Constantine's Sword: The Church and the Jews (91 page)

The Ambassador, after several moments of reflection, asked me: What will the Holy See do if events continue?

1 replied: The Holy See would not want to be put into the necessity of uttering a word of disapproval.

The Ambassador observed: For more than four years I have followed and admired the attitude of the Holy See. It has succeeded in steering the ship in the midst of rocks of every kind and size without colliding and, even if it has greater confidence in the Allies, it has known how to maintain a perfect balance. I ask myself if, at the very time that the ship is reaching port, it is fitting to put everything in danger. I am thinking about the consequences which such a step of the Holy See would provoke ... The order came from the highest source ... Your Eminence will leave me free not to report this official conversation?

I remarked that I had asked him to intervene appealing to his sentiments of humanity. I left it to his judgement to make or not make mention of our conversation which was so amicable.

I wanted to remind him that the Holy See, as he himself has perceived, has been so very prudent so as not 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.

But I also had to tell him that the Holy See should not be put into the necessity of protesting: if ever the Holy See is obliged to do so, it will rely upon divine Providence for the consequences.

In the meantime, I repeat: Your Excellency has told me that you will attempt to do something for the unfortunate Jews. I thank you for that. As for the rest, I leave it to your judgement. If you think it more opportune not to mention our conversation, so be it.
¹⁵

In what way this conversation, as recorded in the cardinal's own notes, can be construed as a dressing down is not clear. The Vatican's concern for the fate of the arrested Jews is apparent, but so is a trust in indirection. Mainly what comes through is Maglione's anxiety.

Our concern is not to sit in judgment on the decisions made in such circumstances, only to insist that a failure of nerve not be recast as heroic, if subtle, diplomacy. Assessing Maglione's meeting with Weizsäcker, John Morley, the Catholic scholar who made the first thorough study of what diplomatic archives have been published, said, "There was neither confrontation, nor criticism, nor a plea for justice."
¹⁶
The Vatican secretary of state explicitly authorized the ambassador to regard this communication as private—the opposite of protest. The ambassador was authorized to refrain even from reporting the meeting to Berlin. Maglione trusted Weizsäcker to "do something for the unfortunate Jews," but without pressing him in any way. According to Maglione, this intervention led to the release of many Jews, and the pope's defenders have made much of that claim, but the record does not bear it out, to say the least.
¹⁷

Other Church officials weighed in as Maglione did. It should be no surprise that the only beneficiaries of these interventions were the "fortunate" minority among the arrested who had converted to Christianity, or were married to Jews who had. This one effect of the Vatican strategy seems clear: About two hundred baptized Jews and Jews married to Catholics were set free before the rest of the Jews were transported north. In his own report to Berlin of his contacts with the Vatican, Weizsäcker seems to have been concerned to protect the pope from Nazi retaliation. He may actually have sought ways to mitigate the campaign against the Jews, but not because of Maglione's intervention. There is reason to believe that Weizsäcker was the one taking the initiative on behalf of Jews. His communications to Berlin have been published, and it is hard to know what game he was playing. Saving Jews may have been one purpose, but maintaining his standing with his superiors was surely paramount. In his communiqués, he emphasized more than once his success in keeping the pope from issuing any protest. For example, on October 28, Weizsäcker sent this message:

By all accounts, the Pope, although harassed from various quarters, has not allowed himself to be stampeded into making any demonstrative pronouncement against the removal of the Jews from Rome. Although he must count on the likelihood that this attitude will be held against him by our opponents and will be exploited by Protestant quarters in the Anglo-Saxon countries for purposes of anti-Catholic propaganda, he had done everything he could, even in this delicate matter, not to injure the relationship between the Vatican and the German government or the German authorities in Rome. As there will presumably be no further German action to be taken in regard to the Jews here in Rome, this question, with its unpleasant possibilities for German-Vatican relations, may be considered as liquidated.

