Constantine's Sword: The Church and the Jews (92 page)

By continuing to promote the image of Pius XII as a saint, whether he is ever formally canonized or not, is the Vatican trying to do for itself what it tried to do for German Catholicism in the immediate aftermath of the war? As a boy, I saw how this worked. In a letter to the bishops of Bavaria, in August 1945, Pius XII praised "those millions of Catholics, men and women of every class" who had resisted Nazism in Germany. Heroes like the Berlin Cathedral provost Lichtenberg and Father Delp were lifted up not as exceptions but as exemplars of Catholic behavior. Pius XII's praise of German Catholic resistance ignored the fact that such resistance was, as Lewy puts it, "not only discouraged by the Church, but condemned. Catholics who actively fought against the Hitler regime were rebels not only against the State, but against their ecclesiastical authorities as well."
³³

As the Catholic Church seems determined to negate
The Deputy's
slander of Pius XII by raising him to sainthood, impeding, if not foreclosing, the ability of future historians to arrive at dispassionate judgments of these events, one wonders: Should the question of Pius XII's "silence" be this important? In remembering the fate of Jews living "under his very windows," words the historian Susan Zuccotti uses as the title of a recent book,
³⁴
perhaps the more important piece of unadjudicated business concerns how those Jews came to be there in the first place. The Roman ghetto, from the middle of the sixteenth century to the last quarter of the nineteenth century, stood as a palpable sign not only of the Church's attitude toward Jews but of the pope's own claim to absolute authority. Traditional religious anti-Judaism was transformed when oppressive dominance of the Jew became a particular note of papal authority. It is instructive to recall here that it was through "restrictions, enslavement, and humiliations" of Jews—in the phrase the Jewish leader Giacomo Saban addressed to John Paul II during his visit to the Rome synagogue
³⁵
—that the Vatican put its temporal authority on display for the world to see. This was especially true during its last embattled phase, when popes repeatedly celebrated their return to power during the on-and-off revolutions of the nineteenth century by rebuilding the ghetto walls. The Roman ghetto thus became the perfect symbol of the way that forces rallying to the threatened pope "reinvented antisemitism," in the words of one historian, "as central to the Catholic tradition."
³⁶
That is what made the ghetto, in Cardinal Cassidy's word, the "antechamber" of the death camps. In that connection, one must ask—and we will—what it means that the Church has even now gone forward with the cause of canonization of Pius IX, the last pope to defend, and rebuild, the ghetto walls.

By focusing so much of the Jewish-Catholic dialogue on the question of Pius XII, the broader question of a massive Catholic failure is deflected. One example of this surfaces in the work of Daniel Jonah Goldhagen, whose book
Hider'
s
Willing Executioners
caused such a sensation in 1996. He deals extensively with the failure of the Christian churches in Germany. Following the historian Guenter Lewy, he shifts the focus from what the churches did not do—the "silence"—toward their positive role in the Nazis' genocidal project, that of supplier of crucial records. Goldhagen writes, "The foundational element of the Nuremberg Laws was the regime's capacity to distinguish and demonstrate the extent of a person's Jewish ancestry, to know who was a Jew. Enforcement therefore depended upon the use of the genealogical records in the possession of local churches."
³⁷
Lewy quoted a priest who defined this identification activity as a "service to the people," but that was in 1934. Once the function—and the result—of this role became clear, did the churches stop performing it? Lewy says no. "The very question of whether the Church should lend its help to the Nazi state in sorting out people of Jewish descent was never debated." A few heroes among the clergy, including Angelo Roncalli, the future Pope John XXIII, exploited the Church's function as a racial-certification agent to provide false identity documents to Jews, but the institutional Church never renounced this role. "The cooperation of the Church in this matter continued right through the war years," Lewy writes, "when the price of being Jewish was no longer dismissal from a government job and loss of livelihood, but deportation and outright physical destruction."
³⁸
This fact leads Goldhagen to include certain Church officials among the agents of destruction. "What defines a perpetrator?" he asks. "A perpetrator is anyone who knowingly contributed in some intimate way to the mass slaughter of Jews ... Perpetrators include railroad engineers and administrators who knew that they were transporting Jews to their deaths. They include any Church officials who knew that their participation in the identification of Jews as non-Christians would lead to the deaths of the Jews."
³⁹

Pope Pius XII, without violating his tactic of diplomatic prudence, could have quietly instructed parish priests throughout Europe to destroy baptismal records once their diabolical function became clear. He never did.

