Biased attacks against Pius XII (Eugenio Pacelli) are nothing new. Certainly, they have become commonplace. Still, Daniel Goldhagen’s recent 27,000-word essay for the New Republic,titled “What would Jesus have done? Pope Pius XII, the Catholic Church and the Holocaust” (January 21, 2002) draws special attention. Based on his upcoming book, A Moral Reckoning (ed. Knopf) Goldhagen’s article is notable both for the astonishing breadth of its claims and for the air of righteous indignation with which it is filled. Not content with saying, as other scholars have done, that Pope Pius In fact, he even maintains that “the main responsibility for the production of this hatred so widespread in the West in all times belongs to Christianity. More specifically, to the Catholic Church.” Such accusations demand a comprehensive response.
In his latest book, Hitler’s voluntary executioners[this book has been published in Spain by the Taurus publishing house, n.d.t.], Goldhagen stated that the blame for the Holocaust should be placed on the shoulders of ordinary Germans and their characteristic anti-Semitism. When scholars of contemporary history on both sides of the Atlantic expressed their doubts on this point, he finally admitted that he had underestimated the fact that factors other than anti-Semitism led to the crimes of the Third Reich. “I’ve skipped a little bit about some things in this story,” he said. Well, he has skipped them again.
Goldhagen’s article is not based on original historical research. It depends entirely on secondary sources written in English. This contributes to an inexcusable number of errors, large and small. Several of the dates he gives regarding the establishment of ghettos in Europe are wrong (one of them by more than 50 years). He is also wrong (in three decades) about the beginning of the beatification process of Pius XII, and he is wrong about the date on which the so-called “Hidden Encyclical” came to light. He is wrong to call the concordat with the Holy See “the first international treaty of the Nazis.” He is wrong to say that the Belgian Church was silent when it was one of the first to denounce Nazi racial theories. There is no basis in suggesting that the German cardinals Michael von Faullhaber and Clement August von Galen were insensitive to Jewish suffering or kept silent about it. Goldhagen says that Pius XII “clearly refused to support” the protest of the French bishops, when the truth is that he broadcast it on Vatican Radio for six consecutive days.
He accuses Pius Goldhagen also misidentifies the role of Vatican official Peter Gumpel (who is the narrator or judge, not the postulator or promoter of the cause for the sainthood of Pius
He seems unaware that the Catholic scholars on that committee separated themselves from the claims made by their Jewish opponents after its collapse. He identifies the much admired king of Denmark during the war with Christian II when he was Christian X. He refers to Pope Pius XI as if he had been Cardinal Secretary of State, when in fact his successor Pius XII was. Some failures like this could be attributed to a basic lack of care. However, Goldhagen’s most serious errors – each and every one of them are attacks on the Catholic Church and the Pope – reveal that there is something much more problematic in his essay.
The Christmas message of 1942
Goldhagen’s efforts to trivialize and diminish Pius XII’s famous Christmas message and his clear denunciation of Nazi ideology are representative of the biased and one-sided approach that fills his work. In the 1942 message, Pius said that the world had “plunged headlong into the darkness of tragic errors” and that “the Church would be deceiving itself, would have ceased to be a mother, if it were deaf to the cries of suffering children, which reach the ears of all classes of the human family.” He spoke of the need for humanity to make “a solemn vow never to rest until the brave souls of every people and nation on Earth rise up in legions determined to form a society and to dedicate themselves to the service of the human person and a divinely ennobled human society.” He said humanity owed this vote to all victims of war, including “the hundreds of thousands who, through no fault of their own, and solely because of their nationality or race, they have been sentenced to death or gradual extinction” (emphasis added).
In delivering this and other messages during the war, Pius used the word stirpe, which, according to Zanichelli’s Italian and English Dictionary It can be translated by origin, birth, family, race or descent, but had been used for centuries as an explicit reference to the Jews. The British recordings (British Public Records Office, FO 371/34363 59337 [5 January 1943]) reflect the view that “the Pope’s condemnation of the treatment of the Jews and Poles is quite unmistakable, and the message is perhaps more forceful in tone than any of his recent messages.” On February 21, 1943, the Dutch bishops published a pastoral letter in defense of the Jewish people in which express reference was made to the Pope’s message.
Furthermore, a well-known editorial that appeared on Christmas Day in the New York Times praised Pius XII for his moral leadership in opposing the Nazis: No Christmas sermon reaches more faithful than the message that Pope Pius XII addresses to a world in these times torn by war. This Christmas more than ever is a solitary voice crying out in the face of the silence of a continent…
When a leader, addressing nations on both sides impartially, condemns as heresy the new form of national state that subordinates everything to itself, when he declares that everyone who wants peace must protect the “legal security of individuals” against “arbitrary attacks,” when he censures the violent occupation of territories, the exile and persecution of human beings for no other reason than race or political opinion, when he says that people must fight for a just and decent peace, a “total peace”; then the “impartial trial” has the same force as the ruling of a Supreme Court. A similar editorial from Times said:
The study of the words that Pope Pius XII has addressed to the Catholics of various nations in encyclicals and addresses since his arrival leaves no room for doubt. It condemns the cult of force and its concrete manifestation in the suppression of national freedoms and the persecution of the Jewish people.
Obviously, in contrast to what Goldhagen tries to have us believe, everyone knew who the Pope was referring to, including the Axis powers. According to an official Nazi report drawn up by Heinrich Himmler’s Higher Security Office (theReichssicherheitshauptamt) and addressed to the office of Foreign Minister Joachim von Ribbentrop:
In a way never seen before, the Pope has rejected the National Socialist New European Order… It is true that the Pope does not refer to the German National Socialists by name, but the speech is a long attack on everything we defend… God, he says, considers all peoples and races to deserve equal consideration. Here he is speaking clearly in defense of the Jews… In practice he is accusing the German people of injustice towards the Jews, and becomes the voice of the Jewish war criminals.
An American report noted that the Germans were “conspicuous by their absence” at the Midnight Mass said by the Pope to diplomats on Christmas Eve following the papal message. German ambassador Diego von Bergen, following instructions from Ribbentrop, warned the Pope that the Nazis would retaliate if the Vatican abandoned its neutral stance. Reporting the response to his superiors, the German ambassador declared: “Pacelli is no more sensitive to threats than we are.”
Vatican Radio
Goldhagen asks the following rhetorical question: “Why did [Pius XII] speak publicly about the suffering of the Poles as a real and moral problem, but not that of the Jews? There is no good answer.” He then cites a Vatican Radio broadcast in January 1940, thus trying to show that the Vatican cared only for Polish Catholics, and was not capable of saying a good word to the Jews. By doing this, you seriously distort the truth.
To begin with, the message Goldhagen cites is not limited to Christian Poles. He only talks about “Poles”. Of course, writings of the time sometimes distinguished between “Poles” and “Jews,” using the former designation to refer to Polish Christians, but this was far from always the case. Furthermore, Goldhagen implies that Jews were never mentioned on Vatican Radio. This is simply false.
Goldhagen appears to have taken his Vatican Radio quote from Pierre Blet’s bookPius XII and the Second World War. This book presents itself as a summary. If Goldhagen had actually investigated the Vatican Radio transcripts for January 1940 (the month he focuses on) he would have discovered that Jews were indeed expressly and clearly identified. A key passage says that:
“A system of internal deportation and zoning is being organized in the midst of one of the harshest winters in Europe, based on principles and using methods that can only be described as brutal; and a terrible famine threatens 70 percent of the Polish population, as their food and tools are shipped to Germany to refill the granaries of the metropolis. Jews and Poles are forcibly grouped into ghettos. separated, hermetically sealed, and woefully inadequate for the economic survival of the millions of people destined to live there.”
Even Michael Phayer (another critic of the Pope) refers to this explicit defense of the Jews in his book The Catholic Church and the Holocaust, 1930-1965 (listed on the list of books used by Goldhagen). On October 15, 1940, Vatican Radio denounced “the immoral principles of Nazism” and on March 30, 1941, it explicitly condemned “the perversity of Hitler.” These broadcasts were among the first to report on Nazi persecutions, but they were not the only such stories on Vatican Radio. They continued throughout the entire war.
The Catholic faithful heard these broadcasts and reacted accordingly. The French rescuer priest (and later cardinal) Henri de Lubac paid tribute to the Pope’s radio station in his book Christian Resistance to Anti-Semitism, in which he describes the profound impact he had on the French Resistance. Similarly, Father Michael Riquet S.J., a former Dachau prisoner who was praised for saving Jewish lives, stated: “Pius XII spoke, Pius XII condemned, Pius
The hidden encyclical and the Summi Pontificatus
At the beginning of his essay, Goldhagen studies the so-called “hidden encyclical.” The story here is that in June 1938, more than a year before the outbreak of World War II, when Eugenio Pacelli was Vatican Secretary of State, Pope Pius XI commissioned a draft papal declaration attacking racism and anti-Semitism. Unfortunately, he died before it was finished. According to Goldhagen, Pius XI outlined it, Pius XII buried it, and it remained hidden until it was published in France in 1995.
If this story were true, it would help support Goldhagen’s description of Pius XII as evil. But it’s not true. To begin with, there was never an encyclical, not even a draft encyclical. Pope Pius XI requested a working document from Father John LaFarge, S.J. He thought it might one day be used as the basis for an encyclical. LaFarge was neither an expert theologian nor a historian, so he asked two other priests, one from France and the other from Germany, for help. This resulted in three different working documents, one written in French, one in English and one in German.
