The Vatican and the Holocaust: Unanswered Questions
By: Jack Fischel
From: Congress Monthly, July/August, 1998
J. Geffen
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1.
Silence, like defeat, has many fathers. It may be prompted by indifference, fear,
approval, or disapproval. These elements, either alone or in combination, are manifest
in historical situations as well as private circumstances, and may help to explain in
part the notorious silence of the Catholic Church during the anguished years of the
Holocaust. Now the Church has at last spoken out, in its official capacity, in a selfdescribed “act of repentance,” but despite the brave words, certain questions that have
haunted the world for over 50 years still remain unanswered.
2.
The Church’s mea culpa is contained in a long-awaited Vatican document, We
Remember: A Reflection on the Shoah, 11 years in the making and issued last March
by the Holy See’s Commission for Religious Relations with Jews. It acknowledges
that centuries of Christian prejudice aimed at Jews rendered many Christians less
sensitive to the Nazis anti-Jewish atrocities. It also acknowledges that individual
Catholics did things that were wrong or even sinful in their support of anti-Semitism
and Nazi persecution of Jews, and it repents for this -–using the Hebrew term teshuva.
3.
However, to the dismay of many Jewish leaders, the document falls short of
expectation and ultimately absolves the Church as such from complicity in the
Holocaust. Indeed, the document fails to do what the current Pope, John Paul II, has
done in less formal documents and speeches (and what has been enunciated by
Catholic bishops’ conferences in Germany, Poland, Hungary, and France) – that is,
take direct responsibility for the Church’s failure to ameliorate the attempted
annihilation of the Jewish people. In sum, while the document is filled with contrition
over the Vatican’s failure to curb the killing of Jews, it skirts the all-important issue of
the Church’s silence.
4.
Why did the Vatican not speak out more forcibly against the Nazi horrors as
they were taking place? Is it also possible that, in the years prior to the outbreak of the
war, the Church tacitly supported the elimination of the Jews from German public
life? Until the Vatican opens its Holocaust-era archives, answers to these questions
must be based on circumstantial evidence. What is known – and what We Remember
stresses – is that Pope Pius XII is given credit for saving the lives of several hundred
thousand Jews. (Historian Pinchas Lapide estimates the total at 800,000.) For many
Catholic and some Jewish defenders of Pius XII, this represents a convincing
argument that, far from being indifferent to the plight of the Jews, the Pope, through
his actions if not his words, demonstrated a concern for the suffering Jews.
5.
To properly understand the background behind the debate over the role of the
Vatican during the Holocaust, it is necessary to divide the Nazi war against the Jews
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into two phases. The first is the period between 1933 and 1939, when Jews were
eliminated from German public life and stripped of all rights. The second phase came
with the Holocaust. The debate tends to focus on the response of the Vatican to the
wartime destruction of European Jewry and not the earlier silence, when Jews in
Germany were being systematically degraded.
6.
By not consistently protesting Hitler’s anti-Semitic policies in the years between
1933-1938, the Catholic Church, it is strongly argued, acquiesced in the Nazi
persecution of the Jews. In the early years of the Third Reich, the Catholic Church
was still an institution with sufficient moral authority to confront the Nazis on the
issue of anti-Semitism. A clue to the Church’s relative silence at this time is afforded
by a recent book, The Hidden Encyclical of Pius XI, by George Passelecq and Bernard
Suchecky.* The “hidden encyclical” refers to Humani Generis Unitas (The Unity of
Mankind), commissioned by Pope Pius XI in 1938, in response to the mounting
attacks on Germany’s Jewish population. The importance of the encyclical, however,
can best be understood by placing it within the context of the relationship between the
Nazis and the Catholic Church.
7.
In 1933, the Vatican negotiated a concordat with the new Nazi government,
with the expectation that it would not meddle in the internal affairs of the German
Church. It quickly became apparent, however, that Hitler would not tolerate the
influence of any organized body other than the Nazi Party. Thus, as long as the
Catholic Church restricted itself to matters of faith, the Nazis did not interfere.
However, the then-reigning pontiff, Pius XI, soon came to understand that Nazi
racism was incompatible with Catholic doctrine, which asserts the unity of all
mankind in the person of Christ and holds that all can attain salvation only through the
Church. The efficacy of baptism, therefore, does not discriminate on the basis of
ethnic origin or race. The Nazi state, on the other hand, stressed the primacy of race as
an inherent characteristic that can never be altered. Thus Jews, even baptized ones,
could never be Aryans and must be extirpated from society.
9.
Many German Catholics (and Protestants, too) were horrified by the racism of
the Nazis, among them, Pius XI. In 1937, he issued the encyclical Mit Brennender
Sorge (With Burning Anxiety), which attacked Nazi racism but said nothing regarding
the persecution of the Jews. In the words of historian Guenther Lewy, the encyclical
“only emphasized the outrageous points in Nazi doctrine in order to condemn them in
a manner that did not entail the condemnation of political and social totalitarianism.”