Critics of Pius XII, like Hochhuth, have accounted for his failure to challenge Hitler more directly by charging him with cowardice, or with Nazi sympathies, but his biographer John Cornwell shows that the former was never the case, and by the late 1930s neither was the latter. Pius XII's courage and his contempt for Hitler were demonstrated by his active participation, early in his pontificate, in a plot to overthrow the German dictator. From late 1939 through March 1940, Pius XII served as a channel of communication between a group of anti-Hitler German army chiefs, led by General Ludwig Beck, and the British government, represented by Britain's Vatican minister, Francis d'Arcy Osborne. The Germans indicated their readiness to stage a coup and end the war, but only with assurances from London that the Munich settlement would be honored. For whatever reason, the British failed to pick up on the initiative, but not before the plotters and the pope himself had acted in ways that Hitler, had he learned of them, would have savagely punished. This episode leads Cornwell to a firm conclusion about Pacelli: "Pusillanimity and indecisiveness—shortcomings that would be cited to extenuate his subsequent silence and inaction in other matters—were hardly in his nature."
⁴⁰

So what accounts not only for the silence of Pius XII, but for Eugenio Pacelli's complicity with Hitler in the early years? The early years offer the clue, for it was then that Pacelli's determination to put the accumulation and defense of papal power above everything else showed itself for what it was. Above the fate of the Jews, certainly, but also above the fate of the Catholic Church elsewhere in Europe. "Was there something in the modern ideology of papal power," Cornwell asks, "that encouraged the Holy See to acquiesce in the face of Hitler's evil, rather than oppose it?"
⁴¹
The answer to this awful question, it seems increasingly clear, is yes, which makes even more problematic, too, the Vatican's current wish to make a saint of Pius IX, whose claim to infallibility and whose "Syllabus of Errors" made him the supreme modern ideologue of papal power.

It almost goes without saying that Pacelli would have shared the broad antisemitism of his culture, the Christian contempt for Judaism that would not be repudiated until Vatican II. But the pursuit of papal power in the modern era had come at the expense of Jews, and that too is part of what led to Europe's acquiescence before the Final Solution. We just recalled how this played out in the Roman ghetto, but it affected theology as well. When the "Syllabus of Errors" (1864) was defined by a leading Catholic journal as a set of detested "modern ideas ... of Jewish origin";
⁴²
when European liberal movements in politics and education were denounced as a demonic Jewish conspiracy; when Church organs led the way in branding Jews simultaneously as revolutionaries and financiers; and when all of this is centered in vengeful Catholic policies toward Jews in the Roman ghetto, under the pope's windows, a far graver issue arises than the silence of one man. The question rather becomes, How did a succession of popes prepare the way for the "silence" of an entire civilization?

"The Pope's silence," Father Edward Flannery wrote, "is better seen as the apex of a triangle that rested on the much wider acquiescence of the German episcopacy, his most immediate 'constituents,' which, in turn, rested on the still wider apathy or collusion with Nazism of German Catholics—or Christians—themselves so ill prepared for any better response by accustomed antisemitic attitudes so often aided and abetted in the past by the churches themselves. The triangle continues to widen, as we include a Europe and a Western world, impregnated with an indifference, if not an antipathy, to Jews."
⁴³