The source on which Goldhagen relies –The hidden encyclical of Pius XI, by Georges Passelecq and Bernard Suchecky – deals with English and French documents, but not German. That book also makes it clear that, contrary to what Goldhagen claims, Pius XI was not the author of any of these documents. In fact, as that book makes even clearer, there is no evidence that he or Pius see them. A copy was sent to Pius XI, but by then he was seriously ill. When it was found after his death, there were no notes on it that would suggest that he had reviewed it at any time. The book also explains that the document disappeared immediately after the death of Pius XI, and the men who were working on the project believed (and were in fact correct) that Pius No I had seen it. Therefore, he could not have buried it. Finally, this matter was made public in 1972 by National Catholic Reporter and again in 1973 L’Osservatore Romano, not in 1995, when Passelecq and Suchecky’s book appeared.
The principal author of the German draft, Professor Gustav Gundlach, S.J., assisted Pius XII with his first encyclical, Summi Pontificatus, which appeared on October 20, 1939, just after the outbreak of war. It is not surprising that the Summi Pontificatus (which expressly mentions the Jews and calls for solidarity withall those who profess a belief in God) contains language similar to that of the document Gundlach had worked on. In fact, Father LaFarge wrote in the magazine America that it was obvious that the Summi Pontificatus It applied to the Jews of Europe. He was worried only that Americans might not realize that it applied equally to racial injustice in the United States.
Since Goldhagen has limited his research to a single, incomplete source, it is not surprising to find that his comments compound errors about the “hidden encyclical” (A much better book on the subject, edited by Anton Rauscher, recently appeared in Germany). What is very surprising is that Goldhagen does not even mention theSummi Pontificatus.
In January 2002, the Rutgers Journal of Law and Religion made public and posted on the Internet documents from the private archive of General William J. “Wild Bill” Donovan, who served as special assistant to the American chief prosecutor at the International Military Tribunal in Nuremberg. In a confidential report documenting Nazi persecution of the Church, prepared for the Nuremberg trials, the situation surrounding the Summi Pontificatus It is being studied as a possible support point for a separate cause against the Nazis. The report notes that the priests who read it were reported to the authorities and that Nazi officials stopped its printing and distribution.
“This encyclical,” wrote Heinrich Müller, head of the Berlin Gestapo, “is directed exclusively against Germany, both in ideology and in the attention it pays to the German-Polish dispute; how dangerous it is for our international relations and for our internal affairs is beyond discussion.” Reinhard Heydrich, head of the SS security office in Warsaw, wrote: “This statement by the Pope makes an unequivocal accusation against Germany.” The header of New York Times declared: “The Pope condemns dictators, treaty violators, racism and urges the restoration of Poland.” Later, Allied forces released 88,000 of them behind enemy lines for propaganda purposes.
The Concordat
In 1933, the Holy See and the German government signed an agreement that ensured for the following years the right of the Church to provide its services and perform its functions. Deceptively, Goldhagen reports that “Pacelli rushed to negotiate for the Church a treaty of cooperation, the concordat, with Hitler’s Germany.” He also wrongly adds that this was “Nazi Germany’s first international treaty.”
Goldhagen has probably been confused by James Carroll’s bookConstantine’s Sword. Astutely, Carroll says that the concordat was the first bilateral treaty of Nazi Germany. In fact, the Pact of Four between Germany, France, Italy and the United Kingdom preceded the signing of the concordat. Furthermore, Hitler’s representatives were fully accredited and recognized by the League of Nations and took part in the discussions in Geneva regarding disarmament, which also took place before the signing of the concordat. On May 5, 1933 (more than two months before the signing of the concordat) the Soviet Union renewed a friendship and trade agreement with Germany, and that same day the British Parliament voted to accept an Anglo-German trade agreement. In other words, Germany, France, the United Kingdom, the Soviet Union, and the entire League of Nations accredited the new German government before the concordat was signed. Carroll may have been technically correct, if misleading. Goldhagen is plainly wrong.
Goldhagen is also wrong when he asserts that a “secret annex” gave the Church’s approval to German rearmament. The concordat is limited to guaranteeing that YeahIf Germany rebuilt its army, soldiers would have access to military chaplains. It was about protecting the sacraments, not about approving rearmament. That Goldhagen transforms this into something iniquitous can only be explained as part of his strenuous efforts to defame Catholics and the Pope.
The aforementioned recently declassified confidential report from the Nuremberg trial confirms that the concordat was a “Nazi proposal.” The Nazis accepted clauses that the Church had previously proposed to Weimar, but that Weimar had rejected. The Nazis told the Vatican that it would have to choose between accepting those clauses (which guaranteed that the Church could function) or facing severe persecution. In fact, to show that they were serious, the Nazis severely persecuted German Catholics in the weeks before the concordat. In a private conversation with the British charge of Vatican affairs, Pacelli said the choice was “either accept their demands or the de facto elimination of the Catholic Church in the Reich.”
The concordat, of course, came during the pontificate of Pius XI. Like David Kertzer (The Popes against the Jews), Goldhagen accuses Pius XI of being anti-Semitic. This is a strange allegation. Pius XI is usually presented as the good Pope, the one who dared to speak, in contrast to the “quiet” Pius XII. Pius
“Let us emphasize that in the Holy Mass, Abraham is our Father and our Patriarch. Anti-Semitism is incompatible with the high thought that that fact expresses. It is a movement with which Christians can have nothing to do. No, no, I tell you that it is impossible for a Christian to take part in anti-Semitism. It is inadmissible. Through Christ and in Christ we are the spiritual progeny of Abraham. Spiritually, we are all Semites.”
In January 1939, the National Jewish Monthly reported that “in Italy, the only light left is in the Vatican, from where beautiful humanitarian messages from the Pope [Pius XI] have been coming out regularly.” When he died the following month, the Nazi press denigrated him as “Chief Rabbi of the Western World.”
Despite the ridiculous claim that Pius XI was anti-Semitic, Goldhagen twists the facts so that he can “blame” Pius He also “blames” Pius XII for writing the anti-Nazi encyclical of 1937. Mit brennender Sorge.
Mit brennender Sorge
Of all Goldhagen’s nonsense, none is less understandable than his description of the great encyclical Mit brennender Sorge – the Vatican’s powerful denunciation of German fascism and racism – as a cumbersome anti-Semitic pamphlet. Mit brennender Sorge, published by Pius XI when Pacelli was his Secretary of State, it is one of the most tremendous condemnations of any national regime that the Holy See has ever published. He condemned not only the persecution of the Church in Germany but also the neo-paganism of Nazi racial theories. In part, the encyclical said that:
“If the race or the people, if the State or a certain form of it, if the representatives of the state power or other fundamental elements of human society have an essential position worthy of respect in the natural order, nevertheless, whoever removes them from this scale of earthly values, elevating them to the supreme norm of everything, even religious values, and, deifying them with idolatrous worship, perverts and falsifies the order created and imposed by God, is far from the true faith and from a conception of life in accordance with it.” He pointed directly against Hitler and Nazism by saying:
“Only superficial spirits can fall into the error of speaking of a national God, of a national religion, and undertake the crazy task of imprisoning within the limits of a single people, in the ethnic narrowness of a single race, God, creator of the world, king and legislator of the peoples, before whose greatness the nations are drops of water in a bucket (Isaiah 11:15).”
The encyclical also praised those pastors of the Church who had stood firm and set a good example. He concluded that “the enemies of Christ who dream in vain of the disappearance of the Church will recognize that they have rejoiced too soon and that they have wanted to bury it too quickly.”
Unlike most encyclicals, which are written in Latin, Mit brennender Sorge It was written in German. It bore the date of March 14, 1937, Passion Sunday, but was smuggled into Germany, distributed to all parishes and read from the pulpits on March 21, 1937, Palm Sunday.
That Mit brennender Sorge was read to everyone is only because it caught the Nazis by surprise. It was not published in the German newspapers. An internal German memorandum dated March 23, 1937 described the encyclical as “almost a declaration of war against the Reich government.” The Nuremberg indictment report explained the measures the Nazis took in retaliation: all available copies were confiscated, twelve printing presses were closed, those guilty of having distributed the encyclical were imprisoned, and Church publications in which the encyclical had appeared were banned. Later, even mentioning the encyclical was criminalized in Nazi Germany.
The day after the appearance of the Mit brennender Sorge, he Völkischer Beobachterlaunched a harsh counterattack against the “Jewish God and His delegate in Rome.” The Schwarze Corps He called it “the most incredible of Pius XI’s pastoral letters, every sentence in it was an insult to New Germany.” The German ambassador to the Holy See was instructed not to take part in the solemn Easter celebrations, and German missions throughout Europe were told that they “had to consider the papal encyclical a declaration of war… inciting Catholic citizens to rebel against the authority of the Reich.”
The persecution of the Jews, unfortunately, did not diminish, it worsened after the appearance of the Mit brennender Sorge. This reaction is but one of many examples of Nazi reprisals – against Jews and Christians – that Goldhagen denies ever happened. His attempt to turn this harsh papal message into a cumbersome anti-Semitic and pro-Nazi pamphlet is simply incredible.
