This is an excerpt from an article entitled "Catholic Heroes of the Holocaust":
>>But what of the official Church? In the past year there has been a fresh irruption of stories about the alleged inaction of the hierarchy, and especially the "silence" of
Pope Pius XII, stories worse in some ways even than Rolf Hochhuth's scurrilous 1963 play, "The Deputy." Even The New Yorker, in its April 7, 1997 edition,
printed an article that asserted Pius and the hierarchy turned their backs on the Jews; and journals such as The Catholic Times and The National Catholic
Register (owned by the Legionaries of Christ) in reporting the progress of a document on the Holocaust being prepared by the Pontifical Commission for Religious
Relations with the Jews, treat the question as open.
Probably the most systematic and comprehensive study of the Pope's and the hierarchy's handling of the Holocaust is Pinchas Lapide's 1967 book, Three Popes
and the Jews. Lapide, an Israeli diplomat, was a member of the Palestinian Brigade that found many interned Jews in Italy at the end of World War II. After
exhaustive research, Lapide concluded that at least 700,000 Jews, and more likely 860,000, owed their lives directly to the Church; he also concluded that Pius
simply could not have done more than he did. The suggestion that Pius ought to have spoken more forcefully he treats with near derision; he quotes many Jewish
leaders, many of them rescued by Catholics, to the effect that more forceful speeches would certainly not have caused the Nazis to moderate the persecutions, and
would most probably have induced them to intensify them.
Not that the Pope was silent. As early as April 1935, as Vatican Secretary of State, Cardinal Pacelli addressed 250,000 pilgrims at Lourdes: "These [Nazi]
ideologues are in fact only miserable plagiarizers who dress up ancient error in new tinsel. It matters little whether they rally round the flag of the social revolution...or
are possessed by the superstition of race and blood." He was responsible for the final wording of Pius XI's March 1937 encyclical, Mit brennender Sorge ("With
burning sorrow"), and made it more strongly antiracist. The encyclical, the first ever written in German, was read in all German churches on Palm Sunday; the Nazi
Foreign Office characterized it as "a call to battle…as it calls upon Catholic citizens to rebel against the authority of the Reich."2
In 1938 Italy passed its first anti-Jewish laws. Pius XI condemned them. He took action, as well. In January 1939 he asked the ambassadors to the Vatican to
procure entry visas to their countries for German and Italian Jews. He also called a German bishop to Rome to plan a resettlement project in Sao Paulo. Presumably
his Secretary of State was involved in these initiatives (General Ludendorf wrote: "Pacelli was the live spirit which stood behind all the anti-German activities of
Rome's policy"3); but he would not be Secretary of State much longer. Pius XI died in February.
Cardinal Pacelli was elected as Pius XII in March. As one of the standard first steps in the persecution, Jews were now banned from the learned professions. The
new Pope invited many to the Vatican and offered to help them to emigrate; many accepted, and Pius intervened with the diplomats of other countries to obtain entry
visas for them.
Italy declared war on France on June 10, 1940. The Pope was determined to keep the Vatican neutral, and to make it a refuge. He brought the diplomats of nations
at war with the Axis into the Papal Hospice of Santa Marta, close to the Holy Office and the German College. He assigned the Holy Office to develop its contacts
throughout Europe into a chain of agents who would deal with intelligence, prisoners of war and refugees. One of the most fascinating rescuers of the war, Msgr.
Hugh O'Flaherty, Primo Notario of the Holy Office, thus became involved early on in the Vatican's information-gathering and humanitarian activities—informally,
also, as he lived in the German College, next door to the diplomats' new quarters.
Also during June, some 500 Jews left Bratislava on a small boat bound for Palestine. Four months later the boat tried to enter the harbor at Istanbul and was denied
permission. An Italian patrol boat picked up the passengers and took them to a prison camp on Rhodes. Warned that they were to be handed over to the Germans,
these Jews sent one of their number to Rome, where he obtained an audience with the Pope. Pius intervened with the Italian government and all 500 were interned in
southern Calabria, where they survived the war.
