked what the Holy See had been able to do “to save lives precious to the Church,” and which measures it proposed to take “in the face of so much injustice.” There is no evidence of a reply in the ADSS, though the grievances of the Poles were noted on several occasions. Appeals such as these had been coming to the Vatican since 1939. Are there any materials in the archives regarding internal discussions as to how the Vatican was to respond?

Point:

In 1940, the Germans decided to put all priests from the concentration camps into one location where they could be tightly controlled.  They were kept together in Dachau Barracks 26, 28, and 30 (later they were squeezed into barracks 26 and 28 which had room and beds for 360, even though there were rarely fewer than 1,500 priests interred there).  These barracks were ringed with a barbed‑wire fence, which restricted the ability of priests to minister to other prisoners during their few free hours.

These Dachau priests worked in the enormous S.S. industrial complex immediately to the west of the camp, but the Nazis had other uses for them as well.  Some were injected with pus so that the Nazi doctors could study gangrene; others had their body temperature lowered to study resuscitation of German fliers downed in the North Atlantic; one German priest was crowned with barbed wire and a group of Jewish prisoners was forced to spit on him.  Fr. Stanislaus Bednarski, a Pole, was hanged on a cross.  In November 1944, three priests were executed “not because they were criminals,” as one judge stated, “but because it was their tragedy that they were Catholic priests.”

As the tide of the war began to turn, and the Germans needed to get all the labor possible out of the prisoners, the S.S. decided to use these generally well-educated prisoner/priests as secretaries and managers.  With priests in the offices where they could manipulate labor schedules, they were able to engage in forms of sabotage.  Thus, a planned gas oven at Dachau never became functional due, at least in part, to the efforts of these imprisoned Catholic priests.

In an allocution to the Sacred College on June 2, 1945, which was also broadcast on Vatican Radio, Pius noted the death of about 2,000 Catholic priests at Dachau and described National Socialism as “the arrogant apostasy from Jesus Christ, the denial of His doctrine and of His work of redemption, the cult of violence, the idolatry of race and blood, the overthrow of human liberty and dignity.”  With “the satanic apparition of National Socialism” out of the way, Pius expressed his confidence that Germany would “rise to a new dignity and a new life”  He went on to point out that Nazi persecution of the Catholic Church both in Germany and occupied nations had been continuous, and that he had been aware of Nazism’s ultimate goal: “its adherents boasted that once they had gained the military victory, they would put an end to the Church forever.  Authorities and incontrovertible witnesses kept Us informed of this intention”

The Vatican’s efforts to win freedom for its bishops and priests imprisoned in Dachau were all frustrated, but no one really doubts the Holy See’s desire to win their freedom.  Pius, by the way, used no different technique in this effort than he did when trying to help Jews.  As one bishop who was imprisoned at Dachau reported:

“The detained priests trembled every time news reached us of some protest by religious authority, but particularly by the Vatican.  We all had the impression that our wardens made us atone heavily for the fury these protests evoked… whenever the way we were treated became more brutal, the Protestant pastors among the prisoners used to vent their indignation on the Catholic priests: ‘Again your big naive Pope and those simpletons, your bishops, are shooting their mouths off… why don’t they get the idea once and for all, and shut up.  They play the heroes and we have to pay the bill.’”

With concerns like this, Pope Pius XII had to weigh carefully the force of his words.

#24.In February 1944, the Pontifical Commission for the Vatican City State (Pontificio Commissione per lo Stato della Città del Vaticano), the administrative agency of Vatican City, recorded the presence of Jews and others who were given refuge within the Vatican. Are Pontifical Commission records and communiqués available with respect to the housing of refugees? Are there records of other people finding refuge in pontifical institutions, for example, the papal villa at Castelgondolfo?

I can send slide photographs of people sleeping and eating in the Vatican at this time.

#26.Rotta was the only nuncio to cooperate with the diplomatic representatives of neutral states, Spain, Portugal, Sweden and Switzerland. On three occasions in late 1944, he and his diplomatic colleagues submitted protests to the Hungarian government in defense of Jews and took active measures to save them. The Vatican expressed its approval of Rotta’s actions at this juncture. Is there evidence of earlier Vatican approval or encouragement of Rotta’s activities?

Point:

In March 1944, Germany invaded Hungary on the pretext of safeguarding communications, and the last great nightmare of the war began.  Hungary had been a haven for refugee Jews.  The Nazis immediately issued anti-Jewish decrees.  After several oral protests, the papal nuncio, Monsignor Angelo Rotta, was the first foreign envoy to submit a formal note expressing Pope Pius XII’s protest. Shortly thereafter, Rotta received a letter of encouragement from Pius XII in which the Pope termed the treatment of Jews as “unworthy of Hungary, the country of the Holy Virgin and of St. Stephen”  From then on, acting always in accordance with instructions from the Holy See and in the name of Pope Pius XII, Rotta continually intervened against the treatment of the Jews and the inhuman character of the anti-Jewish legislation.

Of course there was no encouragement prior to this 1944 action.  The Nazis were not yet there.

The question states that, “Rotta was the only nuncio to cooperate with the diplomatic representatives of neutral states, Spain, Portugal, Sweden and Switzerland.” I want to see their evidence of this allegation.

 

#27.In 1933, Edith Stein wrote to Pius XI asking him to issue an encyclical condemning anti-Semitism. This may have been the first of many appeals made to the Vatican for intervention on behalf of the Jews. Though the date falls beyond the parameters of our mandate, the document is relevant because of its content. How was this letter received? Is the letter itself in the archives, and if so may we see it?

Point:

Her letter resulted eventually in Mit brenender Sorge. Mit brennender Sorge was one of the strongest condemnations of any national regime that the Holy See ever published. It condemned not only the persecution of the Church in Germany, but also the Neo-paganism of Nazi theories. “Whoever exalts race, or the people, or the State, or a particular form of State…  above their standard value and divinizes them to an idolatrous level, distorts and perverts an order of the world planned and created by God,” wrote the Pope.  There was even a brazen swipe at Hitler:

“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 before whose immensity they are ‘as a drop of a bucket’ (Isaiah XI, 15).”

The encyclical concluded that “enemies of the Church, who think that their time has come, will see that their joy was premature.”

Unlike most encyclicals, which are written in Latin, Mit brennender Sorge was written in German for wider dissemination in that country.  It was smuggled out of Italy, copied and distributed to parish priests to be read from all of the pulpits on Palm Sunday, March 14, 1937.  No one who heard the Pontifical document read in church had any illusion about the gravity of these statements or their significance.  Certainly the Nazis understood their importance.

An internal German memorandum dated March 23, 1937, calledMit brennender Sorge “almost a call to do battle against the Reich government.”  All available copies were confiscated.  German printers who had made copies were arrested and the presses were seized.  Those convicted of distributing the encyclical were arrested, the Church-affiliated publications which ran the encyclical were banned, and payments due to the Church from the Government were reduced.

The day following the release of Mit brennender Sorge, a Nazi newspaper, the Voelkischer Beobachter, carried a strong counterattack on the “Jew-God and His deputy in Rome.”  Das Schwarze Korps, official paper of the SS, called it “the most incredible of Pius XI’s pastoral letters; every sentence in it was an insult to the new Germany.”  The German ambassador to the Holy See was instructed not to take part in the solemn Easter ceremonies, and German missions throughout Europe were informed by the Nazi Foreign Office of the “Reich’s profound indignation”  They were also told that the German government “had to consider the Pope’s encyclical as a call to battle… as it calls upon Catholic citizens to rebel against the authority of the Reich.”

Hitler verbally attacked the German bishops at a mass rally in Berlin, and he dictated a letter of protest to the Pope, complaining that the Vatican had gone to the people instead of coming to him.  Vatican Secretary of State, Eugenio Pacelli (the future Pope Pius XII), rebuffed German protests, noting that the German government had not been cooperative in the past when the Vatican complained about the various matters (including the Nazis treatment of Jews).  In May, Hitler was quoted in a Swiss newspaper saying, “the Third Reich does not desire a modus vivendi with the Catholic Church, but rather its destruction with lies and dishonor, in order to make room for a German Church in which the German race will be glorified.”

#30.Finances are occasionally mentioned in the context of the relief of civilian suffering. For example, an accounting of the disbursement of funds is given in cases where Jewish organizations donated funds to the Vatican for relief and rescue. However, the volumes contain no documents regarding the Vatican’s own financial transactions relating to such efforts. Is there any archival evidence to indicate how the Vatican collected and disbursed its own or other funds in carrying out such activities, such as the annual Peter’s Pence collection?

Pius spent his entire private fortune on their behalf.  Pius spent what he inherited himself, as a Pacelli, from his family.  This was apparently not an insubstantial amount.  According to John Cornwell, the future Pope inherited $100,000 in the mid-1930s.

#34.On March 18, 1942, Gerhart Riegner of the World Jewish Congress and Richard Lichtheim, representing the Jewish Agency for Palestine, sent a remarkably comprehensive memorandum on the fate of Jews in Central and Eastern Europe to Archbishop Filippo Bernardini, the nuncio in Switzerland, and a day later Bernardini forwarded the document to Maglione himself. While the report gave no clear sense of a European-wide “final solution,” it left little to the imagination in its description of horrors organized on a continental scale. Is there any indication in the archives about what response, if any, was made to this report? For example, did the Holy See notify hierarchies or its diplomatic representatives regarding the contents of the report?

Point:

Gerhard Riegner’s memorandum to the Holy See was dated March 18, 1942.  It described Nazi persecution of Jewish people, and it was not published by the Vatican in its collection of wartime documents (Actes et Documents).  By the same token, the letter of thanks that Riegner sent to Nuncio M. Philippe Bernadinion April 8, 1942 was also not published.  In that letter, Riegner stated:

“We also note with great satisfaction the steps undertaken by His Excellence the Cardinal Maglione, with authorities of Slovakia on behalf of the Jews of that country, and we ask you kindly to transmit to the Secretariat of State of the Holy See the expression of our profound gratitude.

“We are convinced that this intervention greatly impressed the governmental circles of Slovakia, which conviction seems to be confirmed by the information we have just received from that country….

It appears… that the Slovak Government finds it necessary to justify the measures in question.  One might therefore conclude that it might be induced – in the application of these measures – to conform more closely to the wishes expressed by the Holy See which desired to revoke the recent measures against the Jews.

“In renewing the expressions of our profound gratitude, for whatever the Holy See, thanks to your gracious intermediation, was good enough to undertake on behalf of our persecuted brothers, we ask Your Excellency to accept the assurance of our deepest respect.”

The reason that neither the memo nor the letter of thanks were printed in the Actes et Documents collection is that they were classified as “unofficial.”  Moreover, the memo was rather long and did not report a definite source of information, but reported on persecutions that were “more or less known to the public at large.” (Judging Pius XII, Inside the Vatican, February 2000, at 61, 66, quoting Father Blet, who noted that the memorandum had been published in a well-known book prior to the Vatican’s collection being published).  Riegner’s memo is, however, mentioned in theActes et Documents collection.  Le nonce à Berne Bernardini au Cardinal Maglione, March 19, 1942, Actes et Documents, vol. VIII, no. 314, p. 466.  In fact, a footnote was added just to draw attention to receipt of the memo.  It was certainly never hidden, concealed, or missing.

#35.  There is evidence that the Holy See was well-informed by mid-1942 of the accelerating mass murder of Jews. Questions continue to be asked about the reception of this news, and what attention was given to it. How thoroughly informed was the Vatican regarding details of Nazi persecution and extermination? What was the Holy See’s reaction, and what discussions followed the reports that flowed in describing evidence of the “Final Solution”? What, more specifically, were the steps leading up to the Pope’s Christmas message of 1942? Are there drafts of this message?

#36.  In light of the above, in September 1942 there were requests for a papal statement from the British, Belgian, Polish, Brazilian and American diplomatic representatives to the Holy See. In Volume 5 of the ADSS, only the response to Myron Taylor, the American representative to the Pope, is published. Might the responses to the other representatives be made available?

Point:

In September 1942, President Roosevelt sent a message to the Pope detailing reports from the Warsaw ghetto and asking whether the Vatican had any information that would tend to confirm or deny the reports of Nazi crimes.  In mid-October, the Holy See replied, stating that it, too, had reports of  “severe measures” taken against the Jews, but that it had been impossible to verify the accuracy of the reports.  The statement went on, however, to note that “the Holy See is taking advantage of every opportunity offered in order to mitigate the suffering of non-Aryans.”

At their annual meeting in November 1942, in Washington, D.C., the U.S. Bishops released a statement:

“Since the murderous assault on Poland, utterly devoid of every semblance of humanity, there has been a premeditated and systematic extermination of the people of this nation.  The same satanic technique is being applied to many other peoples.  We feel a deep sense of revulsion against the cruel indignities heaped upon Jews in conquered countries and upon defenseless peoples not of our faith….  Deeply moved by the arrest and maltreatment of the Jews, we cannot stifle the cry of conscience.  In the name of humanity and Christian principles, our voice is raised.”

For his part, in late 1942, Pius sent three letters of support to bishops in Poland.  The letters were intended to be read and distributed by the bishops to the faithful.  The bishops all thanked the Pontiff, but responded that they could not publish his words or read them aloud, because that would lead to more persecution of Jews and of Catholics.

With the Vatican having recognized Nazi atrocities earlier than many other nations and having assisted western powers early during the hostilities, Allied leaders sought to have the Pope join in a formal declaration concerning the atrocities taking place in Germany and in German-occupied areas.  In a message dated September 14, the Brazilian ambassador, Ildebrando Accioly, wrote: “It is necessary that the authorized and respected voice of the Vicar of Christ be heard against these atrocities.”  On that same day, British Minister D’Arcy Osborne and American representative Harold H. Tittmann requested a “public and specific denunciation of Nazi treatment of the populations of the counties under German occupation.”  Interestingly, neither Tittmann nor Accioly mentioned the treatment of Jews by the Nazis. Osborne, who did mention the treatment of Jewish people in his request to the Pope, reported back to London that the coordinated requests to the Pontiff looked like an effort to involve the Pope in political and partisan action.

Pius was non-committal in response to these requests, and a few weeks later President Roosevelt’s representative, Myron Taylor, renewed the request on behalf of the Allies.  American representatives ultimately reported back that the Holy See was convinced that an open condemnation would “result in the violent deaths of many more people.” A secret British telegram from this same time period reported on an audience with the Pope:

“His Holiness undertook to do whatever was possible on behalf of the Jews, but His Majesty’s Minister doubted whether there would be any public statement.”

The Pope did not join in this condemnation, perhaps because as aNew York Times editorial concluded, the joint statement was “an official indictment.”  Pius did not want to breach the Church’s official neutrality by joining in a declaration made by either side, and he was concerned that the Allies’ statement would be used as part of the war effort (as happened with some of his earlier radio broadcasts).  He did, however, make his own statement.

In his 1942 Christmas statement, broadcast over Vatican Radio, Pope Pius XII said that the world was “plunged into the gloom of tragic error,” and that “the Church would be untrue to herself, she would have ceased to be a mother, if she were deaf to the cries of suffering children which reach her ears from every class of the human family.”  He spoke of the need for mankind to make “a solemn vow never to rest until valiant souls of every people and every nation of the earth arise in their legions, resolved to bring society and to devote themselves to the services of the human person and of a divinely ennobled human society.” He said that mankind owed this vow to all victims of the war, including “the hundreds of thousands who, through no fault of their own, andsolely because of their nation or race, have been condemned to death or progressive extinction.”  In making this statement and others during the war, Pius used the Latin word “stirps,” which means race, but which had been used throughout Europe for centuries as an explicit reference to Jews.

Pius also condemned totalitarian regimes and acknowledged some culpability on the part of the Church: “A great part of the human race, and not a few – We do not hesitate to say it – not a few even of those who call themselves Christians, bear some share in the collective responsibility for the aberrations, the disasters, and the low moral state of modern society.”  He urged all Catholics to give shelter wherever they could.

The Polish ambassador thanked the Pontiff, who “in his last Christmas address implicitly condemned all the injustices and cruelties suffered by the Polish people at the hands of the Germans.  Poland acclaims this condemnation; it thanks the Holy Father for his words….”  British records reflect the opinion that “the Pope’s condemnation of the treatment of the Jews & the Poles is quite unmistakable, and the message is perhaps more forceful in tone than any of his recent statements.” The Pope informed the United States Minister to the Vatican that he considered his recent broadcast to be clear and comprehensive in its condemnation of the heartrending treatment of Poles, Jews, hostages, etc. And to have satisfied all recent demands that he should speak out.

A Christmas Day editorial in the New York Times praised Pius XII for his moral leadership:

“No Christmas sermon reaches a larger congregation than the message Pope Pius XII addresses to a war‑torn world at this season.  This Christmas more than ever he is a lonely voice crying out of the silence of a continent.  The Pulpit whence he speaks is more than ever like the Rock on which the Church was founded, a tiny island lashed and surrounded by a sea of war.  In these circumstances, in any circumstances, indeed, no one would expect the Pope to speak as a political leader, or a war leader, or in any other role than that of a preacher ordained to stand above the battle, tied impartially, as he says, to all people and willing to collaborate in any new order which will bring a just peace.

But just because the Pope speaks to and in some sense for all the peoples at war, the clear stand he takes on the fundamental issues of the conflict has greater weight and authority.  When a leader bound impartially to nations on both sides condemns as heresy the new form of national state which subordinates everything to itself:  when he declares that whoever wants peace must protect against ‘arbitrary attacks’ the ‘juridical safety of individuals:’ when he assails violent occupation of territory, the exile and persecution of human beings for no reason other than race or political opinion:  when he says that people must fight for a just and decent peace, a ‘total peace’ – the ‘impartial judgment’ is like a verdict in a high court of justice.

Pope Pius expresses as passionately as any leader on our side the war aims of the struggle for freedom when he says that those who aim at building a new world must fight for free choice of government and religious order.  They must refuse that the state should make of individuals a herd of whom the state disposes as if they were a lifeless thing.”

The London Times also ran an editorial expressing similar sentiments about the Pope’s statements since his coronation:

“A study of the words which Pope Pius XII has addressed since his accession in encyclicals and allocutions to the Catholics of various nations leaves no room for doubt.  He condemns the worship of force and its concrete manifestation in the suppression of national liberties and in the persecution of the Jewish race.”

To the Axis leaders the Pope’s Christmas message was not hard to decipher.  Mussolini was greatly angered by the speech. The German ambassador to the Vatican complained that Pius had abandoned any pretense at neutrality and was “clearly speaking on behalf of the Jews.”  An American report noted that the Germans were “conspicuous by their absence” at a Midnight Mass conducted by the Pope for diplomats on Christmas Eve.  One German report stated:

“In a manner never known before, the Pope has repudiated the National Socialist New European Order….  It is true, the Pope does not refer to the National Socialist in Germany by name, but his speech is one long attack on everything we stand for… God, he says, regards all people and races as worthy of the same consideration.  Here he is clearly speaking on behalf of the Jews… he is virtually accusing the German people of injustice toward the Jews, and makes himself the mouthpiece of the Jewish war criminals.”

German Ambassador Bergen, on the instruction of Foreign Minister Ribbentrop, immediately warned the Pope that the Nazis would seek retaliation if the Vatican abandoned its neutral position.  When he reported back to his superiors, the German ambassador stated: “Pacelli is no more sensible to threats than we are.”

#37.Questions have been raised regarding the attitude of the Vatican toward a Jewish national home in Palestine during the Holocaust period. Maglione generally responded to requests for assistance in sending Jews to Palestine by reminding appellants of all that the Holy See had done to help the Jews, and of its readiness to continue to do so. But in internal notes published in the volumes, meant only for Vatican representatives, the Secretary of State and his aides explicitly reaffirmed the Vatican’s opposition to significant Jewish immigration to Palestine, stating that “the Holy See has never approved of the project of making Palestine a Jewish home.  Palestine is by now holier for Catholics than for Jews.” The documents also reveal that Angelo Roncalli (the future Pope John XXIII), apostolic delegate to Istanbul, aided Jews to reach Palestine notwithstanding his uneasiness concerning Jewish political aspirations there.  Is there documentation regarding guidelines for rescue efforts and their implications concerning the Vatican policy with regard to Palestine?

Point:

Angelo Roncalli (the future Pope John XXIII), war time apostolic delegate in Istanbul, was thanked for his work on behalf of Jewish refugees.  He replied: “In all these painful matters I have referred to the Holy See and simply carried out the Pope’s orders: first and foremost to save Jewish lives.”

In 1955, when Italy celebrated the tenth anniversary of its liberation, Italian Jewry proclaimed April 17 as “The Day of Gratitude.”  That year, thousands of Jewish people made a pilgrimage to the Vatican to express appreciation for the Pope’s wartime solicitudes.  The Israeli Philharmonic Orchestra even gave a special performance of Beethoven’s ninth symphony in the Papal Consistory Hall as an expression of gratitude for the Catholic Church’s assistance in defying the Nazis. (According to the Jerusalem Post of May 29, 1955, “Conductor Paul Klecki had requested that the Orchestra on its first visit to Italy play for the Pope as a gesture of gratitude for the help his church had given to all those persecuted by Nazi Fascism.”)  Before the celebration, a delegation approached Msgr. Montini, the director of Vatican rescue services who later became Pope Paul VI, to determine whether he would accept an award for his work on behalf of Jews during the war.  He was extremely gratified and visibly touched by their words, but he declined the honor: “All I did was my duty,” he said. “And besides I only acted upon orders from the Holy Father.  Nobody deserves a medal for that”

#38.On March 12, 1943, a consortium of rabbis in North America sent a passionate appeal to Maglione, describing the horrors in Poland and the liquidation of the Warsaw Ghetto, and asking for help from Rome.  It is curious that there are no references in the volumes to the Warsaw Ghetto uprising. Are there any documents relating to this event in the archives?

Point:

On April 19, 1943, Jewish residents of Warsaw staged a desperate uprising in the ghetto.  The Nazis countered with a block-to-block search, but they found it difficult to kill or capture the small battle groups of Jews, who would fight, then retreat through cellars, sewers, and other hidden passageways.  On the fifth day of the fighting, Himmler ordered the S.S. to comb out the ghetto with the greatest severity and relentless tenacity.  S.S. General Juergen Stroop decided to burn down the entire ghetto, block by block.  Many victims burned or jumped to their death, rather than permit themselves to be caught by the Nazis.

The Jews in Warsaw resisted for a total of 28 days.  On May 16, General Stroop reported that “the former Jewish quarter of Warsaw is no longer in existence. The large-scale action was terminated at 2015 hours by blowing up the Warsaw synagogue….  Total number of Jews dealt with 56,065, including both Jews caught and Jews whose extermination can be proved.” (About 20,000 Jews were killed in the streets of Warsaw and another 36,000 in the gas chambers.)  Polish sources estimated that 300 Germans were killed and about 1000 were wounded.

Not only in Warsaw, but throughout Poland, Jewish people were in hiding.  About 200 convents hid more than 1,500 Jewish children, mainly in Warsaw and the surrounding area.  This was especially difficult, because Polish nuns in German-occupied areas were often persecuted and forced into hiding themselves. (In a small town near Mir, Poland, the Nazis executed 12 nuns in one day for suspicion of harboring Jews.)  Nuns who lived in Soviet-occupied areas did not have it much better.  They were sent to work for the Soviets, in areas as far away as Siberia.  As such, the courage of the priests and nuns who provided shelter to Jewish people was truly admirable.

Why did people take these risks?  Roncalli (the future Pope John XXIII) and Montini (the future Pope Paul VI) both gave all credit to Pope Pius XII.  The end of the war saw Pius hailed as “the inspired moral prophet of victory,” and he “enjoyed near-universal acclaim for aiding European Jews through diplomatic initiatives, thinly veiled public pronouncements, and, very concretely, an unprecedented continent-wide network of sanctuary.”  He made hiding Jews on the run the thing to do.

 

#41.The Vatican radio from time to time addressed issues relating to Nazi persecution, and extracts from these broadcasts appeared in the London Tablet. It is said that Pius XII may have written or edited the texts for some of these broadcasts. Is there any documentary evidence regarding Pius XII’s role and are the original broadcast transcripts available?

Point:

During the war it was not known how involved the Pope was with Vatican Radio.  These broadcasts were so strongly worded and partisan that they regularly prompted vigorous protests from Mussolini and the German Ambassador to the Holy See.  (Later, the Polish bishops would complain that papal statements created problems for them by infuriating the Nazis.)  Vatican officials responded that Vatican Radio was run by the Jesuits as an independent concern.  Recently, however, researchers discovered that Pius XII personally authored many of the intensely anti-German statements beamed around the world.  In other cases, directives were found from the Pope regarding the content of the broadcasts.  The late Father Robert A. Graham, one of the people assigned to go through the Vatican’s wartime records, told The Washington Post:  “I was stupefied at what I was reading.  How could one explain actions so contrary to the principle of neutrality?”

#42.The case has repeatedly been made that the Vatican’s fear of communism prompted it to mute and limit its criticism of Nazi atrocities and occupation policies. We are struck by the paucity of evidence to this effect and to the subject of communism in general. Indeed, our reading of the volumes presents a different picture, especially with regard to the Vatican promotion of the American bishops’ support for the alliance between the United States and the Soviet Union in order to oppose Nazism.  Is there further evidence on this question?

Point:

Despite his concern over the spread of Communism, Pius recognized that Nazism presented a similar threat.  He continued to condemn Communism, but as an observer of that time noted, “(w)ith it he bracketed Nazism in the same breath, for it strikes, no less ruthlessly, at the individuality of the home, the very heart of religion.  Both are tyrannically pagan.”  In 1942, Pius told a Jesuit visitor, “the Communist danger does exist, but at this time the Nazi danger is more serious.  They want to destroy the Church and crush it like a toad.”  When the Allies sought to have him speak out against Nazi Germany, he said he was unwilling to do so without also condemning the atheistic government of the Soviet Union, but he also refused Axis requests to bless their attack on the Soviet Union.  In fact, by cooperating with Roosevelt’s request that he encourage American Catholics to support extending the lend-lease program to the Soviets, Pius actually gave economic and military aid to the Soviets.

In the British Public Records Office, there is a short message dated May 10, 1943, from the British Embassy in Madrid.  It reports on a message that had been forwarded by a member of the Spanish Ministry of Foreign Affairs.  According to this report, “In a recent dispatch the Spanish Ambassador reported that in conversation with the Pope[,] the latter informed him that he now regarded Nazism and Fascism, and not Communism, as he used to, as the greatest menace to civilization and the Roman Catholic Church.”  Others were also aware of the Pope’s view.  According to a post-war interrogation of Nazi official Joachim von Ribbentrop, Hitler thought that the Catholic Church sometimes worked with the Communists.  As such, the record simply does not support the conclusion that hatred of Communism blinded Pius XII to the evils of Nazism.