Mystici Corporis Christi
Goldhagen also misrepresents Pope Pius XII’s 1943 encyclical, Mystici Corporis Christi. Since it was primarily a letter on theological issues, it contained no express references to Hitler or the Nazis. Despite that, it was an obvious attack on the theoretical bases of National Socialism. As Israeli diplomat Pinchas E. Lapide wrote in Three Popes and the Jews: “Pius chose mystical theology as a disguise for a message that no cleric or educated Christian could misunderstand.”
In the Mystici Corporis Christi, Pius wrote: “The Church of God… is maliciously despised and hated by those who close their eyes to the light of Christian wisdom and return miserably to the teachings, customs and practices of ancient paganism.” He wrote about “the fleeting things of the Earth” and the “massive ruins” of war. He prayed that world leaders would receive the love of wisdom and left it beyond doubt that “a harsher judgment” awaited those leaders who did not follow God’s will.
Pius appealed to “Catholics throughout the world” to “look at the Vicar of Christ as the loving Father of all those who… take upon themselves with all their 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, united Jews and Gentiles, ‘breaking down the barrier that separated them…in his flesh’ by which the two peoples were divided.” (emphasis added). He observed that the Jews were the first to worship Jesus. Pius then appealed to all those who “follow our peaceful King who taught us to love not only those of a different nation or race, but even our enemies.”
The Mystici Corporis Christi He also harshly condemned the forced conversions (to Catholicism) that were taking place at the time in fascist Croatia, which Goldhagen wrongly claims received support from the Vatican. Vatican Radio used the encyclical as the basis for a broadcast that said: “Whoever makes a distinction between Jews and other men is unfaithful to God and contradicts God’s commandments.”
The 1919 letter
At the center of Goldhagen’s anti-Catholic thesis is the physical evidence that John Cornwell primarily relies on in his failed book Hitler’s dad. The secret history of Pius XII. It is a letter written in 1919 by Eugenio Pacelli, the future Pope Pius XII, when he was nuncio in Munich. That year, Bolshevik revolutionaries temporarily took power in Bavaria. Many foreign dignitaries left Munich, but Pacelli remained in his post, and became a target of Bolshevik hostility. On one occasion, a car machine-gunned Pacelli’s residence. In another, a small group of Bolsheviks broke into the Nunciature, threatened Pacelli with a gun and tried to rob him. And on yet another occasion, an angry mob attacked Pacelli’s car, shouting insults and threatening to overturn his car.
When the Bolsheviks seized power, there were valid reasons for concern. Its leaders occupied the royal palace and put into operation what could be described as a government of rogues. A particular concern of all diplomats in Munich was that the Bolsheviks violated the sovereign immunity of foreign missions and representatives. Two legations were invaded, and in another a car was confiscated. The Austro-Hungarian consul general was arrested without cause and detained for several hours.
Alarmed by this behavior and concerned for the safety of the people in his charge, Nuncio Pacelli sent his assistant, Monsignor Lorenzo Schioppa, to meet with the heads of the new government. Schioppa, accompanied by a representative of the Prussian legation, met with the head of the Republic of the Munich Councils, Eugen Leviné. Its objective was to force Leviné (incorrectly identified as Levien in the final report), “to declare unequivocally whether the current communist government intends to recognize and protect the immunity of diplomatic representatives, and how it intends to do so.”
The meeting did not go well. The only “guarantee” that the representatives could obtain from Leviné was that the Republic of the Councils would recognize the extraterritoriality of the foreign legations “if, and only as long as the representatives of these Powers… do nothing against the Republic of the Councils.” Schioppa was warned that if the Nuncio did anything against the new government, he would be “kicked out.” Leviné made it clear that “they did not need the Nunciature.”
Pacelli wrote a letter to Rome, reporting this meeting. John Cornwell translated some phrases from that letter and presented them as “proof” that Pacelli was anti-Semitic. The key passage, translated by Cornwell (and accepted uncritically by Goldhagen) describes the palace as follows:
“…a gang of young women, of dubious appearance, Jews like all the others, walking with lascivious behavior and suggestive smiles through all the offices. The leader of this female rabble was Levien’s mistress, a young Russian, Jewish and divorced woman, who was in charge… This Levien is a young man, about thirty or thirty-five years old, also Russian and Jewish. Pale, dirty, with drugged eyes, a hoarse voice, vulgar, repulsive, with a face that is both intelligent and cunning.”
For Cornwell and Goldhagen, these words (taken from Schioppa’s report to his superior Pacelli) demonstrated that Pacelli was anti-Semitic. The truth is, however, that this translation is grossly distorted. Use pejorative words instead of neutral equivalents that are more faithful to the Italian original. For example, the most damning phrase in the translation, “Jews like all the others” turns out to be an imprecise and distorted translation of the Italian expression i first The literal translation would be “the first” or “those already mentioned.” (Thus, Goldhagen’s claim that “Communist revolutionaries, according to Pacelli, were ‘all’ Jews” is false. The word “all” appears only in the Cornwell/Goldhagen “translation.”) Likewise, the Italian word schiera It is translated by Cornwell as “band” rather than “group,” which would be more appropriate. Furthermore, the Italian femminile group It should be translated as “female group” and not “female rabble.” Finally, the Italian occhi scialbi It should be translated as pale or inquisitive eyes and not “drug eyes.”
This letter was published in the original Italian in 1992. Church historian John Conway – an Anglican and distinguished scholar – reviewed the book in which it was included for theCatholic Historical Review. Neither he nor anyone else suggested at the time that the letter was anti-Semitic. The tone of anti-Semitism is only introduced by Cornwell’s dubious translation.
It is true that many Bolsheviks were culturally Jewish, although they had renounced the Jewish faith and often their own families. Pacelli (and Schioppa) were perfectly aware of this. They saw the threat to the Church as a threat coming from Bolshevism, not from Judaism or from the Jews as such. It should be added that this message was written fourteen years before Hitler came to power and began the persecution of the Jews. At that time, the people described were not victims but leaders of a revolutionary and oppressive regional government.
Instead of using incorrect translations and thus fabricating an argument, Goldhagen could have looked at direct and relevant evidence from the same period. During World War I, the American Jewish Committee of New York asked the Vatican for a statement regarding the “mistreatment” suffered by the Jewish people in Poland. The answer came on February 9, 1916, from the office of the Secretary of State, where Eugenio Pacelli was – the testimonies are unanimous – working hand in hand with Cardinal Secretary of State Gasparri. It said:
“The Supreme Pontiff… as Head of the Catholic Church, who, faithful to his divine doctrine and its most glorious traditions, considers all men brothers and teaches them to love one another, never fails to instill in all individuals and peoples the observance of the principles of natural law and to condemn anyone who violates them. This law must be observed and respected in the case of the children of Israel as in any other because it would not be in accordance with justice or religion himself to separate from them only for reasons of religious confession. At this moment, the Supreme Pontiff feels in his paternal heart… the need for all men to remember that they are brothers and that their salvation is found in the return to the law of love, which is the law of the gospel.”
This response was published in the New York Times on April 17, 1916 with the headline “A papal bull urgently demands equality for Jews.” It also appeared in Civiltà Cattolica on April 28 of that year, and in London Tablet on April 29. Goldhagen, of course, forgets to mention it.
Papal efforts in Italy
Among the secondary sources on which Goldhagen relies is Susan Zuccotti’s controversial book Under his very windows. Zuccotti discovered that Catholic clergy and laity defied Nazis and fascists by providing food, clothing and shelter to Jews and other refugees throughout Italy. As a result of these efforts, while approximately 80 percent of European Jews perished during World War II, 85 percent of Italian Jews survived the Nazi occupation. Despite this, Zuccotti does not give any credit to Pope Pius XII, according to her because she could not find written evidence of directives given by him to Italian Catholics. Goldhagen inflates this to say that “there is no evidence of the Pope’s directing hand.” Holocaust deniers use the same argument to absolve Hitler of responsibility for the deaths of six million Jews. They also highlight that there is no “written evidence” of Hitler’s directing hand, much less direct orders.
Although Zuccotti is anything but friendly toward Pius For example, he studies the case of a bishop who gave a lecture during the war while holding in his hands a letter from Pius ordering Catholics to protect the Jews (Zuccotti disputes this report only because other witnesses did not see the actual text of the letter). It tells of the nuns who said the Pope ordered them to open their convents to Jewish refugees. Zuccotti studies a letter from A.L. Eastman, of the World Jewish Congress, in which he thanks the Pope for helping to free imprisoned Jews. He quotes the words of the Pope’s nuncio to Vichy, praising Pope Pius XII for condemning the persecution of Jews and others. Take note of the gratitude of the Jewish people to the Pope after the war. Mentions the thanks given to the Pope by Jewish chaplains. At other points along his path he brings to light other testimonies, including more letters of gratitude from the Jewish people and the testimony of the future Pope Paul VI explaining that his efforts on behalf of the Jewish victims had been made under the direction of Pius XII.
It is true that Zuccotti refuses to believe that there was much papal involvement in the rescue efforts, but this is due to his extremely stingy interpretation of the data. Still, he admits that the Catholic rescuers “invariably believed that they were acting in accordance with the Pope’s wishes.” Their main argument is that there is no evidence written. The truth is that there is a great wealth of other types of “evidence of the Pope’s directing hand.” Goldhagen’s claim that Zuccotti has “ruined the reputation of Pius XII” goes far beyond anything that historical facts can justify.
