Pope Pius XI, Pope Pius XII and Two Different Responses to Hitler’s Anti-Jewish Laws

Recently I watched Amen, a Costa-Gavras film about an SS officer and a Jesuit priest trying to get the Vatican to denounce the Holocaust.  It was very critical of the Pope for his feeble response to the atrocities being committed against millions of Jewish lives.  How fair is that criticism?  I decided to research the actions of the two popes during the 1930s and 1940s and see how they reacted to Adolph Hitler and his policy against the Jews.  Pope Pius XI, the pope during most of the 1930s, was increasingly confrontational of Hitler and the Nazis as their actions began to affect more people.  Pope Pius XII, the wartime pope, privately approved of sheltering Jewish refugees in church property, but he never publicly condemned the shipping of Jews in concentration camps and the killing of Jewish lives.  The two different reactions of the two popes offers a microcosm of the way religion has dealt with authoritarian governments and atrocities against its citizens.

Pope Pius XI was formerly Achille Ratti, a scholarly clergyman and librarian who spent 45 years of his life presiding over two great scholarly collections, the Ambrosian Library in Milan and the Vatican Library in Rome.  He was a great lover of books, and he held great faith in the power of knowledge that good books endowed upon the reader.  Ratti presided in Poland after World War I and was selected as cardinal of Milan soon afterwards.  In 1922, he was elected as pope as a compromise candidate in a divided conclave.

Georges Passelecq and Bernard Suchecky chronicled Pope Pius XIs interactions with Hitler in a good book titled The Hidden Encyclical of Pius XI.  At first Pope Pius XI signed concordants with Mussolini and Hitler in the late 1920s and early 1930s the hopes that these agreements would help maintain religious autonomy in churches and catholic schools.  To get Hitler and Mussolini to agree to this, Pius had to sacrifice the influence of Catholic political parties in the two dictators countries, and this severely weakened any political opposition to Hitler and Mussolini. 

Pius’s hopes that the concordants would allow the church to run without interference from the Nazis was dashed as Hitler broke promise after promise.    Pope Pius XI reacted in kind, increasing his criticisms of Hitler and the Nazi racial policies.  In 1937 he asked Cardinal Faulhaber to draw up an encyclical that would criticize Hitler’s nonadherence to the concordants and had his secretary of state Eugene Pacelli  secretly sent to the German churches to have them read from the pulpits and published in small local presses.  This encyclical, Mit Brennender Sorge or “With Burning Dismay”  (http://www.vatican.va/holy_father/pius_xi/encyclicals/documents/hf_p-xi_enc_14031937_mit-brennender-sorge_en.html), denounced the Nazi intimidation of Catholic schools and the hostility of the Nazis towards free religious activity.  In one passage, the encyclical states: 

“Whoever exalts race, or the people, or the State, or a particular form of State, or the depositories of power, or any other fundamental value of the human community – however necessary and honorable be their function in worldly things – whoever raises these notions above their standard value and divinizes them to an idolatrous level, distorts and perverts an order of the world planned and created by God; he is far from the true faith in God and from the concept of life which that faith upholds. “

With this statement, Pius XI began to increasingly criticize Hitler’s racial policies to different groups.  In a 1938 address to Belgian pilgrims, the pope said that “we are the spiritual offspring of Abraham…  We are spiritually Semites.”   Four months earlier, he had commissioned an American priest named John LeFarge to write an encyclical titled Humani Generis Unitas to more explicitly denounce the Nazi policy against the Jews.  LeFarge was chosen because of his work in the Catholic Interracial Council and the Catholic Rural Life Movement and his 1937 book Interracial Justice, which attacked the segregation laws of the southern states of the U.S.  Before LeFarge could finish the encyclical, however, Pope Pius XI died in 1939 and his successor shelved the project.

