In 1995, Pope John Paul II issued a message on the 50th anniversary of World War II, stating that “the Christians of Europe need to ask forgiveness, even while recognizing that there were varying degrees of responsibility in the events that
In 1995, Pope John Paul II issued a message on the 50th anniversary of World War II, stating that “the Christians of Europe need to ask forgiveness, even while recognizing that there were varying degrees of responsibility in the events that led to the war.”
Over the next several years, against the advice of certain cardinals, John Paul made a startling call for the church to engage in “the purification of historical memory.”
For a church that considers popes to be infallible—perfect in truth on matters of dogma—the idea of acknowledging its failures in the mud of history was a dramatic shift. In time, John Paul issued a line of apologies to church victims and for such mistakes as the prosecution of Galileo and the past institutional support of slavery. The pope who had endured the Nazi horror in a Polish seminary took special note of “sufferings inflicted upon Jews.” In 1998, the Vatican issued We Remember: A Reflection on the Shoah with John Paul’s expressed hope that it might “help to heal the wounds of past misunderstandings and injustices.” We Remember states:
We cannot know how many Christians in countries occupied or ruled by the Nazi powers or their allies were horrified at the disappearance of their Jewish neighbours and yet were not strong enough to raise their voices in protest. For Christians, this heavy burden of conscience of their brothers and sisters during the Second World War must be a call to penitence. We deeply regret the errors and failures of those sons and daughters of the Church.
We Remember avoids comment on the Vatican’s role “in meditating on the catastrophe which befell the Jewish people, on its causes, and on the moral imperative to ensure that never again such a tragedy will happen. At the same time [the decree] asks our Jewish friends to hear us with an open heart.” The document does say:
Addressing a group of Belgian pilgrims on 6 September 1938, Pius XI asserted: “Anti-Semitism is unacceptable. Spiritually, we are all Semites”… Pius XII, in his very first Encyclical, Summi Pontificatus, of 20 October 1939, warned against theories which denied the unity of the human race and against the deification of the State, all of which he saw as leading to a real “hour of darkness.”
The reality behind both of those events, as David I. Kertzer demonstrates in The Pope and Mussolini, was sanitized in the 1998 Vatican version. A distinguished historian at Brown University, Kertzer has advanced John Paul’s call for “purification of the historical memory” in a manner that the pope could probably have not imagined.
In drawing on archives the Vatican has recently made available, Kertzer explores the milieu of church officials around Pius XI—notably the Secretary of State, Cardinal Eugenio Pacelli, who would become the next pope, Pius XII—in a devastating account of how Vatican officials gave passive support to Benito Mussolini’s Fascist regime as it began persecuting Jews in alliance with Hitler, over the protests of the dying pope.
What a disaster it would be in the church’s efforts to atone for its history of anti-Semitism if Francis or any future pope were to make a saint of Pacelli.
Pius XI’s now-famous remark (“Anti-semitism is unacceptable. Spiritually, we are all Semites.”) was the cry of a defeated man. He had made huge concessions to the authority of Mussolini, legitimizing the dictator in a very real sense, for what the pope expected would be a strengthening of the church. Near his end and knowing he had been betrayed, the pope spoke in a “voice [that] trembled” to the “staff of Belgian Catholic radio,” writes Kertzer. But in that audience at the Vatican, there was no radio to broadcast. His dramatic words were airbrushed from L’Osservatore Romana, the Vatican newspaper of record, which operated outside the tentacles of Fascist censors. Citing state intelligence files, Kertzer notes the surprise of Fascist secret police on the Vatican’s silence about a papal statement.
“How exactly Pacelli and his undersecretary [Monsignor] Domenico Tardini, had ensured that the Vatican newspaper ignored the pope’s explosive remarks remains a mystery,” writes Kerzer. “Most of the pages from Pacelli’s log of his meeting with the popes in these months are, curiously, missing from those open to researchers in the Vatican Secret Archives.”
There is little mystery otherwise in this thorough-going account for which Kertzer also did research in the archives of the Jesuit community of Rome. The complexities within that religious order, renowned for its scholars and loyalty to the pope, make for a numbing leitmotif.
Father Tacchi Venturi became the pope’s personal envoy to Mussolini; the Jesuit wanted secret police to spy on Italy’s Jewish bankers and was fully behind Mussolini’s hammer-stroke nationalism. In 1938 the pope summoned Father John LaFarge, a New York Jesuit and author of Interracial Justice, asking him to “secretly draft an encyclical on what the pope considered to be the most burning questions of the day: racism and anti-Semitism,” writes Kertzer.
“I am stunned. The Rock of Peter has fallen upon my head,” LaFarge told a friend. He ran into opposition from the Superior General of his own order, Father Wlodzimierz Ledóchowski, a Pole who harbored hostile views of Jewish people and insisted on providing two priests to assist LaFarge. Ledóchowski arranged for the encyclical to be watered down and worked with others to have it tabled as the pope faced his final illness.
Kertzer pull