On the Vatican side, at any rate, there is one definite indication of this.
L'Osservatore Romano of
October 25/26 gives prominence to a semi-official communiqué of the Pope's loving-kindness which is written in the characteristically tortuous and obscure style of this Vatican paper, and says that the Pope lavishes his fatherly care on all people,
regardless of nationality, religion, or race
[emphasis in the text). The manifold and increasing activity of Pius XII (it continues) has been intensified of late because of the augmented suffering of so many unfortunate people. No objection can be raised to this public statement, the less so as its text...

will be understood by only very few people as having special reference to the Jewish question.
¹⁸

Defenders of the pope note that this communiqué "has been cited against Pius. But read in context, it indicates that the pope would have gone public had the deportations not stopped."
¹⁹
In any case, was the suspension of a massive roundup of Jews in Rome the result of Vatican indirection or of an alerted Jewish community's having dispersed and gone into hiding around the city, with the aid of the Catholics who gave them refuge? These and other records suggest that the pope wanted reasons
not
to "go public," and with the help of the clever Weizsäcker, he found them. John Morley drew this conclusion about the events in Rome of October 1943: "The Vatican's efforts on behalf of these Jews failed, principally because the steps taken were so slight as to be out of all proportion to the crime committed."
²⁰
And as for the further roundup of Jews stopping because of Vatican pressures, more than a thousand additional Jews were arrested after October 16. Neither Pius XII nor his secretary of state openly protested any of this, to the great surprise even of high-level Germans in Rome.
²¹
' This failure the historian István Deák labels "deplorable." The pope, Deák says, "did nothing."
²²

The Deputy
concludes portentously with an announcer's reading four stark sentences about the gas chambers continuing "to work for a full year more," as if Pius XII were responsible for that crime. The play's indictment of the pope stands as one extreme of how he is remembered. Morley studied the eleven volumes of Vatican documents made public after
The Deputy
caused its stir, and in 1999 he was appointed to a joint Jewish-Catholic commission to examine those and other archives further. He rejects Hochhuth's portrayal, but his conclusion is still critical. He ended his book
Vatican Diplomacy and the Jews During the Holocaust, 1939–1943
with this paragraph: "It must be concluded that Vatican diplomacy failed the Jews during the Holocaust by not doing all that it was possible for it to do on their behalf. It also failed itself because in neglecting the needs of the Jews, and pursuing a goal of reserve rather than humanitarian concern, it betrayed the ideals that it had set for itself. The nuncios, the secretary of state, and, most of all, the Pope share the responsibility for this dual failure."
²³

In an earlier chapter, I referred to a meeting with Cardinal Edward Cassidy, the chief author of "We Remember," convened in 1999 to "build upon" that document, a meeting at which I was present. Also in attendance was a
New York Times
writer, who suggested that if
The Deputy
offers one distortion of Pius XII, his canonization would amount to another. Yet even as worldy a figure as the novelist Graham Greene once portrayed Pius XII as "the servant of the servants of God, and not impossibly, one feels, a saint."
²⁴
Greene was famously a convert, but he was never a sentimental Catholic. For him to have such an opinion of Pius XII, expressed in a
Life
magazine article in 1951, evokes a lost sense of the filial devotion that pope once inspired. His death on October 9, 1958, prompted a plethora of tributes, including some from prominent Jewish figures.
²⁵
I have in front of me an illustrated book on the life of Pius XII, published on the occasion of his death. It includes a 78 rpm record, "The Voice of Pope Pius XII with the Vatican Choir and the Bells of St. Peters."
²⁶
The photos show Eugenio Pacelli as a boy of twelve, as a newly ordained priest, as a papal delegate to the 1911 coronation of England's King George V. Pacelli is pictured as the nuncio to Berlin, as the papal secretary of state, and as "Head of Christendom." One photo shows him in the triple tiara, sitting on the ornate portable throne, balanced on the shoulders of helmeted guards. The pope aims a blessing at the camera. The caption reads:

