Pope, Concordat and Holocaust

 Pope Pius XII was “a Germanophile who had been schooled as a diplomat: Treaties (particularly one he'd drafted between Germany and Rome in 1933) and the Communist threat were his main priorities. Protection of Vatican City from Allied or Axis bombs was another.” [1]

Prof. Friedlander describes the Pope's stance as “selective appeasement” of Hitler: whilst Pius raised some objections to Nazi measures, his concern did not extend to their killing of the Jews. [2] The Israeli Government seems to agree. Social Affairs Minister Isaac Herzog said in 2008 that the beatification of Pius XII is “inacceptable” because the Vatican knew full well about the arrest and deportation of European Jews, and that, “to date, there has been no proof brought to light that the Pope took any action whatsoever as would behoove the status of the Holy See”. [3]

In 1999 the Vatican granted an International Catholic-Jewish Historical Commission access to a limited selection of the documents concerning Pius XII and the Holocaust. The next year they issued a fascinating report, requesting proper access. This the Vatican would not allow. Unable to control the real scholars, recourse has been had to apologists for a veritable “beatification industry”. However, as Prof. Edward Kessler politely put it, “The Vatican will not achieve credibility on the question of Pius XII's wartime record by relying solely on the work of defenders of Pius XII, some of whom engage in questionable research”. [4]  (Nor, one might add, will they get it by attacks on competent historians like Phayer whose works cannot be used to promote canonisation. [5])

Now the Vatican appears to be trying to sidestep the evidence completely by drawing a distinction between the Pope's private piety and the morality of his actions. It asserts that the decree on his “heroic virtues” [6] was issued “because he is a model for Christian life, not because of the historical decisions he made”. [7] This manoeuvre was allowing the Vatican to stall on making accessible the wartime documents on him no sooner than 2014 [8] and now that has been shoved off to 2015 at the earliest. [9] Not only is the evidence still withheld, the present pope is also claiming that Pius XII's ostensible help to the Jews was “in a hidden and discreet way”. [10] In other words, secret actions purportedly described by secret evidence....

In February 2010 the Vatican announced with great fanfare that it would be posting online some documents about Pius XII that had been “previously published” (!) [11] The next month, however, a group of prominent Catholic historians sent a letter to the Pope to “implore” him to delay the beatification proceedings until the archives had been properly opened. [12] With great delicacy they asserted that, regarding the Church's long traditon of antisemitism, “it is challenging to separate Pope Pius XII from this legacy”....

Notes
 

---

 ●  Sergio I. Minerbi, “The silence was deafening”, Haaretz, 3 September 2010. Prof Minerbi has been ambassador for Israel and published a dozen books, among them The Vatican and Zionism (1990). This is a very astute article. 

[...] Cardinal Bertram had published, on March 28, 1933, a "proclamation by the German bishops" about Nazism that had the effect of retracting their earlier statement regarding the irreconcilability of National Socialism and Catholicism.

So the condemnation of Nazism was lifted, with "nothing given in return" by the Nazis, according to Wolf. [...] Wolf thinks that Pacelli could have "dictated hard conditions for those concessions," and that he could have demanded the signature of a concordat, with all the guarantees that would have provided for Catholic institutions in Germany.

Not long after, a concordat was signed, on July 20, 1933, giving "Hitler's government its first agreement under international law and a not inconsiderable foreign policy success."  Read more

●  Julia Gorin, “Mass grave of history: Vatican's WWII identity crisis”, The Jerusalem Post, 22 February 2010. This essay by an expert on the Balkans presents a wider perspective than is usual.
 

The controversy over the canonization of Pope Pius XII concerns whether he spoke out enough against the slaughter of Jews during World War II. But that question is a red herring when trying to grasp the big picture of the Vatican's role during the war.

The real question is whether the Vatican supported the world order, or at least aspects of it, that the Third Reich promised to bring, a world order in which dead Jews were collateral damage - which Pius indeed regretted. The answer can be found in a region of Europe that is generally ignored despite being the nexus of world wars: the Balkans.

