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PIUS XI |
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Eugenio
Pacelli, 1876-1958), pope (1939-1958). Born in Rome,
Pacelli studied philosophy at the Gregorian University and
theology at Sant' Apollinare, both in Rome.
After his ordination in 1899 he entered the Secretariat
of State in 1901 and began a long career in papal diplomacy. He
became assistant secretary of state in 1911, pro-secretary of
state in 1912, and secretary of the
Congregation for Extraordinary Ecclesiastical Affairs in 1914. On
May 13, 1917, Pacelli was consecrated titular archbishop
of Sardes and appointed nuncio to Bavaria. He became nuncio to
Germany in June 1920 and signed the concordats with Bavaria
in 1924 and Prussia in 1929. Pacelli was made
a cardinal in 1929, and a year later he was appointed
secretary of state. He concluded the concordat with Baden in
1932. From the time of Adolf Hitler's
accession to power (January 30, 1933), the acts of Cardinal
Pacelli have been a matter of controversy. According
to official Catholic sources, Pacelli did not in any
way influence the German bishops who, on March 28, 1933, lifted
previous prohibitions against the Nazi party
so that any Catholic could now "be loyal to the
lawful authorities." On
April 10 of that year, Franz von Papen and Hermann Goring
were received by Pope Pius XI, who, according to von Papen,
"remarked how pleased he was that the
German government now had at its head a man uncompromisingly
opposed to communism and Russian nihilism in all its forms."
The strong anticommunism of the Holy See played a major role
in the stand of Pacelli. On July 20, a
concordat was signed at the Vatican by Pacelli and von
Papen that represented a great diplomatic victory for Hitler. Hitler,
however, never intended to implement the concordat.
With religious liberty at stake, Pope Pius XI on March 21, 1937,
issued the encyclical Mit brennender Sorge (With Burning
Concern), in which he questioned the errors
of Nazi ideology: "Whoever detaches the race, the nation,
the state, the form of government ... from the earthly frame
of reference and makes them into the highest
norm of all, higher than religious values, and worships
them with idolatry, perverts and distorts the order of things
provided and commended by God." The
encyclical condemned neo-pagan theories such as the
"idolatric doctrine of the race," but not the
constitutional form of the Nazi regime. Cardinal
Pacelli was elected pope on March 2, 1939, and took
the name Pius XII. Regarding his attitude to Jews, his pontificate
is the subject of disagreement among
scholars, some praising his aid to individual Jews in
distress, others criticizing his silence and his failure to publicly
condemn the Nazi persecutions. Even Catholic
authors who base themselves only on the official
documents published by the Holy See have deplored some aspects of
the conduct of the papacy in general and of
Pius XII in particular. From
the very beginning of the Nazi regime, the church tried
to alleviate the fate of Jews who had converted to Catholicism. This
is illustrated by the remonstration of the
Holy See against those aspects of the Italian
racial laws of 1938 that dealt with mixed marriages and the children
of such marriages. As a general rule it can
be said that the Holy See relied exclusively
on diplomacy, while human suffering and moral principles were
ignored. Nevertheless,
when it became urgent to find a haven for thousands
of Jewish refugees after the Kristallnacht pogrom, the Holy See
intervened in March 1939, in Catholic Brazil. It obtained
3,000 visas for baptized Jews, of which
2,000, however, were not granted because of alleged "improper
conduct," in Cardinal Luigi Maglione's words. This was probably
a reference to the returning of Jews to
Judaism once they reached Brazil. Some historians
believe that in its policies toward refugees, the church manifested
antisemitism, indifference to the plight of the non-Christian
Jews, and excessive neutralism. In
the spring of 1940, the Chief Rabbi of Palestine, Isaac
Herzog, asked the papal secretary of state, Cardinal
Maglione, to intervene in Spain to keep Jews
there from being sent back to Germany, and he later wrote
again about a similar situation in Lithuania. But the Holy
See did not intervene. Some
historians claim that the pope had only partial knowledge
of the Nazi program of extermination of the Jews, but this seems not
to have been the fact. The papal Secretariat of State was
among the first bodies in the world to
receive information about the massacre of the Jews. At the
beginning of 1941, Cardinal Theodor Innitzer of Vienna told
Pius XII about the deportation of Jews that
was taking place. The charge d'affaires in Slovakia,
Giuseppe Burzio, as early as October 27, 1941, sent a report
to his superiors at the Holy See in Rome,
according to which Jews were being systematically destroyed.