#43.In several of the volumes, the editors cite hundreds of documents which are not themselves published. For example, in Volume 10 alone the editors list 700 such documents. In some cases, the documents are briefly summarized or quoted. It would be helpful if these documents could be made available.

It would be helpful if scholars would read the documents that have been made available.  Each member of the study group was assigned only two books out of the 11-volume set.  One member reportedly read a third volume.  Apparently none of them were very familiar with these documents prior to this project.  At least they seem not to have had access to any other set.  (The commission had one set to share. For a while, no one had volume 6.)  I, at least, own a complete set.

#44.The Poles were major victims of the Nazis. Members of the Polish Government in Exile in London and some Polish bishops were often very vocal in their criticism of Pius XII’s role. It has been reported that the Vatican commissioned the Jesuits to prepare a defense of its Polish policy. Is this correct and, if so, may we see the report? More generally, the subject of Vatican-Polish relations is an essential element for understanding the role of the Holy See during the Holocaust period and deserves further investigation in the Vatican archives. Is there other pertinent information on this subject in the archives that is not in the volumes, and may we see it?

I have a copy of the report from the Jesuits. America Press published it in English in 1942.  A copy can be found in the New York City public library.

#45.The volumes contain urgent appeals to the Vatican for assistance, articulated by desperate Jewish petitioners. These petitions frequently are couched in language of effusive praise as well as gratitude for actions already undertaken. Yet the volumes contain few examples of the assistance already given that gave rise to such expressions of praise and gratitude. What information can be obtained from either the archives or other sources concerning the concrete assistance already given which gave rise to these expressions of gratitude?

The best evidence, of course, is the testimony of these people who were there – which is what the study group seeks here to confirm.  There are also 98 deposition transcripts from witnesses who saw things first-hand and testified under oath.  This question, like many others, takes on the feel of the famous: “When did you stop beating your wife?”

#47.Did Pope Pius XII have serious doubts about the wisdom or correctness of his policy of “impartiality,” whether it related to Jews, Poles or any other victims of the Nazis? The published documents unfortunately provide little evidence, although Volume 2 gives us a valuable insight into his thinking during the wartime period, especially about the German Church, to which he felt particularly close. In his diary, Roncalli reports of an audience on 11 October 1941 with the Pope who asked whether his “silence” concerning Nazism would be badly judged. Are there any personal papers of Pius XII or records of his discussions with leading advisers, diplomats or important foreign visitors that would illuminate this issue, and, if so, could we see them?

There are occasional reports of expressions of concern over the course he chose. However in his first encyclical, Summi Pontificatus (“Darkness over the Earth”), released in 1939, Pope Pius XII set forth his position on Hitler, the war, and the role that he would play.  He stayed true to that position throughout the war.

This encyclical made reference to “the ever-increasing host of Christ’s enemies” (paragraph 7), and noted that these enemies of Christ “deny or in practice neglect the vivifying truths and the values inherent in belief in God and in Christ” and want to “break the Tables of God’s Commandments to substitute other tables and other standards stripped of the ethical content of (Christianity).”  In the next paragraph, Pius charged that Christians who fell in with the enemies of Christ suffered from cowardice, weakness, or uncertainty.

In paragraph 13, Pius wrote of the outbreak of war: “Our paternal heart is torn by anguish as We look ahead to all that will yet come forth from the baneful seed of violence and of hatred for which the sword today ploughs the blood drenched furrow.”  In the next paragraph, he wrote of the enemies of Christ (an obvious reference to Hitler’s National Socialists) becoming bolder.

Paragraphs 24 through 31 laid out the Pope’s belief that prayer (not public condemnation) was the only appropriate response for the Bishop of Rome.  Obviously, Pius viewed this as an important act of faith.  Moreover, it was the lack of Christianity that he identified as the cause of the “crop of such poignant disasters.”  Faith and prayer were the things he could contribute to the world at that time, not political or military strength.

Pius also expressed his belief in redemption.  Thus, even though the enemies of Christ were committing horrible atrocities, it was still possible for even these very evil people to be redeemed.  It was fundamental to the Pope’s faith that anyone could ask and be forgiven.

Paragraphs 45 to 50 of the encyclical deal with racial matters and expressed the Pope’s belief that the Church could not discriminate against any given race of people.  This would have to be seen as a slap at the racial policies in both Germany and Italy.  Pius expressly stated that all races and nationalities were welcome in the Church and had equal rights as children in the house of the Lord.  In paragraph 48, he put meaning to those anti-racist statements by naming new bishops of different races and nationalities.  Moreover, he expressly said that the Church must always be open to all:

“The spirit, the teaching and the work of the Church can never be other than that which the Apostle of the Gentiles preached:  Aputting on the new (man) him who is renewed unto knowledge, according to the image of him that created him.  Where there is neither Gentile nor Jew, circumcision nor uncircumcision, barbarian nor Scythian, bond nor free.  But Christ is all and in all” (Colossians iii. 10, 11).

The equating of Gentiles and Jews would have to be seen as a clear rejection of Hitler’s fundamental ideology.

Paragraphs 51 to 66 seem to be Pius XII’s view of a just society.  Here he asserts that the first reason for the outbreak of war is that people have forgotten the law of universal charity. The second reason is the failure to put God above civil authority.  He argues that when civil authority is placed above the Lord, the government fills that void, and problems develop.  This is exactly what Hitler had done.  (This analysis would likely also apply to Pius XII’s view of the Soviet Union, which at that time had an agreement with Hitler.)

Pius said that nations must have a religious basis.  He wrote that the goal of society must be development of the individual, not the power of the state.  Again, this was a slap at Hitler’s dismantling of religious institutions and development of the state in Germany.  In fact, paragraph 60 was a direct answer to Hitler’s view of the state as set forth in Mein Kampf:

“To consider the State as something ultimate to which everything else should be subordinated and directed, cannot fail to harm the true and lasting prosperity of nations.  This can happen either when unrestricted dominion comes to be conferred on the State as having a mandate from the nation, people, or even a social order, or when the State arrogates such dominion to itself as absolute master, despotically, without any mandate whatsoever.”

Similarly, Pius presented an answer to Hitler’s views of the family and of education in this section of the encyclical.

Pius made note of how “powers of disorder and destruction” stand ready to take advantage of sorrow, bitterness, and suffering in order to make use of them “for their dark designs.”  This would seem to be a description of how Fascists in Italy and Nazis in Germany took advantage of the chaos following the First World War to rise to power.  Pius also responded to the demands of Hitler and Mussolini (and, for that matter, Stalin) for stronger central governments.  While acknowledging that there may be difficulties that would justify greater powers being concentrated in the State, the Pope also said that the moral law requires that the need for this be scrutinized with greatest rigor.  The State can demand goods and blood, but not the immortal soul.

Paragraphs 73 to 77, dealt with the Pope’s ideas relating to international relations.  Here, he wrote:

“Absolute autonomy for the State stands in open opposition to this natural way that is inherent in man… and therefore leaves the stability of international relations at the mercy of the will of rulers, while it destroys the possibility of true union and fruitful collaboration directed to the general good.”

Pius stressed the importance of treaties and wrote of an international natural law which requires that all treaties be honored.  With Hitler having recently breached several treaties and the concordat, this must be seen as another swipe at the Nazi leader.

Interestingly, in paragraph 85, Pius accurately described the challenges he would face, and he set forth the code of conduct that he followed throughout the rest of the war:

“And if belonging to (the Kingdom of God), living according to its spirit, laboring for its increase and placing its benefits at the disposition of that portion of mankind also which as yet has no part in them, means in our days having to face obstacles and oppositions as vast and deep and minutely organized as never before, that does not dispense a man from the frank, bold profession of our Faith.  Rather, it spurs one to stand fast in the conflict even at the price of the greatest sacrifices.  Whoever lives by the spirit of Christ refuses to let himself be beaten down by the difficulties which oppose him, but on the contrary feels himself impelled to work with all his strength and with the fullest confidence in God.

In paragraphs 93 to 95, Pius expressed the importance that he attached to the spirit as opposed to the physical world.  Here he made clear that the most important thing would be to open people to Christ.  He said that the Church must be protected so that it can fulfill its role as an educator by teaching the truth, by inculcating justice, and by inflaming hearts with the divine love of Christ.  Indeed, throughout the war, he would protect the Church so that it could carry out its life and soul-saving functions.

Paragraphs 101 to 106 drew distinctions between the Vatican and other secular nations and explained the Church’s special role in the world.  The Church “does not claim to take the place of other legitimate authorities in their proper spheres.”  Instead, Pius wrote, the Church should be a good example and do good works.  The Church:

“spreads it maternal arms towards this world not to dominate but to serve.  She does not claim to take the place of other legitimate authorities in their proper spheres, but offers them her help after the example and in the spirit of her Divine Founder Who “went about doing good” (Acts x. 38).

This same thought was expanded upon when Pius wrote “render therefore to Caesar the things that are Caesar’s.”  In other words, the Church plays an important, but limited role in resolving disputes in the secular world.  His obligation was to pray for peace and offer comfort to the afflicted.

Pius expressed his confidence that the Church would always prevail in the long run.  Any structure that is not founded on the teaching of Christ, he wrote, is destined to perish.  Read in context, this was a promise of the ultimate failure of Nazism.  In fact, he expressly foresaw that Poland would be resurrected:

“This… is in many respects a real ‘Hour of Darkness,’… in which the spirit of violence and of discord brings indescribable suffering on mankind….  The nations swept into the tragic whirlpool of war are perhaps as yet only at the ‘beginnings of sorrows,’… but even now there reigns in thousands of families death and desolation, lamentation and misery.  The blood of countless human beings, even noncombatants, raises a piteous dirge over a nation such as Our dear Poland, which, for its fidelity to the Church, for its services in the defense of Christian civilization… has a right to the generous and brotherly sympathy of the whole world, while it awaits, relying on the powerful intercession of Mary, Help of Christians, the hour of a resurrection in harmony with the principles of justice and true peace.”

The reference to Poland resolved any doubts about to whom Pius was referring.

In paragraphs 107 to 112, Pius wrote that it was his duty to try for peace, and that duty had to be fulfilled even if it meant that the Church was misunderstood in the effort:

“While still some hope was left, We left nothing undone in the form suggested to us by Our Apostolic office and by the means at Our disposal, to prevent recourse to arms and to keep open the way to an understanding honorable to both parties.  Convinced that the use of force on one side would be answered by recourse to arms on the other, We considered it a duty inseparable from Our Apostolic office and of Christian Charity to try every means to spare mankind and Christianity the horrors of a world conflagration, even at the risk of having Our intentions and Our aims misunderstood.”  He encouraged people to keep faith that good will prevail, and he once again expressed his faith in the ultimate triumph of God’s will.

This encyclical shows that Pius did not waver in his approach to Hitler and the Nazis. In 1939 he laid out his vision, which he followed for the rest of the war. Thus, it was not a matter of fear, nor did Pius change after he learned of the Nazi abuses. All along he thought that the best way to assure peace was through prayer. All along he thought that the best way to assure peace was through prayer.  He charted his course and stayed with it.

 

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

(11/2000)

author of Yours is a Precious Witness: Memoirs of Jews and Catholics in Wartime Italy, (1997) and Pope Pius XII: Architect for Peace, (Paulist Press, 2000).

            In the last 30 years, above all with the pontificate of John Paul II, giant steps have been made toward progress in dialogue between Jews and Catholics.  To prepare a serious scholarly analysis on Pius XII, several scholars were called to participate in a Commission in order to examine the Vatican documents of the Holy See during the Second World War.  This group’s assignment as scholars was to analyze documents already published.  The group consisted of three Catholics: Eva Fleischner, Gerald Fogarty, and John Morley; and three Jews: Michael Marrus, Bernard Suchecky, and Robert Wistrich.

            Marrus was interviewed by Paolo Mastrolilli, an Italian journalist.  “We must not fall into the error of evaluating facts that occurred more than 50 years ago with today’s sensitivity,” Marrus stated.  …”Vatican Council II has enormously changed relations between Jews and Catholics, and therefore now certain attitudes may seem strange.  During the period of Pius XII, the reality of the times was different.”

            According to Fogarty, “Pius XII believed more in diplomacy than in public declarations and he behaved himself accordingly.  His priority was to stop Nazism and for this reason he also accepted in silence the alliance with Russia, reserving for himself the fight against Communism at a latter date.  The American Secret Services have documents that judge in a very positive way the actions of the Vatican during the war, but until now they have remained secret.  The Holy See was careful to preserve its neutrality, but there exists proofs of the help offered to several German generals, who in the Spring of 1940 had planned a plot to free themselves of Hitler: therefore, what counts more, the public words of the Pope, or the acts accomplished to stop Nazism?”

            Fogarty also said that “the panel has still not succeeded in overcoming the widespread myth in Anglo-Saxon culture which believes that there are important unpublished documents in the Vatican Archives.  If such files existed, other proofs of those documents would have been found in the studies I have carried out in archives all over Europe.”  In order to help his colleagues understand that the opening of the Vatican Archives does not answer these questions definitively, he gave this example: “In the spring of 1940 there was an attempt to oust Hitler by a group of generals who later tried to surrender to the English.  The negotiations took place with the Vatican’s mediation and the knowledge of Pius XII.  However, there are no documents on this case in the Vatican.”

            There was no guarantee that the Nazis would have respected the Vatican.  One can readily understand that, when the Nazis occupied Rome and the SS and the Gestapo were searching for Jews throughout the Rome area, it was necessary to destroy whatever documentation might have affected Vatican neutrality.

            Apparently, the Commission members did not research the existing material that would have answered, at least in part, some of the 47 questions.  Some of this information may be found in other archives.  A typical example is Number 44.  It reads: “The Poles were major victims of the Nazis.  Members of the Polish Government in Exile in London and some Polish bishops were often very vocal in their criticism of Pius XII’s role.  It has been reported that the Vatican commissioned the Jesuits to prepare a defense of its Polish policy.  Is this correct and, if so, may we see the report?  More generally, the subject of Vatican-Polish relations is an essential element for understanding the role of the Holy See during the Holocaust period and deserves further investigation in the Vatican archives.  Is there other pertinent information on this subject in the archives that is not in the volumes, and may we see it?”

            Obviously the members of the Commission did not complete their homework.  The documentation they requested may be found in the New York Public Library.  Indeed, millions of Jews and non-Jews were brutally victimized and exterminated by the Nazis.  The document, “Pope Pius and Poland,” published by The American Press should have enlightened the Commission members.  Copies have been available.  With the imprimatur of Cardinal Francis J. Spellman, Archbishop of New York, this documentary outline of papal pronouncements and relief efforts in behalf of Poland since 1939, was published in 1942, and made available at 10 cents per copy.

            In the Foreword, Francis X. Talbot, S.J., editor-in-chief, states: “To those who love and seek the truth, here is the truth.  History will record the truth that Pope Pius XII stands united with Poland, as Poland and the Polish people everywhere are united with the Pope.”  This pamphlet is a schematic outline of the evidence available that shows the fatherly affection and deep understanding which His Holiness revealed  toward the Polish people.  It is based on what has been published in newspapers and other periodicals or announced on the radio.  (See The New York Times, Vatican Radio and L’Osservatore Romano.)

            The day after his election, March 3, 1939, Pius XII pleaded for peace and diplomatic efforts to prevent the outbreak of hostilities.  (See Acta Apostolicae Sedis, XXXI (1939), pp. 86, 87.)  Other statements followed on Easter Sunday (Ibid., p. 145ff.)  and June 2, 1939, to the Sacred College of Cardinals [See L’Osservatore Romano, June 3, 1939.]

            On August 29, 1939, in his radio appeal Pius XII pleaded: “…Humanity craves justice, bread and liberty, not the sword that kills and destroys.  Christ is with us; for brotherly love was made by Him a solemn and fundamental commandment…” (Acta Apostolicae Sedis, XXXI, 1939, pp. 333, 335)

            On August 31, 1939, the Pope called the ambassadors of Germany, France, Italy and Poland to his study and the Cardinal Secretary of State distributed to each a copy of his pontifical message: “The Holy Father is unwilling to abandon the hope that the present negotiations may issue in a just and peaceful solution  such as the whole world continues to implore.  In the name of God, therefore, His Holiness exhorts the Governments of Germany and Poland to do everything possible to avoid incidents of every kind and to forego every measure that might aggravate the present tension.  He begs the Governments of England, France and Italy to second this request.  (Ibid., pp. 335-336)

            Already on September 3, 1939, many Polish cities were burning and the country was bathed in blood and tears.  The Pope received a group of Polish refugees at Castelgandolfo and tried to comfort them, pointing out that the Fatherly Providence of God was the fundamental guarantee of the indestructibility of the nation and of its rebirth after the passing calamities of the moment.  Christ… “one day will reward the tears you shed over your beloved dead, and over a Poland that shall never perish.” (Ibid., pp. 393-396)

            The Commission questions Pius XII’s reaction to Kristallnacht(“The Night of the Broken Glass”).  Did the members read the articles in the Vatican newspapers, L’Osservatore Romano, reporting on the anti-Jewish atrocities committed on Kristallnacht?  This newspaper, describing the crimes of November, 1938, with headlines such as, “Dopo le manifestazion antisemite in Germania,” and “La ripercussione delle manifestazion antisemite in Germania,” was the voice of Pope Pius XII.

            As Andrea Tornielli, in Il Giornale, November 13, 1998, points out: “It is ironic that Meir Lau, Israel’s Chief Rabbi, denounced the silence of Pope Pius XII after Kristallnacht on November 9, 1938.”  The Rabbi questioned:  “Where was Pius XII in November of 1938.”  “Why didn’t he denounce the violence of that night?”  Torniello writes: “Eugenio Pacelli was not yet Pope.  He was in Rome, Secretary of State to Pius XI who did not hesitate to condemn racial hatred during an audience, stating: Spiritually we are all Semites.”  [The Rabbi seems to have forgotten that Eugenio Pacelli had not yet been elected to the Chair of Peter which took place on March 2, 1939.]

            What was Pacelli doing in the Vatican?  Even before Kristallnachthe was assisting the Pontiff in writing the encyclical Mit brenneder Sorge (March 14, 1937), with which the Catholic Church condemned Nazism.  This was a denunciation that provoked Hitler’s anger.  It was written in German because the Vatican wanted it read in all the churches in Germany on Palm Sunday, March 21, 1937.  In fact, the following day, the National Socialist Party newspaper Volkischer Beobachter published a poisonous counterattack to the “Jewish God and his vicar in Rome.”

            Tornielli belongs to a group of Jewish and Christian writers who want to spread the truth.  However, the difficulty lies with the fact that prejudice regarding the “silence” of the Pontiff is a very popular theme.  Apparently, the media refuses to acknowledge the truth.

            The facts cannot be denied.  Sixty years ago on Kristallnacht, the Nazis destroyed 1,400 synagogues and stores belonging to Jewish citizens in Germany and Austria.  The following days German newspapers published statements by Lutheran theologians who, far from condemning the violence, were pleased that the persecution began on Martin Luther’s birthday.

According to Andrea Tornielli’s article, Hitler’s followers executed the program found in Luther’s book Von den Juden und ihren Lugen(1543), translated from German into Latin by Justus Jonas.  In 1936 it was circulated in a version edited by the evangelical theologian Dr. Linden.  An Italian edition with commentary by Attilio Agnoletto, was published in 1997.

             In this book, Luther advises that “under pain of death the Rabbis should not be allowed to teach and Jews should be denied the public trust and safe-conduct.”  He also states that “work should be imposed on all young and robust Jews, men and women, so that they will earn their bread with the sweat of their brow.”

            It is not difficult to imagine that the Nazis would find these words the legitimization of the concentration camps.  But it is strange that during the commemoration of Kristallnacht, the one to be accused has been Pope Pius XII.  Instead, not a word about the theologians who applauded and reprinted the ferocious anti-Jewish libel.

 

by Robert P. Lockwood

(9/2000)

Shortly before the joint beatification of Pope John XXIII and Pope Pius IX on September 3, 2000, Catholic News Service published a story contrasting popular reaction to the two men.¹ The report noted Italian television specials planned on Pope John XXIII, gift shops crowded with holy cards, books and videos on his life, and pilgrims still flocking to his tomb. This was contrasted with virtual silence over Pope Pius IX, whose tomb at the Basilica of St. Lawrence was closed to the public as workers wrestled with a drainage problem.

          Pope John XXIII (1958-1963) remains “Papa Giovanni” in the public imagination. Though pope for only five years (he was elected as an “interim” pontiff at the age of 77), he is recalled as the pope who convened the Second Vatican Council. His encyclicals Mater et Magistra and Pacem in Terris were considered landmarks in the development of modern Catholic social doctrine. On the popular level, he is remembered as much for his approachable demeanor and down-to-earth spirituality after the seemingly esthetic, mystical later years of his predecessor, Pius XII. The pope of ecumenism, John XXIII’s popularity extended well into the non-Catholic world andTime magazine named him its “Man of the Year” in 1962.

          Pope Pius IX is a man of another century. He served as pope from 1846 to 1878, the longest and one of the most difficult pontificates in history. (St. Peter’s pontificate was traditionally listed as 25 years and, until Pius IX, it was assumed that no pope would ever reign longer than the first pontiff.) He was immensely popular in his own times throughout much of the Catholic world, though certainly not in the leadership of the burgeoning 19^th century republics or in radical circles. He was the first public pope of the modern era.

          Pope Pius IX, or Pio Nono, as he was both affectionately and not so affectionately called in Italian, has been treated less kindly by the world. Though Pope John XXIII himself spoke well of Pius IX and reinvigorated the investigation of his possible canonization,² the popular portrait of his papacy has him as a diehard reactionary adverse to the modern world. He is pictured as interested only in amassing papal power, and through the First Vatican Council he substituted a definition of papal infallibility for the loss of the papacy’s temporal kingdom in the nineteenth-century creation of the Italian State. He is seen as an anti-Semite who collaborated in the kidnapping and forced conversion of a Jewish child, with the dark hint of a papacy that helped generate the mindset in Catholic Europe that would lead to the Holocaust. Finally, he was the enemy of the freedoms of the modern world through his infamous Syllabus of Errors that condemned all that was right in modern thinking. This image of Pius IX persists. It is certainly encouraged within certain Catholic circles that have never forgiven the First Vatican Council’s definition of papal infallibility. They create an image of Pius IX forcing such a definition on an unwilling hierarchy.³

          Beatification and canonization in the Church involve judgments of sanctity on the merits and holiness of an individual’s life.  The reasons for the beatification of Pope Pius IX certainly center on those aspects of his life, not necessarily on the impact or results of the policies of his papacy. Yet, various pundits have put forward their own explanations of his beatification by Pope John Paul II. These range from an attempt to balance an allegedly “liberal” Pope John XXIII with the caricature of a “conservative” Pius IX, as well as the more realistic view of connecting the popes of the First and Second Vatican Councils. In any case, the alleged purpose of his beatification beyond recognition of his own personal sanctity is simply conjecture. What is of concern, however, are the historical caricatures created of Pope Pius IX. Painting Pius as the anti-Semitic enemy of freedom interested only in exercising power over lives fits a portrait of Catholicism common in the bitterly anti-Catholic world of 19^th century Europe and America. The caricature also fits comfortably with contemporary anti-Catholic sentiment. Yet, Pius IX and his world – as well as his reaction to it – are far more complicated than the secularized propaganda that greeted his beatification. 

          Though Pope Pius IX would serve for 32 years, the modern caricature of his papacy surrounds four events: his resistance to Italian unification and political trends in 19^th century Europe; the Syllabus of Errors that appeared to set the Church squarely against democratic ideals; the “kidnapping” of Edgardo Mortara, a Jewish child taken from his family by authorities after his Christian baptism was discovered; and the definition of the doctrine of papal infallibility at the First Vatican Council of 1870. It is these events that bear closer inspection, while keeping in mind the larger agenda of a pontificate that would see the Church reborn and revitalized after it appeared to be virtually destroyed at the beginning of the century.       

Background

          The future Pope Pius IX was born Giovanni Maria Mastai-Ferretti in Senagallia in the Papal States, the ninth child of a minor count in 1792. He was born into a troubled world. Before he had reached the age of 21, French authorities imprisoned two popes and, without the bravery of those popes, the Church would have become an effective puppet of France. The Church in revolutionary France had been virtually destroyed and the old Catholic dynasties of Europe seemed destined to collapse.

          In 1797, Pope Pius VI was forced by the French to accept the virtual destruction of the Papal States, the “patrimony of St. Peter” that the popes had ruled for over a thousand years. After a riot broke out over the planting of “Liberty Trees” around Rome, French troops entered the city and Pius VI, terminally ill, was carted off as a prisoner. He died under French imprisonment in August 1799.  His successor faired no better. Pope Pius VII had returned to Rome when Napoleon had assumed complete power and appeared to moderate his position against the Church. He concluded an agreement with Pius over the reconstruction of the French hierarchy. Pius VII was forced to take part in Napoleon’s self-coronation as emperor in 1804.

          Within a short time, however, Napoleon’s desire to become “King of All Italy” and to secure the Pope’s alliance in his war against the allies led to French occupation of Rome and cannons aimed at the papal residence. In July 1808, like his predecessor, Pope Pius VII was arrested by French troops when he refused to abdicate as sovereign of the Papal States. He would live as a monk (he had been a Benedictine monk prior to his election) in the episcopal residence at Savona for four years before being forced to France in 1812. He was unable to exercise any authority and on more than one occasion, came close to virtually surrendering his authority over the Church to the whim of the Emperor. But with Napoleon’s defeat, Pius returned to Rome on March 24, 1814, welcomed as a living martyr.⁴

          Before Giovanni Mastai-Ferretti had been ordained a priest in 1819, two popes had been imprisoned and the Church in Europe nearly destroyed by the revolutionary movements and nationalist fervor that swept out of France and across the continent. At age 15, the young man had begun to suffer from epileptic seizures and he needed a special episcopal dispensation before ordination. It required that he not celebrate Mass without the assistance of another priest. However, his career soon progressed rapidly. He was assigned to the papal diplomatic corps (he would serve for a time in Chile) and in 1827 became archbishop of Spoleto and, in 1832, bishop of Imola near Bologna.