The encyclical, which was read in the German churches, also marked the beginning of
the end of the Catholic Church in Germany. The Nazis responded by arresting priests
and nuns and charging them with crimes ranging from financial malfeasance to sexual
aberrations. In the face of this ruthlessness, the Vatican grew more cautious vis-à-vis
the Nazi regime, lest it lead to additional arrests and the confiscation of Church
*
Translated from the French by Steven Rendall. With an introduction by Garry Wills. Harcourt Brace
& Company. 319 pages, $25.00
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property. The Church feared for its own survival in Germany, and Vatican apologists
have argued that it was, therefore, unreasonable to expect it to challenge the Nazis
over the latter’s anti-Semitic policies.
9.
Historically, the position of the Catholic Church toward the Jews was to tolerate
their persecution but also to protect them from the violence of the mobs. Jews were
viewed as a “stiff-necked people” who turned their back on the Lord by not accepting
Jesus as the Christ. Because of their stubbornness, they were cursed by God to wander
the earth until they came to accept Jesus as the fulfillment of the Hebrew Scriptures
and then convert to Christianity. The persecution of the Jews from the Middle Ages
on was justified as implementing God’s design for them; but as for killing Jews, this
was contrary to God’s will, inasmuch as the Second Coming required the Jews’
presence in order for them to accept Christ. Thus, the Nazi persecution of the Jews
during the 1930s seemed consistent with traditional Christian theology, and Catholic
acquiescence, an appropriate response (a point acknowledged in We Remember: A
Reflection on the Shoah).
10. When Pius XI realized that the Nazi campaign against the Jews marked a radical
departure from traditional anti-Jewish policies and practices, he set in motion, a year
after the issuance of Mit Brennender Sorge, the composition of a document that would
condemn both racism and anti-Semitism and ordered an American Jesuit, Father John
Lafarge, to produce such an encyclical. The result was Humani Generis Unitas, the
“hidden encyclical,” so-called because it was never published. For at this time, the
Pope’s health began to deteriorate and the encyclical became a casualty of
bureaucratic inertia.
11. Humani Generis Unitas included a (belated) condemnation of the Nuremberg
Laws and rebuked the Nazis for excluding Jews from the community because of race.
But the encyclical also called for the quarantine of Jews from Christians, “lest their
profaneness infect good Christians … The Church has always recognized the historic
mission of the Jewish people, and its ardent prayers for their conversion do not make
it lose sight of the spiritual dangers to which contact with Jews can expose souls.” The
encyclical included the following warning:
So long as the Jewish people persist in their unbelief and maintain their
hostility to Christianity, the Church must exert itself by every means to
avert the perils that this unbelief and hostility might create for the faith
and mores of the flock.
It is conceivable that had his health not failed, Pius XI might have moderated some of
the more egregious language about the Jews, but such attitudes were certainly the
prevailing ones at the time among large segments of the Catholic clergy.
12. Upon his death in 1939, Pius XI was succeeded by Cardinal Eugenio Pacelli,
who became Pope Pius XII. His reign encompassed the years of World War II and the
Holocaust, and his tenure was characterized by a reluctance to take the moral high
ground by voicing outrage against the Nazi genocide. Rather, he engaged in quiet
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diplomacy in his effort to protect Catholic interests in Germany and in other countries
under German occupation.
13. Although Pope Pius XII received secret reports from the archbishop of Krakow,
Adam Sapieha, about the unfolding genocide, he refused to share this information
with his Catholic constituency. In his defense, his supporters have argued that Pius
XII simply did not comprehend the enormity of what the Germans were doing to the
Jews. Yet as the Nazi genocide evolved into the Holocaust, the Vatican was fully
aware of the “Final Solution” and was among the first bodies in the world to receive
the ghastly information. Despite this, the Vatican refrained from any action that might
compromise its institutional interests.
14. Those who claim that the Vatican’s silence was merely a cover for the Church’s
anti-Semitism point to such examples as the following: When the then-Chief Rabbi of
Palestine, Isaac Herzog, approached the Vatican to intervene in Spain on behalf of
Jewish refugees in danger of being repatriated to Germany, the Holy See refused.
Similarly, the Vatican refused to endorse a plan that would have transferred some
6,000 Jewish children from Bulgaria to Palestine because of its theological
reservations about Zionism. When the Vichy government asked the Vatican whether it
would object to the passage of anti-Jewish laws, the response was that although the
Church repudiated racism, it did not look askance at every anti-Jewish measure. In
September 1942, the British government requested the Vatican to condemn the Nazi
treatment of the population in the occupied territories, as well as the persecution of the
Jews. When the Vatican refused, a British official commented: “A policy of silence in
regard to such offenses against the conscience of the world must necessarily involve a
renunciation of moral leadership and a consequent atrophy of the influence and
authority of the Vatican.”
