PIUS XII & THE HOLOCAUST : Sorting out a tragic legacy.

Pius XII's response or lack of response to the Nazi extermination of the Jews has been the subject of heated controversy since Rolf Hochhuth's 1964 play The Deputy depicted the princely Eugenio Pacelli as a miser and a coward. Last year John Cornwell's tendentious Hitler's Pope (Viking) reinvigorated Hochhuth's malevolent caricature, charging Pius with anti-Semitism, connivance with Hitler's rise to power, and, in case slow readers didn't get the point, even with starting World War I.

A stream of books published this fall tries to make sense of Pius's seeming indifference to the fate of the Jews. Hitler, the War, and the Pope (Our Sunday Visitor), by law professor Ronald J. Rychlak, includes a vigorous rebuttal of Cornwell. Ralph McInerny, Notre Dame's happy scourge of heterodoxy, has also risen to Pius's defense in The Defamation of Pius XII (Saint Augustine Press). In a more useful vein, Holocaust historian Michael Phayer's The Catholic Church and the Holocaust, 1930-1965 (Indiana University Press) offers a detailed historical analysis of the period. Tireless readers have only to wait until January for James Carroll's Constantine's Sword: The Church and the Jews, A History (Houghton Mifflin). The crusading Carroll ends his tome with a fifty-page exhortation titled "A Call for Vatican III."

Making moral and historical sense of Pius's actions is a painful and daunting task, a task not made easier by those who bring strong ecclesiological agendas to the table. Nor is clarity achieved by regarding criticism of Pius as anti-Catholicism in fashionable guise, or defense of Pius as anti-Semitism by other means. An excellent example of how to avoid these dangers was on display last month when Fordham University at Lincoln Center hosted a conversation between distinguished historians Michael Marrus and Gerald P. Fogarty, S.J. The program was part of the university's annual Nostra Aetate Dialogues that usually attract a crowd of vocal Catholic and Jewish New Yorkers. Both Marrus and Fogarty are members of the Vatican commission now examining the church's records relating to the Holocaust. In October the commission, made up of three Catholic and three Jewish scholars, recommended that the Vatican open its entire archives, previously published in edited form, to public scrutiny.

Before a standing-room-only crowd, Marrus and Fogarty discussed a single document, a letter sent from Pius XII to President Franklin D. Roosevelt on July 20, 1943, shortly after the first Allied bombing of Rome. As Marrus, author of the indispensable The Holocaust in History (Meridan), explained, it is important to "try to enter into the worldview and the habits of mind and thinking of the Vatican at that time." Pacelli was a skilled diplomat, intent on securing the church's prerogatives from whatever nation he was negotiating with, even the United States. The letter protested the destruction of the basilica of Saint Lorenzo, noted that the Vatican's diplomatic neutrality was "deep in [the church's] apostolic nature," mourned the loss of civilian life, and concluded by reminding Roosevelt that civilization rested on the foundation of Christianity. The letter's arcane style stressed moral principles, used symbolic language, and was vague about specifics. Pius's language, Marrus said, is "prolix and obscure" and its meaning "difficult to extract."

However, the letter did mark an alteration in Vatican policy. Urged to speak out against the Nazi euthanasia program, the bombing of London, and the invasion of Poland, the Vatican remained silent. If he were to denounce the actions of the Nazis, Pius warned American diplomats, he would also have to denounce Stalin. But when it came to the destruction of Rome's sacred places, Vatican neutrality wavered. "His primary concern," Fogarty said, "was that of the church." In this, Marrus observed, the pope revealed himself as "strangely parochial."

Pius's unwillingness to protest explicitly the murder of the Jews was, in large part, the result of a misplaced faith in diplomacy and his religious parochialism. By Christmas of 1942 the Vatican knew of the Nazi genocide. A concerted effort was mounted by the Allies to get the pope to condemn the Nazis in his Christmas message. Although Pius denounced racial persecution and killing, "the word Jew was not mentioned," Marrus said.

At this point, hissing and grumbling was heard from the crowd at Fordham. But, Marrus, who is Jewish, insisted on complicating the picture further. Although "the information is there [about the Holocaust], awareness isn't always there. People didn't always get it." "However we judge these reasons now," Marrus explained, the Vatican honestly thought "explicitness would make the suffering worse for the Jews."

The audience's impatience with Marrus's failure to simply condemn Pius was even more audible now. Bravely, he pressed on. Both Catholic and Jewish victims of the Nazis appealed to the pope to make explicit charges against Hitler. Pius's basic instincts led him to reject such appeals. If we are to sit in judgment, Marrus said, we must try "to wrap our minds around the spirituality of Pius XII." Beseeched by the German bishops to protest the deaths of hundreds of thousands of German civilians, Pacelli instead urged German Catholics to recognize God's judgment, and to "accept the misfortune that has come upon them with a spirit of penance."

When asked what should be done about the crimes of war, invariably Eugenio Pacelli's answer was that we should pray. "This is a response that sounds so utterly incommensurate," Marrus noted. "Yet for Pacelli, this is what he was supposed to do."

In certain circumstances, Pius's tragic legacy reminds us, even genuine piety can be a moral error.