            The Church had been dramatically affected by the chaos of the French Revolution and its Napoleonic aftermath. The seizure and restoration of the Papal States had a strong impact on how the Church viewed itself and what was necessary for it to continue its mission in the 19^th century. The Papal States were lands in Italy directly ruled by the Holy See, stretching back over the centuries. Though tradition held that they came by donation of the Emperor Constantine in the Fourth Century, they can directly be traced to the “Donation of Pepin” in 756. Varying in size, but always centered in Rome, the Papal States were ruled directly by the Pope as a temporal sovereign. Napoleon had annexed the Papal States to the French Empire in 1809. The reconstruction of Europe at the Congress of Vienna in 1815 restored the Papal States.

           The surrender of the Papal States by Pius VII and his virtual incarceration by Napoleon reinforced in the Church the vital need for the pope to maintain his position as a temporal ruler. Without the Papal States, the Emperor dominated Pius and his spiritual authority compromised. It became clear to the Church at the time what history appeared to teach: without the Papal States, the pope could become merely a pawn of whatever European ruler dominated at any given point. The pope should be a citizen of no country and not subject to the laws of individual rulers. Free exercise of the papal ministry was equated with the freedom guaranteed by being a temporal ruler subject to no other ruler or nation. “On the lips of Napoleon the call for the Pope to lay down his temporal sovereignty and to rely on spiritual authority had been blatant code for the enslavement of the papacy to French imperial ambitions. Without his temporal power, Pius VII…had come within a whisker of signing away his spiritual authority. If the Pope did not remain a temporal king, then it seemed he could no longer be the Church’s chief bishop.”⁵ That firm belief was central to Church’s understanding from 1814 on. But it would directly clash with the movement for Italian unification as a nation-state. The Papal States cut Italy in half and was centered in Rome, Italy’s most important and historic city.

          While the Church struggled to rebuild after the devastation of the Napoleonic wars, the restoration of the monarchies established by the Congress of Vienna would prove a chimera. A new world was emerging where national identity – rather than identity with ancient royal houses – would become a driving forced in both politics and how people thought of themselves. It was an era when racial identity, and racism, became a growing and dangerous part of “modern” thinking. This new “racialism” would underlie many of the tragedies that would be faced by Giovanni Mastai-Ferretti when elected pope in 1846.

         The two major predecessors of Pio Nono, Pope Leo XII (1823-1829) and Pope Gregory XVI (1831-1846)⁶ faced this new world sternly. Pope Leo worked diligently – some would say harshly – to reestablish firm control over the Papal States. Pope Leo re-instituted difficult rules against Jews living in the Papal States and followed a diplomatic policy that supported the royal houses of Europe. It was this seeming alliance between “throne and altar” in an age where there were growing movements toward more representative forms of government that was be a difficult inheritance for Pius IX. Pope Gregory would carry this policy so far that he condemned a Polish Catholic uprising against the Russian Czar who viciously persecuted the Polish Church. Facing rebellions in his own Papal States, Gregory would not consider compromising to the principle of revolution.

          At the same time, however, the severity of what the Church faced must be understood. The new, “liberal” regimes that would arise in Europe were not as we might picture them. The separation of Church and State, for example, was not a constitutional prescription for both to operate independently of each other. It meant, instead, that the Church would be dominated by the new regimes. Church property was confiscated, religious orders suppressed, the Church banned from education. The government would determine Church appointments and anti-clerical legislation would be widespread. Papal authority to work with the bishops within the nation states would be severely limited, and government permission was needed – and routinely denied – for the publication of papal edicts and encyclicals. Throughout the 1830s and 1840s, Pope Gregory confronted over and over again governmental attempts to limit and suppress Church life. As will be seen in the section on papal infallibility, pressure for a clearer definition came from many bishops who had seen the papacy as their means of protection against state persecution and control.

           At the very beginning of his pontificate, Pope Gregory had made what would be seen as a disastrous decision. Gregory had needed to call on the assistance of Austrian troops in the summer of 1831. The 1830 revolution in France overthrew the Bourbon monarchy reestablished at the Congress of Vienna and replaced it with the so-called “Citizen King,” Louis Phillippe, who would rule until overthrown in the revolution of 1848 that would return a Bonaparte to power. This sparked uprisings in Italy where there was growing popular movement for a unified Italian state. It was the birth of the “risorgimento,” the Italian reunification movement. Within weeks of Gregory’s election, rebels controlled many cities throughout the Papal States. He called on the Austrian government to help suppress the rebellion. “It was a fateful moment for the papacy, in which it threw its lot in with the big battalions, against a growing Italian desire for liberty and self-determination. The aftermath in the Papal States was disastrous. The papal prisons filled up, and exiles schooled Europe in anti-papalism.”⁷ Gregory’s rule of the Papal States, protected and propped up by foreign troops, was hated in Italy and became a symbol in Europe – unfairly when compared to most contemporary governments – of the worst in reactionary authority.    

           This was the legacy that would be inherited by Pope Pius IX: a commitment of the Church to the Papal States as the only means to assure the freedom of the popes to spiritually rule the Church; a rise in nationalism and racialism as the dominant aspects of European life; a growing reliance on papal authority as the only means to protect the Church from the anti-Catholic repression of the new “liberal” states; and an unfortunate reliance on foreign troops to maintain papal authority within the Papal States, forcing the pope to be seen as a hindrance to Italian dreams of unification.

Pope Pius IX, Nationalism and the Italian Risorgimento

           When Pope Pius IX was elected at the surprisingly young age of 54 the more conservative forces in Europe shuddered. At first glance, he appeared to be sympathetic to the new liberal nationalism. He was elected in only two days, one of the shortest conclaves in history. He was elected primarily by Italians, who made up 54 of the 62 cardinals.⁸ The new pope immediately ordered amnesty for prisoners and exiles, most of whom had been had been revolutionaries. The new pope was hailed a “liberal,” and Europe proclaimed him a hero. In Italy and in certain Church intellectual circles, it had often been expressed that the pope could provide the monarchial leadership of a united Italy under a constitutional government. In Pius IX, many Italians felt they had found such a man.

          It was a misreading of Pius that would help create an image of an early, “liberal” pope that would be replaced by a reactionary once he faced revolution in Rome. This is a common understanding in historical interpretation of his reign, but needs to be modified. In fact, Pius from his first days could not be defined politically. He was moderate, deeply spiritual, yet also a simple man. He would be known for a playful sense of humor (as well as a sharp temper), and had an almost naïve, caring soul. Even when his temper gained the best of him, he did not bear grudges and was almost always self-effacing and apologetic at the next meeting with those who had generated his anger. Even his most strident enemies, once having met him, uniformly praised his charm, spirituality and simplicity. Most important, he was completely and totally a man of the Church who saw God’s providence in all the events of his reign. Even in the loss of the Rome and the Papal States he would see the mysterious action of God. Though certainly sympathetic early to Italian patriotic movements, his concern was with the Church and, through the Church, for the salvation of souls. Ascribing to Pius a consistent and driving political philosophy or a political agenda separate from the Church is to misunderstand the man. Even his loyalty to the Papal States was not a temporal matter. He saw his rule as part of the Patrimony of Peter and as an absolute necessity for the spiritual independence of the Church.

          Pius IX began rudimentary representative political reforms in the Papal States. He removed many of the restrictions on Jews and tore open the gates of the Jewish ghetto in Rome. In 1847, he demanded that the Austrians withdraw from a border city within the Papal States. When the Austrians withdrew, he was seen as a hero to Italian patriots. (It is said that the revolutionary Garibaldi, living in Brazil, offered his service to the papal representative upon hearing the news.) More and more, Italian patriots came to believe that unification could be had by throwing the Austrians out of Italy, overthrowing the “foreign rulers,” and establishing Pope Pius IX as a constitutional monarch.

          In the year 1848, revolutions swept Europe. Louis Phillippe lost his throne in France and rulers throughout the states of Germany faced uprisings. In Austria, the architect of the Europe that arose from the Congress of Vienna, Chancellor Metternich, was overthrown. In a short time, Italy was in flames.  Pius IX had instituted reforms in the government of the Papal States that were promising, and in 1848 he established elected municipal government in Rome. But the fear remained that whatever happened, revolutions in Italy would be squelched by Austrian or French troops. When war broke out in northern Italy against the Austrians, it was hoped that the Pope would order papal troops to join the battle. He did not. Instead, on April 29, 1848, he announced that he could not send men to war on a Catholic nation. He renounced any tactic to name him king of a unified Italy, and called for an end to violent revolution. Throughout Italy, it was believed that the Pope had abandoned the cause of liberty.

          Pius struggled over the next few months to maintain the integrity – and neutrality – of the Papal States against the Austrian army, while keeping civil peace within the Papal States. Rome itself was seething with violence and potential revolution. Pius appointed Pelligrino Rossi to be his prime minister in September. Rossi “cleansed the police force of unreliable men, ordered an army battalion out of Rome, protected the Jews in the old ghetto who were at risk from the mob, brought in a strong force of police from outside Rome, and ejected to Naples a couple of well-known revolutionaries…”⁹ He hoped to counter the king of Piedmont in northern Italy who was making strong moves to head up a federated Italian state. He cleaned up the streets of Rome and made them safe. He gave all the appearances of a man putting down a rebellion. He was. And on November 15^th he was stabbed to death.

          Mob violence exploded in Rome. Outside the papal residence, the Quirinal palace, a mob demanded a new government, and a monsignor standing next to the Pope was killed by gunfire.    When a revolutionary government was forced on the Pope, he decided to flee Rome and went to Gaeta under the protection of King Ferdinand of Naples. In Rome, the revolutionary government attempted to secure the Pope’s return but could not guarantee his freedom to reign over the Church, let alone the Papal States. The Roman rebellion turned ugly and though the new government attempted to restrain the mobs, priests were killed and churches desecrated. Five bishops were arrested and the government took over Church property. However, the revolts throughout Italy began to collapse under the crush of Austrian troops. At that point, the French, now under the dictatorship of Louis Napoleon, deemed it wise to invade Rome and restore order, rather than see the Austrians occupy the city. Nine months later, on April 12, 1850, the Pope returned. He abandoned the Quirinal for the Vatican, a symbolic move from the palace of his temporal authority to the home of his spiritual authority. For 20 years, Pope Pius IX would retain temporal power but solely through the occupation of Austrian and French troops in Rome.

          It was certainly true that Pope Pius became far less sympathetic to the cause of Italian unification after 1848. Wherever revolutions occurred, widespread violence and attacks on the Church took place. He had been shown clearly what revolution meant in this period of European history, with a priest shot dead next to him. The revolutionary Roman government was decidedly opposed to the Church and vowed to eliminate the Catholic impact on civil society. Pius had seen revolution and found it dangerous.

          In the three decades of his papacy, Pius IX would develop an enormous personal following among Catholics worldwide. The Church was growing rapidly, particularly outside the chaos of continental Europe. The internationalization of the Church expanded as it never had before. And Pius was its leading public figure, not because of his political savvy but rather the strength of his faith and how well it resonated with the world’s Catholics. “The strength of the authority of Pope Pius IX in the Catholic Church lay not in the crowned heads, nor in the need of clergy under pressure from governments to appeal to Rome for help, nor in better communications, nor even, in the world-wide sense in Catholicism, that the Pope was in danger of persecution in the modern world…Pius IX shared the people’s affection for a warmth of devotion, for the cults of the Blessed Virgin and the Sacred Heart, and the coming forms of eucharistic devotion. He was a religious man and a pastor by instinct, not at all a politician. The development of the Churches in Europe during the next three decades elicited all the priestly side of him, so that his personal influence upon the Catholic Church became greater than any of his predecessors…”¹⁰

          After the revolutions of 1848 and 1849 and their suppression, Piedmont – with a constitutional government under the monarchy – became the hope for Italian unification by driving out the Austrians and taking over the Papal States. It became the darling of liberal and Protestant Europe, while the Papal States were tarred as a medieval throwback destined for the dustbin of history. Piedmont would launch a series of anti-Catholic legislative acts to prove its stripes in Europe and to maintain support toward its goal of assuming the leadership of the entire peninsula. Under the brilliant leadership of Count Camillo di Cavour, a consistent publicity campaign to undermine the credibility of papal rule was undertaken worldwide. The spreading impact of newspapers on the rising middle classes would be a tremendous source in undermining his reputation in Europe and America in particular. Newspapers of this era were little more than hysterical propaganda sheets, as this was long before there existed even the slightest commitment to objectivity and balance. (It would be an important concept to remember when the Syllabus of Errors would condemn the concept of freedom of the press. This was a reaction not to objective and responsible journalism, but rather to the concept of hate literature and irresponsible political propaganda of which most newspapers thrived in that period.)      

          Pope Pius IX inadvertently fueled this hate campaign when he reestablished the British hierarchy in 1850. The Catholic population in England had been growing through Irish immigration and had accelerated during the disastrous famine of the 1840s. The Catholic Church in England was ruled previously by vicars reporting directly to Rome. The reestablishment of the hierarchy allowed for direct and quicker action. It made sense. Also, the Oxford Movement within Anglicanism – an attempt to recapture the apostolic and Catholic nature of the Church – had recently led to a number of prominent conversions to Catholicism, including that of John Henry Newman. Combined with the reestablishment of the hierarchy, England saw all this and went through one of its periodic bouts of “no-popery.” A practical result of this was England’s formal declaration in 1856 that the Papal State was a European scandal and demanded that Austrian and French troops should be withdrawn.¹¹

          In the United States, the 1850s saw the rise of anti-Catholicism in the powerful Know Nothing movement. A political movement prior to the Civil War, the popular appeal of the Know Nothing Party was based on a growing anti-immigrant and anti-Catholic sentiment. 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 in their own schools where dangerous doctrines were taught. 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.¹²  

          The combination of many of these forces not only dramatically impacted on the history of that era, but upon that history’s portrayal. The propaganda spread by supporters of Italian unification, England’s consistent anti-Catholicism, and a receptive audience in the United States, helped to create fertile ground for the image of an intractable medieval Pope dominating an impoverished Papal States yearning for freedom from theocracy.  These sentiments in combination would support what was essentially a land grab against a virtually defenseless Papal States by the government of Piedmont.

           Cavour secured the support of France to oust the Austrians from their strongholds in Northern Italy and war broke out in the Spring of 1859. Cities within the Papal States erupted in support of the popular war to oust the Austrians. (When a revolt in Perugia was ruthlessly suppressed by Swiss mercenaries, the papacy took another propaganda defeat in the eyes of Europe.) Under the pretext of war, Piedmont annexed a large section of the Papal States. This was simple aggrandizement and Pius IX could do nothing but thunder in protest. With Garibaldi’s victories in Sicily and southern Italy, Victor Emmanuel, king of Piedmont, was declared king of a not-quite-united Italy in 1861. The Papal States by now virtually ceased to exist, leaving only Rome and a small strip of western Italy under papal control. Throughout Italy, the new Italian state would wage war on the Church with the Church fighting back by refusing the sacraments and not taking part in state celebrations. Bishops were jailed, monasteries and Catholic schools suppressed, convents disbanded. All that was left was the final taking of Rome. Prussia had overthrown Austrian power in 1866, leaving only the French troops in Rome to defend the Pope. In 1870, at the onset of the Franco-Prussian War, the French troops were withdrawn and Victor Emmanuel sent his soldiers to secure the city. On papal orders, only token resistance was offered. Italy was now unified, and the Pope declared himself a “prisoner” and retreated to the Vatican.¹³

           While in the Catholic world Pope Pius was viewed as a martyr, his defense of the Papal States reinforced an image of him as a stern opponent of freedom. It is true that, in the end, the loss of the Papal States would actually serve to elevate the papal reputation worldwide. At the time, however, it was viewed as a stunning defeat by both the Church itself, and a secular world that assumed the Church had received a mortal blow.  The Church would quickly understand, however, that loss of temporal authority for the Pope did not destroy his spiritual authority. In fact, it enhanced it in the eyes of the world.

           Pope Pius IX would live for another eight years after the final loss of the Papal States. The absorption of the Papal States was an act of raw piracy no matter how positively the outcome was viewed by the world and history. The Pope would speak out – excommunicating those involved in the seizure – but never truly adopted a policy to either regain the Papal States or directly undermine the new Italian government. If anything, he hoped for a miracle and if no miracle was forthcoming, it must be God’s will.

          The final political challenge that engaged Pius IX was the Prussian kulturkampfunder Otto von Bismarck. When the Prussian armies defeated Louis Napoleon in the Franco-Prussian War in 1870, the Prussian state would turn on the Church as its paramount danger.   Among other matters, a series of laws were promulgated against the Church, including convent inspections, the removal of the church from education, the ouster of the Jesuits, the right of the state to reject Church appointments, and for the local Church to be free of “foreign intrusion,” meaning papal authority. This was how the separation of Church and State was defined in the period. With the growth of the national State apparatus, all aspects of civil life fell under State control. It was strongly believed, for example, that religious schools would undermine the secular State. Education should be the monopoly of the State and it was viewed as a violation of Church and State separation if religious controlled individual schools. Education was the duty of the State to raise children in proper nationalistic fervor.

          Bismarck’s kulturkampf backfired. Strong resistance united Catholics under Pius IX. By 1877, Bismarck knew the policy was a failure and would slowly withdraw it. When Pius IX died in 1878, Bismarck offered a toast and felt free to abandon the policy completely. Curiously, Pius is often blamed for the vehemence of the kulturkampf. The argument is made that the definition of papal infallibility promulgated by the First Vatican Council triggered repression of the Church in Germany. This was not the case. Bismarck viewed the Church as an enemy to control long before the First Vatican Council. Germany, he believed, could not be united with a strong Catholic presence as a counterpoint to the power of the State. Wherever the new nation states arose Catholicism was seen as a force that undermined nationalism.¹⁴

          The endless battles of Pope Pius IX with the new Europe that was emerging throughout his long pontificate dramatically affected how he would be viewed by history. From a liberal “hero” in the first two years of his pontificate, Pius’ refusal to wage war on Austria in the cause of Italian unification turned “thinking” Europe against him almost over night. Much of the popular knowledge of his pontificate is forever colored by the incessant propaganda of his political enemies. We also tend to forget that the “liberalism” of the growing nation states of Europe was not how we define liberalism today.

          The nation states developing in Europe – fiercely anti-Catholic and highly nationalistic – were the forerunners of the totalitarian states of the 20^th century. Bismarck’s Prussia and Cavour’s Italian kingdom, would become Nazi Germany and Fascist Italy.  The seeds of this horrific development were planted in racialism, nationalism and communism that grew directly from the philosophy of liberalism of 19^th century Europe. From that perspective, the political policies of Pius IX make much greater sense than merely a reactionary bigotry most often portrayed, particularly when the beatification of the pope was treated in the popular press. It also helps to frame at least an understanding of the vehemence of his Syllabus of Errors and the concerns that were behind it.

The Syllabus of Errors

No other document of Pope Pius IX generated more controversy in his own time than the Syllabus of Errors. It became a document cited consistently – and to our own day – by fundamentalist critics of the Church. At the time it was issued, it was viewed by liberal Europe as proof that the Catholic Church was an anachronism doomed to extinction.

          The Syllabus of Errors was issued as an attachment to an 1864 encyclical of Pius IX, Quanta Cura. The encyclical itself and the Syllabus had been in the planning stages for a number of years, though the immediate cause was a speech given in France by a liberal Catholic, Count Charles Montalembert in 1863. He argued that the Church must accept the rise of independent democracies and the new world that was emerging. The old Catholic regimes were dying, and absolutism was dead. The Church must forget the concept of Catholic states and enter the turbulent world of the new democracies. His view was summarized as a call for a “free Church in a free state.” It was better to tolerate error, as long as the Church was free to respond with the truth.

          The speech irked conservatives within the Church who demanded a clear refutation. Particularly from the Italian perspective, they looked at the world of the so-called “free states” and saw confiscated property, nuns and priests driven from their Religious Orders, bishops arrested, the Church drummed out of any role in education or the public arena, heated anti-Catholic rhetoric in newspapers and legislatures, and the confiscation of the Papal States by armed force. They wondered if this was the future of a “free Church in a free State.”

           By early 1860, many within the Church had argued that a formalized response to the errors of the modern world was necessary. The Church was being portrayed universally as the enemy of thought and civilization, representing a return to the Dark Ages. This disgusted Catholics who saw the Church as the converter of barbarian Europe, the preserver of ancient knowledge, the creator of the glories of the Renaissance, and the salvation of the world through Christ. To their minds, what had modern civilization created – slums, crime, political chaos, hatred, racism, war, agnosticism and atheism. They looked at the world since the French Revolution, and they saw not the rebirth of civilization, but its collapse.

          The Syllabus itself was a collection of 80 statements from the Church responding to specific propositions. The Syllabus read as propositions to be condemned. For example, condemned were the propositions that “All action of God upon man and the world was to be denied”¹⁵; and “The State, as being the origin and source of all rights, is endowed with a certain right not circumscribed by any limits.”¹⁶

          The encyclical and the Syllabus went through any number of drafts and, over time, Pius seemed to have lost interest in it and may not have read the final draft.¹⁷The encyclical with the Syllabus was released in 1864 and caused an almost immediate firestorm. The encyclical in many ways was a fair statement against a host of current thought that remain worthy of condemnation today – indifferentism, atheism, rationalism. The Syllabus itself contained 80 condemned propositions, many of which are similarly worthy of rebuke: denying the existence of God and the truth of Scripture, the Church’s right to teach is dependent on the consent of secular authority, the equation of human reason with Divine Revelation, the all-inclusive authority of the State.

          Other areas provided more graduated degrees of difficulty, particularly if read in the context of today’s understanding of the ideas involved. The condemnation of separation of Church and State seems archaic. What must not be forgotten is how such separation was defined at the time. It certainly meant in many countries, such as Bismarck’s Prussia, that the Church was absolutely subservient to the State and must be divorced entirely from civil life. When the encyclical condemned freedom of the press, it was being drafted at the time of a viciously anti-Catholic press and a journalism that had no norms of objectivity or balance.

          There are areas in the Syllabus that are both prophetic and a grim reminder of the philosophy of State and race that was growing more and more popular in Europe, particularly in the growing acceptance of the thesis that as the State represented the race of people, the State has the right to wield complete authority over the individual as the representative of the people.

          The most serious difficulties in the public perception of the Syllabus, however, were in the last four condemned propositions. These propositions supported the concept of the Catholic Church being the official religion of a State and appeared to deny religious tolerance to non-Catholics. The 80^th and last proposition would be greeted with hilarity and satire, when it condemned the notion that the “Roman Pontiff can, and ought to, reconcile himself, and come to terms with progress, liberalism and modern civilization.”¹⁸

          “The Syllabus was in fact a far less devastating document than it appeared at first sight. Its 80 propositions were extracted from earlier papal documents, and Pio Nono repeatedly said that the true meaning of the Syllabus could be discovered only be referring to the original context. So, the offensive proposition 80 came from the briefIamdudum Cernimus of 1861. Its apparently wholesale condemnation of ‘progress, liberalism and modern civilization’ in fact referred quite specifically to the Piedmontese government’s closure of the monasteries and Church schools.”¹⁹ That was the explanation given to the Syllabus in an immensely popular pamphlet written by the bishop of Orleans, Felix Dupanloup. Pius IX accepted the bishop’s interpretation as accurate. Citing each of the propositions, Dupanloup noted the exact source of the condemnation in reference to an exact event or statement. This gave vital historical context to the Syllabus as well as a clear frame of reference. It roots the Syllabus in its specific point in time, and gives it a greater understanding than when read with contemporary eyes. 

            With Bishop Dupanloup’s explanation in hand, much of the initial furor over theSyllabus died out. The Syllabus generated the most difficulty in the United States, where it was often used as anti-Catholic fodder in making the case that the Church was fundamentally opposed to the separation of Church and State, religious tolerance, public schools and free speech. It is still used today in that regard by some fundamentalist critics, forgetting the time and the context in which it was written.

The Kidnapping of Edgardo Mortara

In recent years, no event more surprised Catholics than the story of a young Jewish boy taken from the home of his parents during the papacy of Pius IX to be raised as a Catholic. Though it caused an international furor in its time, the story had been generally forgotten until resurrected in David Kertzer’s, “The Kidnapping of Edgardo Mortara” published in 1997.²⁰ Kertzer theorizes that the story had disappeared because Jews were embarrassed that the young boy would eventually become a priest, and Catholics were simply embarrassed by the whole affair.²¹

          Kertzer, however, makes the additional argument that the Mortara affair was also a sign of the roots of racial anti-Semitism that would emerge in Italian Fascism, and as such the Church played a role in establishing the framework for the Italian racial laws of 1938.²² This misunderstands the motivations involved in the Mortara affair at the time, and forgets that it was the Church that protested vehemently the 1938 laws and was the single greatest protector of Italian Jews during the war years.²³

          Pius IX was considered a friend and protector of the Jews during the early years of his pontificate. Rome had its own Jewish ghetto in 1846, established in the late 16^thcentury. (Most other cities in Europe with Jewish populations had similar ghettos.) The ghettos existed both to “protect” Christians from possible apostasy in contact with Jews, and to protect Jews from mob attack. Jews were allowed outside the ghetto during the day, but were expected to return in the evening. Four synagogues existed within the Jewish ghetto in Rome, the only non-Catholic religious facilities allowed to function within the city. Upon becoming Pope, Pius IX ordered the end to various insulting traditions aimed at the Jewish community in Rome: anti-Jewish comedies, parading of rabbis in costume during Carnival, and the necessity that representatives of the community be forced to hear sermons once a year exhorting them to conversion. The walls enclosing the ghetto were torn down. To the Jews, “the liberal regime of Pius IX felt to them like a miracle.”²⁴

          After the revolt in Rome in 1848, Pius IX initially withdrew these liberal statutes, angered at Jewish participation in the revolt (three Jews served on the Roman municipal council during the revolt). It was alleged – and doubtful – that Jews had robbed churches during the uprising. But though the restrictions were back on the books, and the insulting conversion sermon was reestablished, most of the anti-Jewish laws were no longer enforced and Jews were no longer confined to the ghetto. In different areas within the Papal States, the Jews could generally live, work and move about freely, such as in Bologna.

         “The knock came at nightfall. It was Wednesday, June 23, 1858.” Thus Kertzer begins his study of the Edgardo Mortara affair. Bologna was still part of the Papal States and the Mortara family had settled there after the end of the uprisings of 1848 and 1849, rather well off as part of the new middle-class. Edgardo, age six, was one of eight children of Marianna and Momolo Mortara. The Mortaras had employed a Christian servant to help in raising the children. It was not an uncommon practice, though by law Jews were not to employ Christian servants. It had come to the light of Church authorities in Bologna, specifically the Dominican head of the local Inquisition, that the servant girl had baptized young Edgardo as an infant when she thought he was in danger of dying. (This was one of the very clear reasons why Christians were not supposed to be employed in Jewish households. It was against the law for Jews to be baptized without consent and fear of just such cases was at the heart of the legislation.) The law in the matter was clear: a baptized Christian could not be raised in a Jewish home. To do so at that time would be seen as being a party to apostasy, a denial of the validity of Baptism, and endanger the soul of the baptized. Edgardo was taken from his parent’s home and transported to Rome, where he would be raised a Catholic.

