Pope John Paul II Step Closer to Possible Beatification

Pius XII created agencies to coordinate relief work. American Jews and Cardinal Spellman channeled throughout the Pope generous humanitarian aid for the Jews.

From the first days of the war, Pope Pius XII distributed untold sums to aid the Jews all over Nazi occupied Europe. One of Pius XII’s first steps at the beginning of the War was the creation of two official agencies with pontifical rank to coordinate relief work, the Pontifical Aid Commission and the Office for Information. The first body, in liaison with local organizations, channeled supplies of food, medicine, and clothing, to the needy, to the prisoners of war in particular. It was a task of vast proportions involving 40 countries; financial grants were provided for the repatriation of 630,000 displaced persons; full responsibility was taken for 53,000 victims. Church authorities joined forces with national and international Jewish agencies. American Jews also trusted on the hands of the Pope large sums that were distributed according to the wishes of the donors. Cardinal Spellman also channeled generous humanitarian aid from the U.S. Catholics.

The Vatican Information Office handled over one and a quarter million requests and succeeded in locating over half a million of the displaced persons, mostly Jews, a success ratio of 44 percent, in spite of the non cooperation from the Nazis and little, if at all, cooperation from the Allies. The communication with prisoners of war was another of its important services. Both Agencies were under the direction of Msgr. Giovanni Battista Montini, the future Pope Paul VI.

PIUS XII AND THE RESISTANCE

Pius XII, a man of great personal courage dared to be involved in a high risk venture that could even endanger the very existence of The Church-the support of the internal resistance to the Nazis inside the German Armed Forces. The French and the British governments were deaf to the pleas of the Vatican to assist the German internal resistance to the Nazi government. From the very beginning Pius XII tried to persuade the Allies to support the inside German opposition, but they did not heed the Pope.

A number of anti-Nazi plotters inside the Abwehr, the intelligence branch of the armed forces, made repeated, and ultimately futile attempts through the Holy See to reach and persuade the British to back, or even to talk with the German resistance. They were all killed in the July 20, 1944; plot to assassinate Hitler, the last in a long line of foiled attempts to get rid of the dictator. The leader, a Roman Catholic officer, Count Claus Schenk von Stauffenberg was shot on he spot. Other conspirators, mostly Protestants, were not so lucky; they were hung by using piano strings from butchers’ hooks and filmed on Hitler’s orders so that he could watch it himself later.

According to historian O’Carroll, in 1983 the Italian magazine Gente, published the testimony of General Wolff, the commander of the German forces in Italy during WWII. He revealed that in 1943 Pius XII had invited him to the Vatican and tried to persuade him to end the war in Italy on his own initiative. General Wolff was impressed and gave the matter thought; he finally decided against the Pope’s plea. But he recorded the immense personal impression that Pius XII made on him. We already mentioned how the whole leadership of the Italian resistance found refugee in the Church’s facilities in Rome.

Pius XII also served as a conduit for an offer made by a group of anti-Nazi German generals to topple Hitler from power. They wanted to know if the British would make peace with Germany if they succeeded in arresting Hitler and removing him from power. The proposal was made by Colonel-General Ludwig Beck (four star general), who latter was made chief of the German General Staff, but who resigned in 1938 convinced that Hitler was a criminal. Pius XII had known Beck when he was Nuncio in Berlin and “highly esteemed his honesty and integrity.”

The Pope also allowed the Vatican diplomatic corps, which was protected by diplomatic immunity, to carry messages between the Allied powers. There was a close collaboration between the Vatican and the Allies’ intelligence services. In fact, the Vatican forewarned Holland and Belgium of the upcoming German invasion.

TESTIMONIALS ON PIUS XII FROM WORLD LEADERS.

The fact is, as affirmed Graham, that even before 1944, the world Jewish organizations had recognized in the Vatican a friend who was willing- and often able- to help their people during their tragic ordeal in occupied Europe. The concerns of the Jewish organizations were also those of the Holy See. Sometimes The Church acted on the appeal of a Jewish organization, at other times, they acted on the basis of reports received from its own representatives in the occupied territories where they held a relationship of confidence with the local Jewish leaders. In many instances, the Holy See had already acted upon information received from its own nuncios before the appeals from Jewish organizations arrived at the Vatican.

Pope Paul VI, who was a close collaborator with Pius XII, authorized in 1964 the publications of the documents of the Holy See relating World War II. In Volume X, there is a day-by-day record of the Holy See’s correspondence with the most active international Jewish organizations. Among the more important of these are the ones from the Emergency Committee to Save the Jewish People of Europe, the World Jewish Congress, the American Jewish Congress, Agudas Israel World Organization, Vaad Hahatzala of the Unions of Orthodox Rabbis of the United States and Canada, Hijefs (Schweizerischer Hillfsverein fur Judische Fluchling im Ausland), the Jewish Agency for Palestine and the American Jewish Committee.