Catholic Church, looking for a bulwark against communism, supported what became genocidal regime of Nazi satellite Croatia. Read more

 

  ●  Gregory S. Paul, “Why Making Pope Pius XII a Saint is a Very Bad Idea”, OpEdNews, 20 April 2010.

The replacement of the German monarchy after the Great War by democracy appalled the churches, Catholic as well as Protestant. They were bought off when the Weimer constitution directed about a tenth of income tax revenues to the church that a given taxpayer belonged to. The objections by the Mother Church suddenly lessened as Germany became a cash cow for Rome. Since Catholics made up a third of the population their institution got about a third of the income, amounting to about a billion per year in current dollars (still running, the system currently delivers about six billion per annum). Read more

Gregory S. Paul, “The great scandal: Christianity's role in the rise of the Nazis: Part 1 and Part 2”, Free Inquiry, Volume 23, Number 4, October-December 2003.

 

●  Paul Callan, “Pope haunted by Hitler”, Daily Express, 26 July 2008, is a review of Gerard Noel's 2008 book, Pius XII.

[Pope Pius XII explained his inaction as follows] “There are many millions of the Catholic faithful whose minds have been captured by Hitler – and these blinded souls would be lost to the Holy Mother Church were our actions to be overt or extreme.” [...]

Hitler himself despised the power wielded by the Church (despite having been raised as a Catholic himself) as he saw it as a challenge to Nazism. The Führer said of the Church: “While always talking about love and humanity they [clerics] are, in fact, interested in only one thing, power – power over men’s souls and hence over their lives.”  Read more
 

●  H. Brand, “The Silence of the Vatican and the Plight of the Jews”, New Politics, vol. 8, no. 2 (new series), whole no. 30, Winter 2001. [H. Brand describes himself as a “sometime lay teacher of Jewish history”].

After the Concordat between the Nazi regime and the Holy See had been concluded in the summer of 1933, Cardinal Faulhaber sent a handwritten note to Hitler, stating:
“What the old parliaments and parties did not accomplish in 60 years, your statesmanlike foresight has achieved in six months. For Germany's prestige in East and West . . . this handshake with the papacy, the greatest moral power in the history of the world, is a feat of immeasurable blessing.”  Read more

 

● Joseph Loconte, “The Decade of Appeasement”, The Daily Standard, 7 February 2008. [Dr. Loconte is a senior fellow at Pepperdine University's School of Public Policy.]

Germany's Catholic Centre Party, backed by the Vatican, swiftly supported unrestricted powers for Hitler and the suspension of the Weimar Constitution. The editor of the Catholic journal Augsburger Postzeitung summarized the mood: “The positive attitude of the German Catholics to the new state is no longer impeded by religious scruples.” The same might be said of the Holy See, which in April received Nazi leaders Franz von Papen and Hermann Goring with full honours. Within months Pope Pius XI signed a Concordat with Hitler. Intended as a shield for the church, the agreement lent Hitler international credibility, criminalized Catholic political activity, and demoralized bishops and priests who opposed Nazi rule.  Read more

 

● John Cornwell, “Hitler's Pope”. The full text of Cornwell's abridged version of Hitler’s Pope, as published in Vanity Fair, October 1999. [John Cornwell is a British journalist, science historian, religious affairs commentator and devoted Roman Catholic who once studied for the priesthood. He originally set out to write an exoneration of Pius XII and was therefore granted exclusive access to restricted Vatican and Jesuit archives. His scholarship is unimpeachable, making it necessary to oppose his conclusions by other means: “an American nun once tried to throttle him on live TV”.]

The Reich Concordat granted Pacelli the right to impose the new Code of Canon Law on Catholics in Germany and promised a number of measures favourable to Catholic education, including new schools. In exchange, Pacelli collaborated in the withdrawal of Catholics from political and social activity. […] Hitler insisted that his signature on the concordat would depend on the Centre Party's voting for the Enabling Act, the legislation that was to give him dictatorial powers. […] Next, Hitler insisted on the “voluntary” disbanding of the Centre Party, the last truly parliamentary force in Germany. Again, Pacelli was the prime mover in this tragic Catholic surrender. […] In the political vacuum created by its surrender, Catholics in the millions joined the Nazi Party, believing that it had the support of the Pope.  Read more

 

● Guenther Lewy, “Catholic political ideology: the union of theory and practice”, Chapter 12 (the final one) of The Catholic Church and Nazi Germany, 1964. (A few more quotes from this important book can be found by searching for “Lewy” here). [Guenter Lewy left his native Germany as a boy of fifteen in 1939 and is now Professor Emeritus of Political Science at the University of Massachusetts.]