          The Mortara affair would create an international furor. It was quickly utilized by the enemies of the Church, and Pius IX, as a symbol of papal backwardness and viciousness. Just two years before most of the Papal States would be seized by the Kingdom of Piedmont in the rush to Italian unification, it became a valuable propaganda tool in the effort to present the Church as a medieval institution, and the Pope as an intolerant fanatic.

          The difficulty for the Church, and Pius as he became aware of the affair, was that it was left with little choice at the time. While it is impossible today to understand the position of Pius and the Church in taking a child from his parents, the action was not without precedent and was not uncommon. It was simply considered impossible for a baptized child to remain in a home where he would not – could not – be raised Christian. Such experiences were commonplace even decades later in America. As late as the early 20^th century, it was common for Irish Catholic children to be plucked off the streets of New York and transported to the West to be raised by solid Protestant families. It was considered an act of charity and evangelization, assuring that the children would be raised good Protestants.²⁵ Later, out of sensitivity to such actions of the past, it became common practice by the mid 20^th century to place orphan children in adopted homes of the same faith. It continues today in the area of racial adoptions, where it is preferred that an adopted child be of the same race as the adopting parents.   

          As the young Edgardo was transported to Rome, it was claimed that he showed immediate signs of the desire to live the Catholic faith, eagerly following the guards into church to celebrate Mass. The exact story, of course, will never be known of these early days as it became wrapped up in propaganda from both sides. Supporters of the Church would argue that the reality of Edgardo’s baptism could be seen as soon as he was placed in a Catholic environment. Supporters of the parents argued that he was merely trying to please his kidnappers and longed to be returned to his parents. Edgardo would disagree later in life with that interpretation, though it is easy to understand how he was influenced by the Catholic environment that quickly enveloped him as a young child.

          Pope Pius IX would eventually be asked to use his authority to have Edgardo returned to his parents. By then, of course, the papal hands were even more tightly bound by the international publicity surrounding the case. To give in, would be to surrender to the enemies of the Church. Edgardo had also became a favorite of the pope, and could be seen scurrying around the papal rooms. He would eventually study for the priesthood and be ordained. When Rome was absorbed into the unified Italian State in 1870, Edgardo was 18 and had begun his studies for the priesthood. When another Jewish boy who had claimed conversion to the Church was seized and returned to his parents,²⁶  Edgardo fled to Austria. He eventually made peace with his mother and family, though his father passed away before they could be reconciled.²⁷He remained a monk and died in 1940 at the age of 88 at a Belgian abbey where he lived and studied for many years.

          The Mortara affair supplied the enemies of Pius IX with a strong propaganda weapon at a point when the Papal States were about to collapse. The extent of the vitriol aimed at Pius was enormous and worldwide. Adopting the anti-Catholic rhetoric of the Know Nothings, Jewish groups in the United States saw it as a Jesuit-inspired conspiracy of “soul-less lackeys,” compared Pius to the “Prince of Darkness” and reminded their Protestant audience of the “history of these incarnate fiends, written in the blood of millions of victims.”²⁸ For Cavour, who aimed at Italian unification, it was one more weapon to be used in the propaganda arsenal.

          Was Pius XI’s refusal to return Edgardo Mortara an act of pure anti-Semitism?  In the context of the times, it clearly was not. This did not involve racial prejudice. The Church in Rome had a long history of defending Jewish converts to the faith and accepting them completely after such a conversion, as was done in the case of Edgardo Mortara. The Church in Rome viewed with disgust and disdain the Spanish Inquisition’s attacks on conversos – Jewish converts to Catholicism accused in later generations to be secretly practicing the Jewish faith – as simple racial prejudice, or a means to extort Jewish money.²⁹ The motivations of Pius IX were not anti-Semitic, though they certainly were offensive to the Jewish faith. But in his actions, Pius reflected both the generally accepted norms of the time concerning families of mixed religion, as well as the law as it stood within the Papal States. To return Edgardo would have been, to Pius IX, denial of the validity and sacredness of the sacrament of baptism.          

          The actions of Pius IX are not defensible in today’s understanding, and would not be defended by the Church. Yet his motivations were not racially motivated. It was not understood by him to be an anti-Jewish act, but an act to assure the salvation of a soul. His motivation was primarily religious. He believed unquestionably that a baptized child could not be raised in an unbaptized household. That is why he so firmly rejected returning the boy, despite the favorable publicity it would have engendered for him in perilous times.

Papal Infallibility          

In 1867, a huge gathering of bishops from around the world was held in Rome to celebrate the eighteenth hundredth anniversary of the deaths of St. Peter and Paul. It was both a celebration – and a reminder to the world – of the universality of the Church. It was to this assembly that Pius announced his plans for a General Council of the Church. The Curia opposed the plan, fearful that in those dangerous times a Council could show the world a divided Church. Pius had no such fears. It was originally though that the Council would be pastoral in tone, dealing with the widely felt need to update Church canonical law and the status of the growing foreign missions. However, the agenda quickly turned doctrinal in intent. It was generally concluded that a Council was necessary to discuss the authority of the papal office itself.

          Why? Many of the events of the previous 40 years had centered on the office of the papacy and the nature of papal authority. There were various movements at play within the Church. On the one hand, a strong movement – referred to as “ultramontanism” – believed that papal authority must be understood in virtually limitless spiritual terms. Ultramontanism – from the Latin for “beyond (or across) the mountains” – traditionally referred to those European Catholics who supported papal authority over the concept of regional churches. These people believed that a strong papacy provided protection to the local Catholic communities and stood as a voice for the universality of the Church. This was particularly evident in states where the Church was under attack or subject to government control. There were other historic movements, such as Gallicanism which saw the pope as simply a “senior bishop among bishops,” which would dramatically limit papal authority in the face of national Churches. Similarly, there were strains of Conciliarism that sought to place the authority of General Church councils over the Church, or even “Josephenism” which would subject the local Church to the control of the State.

          But at this point, many of those historic movements to limit the papacy had lost serious theological momentum within the Church. Even before the devastating events of the French Revolution and the wars of Napoleon, they had lost much of their theological steam. But those events, combined with the emergence of the modern liberal states, had reconfirmed to many within the Church the vital importance of the ancient belief of the central authority of the bishop of Rome as the successor of St. Peter. Virtually no one in the hierarchy of the Church outright rejected the theological concept of papal infallibility – that when the Pope addressed matters of faith and morals as the Vicar of Christ, he was guided by the Holy Spirit and therefore not subject to error. However, it had never been clearly defined as to the extent of that infallibility and that is where true divisions existed. A perfect example was the Syllabus of Errors – was that an infallible papal statement, true for all times and for all people? Was every public statement of the pope on doctrine and morals to be considered infallible? The ultramontanes certainly believed so.

          Pope Pius IX certainly leaned heavily toward the ultramontane definition of infallibility. Others, however, were far less certain. There were two prominent schools within the hierarchy, all in minority to the ultramontanes. There were some that rejected outright any definition of papal infallibility as unclear within Catholic tradition. While acknowledging the authority of the pope, they thought it theologically dangerous to attempt to define it. They believed that the authority of the Church had historically existed, that all Catholics believed it, and to define it would simply mean to limit it, or to misunderstand it. Others, called “inopportunists,” felt that in the current state of the world, it was not “opportune” to define papal infallibility. This was the position of Cardinal Newman of England, as well as a number of prominent American bishops. They believed that a definition would cause difficulties within the liberal democracies for the Church, as well as with other Christian traditions.  Finally, there were extreme anti-infallibilists such as Lord John Acton of England, a prominent Catholic layman, who dreaded any such definition.

          Acton believed that a definition of papal infallibility would retroactively extend to bad popes and bad decisions of the past. He thought it historically a disaster. Acton also believed that authority in the Church should be greatly limited. It prevented the free exchange of ideas with modern culture. Truth existed within the Church, Acton believed, but authoritative statements were not in keeping with the spirit of the times. His teacher, the historian and theologian Father Ignaz von Dollinger, shared many of Acton’s concerns.³⁰

          Acton would be of three-fold importance to the Council. First, he became an outside agitator demanding intervention from various governments to prevent a definition of papal infallibility. (It was later argued that Acton’s rhetoric against the definition was utilized by Bismarck as a reason for the kulturkampf. Bismarck had his own reasons, however, and Acton’s rhetoric was unnecessary to sour him on the Catholic Church.) Second, Acton was in Rome for the Council and provided accounts of the Council through his contacts with those opposed to a definition to von Dollinger. Under the pen name “Qurinus,” von Dollinger re-wrote the letters and published then in the Allgemeine Zeitung, an Augsburg newspaper. The accounts from an anti-infallible perspective were read internationally and became the basis for most historical accounts of the Council. Finally, Acton’s Roman apartment became a center for strategizing the anti-infallible positions.³¹

            Pius IX exerted as much pressure as he could to secure the definition of papal infallibility, proclaiming famously to one cardinal, “I am the church! I am the tradition!” Yet even Acton, who loathed Pius and looked for curial conspiracies everywhere, had to acknowledge that debates were open and ideas freely exchanged. He wrote in his journal, “Nobody molested on account of hostile opinion. Letters carefully examined, and much espionage. But no serious hindrance put in the way of distributing documents, pamphlets, etc. Newspapers frequently stopped; but distributed to the bishops, so that their effect on the course of events was not prevented.”³²  

          The accusation is made that a definition of papal infallibility was demanded by Pius IX and forced on an unwilling Council by papal pressure, curial conspiracies, and squelched debate. Garry Wills charged that the Council was rigged and opponents silenced.³³ However, he has no explanation for the debate that openly went on for months, or that the final definition of papal infallibility fell far short of the desires of the ultramontanes. The fact was that consensus emerged, except for extremists on each side, that spelled out a definition of papal infallibility clearly in line with Church tradition and the theology of the papacy. As the conciliar fathers grew closer to consensus and understanding, a definition emerged that was far from ultramontane. The Council proclaimed no new teaching that extended papal authority beyond a point the Church had understood for centuries. Subsequent popes have issued one ex cathedra statement (Pope Pius XII defining Catholic teaching on the Assumption of Mary in 1950) and did so only after extensive consultation with the world’s bishops.

          The definition of Papal infallibility by the First Vatican Council was not created or mandated by Pope Pius IX. It was a reaffirmation of a consistent teaching of the Church as subsequent history has clearly shown.

Conclusion

The legacy of Pius IX has suffered much at the hands of 19^th century anti-Catholic propaganda as seen in contemporary negative reaction to his beatification. Pius was not an anti-Semite. His response to the “liberalism” of his day was not a response to liberalism as we define it. “The heritage of the eighteenth-century rationalism, however, together with the anti-religious or atheist element of the French Revolution, survived in the development of Continental liberalism and the centralized modern state. Belief reigned in the unstoppable advance of science, in Darwinism, in modern technology, economics, capitalism. The educated elite and the working classes constituting a new urban proletariat became increasingly divorced from religious influences. Politics and economics mattered as never before; political passions replaced the religious zeal of old.”³⁴ It was a “modernism” that would lead not to a secular utopia, but to the horrors of the world wars of the 20^th century and national, political and racial ideologies gone mad.

          Pius was not an anti-Semite, though he certainly was a man of his times in regard to the questions of religious tolerance. He defended the thousand-year existence of the Papal States not for monarchial pretensions, but for defense of the freedom of the papacy to exercise its spiritual authority. He defended the Church against modern propositions that were high-sounding, but utilized to arrest bishops, shoot priests, close Catholic schools, disband religious orders and force the Church out of civil society. Though firm in his belief in papal infallibility, he did not force a definition on the First Vatican Council that was greater than the tradition of the Church.

          The greatest enemies of Pius IX never questioned the deepness and sincerity of the faith he believed and lived. His incessant promotion of a rich devotional life within the Church led to a renewal of popular Catholic spirituality that had not been seen for over a century. 

          Pius IX was certainly the first “popular” pope of the modern era, recognized and esteemed by Catholics worldwide. “The Catholic world knew this pope as no pope was known before….He was the first pope in the history of the papacy to be, in the modern sense of the word, news.” ³⁵

          During his long pontificate, “the Church had been transformed in every aspect of its life. Almost the entire episcopate had been re-appointed during his reign. The religious orders had experienced a renewal and growth unimaginable a generation earlier, not merely by the expansion of existing orders, but by the creation of new ones. Many of these new orders were dedicated to apostolic work in schools, hospitals and overseas missions, and they represent an astonishing flowering of Christian energy.”³⁴ The Church grew enormously and the internationalization of the episcopacy began in earnest. The hierarchy was reestablished in England, and the Church in the United States expanded at an enormous rate.

            The long papacy of Pope Pius IX rescued the Church from its darkest days in the aftermath of the French Revolution. In 1815, the Church as an institution in continental Europe had nearly been destroyed. Two popes had been imprisoned, religious orders destroyed, the Church in chaos. When Pius IX died on February 7, 1878, after a 32-year reign, the Church had been reborn. 

RESOURCES

The best biography of Pope Pius IX is not available in English – Father Giacomo Martina’s three-volume work, “Pio Nono” is considered the best study of his pontificate. Eamon Duffy’s “Saints and Sinners” gives an overview of his papacy. The section on Pius IX in Owen Chadwick’s “A History of the Popes: 1830 – 1914” gives a solid overview as well. We await an English translation of “Pio Nono.” 

SUMMARY POINTS

• ·         Beatification and canonization in the Church involve judgments of sanctity on the merits and holiness of an individual’s life.  The reasons for the beatification of Pope Pius IX certainly center on those aspects of us life, not necessarily on the impact or results of the policies of his papacy.
• ·         Though Pope Pius IX would serve for 32 years, the modern caricature of his papacy surrounds four events: his resistance to Italian unification and political trends in 19^th century Europe; the Syllabus of Errors that appeared to set the Church squarely against democratic ideals; the “kidnapping” of Edgardo Mortara, a Jewish child taken from his family by authorities after his Christian baptism was discovered; and the definition of the doctrine of Papal infallibility at the First Vatican Council of 1970.
• ·         Giovanni Maria Mastai-Ferretti was born into a troubled world. Before he had reached the age of 21, the French imprisoned two popes and, without the bravery of those two popes, the Church would have become a virtual puppet of the Empire. The Church in revolutionary France had been virtually destroyed and the old Catholic regimes of Europe seemed destined to collapse.
• ·         A new world was emerging in the 19^th century where national identity – rather than identity with ancient royal houses – would become a driving forced in both politics and how people thought of themselves. It was an era where racial identity, and racism, became a growing and dangerous part of  “modern” thinking.
• ·         This was the legacy inherited by Pope Pius IX: a commitment of the Church to the Papal States as the only means to assure the freedom of the popes to spiritually rule the Church; a rise in nationalism and racialism as the dominant aspects of European life; a growing reliance on Papal authority as the only means to protect the Church from the anti-Catholic repression of the new “liberal” states; and an unfortunate reliance on foreign troops to maintain papal authority within the Papal States, forcing the pope to be seen as a hindrance to Italian dreams of unification.
• ·         Ascribing to Pius IX a consistent and driving political philosophy or a political agenda separate from the Church, is to misunderstand the man. Even his loyalty to the Papal States was not a temporal matter. He saw his rule as part of the Patrimony of Peter and as an absolute necessity for the spiritual independence of the Church.
• ·         When war broke out in northern Italy against the Austrians, it was hoped that the Pope would order papal troops to join the battle. Instead, on April 29, 1848, he announced that he could not send men to war on a Catholic nation. He renounced any tactic to name him king of a unified Italy, and called for an end to violent revolution. Throughout Italy, it was believed that the Pope had abandoned the cause of liberty.
• ·         When a revolutionary government was forced on the Pope in 1848, he decided to flee Rome and went to Gaeta under the protection of King Ferdinand of Naples. On April 12, 1850, the pope returned. For 20 years, Pope Pius IX would retain temporal power but solely through the occupation of Austrian and French troops in Rome.
• ·         After the revolutions of 1848 and 1849 and their suppression, Piedmont – with a constitutional government under the monarchy – became the hope for Italian unification by driving out the Austrians and taking over the Papal States. It became the darling of liberal and Protestant Europe, while the Papal States were tarred as a medieval throwback destined for the dustbin of history. Piedmont would launch a series of anti-Catholic legislative acts to prove its stripes in Europe and to maintain support toward its goal of assuming the leadership of the entire peninsula.
• ·         The propaganda spread by supporters of Italian unification, England’s consistent anti-Catholicism, and even a receptive audience in the United States, helped to create fertile ground for the image of an intractable medieval pope dominating an impoverished Papal States yearning for freedom from theocracy.  This would combine to support what essentially was a land grab against a virtually defenseless Papal States by the government of Piedmont.
• ·         In 1870, at the onset of the Franco-Prussian War, the French troops were withdrawn from Rome and Victor Emmanuel sent his soldiers to secure the city. On papal orders, only token resistance was offered. Italy was now unified, and the Pope declared himself a “prisoner” and retreated to the Vatican.
• ·         We tend to forget that the “liberalism” of the growing nation states of Europe was not how we define liberalism today. The nation states developing in Europe – fiercely anti-Catholic and highly nationalistic – were the forerunners of the totalitarian states of the 20^th century. Bismarck’s Prussia and Cavour’s Italian kingdom, would become Nazi Germany and Fascist Italy. The seeds of this horrific development were planted in racialism, nationalism and communism that grew directly from the philosophy of liberalism of 19^thcentury Europe. From that perspective, the political policies of Pius IX make much greater sense than merely a reactionary bigotry most often portrayed.
• ·         By early 1860, many within the Church had argued that a formalized response to the errors of the modern world was necessary. The Church was being portrayed universally as the enemy of thought and civilization, representing a return to the Dark Ages. This disgusted Catholics who saw the Church as the converter of barbarian Europe, the preserver of ancient knowledge, the creator of the glories of the Renaissance, and the salvation of souls. To their minds, what had modern civilization created – slums, crime, political chaos, hatred, racism, war, agnosticism and atheism. They looked at the world since the French Revolution, and they saw not the rebirth of civilization, but its collapse.
• ·         The encyclical with the Syllabus was released in 1864 and caused an almost immediate firestorm. The encyclical in many ways was a fair statement against a host of current thought that remain worthy of condemnation today – indifferentism, atheism, rationalism. The Syllabus itself contained 80 condemned propositions, many of which are similarly worthy of rebuke: denying the existence of God, the truth of Scripture, the Church’s right to teach is dependent on the consent of secular authority, the equation of human reason with Divine Revelation, the all-inclusive authority of the State.
• ·         The 80 propositions of the Syllabus were extracted from earlier papal documents, and Pio Nono repeatedly said that the true meaning of theSyllabus could be discovered only be referring to the original context. So the offensive proposition 80 came from the brief Iamdudum Cernimus of 1861. Its apparently wholesale condemnation of “progress, liberalism and modern civilization” in fact referred quite specifically to the Piedmontese government’s closure of the monasteries and Church schools.
• ·         The Syllabus generated the most difficulty in the United States, where it was often used as anti-Catholic fodder in making the case that the Church was fundamentally opposed to the separation of Church and State, religious tolerance, public schools and free speech. It is still used today in that regard by some fundamentalist critics, forgetting the time and the context in which it was written.
• ·         In recent years, no event more surprised Catholics than the story of a young Jewish boy taken from the home of his parents during the papacy of Pius IX to be raised as a Catholic. Though it caused an international furor in its time, the story had been generally forgotten until resurrected in David Kertzer’s, “The Kidnapping of Edgardo Mortara” published in 1997. Kertzer theorizes that the story had disappeared because Jews were embarrassed that the young boy would eventually become a priest, and Catholics were simply embarrassed by the whole affair.
• ·         The Mortara affair is portrayed as a sign of the Church’s part in creating the racial anti-Semitism in Italian fascism. As such, the Church played a role in establishing the framework for the Italian racial laws of 1938. This is both to misunderstand the motivations involved in the Mortara affair at the time, and forgets that it was the Church that protested vehemently the 1938 laws and was the single greatest protector of Italian Jews during the war years.
• ·         Upon becoming Pope, Pius IX ordered the end to various insulting traditions aimed at the Jewish community in Rome: anti-Jewish comedies and the necessity than representatives of the community be forced to hear sermons once a year exhorting them to conversion. The walls enclosing the ghetto were torn down. To the Jews, the liberal regime of Pius IX felt to them like a miracle.
• ·         It had come to the light of Church authorities in Bologna, specifically the Dominican head of the local Inquisition, that a servant girl had baptized young Edgardo Mortara as an infant when she thought he was in danger of dying. This was one of the very clear reasons why Christians were not supposed to be employed in Jewish households. It was against the law for Jews to be baptized without consent and fear of just such cases was at the heart of the legislation.
• ·         The difficulty for the Church, and Pius as he became aware of the affair, was that it was left with little choice at the time. While it is difficult today to understand the position the Church took in taking a child from his parents, the action was not without precedent and was not uncommon. It was simply considered impossible for a baptized child to remain in a home where he would not – could not – be raised Christian. Such experiences were commonplace even decades later in America. As late as the early 20^th century, it was common for Irish Catholic children to be plucked off the streets of New York and transported to the West to be raised by solid Protestant families. It was considered an act of charity and evangelization, assuring that the children would be raised good Protestants.
• ·         Edgardo Mortara eventually made peace with his mother and family, though his father passed away before they could be reconciled.²⁷ He remained a monk and died in 1940 at the age of 88 at a Belgian abbey where he lived and studied for many years. 
• ·         In his actions, Pius reflected both the generally accepted norms of the time concerning families of mixed religion, as well as the law as it stood within the Papal States. To return Edgardo would have been, to Pius IX, the very denial of the validity and sacredness of the sacrament of baptism.         
• ·         It was originally though that the First Vatican Council would be pastoral in tone, dealing with the widely felt need to update Church canonical law and the status of the growing foreign missions. However, the agenda quickly turned doctrinal in intent. It was generally concluded that a Council was necessary to discuss the authority of the papal office itself.
• ·         Virtually no one in the hierarchy of the Church outright rejected the theological concept of papal infallibility – that when the Pope addressed matters of faith and morals as the Vicar of Christ, he was guided by the Holy Spirit and therefore not subject to error. However, it had never been clearly defined as to the extent of that infallibility and that is where true divisions existed.
• ·         Pius IX exerted as much pressure as he could to secure the definition of papal infallibility, proclaiming famously to one cardinal, “I am the church! I am the tradition!” Yet even Lord Acton, who loathed Pius and looked for curial conspiracies everywhere, had to acknowledge that debates were open and ideas freely exchanged.
• ·        The fact was that consensus emerged, except for extremists on each side, that spelled out a definition of papal infallibility clearly in line with Church tradition and the theology of the papacy. As the conciliar fathers grew closer to consensus and understanding, a definition emerged that was far from ultramontane. The Council proclaimed no new teaching that extended papal authority beyond a point the Church had understood for centuries. The definition of papal infallibility by the First Vatican Council was not created or mandated by Pope Pius IX. It was a reaffirmation of a consistent teaching of the Church as subsequent history has clearly shown.
• ·         Pius was not an anti-Semite, though he certainly was a man of his times in regard to the questions of religious tolerance. He defended the thousand-year existence of the Papal States not for monarchial pretensions, but for defense of the freedom of the papacy to exercise its spiritual authority. He defended the Church against modern propositions that were high-sounding, but utilized to arrest bishops, shoot priests, close Catholic schools, disband religious orders and force the Church out of civil society. Though firm in his belief in papal infallibility, he did not force a definition on the First Vatican Council that was greater than the tradition of the Church.
• ·         The greatest enemies of Pius IX never questioned the deepness and sincerity of the faith he believed and lived. His incessant promotion of a rich devotional life within the Church led to a renewal of popular Catholic spirituality that had not been seen for over a century. 
• ·         The long papacy of Pope Pius IX rescued the Church from its darkest days in the aftermath of the French Revolution. In 1815, the Church as an institution in continental Europe had nearly been destroyed. Two popes had been imprisoned, religious orders destroyed, the Church in chaos. When Pius IX died on February 7, 1878, after a 32-year reign, the Church had been reborn. 

ENDNOTES

¹Vatican Letter, by John Thavis, August 25, 2000, “Balancing Act: Popes to be beatified were very different” (Catholic News Service).
²Ibid.
³For the case against Pius IX within Catholic circles, see Commonweal, August 11, 2000, “No! No! Pio Nono!”
⁴For an outline of the troubled pontificates of Pius VI and Pius VII, see Saints and Sinners: A History of the Popes, by Eamon Duffy (Yale University Press, 1997) pp. 195-214.
⁵Duffy, p. 214.
⁶Pope Pius VIII ruled for 17 months from 1829-1830. He had been imprisoned for six years under Napoleon for refusing to swear allegiance to the French government. As pope, he would relax Leo XII’s restrictive measures in the Papal States and would recognize the regime of Louis Phillippe in France after the Revolution of 1830.
⁷Duffy, p. 219.
⁸ A History of the Popes, 1830-1914, by Owen Chadwick (Clarendon Press, Oxford, 1998) p. 63.
⁹ Chadwick, p. 81.
¹⁰ Ibid, p. 112.
¹¹ Ibid, pp. 114-115, 124-125.
¹² See Nativism and Slavery, by Tyler Abner (Oxford University Press, 1992) pp. 127-161.
¹³ Chadwick, pp. 141-160, pp. 215-218.
¹⁴ See Chadwick, pp. 254-265.
¹⁵ Syllabus of Pius IX (2).
¹⁶ Ibid (39).
¹⁷Chadwick, pp. 174-175.
¹⁸ Syllabus of Pius IX (80).
¹⁹ Duffy, p. 229.
²⁰ The Kidnapping of Edgardo Mortara, by David I. Kertzer (Alfred A. Knopf, 1997).
²¹ Ibid, p. 301.
²² Ibid.
²³For Vatican reaction to the Italian racial laws of 1938 see Hitler, the War and the Pope, by Ronald J. Rychlak (Our Sunday Visitor, 2000) pp. 103-104.
²⁴ Chadwick, p. 129.
²⁵ See The Great Arizona Orphan Abduction, by Linda Gordon (Harvard University Press, 1999) for the case of Catholic children transported to be raised by Hispanic Catholic families. The children were seized upon their arrival to protect them from being raised in a Catholic – and Hispanic – environment.
²⁶ Giuseppe Coen was a 9-year-old Jewish boy who lived in the Rome ghetto who had asked his employer to assist him in converting, or so the story is related. His parents believed that his employer forced the issue. When troops entered Rome, Coen was found and returned to his parents. He apparently wanted nothing to do with them and demanded he be set free. A court ordered him to his parents’ custody. They took him out of the city. He would eventually return to Rome and become a priest.
²⁷In a curious aftermath, Edgardo’s father was charged with murder in the death of a servant girl in his employ in 1871. He was convicted, then freed by an appeal’s court when it was ruled the girl’s death was a suicide. See Kertzer, pp. 266-294.
²⁸ Cited in Kertzer, p. 125, 126.
²⁹ See The Spanish Inquisition: A Historical Revision, by Henry Kamen (Yale University Press, 1997), p. 309.
³⁰For a contemporary biography of Acton see Lord Acton, by Rolland Hill (Yale University Press, 2000).
³¹Hill, p. 200.
³²Ibid.
³²Ibid, p. 407.
³³ Papal Sin, by Garry Wills (Doubleday, 2000) pp. 252-256.
³⁴ Chadwick, 113.
³⁵ Duffy, p. 234.