Eugenio Pacelli succeeded Pope Pius XI and became Pope Pius XII in 1939.  While Pius XI was becoming increasingly confrontational with Hitler and his policies, Pius XII preferred to work behind the scenes and use diplomacy to get things done.  This was due, in part, to his previous experience as a Vatican diplomat and Secretary of State.  Dan Kurzman’s book A Special Mission:  Hitler’s Secret Plot to Seize the Vatican and Kidnap Pope Pius XII makes clear that in spite of his more circumspect approach towards Hitler, Pope Pius XII deeply disliked the dictator and the Nazi idealogy.  In the early part of his papacy, Pius XII had been involved in a plot to oust the Fuhrer.  When Pius first became Pope, he created a special department for the Jews in the German section of the Vatican information office to make it easier to protect them.  Pope Pius XII allowed convents and monasteries to shelter Jewish refugees in Rome when the Nazis were rounding up people to ship to concentration camps.  In March 1940 Pope Pius XII privately protested the persecution of Poles and Jews to German foreign minister Ribbentrop when he visited Rome.  The pope arranged for several thousand to escape to countries that would accept them.  Kurzman notes that after the war, notable Jewish leaders like Golda Meir and historian Martin Gilbert commended the pope for his efforts.

In spite of these efforts, critics ask if Pope Pius XII should’ve made an explicit denunciation of Hitler’s policies towards the Jews and especially the Holocaust, as his predecessor Pope Pius XI was going to with his encyclical Humani Generis Unitas?   Two reasons are given in Kurzman’s book for the pope’s decision not to make that denunciation.  One is that Pius worried about persecution against Catholics that would result from such a denunciation.  He also worried that an explicit statement against the Holocaust would worsen the persecution against the Jews.  Kurzman wrote:

“The strongest justification offered for Pius’s public silence was that any papal protest would provoke Hitler into drastic retaliation.  The pope’s supporters argue that because Dutch prelates protested vehemently against Hitler’s deportations in Holland, several hundred additional victims, mostly Jewish converts, including Edith Stein, the philosopher, were dragged out of Church institutions to their death.  And the supporters further note that about 80 percent of Holland’s Jews were ultimately deported, a higher percentage than in any other Nazi-occupied country.”

When Pius XII made statements critical of the Nazis or in reference to the plight of the Jews, he often couched them in vague language.  His most explicit address was his Christmas address of 1942 (http://www.ewtn.com/library/PAPALDOC/P12CH42.HTM) where he stated: 

“Mankind owes that vow to the countless dead who lie buried on the field of battle: The sacrifice of their lives in the fulfillment of their duty is a holocaust offered for a new and better social order. Mankind owes that vow to the innumerable sorrowing host of mothers, widows and orphans who have seen the light, the solace and the support of their lives wrenched from them. Mankind owes that vow to those numberless exiles whom the hurricane of war has torn from their native land and scattered in the land of the stranger; who can make their own the lament of the Prophet: “Our inheritance is turned to aliens; our house to strangers.” Mankind owes that vow to the hundreds of thousands of persons who, without any fault on their part, sometimes only because of their nationality or race, have been consigned to death or to a slow decline.”

Though I empathize with the quandary that Pope Pius XII was in, I tend to agree with critics that he should’ve followed his predecessors example and made an explicit statement against the Holocaust.   Costa-Gavras noted in his movie Amen that the Catholic Church took a stand to stop the Nazi policy of euthanasia of the mentally ill.  At another time, gentile wives of Jewish men protested as a group the roundup of their husbands and the Nazis released them.   Though there would be consequences to taking such a public stand, the enormity of the Holocaust made it an imperative that any spiritual leader should’ve spoken out against it.   Though Pius XII probably felt that his diplomatic skills were what was needed to save the thousands of lives sheltered in Catholic churches, the millions that died in concentration camps demanded more of an explicit stand.

Pope Pius XI and Pope Pius XII offered two different responses to a great moral evil.  Pius XI was more confrontational of the racial policies of Adolph Hitler, and at the time of his death, he was moving towards making more explicit condemnations.  Pius XII was more circumspect, making a front of being neutral, but working behind the scenes to try to shelter Jewish refugees in monastaries and convents and move them to safer countries.   A case can be made for either approach for a church to use in dealing with difficult moral decisions.  During the time of slavery, the Quakers and Evangelicals made strong moral condemnations of the institution of slavery.  The Anglican Church founded the idea of Via Media as an effective diplomatic way to make peace between the Catholic and Protestant believers in Elizabethan England.   These two examples show that some times call for the confrontational style of a Pius XI, while other times call for the more diplomatic style of a Pius XII.   Though I commend Pius XII for secretly saving many Jewish lives, I think he was the wrong leader for a time that needed a more forceful pope like Pius XI.