Pinchas Lapide reports arriving at Ferramonti-Tarsia to find 3,200 Jews, mostly refugees from Austria, Czechoslovakia and Hungary. "They had been not only saved
by papal intervention but also fed, clad and looked after at Vatican expense by two papal emissaries who set up a kosher kitchen, organized a school for the
children…."4
But do the Pope's efforts qualify him as a rescuer, as someone who risked his life to save Jews? In 1940 Martin Bormann prepared "Operation Pontiff" on Hitler's
instructions. Pius was to be imprisoned in a monastery on the Wartburg. Lapide thinks it probable that Pius knew of the plan. If so, it did not deter him. As the Nazi
persecution of the Jews intensified, and as it spread to the countries occupied by German forces, so did Vatican efforts at rescue and shelter. And Pius instructed the
European hierarchy to follow his lead. "There is no doubt," says Leon Poliakov, a Jewish historian of the Holocaust, "that secret instructions went out from the
Vatican urging the national churches to intervene in favor of the Jews by every possible means."5
In the Heart of the Reich
Even in Germany, Catholic bishops protested the treatment of the Jews. Priests spoke out against Nazism and paid for it with their lives; laymen sheltered Jews.
Hitler came to power in 1933. In December of that year, Cardinal Michael Faulhaber, the "Lion of Munich," delivered a sermon in defense of biblical Judaism. When
the persecution escalated, he spoke more directly to the point:
"History teaches us that God always punished the tormenters of…the Jews. No Roman Catholic approves of the persecutions of Jews in Germany."6
In October 1938, the chief rabbi of Munich told Cardinal Faulhaber that he feared his synagogue would be burned. The Cardinal provided a truck to transport the
Torah scrolls and other important things from the synagogue for safekeeping in his palace. Nazi mobs gathered outside the palace, screaming, "Away with Faulhaber,
the Jew- friend!"7
But Faulhaber and other bishops, including Conrad Cardinal Count von Preysing of Berlin and Bishop Clemens August Count von Galen of Muenster, continued to
speak out in defense of the Jews in sermons and pastoral letters. (It was von Galen who went to Rome to plan the resettlement in Sao Paulo with Pope Pius XI.)
Faulhaber's books were banned, and in 1934 and 1938 attempts were made to assassinate him. He continued to preach against the Nazis until the end of the war.
In Stuttgart, the Resistance developed a well-organized underground to help the Jews to escape. In Hamburg, Raphaels Verein, a Catholic lay association, helped
Jews to emigrate until they were shut down by the Gestapo in 1941.
Also in 1941, Fr. Bernard Lichtenberg, a priest at the St. Hedwig Cathedral Church in Berlin, declared in a sermon that he would include the Jews in his daily
prayers "because synagogues have been set afire and Jewish businesses have been destroyed."8 He was arrested for subversive activities and sent first to prison and
then to a concentration camp. He asked to be sent to the Jewish ghetto at Lodz, but died on his way to Dachau.
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Caritas Catholica, another lay organization, was originally founded to help non- Aryan Christians, but extended its mission to assisting Jews. In the spring of 1943 the
Gestapo arrested its leadership, including Dr. Gertrude Luckner. "[T]he Gestapo demanded to know who was behind her operation. 'My Christian conscience,' she
told them."9 She was sent to Ravensbrueck concentration camp, where she survived until the Allied liberators arrived.
~ ~ ~
Almost incredibly, after ten years of Nazi rule there was still an organized Resistance in Germany. In 1943 Count Helmuth von Moltke, its leader, wrote to a friend in
England: "We now have nineteen guillotines working at full speed."10
A close friend of von Moltke, Fr. Alfred Delp, SJ, had been asked by his provincial the previous year to join the Kresau Circle, "a discussion group including
Lutherans and Catholics, aristocrats and labor leaders, that met to plan how German society could be reconstructed according to Christian principles after the
war."11 Von Molke was the founder of the Kresau group.
Father Delp had written and edited for the Jesuit journal Stimmen der Zeit ("Voices of the Time") until the Gestapo closed it in 1941. Now he helped Jews to
escape, often guiding them to the Swiss border; and he urged others, especially priests, to help also. His writings and his sermons emphasize Christ as "the judge of
history,…the only ruler in whose service men can find the free and truly human life they long for; any other course means delusion and ultimate tragedy."12
When the German generals' plot to assassinate Hitler failed in July 1944, the members of the Kresau Circle were arrested. On Christmas Day 1945, after nearly
eighteen months of interrogation and torture, Fr. Delp was led from his prison cell to be hanged. To his friend the prison chaplain he said, "In half an hour, I'll know
more than you do!"13
Of the 240,000 Jews who remained in Germany and Austria when the killing began, 7,000 survived.<<
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