Using Zuccotti’s argument, Goldhagen violently accuses Pius of “not lifting a finger to end the deportations of Jews from Rome.” In addition to the volume of data to the contrary, there is evidence showing this to be false in Adolf Eichmann’s memoirs, which were published after Zuccotti’s book was written. The memoirs confirm that after the notorious raid of October 16, 1943, the Vatican “vigorously protested the arrest of Jews, demanding that such acts be stopped.”
At Eichmann’s trial in 1961, Israel’s attorney general, Gideon Hausner, said in his opening speech that “the Pope himself intervened in support of the Jews of Rome.” Documents provided in that trial also confirm the Vatican’s efforts to stop the arrests. In its denial of Eichmann’s appeals, Israel’s Supreme Court expressly mentioned the Pope’s protest against the deportation of Hungarian Jews. Jewish historian Michael Tagliacozzo (himself a survivor of the Rome raid), explained:
“The documents clearly prove that, in the early hours of the morning, Pius Rainer Stahel, demanding that the persecution of Jews cease immediately. As a result of these protests, the operation that provided for two days of arrests and deportations was interrupted at two in the afternoon of that same day.
Instead of the 8,000 Jews Hitler demanded, only 1,259 were arrested. After examining the identity documents (of the type that high Church officials ordinarily provided to Jews) more than 200 were freed. Thereafter, the Germans did not carry out any other major raids on Rome. Such facts destroy Goldhagen’s argument about an alleged lack of papal involvement.
The German-Soviet War
Like many other papal critics, Goldhagen claims that the Pope favored the Germans in their war against the Soviet Union. Historical data does not support this accusation. It is true that for much of the 1930s, Hitler and Mussolini were seen by many world leaders (including senior members of the Holy See) as the best defense against the spread of communism. This was, after all, the era of Stalin’s spectacular trials and other measures of mass terror. And it was a long time before the worst Nazi atrocities. Furthermore, it is now clear that Church leaders were right to fear communism. Following the Allied victory, the Soviets expanded their area of influence (and their persecution of the Church) throughout most of Eastern Europe, including half of Germany. They murdered millions of people.
Despite his concern about the spread of communism, Pius was neither blind to other threats nor incapable of recognizing virtue in the Soviet people. Already in 1926, under the direction of Pope Pius XI, the then nuncio Eugenio Pacelli attempted to sign a concordat with the Soviet Union. In 1942, Pius told Father Paolo Dezza S.J. (created cardinal in 1991): “The communist danger exists, but today the Nazi danger is more serious. They want to destroy the Church and crush it like a worm.” When the Axis tried to obtain his blessing for the “crusade” against the atheistic Soviet Union, he refused. In April 1943, Hungarian Prime Minister Nicholas de Kallay met with Pius XII. He said:
“His Holiness spoke of the living conditions in Germany. He described the living conditions that predominate in Germany, which fill him with great sadness, in dramatic words. He finds incomprehensible everything that Germany does in relation to the Church, the Jews, and the people in the conquered territories… He is well aware of the terrible dangers of Bolshevism, but he feels that, despite the Soviet regime, the soul of the great mass of the Russian people has remained more Christian than that of the German people.”
In fact, by cooperating with Roosevelt’s request that he support the extension of Lend-Lease to the USSR, Pius actually provided military and economic aid to the Soviets (later, his repeated intercessions on behalf of Ethel and Julius Rosenberg again showed his ability to look beyond the word “communist”).
The recently disbanded Catholic-Jewish study group discovered that the known data No support the conclusion that Pius favored the Germans over the Soviets. It is no longer surprising that Goldhagen does not even mention this. However, it seems astonishing that Goldhagen reproduces the words of the notoriously pro-Nazi Bishop Franz-Justus Rarkowski without mentioning that:
1) it was practically imposed by force on the Church by the Nazis (under the threat of having neither a military archbishop nor military chaplains);
2) the Church prohibited Rarkowski from participating in the German episcopate;
3) in the time of Pius XII, Vatican Radio explicitly denounced Rarkowski;
4) Vatican Radio declared that: “Hitler’s war is not a just war and God’s blessing cannot be for it.”
German Catholic clergy
Goldhagen is especially critical of Germany’s Catholic clergy. He makes the indefensible and all too vague claim that “the vast majority” of Catholic military chaplains “sided with the perpetrators, forgiving and blessing their crimes…This virtually unknown and barely mentioned chapter of the role of the clergy in the Holocaust has barely been investigated.” In fact, this topic has been widely analyzed and interpreted by German specialists in contemporary history, but their findings do not support Goldhagen’s conclusions.
Catholic clergy were among the first in Germany to recognize the threat posed by the Nazis. In 1930, the bishops of Berlin and Westphalia condemned the Nazis in pastoral letters. In the spring of 1931, the Bavarian bishops similarly condemned National Socialism, describing it as heretical and incompatible with Catholic teaching. Similar declarations were made by the bishops of Cologne, Paderborn and the upper Rhine.
The report from the Nuremberg prosecutor’s office describes dozens of cases in which Catholic priests were persecuted for their opposition to the Nazis. It also shows that the Nazis took measures to silence the Church:
On October 28, 1935, the Ministry of Propaganda imposed prior censorship on all Church periodicals, and on November 30, 1935, the measure was extended to all graphic or written material multicopied for distribution. After 1937, German bishops abandoned their attempts to print their pastorals and simply read them from their pulpits.
Of course, sometimes it was not even possible to read statements from the pulpit. The pastoral letter of the Bavarian bishops of September 4, 1938 was confiscated and banned, as was the pastoral letter of the Fulda Bishops’ Conference, dated August 19, 1938.
Goldhagen accuses the German clergy of collaborating in the delivery of genealogical records to the Nazis. What he doesn’t mention is that much of this information was already available to the Nazis thanks to the German census. From the moment the information was solely in the hands of the clergy and was claimed by the Nazis (under severe threats, one might add), the collaboration of the German Catholic clergy was far from complete. Already in 1946, Monsignor J. Neuhäusler, himself a prisoner at Dachau, published a huge series of documents demonstrating the Church’s widespread resistance to Nazi anti-Semitism, including refusals to hand over genealogical records. The pastoral letters of the German bishops (which were falsified in Guenter Lewy’s bookThe Catholic Church and Nazi Germany, on which Goldhagen appears to be based) have now been published in their entirety. They justify the famous claim made by Einstein in 1940 that the only organization in Nazi Germany that denounced evil was the Church.
The smear campaign waged by Goldhagen against the Catholic people goes far beyond Popes Pius XI and Pius XII, but his targets among the German clergy are very poorly chosen. Declassified OSS documents show that two of the Catholic leaders Goldhagen focuses on (Munich Cardinal Faulhaber and Münster Bishop von Galen) were especially belligerent in their opposition to the Nazis. (The previously secret documents are collected in American Intelligence and the German Resistance to Hitler, edited by Jürgen Heideking and Christof Mauch).
In the 1930s, Cardinal Faulhaber wrote to Secretary of State Pacelli describing the persecution of the Jews as “unjust and painful.” In 1935, at an open-air rally, the Nazis shouted for his assassination. In February 1936, the police confiscated and destroyed one of his sermons (the following year, this would happen twice more). On October 25, 1936, members of the Hitler Youth shouted insults at him as he was getting into his car. In August 1938, the Nazis searched his office. In the last days of November 1938, after he had given a speech, a uniformed detachment stood in front of his house and threw stones at the windows. They shouted “The traitor, to Dachau” and smashed window frames and shutters. In May 1939, there were demonstrations against Faulhaber throughout Bavaria, and posters were hung saying: “Out with Faulhaber, friend of the Jews and agent of Moscow.” After the start of the war, Faulhaber cited Pius XII’s encyclicalSummi Pontificatus in a speech condemning the Nazis, which led to a headline in the London Tablet which said “Cardinal Faulhaber attacks Nazism”.
After the war, Rabbi Stephen S. Wise, a leading American voice for the Jewish cause, called Faulhaber “a true Christian prelate” who had “raised his voice fearlessly” in defense of the Jews. In fact, Wise felt that Faulhaber had been a much better friend to the Jews than the Protestant pastor Martin Niemöller.
Bishop Galen also played a leading role in opposing Nazi racial laws. On February 9, 1936, he publicly gave an anti-Nazi speech at Xanten Cathedral. In response, the Nazis accused Galen of trying to harbor “the corrupters of our race.” Galen also helped Pius XI write the anti-Nazi encyclical Mit brennender Sorge. Later, Pius “We will honor the memory of the late Bishop.”
Goldhagen takes note of Galen’s protests against the euthanasia program, but argues that the Nazis did not retaliate against him and wonders why the German bishops and the Vatican “did not team up with Bishop Galen.” In fact, on December 2, 1940 – long before Galen’s famous sermons against euthanasia – Pius XII published in the Catholic press an official Vatican statement that unequivocally condemned the murder of “lives that do not deserve to live.” This decree entered all the German dioceses, and was published with favorable comments by the German bishops. On March 9, 1941, in a public sermon, Cardinal Konrad von Preysing (whom Goldhagen wrongly paints as a critic of Pius XII) referred to Pius eugenics.” Other German bishops joined the cause, a process that culminated (not began) with Galen’s famous sermons in July and August 1941.