If Pius XII had done what his critics, in hindsight, wish him to have done—excommunication of Hitler, revocation of the concordat, "a flaming protest against the massacre of the Jews," in Lewy's phrase
⁴⁴
—it would have been only a version of what Pius IX did in 1875 against Bismarck, and in 1871 against Garibaldi when he excommunicated all Italians who cooperated with the new Italian state, even if only by voting in its elections.
⁴⁵
As before, Catholics would have had to choose between a Church-hating government and the Church. But in the 1930s, there is reason to believe, vast numbers of Catholic Germans, and perhaps other Catholic Europeans as well—those who had celebrated the
Reichskonkordat,
and those who had baited the Dreyfusards—would have preferred Hitler to Pius XII. "Shall I bring them into conflicts of conscience?" Pius asked, referring to Catholic Germans, in explaining why he could not protest the extermination of Jews.
⁴⁶
Because of the "dark symbiosis"
⁴⁷
of ancient Christian Jew-hatred and modern racism, Hitler's anti-Jewish program, even at its extreme, was simply not that offensive to the broad population of Catholics. As the scholar of antisemitism Léon Poliakov put it, "The Vatican's silence only reflected the deep feeling of the Catholic masses of Europe."
⁴⁸
And in fact, the Vatican's preference for its own power, as it pursued its vision of an absolute papacy, was only a version of the choice countless Europeans made to pursue their own welfare without regard for those outside the circle of their concern—the Jews.

That choice had been nearly two thousand years in the making. It is the last consequence of the long story this book has told, from the Seamless Robe of Christ to the cross of Constantine to
La Croix
to
Kreuz unci Adler,
to the cross at Auschwitz. This story is itself the source of the pope's silence, and the meaning of it. This is the moral failure of Catholicism, and of the civilization of which it is so centrally a part. The pope's silence is better seen, that is, not as the indictment but as the evidence.

53. Edith Stein and Catholic Memory

E
CHT IS A
Dutch town near the River Maas, not far from Maastricht, the symbolic center of the new Europe, and even closer to the German border. I visited Echt as I made my way to the Rhineland, revisiting the scenes in which the story of this book unfolded. But my trek to the small Dutch town took on the character of a solitary pilgrimage. It surprised me to find the contemplatives chapel I'd come looking for at the edge of a shopping district; just beyond the stout brick façade of the chapel's adjoining cloister was the Café Apollo, announcing in English,
Dancing.
Far less obtrusive was a stone tablet on the wall near the Gothic-arched chapel door. The tablet featured the chiseled face of a woman in the veil of a Carmelite nun, Edith Stein, who had fled to this monastery in Echt in 1938, and from which she was snatched by the SS in 1942.

My visit was late in the afternoon of a rainy Tuesday. The chapel door was unlocked, and it opened onto a stark room. The place was vacant, but the sanctuary candle flickered. Twelve pews divided the space, room for perhaps fifty people. A grainy photograph of the famous nun was on the wall to the left, behind a vase holding two craning birds of paradise. I had come here with my three questions. The first: How did the history of Christian antisemitism contribute to the Holocaust? The second: How did the Church abet, or oppose, the Holocaust as it unfolded? And the third: How does the Church today negotiate that layered past, both the deep past of antisemitism and the recent past of the Holocaust? With Edith Stein, that third question moved to the forefront of my mind. In the small chapel organized around her image, I knelt down to ask.

Edith Stein was born a Jew in 1891 in Breslau,
¹
to whose archbishop we referred as wanting the
Reichskonkordat
to defend not Jews but Catholic Jews. Stein left Breslau, but her mother, to whom she remained devoted, lived there, an observant Jew, all her life. Stein was a gifted young woman who made her mark as a philosopher, earning a Ph.D. under the phenomenologist Edmund Husserl. Often described as his protégée, she made significant contributions to his thought, although they are rarely noted.
²
Her dissertation, "On the Problem of Empathy," which she defended in 1916,
³
was the first of several important philosophical works, but her dramatic life and her later devotional writing have been more widely acknowledged. Having abandoned Jewish religious practice in her student years, Stein became a Catholic in 1922, at the age of thirty or thirty-one. She reports having been moved to do so by reading the autobiography of Saint Teresa of Ávila,
⁴
the sixteenth-century Spanish mystic and Carmelite reformer. In 1933, Stein herself entered the Carmelite order.