ARTICLES
April 2003 ARTICLES
Contents © 2003
by Jim Holman.
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Simplistic, Dishonest, and Misleading
Rabbi Hier Attacks, Others Defend, Pius XII
By Martin Mazloom
According to Rabbi Marvin Hier, founder and director of Los Angeles' Simon Wiesenthal Center, six million lives would not have perished if Pope Pius XII had spoken out bluntly against Adolf Hitler. "In 1939, Hitler would've listened to the pope," said Hier. "If Pius XII had spoken out, he would've delivered a TKO [knock out] to Hitler. Hitler would've said, 'I can't carry this plan [the final solution] out.' The world wouldn't stand for it. The climate would've been too dangerous for Hitler, and the Holocaust would not have happened. But he [Pius XII] didn't want to take risks because he might anger the dictators."
Hier has written to Pope John Paul II and Cardinal Edward Cassidy, president of the Vatican Commission for Religious Relations with the Jews, asking them to reevaluate their decision to go forward with the process of beatification for Pius XII (born Eugenio Pacelli). Hier called Pius XII "a pope of silence. He did not speak out publicly," said Hier. "Many priests were more eloquent and courageous than he was. He was too slow and too docile with Hitler. When I examine Pius XII's activities between 1939 and 1945, I do not believe they were the activities of a saint."
Regarding the wartime pope's December 1942 speech, which defenders of Pius XII often cite to prove his opposition to the Nazis, Hier points out that "his comments about the Jews are ambiguous." Hier added that Pius XII was not courageous enough to issue the "hidden encyclical" condemning anti-Semitism and racism that his predecessor Pius XI was working on before he died in March of 1939. "Why didn't he issue the encyclical?" Hier said. "Here's this encyclical that would've motivated the entire world to stop the Holocaust. It's clear he didn't want to do it. It was too hot for him to handle."
Ronald J. Rychlak, Catholic author of Hitler, the War and the Pope, and professor of law at the University of Mississippi School of Law, emphatically disagrees with Hier. "The idea that Pius XII suppressed a statement that condemned anti-Semitism and the Nazis is preposterous," said Rychlak. "The 'hidden encyclical' is very much a misnomer," he said. According to Rychlak, Pius XI asked Father John LaFarge, S.J., to write a paper that might one day be used as the basis for an encyclical. Father LaFarge, in turn, sought help from two other priests -- one French and the other, the German Jesuit Gustav Gundlach. Thus, three different papers in three different languages were produced. "They were not even drafts of encyclicals," said Rychlak. "And there's no indication that Pius XI or Pius XII ever saw these papers."
In Rychlak's First Things article, "Goldhagen v. Pius XII" (June/July 2002), written to point out and correct factual errors in Daniel Goldhagen's anti-Pius XII book, A Moral Reckoning, Rychlak states that Gustav Gundlach helped Pius XII with his first encyclical Summi Pontificatus, which was released on October 20, 1939, just six weeks after the outbreak of war. "Not surprisingly," writes Rychlak in his article, Summi Pontificatus (which expressly mentions Jews and urges solidarity with all who profess a belief in God) contains language that is similar to the paper on which Gundlach had worked."
In his article, Rychlak also states, "Reinhard Heydrich, leader of the SS Security Office in Warsaw, wrote, 'this declaration of the Pope [Summi Pontificatus] makes an unequivocal accusation against Germany.' The New York Times headline declared: 'Pope Condemns Dictators, Treaty Violators, Racism; Urges Restoring of Poland.'"
Rychlak described as "wishful thinking" Hier's claim that, if Pius XII had spoken out forcefully against Hitler in 1939, the Holocaust would never have happened. Said Rychlak, "If Pius XII had issued an encyclical like that, it would've lasted 24 hours, and the Vatican would've lasted 30 minutes. In fact, Mit brennender Sorge had to be smuggled into Germany in 1937. There was no free press in Germany." According to Rychlak's essay, Mit brennender Sorge, an encyclical issued by Pope Pius XI when Pacelli was his secretary of state, "is one of the strongest condemnations of any national regime that the Holy See has ever published. It condemned not only the persecution of the Church in Germany, but also the neo-paganism of Nazi racial theories."