15. Unlike the 1930s, when the Church’s silence regarding the persecution of Jews
was prompted by traditional anti-Jewish attitudes, its response to the Holocaust was
more complicated. Given the Church’s historical record, and the special place
assigned to Jews in Catholic theology, the murder of European Jewry challenged the
traditional role of the Church as protector of the Jews against the violence of the
mobs. In effect, Pius XII’s silence in the face of the Holocaust warrants his
condemnation, if only because he departed from the traditional Church policy, which
stressed the physical preservation of the Jews. Yet this indictment is not altogether
fair. Where it was possible, the Church did act.
16. The record shows that in places where the Church had some leverage, such as
Slovakia, Hungary, and Romania, the Vatican intervened on behalf of Jews. In those
countries, Pius XII was instrumental in halting the deportations of Jews and his efforts
resulted in the saving of many Jewish lives. In Italy, Jews were given shelter in monasteries
and convents. In Poland, the Church organized a number of rescue attempts to save Jewish
children. The Pope cabled the Hungarian Regent, Miklos Horthy, asking him to reverse the
orders for the deportation of Jews to Auschwitz. (The “signals” which emanated from the
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Vatican in regard to sheltering Jews marked for extermination, however, were apparently also
sent to those who helped leading Nazis, such as Adolf Eichmann and Josef Mengele, escape
to Latin America after the end of the war. This unfortunate page in the history of the Catholic
Church also awaits the opening of the appropriate Vatican archives, to determine the
complicity of the Holy See in abetting the escape of fleeing Nazi war criminals.)
17. In the final analysis, what can be said with any degree of certainty about the Vatican’s
silence during the Holocaust years is that, faced with the Nazi threat to destroy the
Church, the Pope saw as his prime duty the protection of the Church’s interests. The
Vatican’s silence was motivated less by any anti-Jewish considerations or support for
the Nazi genocide, than by the instinct for self-preservation. As for the Vatican’s
claim that it saved the lives of hundreds of thousands of Jews, it remains unclear as to
whether the Church includes in this number (and therefore takes credit for) the works of
individual Catholic laymen, priests, and nuns, who risked their own lives to shelter Jews.
Another unresolved question is the matter of the Jewish children who were placed in the care
of Catholic institutions by their parents to protect them from the Nazis and were then baptized
by the priests. Despite requests from Jewish organizations, as well as from many of the
children in question, now adults seeking to learn about their parentage, the Catholic Church
remains reluctant to open its records of Jewish children who underwent the so-called “rescue
baptisms.”
18. It is obvious that the Church’s document, We Remember: A Reflection on the
Shoah, is not the last word on the subject. While this “act of repentance” is certainly
welcome, it is selective in its analysis. There are still too many omissions, too many
unanswered questions. Let us therefore hope that the Church will find occasion again
to speak out on the question at hand, this time with sufficient force to close the book
on the whole sorry matter.
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Answer in your own words in English, unless otherwise indicated.
1.
Answer the question below in English.
In what terms – paragraph 2 – did the Vatican make its admission of guilt?
Answer : ____________________________________________________________
Answer the question below in Hebrew.
2.
On what points is the Vatican document deficient? (paragraph 3)
Answer : ____________________________________________________________
3.
4.
Answer the question below in English.
Provide the information that might conflict with the widespread notion of Pope
Pius XII remaining indifferent to the horrors endured by the Jews during World
War II.
Answer : ____________________________________________________________
Answer the question below in English.
How does phase one of the Nazi war against the Jews – paragraph 5 – differ
from the second stage?
Answer : ____________________________________________________________
Answer the question below in Hebrew.
5.
What makes Catholic doctrine, by definition, incompatible with Nazi ideology
(paragraph 7)?
Answer : ____________________________________________________________
Choose the best answer.
6.
Catholic condemnation of Nazi racism – paragraph 8 – stopped short of
criticizing
a. Nazi ideology.
b. its emphasis upon racial purity
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c. its contempt for inferior races.
d. Its daily social and political
practice.
Answer the question below in Hebrew.
7.
How does the author – paragraph 9 – account for the fact that, historically, the
Catholic Church had both accorded physical protection for the Jews, and
condoned their persecution?
Answer : ____________________________________________________________
Answer the question below in Hebrew.
8.
The “hidden encyclical” – paragraphs 10-11 – though critical of Nazi policy,
was nevertheless couched in ambiguous terms; where does its ambiguity lie?
Answer : ____________________________________________________________
9.
10.
11.
Answer the question below in English.
Provide the evidence that might suggest that Pope Pius XII could be perceived
as more than just a horrified spectator of a ghastly unfolding scene? (paragraphs
13-14)
Answer : ____________________________________________________________
Answer the question below in English.
What facts might suggest that the Catholic Church headed by Pope Pius XII did
make some efforts to rescue Jews during the Second World War?
Answer : ____________________________________________________________
Answer the question below in English.
Which of the Vatican’s post-World War II acts might be considered
inexcusable?
Answer : ____________________________________________________________
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