Robert S.

Wistrich

THE VATICAN AND THE SHOAH

The common history of Catholics and Jews over the past two millennia
has often been tormented, even excruciating. The beginnings of what
has come to represent a sea-change in those relations dates back to the
document Nostra Aetate (In Our Time) released by Rome in 1965,
which finally lifted the collective burden of deicide from the Jewish
people. In fifteen long Latin sentences, the Vatican removed the historic slander that the Jews killed Christ and must forever suffer for
this capital crime. These sentences deplored "all hatreds, persecutions,
displays of anti-Semitism levelled at any time or from any source
against the Jews." Pope John XXIII, who had inspired the decisions of
the Vatican II and Nostra Aetate, was the first pope in history to ask
forgiveness (shortly before his death) for "the curse which we unjustly
laid on the name of the Jews." He began the process of reversing the
long-standing Augustinian theology of the Church which regarded Israel (in the religious sense) as eternally bearing the mark of Cain for
having rejected and "crucified" Jesus. That momentous step has
opened the door during the past thirty years to a dramatic rethinking
of Catholic theology regarding the Jews and Judaism; and, arguably, in
the sphere of Jewish-Christian relations more has been achieved in the
last three decades than in the previous two thousand years.
These advances, which have continued the historic process inaugurated by John XXIII, owe a great deal to the personal commitment of
Pope John Paul II-the first non-Italian to sit on St. Peter's Chair for
several hundred years. In 1986 he was the first Bishop of Rome to
enter a Jewish Synagogue in the Eternal City; on December 30, 1993,
as a result of his prodding, the Holy See finally established diplomatic
relations with the State of Israel and in 1998, on its fiftieth anniversary,
a menorah was lit in its honor in the Vatican itself. The present Pope
was also the patron of a concert specially commemorating the Shoah
which was held in Rome under Vatican auspices, several years ago.
Under his twenty-year stewardship, the Catholic Church has
strengthened its position across all continents, reached out to defend
human rights, played a vital role in bringing about the demise of Communism and sought to achieve a deeper rapprochement between the
great world religions. Nowhere has this new spirit of reconciliation
Modern Judaism 21 (2001): 83-107 ? 2001 by Oxford University Press

This content downloaded from 193.126.124.201 on Sat, 14 Mar 2015 18:42:10 UTC
All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions

84

Robert S. Wistrich

been more apparent than in the redefinition of the Church's relations

with the Jews. In March 1998, the Vatican issued a fourteen page document entitled "We Remember: A Reflection on the Shoah" intended,
in John Paul II's words, "to heal the wounds of past misunderstandings
and injustices" and shape a common future in which "the unspeakable
iniquity of the Shoah will never again be possible." In a cover letter to
Cardinal Edward Cassidy (President of the Commission for Relations
with the Jews, the organization that prepared the text), the Pope
stressed that the Shoah "remains an indelible stain on the history of
the century that is coming to a close."
In preparation for the Third Christian Millennium, he declared
that it was incumbent on the sons and daughters of the Church "to
purify their hearts, through repentance of past errors and infidelities,"
and to examine their own consciences concerning "the responsibility
which they too have for the evils of our Time."' This call to "teshouvah"
(the Hebrew word for repentance that is preferred in the Vatican document, as is the term "Shoah" rather than Holocaust) reflects the special
intensity of the present Pope's remembrance of the Shoah and his determination to reshape Catholic-Jewish relationships for the better. Already in 1990 he evoked for Christians "the heavy burden of guilt for
the murder of the Jewish people" as an "enduring call to repentance."
In January 1995 he made a resounding call to his listeners "Never again
anti-Semitism!" and in October 1997 he reminded Catholics that the
Divine Covenant with the Jews is still operative.2
No doubt that Pope John II's bond with the Jews goes back to the
days when he was still Karol Wojtyla, a young Pole studying for the
priesthood in Cracow, then under wartime German occupation. The
macabre conditions of life in those years, the martyrdom of Poles (including several thousand Catholic priests executed by the Germans),
and, above all, the Nazi mass murder of the Jews in nearby Auschwitz
was part of his daily experience and never forgotten. He was clearly
changed by what he witnessed and the fate of the Jews became something central to his consciousness. Indeed, it had a very personal dimension since the young Wojtyla had spent the first eighteen years of
his life in Wadowice (a small town about thirty miles from Cracow)
where about a quarter of the population were Jews, some of them living in his neighborhood and counted among his friends. When he returned in 1948 to Cracow from Rome (after a two year period of study)
he discovered that his Jewish friends had vanished and the scale of the
Jewish tragedy fully dawned on him.3
Wojtyla had grown up in a country which in the 1930s was still
permeated with an anti-Semitism that was openly fostered by the Catholic Church. When he was sixteen, the Primate of Poland, Cardinal
Hlond, had stigmatized PolishJews in a pastoral letter for their hostility
This content downloaded from 193.126.124.201 on Sat, 14 Mar 2015 18:42:10 UTC
All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions

The Vatican and the Shoah

85

to the Church, for spreading liberalism, atheism, and Communism, for

promoting immorality and other vices.4 It was common enough for
Polish priests to support the segregation of Jews in schools and universities, and to defend anti-Semitism as an expression of healthy Polish
nationalism and self-defense in the name of Poland's Catholic identity.
Polish Catholics might deplore German and Austrian anti-Semitic brutality, but for many, the Jews in Poland were perceived as an alien
threat. Karol Wojtyla appears to have been remarkably free of these
prejudices even though at least two of his most admired mentors-Cardinal Adam Sapieha of Cracow and the martyred Polish priest, Maximilien Kolbe-were hardly considered friends of the Jews.5 In 1971, as
Cardinal of Father Cracow, Wojtyla would go to Auschwitz to celebrate
the beatification of Kolbe, who had sacrificed his life for a fellow prisoner in the death camp.
Seven years later he was back at Auschwitz again, to celebrate
mass-this time as Pope Joannes Paulus II-the first Polish pope in history. It was in memory of that visit that a large, eight-meter-high crucifix was erected near the death camp which still stands and is now a
source of bitter controversy. The proliferation of crosses put up by
militant local Catholics in recent times (which has provoked dismay
among Jews) is not the first time that confrontation has erupted over
the Auschwitz site. In the 1980s there was the Carmelite nuns affair
(the establishment of a convent at Auschwitz for penance and prayer)
seen by most Jews as an inappropriate attempt to turn the death camp
into a "Christian"graveyard. To many it seemed intolerable that Christian prayers should be said in Auschwitz at all, by those "who could
have raised their voices for our brothers and sisters, and did not do
so." To his credit, it should be said thatJohn Paul II did try to defuse
the conflict (the Carmelite nuns moved in 1993) and to calm the more
hot-headed voices among his Polish countrymen.6
There is no doubt that the present Pope is attuned to Jewish sensitivities about Auschwitz and this is reflected in the recent Vatican text
where the Shoah is described as "a major fact of the history of this
century, a fact which still concerns us today." This "unspeakable tragedy" which can leave no one indifferent, least of all the church, with
"its very close bonds of spiritual kinship to the Jewish people," is an
event that commands not only remembrance but a moral imperative
that racist hatred should never again sow such suffering on earth. It is
evoked in terms that leave no doubt as to its horror and should act as
an effective counterweight to any temptation towards "Holocaust denial" or relativism in the Catholic world or beyond.
The Vatican document is also forthright in facing the fact that the
Shoah took place "in countries of long-standing Christian civilization";
that "erroneous and unjust interpretations of the New Testament" conThis content downloaded from 193.126.124.201 on Sat, 14 Mar 2015 18:42:10 UTC
All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions

86

Robert S. Wistrich

cerning the "alleged culpability" of the Jews contributed in the past to

discrimination, expulsions, and even forced conversions; it acknowledges thatJews were sometimes victims of looting and massacres in the
"Christian"world (albeit a somewhat vague, nonspecific and minimalist
statement). On the other hand, anti-Semitism is unequivocally condemned throughout the text, especially the pseudo-scientific theories
of Nordic-Aryan supremacy and the doctrine of "supposedly inferior
races" which provided an ideological foundation for Nazi exterminationist policy. Theologically speaking, the Nazi drive to physically uproot the Jewish people (defined as the witness-people to the One God
and the Law of the Covenant) is interpreted in the document as "a
definite hatred directed at God itself." This attitude is said to have
logically held to the rejection of Christianity and to the persecution of
the churches.
The Vatican is also very clear about the failure of Western governments (in North and South America as well as Europe) who were "more
than hesitant to open their borders to the persecuted Jews" and whose
behavior lays "a heavy burden of conscience on them." There is a more
halting recognition that many Christians in German-occupied Europe
"were not strong enough to raise their voices in protest" during the
deportations of Jews to the death camps. This failure is deeply regretted. Such errors and failings of Christians in the past represent, however, a "binding commitment" for the future. In its concluding section,
the document spells this out by calling on "our Catholic brothers and
sisters to renew the awareness of the Hebrew roots of their faith," to
recognize Jews as "elder brothers" (well-intentioned if double-edged in
traditional Christian theology) and to work for a common future-one
in which mutual prejudices will be eradicated.
At first sight these and many other aspects of the document would
seem to deserve a warm welcome, especially since the general tone is
one of self-questioning, acknowledgement of the traumas of the past,
repentance, and a desire for self-purification. So why the sense of disappointment, especially among Jews but also in liberal Catholic circles
and in the media more generally?7 Partly, this cool reaction may reflect
the time-lapse since 1987 when PopeJohn Paul II first promisedJewish
organizations he would address the question of the Church and the
Shoah in an authoritative document. Not only has the Pope himself
made more trenchant statements than those in the Vatican text, but
so, too, have Bishops' conferences held in France, Germany, Holland,
Switzerland, Poland, and Hungary.
For example, the German Catholic bishops on January 23, 1995
(fifty years after the liberation of Auschwitz) squarely blamed the
Church itself and not merely its individual members for its behavior
during the Shoah. They pointed to the anti-Jewish attitudes in German
This content downloaded from 193.126.124.201 on Sat, 14 Mar 2015 18:42:10 UTC
All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions

TheVaticanandthe Shoah

87

Catholicism as one of the main reasons why "during the years of the
Third Reich Christians did not offer resistance to racial anti-Semitism."
Some German Catholics, the Conference noted, actually "paved the
way for crimes or even became criminals themselves." The German
bishops openly admitted that the failures and guilt of that time did
have a "church dimension"; that the Catholic Church in Rome and in
Germany had been far too fixated on protecting their own institutions
and "remained silent about the crimes committed against Jews and Judaism." These honest admissions (duplicated by the French and Polish
bishops) certainly correspond more closely to the findings of historical
research than the much more vague, more evasive remarks in the Vatican text.
Indeed, the record of German Catholics after 1933 was a dismal
one which has been exposed, predominantly by Catholic historians,
every since the 1960s.8 If the Church hierarchy condemned Nazi ideology before Hitler seized power, their warnings faded rapidly after
March 1933. Unlike their counterparts in France, Belgium, Italy, or
Holland, they appeared to be following rather than guiding their flock.
They even accepted the Nuremberg race laws which forbade intermarriage with baptized Jews, in contravention of Catholic doctrine and
there were virtually no protests after the Crystal Night pogrom of November 1938.' Worse still, the Catholic church in Germany collaborated in helping to establish who was of Jewish descent in the Third
Reich (the Protestant churches were no better)-an act that would have
fatal consequences for many. Its leaders showed a disastrous naivety in
believing that Hitler wished to uphold Christian morality, family values,
and respect the Concordat with Rome. They were slow to grasp the
totalitarian, anti-Christian dynamic of National Socialism. Above all,
they failed to see that Nazi leaders were impervious to private and
individual protests. They did not realize that only determined public
opposition, fear of sanctions, and the stirring up of the populace could
have any effect upon them. This same mistake was repeatedly made by
the Vatican between 1933 and 1945.
"We Remember" briefly mentions three German Catholic bishops
in its statement, as examples of resistance to National Socialism. One
was indeed a true hero-the Provost of St. Hedwig's Cathedral in Berlin, Bernhard Lichtenberg, who died on his way to Dachau in 1943
after having publicly prayed for the Jews. He was a rare exception
among the more than twenty million Catholics in Nazi Germany. The
other two cases-leading members of the Roman Catholic hierarchy in
the Third Reich-were far more ambivalent than the Vatican statement
implies. The first, Cardinal Bertram, did indeed oppose National Socialism before 1933 but afterwards his objections became increasingly
timid and inaudible.10He never spoke out against the regime from the
This content downloaded from 193.126.124.201 on Sat, 14 Mar 2015 18:42:10 UTC
All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions

88

Robert S. Wistrich

pulpit and in 1939 sent Hitler a congratulatory telegram for his fiftieth
birthday, which he repeated the following year. Even more astonishing,
in May 1945 he celebrated a solemn requiem mass for Adolf Hitler,
shortly after his suicide in Berlin. Hardly the stuff of which resistance
is made!
The case of Cardinal Michael Faulhaber of Munich, praised by the
Vatican for his Advent Sermons of Christmas 1933 (which "clearly expressed rejection of Nazi anti-Semitic propaganda"), is more complex.
Faulhaber's series of sermons before overflow crowds in St. Michael's
Church (published in 1934 as a book) did defend the Old Testament
and the Jewish origins of Christianity against Nazis and volkischracists.11
No doubt it took some courage at the end of 1933 to remind Germans
that Israel before the coming of Christ was a vehicle of Divine Revelation; that pre-ChristianJudaism was deserving of the highest reverence;
that the Hebrew Bible was an indispensable treasure for the German
nation and the Christian faith.
But Faulhaber also made it clear that the Covenant with modern,
post-Christian Jews had been revokedand that his defense of the Old
Testament had no implications regarding the "antagonism to the Jews
of today." In 1934 he would indignantly repudiate suggestions made
abroad that his sermons constituted a defense of German Jews or a
criticism of Nazi policy. Faulhaber undoubtedly had concerns about
the violations of the Concordat-some of which may well have influenced the anguished encyclical Mit BrennenderSorge(With Deep Anxiety)
of 1937, which was released by Pope Pius XI. But he seems to have
been readily convinced by Hitler that the rights of the Catholic Church
would be respected and that National Socialism was a vital bulwark
against the Bolshevik danger. Faulhaber had no difficulty in supporting
the Anschluss with Austria and the occupation of the Sudetenland in
1938, for which he even sent a telegram of thanks to the Fiihrer in the
name of the German episcopate.
Similar ambivalences can be found in the policy of Pope Pius XI
towards the Third Reich. He had agreed to the Concordat with Hitler
(which was designed and signed by his Secretary of State Pacelli-the
future Pius XII) and was the first foreign "ruler"to shake his hand and
grant him some international legitimacy. In 1933 Pius XI still praised
Hitler and spoke of a common struggle against the danger of Russian
Bolshevism.12 But his main concern was to maintain and protect Catholic institutions and interests within Nazi Germany. It was the failure of
this policy which had provoked Mit BrennenderSorge-the one open and
public criticism by the Vatican of the National Socialist regime.13 This
critique was focused around the concept of "paganism" and it is this
category which recurs in the current Vatican statement on the Shoah.
It would appear that for Rome in 1998, no less than for Popes Pius XI
This content downloaded from 193.126.124.201 on Sat, 14 Mar 2015 18:42:10 UTC
All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions

The Vatican and the Shoah

89

and XII in the 1930s and 40s, Nazism was a form of "neo-paganism"
which had nothing to do with Christianity and was in fact anti-Christian.14This claim has caused much scorn from critics who regard it as
apologetic in nature and designed to evade Christian responsibility for
the Shoah. Thus it needs to be examined more closely.
What did the Catholic Church mean, then and now, when it used
the term paganism and to what extent does this capture an important
truth about Nazism? Cardinal Faulhaber in his 1933 sermons had already warned that the vilkisch and Nazi emphasis on blood, soil, and
race insofar as it was exclusivist or called for hatred of other nations
was a neo-pagan perversion opposed to universalist Catholic principles.
He even declared that such a pagan relapse would be "the beginning
of the end of the German nation." Pius XI's encyclical of 1937 voiced
similar fears when condemning the idolatrous cult of the nation, the
race, the all-powerful State, and the self-deified leader as a complete
distortion of Christian belief in a person transcending God.15Pius XII's
first encyclical in 1939 echoes this position yet, like his predecessor, he
never once mentioned the word "Jew"or anti-Semitism-though this
was the predominant form of racism in Europe during the late 1930s.'6
Paganism was a codeword for the naturalistic world of Nazism with its
echoes of pre-Christian primitivism, its cult of vitality and power, and
the rights of the strongest in the struggle for survival; paganism also
referred to the exaltation of blood and soil, of the Urgermane(the primordial German) and the worship of the Volk; "paganism" referred to
the glorification of the master race seeking world domination and to
the worship of the Fiihrer as an earthly Messiah in place of Christ."7
There can be little doubt that there were powerful neo-pagan currents in the Third Reich and to that extent some of the criticism of the
Vatican document seems misplaced. One can find such tendencies in
Himmler's SS with its cultivation of a perfect warrior race of blond,
blue-eyed Germanic heroes; in the ideology of the Hitler Youth; in
Nordic-Aryan blood mysticism and the ideals espoused in Alfred Rosenberg's Myth of the TwentiethCenturywhich inter alia denounced the
"Semitic-Latin spirit" of Roman Catholicism; in Nazi art and architecture; in the velkischsectarians who dreamed of a new Germanic religion
and in many other cultural manifestations of the Third Reich.
But if the Nazis were pagans, they were also "baptised Christians"
throwing off an unwanted Judeo-Christian legacy in the name of their
new-found political religion.'8 Dialectically speaking, their "neo-pagan"
Christophobia could not have existed without Christianity and this is
what the Vatican document overlooks. This was not only apparent in
Nazi manipulation of Christian symbols, liturgy and ritual in their mass
politics or in the borrowings of Christian vocabulary scattered in the
rhetoric of Hitler, Goebbels and other leaders of the Third Reich.'9 It
This content downloaded from 193.126.124.201 on Sat, 14 Mar 2015 18:42:10 UTC
All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions

90

Robert S. Wistrich

was, above all, true of Nazi anti-Semitism-which the Vatican statement

wishes to separate at all costs from Christian anti-Judaism. On this
point Rome would have been better advised to take its example from
the Drancy statement of the French bishops on October 2, 1997, expressing contrition for the silence of the Church's pastors in face of
the racist laws of the Vichy government during the Second World War.
True, the French bishops did not propose a direct cause-and-effect link
between the widespread Christian anti-Jewish feelings in prewar Europe and the Shoah; but unlike Rome, they did admit "the role, indirect if not direct, in the process which led to the Shoah which was
played by commonly held anti-Jewish prejudices, which Christians were
guilty of maintaining." The French bishops acknowledged that one cannot completely separate modern anti-Semitism from stereotypes that
were stamped by the Catholic (and later the Protestant) traditions on
the theology, the preaching, the liturgy, the folklore, and the art embedded in a Christian culture.20
Unfortunately, the Vatican text does precisely that when it removes
any Christian responsibility for modern anti-Semitism, which it insists
on defining as essentially "sociological" and political, based on "a false
and exaggerated nationalism," pseudo-scientific race theories, excessive
fears of social change and exaggerated ideas of Jewish influence. All of
these factors did indeed play an important role but they presupposed
a cultural and ideological framework that was created by centuries of
Christian theology and popular myth. Yet the document has nothing
to say about the Christology developed by the fathers of the Church and
its demonization of the Jews; about the adversosjudaeos polemical literature over centuries; the negative stereotypes of the Jews as Satan (or
agents of the Devil), as Anti-Christ, as Judas, not to mention Ahasverus-the wanderingJew of Christian legend-condemned to eternal exile and divine punishment. There is not a word about the prominent
churchmen (bishops, monks, priests, friars) who at different times lit the
flames of confessional hatred from the Middle Ages to the modem era.
Nor is there anything about Innocent III and the Lateran Council
which ordered Jews to wear the yellow badge and distinct garb; or
about the sixteenth century popes (Paul III, IV, and V) who confined
Jews to ghettos in Rome and the Papal states; not to mention later
popes who reinforced such segregationist legislation. This long history
of Christian anti-Judaism and anti-Semitism has been thoroughly documented by Catholic as well as Protestant and Jewish scholars, so it is
surprising to see it not taken into account in a statement of repentance,
even if only in passing.
Of course, the Nazis transmuted the medieval Christian demonology into a modern, pseudo-biological key which was neither "pagan"
nor purely "Christian." But one has only to examine a typically Nazi
This content downloaded from 193.126.124.201 on Sat, 14 Mar 2015 18:42:10 UTC
All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions

The Vatican and the Shoah

91

anti-Semitic rag like Julius Streicher's Der Stiirmer to find traditional

Christian motifs everywhere. There is the Crucifixion ("Golgotha has
not yet been revenged" as a typical headline), the image of the eternally
cursed people; the usurious Jew squeezing the poor peasant dry; the
Jew as the "devil in human disguise" and of course, the ritual murderer
of Christian children. Nazism radicalized and secularized these popular
Christian stereotypes even as it began to turn against the ethical substance of Christianity with growing ferocity.21
Hitler was himself careful to publicly disguise the full extent of his
contempt for the "effeminate pity-ethics" of Judeo-Christianity, which
he saw as completely antithetical to the strong "heroic belief in God in
nature, God in our people, in our destiny, in our blood." Outwardly
he sought, at least until 1937, to adopt a Christian mantle in seeking
church support for his crusade against Jewry and international Bolshevism. In his wartime Table Talk, the mask is removed and the mass
murder of European Jews is significantly accompanied by sometimes
nightly ravings against Judeo-Christianity.22Karl Marx is presented as
the heir of St. Paul whose monotheistic creed was regarded by Hitler
as deeply subversive, egalitarian and pacifist, disguising the Jewish will
to world domination. Bolshevism is therefore the illegitimate child of
Christianity and both were to be execrated as diabolical creations of
the revolutionary Jew.
The Bolsheviks sought to destroy the western world and human
civilisation just as their Christian ancestors had undermined the might
and the culture of the Roman Empire. Martin Bormann (Hitler's closest aide at the end of the war) summed up the connection in 1944
when he said that Nazi doctrine was "anti-Jewishin excelsis,for it is both
anti-Communist and anti-Christian."23This was a view shared by many
other Nazi leaders, including Himmler and Goebbels (both lapsed
Catholics like Hitler), Darre, Rosenberg, and Ley. The Vatican document is not mistaken to assume that the ideology of these men was
profoundly anti-Christian; nor is it wrong to insist that there is a distinction between Christian and Nazi anti-Semitism-a difference that
might be compared to that between an uncomfortable and a lethal
fever.2 Nor can one deny the fact that the "Final Solution" had no
Christian precedent.
But there is little consolation to be drawn from the fact that Auschwitz was not preprogrammed in the logic of Christianity. For when
one examines the behavior of the Vatican and the Church hierarchy in
Europe during the Shoah, the results are not encouraging to say the
least. True, there were some brave churchmen whose light shone in
the general darkness. There was Archbishop Saliage of Toulouse who
denounced the tragic spectacle of the deportations; his statements and
those of Cardinal Gerlier of Lyon and the bishop of Marseille were a
This content downloaded from 193.126.124.201 on Sat, 14 Mar 2015 18:42:10 UTC
All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions

92

RobertS. Wistrich

turning-point in the summer of 1942 when the deportations of French

Jews began and public opinion turned against Vichy's collaborationist
policy. (This had been preceded by a long silence during which neither
the French hierarchy nor the Vatican protested Vichy's racial laws excluding the Jews.)25There was the papal nuncio in Budapest, Angelo
Rotta, who ceaselessly prodded the Primate of Hungary to pressure his
government to stop the deportations of Hungarian Jewry to Auschwitz
in the summer of 1944. Rotta's own letter to Horthy condemning the
war against the Jews was the first official public protest against the
"Final Solution" by a representative of the Pope.
Another remarkable churchman who did much to save Jewish lives
was the Archbishop of L'viv in the Ukraine, the Metropolitan Andrei
Sheptyts'kyi, who witnessed the massacre of Jews in his city by Ukrainians as well as Germans. It was no easy matter to denounce such killings
in the highly charged nationalist and anti-Semitic atmosphere of the
Ukraine in 1942-3, caught between the German hammer and the Bolshevik anvil.26
None of these examples is mentioned in the Vatican document
(and there are others) though reference is made to the many acts of
Christian charity and rescue during the Shoah. Instead, "We Remember" makes a point of twice mentioning Pope Pius XII in a positive
light-initially for his encyclical of October 20, 1939, "Summi Pontificatus," warning against theories that denied the unity of the human
race-and secondly for what he did "personally or through his representatives to save hundreds of thousands of Jewish lives." This statement, which upset many Jews, was also critically noted by non-Catholic
commentators." It even prompted questions in the Israeli Parliament
with the Foreign Minister being asked to try and oppose the beatification process of Pope Pius XII.28
In the United States, there were some strong Catholic reactions.
Patrick J. Buchanan, for example, denounced all criticism of Pius XII
as motivated by anti-Catholicism and moral blackmail. He blamed leftwing critics of America and Rome, the "twin pillars of Western civilization against Bolshevism" ever since the 1950s. Like the Vatican document, he also cited Jewish testimonies of gratitude to Pius XII for his
efforts to rescue Jews in their darkest hour.29 Other Catholic voices
quoted The New YorkTimes of December 25, 1941 which had praised
the wartime Pope as "a lonely voice in the silence of darkness enveloping Europe this Christmas."so3
(They invariably contrasted this praise
with the same newspaper's negative assessment of Pius XII and the
Vatican document of 1998.) Kenneth Woodward, in a Newsweekarticle
(March 30, 1998) went so far as to deny that Pius XII was silent during
the Shoah, or that he did little to help Jews, or that he was pro-German-all these claims being branded as "monstrous calumnies."s' EdThis content downloaded from 193.126.124.201 on Sat, 14 Mar 2015 18:42:10 UTC
All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions

The Vatican and the Shoah

93

ward Cassidy, the Cardinal responsible for "We Remember," appeared

to agree with Woodward for, in a generally conciliatory appearance
before the American Jewish Committee in May 1998, he remarked that
Pius XII had been unjustly denigrated."3On the Jewish side, there was
general surprise and some shock that Pius XII should be positively depicted as someone who actively fought racism and anti-Semitism. The
negative image of the Pope as a man who showed almost criminal weakness in face of the Shoah had been created in 1963 by a non-Jewish
German playwright, Rolf Hochhuth in his semi-documentary play, The
Deputy.33Historical works from the 1960s onwards, including those of
Guenther Lewy, Saul Friedlander, Friedrich Heer, Carlo Falcone, John
Morley, and others had reinforced the somewhat one-sided picture of
a Pope who preferred diplomacy to moral and humanitarian imperatives; who did not regard Hitler's war as unjust; who preferred Nazism
to Stalinism; who seemed to have forgotten that he was not just another Head of State but the "Vicar of Christ"; who was ready to accommodate almost any regime provided it respected church property; and
who did not judge it opportune to tell the people the truth about the
massacres of Jewry. Most shocking of all, was the seeming serenity of
the Vatican and its representatives, strictly adhering to business as
usual, while Europe was morally and spiritually collapsing around
them. In this context, the Pope's silence about the murder of Jews,
gypsies, Poles, or Serbs seemed best understood as signalling the bankruptcy of a certain kind of Vatican Realpolitik which had in fact lost
touch with reality!34
No doubt some suspects of this harsh picture need to be modified,
though by no means everything. It would certainly be wrong to present
Pius XII as approving of Nazism and there is no evidence that he was
anti-Semitic, though he never objected to the substance of the antiJewish laws passed in France, Hungary, Croatia, Slovakia, and other
Catholic countries, before the "Final Solution." Pius XII, like his predecessor, opposed racist anti-Semitism but he shared the traditional Catholic view of modern Jewry as an "element of decomposition" in western
culture.35He would have had difficulty identifying with John Paul II's
benevolent perception of Judaism and the need to return to the "Hebrew" roots of Christianity.
At the same time Pius XII could not accept the Nazi and racist
onslaught on baptized Jews (which flagrantly contradicted Catholic
dogma and the efficacy of the sacraments) any more than he could
condone the gassing or murder ofJews.36 Where he had some leverage,
as in Catholic Slovakia and Hungary, he did try to intervene to halt
deportations and mass killing. In Slovakia he ordered bishops to intercede with President Tiso (himself a Catholic priest) as well as with
Prime Minister and Minister of the Interior."7While the interventions
This content downloaded from 193.126.124.201 on Sat, 14 Mar 2015 18:42:10 UTC
All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions

94

Robert S. Wistrich

led to a temporary respite and did save the lives of some baptized Jews,
they were ultimately not successful. His open letter to Hungary's Regent, Admiral Horthy, on June 25, 1944, to do everything in his power
to "save as many unfortunate people as possible from further pain and
sorrow" did have some initial effect due to the international context
and the changing fortunes of war. The Pope's message, as usual, was
couched in discreet, diplomatic language unlike the far blunter American warning to Horthy, but it did have some importance in a predominantly Catholic country. Again, the results proved to be meager.
The same was true of Croatia, only here the conduct of the Vatican
and its representatives appears to have few redeeming features. The
ruler of the Croatian Fascist puppet state, Ante Pavelic, the Poglavnik
(Leader), was a pious Catholic and his fanatical followers were meticulous in the performance of their religious duties. The Croatian Church
was a pillar of the regime which was viewed in the Vatican as a defender of Catholicism and the West against the threat posed by Communist heresy. Rome did not intervene to protest against the savagely
cruel actions of the Ustashe Croatians against Orthodox (Christian)
Serbs or the murder of Croatian Jewry. There is no evidence that the
Pope voiced disapproval of such brutalities in his meetings with Ustashe leaders. True, behind the scenes his representative and the Croatian Archbishop Stepinac acted (in vain) to prevent further murders
and the latter sent a trenchant letter to Pavelic in March 1943 that did
save the lives of some baptized Jews and mixed families. Yet here, as
elsewhere, the Vatican did not oppose the basic injustice of the antiSemitic laws (which removed the Jews from social, economic and cultural life) or condemn local monks and friars involved in murderous
actions against Serbs, Jews or gypsies.38
Such passivity cannot be excused on the grounds of ignorance of
what was happening. Vatican documents show that Rome had abundant information and knew that Jews were being exterminated in Poland and elsewhere in Europe, at the latest from the middle of 1942.
Nor can one explain Pius XII's silence and failure to provide clear
moral guidance by indifference to human suffering or personal cowardice. He was neither insensitive nor lacking in courage to stand up
for what he believed in. This is illustrated by the insistence with which
he instructed papal nuncios to intervene on behalf of baptised Jews
against government ordinances which refused to recognise them as
Catholics. Similarly, he insisted on the exclusive right of the Catholic
church to solemnize marriages (including "non-Aryan" Catholics)
which brought him and his predecessor into conflict with Mussolini's
racist legislation in Italy.39
Pius XII was by no means regarded as pro-Nazi by the Germans.
He had been Pius XI's Secretary of State during the early years of the
This content downloaded from 193.126.124.201 on Sat, 14 Mar 2015 18:42:10 UTC
All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions

The Vatican and the Shoah

95

Third Reich and contributed to formulating the sharp encyclical of

1937 against totalitarian state doctrines and the gross Nazi infringements of the Concordat. Though he had never denounced racist antiSemitism in public, unlike Pius XI (who told Belgian pilgrims in Rome
on September 20, 1938 that "spiritually, we are all Semites"), the Germans assumed that they were of one mind.40 Gestapo and Sicherheitsdienst (SD) documents show that in 1939, upon his election as Pope,
they regarded him as tending more to the western democracies than
the totalitarian states. Moreover, they were concerned by the enthusiastic support which his election generated among World Jewry. Again,
when Pius XII did make his single oblique reference to the Holocaust
in a Christmas message of 1942, the Germans immediately interpreted
it as a criticism of their genocidal policy and a statement on behalf of
the Jews.4' The Western Allies, on the other hand, felt that the Pope
had not gone nearly far enough.
Since much has been made of this statement by apologists determined to show that he was not "silent," it is worth noting that the Pope
devoted all of one sentence to deploring the fact that "hundreds of
thousands of people, through no fault of their own and solely because
of their nation or race, have been condemned to death or progressive
extinction." With all due allowance for the abstract style of papal documents, there is no explicit reference either to Jews or Nazis, though
the latter with the clarity of their paranoid world-view, saw in it proof
that the Pope himself was part of the Jewish world-conspiracy!
The Germans must have been relieved that Pius XII did not permit
himself even such a minimalist statement when they occupied Rome in
October 1943 and deported all the Jews they could find in the Eternal
City to Auschwitz. This "Aktion" happened virtually beneath the windows of the Vatican and no voice was raised in anger as the oldest
Jewish community in Europe was loaded into boxcars for gassing in
the East. True, the Pope did give instructions that convents, seminaries,
and buildings in Vatican City be quietly opened to offer refuge and
safety to those Roman Jews who managed to escape the manhunt. On
the other hand, something was surely wrong when his Secretary of
State Cardinal Maglione (who shared responsibility for Vatican foreign
policy during the Shoah with Pius XII) could tell the German Ambassador in Rome in October 1943, that the Holy See did not want "to give
to the German people the impression that it has done or wished to do
the least thing against Germany during this terrible war."42'43These
words of reassurance meant that Nazi Germany had nothing to fear
from the Vatican when it was deporting Roman Jews to their deaths.
As ever, prudence was the rationale for this policy. The same prudence, discretion, and tact which are reflected in all the communications of Pius XII and Cardinal Maglione concerning the fate of Jews
This content downloaded from 193.126.124.201 on Sat, 14 Mar 2015 18:42:10 UTC
All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions

96

Robert S. Wistrich

threatened with death. There has been no lack of defenders of this line
of conduct, claiming that public denunciations of atrocities against the
Jews would have served no purpose. On the contrary, it is said, it would
most probably have worsened their plight-difficult though it may be
to imagine any fate worse than the Shoah. Most frequently cited in this
connection are the tragic results of the public protest of Catholic bishops in Holland, who, following a papal communication to them, had
condemned the deportation of Dutch Jews to the East. In retaliation,
the Nazis also deported the baptised Jews, whom they had not hitherto
touched. This is said to have dissuaded Pius XII from repeating the
experience.44
Whether it was really the best interests of Jews which determined
the Pope's policy in this matter or other factors connected more with
the Church's own concerns, must remain an open question. Until the
Vatican archives are opened to independent, critical investigation-as
many scholars have requested-we may never know the answer. Even
then, one must assume that conflicting interpretations of his behavior
will persist. As things stand now, however, the Vatican should not be
surprised that many remain sceptical about the claim in the most recent document that Pius XII saved hundreds of thousands of Jewish
lives.45What we do know is that privately and discreetly through his
many diplomatic channels, he did act to save Jews, particularly those
who were baptized. It is also clear that the Vatican had only very limited influence on German policy though the possible effects of an unequivocal and very specific public denunciation by the Pope of its genocidal actions are now impossible to gauge. Catholics constituted over
40 percent of the population of the greater German Reich and an overwhelming majority of citizens in countries like France, Belgium, Italy,
Poland, Lithuania, Hungary, Slovakia, and Croatia where the "Final
Solution" was carried out.
Would Hitler's excommunication or the call to Catholics to refuse
to carry out "criminal orders" or serve in the Wehrmacht have had any
positive results? Perhaps not a great deal of impact, but it would have
at least have encouraged those Catholics in occupied countries like
France, Belgium, and Holland who did oppose the deportations or
those as in Italy (or Poland) who sought to hide Jews regardless of the
danger of German reprisals. Millions of Catholics around the world
might have welcomed a more unequivocal moral position from the
Pope and not only on the fate of the Jews. It is often forgotten that
Polish Catholics were bitterly disappointed when Pius XII (standing
on his political "neutrality")refused to assign guilt when the Germans
invaded Poland in an act of aggression. Despite Polish pleas to intervene, the Pope could not bring himself to openly denounce the execu-

This content downloaded from 193.126.124.201 on Sat, 14 Mar 2015 18:42:10 UTC
All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions

TheVaticanandthe Shoah

97

tions of more than 3,000 Polish Catholic priests by the Nazis during
the war.
Though Pius XII refused officially to bless Hitler's war against the
Soviet Union, he may well have hoped for a German victory in the East
as late as 1943-at a time when the mass extermination of Jews (whose
details were well known to the Vatican) was gathering apace. His preference for Hitler over Stalin (one shared by his predecessor, by Cardinal Maglione and other top Vatican officials) was predicated on the
assumption that there would still be a place for Roman Catholicism in
the Nazi New Order-but none whatsoever under Soviet Communism.
When one adds Pius XII's passionate love of Germany and of German
culture (he had been papal nuncio there during the Weimar era) to his
ideological anti-Communism, then his "silence" becomes more comprehensible, though hardly more appetizing. Moreover, by the standards of Realpolitik, it was a complete failure. Hitler, far from being
the saviour of the West against Bolshevism, brought Stalin's armies
into the heart of Europe with disastrous results for the church and the
peoples of eastern Europe. No one should know this better than John
Paul II, whose Catholic faith was steeled under a postwar Communist
regime in Poland.
It is therefore curious that the Vatican, and a substantial part of
Catholic opinion, should feel such a strong need to defend Pius XII's
record at all costs. This defense often seems exaggerated to the outside
observer, refuting arguments that no serious person is making. No one
is blaming Pius XII or the Catholic Church for the Holocaust, or even
suggesting that the Pope could have single-handedly stopped the
slaughter. Nor can one retrospectively demand that he should have
worn the martyr's crown and sacrificed his life. Nor can one reasonably
object to his efforts to seek peace or dismiss the value of his quiet
diplomacy where it did save Jewish lives and those of other victims of
the Nazis. But it is more than disappointing to find how little if any
moral outrage or public courage was displayed by the Vatican when it
came to the fate of the Jews. The least one can say is that this discretion
did not raise the moral standing of the Church.
The failure at the top highlights, if anything, the heroism of those
ordinary Catholics (and Protestants) who hid, rescued, or saved Jews at
great personal risk. The present Pope has paid tribute on a number
of occasions to such actions and they deserve to be remembered and
honored. It is therefore bizarre that "We Remember" should insist in
its act of contrition that the Church as an institution remains blameless,
while ordinary Christians must do penance for their sins of omission
or worse. Throughout the Vatican document the distinction between
the Church per se and its members is rigidly maintained. Even if one

This content downloaded from 193.126.124.201 on Sat, 14 Mar 2015 18:42:10 UTC
All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions

RobertS. Wistrich

98

accepts that in traditional Catholic theology the Church is the "bride of

Christ" and "the heavenly Jerusalem," divinely ordained and therefore
without sin, surely this teaching cannot be seriously proposed as an
unalterable dogma over fifty years after the Shoah. If the Church and
the Papacy still claim that kind of infallibility, then one wonders who
exactly is offering repentance and for what sin? Are the faithful being
called upon to make their "examination of conscience" independently
of an infallible Church that has floated through nearly two millennia
of history like some kind of spotless Platonic ideal? Are ordinary rankand-file Catholics to be held to more stringent moral standards than
those who in the past set the policy of the Church? Do the sins committed by Catholics during the Shoah belong only to the flock and not to
the shepherd?
It is difficult to imagine that this is the intention of the document,
though it sometimes reads that way. However difficult or painful it may
be, true repentance does require an admission that the leadership of
the Church made errors and failed to uphold its self-proclaimed position as a guardian of morality. Genuine contrition must avoid as much
as possible blurring the line between apologia and apology or hedging
recognition of guilt with too many qualifications. This applies to Protestants, Jews, and Muslims as much as it does to Catholics and it is no
less true in settling moral accounts between nations.
It is no less important to recognize the tremendous progress that
has been made in the Jewish-Christian dialogue for which "We Remember," whatever its flaws, represents as a significant landmark. The traditional anti-Judaism of the Catholic Church-one of the background factors that made the Shoah possible-has been greatly eroded. Judaism
is no longer regarded in enlightened Catholic circles as the old enemy
to be subjugated or denigrated but as an authentic, living religion with
whom dialogue and co-operation are a vital interest. This "special relationship" which Pope John Paul II has particularly emphasized, has
many aspects-some traditional and some more contemporary. It is
simply a fact that Christianity (Catholic, Protestant, or Orthodox) cannot be fully grasped without understanding its Jewish roots. The Vatican document itself stresses this point as well as recalling the Jewish
origins of Jesus, Mary, the Apostles, and so much of the Church's
teaching.
Pope John Paul II has in the past two decades given a consistent
lead in this direction. In his writings, homilies, and speeches on Jewish
themes he has unequivocally denounced anti-Semitism as well as emphasizing how much Judaism and Christianity have in common with
each other.46 Much of the warmth and understanding

he has shown in

pursuing the Christian-Jewish dialogue can, as we have already indicated, be traced back to his personal friendships and positive experiThis content downloaded from 193.126.124.201 on Sat, 14 Mar 2015 18:42:10 UTC
All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions

The Vatican and the Shoah

99

ence of Jewish life in Poland before 1939.47One can hardly exaggerate

the significance of the Pope's insistence that the Old Covenant with
the People of Israel has never been revoked by God; that Jews and
Christians are "called to be a blessing for the world"; and his acceptance of the centrality of Israel as a land and a nation, when speaking
of the Jews as a group. Under the auspices of John Paul II, the Catholic
Church has reaffirmed that it does have a special relationshipwith the
Jewish people who are to be regarded fraternally-as "elder brothers."
The Church has indeed repudiated any notion that the Jews are to be
seen as a "cursed" people.
But these milestones have not been able to remove all the contentious issues that continue to bedevil Catholic-Jewish relationships. Even
during his epochal visit to the Jewish Synagogue of Rome in 1986, John
Paul II's remembrance of the "high price in blood" paid by the local
Jewish community during World War II was somewhat selective. He
recalled that the Holy See had thrown open Vatican City "to offer refuge and safety to so many Jews of Rome being hunted by their persecutors" but ignored Pius XII's public silence as Roman Jews were being
deported to Auschwitz.48 It was left to the president of the Rome Jewish
community, Professor Giacomo Saban, to quietly hint at this fact and
to mention the dark centuries during which John Paul II's papal predecessors had ghettoised and discriminated against Jews.
Such omissions pale, however, in comparison with the controversy
provoked by the Pope's elevation of converts from Judaism to the highest honors that the Church can bestow. Thus, on May 1, 1987, John
Paul II beatified Dr. Edith Stein, a German Jewess, philosopher, convert, and Carmelite nun in a huge ceremony held in a football stadium
in Cologne. The Pope told the assembled crowd: "Today, we greet in
profound honor and holy joy a daughter of the Jewish people, rich in
wisdom and courage, who gave her life for genuine peace.49He insisted
that her baptism was "by no means a break with her Jewish heritage"
but the life of "this heroic follower of Christ was illuminated by the
Cross."
In October 1998 Edith Stein was duly canonized by the Vatican
with all the pomp and grandeur that the Roman Catholic Church reserves for its saints-the first Jewess to receive such honors since the
time of the Virgin Mary! The response of Jewish organizations to this
move was largely negative. Edith Stein had been born to a German
Jewish Orthodox family in Breslau, had converted in 1922 and eleven
years later assumed the name of Teresa Benedicta a Cruce (Teresa,
Blessed of the Cross). On August 2, 1942 she would be arrested in
Holland and deported by the Nazis from her convent to Auschwitz
where she died a week later. Jewish reactions to her canonization (the
Pope had also declared that her saint's day should become an annual
This content downloaded from 193.126.124.201 on Sat, 14 Mar 2015 18:42:10 UTC
All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions

100

Robert S. Wistrich

commemoration of the Holocaust) were not only conditioned by the

traditional Jewish distaste for converts to Christianity. As many Jews
pointed out, Edith Stein had been martyred because she was "racially
a Jew" (according to the Nuremberg race laws of the Nazi regime) not
as a consequence of her Catholic faith. To claim her as a Catholicmartyr of the Holocaust did violence to the facts; and if this action was
designed to show respect for the Shoah, why do this by sanctifying a
person who had chosen to leave Judaism? How could she legitimately
symbolize the Jewish martyrs of the Holocaust?
For many Jews, this smacked once again of efforts by the Vatican
to "Christianize" the Shoah-to transform it into the "Golgotha of the
contemporary world"-to use the Pope's own terminology of twenty
years ago. It raised once more the spectre of rival and antagonistic
memorializations of Auschwitz,50exacerbated in recent years by the epidemic of crosses planted at the site of the death camp by militant Polish Catholics. True, this did not have the approval and encouragement
of the Vatican, but both Rome and the Polish government have had
difficulty in quelling such expressions of Polish Catholic nationalismdesigned to claim Auschwitz as being, above all, the site of Polish
martyrdom.
In the United States, too, there are also militant Catholic voices to
be heard, that lay claim to the crown of supreme victimhood. A lengthy
advertisement in The New York Times (April 1999) by the Catholic
League for Religious and Civil Rights, recalls that apart from six million Jews, there were five million "others" who were also killed, "most
of whom were Catholic." This figure includes three million Polish Catholics and the impression is thereby created that they were murdered
by the Nazis not because they were Poles but as apart of a systematic
planned war against Catholicsbecause of their faith.5"Hitler and other
leading Nazis are presented as if they had deliberately targeted Catholics for mass killing, which is historically quite misleading, not to say
false.
The other side of this propaganda offensive is to repeatedly emphasize the "unfair accusations being levelled today against Pope Pius
XII." This point has even been raised by Cardinal Edward Cassidy, who
has stated that "persons very dear to the Catholic faithful have been
condemned without proof"-almost certainly a reference to Pope Pius
XII. As the Vatican's top liaison official to the Jews, one cannot imagine
that he would have made such remarks without prior consultation with
Pope John Paul II. Cassidy also expressed forceful criticism of Jewish
organizations (in particular, the World Jewish Congress) for being "involved in a systematic campaign to denigrate the Catholic Church" and
for casting aspersions on the Vatican and the present Pope. Recent

This content downloaded from 193.126.124.201 on Sat, 14 Mar 2015 18:42:10 UTC
All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions

The Vatican and the Shoah

101

publications of the World Jewish Congress claiming the Church was

involved in conspiracies after World War II to help the Nazis escape
Europe seem to have especially aroused the Vatican's anger, along with
the severe criticism of "We Remember.""52Cardinal Cassidy also rebuked Jewish groups for not responding to his proposal to assemble a
Jewish-Catholic team of scholars to jointly study the twelve published
volumes of Vatican wartime records. In December 1999, a Historical
Commission of six such scholars (three Catholics and three Jews)-of
whom the present author was one-was created in New York with the
blessing of the Vatican itself. In October 2000, our group presented a
preliminary report to Rome that called for opening the archives in
order that we could pursue our work more thoroughly. Since then,
there has been complete silence from the Vatican Secretariat of State.53
There appears to be a concerted effort in some Catholic scholarship
today, with regard to Pope Pius XII, to insist that he did not bow
to Nazis and Fascists and consciously took the more courageous path
of direct action, thereby saving many hundreds of thousands of Jewish
lives. This militant position, pioneered by the late Reverend Robert A.
Graham (an American Jesuit scholar entrusted by the Vatican with editing its wartime documents) not only exculpates Pius XII from any fault
but even eulogizes him as one of the greatest benefactors and rescuers
of Jews during World War II.54 Small wonder that the present Pope
and the Vatican seem determined to place Pius XII on the fast track
to sainthood. Whether the Jewish-Catholic dialogue would survive intact the implementation of such a controversial policy is an open
question.
Despite these continuing tensions, no impartial observer can deny
the sincerity of Pope John Paul II's resolution to push forward JewishChristian dialogue in the context of preparations for the third millennium. In a general audience (May 5, 1999) in Rome, the Pope hailed
"the vivid dialogical dimension strongly present in contemporary neoJewish literature" that had deeply influenced the philosophy and theology of the twentieth century. He also stressed the "long period of salvation history which Christians and Jews can view together," the debt of
the Church to "the liturgical wealth of the Jewish people," the "intrinsic
value of the Old Testament" and the imperative that "the seeds infected with anti-Judaism and anti-Semitism will never again take root
in human hearts." No less significantly, he looked to Jerusalem as "the
symbolic place of the eschatological pilgrimage of peoples united in
their praise of the Most High."55In April 2000, during a memorable
pilgrimage to Israel, Palestine, and the Holy City of Jerusalem, he expressed his deep pain at the horrors of the Shoah while visiting Yad
Vashem. But it was his wonderful gesture of placing a note in the crev-

This content downloaded from 193.126.124.201 on Sat, 14 Mar 2015 18:42:10 UTC
All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions

RobertS. Wistrich

102

ice of the western wall of the ancient Jewish Temple asking forgiveness
for all the wrong done to the Jewish people, that will remain engraved
in its memory as a positive symbol of his pontificate.
HEBREWUNIVERSITY
OFJERUSALEM

NOTES

1. All quotations are taken from the text of Pope John Paul's cover letter
to "My Venerable Brother," Cardinal Edward Idris Cassidy, dated March 12,
1998. The full text of the Vatican Document (dated March 16, 1998) which
includes the Pope's letter, was released in Rome by the Commission for Religious Relations with the Jews.
2. See John Paul's Address to the October 1997 Vatican Symposium on
"The Christian Roots of Anti-Judaism," L'OsservatoreRomano, November 1,
1997, p. 6.
3. For this and other information about his early life, see the controversial
article by James Carroll, "The Silence" in The New Yorker,April 7, 1997. Carroll,
a liberal Catholic, is especially critical of Papal claims to absolutism and infallibility. See his recent book, Constantine'sSword:The Churchand theJews (Boston,
2001).
4. For a discussion of the background to Cardinal Hlond's 1936 Pastoral
Letter and of Polish Catholic anti-Semitism in general, see Ronald Modras, The
CatholicChurchand Antisemitismin Poland, 1933-1939, (Oxford, 1994), pp. 315,
345-346.
5. For information on Sapieha (who ordained Karl Wojtyla as a priest in
Cracow) and on Kolbe-the founder of the Knights of the Immaculate in
Rome-see Modras, ibid., The Catholic Church and Antisemitism in Poland pp.
41-42, 63-64, 398-399. To what extent Kolbe was an anti-Semite can be argued but not his militant struggle in Poland against atheism, freemasonry, secularism, and the corrupting influence of "modernist"Jewry.
6. Monty Penkower, "Auschwitz, the Papacy, and Poland's 'Jewish Problem,'" Midstream, Vol. 36, No. 6 (August-September 1990), pp. 14-19 and
Geoffrey Wigoder, "The Affair of the Carmelite Convent at Auschwitz," Survey
of Jewish Affairs (London, 1990), pp. 187-204 for two Jewish views of the dispute.
7. For a variety of critical responses see the following: The New YorkTimes
(editorial) March 18, 1998; David Rosen, "Not good enough," TheJerusalem
Post, March 20, 1998; Alan Dershowitz, "Too Little," ibid., March 31, 1998;
"With Burning Anxiety," The New Republic, April 6, 1998. See also A. James
Rudin (National Interreligious Affairs Director of the American Jewish Committee-henceforth AJC) "Holocaust Statement lacks feel of contrition" in Portland PressHerald (Maine), April 4, 1998. Rudin repeated some of his strictures
in the presence of Cardinal Cassidy at the AJC's 92nd Annual Meeting on May
15, 1998 in New York City.
8. For example, Gordon Zahn, GermanCatholicsand Hitler's Wars.A Study

