Senior Vatican Official Criticizes “High-Level Leaders”

Speaking at a conference last week at Tel Aviv University on the actions of the Roman Catholic Church during the Holocaust, Pierbattista Pizzaballa, a senior Vatican official, issued thinly disguised criticisms of the World War ii pope, Pius xii, throwing another log on the raging fire that is the debate over whether to beatify him.

Addressing gathered delegates, Pizzaballa, custos of the Holy Land, openly criticized “church leaders, including those of the highest level, who did not adopt a courageous stand in the evangelical spirit in the face of the Nazi regime” (Haaretz,April 27). Dr. Simcha Epstein, of the Hebrew University’s Vidal Sassoon Center for the Study of Anti-Semitism, said it was clear the phrase “high-level leaders” was a veiled reference to Pius xii.

It was this kind of unprecedented comment that, according to a report by Haaretz on April 28, “did not disappoint those who expected to hear strong, straightforward statements.”

“Jewish organizations and historians for years have been at the forefront of a struggle against the Vatican initiative to beatify Pius due to his inaction during the Holocaust,” Haaretz reported (op. cit.). When Pope Benedict xvi came along, Jerusalem’s hope was that he would stop the beatification process initiated by Pope John Paul ii. But that hope was in vain.

Pizzaballa’s statements, however, once again raised expectations that perhaps the Vatican was taking the widespread criticism of its push to beatify Pius xii seriously, and that his road to sainthood would be halted. But no.

Rabbi David Rosen, member of the Permanent Bilateral Working Commission of the State of Israel and the Vatican, stated that Pizzaballa is not offering any dramatic or new insight into the Vatican’s position toward Pius’s road to sainthood, but rather that his “attitude is that of a man who is aware of Jewish and Israeli sensitivities, and it is therefore more nuanced than the official position; however, it does not reflect a change in the official stance” (ibid.).

Pius xii, the man at the center of the storm, has been accused of remaining silent and turning his head the other way while millions died. In 1999, John Paul ii made a proposal to canonize the wartime pope. Jewish leaders are bitterly opposed to such a move. Questions concerning the Vatican’s responsibility with regard to the persecution of the Jews came into sharp focus in the 1990s.

Catholic historian John Cornwell’s book Hitler’s Pope: The Secret History of Pius xii, published in 1999, shows that prior to his election as pope, Pius xii, as the Vatican representative in pre-war Berlin and then as its secretary of state, helped stamp out opposition to Nazism in the German church. He also abandoned Catholic political parties opposed to Hitler.

Cornwell then charges Pius xii of failing to use his influence in favor of the Jews. The pope did have access to information about Hitler’s extensive killing of Jews. He mildly objected to their persecution rather late in the game, but during his objection didn’t even mention the Jews by name. Pius xii has also been criticized by other historians for failing to warn the Jewish community in Rome before their roundup.

Cornwell (a Catholic himself) wrote in Hitler’s Pope, “Several years ago I was at a dinner with a group of postgraduate students, some of whom were Catholics. The topic of the papacy was broached, and the party got contentious. A young woman asserted that she found it difficult to understand how any right-minded person today could be a Catholic, since the church had sided with the most pernicious right-wing leaders of the century—Franco, Salazar, Mussolini, Hitler. … Then the topic of Eugenio Pacelli—Pius xii, the wartime pope—was raised, and how he had not done enough to save the Jews from the death camps.

“In common with many Catholics of my generation, I was only too familiar with that allegation. … I was convinced that if his full story were told, Pius xii’s pontificate would be vindicated. Hence I decided to write a book that would satisfy a broad spectrum of readers old and young, Catholics and non-Catholics alike who continue to raise questions about the role of the papacy in the history of the 20th century. …

“I applied for access to crucial material in Rome, reassuring those who had charge of the appropriate archives that I was on the side of my subject. Acting in good faith, two key activists gave me generous access to unseen material: depositions under oath gathered 30 years ago for Pacelli’s beatification, and also documents in the office of the Vatican Secretariat of State. At the same time, I started to draw together, critically, the huge circuit of scholarship relating to Pacelli’s activities during the 1920s and 1930s in Germany, works published during the past 20 years but mainly inaccessible to a general readership.

“By the middle of 1997, nearing the end of my research, I found myself in a state I can only describe as moral shock. The material I had gathered, taking the more extensive view of Pacelli’s life, amounted not to an exoneration but to a wider indictment. Spanning Pacelli’s career from the beginning of the century, my research told the story of a bid for unprecedented papal power that by 1933 had drawn the Catholic Church into complicity with the darkest forces of the era. I found evidence, moreover, that from an early stage in his career Pacelli betrayed an undeniable antipathy toward the Jews, and that his diplomacy in Germany in the 1930s had resulted in the betrayal of Catholic political associations that might have challenged Hitler’s regime and thwarted the Final Solution” (emphasis ours).

It is for these reasons, and others, that the proposed beatification of Pius xii has come under close scrutiny and outright resistance from various groups. But still, the Vatican refuses to back down, preferring to leave the general public and the Jews wondering: If Pacelli is the model of Catholic leadership, and with his record meriting a path to Catholic sainthood, has the Vatican learned any lessons from its wartime behavior toward Germany, Hitler and the Holocaust, or should we expect history to repeat itself because lessons have not been learned?

Answering this question must be a priority.