The ambassador & the pope: Pius XII, Jacques Maritain & the Jews.

In the intense debates of recent years surrounding Pope Pius XII, anti-Semitism, and the Holocaust, fresh perspectives can advance our understanding. A good example comes from a seldom-discussed letter written in the summer of 1946 by Jacques Maritain, the most prominent Catholic philosopher of his day, to his longtime friend and associate Giovanni Montini, the future Pope Paul VI, then sostituto in the office of the Vatican's Secretariat of State--effectively the pope's chief of staff. In the letter, Maritain formulated a plea to Pius XII for a solemn declaration denouncing the great scourge of anti-Semitism in the context of the Nazis' destruction of European Jewry and the widespread complicity of Catholics in those events. Such a statement would not have posed any danger of retaliation against the Jews, a reason frequently given for why the pope did not speak out explicitly about the Nazi genocide during the war. Still, Maritain's request was denied. The reasons behind the pope's refusal to make such a statement have to do with the way these matters were understood in the Vatican at that time, where a rigorous supersessionist theology went together with an unwillingness to extend any particular effort on behalf of the Jewish people.

Maritain (1882-1973) was not only a respected expert on St. Thomas Aquinas and a leading Catholic thinker in his own right, but also one of the most influential laymen in the postwar Catholic world. Deeply respected because of his association with General Charles de Gaulle and the French Resistance, he played an important role in the evolution of postwar Christian Democratic movements in France and Italy.

In the spring of 1940, when the ordeal of France under Nazi domination began, Maritain was in Canada teaching at the Pontifical Institute for Medieval Studies in Toronto. He challenged the defeatist policies of the collaborationist Vichy regime, despite its ostentatious support for the institutions of the Catholic Church. Moving to New York, Maritain became deeply involved in rescue activities, seeking to bring persecuted and threatened academics, many of them Jews, to America. He was instrumental in founding the Ecole Libre des Hautes Etudes, a kind of university in exile that was, at the same time, the center of Gaullist resistance in the United States. In 1944, with the Germans in retreat, Maritain returned to Paris to work in the French Foreign Ministry.

Shortly after his return, a reluctant Maritain was prevailed upon to accept the post of French ambassador to the Holy See. It was particularly important for Paris to solidify relations with the Vatican since the new French government intended to purge from the episcopacy many high-ranking churchmen who had compromised themselves during the German occupation. From the standpoint of the new authorities in Paris, Maritain was unquestionably the right man for the job--stoutly republican and associated with de Gaulle, but prominently Catholic and highly respectful of the institution to which he would be accredited.

Linked with Jews through his resistance and rescue activities, Maritain had thought about Judaism for many years, beginning in his student days at the time of the Dreyfus Affair. Through his Jewish wife, Raissa Oumansoff, who converted to Roman Catholicism with him in 1906, Maritain remained closely associated with a Jewish family, Jewish traditions, and the intellectual heritage of Catholic writing on the subject in France. The author of an influential essay in 1937, "L'impossible antisemitisme," Maritain assailed anti-Jewish prejudice, notably the tendency by Fascists and those on the extreme Right to identify Jews with communism and revolution. Continuing into the war years, Maritain denounced the core ideas of anti-Semitism. From his point of view, Jews had a vital role to play in the history of the world. Fascism, he believed, had singled out Jews because they were the harbingers of Christianity: "In our day the passion of Israel takes on more and more distinctly the form of a cross," he said in a broadcast to the Free French in 1944. "Jews and Christians are persecuted together and by the same enemies: the Christians because they are faithful to Christ, and the Jews because they have given Christ to the world." Maritain's prophetic voice pointed toward the Second Vatican Council in the mid-1960s, with its radical transformation of Catholic perspectives on Jews and the Jewish people.

Maritain's old friend Msgr. Giovanni Battista Montini was the wartime subordinate of the Cardinal Secretary of State Luigi Maglione and one of the very closest aides of Eugenio Pacelli, Pope Pius XII. Some fifteen years younger than Maritain, Montini considered the philosopher his teacher and, as a famous interpreter of Aquinas, one of the key promoters of a Catholic response to the challenge of modernity. Montini first encountered Maritain in Paris in the 1920s, when the latter was teaching at the Institut Catholique. Montini translated one of Maritain's works into Italian, and remained a champion of Maritain's philosophy during the 1930s, when confrontations between the church and fascism intensified, and when, in 1937, he entered the papal curia. (Much later, apparently, even as Pope Paul VI, Montini referred to Maritain as "mio maestro.") The two shared important commitments--to Thomist philosophy, but also to the effort to renew the spiritual authority of the Catholic Church, which they hoped, in the postwar period, to disentangle from the apparatus of states. Understood to be friends, both the ambassador and the papal aide were under some attack from the Catholic Right in 1946, partly because of Maritain's previous promotion of what was considered a culturally venturesome doctrine of "integral humanism," and likely because of his close association with de Gaulle's commitment to dealing severely with a defeated Germany.

Maritain's letter to Montini is dated July 12, 1946, just two months after he had presented his credentials as ambassador. And while the letter went to Montini, it was clearly the pope to whom the message was directed. Maritain was writing, he told Montini, as a friend and not as an ambassador, "feeling impelled as a Catholic to present an appeal at the feet of the Holy Father, together with [his] sentiments of filial and profound devotion."