 

by Robert P. Lockwood

(8/2000)

“Let us pray that each one of us, looking to the Lord Jesus, meek and humble of heart, will recognize that even men of the church, in the name of faith and morals, have sometimes used methods not in keeping with the Gospel in the solemn duty of defending the truth.” – Joseph Cardinal Ratzinger, Jubilee Request for Forgiveness, March 12, 2000

“The Inquisition resulted in the torture and murder of millions of Christians whose only crime was a rejection of Catholic heresy and a commitment to follow the Bible as their sole authority for faith and practice. John Paul II has not confessed the Inquisition; he has failed to label his fellow popes the murderers they were.” – Jerry Kaifetz

Among the many difficulties in addressing the issue of anti-Catholicism are the cultural assumptions, historical canards and conventional wisdom that fuel the prejudice. Many Americans, Catholics as well as non-Catholics, have an understanding of history, as well as a way of thinking, that carries the baggage of post-Reformation propaganda or 19th century Enlightenment prejudices. Myths created in anti-Catholic passions have become part of the cultural corpus and accepted as undeniable truths.(1)We all know, for example, that the astronomer Galileo was tortured and imprisoned for years by the inquisition. He then recanted his scientific theory on the rotation of the earth around the sun, but bravely muttered aloud as he left the trial chamber, Eppur si muove! (“And yet it does move”). The historical reality, however, is that Galileo was never tortured, lived in comfort at the Florentine embassy during his trial, and the defiant quote was a legend created nearly 125 years after his death.(2)

Common to these myths are an invented history meant to portray Catholicism as the enemy of free thought, an alien presence in a democratic society, and as a perverse form of medieval superstition that survives on the ignorance of believers and the Church’s own violent will to power. Just as these myths served a purpose in the Reformation and were perpetuated in the 18th century Enlightenment and the 19th century world of progress and scientism, they serve a purpose in today’s secularist climate. Though developed in a war of propaganda between Catholicism and the dissenting churches of the 16th century, the theological trappings of the myths have been stripped away in many cases. They are now simply historical assumptions used to undermine and dismiss Church positions, particularly in the public arena, without the necessity of analyzing or addressing those positions. They are common rhetorical tools useful because they are universally understood and accepted.

In our own time we are seeing the creation of such a myth in allegations of silence and collaboration with the Nazis of Pope Pius XII during World War II. Though the allegations contradict clear historical evidence, they are becoming conventional wisdom regurgitated by columnists and commentaries with no need for substantiation.(3) Of the many historical myths about Catholics and Catholicism, however, perhaps the most pervasive are those centered on the inquisition in general and the Spanish Inquisition in particular. From the 16th through the early 20th Century, the legend of the Inquisition grew larger than its history. This legend of the inquisition persists today in the imagination, well after its debunking by historians.

A good summation of that legend as it persists today was in the May 20, 2000 edition of The Times, a regional newspaper in Northwest Indiana and suburban Chicago.  Written by Jerry Kaifetz, the owner of a chemical manufacturing company with a doctorate from Bethany Theological Seminary in Alabama, it is a response to the papal Jubilee “Request for Forgiveness” in March 2000. Kaifetz wrote: “The pope has not confessed the bloody and horrible 600-years inquisition against humble Bible-believers, which was instigated by Pope Innocent III (1198-1213). Some of the devices and inventions used to torture the “heresy” out of those rejecting the Catholic Church’s authority included “The Iron Maiden,” “Hanging Cages,” “The Judas Cradle,” “Skinning the Cat,” “The Head Crusher,” “The Heretic’s Fork,” “The Barrel Pillory,” “The Rack,” “The Knee Splitter,” “The Breast Ripper,” and other devices too numerous to mention or too heinous to describe in any detail. The inquisitor was commissioned directly by the pope and acted directly on his behalf. The trials were held in secret and the inquisitor acted as judge, jury and prosecutor. The accused was never represented. The Inquisition resulted in the torture and murder of millions of Christians whose only crime was a rejection of Catholic heresy and a commitment to follow the Bible as their sole authority for faith and practice. John Paul II has not confessed the Inquisition; he has failed to label his fellow popes the murderers they were.”(4)

Kaifetz, writing on the cusp of the New Millennium, neatly summarizes the falsehoods, exaggerations and myths of the inquisition established in the religious wars of the 16th Century. While he approaches the inquisition from the perspective of a more traditional form of religious anti-Catholicism, the image he presents would be shared by many today, including some Catholics.

What, in fact, were inquisitions? Generally defined, inquisitions were ecclesial investigations, meaning that investigations were conducted either directly by, or under the auspices of, the Church. The investigations were undertaken at certain times in certain regions under the authority of the local bishop and his designates, or under the auspices of papal-appointed legates, or representatives from Religious Orders delegated the task from the papacy. The purpose of the investigations was peculiar to the local circumstance. They usually involved a judicial process aimed to obtain the confession and reconciliation with the Church of those who held heretical views or engaged in activities contrary to Church teaching and belief. The goal was to secure a person’s   repentance, and to maintain the unity of the Church. These investigations were  conducted with the cooperation and involvement of the temporal authorities. If these investigations resulted in finding serious doctrinal heresy and an unwillingness to abjure from heresy, it was the responsibility of the secular authorities to undertake punishment. The uniqueness of the inquisitions was that the Church conducted the investigations, and that the Church worked closely with civil authorities. In Protestant states after the Reformation, the distinct role of the religious congregation did not necessarily exist, and the investigation, trial and punishment of dissenters were primarily the responsibility of the state.

The common assumptions about the inquisition – the myths of the inquisition – are neatly summarized in the Kaifetz opinion piece, and could be outlined as follows:

· The inquisition was a single, unified court system directly responsible to the pope and controlled solely by the papacy.

· The inquisition existed throughout Europe for nearly 700 years, founded in the 12th century and continued to the early 19th century. Prior to the Reformation, it focused on a “secret” and “hidden” church, similar to that of the Reformation churches.

· The inquisition was primarily aimed at the early Protestant reformers of the 16th century and the Spanish Inquisition alone killed and tortured hundreds of thousands, if not millions of Protestant reformers.

· Vicious and unique tortures were routinely used, particularly in the Spanish Inquisition.

· The Spanish Inquisition existed independent of Spanish royal authority and existed solely as an arm of the Church, as did all other inquisitions.

· The inquisition was a means for the Church to exercise its authority over science.

· Persecution of religious dissent was unique to the inquisition and to the Catholic Church in Europe.

These assumptions about the inquisition and how it operated are part of the cultural baggage of Western civilization. They are far more myth than history. Yet, it would be very wrong to whitewash the inquisition, or to attempt to explain away its historicity. In the words of the papal apology, Catholics should understand that there were events in the past where “men of the church, in the name of faith and morals, have sometimes used methods not in keeping with the Gospel in the solemn duty of defending the truth.” The inquisition existed and it remains an unsettling part of Catholic history. However, the caricature of the inquisition that most of us have come to know and that is often utilized in anti-Catholic polemics has little to do with the reality of the inquisition.

Prelude

In its simplest summary, the Church after the death of the Apostles had a faith that “united scattered congregations: that Christ was the Son of God, that He would return to establish his Kingdom on earth, and that all who believed in him would at the Last Judgment be rewarded with eternal bliss.”(5) However, very soon the Christian community needed to give better definition to its beliefs as conflicts and disputes arose. From very early (as noted in Scripture(6)) the Christian community was forced to confront how to deal with those people who persisted in teachings contrary to the Apostolic Faith. For the most part, the early Church settled on admonishment, avoidance and, if a person persisted in error, expulsion from the community. This also led the early Church to an increased understanding of the universal authority of the See of St. Peter at Rome as the defender of the “deposit of the faith.” As the Christian faith grew throughout the Roman Empire and Church authorities settled controversies over essential teachings, statements of faith were developed. These Creeds (statements of fundamental beliefs) came in response to various teachings that were seen by Christian leaders as fundamentally erroneous.

With the victory of Constantine in the second decade of the Fourth Century, followed by the conversion of most of the Roman Empire by the end of the century, Christianity became the faith of the Empire. While this ended the age of martyrdom under intermittent Roman persecution, it created its own difficulties. Most prominent was the relationship of the Church – particularly Church authority – to the Christian emperors. It was a problem that, in certain respects, would plague Church relationships with government until the dramatic changes of the late nineteenth century and early 20th centuries. Government wanted to control the Church within its borders, seeing the faith as inextricably linked to societal stability, identity, and as foundational to royal power. At the same time, the Church wanted to be seen as separate and above this  “City of Man,” while also seeing in the secular arm the means to assure orthodox belief.

It was a troubled period of confusing – and at times obscure – doctrinal controversies after the legalization of Christianity and as the faith became the official religion of the Roman Empire by the end of the Fourth Century. Roman imperial power would insert itself into doctrinal controversies, at times with the support of Church leadership, at other times with the Church standing in opposition. With the disastrous effect of doctrinal heresies on both Church and social unity, however, there was a growing consensus that use of the “secular arm” was necessary, with even St. Augustine arguing in favor of it.(7) With Christian emperors occupying the imperial throne, heretical views came to be seen as not only a violation of Christian unity, but as an act of treason against the State. This is essential to an understanding of how heresy came to be viewed, particularly in Western civilization. It was not a matter of arbitrary enforcement of ecclesial discipline, or doctrinal conformity. Heresy was seen as an evil that threatened the unity of the community, as well as threatening the salvation of souls. Heresy was not merely an individual act – it was an attack on the state itself.  This would become an ingrained part of European thinking, inherited by royal authority and the Church ecclesiastical leadership, as well as by the 16th Century Protestant reformers.(8) It was during this early period that both canon and civil law were developed dealing with heresy that would become the sources for addressing religious dissent in the Second Millennium.

After the breakdown of Roman imperial authority in the Fifth Century, heresy, perhaps a luxury of wealth and leisure, lessened within the more vital concern of the evangelization of non-Roman Western Europe. While theological disputes rose from the Sixth through the 10th Century, the Church struggled to establish independence from the interference of the Eastern emperors and domination of petty local rulers while at the same time developing ecclesial structures and clerical discipline.(9) With the renewal of the papacy and the conversion of Europe accomplished, powerful reform movements began in the 11th Century that reaffirmed the need for unity of belief and the means to address doctrinal dissent that threatened both Church and society.

The Medieval Inquisition

“Through the early Middle Ages belief had been taught through the use of simple creeds, and behavior had been regulated by a series of penitential regulations and by the rich liturgy performed by trained specialists. These rules had achieved the conversion of most of northern Europe to Christianity by the year 1000. They had depicted the world as a place of temptation and the prospects of salvation in it as slender. But during the course of the eleventh century a spirit of religious reform argued that the prospect of salvation in the world would be greatly increased if the world were reformed. With the reform of the papacy itself at the end of the eleventh century the Latin Church began to devise its grand program of sanctifying the world.”(10) The reform of the papacy involved the freedom from its domination by Italian aristocrats that had taken place in the tenth century.(11) Led by a stronger papacy, the “grand program of sanctifying the world” was a combination of the Church’s need to reform its institutional life, free itself from control by secular lords, and to build a Christian society. This required a clearer understanding of the essentials of the faith among believers and a more incessant demand to proper Christian behavior. There was also the growing fear that “Those who dissented from belief or behaved in a manner that was explicitly defined as un-Christian appeared no longer as erring souls in a temptation-filled world, but as subverters of the world’s new course….”(12)

Christian rulers and the common people themselves shared the same perspective. The “Inquisition” as a formal process of the Church would not be codified until the 13th Century. But in the two centuries prior, there was a strong movement to forcefully address religious dissent. To be a “heretic” meant facing possible mob justice and certain trial by secular courts.

The two heresies of the 12th and early 13th centuries that gave birth to the medieval inquisition were that of the Cathars (or Albigensians) and the Waldensians. The Cathars essentially held that the “evil god” of the Old Testament created the material world and saw the Church as the instrument of that material world. The Waldensians preached against wealth, clericalism and rejected the sacramental nature of the Church. Both these movements coalesced to a certain degree, and would become somewhat popular in Southern France, Northern Italy and parts of Germany.(13)  (Protestant reformers in the 16th Century would often point to these movements as part of an alleged “silent” Church that existed since the Apostolic Age, as Kaifetz suggests. In reality, the Cathars and the Waldensians had a decidedly non-Christian “dualistic” perception of God, the source of which was essentially pagan philosophy. Their views were unique to the times and would have horrified the 16th century Protestant Reformers.)

Up to the late 12th Century, such heresies were considered the responsibility of the local bishop. It was assumed that secular rulers (as well as the mob) would take action. The Church response had remained primarily an attempt to persuade and, if necessary, excommunicate heretics. But an evolution was taking place. “The Third Lateran Council of 1179 produced several canons condemning heretics – chiefly to excommunication and denial of Christian burial – and several widely circulated condemnations of heresy, with specific descriptions of heretical beliefs and practices, as well as privileges comparable to those of crusaders for those who fight against heretics and their defenders. In 1184 Pope Lucius III issued the decretal Ad abolendam … called ‘the founding charter of the inquisition.’”(14) Pope Lucius’ decree called for those found by the local church to be heretical to be turned over to the secular courts. In 1199, Pope Innocent III (1198-1216) identified heresy with treason. As part of his singularly strong reform movement, including encouraging of popular devotions, increased emphasis on catechesis, and the eradication of clerical abuses, Pope Innocent III viewed heresy as a destroyer of souls. When Albigensians in Southern France killed a papal representative in 1208, Innocent called for a “crusade” against the heretical sect. The violence of the subsequent “Albigensian Crusade” was not in keeping with the reforms and plans of Innocent, who stressed education, confession, clerical reform and preaching to counteract heresy.(15) Yet, under the control of mobs, petty rulers and vindictive local bishops who cared little for Innocent’s interventionist reforms, armies from northern France swept through the heretical strongholds for over 20 years. The Albigensian heresy effectively disappeared.

The uncontrollable fanaticism of local mobs of heresy hunters, the indifference of certain ecclesiastics, the violence of secular courts and the bloodshed of the Albigensian crusade led to a determined effort by the papacy to exercise greater control over the determination and prosecution of heresy. This would allow for some measure of persuasion and conversion, rather than simply prosecution by secular courts that emphasized punishment rather than salvation. Beginning a trend started earlier in the century, papal legates from the curia, or local judges appointed by the popes began to exercise courts of inquisition. The papacy also began to use the Mendicant Religious Orders, especially the Dominicans (founded 1220) and, later the Franciscans (founded 1209) to combat heresy by serving as confessors, preachers and judges.(16)  In 1231, Pope Gregory IX (1227-1241) specifically commissioned the Dominicans as papal judges of heresy.(17)

Over the next 20 years there grew up a very specific state of canonical legislation for dealing with heresy. Though not as severe as the secular courts of Europe at the time, the penalties for heresy – including confiscation of property and the formality of turning persistent heretics over to the secular courts for punishment – became codified within ecclesial courts.(18) This was, then, the formal establishment of the medieval inquisition. It consisted of a mix of local episcopal courts, as well as papal-designated judges and legates. It had close ties to the secular rulers who, in effect, enforced the judgments of ecclesial courts as heresy had become equated with treason. There was no central office in the medieval inquisition, no overarching authority. Local bishops, or members of the Mendicant orders assigned over a period to a certain area, established ecclesial courts for the investigation of heresy. They used procedures common to contemporary European legal procedures. By the late fourteenth and most of the fifteenth centuries, the work of such ecclesial courts was “intermittent and occasionally non-existent.”(19)

The medieval inquisition courts often functioned like circuit courts of the more recent past. Codes and manuals were developed that detailed how an inquisition was to function. It began with the arrival in an area of the inquisitors, possibly members of the Dominican order. They would preach a sermon to the clergy and laity of an area on the dangers of heresy. A “period of grace” would them be extended to allow for confessions of dissenting practices without subsequent trial. Trials were held for those who refused to confess under the period of grace. For those who returned to the Church, forgiveness was granted and some form of penance imposed. Those that did not reject their heresies were excommunicated and turned over to the secular authorities.

For the most part, these courts functioned similarly to their secular counterparts at that time though generally, their sentences and penances were far less harsh. The investigations were held in secret and names of witnesses were not given to the accused, generally out of fear of retaliation. (The names of witnesses were known to the inquisitors and were kept in the written records. Judges were given detailed instructions in the manuals on how to detect false witness. Those accused were also allowed to list their known enemies and witnesses appearing on such a list were often discounted.) At the conclusion, the decrees of the trial were made public.(20)

A number of questions arise concerning these medieval inquisitions. First and most important to the myth of the inquisition, concerns the use of torture in obtaining confessions. Proof was necessary in order to convict and in the absence of such, confession was necessary. As Peters explains at length:

“The tradition of Roman and medieval criminal law had made torture an element in the testimony of otherwise dubious witnesses, and a procedure could be triggered by enough partial proofs to indicate that a full proof – a confession – was likely, and no other full proofs were available. The procedure of torture itself was guarded by a number of protocols and protections for the defendant, and the jurists rigorously defined its place in due process. A confession made after or under torture had to be freely repeated the next day without torture or it would have been considered invalid. Technically, therefore, torture was strictly a means of obtaining the only full proof available…Their tasks were not only – or even primarily – to convict the contumacious heretic, but to save his soul if possible and to preserve the unity of the Church. In this their interest often ran counter to those of lay people (who simply wanted the heretic destroyed before the whole community suffered), and of judicial officers of temporal powers, who sought only to punish.”(21)

The guidelines from the manuals were extremely strict and torture was not used to punish, as was common in the secular courts. The gruesome lists such as Kaifetz’ were an invention of post-Reformation propaganda in regard to the Spanish Inquisition rather than the reality of the medieval inquisitions. Such actions cannot be justified in our own age, but they can at least be understood as part of accepted judicial procedure at that time. In any case, the use of torture in inquisition courts was far less extensive, and far less violent, than the norms of secular courts.(22)

The question also arises concerning the beliefs that were prosecuted. The general accusation made by 16th Century reformers were that alleged “heretics” were simple bible-believing Christians, precursors of the Protestant revolt. As will also be seen in the Spanish Inquisition, this was usually not the case. The Albigensian heresy was the most extensive religious dissent in the period of the medieval inquisitions. Albigensianism was an essential denial of a Christian understanding of God that led to a host of strange beliefs and practices (such as the non-sinfulness of fornication). But for the most part, “heretical views” were hardly organized in a systematic theology, particularly prior to the 16th Century. Those prosecuted were usually the ignorant, the troublemaker, the braggart and, at times surely, the drunkard in his cups professing blasphemy. Those prosecuted rarely held a deeply contrary belief system. (While those alleged to be witches would become a major concern of the Reformers, this was far less so in the inquisition trials. Sporadic trials for witchcraft by inquisition judges would take place in different areas at different times, though it was generally considered the business of the secular courts and such activities the product of a deluded mind rather than a heretic.)

Additionally, actions contrary to the faith where commonly prosecuted, rather than beliefs as such. Common fornication, refusal to attend to the Sacraments, disregard of religious practice and devotion were often prosecuted by inquisition trials. Clergy living a dissolute lifestyle or speaking out in ignorance against commonly accepted moral teachings were a major focus of the inquisitions, as well as those who spoke out against the inquisitions. The concept of a rigid thought police searching out a reformed “underground church” was the wishful thinking – and propaganda – of later centuries.

The final question concerns the extensiveness of the inquisition prior to the 16th century, as well as its uniformity and its continuity through the centuries and in different regions. After the suppression of the Albigensian heresy in Southern France in the 13th century, inquisitorial trials waxed and waned in the face of local needs. In France itself, trials were primarily in the hands of secular authorities. In some areas – such as England – heresy was a smaller problem, and ecclesial courts to judge heresy were utilized intermittently. While there were inquisitorial courts, they were under the supervision of local Church authorities and worked closely with the secular arm. The most notable example of its use in England prior to Luther’s revolt in the 16th Century was aimed at the Lolled followers of John Wycliff in the last quarter of the 14th Century and beginning of the 15th Century.

John Wycliff was a priest and instructor at Oxford where he developed his theology of predestination – that people were “predestined” to be saved or lost and the good works they do are signs of their election, not a means toward salvation. Inevitably, this theology led to the conclusion that sacraments, the priesthood and the Church were unnecessary. Wycliff’s views became popular, particularly as they meant that the English Parliament – cash-strapped and preparing for war with France – need not forward a tribute to the pope. Wycliff was summoned before a council of bishops to explain his position, but the meeting ended when a fight broke out between his armed retinue and members of the audience. Wycliff’s views were forwarded to Pope Gregory XI who issued a condemnation and ordered the bishops to hold an inquisition. If Wycliff still maintained those views, he was to be excommunicated and turned over to the secular authorities. As his trial by the bishops was about to begin, royal intervention – and a mob outside – convinced the bishops to call a halt to the proceedings. Pope Gregory XI then died and a resulting papal schism let Wycliff proceed in his studies. However, when he launched an attack on the Eucharist, many of his previous supporters abandoned him. A revolutionary uprising by peasants and workers was seen as a result of his work, and his royal support ebbed as well. He was summoned to appear in Rome, but died on New Year’s Eve, 1384.(23)  His remaining followers, called Lollards, would face local inquisitions.

In the German states, inquisition trials were few and far between. Additionally, those that were conducted fell under the authority of the local bishops who were often identified with the secular authority. As in many cases, the secular authorities often conducted trials as well. A notable exception was the case of John Hus in Bohemia. Hus had absorbed elements of Wycliff’s teachings, as well as a rising Bohemian nationalism. Attacking a host of Church teaching – and the pope as the Anti-Christ – Hus was ordered to appear at the Council of Constance in 1414, where the Church was attempting to resolve disputed claims to the papacy and enact ecclesiastical reform. Hus was condemned by the Council and turned over to the civil authorities who executed him in 1415.(24)  Pope John Paul II would state that the execution of Hus was a mistake.

By the mid to late 14th century, papal commissioned inquisitors had disappeared from many parts of Europe. Inquisitorial courts, such as they were, were conducted under local episcopacies working closely with local temporal authorities and dealing with local circumstances. Regional control of the inquisition process – and regional concerns – would become dominant.(25)  A vast, papal-controlled, grand and singular inquisition never really existed in Europe. The closest approximation of that was in the mid to late 13th century, but did not last very long.(26)

The Spanish Inquisition

Most of the myths surrounding the inquisition have come to us wrapped in the cloak of the Spanish Inquisition. Traditional anti-Catholic presentations will discuss the papal decretal of 1184, Pope Innocent III and the Albigensian crusade beginning in 1208, then leap ahead to the Spanish Inquisition in the mid 16th Century. It is with the Spanish Inquisition that the lurid myth of the inquisition truly developed. It is the world of Edgar Allen Poe’s The Pit and the Pendulum, with vivid descriptions of burning heretics in auto-de-fes, ghastly engines of torture, innocent Bible-believers martyred for their faith, and a once vibrant economic and social power hurled back into a papal-dominated “dark ages” from which it has yet to truly emerge. In many ways, the reality of the Spanish Inquisition has its own human tragedies, but it is not the tragedy presented in the common caricatures.

It is a curiosity of history that the medieval inquisition of the 13th and 14th centuries was little utilized in Spain or Portugal. It was only after the mid-fifteenth century that the Spanish Inquisition would develop, and its target would not be heretics in the traditional sense, but rather Jews who had converted to Christianity and were accused of secretly practicing their old faith. To many contemporary historians of the Spanish Inquisition, the story unfolds not as a “religious” persecution, but rather a racial pogrom. Additionally, the Spanish Inquisition had very little involvement with trials and punishments of Protestants, even with centuries of propaganda to the contrary.

Spain was unique in Western Europe for the diversity of its population. In addition to a large segment of Muslims, medieval Spain had the single largest Jewish community in the world, numbering some one hundred thousand souls in the 13th Century(27) For centuries Jews and Christians had lived and worked together in a rather peaceful though generally segregated co-existence. In the 14th Century, anti-Jewish attitudes were on the rise throughout Europe. In 1290, England expelled its Jews and France followed in 1306. Spain began to experience an increasing anti-Jewish sentiment. It exploded in the summer of 1391 with angry anti-Jewish riots. More religious than racial – though this has been disputed(28) – these riots led to major forced conversions of Jews to Christianity. These Jewish converts would be called conversos or New Chistians, to distinguish them from traditional Christian families. Theconverso (or the more scornful term, marrano) identity would remain with such families for generations.

To the converso families, such conversions were not without benefit (not including the benefit of saving their lives in the 1391 riots). They were welcomed into a full participation in Spanish society not available to Jews and they would soon become leaders in government, science, business and the Church. Though it was legislated in certain areas that those forced to convert could return to their own religion, many did not. Theseconverso families obviously faced the scorn of those who remained Jews. At the same time, however, over the years the Old Christians saw them as opportunists who secretly maintained the faith of their forefathers. It was a strong mixture of racial and religious prejudice against theconversos that would stir-up the Spanish Inquisition.

Spain in the 15th century was in the process of unifying the two traditional kingdoms of Castile and Aragon, while engaging in the final defeat of the Muslim stronghold of Granada. Isabella of Castile had married Frederick of Aragon in 1469. She came to the throne in 1474. When Ferdinand became king of Aragon in 1479, the two kingdoms were effectively united. War was waged with Granada beginning in 1482, with its final defeat coming 10 years later.