On March 9, 1942, Burzio forwarded a telegram and wrote that the
deportation of eighty thousand Slovak Jews to Poland was
equivalent to sending a large number of them
to certain death. That
September, a common diplomatic move was made by the diplomatic
corps accredited to the Holy See. The British government was most
anxious to secure a public papal condemnation of the Nazi
treatment of inhabitants of occupied
territories and of the persecutions of the Jews. Osborne
Francis d'Arcy, the British representative, wrote to the
secretary of state: "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." On
September 18, Monsignor Giovanni Battista Montini, the
future Pope Paul VI, noted: "The massacres of the Jews
reach frightening proportions and
forms." But when the United States representative to the
Vatican, Myron Taylor, forwarded a note to Cardinal Maglione
that month, stating that the Jews were being
sent to the east to be killed, the secretary of state
replied that it was not possible to verify the accuracy of
such rumors. On
October 7, 1942, the chaplain of a hospital train in
Poland wrote: "The elimination of the Jews, through mass
assassination, is almost total . . . they say
that two million Jews have been murdered." That
December, prior to Christmas Eve, many telegrams,including
one from Chief Rabbi Herzog, brought urgent
appeals to the pope to save the Jews of eastern Europe.
Pius XII decided to break his reserve, and in his message
broadcast by the Vatican radio on December
24, he spoke about 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 reference to Jews was
clear but not explicit. In March 1943, Burzio wrote again:
"Jews in Poland are (being] killed by
gas or machine guns." In
Slovakia, where a Catholic priest, Monsignor Jozef Tiso,
was head of state, "therefore the scandal is greater, and
greater the danger that responsibility can be
shifted to the Catholic Church itself," according
to the historian John Morley (p. 101). Morley comments that the
Vatican perhaps did not act because of indifference to the
deportation of the Jews, because of German
influence, or because it cared only for Catholic interests. In
France, following the German invasion and the establishment
of the Vichy government, Marshal Philippe Petain wrote in August
1941 to his ambassador in the Holy See, Leon Berard, asking
him to verify whether the Vatican would
object to anti-Jewish laws. Berard made an inquiry at
the Secretariat of State and answered that even if the church
condemned racism, it did not repudiate every
measure against Jews. Morley writes that the Vatican's
role was ambivalent; there was little opposition to anti-Jewish
laws, and only a quiet protest against the
deportations of 1942. The papal nuncio in France,
Valerio Valeri, considered the reaction of the French bishops to be
"a platonic protest." Monsignor
Jules-Gerard Saliege, the archbishop of
Toulouse, made public a pastoral letter against the persecution of
the Jews, but the Holy See itself did not
react in France. In
Germany, the Jews could not find a champion who would
try to stop the killing through an appeal to the public. The
papal nuncio in Berlin, Cesare Orsenigo, was
so weak in his remonstrations to the Nazi government
that even the bishop of Berlin, Konrad von Preysing, asked the pope,
in January 1943, whether he should be represented at all at
the German government. Pius XII apparently
wished to avoid the reprisals that might have been
provoked by publicly condemning the persecution of the Jews, and he
therefore left the responsibility for such decisions to
local clergy. Italy,
after the armistice of September 8, 1943, was also occupied
by the Nazis. At the end of that month the Nazis demanded 50
kilograms of gold from the Jewish community.
The Vatican is said to have offered 15 kilos, but
this was not taken up. On October 16 of that year, the Nazis
arrested more than a thousand Jews in Rome
and sent them to their death in Auschwitz. No intervention
stopped the action, taken almost under the papal windows. Baron
Ernst von Weizsacker, the German ambassador to the Holy See,
sent a report on October 28 to the German
Foreign Office in which he wrote: "Although
under pressure from all sides, the pope has not let
himself be drawn into any demonstrative censure of the deportation
of Jews from Rome. Although he must expect
that his attitude will be criticized by our enemies
and exploited by the Protestant and Anglo-Saxon countries in their
propaganda against Catholicism, he has done everything he
could in this delicate matter not to strain
relations with the German government and German circles in
Rome." Catholic
authors explain that Weizsacker wanted only to avoid
Nazi reprisals against the pope. The fact remains, however, that no
public protest was made on that occasion. At
the same time, in many monasteries, churches,
and ecclesiastical buildings in Italy, Jews were saved during the
Nazi occupation, and the simultaneous opening
of so many Catholic institutions could have
taken place only under clear instructions by Pius XII. Moreover, the
pope protested officially, if only privately,
against the persecution of the Jews in those
countries where he felt that he might have some influence. In
Bulgaria, the Holy See was asked to help save 6,000 Jewish
children by transferring them to Palestine. On this occasion the
secretary of state, Cardinal Maglione, wrote to the apostolic
delegate, Amleto Cicognani, in Washington and
expressed his reserve concerning Zionism. Throughout
the period of the German occupation of Hungary, which
began on March 19, 1944, the papal nuncio in Budapest, Angelo Rotta,
as well as the pope himself, took measures to
help Hungarian Jews. As early as March 24,
Rotta advised the Hungarian government to be moderate in its plans
concerning the Jews. When this admonition was not heeded, he
continued throughout April to approach the
Hungarians about their treatment of the Jews. Speaking
in the name of the pope, Rotta protested against the planned
deportation of the Jews--as it happened, on the very day that
they began (May 15,1944) but again to no avail. On June 25, the pope
himself cabled the Hungarian regent, Miklos
Horthy, asking him to reverse Hungarian policy on the
Jews. The cable read: "We
have been requested from several sides to do everything
possible to ensure that the sufferings which have had to be
borne for so long by numerous unfortunate
people in the bosom of this noble and chivalrous nation
because of their nationality or racial origin shall not be
prolonged and made worse. Our fatherly heart,
in the service of a solicitous charity which embraces
all mankind, cannot remain insensitive to these urgent
wishes. Therefore I am turning personally to
Your Excellency and I appeal to your noble feelings, in
full confidence that Your Excellency On
July 1, the regent replied to the pope's message: "I
received your Holiness's telegraphic message with the
deepest understanding and with thankfulness, and I beg you to
be convinced that I am doing all in my power
to see that the demands of Christian and humane principles
are respected. May I be permitted to ask that in the hour of
grievous trial Your Holiness may continue to
look with favor on the Hungarian people." Shortly
thereafter, on July 7, Horthy ended the first wave of
deportations from Hungary. Undoubtedly, the papal protest, along
with those of King Gustaf V of Sweden,
Anthony Eden, and President Franklin D. Roosevelt,
contributed to his decision to stop the transports. After
the arrow cross party seized power in Hungary on October
15, Rotta again registered numerous protests on behalf of the Jews.
Many of his actions were taken jointly with
the representatives of several neutral states.
Like them, Rotta issued letters of protection (Schutzpasse) in the
name of the Vatican to Jews. These
letters helped safeguard some twenty-five hundred
Jews from the Arrow Cross reign of terror. All of these
acts were significant contributions toward
the rescue of the remaining Hungarian Jews. During
the war, criticism was heard from within the Catholic
church itself. Cardinal Eugene Tisserant told Cardinal Emmanuel
Suhard on June 1, 1940, of his fears that
history would prove critical of the Holy See for
having adopted an accommodating political line "for its own
exclusive advantage." Cardinal August
Hlond of Poland reported in August 1941 to the secretary
of state that the Polish people believed the Pope had abandoned
them. This was said in light of the Nazi
persecution of the Polish church and clergy. The
attitude of the pope toward Nazi officials "dramatically
changed" after September 1942, when Myron Taylor told him that
the Allies were determined to achieve total
victory. This would suggest that for Pius XII
considerations of Realpolitik were more important than moral
principles. The
major question that arises is why Pius XII did not raise
his voice in public forcefully against the Nazi cruelty. Here
are some possible answers to this question,
given by Catholic writers:
The
controversy about Pius XII and the Holocaust is still
open. At the end of his visit to Israel in 1964, Pope Paul VI
came to Pius's defense in Jerusalem. On
March 12, 1979, Pope John Paul II met with Jewish leaders
in Rome and said: "I am happy to evoke in your presence today
the dedicated and effective work of my
predecessor Pius XII on behalf of the Jewish people."
In a meeting with American Jewish leaders in September 1987 in
Miami, John Paul II again recalled the
positive attitude of Pius XII. However, his passivity
in the face of the Author: Sergio I. Minerbi The Encyclopedia of the Holocaust, New York: Macmillan, 1990, Gutman, Israel (editor in chief) |
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