Mit brennender Sorge states that "none but superficial minds could stumble into concepts of a national God, of a national religion; or attempt to lock within the frontiers of a single people, within the narrow limits of a single race, God, the Creator of the universe, King and Legislator of all nations before whose immensity they are 'as a drop of a bucket' (Isaiah 11:15)." In Goldhagen v. Pius XII, Rychlak writes, "unlike most encyclicals, which are written in Latin, Mit brennender Sorge was written in German" and "was smuggled into Germany, distributed to all parishes, and read from the pulpits on Palm Sunday, March 21, 1937." Rychlak also writes that "an internal German memorandum, dated March 23, 1937, called the encyclical 'almost a call to do battle against the Reich government'" and "later on, the mere mention of the encyclical was made a crime in Nazi Germany."
A number of high profile Jews lauded Pius XII for his efforts to save the Jews during the Holocaust. Jewish historian Jeno Levai testified at the Eichmann trial in 1964 that Pius XII had done all he could to save Jews and titled his 1966 book, The Church Did Not Keep Silent. At the death of Pius XII in 1958, both Golda Meir, then Israel's foreign minister, and Dr. Issac Herzog, then chief rabbi of Israel, lamented the pope's death. Joseph Lichten, director of B'nai B'rith Anti-Defamation League International Affairs Department wrote, "what cannot be questioned is the integrity, the charity, and the deep commitment to humanity of Pius XII. It is idle to speculate about what more he could have done, for unlike most of the leaders of his day, he did very much."
But Rabbi Hier said, "these are people who haven't seen the documents" (like the "hidden encyclical" which was made public in 1972 by the National Catholic Reporter) that provide evidence of Pius XII's lack of courage and indifference to the plight of the Jews. Hier also said he disagrees with Pinchas Lapide, an orthodox rabbi and senior Israeli government historian, who wrote in his book, Three Popes and the Jews, that Pius XII "alleviated, relieved, retrieved, appealed, petitioned -- and saved as best he could.Who but a prophet or martyr could have done much more?" Lapide estimated that "the final number of Jewish lives in whose rescue the Catholic Church had been instrumental is thus at least 700,000 souls, but in all probability is much closer to the maximum of 860,000." Rabbi Hier said he enjoyed Daniel Goldhagen's 1996 book Hitler's Willing Executioners: Ordinary Germans and the Holocaust but has not yet read Goldhagen's latest work, A Moral Reckoning.
Rabbi David Dalin, though, is not a fan of Goldhagen's work. Dalin, a visiting fellow at Princeton University's James Madison Program, actually defended Pope Pius XII in the February 10, 2003 Weekly Standard. In his essay, "History as Bigotry," Dalin took Goldhagen to task for his shoddy scholarship in A Moral Reckoning and, like Rychlak, publicly corrected Goldhagen's errors. Describing Goldhagen's argument in A Moral Reckoning as "simplistic.dishonest and misleading.," Dalin wrote that "in 1964 Cardinal Paolo Dezza, the wartime rector of the Pontifical Gregorian University, published a signed article stating unequivocally that during the German occupation of Rome, Pius XII explicitly told him to help 'persecuted Jews' and do so 'most willingly.'"
Dalin also wrote that Antonio Gaspari recently "came across new documents, establishing that as early as 1940 Pius XII explicitly ordered his secretary of state, Luigi Maglione, and Maglione's assistant, Giovanni Battista Montini (the future Paul VI), to send money to Jews protected by the bishop of Campagna." According to Dalin, David Alvarez' recent book, Spies in the Vatican: Espionage and Intrigue from Napoleon to the Holocaust, "shows how much Hitler distrusted and despised Pius XII."
Rychlak agreed that there was no love lost between Pius XII and Hitler. "Pius XII was not deceived about Hitler," Rychlak said. "He knew Hitler was a bad guy and wanted to destroy the Church." He added that Pius XII, following the doctrine of subsidiarity, supported local bishops who spoke out against the Nazis and supported those bishops who asked the Pope not to speak out lest the Nazis intensify their retaliation against Jews and Catholics.
Dalin also defended Pope John Paul II, upon whom Goldhagen frowned in his book. Even Rabbi Hier praised the current pontiff. "If the current pope -- Pope John Paul II -- had become pope in 1939," said Hier, "the Holocaust would never have happened. He would've taken on Hitler. He would've had a tremendous impact on Christians. Without any animosity, I say, I'm a big fan of the current pope; but I've read too many books and too many documents to believe Pius XII did all he could have for the Jews. Pius XII was no saint."
Rychlak, though, believes it's "unfair" to make such a judgment, in distant retrospect. "Pope John Paul II has called Pius XII a great pope and has been supportive of his cause of canonization. If you read the documents, Pius XII did what he thought was best for everyone," said Rychlak. "There's no doubt in my mind that if he thought something would've stopped the Holocaust, he would've done it."