Further compounding his errors, Goldhagen makes the accusation that Galen’s protests succeeded in ending the euthanasia program and the Nazis did not retaliate. In fact, the euthanasia campaign did not end, but continued in the greatest secrecy until the end of the war. Furthermore, as one of Galen’s successors in the bishopric of Münster, Richard Lettmann, explained: “After having preached these sermons, the bishop was prepared to be arrested by the Gestapo… The bishop was greatly displeased when twenty-four secular priests and thirteen members of the regular clergy were deported to concentration camps in their place, ten of whom lost their lives.” The minutes of the Nuremberg trials also show that Galen was sometimes prohibited from speaking in public or giving blessings. In fact, as a result of his harsh words, the Diocese of Galen suffered a higher proportion of deaths than most other dioceses. None of these crucial facts are mentioned by Goldhagen.
Cardinal Adolph Bertram of Breslau, also handpicked by Goldhagen, first expressed his opposition to National Socialism in 1930, when he denied a religious burial to a well-known Nazi officer. In widely publicized statements, he criticized as a serious error the unilateral glorification of the Nordic race and the contempt for divine revelation that was increasingly being taught throughout Germany. He warned against the ambiguity of the concept of “positive Christianity,” an ultranationalist religion that the Nazis were favoring. Such a religion, he said, “for us Catholics cannot have a satisfactory meaning since each one interprets it in the way he pleases.” In response to Bertram, the Nazi press cited some statements by Pope Leo XIII about the relations of practicing Catholics with political parties in order to support the claim that Catholics could be National Socialists. Secretary of State Pacelli then commissioned a long article to be published in the Vatican newspaper, which corrected the Nazi misrepresentations of León’s pronouncements, and said that a Christian should not belong to a political party that opposed Christian ideals.
Goldhagen also accuses Bertram of having prepared a Requiem Mass to be said for Hitler’s death. Today, this is what we know for sure: Bertram was old and sick when the war ended. When he died (a few weeks later) his papers included a handwritten order directing that requiem masses be said for all Germans who died in war, including Hitler (early reports said he had died fighting), and for the protection of the Catholic Church in Germany. This order was never sent, and the mass was never said. Bertram’s private secretary later reported that he knew nothing of this or any similar order. In fact, the same order showed two large deletions. In other words, the evidence suggests that someone (maybe Bertram, maybe not) thought about commissioning a requiem mass, but Bertram canceled it. Apparently, Goldhagen has been misled by Klaus Scholder’s book, A Requiem for Hitler: And Other New Perspectives on the German Church Struggle. The cover of that book shows part of the order, but omits the portion showing it was crossed out. Once again, Goldhagen’s hesitant reliance on secondary sources has led him to make a serious mistake.
In a related note, Goldhagen states that the Polish ambassador pleaded with Pius for the Jews in vain, and that by 1944 Pius XII was so “fed up” with hearing about the Jews that he became angry with the ambassador. Goldhagen does not show documents that support such an accusation. This is hardly surprising, given that it is false. Pius XII was disgusted by the reports the ambassador was receiving from people of outside occupied Poland who, based on erroneous information, complained that the Pope was doing too much for the Jews but not enough for the Poles. The Polish ambassador to the Holy See during the war was Kazimierz Papée, whose 1954 book Pius XII i Polska (Pius XII and Poland) studied the policy followed by Pius XII during the war and said agree to that policy. This information is exhaustively analyzed – and supported – in Papée’s book, which Goldhagen does not mention at all.
The French bishops
Goldhagen says that Pius XII “clearly refused to support” the protest of the French bishops. This is yet another falsehood. Under the Pope’s direction, the protests were broadcast and studied for several days on Vatican Radio. Statements such as “whoever makes distinctions between Jews and other men is unfaithful to God and comes into conflict with the commandments of God” were broadcast in France, in French, on Vatican Radio. Cardinal Pierre Gerlier, a French Catholic bishop who condemned Nazi atrocities and the deportation of Jews explicitly stated that he was obeying the instructions of Pius XII when he made these statements (Australian Jewish News, April 16, 1943).
When the deportations from France began, Pius made a formal protest to the Head of State, Marshal Henri Pétain, instructed his nuncio to make another protest, and recommended that religious communities provide refuge for the Jewish people. In fact, the American press reported protests by the Pope to the Vichy government on three occasions during August 1942. Unfortunately, the result of the protests was that the Vichy Prime Minister, Pierre Laval, became enraged, and reaffirmed his decision to cooperate in the deportation to Germany of all non-French Jews (This is yet another example of the reprisals that Goldhagen says did not take place). On August 6, 1942, a holder of the New York Times proclaimed: “The Pope is told to pray for the Jews on lists for expulsion from France.” Three weeks later, a headline in the same newspaper told the story: “Vichy traps Jews, Pope Pius XII ignored.”
He Canadian Jewish Chronicle carried the following headline on September 4, 1942: “Laval Ignores Pope: 25,000 Jews in France Arrested for Deportation.” In an editorial dated August 28, 1942, the California Jewish VoiceHe called Pius “a spiritual ally” because “he has linked his name to the multitudes horrified by the inhumanity of the Axis.” In an editorial, the Londoner Jewish ChronicleHe said that the Vatican was owed “a word of sincere and formal appreciation” from Jews for its intervention in Berlin and Vichy. Stephen S. Wise wrote in 1942:
“It appears to be more than a rumor that His Holiness Pius “Spiritually we are all Semites” will never be erased from the memory of the people who do not forget but do forgive.”
In August 1942, Archbishop Jules Gérard Saliège of Toulouse sent a pastoral letter to be read in all the churches of his diocese. He said: “There is a Christian morality that gives rights and imposes duties… The Jews are our brothers. They are part of humanity. No Christian can dare to forget that!” The Vatican newspaper L’Osservatore Romano He praised Saliège as a hero of Christian courage, and when the war ended, Pius XII created him a cardinal.
Goldhagen reproduces the recent declaration of some French bishops (not ofthe French bishops, as he mistakenly says) in which the failures of French Catholics during the war were confessed. But that statement was critical only of those French areas and dioceses that fell prey to anti-Semitism. As with the 1995 statement by the German bishops, there was no criticism of Pius XII or the Holy See.
Papal efforts in Hungary
Even Goldhagen has to admit that Pius XII intervened in Hungary, but he tries to diminish the importance of the Pope’s actions by implying that his famous open telegram protesting the deportations of Jews was isolated and late. Again, the facts are against Goldhagen – or rather he stands against the facts. Jenö Levai, the great authority of Hungarian Jewry, who had access to direct archival evidence, documented the Church’s rescue work in his appropriately titledHungarian Jewry and the Papacy: Pius XII Was Not Silent.
Almost from the first day following the invasion of Hungary in March 1944, papal nuncio Angelo Rotta worked to help improve the treatment of Jews. He provided baptismal certificates and passports that allowed thousands of Jews and Jewish converts to leave Hungary. The Holy See also informed other countries of the situation in Hungary, and this put international pressure on the Hungarian government. Rotta raised several verbal protests against anti-Jewish decrees and on behalf of Pius XII was the first foreign envoy to send a formal written protest. Shortly after, Rotta received a letter of encouragement from Pius in which the Pope called the treatment of the Jews “unworthy of Hungary, the country of the Holy Virgin and Saint Stephen.” Thereafter, Rotta regularly protested against the treatment of Jews and the inhumane nature of anti-Jewish legislation.
On June 25, Pius himself sent the well-known open telegram to the Regent of Hungary, Admiral Miklas Horthy. Goldhagen recognizes this telegram, but it is worth reproducing:
“Supplications have been addressed to Us from various sources, begging Us to exercise all Our influence to reduce and mitigate the sufferings which, on account of racial or national origin, have for so long been peacefully endured by a large number of unfortunate people belonging to this noble and chivalrous nation. In accordance with Our service of love, which embraces every human being, Our paternal heart could not remain insensitive to these urgent demands. For this reason, We appeal to the noble sentiments of Your Serene Highness in complete confidence that His Serene Highness will do everything in his power to save a large number of unfortunate people from worse pain and suffering.”
Pius XII also sent a telegram to Hungarian Cardinal Justinian Serédi asking for support from the Hungarian bishops. Serédi responded by making a statement in turn. It said:
“We would fail in Our moral leadership and fail in Our duty if We did not ask that Our compatriots not be treated unjustly because of their origin or religion. We, therefore, beseech the authorities, in full knowledge of their responsibility before God and history, to revoke these painful measures.”
This harsh statement, delivered following a formal request from the Pope, was read publicly in Catholic churches until the Nazis confiscated all copies.
On June 28, New York Archbishop Francis Spellman broadcast a strong appeal to Hungarian Catholics deploring anti-Jewish measures, which, he said, “caused shock to all men and women who show a sense of justice and compassion.” These measures were, he said, “in direct contradiction with the doctrines of the Catholic faith professed by the vast majority of the Hungarian people.” He described it as incredible “that a nation that has been so consistently faithful to the impulses of human kindness and the teachings of the Catholic Church should now submit to a false and pagan code of tyranny.” The magazine time reported: “This morning, listeners of 36 million radio sets in Europe could have heard the Archbishop of New York, Francis Joseph Spellman, preaching civil disobedience. The archbishop’s broadcast… eloquently urged nine million Hungarian Catholics to disobey their government’s new anti-Semitic decrees.” The Allies dropped copies of the message over Hungary. Spellman later confirmed that he had made the statement upon express request of Pius XII.