Isabella succeeded to the Castilian throne upon the death of her stepbrother, Henry IV. Henry had long protected both the Jews and theconversos. Upon his death, there was a widespread outbreak of anti-Jewish and anti-converso protest and violence. “From the mid-Fifteenth Century on, religious anti-Semitism changed into ethnic anti-Semitism, with little difference seen between Jews and conversos except for the fact that conversos were regarded as worse than Jews because, as ostensible Christians, they had acquired privileges and positions that were denied to Jews. The result of this new ethnic anti-Semitism was the invocation of an inquisition to ferret out the false conversos who had, by becoming formal Christians, placed themselves under its authority.”(29) In 1478, Ferdinand and Isabella requested a papal bull establishing an inquisition, a bull granted by Pope Sixtus IV. In 1482 the size of the inquisition was expanded and included the Dominican Friar Tomas de Torquemada, though Pope Sixtus IV protested against the activities of the inquisition in Aragon and its treatment of the conversos. The next year, Ferdinand and Isabella established a state council to administer the inquisition with Torquemada as its president. He would later assume the title of Inquisitor-General. This was a major development as it would allow the inquisition to persist well beyond its initial intention, and to be extended to wherever Spanish power existed, including the New World.(30) The papacy would continue to complain about the treatment of the conversos, but the unity of the Spanish Inquisition with the State would remain a distinguishing characteristic, and a primary source of post-Reformation European hatred.

Why did Ferdinand and Isabella establish the Inquisition in Spain? Ostensibly, the reason was to investigate the allegations of Judaizing among the conversos. Historians have pointed to other reasons: as a means to consolidate power, as a source of revenue from the confiscation of converso wealth, as a means to eliminate the conversos from public life, and as part of the Reconquista of a united Spain to the faith. The stated reason for the inquisition was to root out “false” conversos. There seems to have been an allure to the claim that many conversos secretly practiced their old Jewish faith and, as such, were undermining the Faith. For centuries, such legends would persist in Spain, though most evidence shows that there were few “secret” Judaizers and that most conversos, particularly after the first generation of forced conversions, were faithful Catholics. This is why many historians have concluded that at the center of the inquisitorial storm was a racial, rather than a religious prejudice at work.

In March, 1492, Isabella and Ferdinand ordered the expulsion – or conversion – of all remaining Jews in their joint kingdoms. The intent of the declaration was more religious than racial, as Jewish conversion rather than expulsion was certainly the intent. While many Jews fled, a large number converted, thus aggravating the popular picture of secret Judaizers within the Christian community of Spain. Up through 1530, the primary activity of the inquisition in Spain would be aimed at pursuingconversos. The same would be true from 1650 to 1720. While its activities declined thereafter, the inquisition continued to exist until its final abolition in 1824.

The Spanish Inquisition had been universally established in Spain a few years prior to the expulsion of the Jews in 1492. Records show that virtually the only “heresy” prosecuted at that time was the alleged secret practice of the Jewish faith. In all, between the establishment of the Inquisition in Spain through 1530, it is estimated that approximately 2,000 “heretics” were turned over to the secular authorities for execution.(31) Many of those convicted of heresy were conversos who had fled. These were burned in effigy.

The most famous period of the Spanish Inquisition, under the legendary Torquemada, had little to do with the common caricature of simple “bible-believing” Protestants torn apart by ruthless churchmen. The true picture is unsettling enough: it was a government-controlled inquisition aimed at faithful Catholics of Jewish ancestry. The motivations seemed far more racial than religious, if not in Ferdinand and Isabella, then certainly among those who carried it out. The papacy, under Sixtus IV (1471-1484) and Innocent VIII (1484-1492), rather than controlling the Spanish Inquisition, protested its unfair treatment of the conversos with little result.

Reformation Response

Under Charles V, successor to Ferdinand and Isabella, the Inquisition became an established part of Spanish justice. With the outbreak of Luther’s Reformation in Europe and the spread of its ideas in the 1520s, it was entrenched as a means to both protect the faith in Spain from infiltration of this new heresy, and as a further means to buttress royal power.

The Reformation would have little impact in Spain. One on the one hand, the existence of an active State-sponsored inquisition can be viewed as one reason it never took hold. On the other hand, however, Spain’s traditional Catholicism so identified with the Reconquista of the late 15th Century surely played a strong role. “Unlike England, France and Germany, Spain had not since the early Middle Ages experienced a single significant popular heresy. All its ideological struggles since the Reconquest had been directed against the minority religions, Judaism and Islam. There were consequently no native heresies (like Wycliffism in England) on which German ideas could build.”(32)  Humanism itself also had a rather weak impact in Spain. Scholars and essayists such as Erasmus had only a minimal following.(33) The small number of humanists with an understanding of Erasmus were viewed suspiciously, however, and Erasmus would eventually become equated with Luther in Spain.

The image of a Spanish Inquisition burning hundreds of thousands of Protestant heretics has no basis in historical fact. There were so few Protestants in Spain that there could be no such prosecution, no matter how strong the inquisition and no matter how much anti-Catholic propagandists tried to create such an image in the 16th Century and thereafter. During the Reformation period, the inquisition in Spain certainly searched for evidence of Protestantism, particularly among the educated classes. Contemporary trends were viewed suspiciously, even though those involved were clearly Catholic in practice. Mystical spiritual movements were investigated, leading to persecution of a small group of illuminists, or alumbrados. This was an interior spiritual movement based on a passive union of the soul with God. While its condemnation in Spain affected only a few, it did impact on a generation of spiritual writers, including St. Theresa of Avila who would be questioned for alleged illuminist leanings.(34) “The Lutheran threat, however, took a long time to develop. In 1520, Luther had probably not been heard of in Spain…However, a full generation went by and Lutheranism failed to take root in Spain. There was, in those years, no atmosphere of restriction or repression. Before 1558 possibly less than 50 cases of alleged Lutheranism among Spaniards came to the notice of the inquisitors.”(35)

The discovery of a small cell of Protestants in Seville and Valladolid in the late 1550s, however, generated concern in the highest quarters in Spain. The Seville group “totaled around one hundred and twenty persons, including the prior and members of the Jeronimite convent of Santa Paula. The group managed to exist in security until the 1550s, when some monks from San Isidro opportunely fled. The exiles…played little part in Spanish history but were glories of the European Reformation.”(36) The Seville Protestants were discovered in 1557, which led to the arrest of the Valladoid group as well in 1558. Spain reacted in horror to the discovery, and Charles V from his monastery retirement wrote in an infamous letter to his regent daughter Juana in Spain that so “great an evil” must be “suppressed and remedied without distinction of persons from the very beginning.”(37) Though Spain braced for a tidal wave of revelations and discoveries – with finger-pointing and accusations of pseudo-Protestants everywhere – in all, just over 100 persons in Spain were found to be Protestants and turned over to the secular authorities for execution in the 1560s. In the last decades of the century, an additional 200 Spaniards were accused of being followers of Luther. “Most of them were in no sense Protestants…Irreligious sentiments, drunken mockery, anticlerical expressions, were all captiously classified by the inquisitors (or by those who denounced the cases) as ‘Lutheran.’ Disrespect to church images, and eating meat on forbidden days, were taken as signs of heresy.”(38)

One aspect of the Spanish Inquisition that played into the hands of the Reformation propagandists was when it claimed jurisdiction over foreigners on its soil. Sailors and traders from foreign countries made up the bulk of the accusations of “Lutheranism” in Spain, leading to clashes with these governments. (Well into the 20th Century, all nations outside of Spain were referred to as tierras de herejes, or the “heretical countries.”) Tales from these people who had faced the Spanish Inquisition were a favorite form of anti-Catholic literature and provided an unreliable source for the whole “black legend” that surrounded it.

In many ways, the inquisition in Spain mirrored the structures of the medieval inquisitions. An inquisition began with the arrival in a community of its officers who would announce it at a Mass with all the community assembled. As in the medieval inquisition, an “edict of grace” was usually given to self-confess offenses without serious penalty. An “edict of faith,” was often read that listed the heresies under investigation.  By the 16th Century, inquisition trials were not public. The names of accusers were kept secret from the accused. Evidence was collected and presented to theologians for assessment. If proof were deemed sufficient, an arrest would take place (a rule often violated, as some arrests seemed to take place before any proof was established). Arrest was followed by immediate seizure of the property of the accused, which would be held until the case was settled.

As in the medieval Inquisition, torture was used to elicit confessions when there was insufficient proof. Torture was common throughout Europe in judicial actions and Spain was no exception. Torture could only be used in cases of heresy, which meant that it was not used for the minor offenses that made up the majority on inquisitorial activity. After 1530, however, torture appeared more frequently when the inquisition was specifically investigating alleged Judaizers and Protestants. However, the “scenes of sadism conjured up by popular writers on the inquisition have little basis in reality, though the whole procedure was unpleasant enough to arouse periodic protests from Spaniards.”(39) Those conducting the tortures were not clergy, as often portrayed in artistic representations, but were professionals normally used in the secular courts. The torture could not cause bloodletting or result in loss of life or mutilation. The purpose of the torture, unlike in secular tribunals, was to gain either information or confession, not punishment. It was used only in a minority of cases, and normally as a last resort.(40)

Since evidence and witnesses were gathered before the arrest, the inquisition did not see its function as a trial to determine guilt or innocence. The accused was arrested with the goal of gaining a confession. The accused was usually given three opportunities to admit to the wrongs after which, the prosecutor would read the charges and the accused had to respond immediately. Unlike the medieval inquisition, the accused was allowed legal counsel, though these counselors were officers of the inquisition and not terribly helpful or trusted. The accused could then muster a defense based on witness testimony, or pleas of extenuating circumstances, such as drunkenness. A body called theconsulta de fe, made up of inquisitors, a representative of the local bishop and theological consultors would then issue a ruling.

Those found guilty were sentenced to varying degrees of penances that could go from donning the sanbenito, a yellow penitential garb to be worn at all times in public, to servitude on a Spanish galley. As in the medieval inquisition, most cases did not involve heresy. Charges such as bigamy, adultery, lewd living and blasphemy were the majority of cases. Only unrepentant heretics or relapsed heretics could be “relaxed” – turned over – to the secular authorities to be burned at the stake. After the bitter persecution of the conversos in the first 20 years of the inquisition, in the 17th and 18th centuries fewer than three people a year were executed throughout Spain.(41) In fact, most condemned were burnt only in effigy, having previously died or fled the country.

The auto de fe that followed trials is the most infamous, and misunderstood, part of the Spanish Inquisition. An auto de fe was a unique aspect of the Spanish Inquisition, a public, liturgical “act of faith.” Usually held in a public square, an auto de fe involved prayer, a Mass, public procession of those found guilty and a reading of their sentences. The event could certainly take the entire day and the public was encouraged to witness it. Artistic representations of the auto de fe by propagandists usually involved images of torture and the burning of the accused. As such, they became a major source for creating the image in the popular mind of the Spanish Inquisition. However, no such activities took place during what was essential a religious act stressing the “reconciliation” of those accused with the Church. There was no torture as trials had been concluded, and if executions were to take place, they were separate from the auto de fe and conducted less publicly after the fact.(42)

The Spanish Inquisition was unique. Wrestled early from the papacy, it was controlled by the Spanish monarchy. Its aim, certainly, was to maintain a Catholic Spain, but its use was primarily centered on Catholicconversos of Jewish and, later, Muslim ancestry. It was certainly a force that kept Protestant – and, to a degree, Enlightenment – thought out of Spain, though the number of those actually prosecuted for such activity was very small. It would persist with various flare-ups in activities through the 17th and 18th centuries, though the auto de fe became less frequent. The last major outburst in activity was aimed once again at alleged Judaizing among conversos in the 1720s. It was formally ended by the monarchy in 1834, though it had effectively come to an end years prior.(43)

The Inquisition in Italy         

Unlike the inquisition in Spain, the inquisition in the Papal States and in various Italian cities had no conversos to be targeted. (Many Spanishconversos would find refuge in Rome and other Italian cities where they were never bothered.) By the mid-sixteenth century and the publishing of the reforms of the Council of Trent (1563), the inquisition in Rome focused on keeping out Protestant thought. “Like the Spanish Inquisition, the Roman Inquisition and its subordinate tribunals appear to have been generally successful in keeping any substantial Protestant influence from spreading widely in the peninsula…once the immediate problem of Protestantism was reduced, (the inquisition) turned the bulk of its operation to the question of internal ecclesiastical discipline and to offenses other than Protestantism.”(44)

The early inquisition in Rome also focused on the so-called “popular religion,” the superstitious practices, including witchcraft, that were survived in the fifteenth and 16th centuries. The Spanish Inquisition would also flirt at times with these practices. Unlike the Protestant reformers, however, the inquisitions in both Italy and Spain eventually began to see these difficulties as the result of poor catechesis, rather than active heresy and took less interest in its prosecution. After early rather intense prosecution, the inquisitions generally turned skeptical toward accusations of witchcraft and sorcery and established rigorous rules of prosecution and evidence. In most cases in Catholic countries in the 17th century and beyond, the inquisitions had less and less to do with prosecution of superstition.(45)

The inquisitions as they existed in the Papal States and the cities and kingdoms throughout Italy were never viewed with the same approbation as the Spanish Inquisition. For the most part, these inquisitions focused on clerical abuses and, outside the Papal States, had a strong mix of political intrigue. However, three famous cases that contributed to the myth of the Inquisition took place in Italy. They were the trials of  Savonarola (1498), Giordano Bruno (1593-1599) and Galileo (1633).

“Savonarola was the Middle Ages surviving into the Renaissance, and the Renaissance destroyed him.”(46)  A Dominican friar, Girolamo Savonarola was a firebrand speaker who denounced the immorality of his time, and did not spare Pope Alexander VI (1492-1503). Preaching in Florence, he formed his own renewed monastic order, as well as becoming an influential leader in the new Florentine Republic proclaimed in June 1495. Poor statesmanship – as well as a populace that grew tired of his puritanical reformation as seen in the “bonfire of the vanities” where worldly items were burned – led to his downfall. Pope Alexander VI was little concerned about Savonarola’s personal criticism. But when his friends proclaimed him a prophet from God, and he attempted to convince the French king to call a general council and depose the pope as “an infidel and a heretic,” he was summoned to Rome to explain himself. Savonarola claimed ill health and Alexander ordered an investigation of his sermons. A Dominican reviewed them favorably and convinced the pope that not only should he not be tried, but that he should be named a cardinal. The offer was made and was rejected in a thunderous series of Lenten sermons denouncing the Church and the papacy. He issued letters to the kings of Europe demanding a council to overthrow what he saw as a corrupt papacy.

Florence was being torn apart by the controversial friar. He was soon abandoned by Florentine leadership and arrested along with two others from his order. The pope asked that they be sent to Rome for an ecclesial trial, but Florentine authorities, tired of the meddlesome friar, wanted him killed. He was tried under the local inquisition on charges of schism, heresy, revealing confessional secrets, false prophecies and visions, as well as causing civil disorder. He was found guilty and executed on May 23, 1498. Though seen by some as a pre-Reformation martyr, his meddling in Florentine politics, rather than his call for moral reforms and his attacks on Pope Alexander VI caused Savonarola’s downfall. Though certainly tried with the approbation of the pope, his death was more a civil act than an inquisitorial judgment.(47)

Giordano Bruno was born near Naples in 1548. He was ordained a Dominican in 1572, but he quickly came to doubt most fundamental Christian belief. Unlike the Protestant reformers, Bruno saw himself as a philosopher. He left the monastery, ending up for a time in Geneva where he was tried for citing heresy by a Calvinist theologian. He apologized and was freed. Bruno wandered Europe, where he was recognized in various courts as a masterful philosopher as well as a common nuisance. Vain, arrogant and a misogynist, he would be denounced a heretic by the reformed churches as well as the inquisition. His philosophy, as disorganized as it was, identified God with an infinite universe.(48) After 16 years of wandering, Bruno decided to return to Italy thinking  “should be questioned by the Inquisition, he could (as well he might) quote enough orthodox passages from his works to deceive the Church into thinking him her loving son.”(49) In 1592, the Venetian inquisition had him arrested. He was arrested not only for his heretical views, but also as a priest who had abandoned his vocation. In 1593, he was sent to Rome. After years of imprisonment and questioning, he was condemned in 1599 for his writings on the Trinity and the Incarnation. He was ordered to recant. He appealed to the pope who judged the propositions heretical. Bruno refused to recant and he was turned over to the secular authorities. He was burned on February 19, 1600.(50)  Bruno was an excessive character – and a bit of a charlatan – who rejected fundamental beliefs of Catholicism and was condemned by the reformers as well. A man who abandoned the priesthood, in the difficult days of the Reformation and the Counter Reformation, he was certain to be prosecuted and seemed to court his own martyrdom.

The Galileo affair entered the mythological corpus of Western secularism as symbolizing the Church as anti-science. Galileo was tried by the papal inquisition in 1633 for publishing in defiance of a mandate he was allegedly given in 1616.   Galileo taught as fact that the earth rotated on its axis and orbited the sun. Both views appeared to violate Scripture. His 1633 trial is most often portrayed as Galileo the scientist arguing the supremacy of reason and the tribunal judges demanding that reason abjure to faith. The trial was neither. Galileo, a firm and orthodox Catholic, and the tribunal judges shared a common view that science and the Bible could not stand in contradiction. If there appeared to be a contradiction, such a contradiction resulted from either weak science, or poor interpretation of Scripture. In context, the trial exhibited both faults. Galileo’s technology was far too limited at the time to scientifically prove his assertion of the earth’s double rotation. At the same time, the tribunal judges were at fault for a literal interpretation of biblical passages and making scientific judgments never intended by the Scriptural authors. Galileo was sentenced to a comfortable house arrest after he recanted his views. He died in 1642.(51)

In each of the above cases, a myth grew that became useful to anti-Catholic propagandists. Savonarola symbolized the “debasement” of the papacy and the Catholic world prior to the Reformation. He was seen as a symbol of moral reform in the alleged moral squalor of the world of the Renaissance popes. Bruno became the martyr to “free thought”; Galileo to science versus religious superstition. All were seen as the victims of an inquisition that came to be seen as the driving force of papal power, the creator of “millions” of Protestant martyrs, and the enemy of Enlightenment and Progress. It was this myth that persists today.

The creation of the myth of the Inquisition

“The Inquisition was an image assembled from a body of legends and myths which, between the sixteenth and the twentieth centuries, established the perceived character of inquisitorial tribunals and influenced all ensuing efforts to recover their historical reality. That body took shape in the context of intensified religious persecution as a consequence of the Reformation of the sixteenth century and of the central role of Spain, the greatest power in Europe, in assuming the role of defender of Roman Catholicism.” (52)

Edward Peters in Inquisition explains how the myth of the all-embracing inquisition developed in European thought. Protestant reformers used the inquisition – which they presented as a unified, papal-dominated event from the 13th century through the 17th century – as a source for creating centuries of alleged Christian martyrs and a hidden, Bible-believing Church that they claimed had always existed. It also served  as a means to generate anti-Catholic sentiment, particularly during the Revolt of the Netherlands against Spain. The creation of the myth of the Inquisition was tied to the creation of an image of Spain in the consciousness of the West. “An image of Spain circulated through late sixteenth-century Europe, borne by means of political and religious propaganda that blackened the characters of Spaniards and their ruler to such an extent that Spain became the symbol of all forces of repression, brutality, religious and political intolerance, and intellectual and artistic backwardness for the next four centuries. Spaniards and Hispanophiles have termed this process and the image that resulted from it as ‘The Black Legend,’ la leyenda negra.”(53)

The building of the myth of the Inquisition, particularly the Spanish Inquisition, had nothing to do with the actual racial persecution of theconversos. That critical aspect of the Inquisition would not be rediscovered until historical studies of the actual documents of the Spanish Inquisition late in the 19th Century, study that continues today. The crucial element in the 16th Century was the inquisition in Spain of a small number of Protestants from 1559 to 1562. In Germany in 1567, two Spanish Protestants under the pseudonym Reginaldus Gonzalvus Montanus published Sanctae Inquisitionis Hispanicae Artes. Though a basic propaganda tract, it would be reprinted throughout Europe and be considered the definitive source on the inquisition for over 200 years. Most inquisition “histories” written thereafter, virtually until the late 19th Century, would rely on Montanus, which became a primary source, though written by anything but an unbiased eye.

Curiously, another source for the myth of the inquisition was Catholic Italy. Italian Catholics – the papal representatives included – had a dislike for the Spanish whom they considered rural racist bumpkins. The attacks in Spain on the conversos were viewed as despicable in Rome. Italians “felt that Spanish hypocrisy in religion, together with the existence of the Inquisition, proved that the tribunal was created not for religious purity, but simply to rob the Jews. Similar views were certainly held by the prelates of the Holy See whenever they intervened in favor of the conversos. Moreover, the racialism of the Spanish authorities was scorned in Italy, where the Jewish community led a comparatively tranquil existence.”(54) Another Catholic source was Bartolome de las Casas. Las Casas was writing to condemn Spanish governmental policies in the New World and the use of slavery. His work was used by anti-Spanish propagandists to paint a portrait of evil Spain despoiling innocent natives, as they would surely do in any land over which they ruled, Old World or New.

The true explosion in inquisition rhetoric was in the period just prior to and through the revolt in the Netherlands from Spanish control. That revolt involved a fragile alliance of Catholic and Calvinist leaders against Catholic Spain. Beginning in 1548, the “printing press and propaganda turned to the service of political reform, with the inquisition as a major focus, on such a wide scale and with comparatively devastating effects.”(55) Though the Dutch themselves were trying heretics with their own state-run inquisition, it was argued that King Philip II of Spain (who succeeded Charles V) would introduce specifically a Spanish Inquisition in the Netherlands, not only crushing Protestants but denying Catholics their own freedoms as well. Popular literature created a horrific picture of an all-encompassing Spanish Inquisition that dominated the king and controlled every aspect of Spanish life. The inquisition became the fundamental instrument of Catholic oppression, not only of Protestants, but also of free thought and free men of any faith.

As the Calvinist element began to dominate in the Dutch revolt, one of the most famous documents in the creation of the myth of the inquisition was published in 1581, the Apologie of William of Orange. Written by a French Huguenot, the Apologie detailed a horrific inquisition, generated by Spaniards who “are of the blood of the Moors and Jews.”(56) “With theApologie, all of the anti-Inquisition propaganda of the past 40 years was enshrined in a political document that validated the Dutch revolt.”(57) When the English under Elizabeth I prepared to defend themselves against the Spanish armada, and the pope called for an English crusade, nationalistic fervor was fueled in England by anti-Catholic propaganda. Central to the propaganda campaign are a series of books and pamphlets detailing the horror of the Spanish Inquisition. The inquisition would become a hallmark of English anti-Catholic literature for 200 years, and be passed on to the popular anti-Catholic mythology in the United States.

Relying on these histories, fantastic accounts of alleged survivors and pure propaganda, an image of the inquisition was created that persists today. Fueled as well by the 18th Century Enlightenment and 19th Century Age of Scientism, the myth was created of “the universal oppressor of those who sought political liberty as well as true religion. In a series of specific circumstances and the articulation of local experience, the instruments of the Roman Church and the Spanish Empire merged into a single awesome institution: The Inquisition. Serving the diverse purposes of many sixteenth-century thinkers well, the Inquisition became a common object of reference in the debates over the problem of religious and civil toleration. Many people who found it difficult to agree with each other on many issues found it easy to agree upon The Inquisition.” (58)

Conclusion

Historical studies of the archives of the inquisitions in the 20th Century have created a different picture beyond the steamy rhetoric of Reformation polemics. At the beginning, a number of common assumptions concerning the inquisition were outlined. In conclusion, they should be briefly revisited:

· The inquisition as a singly, unified court system directly responsible to the pope and controlled solely by the papacy. Even within the Papal States in the 16th century, the papacy had difficulty maintaining effective control over local inquisitions. Inquisitorial courts were usually controlled by the local church in alliance with local secular authority. Though it began in the 13th century as a papal-designated juridical system to remove “heresy-hunting” from control of the mob or secular authorities, it evolved rather quickly as a device of the local church and secular authorities to address local, and later national or dynastic goals. There were many inquisitions, rather than a singular “Inquisition.”

· The inquisition existed throughout Europe for nearly 700 years and focused its efforts on a “secret” and “hidden” church, similar to that of the Reformation churches. The many inquisitions that took place existed sporadically in different regions, at different times, and to meet different local needs. The medieval inquisition barely existed, for example, in Spain and Portugal. For hundreds of years, the inquisition in many places existed only sporadically, if at all. In the 16th century, it existed primarily in Spain, Portugal, the Papal States and other Italian cities. It existed – dominated by the State – in France and, early in the century, in England. It did not exist as a single continuous entity, nor did it prosecute a “secret” church that was a precursor of Protestantism. Early heresies – such as the Albigensians – held doctrinal positions that were essentially unchristian that would have horrified the Protestant reformers.

· It was primarily aimed at the early Protestant reformers of the 16th century and the Spanish Inquisition alone killed and tortured hundreds of thousands of Protestant reformers. The Spanish Inquisition was aimed primarily at Catholics of Jewish ancestry. In total, it is unlikely that even a thousand, let alone hundreds of thousands, Protestants suffered at the hands of the Spanish Inquisition. While those alleged to be Protestants were inquisitorial victims in England and Europe, there numbers were small and most were protected by Protestant or sympathetic rulers. Much of the focus of the various inquisitions were clerical abuses and what was considered scandalous behavior. Most cases in the inquisitions involved adultery, drunkenness,  failure to attend to religious devotions,  sacrilege, verbal abuse of clergy, etc.

· Vicious tortures were routinely used. Torture was utilized, but under rules far stricter than the norm in secular courts of the time. Torture was never used for punishment. Exotic torture mechanisms were the creation of propagandists. Torture could only be used in cases involving a charge of heresy or a relapsed heretic. As the far majority of inquisitorial cases did not involve such issues, torture was a rare occurrence and a last resort.

· The Spanish Inquisition existed independent of Spanish secular authority and existed solely as an arm of the church, as did other inquisitions. Though established with papal mandate, the Spanish Inquisition was an office of the Spanish government and existed so long because of that support. The crown and the Church in Spain, not the papacy that often took issue with its activities, controlled it. For the most part, inquisitions in Spain and elsewhere were under the control of the local church working with local secular authorities.

· The inquisition was a means for the Church to exercise its authority over science. Inquisitions rarely involved themselves in the area of science, despite the well-known case of Galileo. Even in the Galileo case, the concern of Church authorities was not in the discussion of the theory of the orbit of the earth around the sun – a theory that appeared to contradict Scripture – but teaching what was then scientifically unverifiable as scientific fact.

· Persecution of religious dissent was unique to the inquisitions and to the Catholic Church in Europe. Religious dissent was punished in all Protestant lands throughout the Reformation period, whether of Catholics or Protestants dissenting from the majority Protestant viewpoint. The difference was that this was considered solely a judicial activity of the state, rather than involving an ecclesial court.