For many years, the diplomat reminded Montini, Maritain had been aware of the most savage hatred directed against "Israel." Nazism had simply carried the ancient campaign to new levels of atrocity. "During the war six million Jews have been liquidated," he wrote, "thousands of Jewish children have been massacred, thousands of others torn from their families and stripped of their identity ... Nazism proclaimed the necessity of wiping the Jews off the face of the earth (the only people that it wanted to exterminate as a people)" (emphases in original). "Among the many other crimes that have ravaged and debased humanity," Maritain went on, this was a "mysterious tragedy" that expressed "a hatred of Christ," targeting as it did "the people who gave to the world Moses and the prophets and from whom Christ himself came."

He then referred to "the tireless charity with which the Holy Father had tried, with all his might, to save and protect the persecuted," and to his "condemnations of racism that have won for him the gratitude of the Jews and all those who care for the human race." "However"--and this was obviously the point of the letter--"what Jews and also Christians need above all [at this juncture] is a voice--the paternal voice, the voice par excellence, that of the Vicar of Jesus Christ--to tell the truth to the world and shed light on this tragedy. This has been, permit me to say it, greatly lacking in the world today."

Maritain accepted that during the war, "for reasons of prudence and a higher good, and in order not to make persecution even worse, and so as not to create insurmountable obstacles in the way of the rescue that he was pursuing, the Holy Father had abstained from speaking directly to the Jews and from calling the solemn and direct attention of the whole world to the iniquitous drama that was unfolding. But now that nazism has been defeated, and that the circumstances have changed," he asked, "could it not be permitted, and that is the reason for this letter, to transmit to His Holiness the appeal of so many anguished souls, and to beg him to make his voice heard?"

Respectfully, Maritain went on to make the case to Montini that the time was indeed ripe. "It seems to me--and I hope that your Excellency will not see any presumption in what I am writing in all humility--it seems to me that this is a particularly opportune moment for such a sovereign declaration of the thought of the church." Strikingly, one of the reasons had to do with the Jews themselves: "the conscience of Israel is particularly troubled," Maritain noted, "[and] many Jews feel deeply within them the attraction of the grace of Christ, and the word of the pope would surely awaken in them echoes of exceptional importance." And on the other hand, as he observed, "the anti-Semitic psychosis has not vanished, on the contrary one sees that everywhere in America and in Europe anti-Semitism is spreading in segments of the population, as if the poisons issuing from Nazi racism continue to do their work."

Maritain's appeal was "urgent," he said. He referred to "the part that many Catholics had in the development of anti-Semitism," both in the more distant past, during the war, and in the present. An appeal such as he was proposing, in proclaiming "the true thought of the church, would therefore be a work of enlightenment, striking at a cruel and evil error, as well as being a work of justice and reparation." Finally, Maritain underscored, he was making his appeal "as a Catholic and as one humbly devoted to His Holiness and as a Christian philosopher who has taken the liberty to write."

Four days after writing to Montini, Maritain had an audience with the pope. Apparently informed of Maritain's request, Pius chose not to act. The pope had, he told the philosopher, "already spoken on this issue while receiving a Jewish delegation." It would not do, apparently, to repeat what had already been said on that occasion. Maritain subsequently expressed his disappointment to Montini. And there the matter rested. Maritain either took the trouble to research the pope's words to the Jewish delegation or was given a copy by the pope--we know this because he referred the statement to some petitioners three days later. It makes sense to refer to the pope's remarks here, since Pacelli himself apparently considered it an appropriate response to the kind of concerns that Maritain had articulated.

Pius delivered the address in question on November 29, 1945, to an audience of seventy Jewish refugees from German concentration camps, who had asked for "the great honor of personally thanking the Holy Father for the generosity that he had shown them when they had been persecuted during the terrible period of Nazi-Fascism." Framed in the highly apologetic and convoluted rhetoric of the day, Pacelli's speech appeared in the Vatican daily L'Osservatore Romano the following day: "Your presence, gentlemen, seems to us an eloquent testimony to the psychological transformations that the world conflict has, in its different aspects, created in the world," he began. Pius then referred to:

  the abyss of discord, the hatred, and the folly of persecution which,
  under the influence of erroneous and intolerant doctrines, in
  opposition to the noble human and authentic Christian spirit, have
  engulfed incomparable numbers of innocent victims, even among those
  who took no active part in the war.

The pope carefully wove into his address some discrete allusions to what separated his Jewish listeners from the Catholic faith.

  The Apostolic See remains faithful to the eternal principles of the
  law, written by God in the heart of every man, which shines forth in
  the divine revelation of Sinai and which found its perfection in the
  Sermon on the Mount and has never, even in the most critical moments,
  left any doubt as to its maxims and its applicability.

Pius took comfort in the delegation's appreciation of the charity of the church. "Your presence here," he said, The pope was wary of political involvement.

  is an intimate testimony of the gratitude on the part of men and women
  who, in an agonizing time, and often under the threat of imminent
  death, experienced how the Catholic Church and its true disciples know
  how, in the exercise of charity, to rise above the narrow
  and arbitrary limits created by human egoism and racial passions.

Michael R. Marrus teaches at the University of Toronto and is the author of The Holocaust in History (New American Library), among other books. Another version of this paper will appear in a forthcoming number of Studies in Contemporary Jewry.