Natural law is abstract and vague to the point of making its application to concrete cases extremely difficult. It requires an authoritative interpreter, the Church. But this means that the gap between the abstract principles and the case at issue will be closed by answers tied up and almost predetermined by the interests of the Church as an institution. […]
● The German Catholics in 1937 were told that resistance to the Nazi state was sinful;
● Spanish Catholics at the same time were urged to support the rebellion of General Franco against the Second Spanish Republic.
● In World War II Catholics serving in both of the warring factions were assured that they were fighting a just war.
● The institution of slavery was at one time defended by leading theologians as in consonance with natural law; today, in an age of colonial revolts and assaults upon all forms of discrimination, the Church stands for full equality.
All these positions have been justified on the basis of the same natural law premises. […] As a Protestant theologian, John C. Bennett, has expressed it […], “Natural law plus prudence equals flexibility”.  Read more

 

● Michael Mannion, “Book Reviews: The Catholic Church and Nazi Germany” (an introduction and ten short book reviews), Journal of the Mindshift Institute 2003. [Michael Mannion is a writer whose interest in anti-Semitism appears to have been piqued by being taught in Catholic schools in New York City in the 1950s that Jews were Christ-killers.]

The Concordat of 1933 made it apparent to all concerned that the Vatican did not take a hostile attitude toward Hitler. The agreement conferred legitimacy on the Nazi government. Under the terms of the Concordat, the Vatican was assured its property and wealth would be secure under the Nazi regime and the Hitler government agreed to continue to pay subsidies to the Church. In addition, the independence of the Catholic school system was protected from the Nazis and Catholic parents could choose to send their children to Catholic schools instead of state schools.

In return, the Catholic Church taught obedience to Hitler. Article 32 of the Concordat gave Hitler what he really wanted: the exclusion of the Catholic clergy from all political activity. Catholic clergy were forbidden to be political candidates, political office-holders or to support any politicians.  Read more

 

● Gregory S. Paul, “The Great Scandal: Christianity's Role in the Rise of the Nazis”, Free Inquiry, Volume 23, Number 4, October/November 2003. [Gregory S. Paul is a palaeontologist whose interest in evolution prompted him to look at whether there was any link between the religiosity of a society and how well that society functioned. The full study can be found in an academic journal from an American Jesuit University.]

[…] Having failed in repeated attempts to negotiate the ardently desired concordat with a sceptical Weimar democracy, [the Vatican and] leading Catholics saw their chance to get what they had been seeking from an agreeable member of the church—that is, Hitler—at an historical moment when he and fascism in general were regarded as a natural ally by many Catholic leaders. Negotiations were initiated by both sides, modelled on the mutually advantageous 1929 concordat between Mussolini and the Vatican. […]

Evidence indicates that the Vatican was pleased to negotiate away all traces of the [Catholic Central Party], for which it had no more use, save as a bargaining chip. In this the Holy See treated [the German Catholic Party] no differently than it had the Italian Catholic party, which it negotiated away in the Concordat with Mussolini.  Read more

 

● Michael Phayer, The Catholic Church and the Holocaust, 1930–1965, Indiana University Press, 2000. [Michael Phayer is Professor of History at Marquette University.] Three short online book reviews – excerpts and links below:

● From a review by Robert A. Krieg, Professor of Theology, University of Notre Dame in Theology Today Jan 2002:

His thesis is that Pius XII privately helped Jews only to the extent that his efforts did not jeopardize two major priorities in his foreign policy. First, judging that the Church's primary enemy was not Nazism but Communism, the pope wanted to maintain good ties with Germans and their government so that he could work with them to resist the spread of Communism into Europe. Second, concerned to protect Rome from destruction during the war, he did not want to say anything that might bring down the Luftwaffe's bombs upon Vatican City. Concentrating his account on two historical eras (1939-1945 and 1945-1965), Phayer treats Pius XII's words, actions, and influence on the Church in relation to the Holocaust.
Phayer's argument in support of his thesis is convincing.  Read more

● From a review by Stanley Hoffmann, Professor of Government at Harvard University, in Foreign Affairs, May/June 2001:

A comprehensive and deeply disturbing volume. Phayer describes in detail Pope Pius XII's preference for quiet diplomacy with Hitler and his regime, his anxiety about the Catholic Church's fate, his solicitude for Germany's Catholics, and his conviction that communism posed a greater threat than did Nazism. Pius not only failed to make public his knowledge of Nazi atrocities against Poles or the Croat massacres of Serbs and Jews; when Rome's Jews were sent to Auschwitz in 1944, he focused only on protecting the city from Allied bombings and a possible communist insurgency. And Pius was no exception – many church authorities also failed to speak out.  Read more

● From a review in Publishers Weekly:

Phayer makes an important addition to the literature of Holocaust studies: he provides evidence that Pope Pius XII (who reigned over the Catholic Church from 1939 to 1958) knew in early 1942 what was happening to Europe's Jews (and to non-Jews in Croatia and Poland), yet he remained silent. The pope, he argues, was a Germanophile who had been schooled as a diplomat: treaties (particularly one he'd drafted between Germany and Rome in 1933) and the Communist threat were his main priorities. Protection of Vatican City from Allied or Axis bombs was another.  Read more

 

● Saul Friedlander, The Years of Extermination: Nazi Germany and the Jews 1939-1945. [ Prof. Friedlander is a Holocaust survivor, Pulitzer Prize winner and Israeli historian.] Two online book reviews – excerpts and links below:

● From a review by Dr. Steven Welch:

Pope Pius XII comes in for heavy criticism for his "selective appeasement" of the Nazis. While the Pope sought in some cases to raise objections to Nazi measures, his concern did not extend to the mass murder perpetrated against the Jews.  Read more

● From a review by Prof. Jeffrey Herf:

The overwhelming majority of Catholic Church leaders who had previously denounced the Nazi murders of the mentally ill and physically handicapped said nothing about the deportations of Jews from Germany. Friedländer concludes that between 1939 and 1945 the vast majority of church officials remained silent. They made clear and ugly distinctions between a tiny minority of Jews who converted to Christianity and the vast majority who did not.  Read more

 

---

List of articles mentioned above:

• H. Brand, "The Silence of the Vatican and the Plight of the Jews" , New Politics, vol. 8, no. 2 (new series), whole no. 30, Winter 2001. 

• Joseph Loconte, "The Decade of Appeasement", The Daily Standard, 7 February 2008. 

• John Cornwell, "Hitler's Pope". The full text of Cornwell's abridged version of Hitler’s Pope, as published in Vanity Fair, October 1999. 
   
• Guenther Lewy, "Catholic political ideology: the union of theory and practice" , Chapter 12 (the final one) of The Catholic Church and Nazi Germany, 1964.
   
• Michael Mannion, "Book Reviews: The Catholic Church and Nazi Germany" (an introduction and ten short book reviews) 2003. 
   
• Gregory S. Paul, "The Great Scandal: Christianity's Role in the Rise of the Nazis", Free Inquiry, Volume 23, Number 4, October/November 2003.
   
• Michael Phayer, The Catholic Church and the Holocaust, 1930-1965, excerpts from three online book reviews
  ○  Review by Prof. Robert A. Krieg 
  ○  Review by Prof. Stanley Hoffmann
  ○  Review from Publisher’s Weekly. 
   
• Saul Friedlander, The Years of Extermination: Nazi Germany and the Jews 1939-1945, excerpts from two online book reviews
  ○  Review by Dr. Steven Welch
  ○  Review by Prof. Jeffrey Herf
   

 (Last update 31 May 2010)