In popular culture – particularly in the United States – the legend of the Inquisition thrives. Utilized as an image in political debates and the cultural wars, the inquisition remains an effective club. While the Church has acknowledged the errors in the past associated with the inquisition, no apology is necessary for the false and unhistorical caricature that remains part of the popular consciousness.

RECOMMENDED RESOURCES

Two books cited extensively within this paper provide excellent overviews of the  inquisition based on modern historical studies. Edward Peters,Inquisition (1988) is available in paperback from University of California Press, Berkeley, CA 94720. Peters book is a fascinating account of the development of the myth of the inquisition and how polemics, art and literature enhanced this myth. Peters is the Henry Charles Lea Professor of Medieval History at the University of Pennsylvania. The Spanish Inquisition: A Historical Revision (Yale University Press) by Henry Kamen is the best available study on the origins, methods and history of the Spanish Inquisition. Kamen is a Fellow of the Royal Historical Society and a professor of the Higher Council for Scientific Research in Barcelona, Spain.

SUMMARY POINTS

· Of the many historical myths about Catholics and Catholicism perhaps the most pervasive are those centered on the inquisition in general and the Spanish Inquisition in particular. From the 16th through the early 20th Century, the legend of the Inquisition grew larger than its history. This legend of the inquisition persists today in the imagination, well after its debunking by historians.

· Inquisitions were ecclesial investigations, meaning that investigations were conducted either directly by, or under the auspices of, the Church. The investigations were undertaken at certain times in certain regions under the authority of the local bishop and his designates, or under the auspices of papal-appointed legates, or representatives from Religious Orders delegated the task from the papacy.

· The inquisition existed and it remains an unsettling part of Catholic history. However, the caricature of the inquisition that most of us have come to know and that is often utilized in anti-Catholic polemics has little to do with the reality of the inquisition.

· From very early (as noted in Scripture) the Christian community was forced to confront how to deal with those people who persisted in teachings contrary to the Apostolic Faith. For the most part, the early Church settled on admonishment, avoidance and, if a person persisted in error, expulsion from the community.

· With the disastrous effect of doctrinal heresies on both Church and social unity there was a growing consensus that use of the “secular arm” was necessary, with even St. Augustine arguing in favor of it. With Christian emperors occupying the imperial throne, heretical views came to be seen as not only a violation of Christian unity, but as an act of treason against the State.

· With the renewal of the papacy and the conversion of Europe accomplished, powerful reform movements began in the 11th Century that reaffirmed the need for unity of belief and the means to address doctrinal dissent that threatened both Church and society.

· The “Inquisition” as a formal process of the Church would not be codified until the 13th Century. But in the two centuries prior, there was a strong movement to forcefully address religious dissent. To be a “heretic” meant facing possible mob justice and certain trial by secular courts.

· The two heresies of the 12th and early 13th centuries that gave birth to the medieval inquisition were that of the Cathars (or Albigensians) and the Waldensians. They had a decidedly non-Christian “dualistic” perception of God, the source of which was essentially pagan philosophy. Their views were unique to the times and would have horrified the 16th century Protestant Reformers.

· The uncontrollable fanaticism of local mobs of heresy hunters, the indifference of certain ecclesiastics, the violence of secular courts and the bloodshed of the Albigensian crusade led to a determined effort by the papacy to exercise greater control over the determination and prosecution of heresy in the 13th century.

· In 1231, Pope Gregory IX (1227-1241) specifically commissioned the Dominicans as papal judges of heresy. Over the next 20 years there grew up a very specific state of canonical legislation for dealing with heresy. Though not as severe as the secular courts of Europe at the time, the penalties for heresy – including confiscation of property and the formality of turning persistent heretics over to the secular courts for punishment – became codified within ecclesial courts. This was the formal establishment of the medieval inquisition.

· By the late fourteenth and most of the fifteenth centuries, the work of such ecclesial courts was intermittent and occasionally non-existent.

· Torture was not used to punish, as was common in the secular courts. The gruesome lists of instruments of torture were an invention of post-Reformation propaganda in regard to the Spanish Inquisition rather than the reality of the medieval inquisitions. Such actions cannot be justified in our own age, but they can at least be understood as part of accepted judicial procedure at that time. In any case, the use of torture in inquisition courts was far less extensive, and far less violent, than the norms of secular courts.

· For the most part, those prosecuted for “heretical views” in the medieval inquisition were hardly organized in a systematic theology, or could be considered a “hidden church.” Those prosecuted were usually the ignorant, the troublemaker, the braggart and, at times surely, the drunkard in his cups professing blasphemy. Those prosecuted rarely held a deeply contrary belief system.

· By the mid to late 14th century, papal commissioned inquisitors had disappeared from many parts of Europe. Inquisitorial courts, such as they were, were conducted under local episcopacies working closely with local temporal authorities and dealing with local circumstances. Regional control of the inquisition process – and regional concerns – would become dominant. A vast, papal-controlled, grand and singular inquisition never really existed in Europe.

· It was only after the mid-fifteenth century that the Spanish Inquisition would develop, and its target would not be heretics in the traditional sense, but rather Jews who had converted to Christianity and were accused of secretly practicing their old faith. To many contemporary historians of the Spanish Inquisition, the story unfolds not as a “religious” persecution, but rather a racial pogrom.

· There seems to have been an allure to the claim that many conversossecretly practiced their old Jewish faith. For centuries, such legends would persist in Spain, though most evidence shows that there were few “secret” Judaizers and that most conversos were faithful Catholics. Up through 1530, the primary activity of the inquisition in Spain would be aimed at pursuing conversos. The same would be true from 1650 to 1720. While its activities declined thereafter, the inquisition continued to exist in Spain until its final abolition in 1824.

· Under Charles V, successor to Ferdinand and Isabella, the Inquisition became an established part of Spanish justice. With the outbreak of Luther’s Reformation in Europe and the spread of its ideas in the 1520s, it was entrenched as a means to both protect the faith in Spain from infiltration of this new heresy, and as a further means to buttress royal power.

· The image of a Spanish Inquisition burning hundreds of thousands of Protestant heretics has no basis in historical fact. There were so few Protestants in Spain that there could be no such prosecution, no matter how strong the inquisition and no matter how much anti-Catholic propagandists tried to create such an image in the 16th Century and thereafter.

· As in the medieval Inquisition, torture was used to elicit confessions when there was insufficient proof. Torture was common throughout Europe in judicial actions and Spain was no exception. Torture could only be used in cases of heresy, which meant that it was not used for the minor offenses that made up the majority on inquisitorial activity. The scenes of sadism conjured up by popular writers on the inquisition have little basis in reality.

· In all, just over 100 persons in Spain were found to be Protestants and turned over to the secular authorities for execution in the 1560s. In the last decades of the century, an additional 200 Spaniards were accused of being followers of Luther. Most of them were not actually Protestants. Any anti-religious sentiments, drunken mockery, anticlerical expressions were all classified by the inquisitors as “Lutheran.” Disrespect to church images, and eating meat on forbidden days, were taken as signs of heresy.

· Only unrepentant heretics or relapsed heretics could be “relaxed” – turned over – to the secular authorities to be burned at the stake. After the bitter persecution of the conversos in the first 20 years of the inquisition, in the 17th and 18th centuries fewer than three people a year were executed throughout Spain. In fact, most condemned were burnt only in effigy, having previously died or fled the country.

· The Spanish Inquisition was unique. Wrestled early from the papacy, it was controlled by the Spanish monarchy. Its aim, certainly, was to maintain a Catholic Spain, but its use was primarily centered on Catholicconversos of Jewish and, later, Muslim ancestry. It was certainly a force that kept Protestant – and, to a degree, Enlightenment – thought out of Spain, though the number of those actually prosecuted for such activity was very small.

· Like the Spanish Inquisition, the Roman Inquisition and its subordinate tribunals appear to have been generally successful in keeping any substantial Protestant influence from spreading widely in the peninsula. Once the immediate problem of Protestantism was reduced, (the inquisition) turned the bulk of its operation to the question of internal ecclesiastical discipline and to offenses other than Protestantism.

· Though seen by some as a pre-Reformation martyr, his meddling in Florentine politics, rather than his call for moral reforms and his attacks on Pope Alexander VI caused Savonarola’s downfall. Though certainly tried with the approbation of the pope, his death in 1498 was more a civil act than an inquisitorial judgment.

· Giordano Bruno refused to recant his strange views and he was turned over to the secular authorities. He was burned on February 19, 1600. Bruno was an excessive character – and a bit of a charlatan – who rejected fundamental beliefs of Catholicism and was condemned by the Protestant reformers as well. A man who abandoned the priesthood, in the difficult days of the Reformation and the Counter Reformation he was certain to be prosecuted and seemed to court his own martyrdom.

· Galileo’s 1633 trial is most often portrayed as Galileo the scientist arguing the supremacy of reason and the tribunal judges demanding that reason abjure to faith. The trial was neither. Galileo, a firm and orthodox Catholic, and the tribunal judges shared a common view that science and the Bible could not stand in contradiction. If there appeared to be a contradiction, such a contradiction resulted from either weak science, or poor interpretation of Scripture. In context, the trial exhibited both faults. Galileo’s technology was far too limited at the time to scientifically prove his assertion of the earth’s double rotation. At the same time, the tribunal judges were at fault for a literal interpretation of biblical passages and making scientific judgments never intended by the Scriptural authors.

· “The Inquisition was an image assembled from a body of legends and myths which, between the sixteenth and the twentieth centuries, established the perceived character of inquisitorial tribunals and influenced all ensuing efforts to recover their historical reality. That body took shape in the context of intensified religious persecution as a consequence of the Reformation of the sixteenth century and of the central role of Spain, the greatest power in Europe, in assuming the role of defender of Roman Catholicism.”

· “An image of Spain circulated through late sixteenth-century Europe, borne by means of political and religious propaganda that blackened the characters of Spaniards and their ruler to such an extent that Spain became the symbol of all forces of repression, brutality, religious and political intolerance, and intellectual and artistic backwardness for the next four centuries. Spaniards and Hispanophiles have termed this process and the image that resulted from it as ‘The Black Legend,’ la leyenda negra.”

· Another source for the myth of the inquisition was Catholic Italy. Italian Catholics – the papal representatives included – had a dislike for the Spanish whom they considered rural racist bumpkins. The attacks in Spain on the conversos were viewed as despicable in Rome. Italians felt that Spanish hypocrisy in religion, together with the existence of the Inquisition, proved that the tribunal was created not for religious purity, but simply to rob the Jews. Similar views were certainly held by the prelates of the Holy See whenever they intervened in favor of theconversos.

· The true explosion in inquisition rhetoric was in the period just prior to and through the revolt in the Netherlands from Spanish control. That revolt involved a fragile alliance of Catholic and Calvinist leaders against Catholic Spain. Beginning in 1548, the printing press and propaganda turned to the service of political reform, with the inquisition as a major focus, on such a wide scale and with comparatively devastating effects.

· When the English under Elizabeth I prepared to defend themselves against the Spanish armada, and the pope called for an English crusade, nationalistic fervor was fueled in England by anti-Catholic propaganda. Central to the propaganda campaign are a series of books and pamphlets detailing the horror of the Spanish Inquisition. The inquisition would become a hallmark of English anti-Catholic literature for 200 years, and be passed on to the popular anti-Catholic mythology in the United States.

· Religious dissent was punished in all Protestant lands throughout the Reformation period, whether of Catholics or Protestants dissenting from the majority Protestant viewpoint. The difference was that this was considered solely a judicial activity of the state, rather than involving an ecclesial court.

· While the Church has acknowledged the errors in the past associated with the inquisition, no apology is necessary for the false and unhistorical caricature that remains part of the popular consciousness.

ENDNOTES

1) See Anti-Catholicism in American Culture (Our Sunday Visitor, 2000) pp. 15-53.
2) For the best contemporary research on the trial of Galileo see Galileo’s Daughter, by Dava Sobel (Walker & Co., NY, 1999).
3) “Is It Enough to be Sorry?” Lance Morrow, Time , March 27, 2000.
4) Dr. Jerry Kaifetz, “Pope John Paul II’s apology falls way short by Catholic standards, The Times newspaper (May 20, 2000).
5) Caesar and Christ, Will Durant (Simon & Schuster, 1972) p. 603.
6) See 2 Cor 11: 3-4; Titus 3: 10-11
7) St. Augustine, “Letter to Boniface.”
8) See Medieval History, by Norman Cantor (Macmillan, 1970 Second Edition) pp. 45-57
9) For a brief outline of the difficulties of the papacy in Rome in the 10th century see The Age of Faith, by Will Durant (Simon & Schuster, 1978) pp. 537-540.
10) Inquisition, by Edward Peters (University of California Press, Berkeley and Los Angeles, CA, 1989) p. 40.
11) Saints and Sinners, by Eamon Duffy (Yale University Press, 1997) pp. 82-83.
12) Peters, p. 40.
13) Encyclopedia of Catholic History, by Matthew Bunson (Our Sunday Visitor, 1995) p. 43.
14) Peters, p. 47.
15) ibid, p. 51.
16) ibid, p. 54.
17) Ille humani generis, Pope Gregory IX.
18) Peters, 53.
19) ibid, 70.
20) The best known manual for inquisitorial judges was Directorium Inquisitorum by Nicolau Eymeric, collected in the late 14th century. The manual would be a fundamental resource in the 16th and 17th centuries.
21) Peters, p. 65.
22) ibid, p. 65.
23) Age of Faith, Durant pp. 33-37.
24) ibid, pp. 164-166.
25) Peters, 74.
26) However, as noted in the case of Wycliff, the papacy was often called on to review the theological positions involved. Particularly in such high profile cases such as Wycliff and Hus, bishops would request papal review of the positions being espoused.
27) The Spanish Inquisition: A Historical Revision, by Henry Kamen (Yale University Press, 1997) p. 8.
28) See The Origins of the Inquisition in Fifteenth Century Spain, B. Netanyahu (Random House, 1995).
29) Peters, p. 84.
30) ibid, p. 89.
31) Kamen, p. 74.
32) ibid, p. 92.
33) Erasmus (1466-1536), who served for a short time as counselor to Charles V, was a Dutch humanist and scholar. Though a harsh critic of the Church he would not join the Reformation and was friendly with St. Thomas More and St. John Fisher, both martyrs to the Reformation in England. Though he was offered a cardinal’s hat in 1535, his writings were eventually condemned in the Catholic Counter Reformation.
34) Peters, p. 89.
35) Kamen, p. 91.
36) ibid, p. 93.
37) ibid, p. 95.
38) ibid, p. 98.
39) ibid, p. 189
40) For a full outline of the Spanish Inquisition and the use of torture see Kamen, pp. 174-192.
41) Kamen, p. 203.
42) See Kamen, pp. 192-213.
43) Kamen, p. 304.
44) Peters, p. 111.
45) ibid.
46) The Renaissance, by Will Durant (Simon & Schuster, 1981) p.161.
47) ibid, pp. 143-162.
48) The Age of Reason Begins, by Will and Ariel Durant (Simon & Schuster, 1989) pp. 620-621.
49) ibid, p. 621.
50) In the late 19th century funds were raised internationally to place a “spike” commemorative at the site where Bruno was burned. Demonstrations – usually anti-Catholic – are held there annually on the anniversary of his death.
51) See Catholic League research paper on Galileowww.catholicleague.org
52) Peters, p. 122
53) ibid, p. 131.
54) Kamen, p. 309.
55) Peters, p. 144.
56) Kamen, p. 310.
57) Peters, p. 153.
58) ibid, p. 154

By Michael Phayer Indiana University Press, Bloomington and Indianapolis

(2000)

   Pope Pius XII (1939-1958), as Secretary of State to Pius XI and as pope, faced Nazi Germany with a remarkable consistency. The Nazis considered him an implacable foe,¹ and he was hailed both during and after World War II as the strongest voice – often the only voice – speaking out in Europe against the Nazi terror.² The Church under his leadership is credited with saving more Jewish lives in the face of the Holocaust than any other agency, government or entity at the time.³  Pius’ combination of diplomatic pressure, careful but sustained criticism while maintaining an essential Vatican neutrality in war-torn Europe, as well as direct action through his nuncios and the local Church where possible, saved what some have estimated as 860,000 Jewish lives.⁴ If that estimate is accurate by only half, it remains a historic effort for a Church fighting without weapons against the most horrific campaign of genocide the world had yet seen.

          Yet, in the face of this clear historical record, Pope Pius XII has come under attack since his death. Beginning with Rolf Hocchuth’s The Deputy in 1963, a revisionism set-in  Pius five years after his death and a new picture of Pius was created.⁵ Accused of an alleged “silence” in the fact of the Holocaust, critics have gone further, insinuating that he may have been a crypto-Nazi sympathizer. In John Cornwell’s Hitler’s Pope⁶ he is portrayed as an anti-Semitic, silent bystander to the Holocaust.

            In an afterword to Ronald J. Rychlak’s masterful defense of Pius XII, Hitler, the War and the Pope ⁷, Robert P. George examines this defamation of Pius XII. George sees two sources for this new myth: “anti-Catholic bigots and anti-papal Catholics have a large stake in preserving the myth that Eugenio Pacelli was ‘Hitler’s Pope.’ The myth is of enormous utility in their continuing efforts to undermine the credibility of the Catholic Church and the teaching authority (magisterium) exercised by the Pope and the bishops in communion with him…(The myths) originate in, and are to a large extent sustained as part of a larger effort to undermine the credibility and weaken the moral and cultural influence of the Catholic Church. Why? Because the Catholic Church – and, within the Church, the institution of the papacy – is the single most potent force of traditional morality in cultural conflicts with communism, utilitarianism, radical individualism, and other major secular ideologies.”

          George hints at an often understated but important aspect to the revisionism concerning Pius XII: his anti-communism and his image as a Cold War pontiff. John Cornwell’s book on Pope Pius XII and the Holocaust, Hitler’s Pope was an amateur’s hatchet job that exploited the Holocaust to attack the papacy of Pope John Paul II. Cornwell is a self-described Catholic who sees a strong papacy as standing in the way of his own vision of proper Church reform. The Holocaust is simply a weapon to be used by Cornwell in this inter-Church debate.⁸ Editorials in the New York Times tend toward the more surreal, anti-Catholic position, lumping in the alleged silence of Pope Pius XII with a laundry list of complaints about Catholicism: the Church’s refusal to ordain women, its opposition to abortion, and its teaching on homosexuality.⁹

          An additional, critical source of the myth of Pius as Holocaust collaborator comes from certain students of history who loathed Pius for his anti-communism. This was an important aspect that served Hocchuth’s interpretation.  Popular in the late 1950s through the 1970s, this school of revisionist historians saw anti-communism as a dangerous threat, and all tainted by it deserving nothing but approbation. Pius certainly fit such a category.

          Michael Phayer, professor of history at Marquette University, has authored a new book on the Catholic response to the Holocaust. Phayer seems particularly affected by that “anti-anti-communism” school of thought on Pope Pius XII. He assumes “papal silence,” and attributes it primarily to a fear of communism. In The Catholic Church and the Holocaust, 1930-1965 ¹⁰  Phayer states that his purpose is to go beyond the issue of the silence of Pope Pius XII to explore how the Church in various countries, and through various individual Catholics, responded to the Holocaust, and how that response eventually led to the Church’s official rejection of anti-Semitism during the Second Vatican Council. Yet throughout the book, he paints Pope Pius XII as a meek pontiff unwilling to engage the Nazis. He states that Pius was motivated by the hope that he could secure a negotiated peace that would leave a powerful Germany as a European defense against an aggressive communist Soviet Union.  

          Yet, Phayer does not examine the allegation of silence on the part of Pope Pius XII, but merely accepts it as a given, bowing to contemporary conventional wisdom rather than the historical record of what was accomplished for Jews by Pius and the Church during the horror of the Shoah. In doing so, Phayer does not present a prosecutor’s case for Pius’ alleged silence, nor for his motives in being silent. Instead, he assumes that silence and postulates motives to fit that alleged reality, without proving that such motives existed.     

          Though Phayer’s book shows serious professional historical study and background on the events of World War II, it has similarities to Cornwell’s screed. Phayer’s prejudices against Pius determine the scholarship he brings to bear on the issue. Phayer’s book requires a more serious response than one would give to Cornwell’s ravings. Yet, it is a deeply flawed work that will play its own role in the ongoing slander of Pope Pius XII.

          Phayer does not portray Pius XII as a Nazi sympathizer, or as a closeted anti-Semite. But for a book that he claims is meant to go beyond the debate over the alleged papal silence, his indictment of Pius is draconian. He claims that Pius “did little for Jews in their hour of greatest need.”¹¹ While acknowledging that working through his papal nuncios he was able to save Jewish lives, his “greatest failure…lay in his attempt to use a diplomatic remedy for a moral outrage.”¹² At the same time, he charges that the “image that emerges of Pope Pius is that of a pontiff whose deep concern about communism and the intact physical survival of the city of Rome kept him from exploring options on behalf of the Jewish people.”¹³ He charges that in the immediate post-war period the Vatican under Pius XII consciously assisted Nazi war criminals to escape and “worked against U.S. policies that sought to make German society responsible for the murder of the Jews.”¹⁴ Why? To maintain a strong Germany in response to the communist threat, and to keep unsullied the enhanced image of the Church in Europe as a result of its actions during the War. While Phayer spends a small portion of his book presenting heroic stories of individual Catholics who engaged in rescue work, he returns consistently to the theme of a silent, almost cowardly Pope Pius XII, whose only desire was to limit communist expansion, even if it meant ignoring the plight of the Jews. Yet while Phayer states this case, he never makes it. He over relies on Nazi interpretation of Vatican action, as well as the editorial opinion of secondary sources rather than documentation.

          Phayer argues that if Pius XI had lived five more years, Church reaction would have been different to the Holocaust and to Nazi Germany.¹⁵ While that is unknowable, of course, and Pius XI was certainly a different personality than Pius XII, Phayer ignores or downplays the important role played by Cardinal Pacelli in determining Vatican reaction to the Nazis in the 1930s. Phayer cites a series of events under Pius XI that he interprets as signaling a new direction that would be reversed under Pius XII. He notes, for example, the 1937 encyclical of Pope Pius XI, Mit brenneder sorge, which condemned racism and idolatry of the State. He makes no mention that it was the future Pius XII, Cardinal Eugenio Pacelli, who drafted the encyclical.¹⁶ In 1938, Phayer describes how Cardinal Theodore Innitzer of Vienna was called to Rome for a dressing-down after he publicly welcomed the Nazi Anschluss of Austria, a rebuke distributed throughout Vatican diplomatic channels. He does not mention that it was Cardinal Pacelli who summoned Cardinal Innitzer to Rome and told him he must retract his statement.¹⁷ Finally, he notes that when Hitler visited Rome on an official visit to Benito Mussolini’s Fascist Italy, “the pope snubbed the dictators by leaving the city.”¹⁸ He fails to mention that Cardinal Pacelli departed with the pontiff.

          Clearly, the future Pope Pius XII had a strong hand in the development of the Holy See’s attitude toward both the Nazi movement and its anti-Semitic policies during the pontificate of Pius XI. There was no difference in substance between the two pontificates in addressing Nazism and anti-Semitism. The differences in approach between the two pontificates, such as they were, centered on the fact that within six months of the election of Pope Pius XII, Germany invaded Poland and Europe was at war.

          Throughout Phayer’s book, he suggests that Cardinal Pacelli’s work on the 1933 Concordat between Hitler and the Holy See “linked the Vatican with the new Nazi regime” and its maintenance became an obsession with Pius XII, thus limiting his ability – or desire – to protest the treatment of the Jews.¹⁹ The concordat was concluded at a time when the Vatican was forced to deal with the reality of Hitler’s rise to power. In June 1933 Hitler had signed a peace agreement with the western powers, including France and Great Britain, called the Four-Power Pact. At the same time Hitler expressed a willingness to negotiate a statewide concordat with Rome. The concordat was concluded a month later, preceded by both the Four-Power Pact and a similar agreement concluded between Hitler and the Protestant churches. The Church had no choice but to conclude such a concordat, or face draconian restrictions on the lives of the faithful in Germany. Pope Pius XI explained that it was concluded only to spare persecution that would take place immediately if there was no such agreement. The concordat would also give the Holy See the opportunity to formally protest Nazi action.  For example, it provided a legal basis for arguing that baptized Jews in Germany were Christian and should be exempt from legal disabilities. Though the Nazis routinely violated the Concordat before the ink was dry, its existence allowed for Vatican protest, and it did save Jewish lives. The first protest filed with the Nazi government under the terms of the concordat concerned the Nazi government-sponsored boycott of Jewish businesses.²⁰

          Phayer cites as another example of the laxity of Pius XII the case of Bishop Alois Hudal – the “Brown Bishop” – an Austrian Nazi sympathizer. Phayer states that even with his well-known anti-Semitism and pro-Nazi sympathies, Hudal “won an appointment as the rector of the Collegia del Anima in Rome, the school of theology for Austrian seminarians. There he remained throughout the Nazi era acting on occasion as an intermediary between Pius XII and Nazi occupational forces, and, after the war, helping Holocaust perpetrators to escape justice.”²¹ Rather than winning his appointment, Hudal was in Rome to be kept on ice. Though he claimed influence in Vatican circles, both the curia and the pope ignored him. Even the Nazis dismissed Hudal as having no influence. (He could not even influence his seminarians that embarrassed Hudal by making themselves absent during Hitler’s state visit to Italy in 1938.) Pius XII did use him once, to serve as an intermediary with the Germans to halt the arrest of Jews during the Nazi occupation of Rome.²² Though Hudal may have personally assisted Nazis to escape after the war, there is no connection between him and the Holy See, or that Pius XII had any knowledge of such actions. Phayer cites no documentation or source other than anti-papal conjecture.²³

          He charges that Pope Pius XII contributed by his silence in the Nazi slaughter of Catholics in occupied Poland, particularly from 1939 to 1941. Yet, Phayer himself acknowledges that Vatican Radio was the first to inform the world of the depths of the Nazi atrocities in Poland just months after its occupation through broadcasts in January, 1940, broadcasts given at the direction of Pope Pius XII.²⁴ Phayer alleges that the broadcasts were suspended in the face of German threats on the Vatican. The Nazis did protest and make veiled threats, but they were hinting at retaliation on the helpless Poles, not the Vatican itself. For a short time, Vatican Radio ceased comment on the Polish situation, though this was done over concern with how the British were altering and re-broadcasting Vatican reports as propaganda.²⁵ By the following January, Vatican Radio was continuing its vociferous critique of German atrocities in Poland.