Admiral Horthy complained to the Germans that he was being bombarded with telegrams from the Vatican and others, and that the nuncio was calling him several times a day. In the face of these protests, Horthy withdrew Hungarian support for the deportation process, making it impossible for the Germans to continue. Horthy’s response telegram to the Pope read: “It is with understanding and deep gratitude that I receive your telegram and ask you to be convinced that I will do everything in my power to make the demands of Christian humanitarian principles prevail.” Horthy agreed to fight the deportations, and even signed a peace agreement with the Allies. For once, it seemed that Pius XII’s pleas on behalf of the victims had yielded positive results. The Germans, however, were not deterred by words alone.
The Germans arrested Horthy in October, placed Hungary under Hungarian Nazi control, and deportations resumed. The Pope and his representative then raised many protests with the German authorities, prepared a report documenting the Vatican’s work with the Jews of Hungary, and encouraged Catholics to help the victims. In October, Pius took part in a campaign to raise money to support Hungarian refugees, urging the faithful to redouble their efforts on behalf of all war victims, regardless of race. Almost every Catholic church in Hungary provided shelter to Jews during the fall and winter of 1944.
On November 10, 1944, Nuncio Rotta protested to the German Foreign Minister, saying that “from a humanitarian perspective but also to protect Christian morality, the Holy See protests the inhuman attitude towards the Jews.” When Nazi officials implied that Jews were simply being sent to Germany to work, not for any evil purpose, Rotta sarcastically responded:
“When elderly people over 70 and even over 80, old women, children and sick people are taken away, one wonders: what work can these human beings be used for?… When we think that Hungarian workers who go to Germany for work reasons are prohibited from taking their families, we are really surprised that only Jews are given this great favor.”
The Budapest nunciature had been bombed and semi-destroyed, communications with the Vatican were extremely difficult, and the lives of those senior Catholic officials remaining in the city were in constant danger. Nuncio Rotta sent a message to Rome asking what to do. Pope Pius’ response was: “If it is still possible to do some good, stay!”
The Germans were finally expelled from Budapest two days before Christmas 1944. Despite the terrible losses suffered during the occupation, most of Budapest’s Jews were saved from the gas chambers.
The World Jewish Congress, at its December 1944 urgent war conference in Atlantic City, sent a telegram of thanks to the Holy See for the protection it gave “in difficult circumstances to persecuted Jews in German-dominated Hungary.” Similarly, the American Jewish Committee sent an expression of deep gratitude to Pius and Cardinal Luigi Maglione for helping to stop the deportations from Hungary. On May 25, 1945, Nuncio Cassulo reported to the Vatican:
“[Chief] Rabbi Safran has expressed to me several times… his gratitude for what has been done for him and the Jewish community. He has now asked me to convey to the Holy Father his feelings of gratitude for the generous aid sent to the prisoners of the concentration camps on the occasion of the Christmas festivities. At the same time, he has told me that he has written to Jerusalem, to the Chief Rabbi [Herzog], and also to other places, in America, to direct attention to what the nunciature has done for them in the time of present difficulties.”
Chief Rabbi Saffran also spoke to other Jewish leaders about the Catholic Church’s efforts to protect the Jewish people. Apparently, however, no one spoke to Goldhagen about it.
Slovakia and Croatia
In attempting to implicate Pius XII in the atrocities perpetrated in the Nazi satellite states of Slovakia and Croatia, Goldhagen again makes many inexcusable errors. He mentions the work of Livia Rothkirchen, a respected authority on the subject of the annihilation of Slovak Jewry, but forgets to mention that in documenting and, appropriately, condemning the savages committed by anti-Semitic Slavs, Rothkirchen highlights that they were committed in spite of Pius XII, not because of him. In fact, he concludes his major work on the subject with the statement that the various letters of protest sent by the Vatican between 1941 and 1944 “sufficiently demonstrate that the Vatican protested the deportation of the Jews of Slovakia.”
Goldhagen implies that the Vatican’s action in Slovakia came only after it became clear that the Allies were going to win the war. In fact, the Nuremberg racial laws were introduced in that country on September 9, 1941. Two days later, the Vatican delegate in Bratislava (the capital of Slovakia) went to see President Jozef Tiso to highlight “the injustice of these ordinances that also violate the rights of the Church.” Very soon afterward, Slovakia’s representative at the Vatican received a written protest from the Holy See saying that such laws “were in open contradiction to Catholic principles.”
When Jews were deported from Slovakia in 1942, the Vatican Secretary of State immediately sent a protest. On March 21, 1942, a pastoral letter was read by episcopal order in all Slovak churches. The letter spoke of the “regrettable fate of thousands of innocent citizens, due not to any fault on their part but to their origin or nationality.” By direct order of Pius XII, the Slovak minister to the Holy See was summoned and required to act before his government. The Vatican also once again instructed the delegate in Bratislava to call President Tiso and ask him to remedy the situation.
Between 1941 and 1944, the Vatican sent four official letters and made numerous requests and verbal protests regarding the deportation of Jews from Slovakia. A letter sent by Pius himself, dated April 7, 1943, could not have been clearer:
“The Holy See has always maintained the firm hope that the Slovak government, also interpreting the feelings of its own people, almost entirely Catholic, would never proceed with the forcible expulsion of persons belonging to the Jewish race. It is, therefore, with great pain that the Holy See has learned of the continuous transfers of that nature coming from the territory of the Republic. This pain is even more aggravated now that it emerges from various information that the Slovak government intends to proceed to the total expulsion of the Jews residing in Slovakia, without sparing even women and children. The Holy See would fail to fulfill its Divine Mandate if it did not deplore these measures, which seriously harm man in his natural right, merely because these people belong to a certain race.”
The next day, a message left the Holy See instructing its representative in Bulgaria to take steps to support Jewish residents who were facing deportation. Very shortly afterwards, the secretary of the Jewish Agency for Palestine met with Archbishop Angelo Roncalli (the future Pope John XXIII) “to thank the Holy See for the happy result of the measures taken in favor of the Israelites of Slovakia.” Goldhagen’s suggestion that this was some kind of arrangement to protect the image of the Church is unworthy of a writer who claims scholarly credentials.
Goldhagen’s treatment of Croatia is not much better. The massacres of Serbs and Jews are well documented, and the collaboration of somemembers of the Catholic clergy is justly condemned. But post-war communist propaganda, which all reputable scholars recognize as pure invention, is the original source of the accusations against Pius XII and the majority of the high Catholic clergy of Croatia. The Holy See actually recorded several papal protests and interventions.
In October 1942, a message went out from the Vatican to its representatives in Zagreb speaking of the “painful situation suffered by the Jews of Croatia” and instructing them to request from the Government “more benevolent treatment for these unfortunate people.” The Cardinal Secretary of State’s notes reflect that the Vatican’s petitions were successful in securing a suspension of “shipments of Jews from Croatia” by January 1943, but that Germany was pressing for “a firmer attitude against the Jews.” Another instruction from the Holy See to its representatives in Zagreb directing them toward efforts on behalf of the Jews was sent on March 6, 1943.
Croatian Archbishop Alojzij Stepinac, after receiving directives from Rome, condemned the government’s brutal actions. A speech he gave on October 24, 1942 is typical of many he made refuting Nazi theories:
“All men and all races are children of God; all without distinction. Whether they are gypsies, blacks, Europeans or Aryans, they all have the same rights… For this reason, the Catholic Church has always condemned and continues to condemn all injustice and all violence committed in the name of theories about race, class or nationality. It is not permissible to persecute Jews or gypsies because they are thought to be of an inferior race.”
The Associated Press reported that “by 1942 Stepinac had become a harsh critic” of the Nazi puppet regime, condemning its “genocidal policy, which murdered tens of thousands of Serbs, Jews, Gypsies and Croats.” Because of this he earned the enmity of the Croatian dictator, Ante Pavelic. (When Pavelic traveled to Rome, he was greatly irritated at being denied the diplomatic audience he wanted.)
On October 13, 1946, when postwar Communist authorities tried to mount a case against Archbishop Stepinac, American Jewish leader Louis Braier declared:
“This great man of the Church has been accused of being a Nazi collaborator. We Jews deny it. He was one of the few men in Europe who stood up against Nazi tyranny precisely at the most dangerous moment for it. He spoke openly and fearlessly against racial laws. After His Holiness Pius XII he was the greatest defender of the persecuted Jews in Europe.”
Despite the defense as well as the protests of Pope Pius XII, Stepinac was found guilty and sentenced to sixteen years of hard labor. Due to protests and outrage throughout the democratic world, and Jewish testimony about the good work he had done, in 1951 his sentence was commuted to house arrest. Almost immediately Pius XII elevated him to the cardinalate.
One of the first acts of the parliament of the newly independent state of Croatia in 1992 was to draft a statement condemning the “impeachment and sentencing of Cardinal Alojzij Stepinac in 1946.” Stepinac was convicted, parliament declared, “because he had acted against the violence and crimes of the communist authorities in the same way as he had acted during the hurricane of atrocities committed in the Second World War to protect the persecuted without regard to… national origin or religious denomination.”