This content downloaded from 193.126.124.201 on Sat, 14 Mar 2015 18:42:10 UTC
All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions

The Vaticanand the Shoah

103

in Social Control (New York, 1962) and Friedrich Heer, Der Glaube des Adolf
Hitler. Anatomie einer politischenReligiositat (Munich, 1968).
9. For a recent summary of the complicities of German Catholics (and
Protestants) in the Third Reich, see John Weiss, Ideologyof Death. Why the Holocaust Happened in Germany(Chicago, 1996), pp. 350-356.
10. On Cardinal Bertram, see Rudolf Lill, "Zum Verhalten des deutschen
Katholizismus gegeniiber den Juden in der Zeit der Weimarer Republik," in
Judaism and Christianityunder the Impact of National Socialism (1919-1945), ed.
Otto Dov Kulka and Paul Mendes-Flohr, published by the Historical Society of
Israel (June, 1982), pp. 103-130 and Chris Manus, "Roman Catholicism and
the Nazis: A review of the attitude of the Catholic Church during the persecutions of the Jews in Hitler's Europe," in Rememberingfor the Future.Jews and
ChristiansDuring and After the Holocaust (Oxford, 1988), pp. 93-108. For the
broader picture see inter alia, John S. Conway, The Nazi Persecution of the
Churches under Hitler (London, 1968); and Ernst Helmreich, The German
Churchesunder Hitler (Detroit, 1979).
11. On the other hand, on July 24, 1933, Faulhaber sent a personal letter
to Hitler, praising him for having achieved in six months what German parliaments and political parties had failed to do in sixty years-namely to sign a
Concordat with the Church. The letter ended: "God preserve the Reich Chancellor for our people." See Friedrich Heer, God'sFirst Love. ChristiansandJews
over Two Thousand Years(London, 1970), p. 309 for a highly critical view of the
Papacy and official Catholic behavior before, during and after the Holocaustwritten by a dissident Austrian Catholic.
12. Heer, ibid., p. 369.
13. For a full account of Pius XI's opposition to fascist and Nazi racialism
(while continuing to espouse traditional Catholic prejudices against Jews and
Judaism) see Georges Passelecq and Bernard Suchecky, The Hidden Encyclical
of Pius XI (New York, 1997). This book was originally published in France in
1995. For the 1937 encyclical, see Heinz-Albert Raem, Pius XI und der Nationalsozialismus:Die Enzyklika "MitBrennenderSorge"vom 14 Marz 1937 (Paderborn,
1979). Still useful for the Italian dimension is the older study by Daniel A.
Binchy, Churchand State in Fascist Italy (London, 1940).
14. The denunciation of "paganism" by the Papacy intensified after the
Rome-Berlin axis of 1936. It was, of course, inclusive of Bolshevism-seen by
Popes Pius XI and XII, as the supreme threat to the Roman church in the
1930s. There was no difference between the two Popes when it came to denouncing Nazi myths of blood and race. See Peter C. Kent, "A Tale of Two
Popes: Pius XI, Pius XII and the Rome-Berlin Axis," Journal of Contemporary
History, Vol. 23 (1988), p. 594.
15. The 1937 encyclical deplored attempts by totalitarian regimes to divinize concepts like race, nation, and state, turning them into an "idolatrous
cult." Such idolatry or statolatry was a perversion and falsification of "the order
of things created and commanded by God." See Peter Matheson, ed, The Third
Reich and the Christian Churches(Grand Rapids, Michigan, 1981), p. 69.
16. The 1939 encyclical SummiPontificatus apparently took over some parts
of an unpublished encyclical, prepared for Pius XI, by two Jesuit priests-the
American, Father John La Farge, and the German Catholic theologian, Gustav

This content downloaded from 193.126.124.201 on Sat, 14 Mar 2015 18:42:10 UTC
All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions

104

Robert S. Wistrich

Gundlach. This "hidden" encyclical (written in 1938) was particularly insistent

on the incompatibility of racism with Catholic doctrine. Nevertheless, even this
text avoided direct reference to the anti-Semitic legislation against Jews (and
their persecution) by Nazi Germany and Fascist Italy. Pius XII shared the thrust
of the "hidden" encyclical's emphasis on "the unity of the human race" but the
document is decidedly equivocal about the Jews. See Passelecq and Suchecky,
The Hidden Encyclical, pp. 115-122, 138-151, and 246-259 for Vatican responses in the 1930s to Nazi and fascist racism. For the anti-Jewish tone of the
Jesuit periodical La Civilta Cattolica(published in Rome) in this period, see The
Hidden Encyclical, pp. 123-137. Also Frederick Brown, "The Hidden Encyclical," The New Republic,April 15, 1996, pp. 27-31. A good overview is provided
by Michael R. Marrus, "The Vatican on Racism and Anti-Semitism, 1938-1939:
A New Look at a Might-Have-Been," Holocaustand GenocideStudies, Vol. 7, No.
3, (Winter 1997), pp. 378-395.
17. For an examination of Nazi "paganism" and attitudes to Christianity,
see Robert Wistrich, Hitler's Apocalypse,Jews and the Nazi Legacy (New York,
1985), pp. 136-153.
18. Franklin H. Littell, "ChristianAntisemitism and the Holocaust," inJudaism and Christianity,Kulka and Mendes-Flohr, eds., p. 462.
19. See Uriel Tal, "Nazism as a Political Faith," The Jerusalem Quarterly
(Spring, 1980), No. 15, pp. 79-90.
20. For the facts about French Catholic attitudes in this period, see Michael
R. Marrus, "French Churches and the persecution of Jews in France, 19401944," in Remembering
for the Future, pp. 307-346. Also Michael R. Marrus and
Robert O. Paxton, VichyFrance and theJews (New York, 1983), pp. 197-203.
21. For a few examples of the considerable literature on this topic, see
James Parkes, The Conflict of the Church and the Synagogue (Cleveland, 1961);
Pierre Pierrard, Juifs et CatholiquesFrangais (Paris, 1970); Rosemary Ruether,
Faith and Fratricide(New York, 1974); Hyam Maccoby, The SacredExecutioner:
Human Sacrificeand the Legacy of Guilt (London, 1982); Alan Davies, ed., Antisemitismand the Foundations of Christianity(New York, 1979); Gavin Langmuir,
History,Religion and Antisemitism(Berkeley, 1990); and Robert S. Wistrich, Antisemitism. The LongestHatred (London, 1992).
22. Wistrich, Hitler's Apocalypse,p. 149.
23. H.R. Trevor-Roper (ed.) Hitler's Table Talk, 1941-1994 (London, 1973),
p. 722.
24. Milton Himmelfarb, "No Hitler, No Holocaust," Commentary(March
1984), pp. 37-43.
25. Marrus, "French Churches," pp. 316, 318, 320-4. Initially, the Catholic
hierarchy supported P6tain's revolution nationale, hoping that it would lead to
the re-christianization of France. According to P6tain's ambassador in Rome,
L6on Berard, the Vatican had no objection to Vichy's racist anti-Jewish laws as
long as they were applied with '"justiceand charity" (a contradiction in terms,
one might have thought!). There was no condemnation from Rome of the
fundamental injustice behind such discriminatory legislation. Indeed, the Vatican appeared to find the numerus clausus imposed in France (and other Catholic lands after 1939) on Jews to be acceptable-a policy of exclusion which
eliminated them from the army, the civil service, the universities, the free pro-

This content downloaded from 193.126.124.201 on Sat, 14 Mar 2015 18:42:10 UTC
All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions

The Vaticanand the Shoah

105

fessions and of course, from public life. Church opposition in France only
seriously began with the deportations of French Jews in the summer of 1942.
26. See Shimon Redlich, "Metropolitan Andrei Sheptys'kyi, Ukrainians and
Jews during and after the Holocaust," in Rememberingfor the Future, pp. 197206.
27. See Peter Steinfels, "Beliefs," The New YorkTimes, March 21, 1998, also
Thomas O'Dwyer "Vatican's struggle to save the church's soul," TheJerusalem
Post, March 20, 1998 and Paul Elie, "John Paul's Jewish Dilemma," The New
YorkTimesMagazine, April 26, 1998, pp. 34-39.
28. Liat Collins, "MKs oppose beatification of Pope Pius XII," TheJerusalem
Post, April 1, 1998. What is evident from the controversy is the degree to which
more than thirty years after Vatican II, Pius XII's role between 1939 and 1945
still remains a pivotal issue in any discussion of Christian complicity in the Holocaust and a source of mutual bitterness. See Commentary,
June/July 1999, letters.
29. Patrick J. Buchanan, "The Smearing of Pius XII," New YorkPost, April
1, 1998. Buchanan quoted, among other witnesses, the Chief Rabbi of Rome,
Israel Zolli (who on February 13, 1945 converted, with his wife, to Roman
Catholicism and took the name of "Eugenio," which was Pius XII's Christian
name) but also the Chief Rabbi of Bucharest. His prime witness (as in other
Catholic apologias) was Golda Meir-then Foreign Minister of Israel-who cabled Rome on Pius XII's death, recalling that the pope's voice had been raised
for Jewish victims in their hour of need. For Buchanan it was evident that Pius
XII has not only been libelled but that left-wing anti-Catholics have engaged in
a "Big Lie" of vast proportions, in vilifying him.
30. Examples include the regular letters and advertisements in the American press of William A. Donahue (President of the Catholic League for Religious and Civil Rights), those of New York lawyer Kevin Doyle (e.g. his letter
to The New YorkTimes, March 22, 1998) and the indefatigable Sister Margherita
Marchione of Morristown, New Jersey. See Paul Elie, "John Paul's Jewish Dilemma," p. 37.
31. See Kenneth L. Woodward, "In Defense of Pius XI," Newsweek,March
30, 1998, p. 35. Woodward maintained that in "choosing diplomacy over protest Pius XII had his priorities right." Apparently, those who think differently
and believe that the wartime pope failed to live up to his role as "Vicar of
Christ" are "revisionist" historians!
32. Remarks by Cardinal Cassidy to the American Jewish Committee,
Breakfast Plenary, held in Washington D.C., May 15, 1998, relating to the Vatican document.
33. On Hochhuth, see the interesting assessment of the controversy by
Hannah Arendt, "Le vicaire, ou silence coupable?" (23 Fevrier 1964) in Hannah Arendt, AuschwitzetJerusalem(Paris, 1991), pp. 221-231.
34. See Guenther Lewy, The Catholic Churchand Nazi Germany(New York,
1965). Saul Friedlander, Pius XII and the Third Reich (New York 1966) and
Carlo Falconi, The Silence of Pius XII (London, 1970). Also John F. Morley,
VaticanDiplomacyand theJews during the Holocaust (New York, 1980). All these
accounts critical of Vatican policy during the war years. For an apologetic defense, see Anthony Rhodes, The Vatican in the Age of the Dictators 1922-1945
(London, 1973).

This content downloaded from 193.126.124.201 on Sat, 14 Mar 2015 18:42:10 UTC
All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions

106

Robert S. Wistrich

35. For an insight into the thinking behind Catholic anti-Judaism in the
1930s, see Passelecq and Suchecky, The Hidden Encyclical,pp. 123-137.
36. For Vatican policy on baptized Jews, see Morley, VaticanDiplomacy,pp.
196-197, 201. Fascist and Nazi policy against intermarriage and the conversion
of Jews to Catholicism struck at the exclusive sacramental structure of the
Church. The Vatican could not accept the rationale of racial laws without denying its core doctrines and conversionary ambitions.
37. See Livia Rothkirchen, "The Stand of the Churches vis-a-visthe persecution of the Jews of Slovakia," in Judaism and Christianity,Kulka and MendesFlohr, eds., pp. 273-286.
38. On the complicity of the Vatican in the Ustashe regime, see Menachem
Shelah, "The Catholic Church in Croatia, the Vatican and the murder of the
Croatian Jews," in Rememberingfor the Future, pp. 266-280. Nevertheless, it
should be noted that the Germans began to see the Vatican as an obstacle to
their exterminationist policy in the Balkans from mid-1942 and the Archbishop
of Croatia as a "friend of the Jews" as well as being hostile to National Socialism. See Jonathan Steinberg, All or Nothing. TheAxis and the Holocaust 1941-43
(London, 1991), pp. 79-80.
39. Meir Michaelis, "The Current Debate over Fascist Racial Policy" in Robert S. Wistrich and Sergio della Pergola (eds.), FascistAnti-Semitismand the Italian Jews (Jerusalem, 1995), pp. 86-93. Michaelis takes an extremely charitable
view of Pius XII's policy.
40. Pius XI's comments are cited by Anthony Rhodes, op.cit., p. 339. He
declared that anti-Semitism was "incompatible" with the lofty thought that
Abraham was the Patriarch and forefather of Catholics. Anti-Semitism was "a
movement with which we Christians can have nothing to do. No, I say to you
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." This
was the most unequivocal statement on the subject by any pope before the
Holocaust but unfortunately it was not published by the Vatican newspaper
and had no authoritative, official status.
41. For SD reports on the churches, see Heinz Boberach, Berichte des SD
und der Gestapoiiber Kirchenund Kirchenvolkin Deutschland 1939-1944 (Mainz,
1971). These reports are used by Donald J. Dietrich to argue that in the eyes
of the German security services, the Catholic church did resist Nazism more
than is often assumed. See his article "Catholic Resistance in the Third Reich,"
in Holocaust and GenocideStudies, Vol. 3, No. 2 (1988), pp. 171-186.
42. See Morley, Vatican Diplomacy,p. 194.
43. Ibid, p. 206.
44. Anthony Rhodes, Vatican in the Age of the Dictators,pp. 344-345.
45. There are no reliable figures on this topic and as long as the Vatican
does not permit free, independent, and critical access to the relevant archives,
speculation rather than solid facts will dominate the discussion. One of the
highest figures given was that of the Israeli historian Pinchas E. Lapide (a former Israeli consul in Italy) in his book The Last ThreePopes and theJews (London, 1967) who claimed that the Catholic Church had saved about 800,000
Jews from certain death during the Shoah. This is far from being accepted by
a consensus of historians and lacks any empirical basis.

This content downloaded from 193.126.124.201 on Sat, 14 Mar 2015 18:42:10 UTC
All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions

The Vaticanand the Shoah

107

46. See Pope John Paul II, Spiritual Pilgrimage. Texts on Jews and Judaism
1979-1995 (New York, 1995) edited by Eugene J. Fisher and Leon Klenicki.
47. Darcy O'Brien, The Hidden Pope (New York, 1998) provides a moving
account of Karol Woytyla's friendship with his Jewish classmate from Wadowice, Jerzy Kluger, which has continued to the present day. Kluger survived
the war and lives in Rome, where he still periodically meets with the Pope.
48. John Paul II, Spiritual Pilgrimage, p. 62.
49. Henri Tincq, L'Etoile et la Croix.Jean-Paul II-Isragl:l'explication (Paris,
1993), pp. 151-162 for the background to the Edith Stein affair.
50. Ibid., pp. 163-220 for the Pope's relationship to the memory of Auschwitz and the international controversy over the Carmelite nuns.
51. "Remembering the Holocaust's Five Million 'Others,"' signed William
A. Donahue, President. The New YorkTimes, April 23, 1999, p. A25.
52. "Catholic-Jewish Ties Hit Choppy Waters," Jewish Week (New York)
March 19, 1999.
53. Jewish groups have long demanded access to the Vatican's archives to
better study its actions during the Holocaust, but this has been refused. On
the current situation, see the interview with me in Der Spiegel (Hamberg) 14
April 2001, pp. 64-66.
54. Margherita Marchione, Yoursis a Precious Witness.Memoirs ofJews and
Catholicsin WartimeItaly (Mahwah, NewJersey, 1997) is a good example of this
literature. In her prologue, she admits that her book is not an historical analysis but "an apologia in defence of Pope Pius XII, who could not take a public
stand against the Nazis without endangering the lives of other human beings."
The focus in Marchione's book is on the rescue of Italian Jews but the credit
for these noble actions is given exclusively to the Catholic Church-not a position most historians would share. Much more critical views can be found in
Giovanni Miccoli, I Dilemmi e i Silenzi di Pio XII. Vaticano,SecondaGuerraMondiale e Shoah (Milano, 2000); Michael Phayer, The Catholic Churchand the Holocaust, 1930-1965 (Bloomington, Indiana, 2000); Susan Zuccotti, UnderHis Very
Windows:the Vatican and the Holocaust in Italy (Bloomington, Indiana, 2001);
and in my forthcoming book, Hitler and the Holocaust (New York, 2001).
55. Pope John Paul II, general audience in Rome, May 5, 1999. See L'OsservatoreRomano, May 5, 1999.

This content downloaded from 193.126.124.201 on Sat, 14 Mar 2015 18:42:10 UTC
All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions