Left: An image depicting Pope Pius XII is seen displayed at the Yad Vashem Holocaust Memorial in Jerusalem (CNS). Right: The cover of Soldier of Christ: The Life of Pope Pius XII, by Robert A. Ventresca.
There’s a running joke in Canada about our charming sense of delicate hubris. A
Toronto newspaper headline wryly proclaims: “Man Lands on Moon. Boots made in
Montreal!” In other words, we’re only 30 million strong and we’re invariably
mistaken for quiet Americans, and so when we do achieve something remarkable,
even of a minimal variety, we like people to know.
Which is why the world needs to know that what will now be
the standard life of Pope Pius XII—the definitive biography of the wartime
pontiff at least for the present—has just appeared. And it was written by a
Canadian academic. It’s true that Harvard University Press published the book,
but Robert
A. Ventresca is a professor at King’s College at Western University in
London, Ontario. And his new volume, Soldier
of Christ: The Life of Pope Pius XII is
a splendid work.
It won’t be the last word in the “Pius wars”, of course, but it is one of the
best. It depicts a profoundly good and devout man who, contrary to what the
critics have claimed, had absolutely no personal animus against Jewish people,
was active in the struggle against Nazism, and was clearly and transparently
the victim of a concerted attempt to libel him and by extension the Papacy, the
Church, and serious Catholicism. Ventresca does agree that were times, both
before and during the war, when Pius could have been more specific in
mentioning Jewish targets of Nazi eugenics and oppression, but that’s about as
severe as the censorship goes.
I’ve obsessed about this issue for some years, partly out of familial and
emotional necessity, in that I am a Catholic whose father was Jewish. He was
not only Jewish but also from a Polish family. The role of Pope Pius XII and
the Church during the Second World War is to me at the epicenter of identity,
loyalty, and truth. There are still Jewish leaders, even after years of debate
(and now Ventresca’s book), who claim that Pope Pius said little and did less
as Europe’s Jews were rounded up and slaughtered. There are non-Jewish
activists—often liberal Catholics fighting modern battles vicariously through
the tragedy of the Holocaust—who want to discredit papal history and thus the
contemporary papacy by arguing the Pope abandoned his moral authority. They
then construe that his successors have to delegate power because of this, and
that power is always to be delegated to their liberal friends.
So, was Pius silent? Was the Church complicit in some
monumental indifference? Was the Church on the wrong side during one of the
great ethical litmus tests of world history? The latter, by the way, is the
genuine issue at play here. The new, or revived, orthodoxy of the Church is
terrifying to the older generation of liberals and they will use history as a
battering ram if they can get away with it.
The truth is somewhat different. Before he became Pope Pius, Cardinal Pacelli
drafted the papal encyclical condemning Nazi racism and had it read from every
pulpit. The Vatican used its assets to ransom Jews from the Nazis, ran an
elaborate escape route and hid Jewish families in Castel Gondolfo. All this is
confirmed by Jewish experts such as B’nai B’rith’s Joseph Lichten. The World
Jewish Congress donated a great deal of money to the Vatican in gratitude for
its wartime work and in 1945 Rabbi Herzog of Jerusalem thanked Pope Pius, “for
his lifesaving efforts on behalf of the Jews during the occupation of Italy.”
When the Pope died in 1958 Golda Meir, then Israeli Foreign Minister, delivered
a eulogy at the United Nations praising the man for his work on behalf of her
people.
For twenty years, in fact, it was considered a self-evident
truth that the Church was a member of the victim class during the Second World
War and Pope Pius was mentioned alongside Churchill and Roosevelt as part of a
triumvirate of good. It was as late as the 1960s that the cultural architecture
began to be restructured around this issue and it is deeply significant that
the attacks on the Pope were largely initiated by the German playwright Rolf
Hochhuth, who claimed in his 1963 play The Deputy that the Vatican had ignored the plight of the Jews. What is seldom
mentioned is that Hochhuth was a renowned anti-Catholic who would later
champion the infamous Holocaust-denier David Irving.
While it is true is that the Pope did not issue an outright attack on the
Nazis’ treatment of the Jews, one of the main reasons was because the leaders
of the Catholic Church in Holland had made just such a public statement
condemning Nazi anti-Semitism and protesting the deportation of the Jewish
people. In response the German occupiers had arrested and murdered every Dutch
Jewish convert to Catholicism they could find. The group included Edith Stein (Sister
Teresa Benedicta of the Cross), who was dragged from her convent to the
slaughterhouse of Auschwitz, to be gassed in August 1942. She would later be
declared a saint by the Church. So, actions have consequences, and the Nazis
were hardly some civilized group who would be swayed by moral and intellectual
argument.
Hundreds of thousands of Catholic religious and lay people risked their lives
and sometimes gave their lives to help the Jewish victims of the Nazi pagans.
To a very large extent their sacrifices have gone uncelebrated, even ignored.
Shamefully, much of the criticism of the Church comes from within, as well as
from critics who use the issue to vicariously attack orthodoxy and Popes John
Paul II and Benedict XVI. This was precisely the case with John Cornwell’s
risible book Hitler’s Pope. Rabbi
David Dalin’s scholarly response, The Myth of Hitler’s Pope, stated that people are trying to, "exploit the
tragedy of the Jewish people during the Holocaust to foster their own political
agenda of forcing changes on the Catholic Church today.” Dalin’s work has done
much to reverse or at least explain the situation, and he is essential reading
for anybody who wants to genuinely understand the reality and the subtext of
all this.
We also need to recall the actions of another significant Jewish man, also a
rabbi. In 1945 the Chief Rabbi of Rome, Israel Zolli, publicly embraced
Catholicism. This extraordinary conversion was partly due to Zolli’s admiration
for the Pope’s sheltering and saving of Italian Jews. Zolli suffered greatly
due to his conversion, and his motives have been questioned quite dreadfully by
his detractors. But that does not change the truth of the situation.
Which brings us back to the meat of the problem, which is anti-Catholicism
using any means necessary to discredit the Church. We may win the Pius wars,
but our enemies will simply find another battleground on which to fight. The
irony of this particular skirmish is that while the Church, and in particular serious
and orthodox Catholics, have worked tirelessly to expunge any vestige of an
anti-Semitism that may have existed, the new Jew-hatred, often disguised
asanti-Zionism, is largely the preserve of the left, Islam, militant atheism,
and their friends. And that unholy alliance, it should be noted, hates the
Church just as much!
