Under His Very Windows: The Vatican and the Holocaust in Italy

Christian Century, Oct 10, 2001 by Victoria Barnett

Michael Phayer's book helps clarify the context of this caution. Of recent historians, Phayer does the best job of portraying Pius XII's understanding of his role as an institutional leader and, during the war, as a diplomat who sought to promote peace, preserve what he viewed as Christian civilization and maintain the church's neutrality. Phayer's book is especially helpful because he looks at Catholic behavior across Europe, portraying the complex challenges that confronted the church in Poland, Croatia and elsewhere.

As this comparative approach reminds us, Pius XII'S reaction to the unfolding genocide was consistent with his guarded response at other crucial points. Despite the pleas of Catholic bishops, priests and Cardinal August Hlond, he refused to protest the Nazi atrocities against Catholic Poles in 1939. Phayer observes that Poles were so angered by the pope's silence that they even spoke about breaking with the Vatican. In Croatia, which presented a different set of problems, the pope again opted for a cautious diplomacy over confrontation and outraged many by granting an audience to the dictator Ante Pavelic, who had led the slaughter of Orthodox Serbs. And, although some Catholic leaders (notably Bishop Clemens Graf von Galen of Munster) decried the Nazi euthanasia measures, no explicit condemnation of these murders emerged from the Vatican.

Phayer believes that Pius XII consistently chose private diplomacy over public protest because of his fixation on diplomacy at the expense of moral advocacy, his obsession with communism and his inflexible personality. Like most European church leaders at the time, Pius XII worded about the threat of communism and viewed himself as a mediator for peace. Especially during the early period of the war, these two central priorities led Catholic and Protestant leaders alike to focus on peace options, placing their hopes in the success of the resistance groups within the German military and diplomatic corps. Here the Vatican's role was hardly passive. The risks it took in 1939-40 by its involvement in secret peace negotiations between British representatives and several German resistance groups were substantial and, in the eyes of some, foolhardy.

Phayer's portrayal of the historical context of these priorities is fair and objective, even as he judges their consequences. Protesting the Nazi treatment of the Jews simply was not a top priority for most church leaders, Catholic or Protestant. Phayer charges that the Vatican's emphasis on diplomacy placed the European Jews "at mortal risk." He is especially critical of the Catholic hierarchy's failure to give more support to Catholic resistance groups and rescuers such as Gertrnd Luckner and Margarete Sommer. A very important additional contribution of this book is its examination of the postwar era and how the church dealt with its history after the Holocaust, in Germany and elsewhere.

BOTH BOOKS RAISE the issue of the role of Christian attitudes toward Judaism, the primary subject of James Carroll's Constantine's Sword. The Church and the Jews: A History. Carroll traces the development of theological anti-Judaism within the Christian tradition, reflecting on its broader cultural and political consequences for the history of Western Europe. He wrestles with the original scriptures, the emerging church and the role of the early church fathers, the churches' alliances at crucial turning points in European history, and the effect this history has had on the church's understanding of its role today. Carroll's conclusions lead him to question the moral viability of the institutional church itself and the papacy's role in promoting or obstructing change.