Costa-Gavras and the Political Thriller

A short while ago I checked out from the library and watched Missing, a movie starring Jack Lemmon and Sissy Spacek.  It’s an intense political thriller by director Costa-Gavras.   I did not know anything of Costa-Gavras, so I decided to do a little research on him.  Costa-Gavras is one of the most respected directors today, the creator of political thrillers that expose government corruption and deceit.

Here is some information on Costa-Gavras from Wikipedia (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Costa_Gavras).   Constantinos Gavras was born on February 13, 1933 to a poor family in the village of Loutra Iraias, Greece.  His father had been a member of the left-wing branch of the Greek Resistance during World War II, and was imprisoned after the war as a suspected communist.  Costa-Gavras went to France to study of law in 1951, and in 1956 he studied film.  In his early years he worked with the famed French directors Yves Allegret,  Jean Giono and Rene Clair.  He directed his first film in 1965.

Costa-Gavras is reknowned as a master of the political thriller.   Michael Wood, a teacher of English and comparative literature in Princeton, wrote in the booklet accompanying the DVD of Missing:

“The films of Constantin Costa-Gavras are often described as political thrillers, and the phrase is helpful as long as we pause over it a little.  There is always a strongly personal element to his stories, a human factor, and the thrills are in the politics rather than set against a political background.  The corpses and the cover-ups, whether in Europe or in Latin America, are intimate features of actual historical situations-an assasination in Greece, an execution in Chile, genocide in Germany- rather than fictional elements woven into a political context, as in The Manchurian Candidate (1962), say, or Salvador (1986) or In The Line Of Fire (1993).”

I’ve watched 3 Costa-Gavras movies that are available at the library:  Missing, Amen, and Z.  The 3 films have what Michael Wood talks about, stories of likable people who are affected by the corruption of the society around them.  The drama in these movies comes as the corruption of the society gradually reveals itself and threatens to envelope the main characters and destroy their integrity.  In two of the movies the heroes become disillusioned with an institution with which they had believed to be honest and virtuous, as they see the institutions collaborating with evil to preserve their own interests.  When I watch these films, I keep getting a sense of outrage at the injustices inflicted on innocent people and a sense of helplessness that large people have against the actions of their government.

My favorite of the films is Missing.  Missing is about the disappearance of Charlie Horman in the Chile of General Augusto Pinochet and the efforts of Horman’s father and wife to find him.  Charlie Horman was a filmmaker and journalist who had been asking questions of American involvement in the coup that toppled democratically elected socialist Salvadore Allende from the Presidency and put General Augusto Pinochet in power.    The early part of the film shows the growing fear that grips the population as the military harasses its citizens and makes them afraid to speak freely.  Charlie, his wife Beth, and his friend Terry are afraid of coming out after curfew, for fear of what the military will do to them.  In one scene, a group of soldiers randomly takes people from a line waiting for a bus to interrogate them.  Blood and corpses are everywhere, a reminder to Charlie and the viewers of the consequences of defying the soldiers.  When Charlie disappears, his father and wife go around to first the American embassy and then to Charlie’s friends in an effort to find out what happened to Charlie.  At first, the father is a firm believer in the American government and is skeptical of Charlie’s wife’s assertions that the American embassy and Chilean military are corrupt.  Gradually though, he finds out that the United States secretly were aiding in the military takeover and the truth of Charlie’s disappearance would expose the extent of the United States involvement.  Jack Lemmon and Sissy Spacek are the main actors and both do a good job of expressing the outrage and disillusionment of two people who had blind faith in the American government and the goodness of American intentions.  I like this film the best of the 3 Costa-Gavras films because of the appeal that John Shea, Jack Lemmon and Sissy Spacek bring to the roles of Charlie, his father and his wife. 

Z is the film that made Costa-Gavras famous.  In this film, a leader of a peace movement is clubbed in the head by some demonstrators after speaking in a peace rally and dies from brain damage.  At first the military and the police tell the public that the leader was an accidental death. As a newspaper photographer and a magistrate investigate, however, they find out that the men who clubbed the leader were part of a right wing organization called the Christian Royalist Organization Against Communism with ties to the military.  They also found that the police were in the crowd of demonstrators and did nothing to protect the peace leader from any harm.  As I watched this film, I was appalled at the lengths that the police went through to keep any different views from coming out.  The film begins with a general likening the military to an antibody and any differences of opinions as being like germs to be extinguished by the antibodies.  I liked the film, but I didn’t find the characters as appealing as Jack Lemmon or Sissy Spacek was in Missing.   I looked up Pauline Kael’s review of this movie ( http://www.geocities.com/paulinekaelreviews/z.html) and she wrote:

“How a political murder is made to look like an accident. Costa-Gavras’s extraordinary thriller–one of the fastest, most exciting melodramas ever made–was based on contemporary events in Greece. The picture never loses emotional contact with the audience; it derives from the traditions of the American gangster movies and prison pictures and anti-Fascist melodramas of the 40s.”