In November, 1943, Herzog, Chief Rabbi of Jerusalem, wrote to Cardinal Roncalli, (the future Pope John XXIII) then Apostolic Delegate to Turkey and Greece, stating: “I take this opportunity to express to your Eminence my sincere thanks as well as my deep appreciation of your kindly attitude to Israel and of the invaluable help given by the Catholic Church to the Jewish people in its affliction. Would you please convey these sentiments which come from Sion, to His Holiness the Pope (Pius XII) along with the assurances that the people of Israel know how to value his assistance and his attitude.” (24) The American Jewish Welfare Board wrote to Pius XII on July 1944 to express their appreciation for the protection given to the Jews during the German occupation of Italy.

In 1944 the War Refugee Board came into existence as the united effort of several American Jewish organizations. During and after the war, the War Refugee Board publicly acknowledged its close relationship with the Holy See. The documentation includes the correspondence from eminent rabbinical leaders who made special appeals to the Holy See; among them are the Grand Rabbi of Jerusalem, Dr. Issac Herzog; the Grand Rabbi of the British Empire, Dr. Joseph Hertz; and Rabbi Abraham Kalmanowitz, leader of the rabbinical school of Mir, in Lithuania.

Fr. William Saunders has quoted Dr. Raphael Cantoni, a leader in Italy’s Jewish Assistance Committee, declaring that “The Church and the Papacy have saved Jews as much and insofar as they could Christians. Six million of my co-religionists have been murdered by the Nazis…but there would have been many more victims had it not been for the efficacious intervention of Pius XII.” (25)

New York Times praises Pius XII’s Christmas Messages in 1941 and 1942

On Christmas Day 1941, the editorial of the New York Times, commenting on Pius XII’s Christmas Message, said: “The voice of Pius XII is a lonely voice in the silence and darkness enveloping Europe this Christmas…as we realize that he is about the only ruler left on the Continent of Europe who dares to raise his voice at all…In calling for a ‘real new order’ based on ‘liberty, justice and love,’ to be attained only by a ‘return to social and international principles capable of creating a barrier against the abuse of liberty and the abuse of power”. “The Pope,” said the NYT, “put himself squarely against Hitlerism, he left no doubt that the Nazi aims are also irreconcilable with his own conception of a Christian peace.”

On Christmas Day 1942, the New York Times editorialized on Pius XII’s Christmas Message and again praised the Pope for his moral leadership. “This Christmas,” said de NYT, “more than ever he (Pius XII) is a lonely voice crying out of the silence of a continent. The Pulpit whence he speaks is more than ever like the rock on which the Church was founded, a tiny island lashed and surrounded by a sea of war… (Pius XII) condemns as heresy the new form of national state which subordinates every thing to itself, he declared that whoever wants peace must protect against ‘arbitrary attacks’ the ‘juridical safety of individuals. The Pope assailed the violent occupation of territory, the exile and persecution of human beings for no other reason than race or political opinion.” The address also contained the first formal enunciation of human rights made by a Pope.

Pope Pius XII, said the NYT, “expresses as passionately as any leader on our side of the war aims of the struggle for freedom when he says that those who aim at building a new world order must fight for free choice of government and religious order. They must refuse that the state should make of individuals a herd of whom the state disposes as if they were a lifeless thing.”

The British Ambassador to the Vatican says that the Pope was the most warmly humane, kindly, sympathetic, and saintly character he had known

D’Arcy Osborne, the Protestant Minister of Britain to the Vatican wrote of Pope Pius XII: as “the most warmly humane, kindly, generous, sympathetic, and incidentally saintly, character who has been my privilege to meet in the course of a long life.” (26)

Germany’s Catholics: neither cowed nor craven
Francis Phillips hails a stunning study of Catholic resistance to National Socialism

16 October 2009

Dietrich Bonhoeffer, who resisted Nazism to the death

The Cross and the Third Reich
By John Frain
Family Publications, £19.95

John Frain subtitles this book, Catholic Resistance in the Nazi Era and at first glance it might seem a well-trodden path, adding little to what is already known. For instance, negative publicity given to the alleged “silence” of Pope Pius XII during the War has led to a succession of scholarly studies of his attitude and behaviour towards Jewish victims of Nazi persecution. But Frain’s terms of reference are wider than this; he examines every level of Catholic opposition to Hitler, particularly in Germany: the electorate, the bishops, courageous individuals, as well as Vatican diplomatic initiatives.

