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December 24, 1999 - Image 75

Resource type:
Text
Publication:
The Detroit Jewish News, 1999-12-24

Disclaimer: Computer generated plain text may have errors. Read more about this.

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Catholics — that lays the ground-
work for Pius XII's dubious record
toward the Jews during the war.
Clearly, what was desperately needed
during the war was a clear condemna-
tion from the Vatican leadership of the
Nazis' Final Solution as reports of atroc-
ities began trickling out of Germany
and Eastern Europe. Instead, Cornwell
depicts a pope who was not ready to
fully accept the information and who,
whenever it came time for forceful pub-
lic action, chose to rationalize inactivity
on the grounds that to be strong would
cause even greater harm.
Coming together to produce this
papal response were several factors, the
most significant being Pacelli's lifelong
obsession with identifying people of
God with papal allegiance, as mani-
fested in his centralizing efforts.
Cornwell argues this was critical for
reducing Pacelli's sense of responsibili-
ty for the Jews. It was the prism
through which Pius XII viewed
wartime events.
Together with other assumptions
and goals that Pius XII held dear —
including his aim to unite Christians
under papal leadership, his desire to
be a peacemaker at the end of the war
and his hatred and fear of commu-
nism — these factors affected his reac-
tions toward Nazi activities in Eastern
and Southern Europe.
What could the pope have accom-
plished had he been bold and forth-
right? At the very least he could have
provided an alert for Jews in many
places as to the true dangers that lay
before them.
Cornwell demonstrates that the
pope could have been a force to
diminish atrocities committed by the
Fascists against Serbs and Jews in
Croatia. And in Rome, his refusal to
speak out may have prevented many
Jews from being saved.
Cornwell asserts that the pope
remained silent out of fear that a com-
munist uprising in Rome would result
if the Nazis left too soon.
There is no doubt that Catholics
and Catholic clergy all over Europe
saved many thousands of Jews,
including me. The story of Roncalli
in Istanbul (later to be Pope John
XXIII) is but one. And it may well
be that Pius XII's secret activities
played a role in these activities on
behalf of Jews at risk.
Cornwell, however, starkly and con-
vincingly makes the case that saving
Jews was never a central part of the
thinking, the strategy or the theology
of Pius XII. And what was necessary to
HITTER'S POPE on page 76

The Pope's
Proclamation

Author/journalist John Cornwell has
written on Catholic issues for many
publications around the world.
According to his new book,
Hitler's Pope, Eugenio Pacelli helped
shape a new ideology of unprece-
dented papal power. He was elect-
ed, as Pope Pius XII, on March 3,
1939, and died on Oct 12, 1958.
While the Second Vatican
Council appeared to have reversed
his ideology of absolute papal
control in the mid-'60s by
encouraging collegiality and local
discretion, Cornwall concludes
that in the latter half of the cur-
rent pope's reign, the papal poli-
cies of Pius XII have re-emerged.
He predicts a titanic ideological
struggle in the Catholic Church
when Pope John Paul II dies.
Here is an excerpt from Hitler's
Pope, beginning with Pope Pius
XI's famous and only statement
on the Holocaust during the war, a
statement he later claimed to be a
clear denunciation of the Nazi
extermination of the Jewish people:

Humanity owes this vow [to bring
society back to its immovable center
of gravity in divine law] to those
hundreds of thousands who, without
any fault of their own, sometimes
only by reason of their nationality or
race, are marked down for death or
gradual extinction. ...
Pacelli's single breach of self-
imposed silence on the liquida-
tion of the Jews was an ambigu-
ous sentence during his Christmas
1942 broadcast. ...
... Clearly, the exhibition of
ambiguous language was intended
to placate those who urged him to
protest, while avoiding offense to
the Nazi regime. But these consid-
erations are overshadowed by the
implicit denial and trivialization.
He had scaled down the doomed
millions to "hundreds of thou-
sands" and expunged the word
"Jews," making the pointed quali-
fication "sometimes only"
Nowhere was the term "Nazi" or
"Nazi Germany' mentioned.
Hitler himself could not have
wished for a more convoluted and
innocuous reaction from the Vicar
of Christ to the greatest crime in
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