Ignoring the facts at all, Goldhagen concludes his grossly inaccurate portrait of Croatia by making another irritating error: “Forty thousand people… perished under the incredibly cruel reign of ‘Brother Satan,’ the Franciscan friar Miroslav Filopovic-Majstorovic. Pius XII neither reprimanded nor punished him… during or after the war.”
The truth is that the nicknamed “Brother Satan” was tried, demoted and expelled from the Franciscan Order before the war ended. In fact, the expulsion took place in April 1943, before the extermination camp was put into operation (from April to October 1943). For Pius XII to have punished him “after the war” would certainly have been difficult. Goldhagen must not have been aware that this renegade priest was executed by the communists in 1945. Many other Croatian collaborationist priests were also punished by the Church (although Goldhagen exaggerates the number of such priests). All this is well documented in the archives of the Franciscans, the Croatian archives, and in the documents of the beatification process of Stepinac.
Once again, Goldhagen has tried to accuse Pius XII by telling the reader the opposite of the truth. This can only be explained as a premeditated defamation of the war pope and the Catholic people in general.
Holland
Like most papal critics, Goldhagen omits important details about the deportation of Jews from Holland. The Dutch bishops had warned their parishioners of the dangers of Nazism as early as 1934, and in 1936 they ordered Catholics not to support fascist organizations under penalty of excommunication. They forbade Catholic police officers from hunting down Jews even if it meant losing their jobs. In the summer of 1942, when Jews were being deported from Holland, the Nazis warned Christian leaders not to interfere.
Despite the warning, on July 26, 1942, the Catholic archbishop of Utrecht had a letter read in all Catholic churches, condemning the treatment of Jews:
“Ours is a time of great tribulations of which two are especially serious: the sad fate of the Jews and the plight of those left the country for forced labor… All of us must be aware of the terrible sufferings that both have to endure, due to no fault on their part… We have learned with great pain of the new provisions that impose deportation to foreign lands on innocent Jews, men, women and children… The incredible suffering that these measures cause to more than ten thousand people is a total opposition to the divine precepts of justice and charity… Let us pray to God and through the intercession of Mary… that He give His strength to the people of Israel, so often tested in anguish and persecution.”
The result of this statement was tragic. It led directly to the deportation and death of many people, including Edith Stein (canonized as Saint Teresa Benedicta of the Cross).
On July 30, 1942, an SS memorandum stated: “Since the Catholic bishops – without being involved – have interfered in these matters, the entire population of Catholic Jews will henceforth be expelled. No intervention on their behalf will be taken into account.” Until now, a Dutch Jew carrying a baptismal certificate was exempt from deportation. As part of the Church’s rescue efforts, such certificates were distributed free of charge during the war.
The official announcement of the General-Kommisar said: “If the Catholic clergy can in this way ignore negotiations, we on the other hand are forced to consider the Catholics of pure Jewish blood as our worst opponents and to take measures to ship them to the East as quickly as possible.” Since Protestant leaders had avoided making statements that would irritate the Germans, Jews carrying Protestant baptism certificates were not deported at the time. Jewish converts to Catholicism (including Edith Stein) and Jews with false baptismal certificates, however, were deported.
The language of Nazi officials makes it clear that the deportations were made in direct response to the bishop’s letter. Even taking into account that Jews with Protestant baptismal certificates were later deported, this situation presents yet another example of the type of reprisals that Goldhagen claims did not happen. Many similar situations that would have influenced the thinking of Pius XII along these lines are detailed in my book Hitler, the War and the Pope, and, contrary to Goldhagen’s assertion, there is nothing “disingenuous” about the arguments contained therein. The simple fact is that no one spoke more explicitly than the Dutch bishops, and no country had a higher percentage of Jews murdered.
The example of Denmark and other testimonies
Goldhagen writes: “Rychlak and other defenders of the Pope omit the study of the famous and most relevant of the cases that prove the effectiveness of acting in favor of the Jews: the case of Denmark.” In fact, I explicitly addressed the case on page 137 of my book:
“On April 9, 1940, German troops violently crossed the Danish border. The Danes, including King Christian “He distinguished himself for his contribution to the effort.”
The footnotes direct the reader to three separate references for this information. Today it is known that King Christian may never have worn the yellow star. Some writers also say that he was never even threatened into doing so. Legend says yes, however, and I certainly did not hide this information.
As Goldhagen himself admits, the Germans eventually deported some five thousand Jews from Denmark. Fortunately, many others had escaped by then. Those who were deported were mostly sent to a “sample” camp in Theresienstadt, where around 90 percent of them survived. Of course, those Jews displaced others who had been living in Theresienstadt. These were in turn sent to extermination camps, so the overall effect was not what Goldhagen would have his readers believe. The main thing for Goldhagen, however, seems to be that he believes that Pius should have forgotten all his other information and relied solely on the approach to the problem adopted by the churches (including the Catholic ones) of Denmark. That, of course, would have been crazy.
The Pope knew of the reprisals that followed the Mit brennender Sorge. I had the example of Holland. He had sent Poland an express condemnation to be read, but the Archbishop of Krakow, Adam Sapieha, burned it, saying it would lead to too many reprisals. Indeed, the Nuremberg minutes document case after case of reprisals against clergy (Catholic and Protestant) that followed statements of condemnation or other agitation against the Nazi regime.
Instead of endangering others with grand public gestures, Pius organized a rescue operation. Churches, convents, monasteries, seminaries, and the Vatican itself offered shelter, without distinctions of race, religion or nationality. A document from American espionage during the war reported that the bombing of the Pope’s summer residence in Castelgandolfo “caused around a thousand injuries and the death of about three hundred more people. The high numbers are due to the fact that the area was crowded with refugees.” No one but Pope Pius XII had the authority to open these buildings to outsiders, and spy reports indicate that he personally protested the bombing. In 1988, a huge, beautifully decorated wooden cross was displayed there. It was given to Pius XII at the end of the war by the Jews who lived there during those terrible days.
Rescuer John Patrick Carroll-Abbing reported that he had assisted Jews following the Pope’s order that “no one be denied” shelter. In fact, in an interview given shortly before his death, Carroll-Abbing said: “I can personally attest to you that the Pope gave me verbal orders face to face to rescue Jews.” Asked about the accusation that the rescuers acted without papal involvement, he denied it and added:
“But it wasn’t just me. It was also the people I worked with: Father Pfeiffer and Father Benoit and my assistant, Monsignor Vitucci and Cardinals Dezza and Palazzini and of course Cardinals Maglione and Montini and Tardini. We weren’t just taking things for granted; we were acting under direct orders from the Holy Father.”
Goldhagen admits that Father Benoit “led hundreds of Jews to salvation” but implies that this was done with virtually no support from Rome. In fact, Benoit spoke movingly about Pius XII and what he did for the Jews. Fernande Leboucher, who worked with Benoit as possibly his closest collaborator, estimated that around $4 million was sent from the Vatican to Benoit and his operation. Even Zuccotti reported that the Vatican provided something of money to help Benoit’s operation.
The last thing a rescue operation requires is to attract attention, particularly when it is likely to lead to retaliation. Goldhagen focuses only on potential retaliation against the Jewish people. Such reprisals occurred, but the Pope was also concerned about Catholics. For this reason: Catholic rescue efforts could fail, causing greater suffering for the Jews. Furthermore: as Pius said, martyrdom cannot be imposed on anyone, but must be accepted voluntarily. Catholic doctrine would not allow the Pope to sacrifice some lives to save others, even if a utilitarian equation implied that this would be appropriate. (However, the Church did not vary its approach based on the identity of the victim. Despite Goldhagen’s conjectures, under Pius XII the Vatican acted the same whether the victims were Catholic priests or Jewish peasants.)
Marcus Melchior, Denmark’s chief rabbi during the war, understood this situation well. He explained that Pius had no chance of influencing Hitler. And he added that if he had opted for a direct confrontation, “Hitler would probably have exterminated more than six million Jews and perhaps ten times ten million Catholics if he had had the power to do so.” Sir Francis D’Arcy Osborne, British Minister to the Holy See from 1936 to 1947, said:
“Pius
Similarly, the chief rabbi of Rome during the German occupation, Israel Zolli, said that “no hero in all history was more militant, more combative or more heroic than Pius XII.”
Goldhagen naively suggests a “cookie-cutter” approach to resisting the Nazis. Historical facts show that sometimes direct confrontation worked with the Nazis, but other times it didn’t. Robert M. W. Kempner, the American deputy chief prosecutor at the Nuremberg war trials, explained that a public protest against the persecution of the Jews could only achieve “partial success when made at a politically and militarily opportune time.” He added that Pius raised such protests through the nuncios when and where it was possible to do so. Clashes, however, would not have been advisable with Hitler. “Every propaganda move by the Catholic Church against Hitler’s Reich,” he wrote, “would not only have been ‘suicide’… but would have accelerated the execution of even more Jews and priests.”
Catholic converts from Judaism
Goldhagen often refers to the Holy See’s efforts as directed toward Catholic converts from Judaism, as opposed to Jews who were not Catholic. As the exact meaning of his words implies, for the Catholic Church, in contrast to Nazi philosophy, being Jewish is a matter of religion and not race. Again, however, Goldhagen’s claims clash violently with the facts.