The author, who modestly describes himself as “neither historian nor theologian”, simply a Catholic layman, has done the common reader like me a great service. I must confess that in my laziness and ignorance I had assumed that, with the exception of a few brave souls such as Clemens August von Galen, Bishop of Münster, most German Catholics were cowed and craven before and during the War; indeed, so anti-Communist as to be warily sympathetic to the Nazis.

With his mastery of the facts, the result of painstaking and careful research, Frain completely demolishes this assumption. Beginning with the question, “Why did one of the most intellectually gifted and industrious nations in the world become subjugated to an indolent, argumentative, autocratic, tedious habitué of a Viennese doss-house?” he provides a brief introduction to the state of Germany after the First World War. Then asking a related question: “What did the Church actually do?” During the period under scrutiny, he makes the interesting discovery that it did a great deal, even well before Hitler came to power in 1933.

Between 1920 and 1933 the German bishops regularly warned their flocks (a third of the population) that the National Socialists (Nazis) were “totalitarian, racist, pagan and anti-Christian”. This view was reflected in the 1933 elections; the Nazi vote in the heavily Catholic areas of the Rhineland and Bavaria was significantly lower than in the (Protestant) north and east. However, discussing Protestant support for Hitler, Frain is careful to distinguish between the powerful and dangerous German Christian movement, with its 600,000 members, its anti-Semitism and its advocacy of a “Reichskirche”, and the Confessing Church of Dietrich Bonhoeffer and Martin Niemöller, which was implacably opposed to this.

It hardly needs to be said that there was no Catholic equivalent of the pro-Nazi German Christian movement.

Looking at the record of the Church’s pastors during this time the author states that in 1932 there were 21,000 Catholic priests in Germany, that over 8,000 of these openly clashed with the Reich, that several hundred were documented as having died at Nazi hands, and that there were many more, undocumented, whose heroic resistance is known only to God. It is in this context that the much-criticised Concordat of 1933 between the Vatican and Nazi Germany must be seen; among other things it did save Catholic clergy “from the moral dilemma of serving a regime hostile to the Church and often barbaric in countries where it invaded”; it also exempted Catholic doctors and nurses from forced participation in the sterilisation programmes.

Frain also explains why the view of Pius XII as either “Hitler’s Pope”, or at the least a moral coward, is utterly baseless. Learning from his bishops that his public utterances, and the Vatican Radio broadcasts, were causing savage Nazi reprisals against the very people he was trying to protect, the Pope was forced to act largely through secret diplomatic channels involving his nuncios. Many references from Jewish historians and Allied diplomats are cited in evidence here. Yet the Vatican also acted swiftly when necessary, silencing Theodor Innitzer, Cardinal Archbishop of Vienna, when he publicly supported the Nazi annexation of Austria. Again, in Slovakia there were no deportations of Jews between October 1942 and September 1944 because of Vatican efforts.

Having examined the conduct of the Church as a whole, the author describes the lives of some individual Catholics who were prepared to die rather than surrender to the Nazi ideology. Several of these men and women, like Bishop von Galen, Maximilian Kolbe, the Polish Franciscan; Edith Stein, philosopher and later Carmelite; or Franz Jägerstatter, the Austrian farmer, are already familiar figures: others, like Fr Jacques Bunel, Sister Restituta Kafka, Marcel Callo, Karl Leisner and Alfred Delp SJ, are less well-known. Reading Frain’s brief yet compelling account of these models of heroic virtue is an inspiring testimony of courage and the cross. Fr Bunel’s story has been told in the film Au Revoir Les Enfants by Louis Malle, a former pupil at his school. Restituta Kafka, nun and nurse, was imprisoned and then guillotined simply for praying with dying patients and putting crucifixes in every room of the Mödling hospital, south of Vienna, where she worked; her surgeon, a Nazi, informed on her.

Dr Frain has had a distinguished career in industry and education. In retirement he has put his gifts at the service of the Church in this robust and readable study. Making use of the works of secular historians such as Michael Burleigh, Sir Martin Gilbert and Sir John Keegan, as well as Church archives, his book is measured and objective rather than defensive in tone. It is a work of imagination as well as scholarship; the author well evokes the atmosphere of fear, making pilgrimages to several haunting arenas of death and tramping the entire perimeter of the Birkenau concentration camp, commenting: “Its vastness is terrifying. This site alone could well have become the killing ground for all Hitler’s victims.” He read Mein Kampf, finding it a “turgid tome” written in a “slovenly, illogical and pretentious style”. His own writing is clear, muscular and free from cliché.

My only (reluctant) criticism is that he has not quite mastered the intricacies of compiling an index; for instance, Michael Burleigh is puzzlingly given only two page references; I added, in pencil, a further 13.

Disclaimer: Opinions posted on Free Republic are those of the individual posters and do not necessarily represent the opinion of Free Republic or its management. All materials posted herein are protected by copyright law and the exemption for fair use of copyrighted works.