          Pius XII had raised the issue of Poland in Easter and Christmas messages, in articles in the Vatican newspaper, L’Osservatore Romano, as well as in the first encyclical of his pontificate, Summi Pontificatus. The Vatican also refused to cooperate with the German demand to control the appointment of bishops in occupied Poland. In a March 1940 confrontation with Joachim von Ribbontrop, Hitler’s foreign minister, Pius XII read to him in German a detailed report on Nazi atrocities in Poland aimed at both the Church and the Jews. That meeting received in depth coverage in the New York Times. The nuncio to Germany was also instructed by Pius repeatedly, as Phayer himself notes, “to plead for better treatment of Polish priests and lay people.”²⁶ Yet, Phayer proclaims papal silence and complains that Pius XII chose a diplomatic rather than a moral approach, without citing what that moral approach would have been, or how it could have been feasible or successful in the face of Nazi aggression.

          Phayer raises the  complaint that Pius would not join in a public statement from the allies in 1942 condemning Nazi atrocities in Poland. He states that Pius XII would not join in the statement, quoting a British diplomat at the time, because he was determined to act as a mediator between Germany and the Allies to end the war. The real reason was that this would be an official statement of the Allied governments and it was impossible for Pius XII, representing a neutral state, to join the effort. However, in his annual Christmas message of 1942, Pius XII condemned totalitarian regimes and mourned the victims of the war, “the hundreds of thousands who, through no fault of their own, and solely because of their nation or race, have been condemned to death or progressive extinction.” He called on Catholics to shelter any and all refugees. The statement was loudly praised in the Allied world. In Germany, it was seen as the final repudiation by Pius XII of the Nazis: “(H)e is virtually accusing the German people of injustice toward the Jews, and makes himself the mouthpiece of the Jewish war criminal.” Oddly, Phayer claims that this Christmas message was not understood and that “no one, certainly not the Germans, took it as a protest against the slaughter of the Jews.”²⁷ He states this despite the negative German reaction and Allied praise for the statement. A prominent Christmas Day 1942 editorial in the New York Times stated: “No Christmas sermon reaches a larger audience that the message Pope Pius XII addresses to a war-torn world at this season…When a leader bound impartially to nations on both sides condemns as heresy the new form of national state which subordinates everything to itself…when he assails violent occupation of territory, the exile and persecution of human beings for no other reason than race or political opinion…the ‘impartial judgment’ is like a verdict in a high court of justice.”²⁸

          Phayer makes a number of broad statements that are at best open to contrary interpretation, and at worst seem to misstate the facts. He claims that a private audience  between Croatian Fascist leader Ante Pavelic and Pius XII, and the appointment of a nuncio, was a victory for Fascist Croatia.²⁹ However, Pius XII refused to greet Pavelic as a head of state and formal recognition was never extended. Pavelic left Rome in an insulted rage, rather than “satisfied” as Phayer contends.³⁰ The Vatican refused to recognize an independent state of Croatia and did not receive a Croatian representative. The pope’s representative in Croatia, Archbishop Marcone, would work tirelessly in defense of the Croatian Jews.

          Phayer states that the Vatican  “refrained from promoting a separate Italian peace with the Allies because it would necessarily weaken Germany.”³¹ Pius had, in fact, pressed Mussolini to negotiate a separate peace and advised the Badoglio regime that succeeded him to do so as well.³²  Phayer cites an underling’s memo to von Ribbentrop that the only obstacle to a “loyal relationship between the church and National Socialism is the latter’s euthanasia and sterilization policies. The murder of Jews was left out of the equation.”³³ He seems to take at face value Nazi interpretations of the position of the Vatican as, in fact, the Vatican’s position.

          He states that while Archbishop Roncalli, the future Pope John XXIII, engaged in the rescue of many Jews, he quotes another historian who states that may have done so without Vatican orders and “possibly even against them.” ³⁴ This would make Archbishop Roncalli a liar as he clearly stated that as nuncio he acted solely at the direction of Pope Pius XII. 

          Phayer charges that the Vatican had prior knowledge of the German roundup of 1,200 Jews in Rome on October 16, 1943 and did nothing to forewarn them.³⁵ He relies for this charge on self-serving German diplomatic explanations, and then makes the preposterous case that it was the German diplomatic corps that “saved” Roman Jews. Throughout Italy, Jews were hidden by the Church. When it seemed certain that German troops would soon occupy the city, Pius helped Jews to evacuate and to hide. Many of those not evacuated, about 5,000, were in hiding in Church buildings when 60,000 Nazi troops occupied Rome. On October 16, the Nazis initiated a roundup of the Jews not in hiding. There is no evidence that Pius had specific prior knowledge, or concealed such knowledge. Reason dictated, of course, that such a raid could happen at any moment. There was little ignorance of what the Nazis were capable of doing to the Jewish community. The Germans had invaded the main Roman synagogue a month earlier and secured a list of Jewish families.

          Immediately upon being notified of the German seizure, Pius demanded that the arrests be halted. He even used Bishop Hudal as a go-between to bring an end to the arrests.  The Nazis stopped large-scale roundups and the Jews in hiding in Rome were protected.

          The central thesis in Phayer’s book is that Pius refused to speak out against the Holocaust and sought a negotiated peace because he wanted a strong Germany to face down the threat of Soviet communism. Yet, nowhere in the book does Phayer cite documented statements of Pope Pius XII to support that assertion. Though he charges ³⁶ that Pius wanted the Soviet Union abandoned by the Allies in order to free up Germany to destroy the Soviet Union, the source for such a conclusion seems to be Nazi wishful-thinking than documented Vatican positions. “Pius XII did not change his position when Germany began its war with Russia, and he never spoke, even by means of allusion, about a ‘crusade’ against Bolshevism or a ‘holy war.’” ³⁷

          Which is not to argue that Pope Pius XII was unrealistic concerning Stalin’s Russia. He was certainly more realistic about Stalin’s intentions that were the U.S. and Great Britain during the war. During Stalin’s rule from 1928 to 1953, historians estimate that he was responsible for at least 20 million deaths. His all-out war against religion, and the Catholic Church in particular, was well know to Pius XII. Yet there is no case for arguing that Pius modified positions against Germany, or refused to speak out on the Holocaust, to somehow prop up Germany and divide the Allies. While anti-papal historians consistently assign that motive to Pius, there is no documented evidence of such a policy. But much is known to the contrary. It is known, for example, that Pius intervened to assure American supplies to the Soviet Union. When some American Catholics raised the issue that giving such supplies was aiding communism, the Holy See assured them that assistance to the Russian people unjustly attacked by Nazi Germany was appropriate. Pius also acceded to an American request not to publicly raise Stalin’s past persecution of the Church after he joined the Allied cause. As cited in Hitler, the War and the Pope ³⁸  Pius wrote to Myron C. Taylor, Roosevelt’s personal representative to the pope: “(A)t the request of President Roosevelt, the Vatican has ceased all mention of the Communist regime.. But this silence that weighs heavily on our conscience, is misunderstood by the Soviet leaders who continue the persecution against churches and the faithful. God grant that the free world will one day not regret my silence.” As Rychlak noted, ironically, “he would later come to be attacked for a different silence.”

          Historians such as Phayer assume this anti-Soviet strategy because of Pius’ concern over the Allied demand for complete and total German surrender. Pius did make clear his belief that failing to attempt to negotiate a peace and demanding complete and total German surrender would only prolong the war and the killing. But that was his reason for the position, a position one would expect from the Vicar of Christ in any war. Certainly, it was not a position without merit. It can be argued – and has been argued – that peace could have been obtained earlier with many lives saved if the Allies had not demanded an unconditional surrender, but rather the removal of Hitler and his Nazi cronies. Many share the view that this did, indeed, both prolong the war and help keep Hitler in power to the very end. Others argue, of course, that the hope for a negotiated peace was simply impossible as Hitler remained in absolute control until his death in a Berlin bunker. In any case, the papal position was viable. And there was nothing in such a papal position that implied anything more than the desire to save lives. To see the papal call for a negotiated peace as either a grandiose ploy on the part of the pontiff to set himself up as the great peacemaker of Europe, as Phayer contends, or to maintain a strong Germany as a bulwark against the Soviet Union, as Phayer also contends, is to invent motives that are historically undocumented.      

          There are elements in Phayer’s book that are interesting and worthy. He outlines well what the Church – and individual Catholics – were able to accomplish in rescuing Jews. He makes clear that the Church did not sit by idly as the Jews were taken to slaughter. Of particular interest is his overview of what the Church did and did not do within Nazi Germany itself. He points out that there were those within the Church who were able to accomplish more than many assume within Nazi Germany in defense of the Jews, though he cannot help but add that they went “further than Pius XII.”

          Rather than “go beyond” the issue of Pius XII as he claims to be the intent of his book, Phayer returns to Pius repeatedly. “To the extent that Pope Pius chose to intervene at all, he did so through intermediaries, the nuncios, rather than by responding to the Holocaust publicly from Rome. In other words, when the pope chose to deal with the murder of Jews, he did so through diplomatic channels rather than through a moral pronouncement such as an encyclical.” ³⁹ But that is precisely the point. First, there was no absolute “papal silence” on the Holocaust. Pius XII spoke carefully, certainly, but the Holy See and its representatives condemned Nazism and its atrocities long before any governments raised the issue. Yet Pius XII was primarily concerned with saving lives rather than high-minded pronouncements that would have accomplished little.

          As outlined in the Catholic League’s research paper on Pius XII and as exhaustively detailed in Rychlak’s definitive work, Hitler, the War and the Pope and Pierre Blet’s Pius XII and the Second World War, work behind the scenes and at the scenes through the papal nuncios was more effective than issuing public statements from the safety of the Vatican. As Phayer himself acknowledges, there was little the Holy See could do to force the Nazis to end their campaign for a “Final Solution.” But Pius could save lives. Dramatic anti-Nazi gestures could have severely limited, if not ended altogether, the Church’s capability to save lives, particularly in Germany and the Axis satellite states. The Jewish lives saved by actions of the Church under the direction of Pius XII accomplished what no other agency, government or entity at the time was able to accomplish. Phayer claims that if Pius XII had issued a formal bombshell, more lives would have been saved. He does not, however, explain how that could have been accomplished and it appears to be wishful conjecture.

           Phayer concludes that immediately after the war, the Holy See under Pius XII attempted to undercut Allied efforts to prosecute German war criminals and to provide the means for Nazis to escape Europe. As the Soviet threat grew more ominous, Pius was perceived to be “uncannily wise to western statesman. Only he had followed a pro-German course consistently.” ⁴⁰ Finally, Phayer states that because of Pius, the Church would not address the issue of anti-Semitism for years after the war had ended. It would only be after his death at the Vatican Council that the Church would squarely address the issue.

          That Pius followed a consistently pro-German course during the war is simply wrong. From the outset of the War, Pius was on shaky ground maintaining the semblance of Vatican neutrality as he clearly and consistently led the Church in a position that supported the defeat of Hitler. Nazi authorities over and over again described Pope Pius XII as the enemy of the Reich, and Hitler went so far is to plot his kidnapping.⁴¹ There is no evidence, of course, that the Holy See aided in an organized way the escape of Nazis. While individual Catholics supplied help, and certain Nazis hid their identities and used Holy See-sponsored refugee services to escape, charges that there was any kind of general policy of Vatican assistance to German war criminals have been completely debunked. Phayer believes that Pius encouraged consistently encouraged clemency for Nazi war criminals as part of his strategy for maintaining a strong Germany. Some German bishops intervened for specific acts of clemency. German bishops would complain about the defamation of all the German people over the actions of the Nazis, yet the Holy See was relatively mute on the issue, though it did oppose in certain cases direct executions. Pope Pius’ personal representative to postwar Germany and liaison to the Allied military authorities, Bishop Aloysius Muench of the United States, advised the Vatican not to intervene and, for the most part, this was the policy that was followed.            

           Concerning the issue of anti-Semitism, the Church had never endorsed the racial anti-Semitism of the Nazis. As early as 1928, when the Nazi part was still in its infancy, the Church had condemned anti-Semitism. The Church, certainly spurred by the horror of the Holocaust, moved to eliminate religious anti-Jewish sentiments that existed within Catholic theology and devotional life. When the Second Vatican Council issued Nostra Aetate, its powerful declaration against anti-Semitism, it is impossible to argue that this somehow contradicted the papacy of Pope Pius XII. Theological and Scriptural studies encouraged by Pius, as well as the very atmosphere of his pontificate and that of Pius XI, were the foundations for Nostra Aetate. The bishops who supported the statement, including a young Polish prelate, Karol Wojtyla, were for the most part those raised to the episcopacy during his pontificate.

          Pius was praised throughout the war and throughout his pontificate for the actions he took in defense of Jews during the war. The actions of the Church in the face of Nazism greatly enhanced its image in the post-war world. Phayer’s primary contentions in this book – that Pius XII was pro-German, placed an anti-Communist agenda ahead of both concern for the Jews and the defeat of Nazi Germany – are not supported by any documented evidence. Most important, no case is built for an alternative strategy by Pope Pius XII that could have saved more Jewish lives. The Church under Pius saved more Jews from the Holocaust than any other entity in that terrible time. That is the undeniable fact that critics of Pius, whatever their motivation, must answer. Phayer does not.                            

          For a complete understanding of the role of Pope Pius XII in World War II, we strongly recommend Ronald Rychlak’s Hitler, the War and the Pope (Our Sunday Visitor Press, $19.95 plus shipping and handling. Call 1-800-348-2440). While there are a few good sections in Michael Phayer’s book, his overall treatment of Pius XII is prejudiced and unconvincing.

         

SUMMARY POINTS

• Pius XII’s combination of diplomatic pressure, careful but sustained criticism while maintaining an essential Vatican neutrality in war-torn Europe, as well as direct action through his nuncios and the local Church where possible, saved what some have estimated as 860,000 Jewish lives.If that estimate is accurate by only half, it remains a historic effort for a Church fighting without weapons against the most horrific killing machine the world had yet seen. Yet in the years after his death, a myth of Pius as a “silent collaborator” in the Holocaust has grown. 
• A critical source of the myth of Pius XII as Holocaust collaborator comes from certain students of history who loathed Pius for his anti-communism. Popular in the late 1950s through the 1970s, this school of revisionist historians saw anti-communism as a dangerous threat, and all tainted by it deserving nothing but approbation. Pius certainly fit such a category.
• In The Catholic Church and the Holocaust, 1930-1965 (Indiana University Press 2000) Michael  Phayer states that his purpose is to go beyond the issue of the silence of Pope Pius XII to explore how the Church in various countries, and through various individual Catholics, responded to the Holocaust, and how that response eventually led to the Church’s official rejection of anti-Semitism during the Second Vatican Council. Yet throughout the book, he paints Pope Pius XII as a meek pontiff unwilling to engage the Nazis. He states that Pius was motivated by the hope that he could secure a negotiated peace that would leave a powerful Germany as a European defense against an aggressive communist Soviet Union.  
• Phayer does not present a case for Pius’ alleged silence, nor for his motives in being silent. Instead, he assumes that silence and postulates motives to fit that alleged reality, without proving that such motives existed.
• Phayer claims that Pius “did little for Jews in their hour of greatest need.”While acknowledging that working through his papal nuncios he was able to save Jewish lives, his “greatest failure…lay in his attempt to use a diplomatic remedy for a moral outrage.”
• Phayer argues that if Pius XI had lived five more years, Church reaction would have been different to the Holocaust and to Nazi Germany. While that is unknowable, of course, and Pius XI was certainly a different personality than Pius XII, Phayer ignores or downplays the important role played by Cardinal Pacelli in determining Vatican reaction to the Nazis in the 1930s.
• The future Pope Pius XII had a strong hand in the development of the Holy See’s attitude toward both the Nazi movement and its anti-Semitic policies during the pontificate of Pius XI. There was no difference in substance between the two pontificates in addressing Nazism and anti-Semitism. The differences in approach between the two pontificates, such as they were, centered on the fact that within six months of the election of Pope Pius XII, Germany invaded Poland and Europe was at war.
• Phayer suggests that Cardinal Pacelli’s work on the 1933 Concordat between Hitler and the Holy See “linked the Vatican with the new Nazi regime” and its maintenance became an obsession with Pius XII, thus limiting his ability – or desire – to protest the treatment of the Jews. The concordat was concluded at a time when the Vatican was forced to deal with the reality of Hitler’s rise to power. The Church had no choice but to conclude such a concordat, or face draconian restrictions on the lives of the faithful in Germany. The concordat also gave the Holy See the opportunity to formally protest Nazi action. Its existence allowed for Vatican protest and it did save Jewish lives. The first protest filed with the Nazi government under the terms of the concordat concerned the Nazi government-sponsored boycott of Jewish businesses.
• ^·          Phayer states that Bishop Alois Hudal, an Austrian Nazi sympathizer,  “won an appointment” as rector of the Collegia del Anima in Rome, the school of theology for Austrian seminarians. There he remained throughout the Nazi era acting on occasion as an intermediary between Pius XII and Nazi occupational forces, and, after the war, helping Holocaust perpetrators to escape justice.” Rather than winning his appointment, Hudal was in Rome to be kept on ice. Though he claimed influence in Vatican circles, both the curia and the pope ignored him. Even the Nazis dismissed Hudal as having no influence. Though Hudal may have personally assisted Nazis to escape after the war, there is no connection between him and the Holy See, or that Pius XII had any knowledge of such actions. Phayer cites no documentation or source other than anti-papal conjecture.
• He charges that Pope Pius XII contributed by his silence in the Nazi slaughter of Catholics in occupied Poland, particularly from 1939 to 1941. Yet, Phayer himself acknowledges that Vatican Radio was the first to inform the world of the depths of the Nazi atrocities in Poland just months after its occupation through broadcasts in January, 1940, broadcasts given at the direction of Pope Pius XII.
• Phayer raises the complaint that Pius would not join in a public statement from the allies in 1942 condemning Nazi atrocities in Poland. The reason was that this would be an official statement of the Allied governments and it was impossible for Pius XII, representing a neutral state, to join the effort. However, in his annual Christmas message of 1942, Pius XII condemned totalitarian regimes and mourned the victims of the war, “the hundreds of thousands who, through no fault of their own, and solely because of their nation or race, have been condemned to death or progressive extinction.” The statement was loudly praised in the Allied world. In Germany, it was seen as the final repudiation by Pius XII of the Nazis.
• Phayer states that the Vatican  “refrained from promoting a separate Italian peace with the Allies because it would necessarily weaken Germany.”Pius had, in fact, pressed Mussolini to negotiate a separate peace and advised the Badoglio regime that succeeded him to do so as well.
• He states that while Archbishop Roncalli, the future Pope John XXIII, engaged in the rescue of many Jews, he quotes another historian who states that he may have done so without Vatican orders and “possibly even against them.” This would make Archbishop Roncalli a liar as he clearly stated that as nuncio he acted solely at the direction of Pope Pius XII.
• Phayer charges that the Vatican had prior knowledge of the German roundup of 1,200 Jews in Rome on October 16, 1943 and did nothing to forewarn them. He relies for this charge on self-serving German diplomatic explanations, and then makes the preposterous case that it was the German diplomatic corps that “saved” Roman Jews. Immediately up on being notified of the German seizure, Pius demanded that the arrests be halted. He even used Bishop Hudal as a go-between to bring an end to the arrests.  The Nazis stopped large-scale roundups and the Jews in hiding in Rome were protected.
• Though he charges that Pius wanted the Soviet Union abandoned by the Allies in order to free up Germany to destroy the Soviet Union, the source for such a conclusion seems to be Nazi wishful-thinking than documented Vatican positions. Pius XII did not change his position when Germany began its war with Russia, and he never spoke, even by means of allusion, about a “crusade” against Bolshevism or a “holy war.”
• There was nothing in the papal position for a negotiated peace that implied anything more than the desire to save lives. To see the papal call for a negotiated peace as either a grandiose ploy on the part of the pontiff to set himself up as the great peacemaker of Europe, as Phayer contends, or to maintain a strong Germany as a bulwark against the Soviet Union, as Phayer also contends, is to invent motives that are historically undocumented.      
• There are elements in Phayer’s book that are interesting and worthy. He outlines well what the Church – and individual Catholics – were able to accomplish in rescuing Jews. He makes clear that the local Church did not sit by idly as the Jews were taken to slaughter. Of particular interest is his overview of what the Church did and did not do within Nazi Germany itself. He points out that the Church was able to accomplish more than many assume within Nazi Germany in defense of the Jews.
• Phayer states: “To the extent that Pope Pius chose to intervene at all, he did so through intermediaries, the nuncios, rather than by responding to the Holocaust publicly from Rome. In other words, when the pope chose to deal with the murder of Jews, he did so through diplomatic channels rather than through a moral pronouncement such as an encyclical.”  But that is precisely the point. First, there was no absolute “papal silence” on the Holocaust. Pius XII spoke carefully, certainly, but the Holy See and its representatives condemned Nazism and its atrocities long before any governments raised the issue.
• Pius XII was primarily concerned with saving lives rather than high-minded pronouncements that would have accomplished little. Working behind the scenes and at the scenes through the papal nuncios was more effective than issuing public statements from the safety of the Vatican. As Phayer himself acknowledges, there was little the Holy See could do to force the Nazis to end their campaign for a “Final Solution.” But Pius could save lives. Dramatic anti-Nazi gestures could have severely limited, if not ended altogether, the Church’s capability to save lives, particularly in Germany and the Axis satellite states.
• The Jewish lives saved by actions of the Church under the direction of Pius XII accomplished what no other agency, government or entity at the time was able to accomplish. Phayer claims that if Pius XII had issued a formal bombshell, more lives would have been saved. He does not, however, explain how that could have been accomplished and it appears to be wishful conjecture.
• That Pius followed a consistently pro-German course during the war is simply wrong. From the outset of the War, Pius was on shaky ground maintaining the semblance of Vatican neutrality as he clearly and consistently led the Church in a position that supported the defeat of Hitler. Nazi authorities over and over again described Pope Pius XII as the enemy of the Reich, and Hitler went so far is to plot his kidnapping.
• There is no evidence that the Holy See aided in an intentional and organized fashion the escape of Nazis. While individual Catholics supplied help, and certain Nazis hid their identities and used Holy See-sponsored refugee services to escape, charges that there was any kind of general policy of Vatican assistance to German war criminals have been completely debunked.
• When the Second Vatican Council issued Nostra Aetate, its powerful declaration against anti-Semitism, it is impossible to argue that this somehow contradicted the papacy of Pope Pius XII. Theological and Scriptural studies encouraged by Pius, as well as the very atmosphere of his pontificate and that of Pius XI, were the foundations for Nostra Aetate. The bishops who supported the statement, including a young Polish prelate, Karol Wojtyla, were for the most part those raised to the episcopacy during his pontificate.
• Pius was praised throughout the war and throughout his pontificate for the actions he took in defense of Jews during the war. Phayer’s basic contentions in this book – that Pius XII was pro-German, placed an anti-Communist agenda ahead of both concern for the Jews and the defeat of Nazi Germany – are not supported by any documented evidence. No case is built for an alternative strategy by Pope Pius XII that could have saved more Jewish lives. The Church under Pius saved more Jews from the Holocaust than any other entity in that terrible time. That is the undeniable fact that critics of Pius, whatever their motivation, must answer. Phayer does not.      
• For a complete understanding of the role of Pope Pius XII in World War II, we strongly recommend Ronald Rychlak’s Hitler, the War and the Pope (Our Sunday Visitor Press, $19.95 plus shipping and handling. Call 1-800-348-2440). While there are a few good sections in Michael Phayer’s book, his overall treatment of Pius XII is prejudiced and unconvincing.

       

FOOTNOTES

¹ Hitler, the War and the Pope, by Ronald J. Rychlak (Our Sunday Visitor 2000) p. 95 for Nazi reaction to Cardinal Eugenio Pacelli as Secretary of State. The German ambassador to the Holy See, Diego von Bergen, spoke to the College of Cardinals on February 16, 1939 after the death of Pius XI and issued a “veiled warning against the election of Cardinal Pacelli.” P. 107.  

² New York Times, December 25, 1942

³ Adolf Hitler, John Toland (Ballantine Books, 1984) p. 549 

⁴ Estimating the exact number of Jews assisted by the Church during the Holocaust virtually impossible. By its very nature, this kind of work did not involve the keeping of records. In Three Popes and the Jews (Hawthorn Books 1967), Pinchas E. Lapide estimated 860,000 Jewish lives were saved by Church action.       

⁵ The Deputy, by Rolf Hochhuth  (The John Hopkins University Press, 1997)

⁶ Hitler’s Pope, by John Cornwell (Viking Press, 1999)

⁷ Rychlak, p. 310

⁸ Cornwell, pp. 360-371

⁹ New York Times, March 14, 2000 editorial

¹⁰ The Catholic Church and the Holocaust, 1930-1965, by Michael Phayer (Indiana University Press 2000)  

¹¹ Phayer, p. xi

¹² Ibid, p. xii

¹³ Ibid, p. xv

¹⁴ Ibid, p. xvi

¹⁵ Ibid, p. xv

¹⁶ Curiously, Phayer somewhat dismisses Mit brennender sorge as failing directly to condemn Hitler or National Socialism. But considering that the encyclical was written in German, rather than Latin, smuggled into Germany for printing and distribution on Palm Sunday, referred to by the Nazis as “almost a call to do battle against the Reich government,” that printers who had made copies and those caught distributing it were arrested, it would seem that it was rather clear who and what the encyclical targeted.

¹⁷ Rychlak, p. 101-102

¹⁸ Phayer, p. 2

¹⁹ Ibid., p. 4

²⁰ See Rychlak, pp. 57-64

²¹ Phayer, p. 12

²² Nothing Sacred: Nazi Espionage Against the Vatican, 1939-1945, by David Alvarez and Robert A. Graham, SJ (Frank Cass Publishers 1997) pp. 98-100

²³ Phayer, p. 166

²⁴ Ibid., p. 25

²⁵ Rychlak, p. 156

²⁶ Phayer, p. 27

²⁷ Ibid., p. 49

²⁸ New York Times, December 25, 1942

²⁹ Phayer, p. 44

³⁰ Rychlak, p. 304.

³¹ Phayer, p. 59

³² Rychlak, p. 198-199

³³ Phayer, p. 59

³⁴ Ibid., p. 86

³⁵ Ibid., pp. 98-100

³⁶ Ibid., p. 59

³⁷ Pius XII and the Second World War, by Pierre Blet (Paulist Press 1999) p. 63

³⁸ Rychlak, p. 164

³⁹ Phayer, p. 82

⁴⁰ Ibid., p. 161

⁴¹ Rychlak, pp. 265-266