The end of the movie lists the things that the military banned from the country and that represented dissent:   peace movements, strikes, labor unions, long hair on men, modern and popular music, Sophocles, Leo Tolstoy, Aeschylus, Socrates , Eugène Ionesco, Jean-Paul Sartre, Anton Chekhov, Mark Twain, Samuel Beckett, , international encyclopedias, free press, new math and the letter Z, which in Greek means “to live”.

Amen is a film about Kurt Gerstein, a chemist and SS officer in Nazi Germany, who is repulsed when he finds out that the chemicals he creates are being used to kill Jews in concentration camps.  After witnessing how the German Catholic bishop stood up to the Nazis to stop the euthanasia of mentally ill people, he makes an effort to contact the Vatican in the hopes that they would make a similar effort to stop the slaughter of Jewish people.  In this effort, he is aided by a Jesuit priest whose family has connections to the upper echelon of the Vatican hierarchy.  As in Missing and Z, the two men are gradually disillusioned as they see the Pope and the Catholic hierarchy as compromising their Christian duty to publicly denounce the Holocaust because they felt that Stalin’s communism was an even greater evil than Naziism.  As someone who has been interested in the issues of Pope Pius XII and the Holocaust, I felt that Costa-Gavras was fair in his depiction of the Vatican and its dealings with the Holocaust.  In one scene, the Pope allows the Vatican to take up Jewish and nonJewish refugees and hide them in churches to help them escape a Nazi roundup in Rome.   I think Costa-Gavras depicts the Jesuit priest as being the Roman Catholic Church at its best, and contrasts that with the worst aspects of the Catholic hierarchy.  In Amen, the two main characters ask important questions.  Why was the Catholic Church able to take a courageous stand against the euthanasia of the mentally ill and not take a similar stand against Jews being shipped into concentration camps?  Though the Pope secretly sheltered some Jews in churches to protect them from Nazi persecution, why couldn’t he have made a public statement condemning the Nazi policies towards the Jews?    While in Missing Costa-Gavras condemns the United States government’s complicity in the actions of the Chilen military, he is more ambigious in his criticism of the Catholic Church.  While he acknowledges the Pope’s hatred of Adolph Hitler and the Nazi ideology, Costa-Gavras also condemns Pope Pius’s feeble response to the enormity of the Holocaust.

Costa-Gavras is a recent discovery for me.  I found his films have opened the eyes of many people of the corruption of fascist government and the ease in which institutions can betray its high ideals.  Z Magazine, an activist magazine based in Boston, was named by its founders after the Costa-Gavras film Z.  Filmmakers like Oliver Stone have been influenced by Costa-Gavras’ films.  My own personal take on the Costa-Gavras films is the necessity of each person to vigilantly guard his or her own personal liberty and to keep our governments and religious institutions accountable.   Involved and courageous citizens are necessary to make sure our institutions, whether they be our government or our churches, do not stray from its highest ideals.  I end this post with another excerpt from Michael Woods’ essay:

“The hero of Missing, like the hero of Z, like the two heroes of Amen, is a good man who changes his (comformist) politics, or more preciscely abandons his old political assumptions,  for the sake of justice and what he learns of the truth.  In Z, the man is a judge who at first can’t believe that the police and the army have organized a group of thugs to disrupt an antinuclear demonstration and kill a man;  in Amen, an SS officer and an Italian priest testify, against their professional class and to their cost, to what is happening to the Jews in Europe in 1936 and after.  Ed Horman doesn’t become less American than he was, and he has  no interest in the coup or indeed in the possibility or the extent of the involvement of the United States.  But he recognizes when he is being lied to, and he finds out how little he knows about what his government is doing- what it feels it has the right to do in his name.”