Peter Popham - The unholy legacy of Pope Pius XII
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The man who presided over the Vatican during the war stands accused of turning a blind eye to the Holocaust. And his reputation is still a source of division between Catholics and Jews. Peter Popham reports from Rome
The "Pius Wars" that have long raged over the
Vatican's desire to declare Pope Pius XII a saint flared up again over the
weekend when the Jesuit priest in charge of the canonisation process declared
that Pope Benedict XVI could not visit Israel until a disputed panel in
Jerusalem's Holocaust museum, which refers disparagingly to Pius, is removed.
Pius XII, the austere, bespectacled Vatican diplomat who
reigned from 1939 to 1958, has long been regarded by conservative Catholics as
one of the greatest of modern popes. His claim to sainthood was opened by Pope
Paul VI, "with the same sort of urgency and certainty", the Vatican
journalist Robert Mickens said yesterday, "as when John Paul II opened the
case for Mother Teresa".
But the Pius XII depicted in the Yad Vashem Holocaust Museum
is a very different figure. Included among the "Unjust", those
responsible directly or indirectly for the Holocaust, he is castigated on a
large panel in the museum for his failure "to leave his palace, with
crucifix high, to witness one day of pogrom". "When reports of the
massacre of the Jews reached the Vatican," it goes on, "he did not
react with written or verbal protests. In 1942, he did not associate himself
with the condemnation of the killing of the Jews issued by the Allies. When
they were deported from Rome to Auschwitz, Pius XII did not intervene."
"As long as that panel remains in the museum,"
Father Peter Gumpel said, "Benedict XVI cannot go to Israel because it
would be a scandal for Catholics. The Catholic Church is doing everything
possible to have good relations with Israel, but friendly relations can only be
built if there is reciprocity."
A spokesman for the Israeli foreign ministry skirted the
museum issue in his reply. "If Benedict XVI would like to visit Israel he
would be a welcome and beloved guest," said Yossi Levy. "Pope
Ratzinger has already been officially invited and whether he accepts or not
depends entirely on his will."
But Sergio Itzhak Minervi, a former Israeli ambassador to
Brussels and a historian, commented: "No moral entity, and least of all
Yad Vashem, can treat these historical questions as if they were in a market,
as Father Gumpel would wish: 'unless you cancel those phrases I don't come'.
Let us be serious. History has need of proof, of documents, which the church
would be well to show to the world."
At the crux of the dispute, as the museum caption states, is
the failure of Pope Pius to make a protest of any kind, either verbally or in
writing, as millions of Jews all over Europe were taken to the gas chambers. By
the end of 1942, he had received reports of the ongoing murder of Jews from at
least nine different countries where the Holocaust was under way, including
Poland, Slovakia and Croatia. The British envoy to the Holy See, Sir D'Arcy
Osborne, practically a prisoner inside the Vatican after the Nazi occupation of
Rome, wrote in his diary late in 1942: "The more I think of it, the more I
am revolted by Hitler's massacre of the Jewish race on the one hand, and, on
the other, the Vatican's almost exclusive preoccupation with the ...
possibilities of the bombardment of Rome."
By the following year, the Holocaust had arrived under the
Pope's nose: in October 1943, more than 1,000 Roman Jews had been rounded up
and were being processed for extermination in a military school a few hundred
yards from the Pope's window. The Pope was personally warned by an Italian princess,
Enza Pignatelli, who had managed to force a way into his study, about the
imminent assault on the city's ancient Jewish community. "You must act
immediately," she had told him. "The Germans are arresting
the Jews and taking them away. Only you can stop them." He told her:
"I will do all I can."
On 18 October, the day the 1,000 Jews were dispatched to
Auschwitz in cattle cars, Osborne was received by the Pope. Pius remarked that
"until now the Germans have always behaved correctly," respecting
Vatican neutrality, but he hoped they would put more police on the streets.
Supporters of Pius claim that his silence was necessary: to
protest would have exposed the church and Catholics across Europe to Nazi
attack and made the Pope himself vulnerable. Thousands of Jews, they point out,
were hidden and protected by individual priests and nuns. They also insist that
Pius's canonisation is a purely internal matter for the Church. "For
Benedict and other conservatives in the Church," says Mr Mickens,
"Pius XII has for a long time been an iconic figure, a figure of reason
and stability. They also like the fact that he was a staunch anti-Communist.
They say that, if he had spoken out against the Nazis, he would have put even
more lives in jeopardy."
But Robert Katz, author of several narrative histories of
Rome during the Nazi occupation, said: "They argue that a lot of worse
things would have happened if he had spoken. But what worse could have happened
than did happen?"
He went on: "It's true that he did what he could to
protect the Vatican, and it's true that there were many individual acts by
Catholics to save Jews. But these were not ordered by the Vatican. If they made
him a saint he would become a role model for Catholics worldwide. His deeds
would be singled out for imitation and veneration; virtue would be found in a
passivity that was sometimes indistinguishable from complicity before the acts
of perpetrators of crimes against humanity."
The new row over Pius emerges exactly 50 years after his
death. "His supporters are extremely frustrated," said Mr Mickens.
"They were hoping that his canonisation would have happened by that
anniversary." Instead even Pope Benedict, one of Pius's ardent admirers,
is now calling for a truce. The issue of the museum caption was "important
but not decisive," said his spokesman, Father Federico Lombardi. And
regarding Pius's canonisation, the Pope "maintains that a period of deeper
study and reflection is opportune."
Read a review of John Cornwell: Hitler's Pope: The
Secret History of Pius XII
"..Cornwell convincingly proves that Pacelli was no
hero, no martyr and certainly no saint. What the world needed then was a
prophet; what it got was a cautious, somewhat timid diplomat. But it is
important to remember that there is no moral equivalency between a timid,
inward-looking diplomat, on the one hand, and Hitler, Himmler, Heydrich,
Eichmann and the rest on the other. These are the men who deserve all of the
blame for the Holocaust. To shift the blame to the pope is to risk a real error
in moral judgment... Still, it is equally important to recognize that he
was no saint. Canonizing Pius would be a mistake for many reasons. It would
cheapen the sanctity of those who by the witness of their lives truly deserve
to be canonized. More importantly, it would be disastrously insensitive to the
many Jews who genuinely feel betrayed by Pius. One hopes that the Vatican will
come to recognize that, if not diabolical like Hitler, Pius hardly provided a
model of prophetic courage and moral outrage that would truly merit the
recognition of a formal canonization.."