...he loves the world as another man may love his only son. The enemies whom his predecessor pursued with such vigor he fights with the weapon of charity. In his presence one feels that here is a priest who is waiting patiently for the moment of martyrdom and his patience includes even the long drawn conversations of the nuns who visit him. From another room one hears the long stream of aged feminine talk while the Monsignors move restlessly in their scarlet robes, looking at their watches or making that movement of the hand to the chin forming an imaginary beard. This is the Latin way of exclaiming at a bore. Out comes the last nun, strutting away with the happy contented smile of a woman who has said her say. And out from his inner room comes the Pope with his precise vigorous step ready to greet the next unimportant stranger "with deep affection."

All the people of Rome feel him to be like the great Popes of past ages whose images are frescoed on the walls and ceilings of the basilicas, their Bishop and incomparable warrior, far from Vatican Hill he defended not only the city, but the cause of righteousness and goodness.
²⁷

The portrait of Pius XII at prayer is familiar to me from childhood. The bespectacled man in white skullcap and red, ermine-trimmed cape, hands folded at an angle like a steeple falling toward the brocaded cushion of the prie-dieu—he really did seem a living saint to us. Thumbing through a tribute book like this, we would have made nothing of its failure to refer to World War II or to mention Jews. By 1958, Pius XII was, above all, an icon of the West's resistance to "the propaganda of hate of Atheistic revolt,"
²⁸
also known as Communism. The only photo in this book not of Pius or St. Peter's shows a throng of nuns and bowing laity in a vast coliseum. The caption reads, "German Catholics Join in Mass Worship." The scene is Olympic Stadium in Berlin, with "many of the worshippers ... from the Soviet Zone." West Germany, led by the Catholic Adenauer, was the anti-Soviet bulwark, which is one reason why questions about the Holocaust were not yet being asked. "Catholics all over Germany joined in the prayer hour which was broadcast over the radio. The Pope in Rome joined the prayer, also."
²⁹
So we have the last word on Pius XII and Germany: The unofficial canonization of the one meant the rehabilitation of the other. This book's fulsome, uncomplicated praise seems lifted from a lost world of order and innocence.

The renewed impulse to restore the image of Pius XII, reflected in the Vatican's
fin-de-siècle
advancing of his "cause" toward beatification, preliminary to an official canonization, is no doubt related to a wish to re-claim that world. In the light even of the most favorable reading of Pius XII's World War II history, the move to canonize him is, in the words of István Deak, "a very strange undertaking indeed."
³⁰
The Church official in charge of promoting the cause of Pius XII's elevation to sainthood is a German Jesuit, Father Peter Gumpel, to whom we referred earlier, and will again in other connections. In June 1997, he told an interviewer:

After having studied all the depositions of all the witnesses in Pius XII's cause, I can say that very rarely have I found evidence so persuasive of heroic virtue ... He was a man of extraordinary charity, laboring ceaselessly not only for the Jews, but for all those who suffered from persecution ... Out of solidarity with the miserable conditions of the people, he did not drink even a single cup of coffee ... Sister Pasqualina, his assistant, has said that even his linen was tattered ... He spent [his patrimony] in works of charity ... In sum, the cause is going forward, and the prospects of Pius's beatification are excellent.
³¹

Such reports from Rome that Pius XII was to be honored as a saint prompted further waves of criticism from Jewish groups and from Catholics. The Vatican did not, as expected, advance the wartime pope's cause toward beatification when it put forward Pius IX and John XXIII in 2000. It was unclear what the status of that candidacy was, although Father Gumpel and others in the Vatican insisted that the Church would not be deterred from declaring Pius XII a saint, and sooner rather than later. In 1999, Gumpel said, "The cause of the beatification and canonization of Pope Pius XII, who is rightly venerated by millions of Catholics, will not be stopped or delayed by the unjustifiable and calumnious attacks against this great and saintly man ... May truth, justice and fairness finally prevail with regard to Pius XII, to whom so many Jews and their descendants owe their lives."
³²