Senior Vatican officials had legal support to protest the persecution of Catholics. Unfortunately, they did not have similar support for non-Catholics – whether Protestant, Jewish or non-believers. Indeed, the Nazis rarely responded positively when protests were made in favor of Catholics (at Nuremberg, German Foreign Minister Ribbentrop declared that there was an entire table full of protests from the Vatican. Most of them went unanswered, many were not even read). A regime that paid no attention to the Church’s protests on behalf of its own members would certainly never have listened to Vatican protests on behalf of non-Catholics. The best the Church could do was try to pass off non-Catholic victims as Catholics and try to intervene to save them on that basis. That is what the Church did, for example, by distributing tens of thousands of false baptismal certificates (Obviously, they were unnecessary for Jews actually converted to Catholicism, who had authentic certificates).
Goldhagen also claims that Pius did not privately give cardinals, bishops, priests and nuns instructions to save Jews. But how can you be sure of such a thing? Catholic rescuers – including people like Cardinal Pietro Palazzini and Tibor Baranski who were later recognized by Israel as Righteous Gentiles – testified that they received precisely such orders from the Pope. Several other witnesses also testified that such instructions were sent in the form of letters. Still others, including Father Marie-Benoit, Carroll-Abbing, Pope John XXIII, and Pope Paul VI, all testified that they received such instructions from Pope Pius XII in face-to-face meetings or through other direct channels.
Goldhagen even tries to link the Vatican and Pacelli with the notorious anti-Semite Julius Streicher. Streicher’s venomous writings tell a different story. He complained about the Pope’s support for the Jewish people:
“Now the Jews have found protection in the Catholic Church, which is trying to convince non-Jewish humanity that there are no distinct races. The Pope has embraced the false conception of racial equality – and the Jews, with the help of Marxists and Freemasons, are doing everything possible to promote it. But the Pope’s attitude will not surprise anyone who is familiar with the cunning schemes of Vatican policy.”
Pacelli’s opposition to Streicher’s worldview was well known. InThree Popes and the Jews, Pinchas Lapide cites a public speech by Pacelli in Rome that repeats Pius XII’s eloquent statement that “spiritually, we are all Semites.”
Postwar statements
Following the arguments of Phayer and Zuccotti, Goldhagen claims that even after the liberation of Rome, Pius remained “silent” about Jews and anti-Semitism. This is nonsense. Pius made one of his most fervent pleas for tolerance in August 1944, after the liberation of Rome. As reported by Dr. Joseph Lichten, the former director of the International Affairs Department of the Anti-Defamation League of B’nai B’rith, Pius said:
“For centuries, [the Jews] have most of the time been treated unjustly and despised. It is time that they were treated with justice and humanity. God desires it and the Church desires it. Saint Paul tells us that the Jews are our brothers. Instead of being treated as strangers they should be welcomed as friends.” In a major address to the College of Cardinals on June 2, 1945, after the surrender of Germany, Pius XII spoke of the background and impact of the encyclical anti-nazi Mit brennender Sorge:
“In those critical years, uniting the attentive vigilance of a pastor with the infinite patience of a father, our great predecessor Pius Mit brennender Sorge, what Nazism really was: the arrogant apostasy of Jesus Christ, the rejection of his doctrine and his work of redemption, the cult of violence, the idolatry of race and blood, the forgetfulness of human freedom and dignity.”
On August 3, 1946, in a statement that Goldhagen mentions only to disparage it (he also leaves out or dismisses papal condemnations of anti-Semitism in 1916, 1928, 1930, 1942, and 1943), Pius declared: “There can be no doubt that peace can come only if there is truth and justice. This presupposes respect for the rights of others and for certain inalienable positions and traditions, especially in the religious sphere, as well as the scrupulous fulfillment of the duties to which all inhabitants are subject.” Continuous:
“For this reason, having received again in recent days numerous calls and complaints from various parts of the world and for various reasons, it is unnecessary to tell you that we condemn all recourse to force and violence, wherever it comes from, as we have also condemned on several occasions in the past the persecution that was unleashed against the Jewish people with fanatical anti-Semitism.”
Pius XI condemned racism until the end of his life. In 1957, he received a delegation from the American Jewish Committee. Representatives of the Committee described the Pope as a “great friend” in the battle against racism and anti-Semitism in the United States. The Pope, in turn, praised the work of the committee, and delivered a statement condemning anti-Semitism. There is simply no legitimate excuse for Goldhagen not to have said any of these statements.
Father Peter Gumpel
Goldhagen saves his lowest blow for the end of his article, directing it against Father Peter Gumpel, S.J. A high official in the Congregation for the Causes of Saints, Gumpel is the narrator or independent investigative judge for the cause of the sainthood of Pius XII. In what is without a doubt the most shameful phrase of his entire controversy, Goldhagen writes: “Perhaps the Church protects Gumpel in his position because only an anti-Semite and historical falsifier could be capable of presenting Pius XII in the resplendent manner required for his canonization.”
Gumpel is a warm man, although he may seem quite serious to those who don’t know him. He is a German Jesuit, who is already over 70 years old, with English as his fifth or sixth language (He is fluent in English, German, Dutch, French and Italian, and Spanish almost perfectly. He also reads Danish, Portuguese, Latin, classical Greek and Hebrew). He was born in 1923, to a distinguished German family.
He was still a child when Hitler came to power. His family opposed the Nazis, and this led the Nazis to kill his grandfather and other relatives of his. Gumpel himself was sent into exile twice. The first time was to France. Later he went to Holland. There he was an underground opponent, risking his life to help escort Jews across the Belgian border.
One night, teenage Gumpel received a phone call telling him that the Nazis had captured his mother and were going to kill her. Fortunately, a German officer who had been a friend of Gumpel’s grandfather intervened and saved his mother’s life. The horror of that night, however, has never left him, nor has his abhorrence of Nazis and anti-Semitism. One can notice it in the disdain with which he pronounces the word “Nazi.”
Gumpel’s experiences during the war led directly to his decision to become a priest. He entered the Jesuits in 1944. He studied in England for four years and pursued various degrees, including a doctorate in the history of Church doctrine. He began teaching at the Pontifical Gregorian University in Rome, and in 1972 he was assigned to the congregation for the causes of saints. He also served on the faculty of the Gregorian and the Pontifical Oriental Institute.
That Goldhagen can call this good man an anti-Semite is already depressing and hardly surprising. Goldhagen’s analysis of matters like this is incredibly biased (Proof of this is the way in which Pacelli’s promise in 1933 not to interfere “in the internal political affairs of Germany” is converted into “the intention of the Church to give the Germans a free hand with the Jews”). In this case, your evidence comes from truncated quotes that have been taken out of context. In fact, Gumpel has repeatedly condemned anti-Semitism and affirmed his fidelity to the teachings of Vatican II.
The accusation that Gumpel is a “historical forger” is perhaps even more intolerable, if it were possible. Goldhagen gives no supporting evidence. In fact, it leaves the reader completely in the dark about what Gumpel has supposedly forged. This practice of tarnishing someone’s reputation by publicly making unspecific and baseless accusations in a situation where the person has little opportunity to defend themselves is nothing more than gross defamation.
The obligation of New Republic
Pope John Paul II has made it a priority to undertake the very serious task of bringing together Catholics and Jews. The Church, especially through the Holy Father, has often apologized for past sins. Sincere efforts have also been made to free the Church from hostility toward people of other faiths, especially since Vatican II.
Goldhagen scoffs at these efforts. He is particularly harsh on the 1998 Vatican document, We Remember: A Reflection on the Shoah. This statement explained the difference between anti-Judaism, of which the Vatican admits “Christians have also been guilty,” and the racial anti-Semitism embraced by the Nazis. This latter evil contradicts the core of Catholic beliefs, and the Church has always condemned it. Goldhagen, however, rejects this distinction.
Goldhagen seems to want nothing less than a renunciation of Christianity. He accuses Pope Pius XII of collaborating with the Nazis and treats the Cross as a symbol of oppression. He lectures on how portions of the New Testament were falsified and asserts that the very term “New Testament” is offensive. Its list-driven approach, coupled with weak fact-checking and poor analysis, results in one of the most unfair head-on attacks launched against Catholics in a mass-circulation publication in generations.
He New Republic He owes his readers, and especially the Catholic people against whom Goldhagen launches his reckless accusations, the responsibility to investigate his claims at least minimally before publishing them. While some difference in analysis is certainly to be expected on this issue, Goldhagen’s errors with the facts and his evident malicious intent go beyond the limits of reason. Eugene Fisher of the North American Conference of Bishops, a leader in promoting good relations between Jews and Christians, called this article “a parody. And a hate crime.” He was right.
At one point in the article, Goldhagen presents a series of questions, rhetorically asking whether defenders of Pius XII can answer them. His answer to each of these questions is “There is no good answer.” In fact, for every question (with the sole exception of the question on Belgium, the Netherlands and Luxembourg, which is a non sequitur) there are completely good answers, and they are easily accessible. Goldhagen simply ignores them.
Why did the New Republic choose to pass off this mystification to its readers as serious history? The only apparent answer is that the editors were so eager to vilify Catholics, their Church, and Pope Pius XII — so eager to join in Goldhagen’s vicious attacks — that they did not want to know the truth: Goldhagen’s thesis is based on selective sources, doctored quotations, careless inaccuracies, half-truths, and outright falsehoods. People of good will, whatever their faith, are right to reject it.
Author: J. M. Bover, SJ.
Source: José M. Bover, Theology of Saint Paul, BAC, Madrid, 1967, p. 461-469.
