By Miki Tasseni:
ONE of the most intractable problem areas that each incoming Pontiff at the
Vatican has had to figure out on his own, is to determine his own specific
attitude to Israel, tied unavoidably with the tortous issue of the church
attitude to the Nazi regime up to World War II. For the past decade there
has been a wide ranging controversy in Israel as to whether Pope Pius XII,
who as pope helped thousands of Jews to escape sure death in Adolf Hitler’s
concentration camps, should be admitted to the honors list of Yad Vashem,
of ‘righteous Gentiles’ who helped the Jewish people in time of peril. It
is an intractable issue that Benedict XVI avoided,
The key to the issueis that it is true that as Pontiff, Pius XII worked
tirelessly to save countless European Jewry from extermination, using the
church network or church agencies like the Jesuists from where the
Franciscan Jorge Mario Cardinal Bergoglio served for many years. But as
Eugenio Maria Cardinal Pacelli he worked first as Papal Nuncio (ambassador)
to Germany in 1917 to 1929 and thereafter as Secretary of State at the
Vatican. Here, he personally negotiated and concluded the Reichconcordat,
a mutual non-interference pact between the Vatican and Berlin.
Historians are more or less agreed that the pact with the Vatican was a
pivotal, or say cardinal instrument of legitimation for the emerging Nazi
authorities, whom most Christians in Germany felt were allied to
traditional German paganism. An important National Socialist philosopher,
Martin Heidegger gives a mirror image of this thinking, where his
existentialist philosophy seeks to shed ‘ontotheology’ (things like logic,
rights, humanism) for existentiality, that is, being born, working and
dying, such that life is really about waiting for death. It is a philosophy
that easily unites the thinking of cruel German troops, Japanese kamikaze
or Al Qaeda suicide bombers, and in Christianity, the St Paul maxim, ‘to
live is Christ and death is beneficial.’ It is total commitment to the
Fuerher, to nation or its sun-god spirit…
A Wikipedia entry on the life of Pius XII says that “the concordat of 1933,
with which the Vatican sought to protect the Church in Germany, and Hitler
sought the destruction of ‘political
Catholicism’
and Pius’ leadership of the Catholic Church during World War II, including
his “decision to stay silent in public about the fate of the Jews” remain
the subject of controversy,” to which one could add, to say the very least.
When the Jewish state was formed in 1947 and later the Yad Vashem award was
created, there was controversy in the United States and elsewhere as to
whether Pius XII was entitled for recognition for his wartime efforts to
save Jews from certain death at the hands of agents of the Gestapo, the
German secret police. Great Jewish scientist Albert Einstein, a lifelong
professor of physics at Princeton university in the US, was among those who
staunchly opposed such nomination.
This position was considered right by many observers and the majority of
Jewish critics, despite the clear fact that without the efforts of Pius XII
thousands of Jews would have perished who otherwise obtained assistance to
shift to safer countries. To this day this refusal to consider Pius XII as
a ‘righteous Gentile’ in the eyes of the Jewish people has often strained
relations with Rome, even before adding latter day disputes like occupation
of the West Bank, selected assassinations of militants, etc. Francis I will
have to face up to this issue as well, as to whether to admit the pre-war
support of Nazi rule, silence on Jewish extermination, or let the issue lie.
The last time that the papacy and Israel has exchanged words on the issue
was during the visit by Benedict XVI at the Yad Vashem Museum in
Jerusalem,, where according to the country’s leading newspaper, Haaretz,
“Survivors (were) angered by (the) pope’s ‘lukewarm’ Yad Vashem speech,”
citing remarks from Yad Vashem chairman, Rabbi Yisrael Meir Lau, that
‘There’s a dramatic difference between killed and murdered,’ as Benedict
XVI talked about those killed in the Holocaust. The visit conducted mid
2009 was a difficult one for the pope, himself a German.
The newspaper said “The speech by Pope Benedict XVI Monday at Yad Vashem
drew criticism from staff members of the Holocaust memorial, who described
it as disappointing and lukewarm. The chairman of the Yad Vashem
Directorate, Avner Shalev, said he expected the pope, “who is a human
being, too,” to draw on his personal experience to issue a stronger
condemnation of Nazis and Germans, who were not directly mentioned in the
speech. The pope grew up in Nazi Germany and served in both Hitler Youth
and the Wehrmacht, before deserting from the army in 1944. Shalev, however,
said the speech was “important,” especially in its criticism of denial of
the Holocaust.” There are many rightwing voices in Europe disputing that
Nazi Germany killed millions of Jews, disputing places, dates, figures,
etc., many of whom are likely to be wary if the conservative pope gave too
much way.
As Francis I is as conservative in social affairs as his predecessor, he
may wish to keep the loyalty of this fringe of support of the church, but
not as constrained in his feelings like the Bavarian ex-pontiff, where the
issue is more touchy. Still in his native Argentina, and nearby Chile, many
former Nazi officers streamed out and Israeli security identified a few and
got them arrested, for instance Adolf Eichmann, An internet entry on his
life says that “Before his arrest by Israel’s Mossad intelligence service,
Adolf Eichmann boasted openly to other foreigners in Argentina of the war
crimes he had committed. He confided in one journalist that his only
mistake was not having murdered all the Jews. “We didn’t do our work
correctly,” the cold blooded Nazi functionary would have declared. He felt
assured living in Argentina, among immigrant friends with roots in Catholic
Europe who shifted to South America. Was the father of Cardinal Bergoglio
among his friends?
That is why, even if he says he comes from the ‘\end of the world’ the new
pope is culturally very close to old Europe, and that is why he was
nominated or carried the day in voting, as Italy wanted one of their own
after two misses, and obtained a carbon copy – a first generation immigrant
to Argentina, speaking fluent Italian. While he is less sensitive to the
actual crimes of the Nazis, the cultural lobby that is likely to weave
around him won’t be entirely different from that which engulfed Benedict
XVI, aparrt from his own Nazi roots. With the latter it was a problem of
his conscience, while with Francis I it will be a matter of a painful
balancing act.
In that case he will have the shadow of Benedict XVI hovering above in
whatever he does or say about that painful period of European history as
well as Jewish memories. Especially since his precedessor is still around
at the special residence that will serve as his retirement home for
meditation and prayer, chances of his changing the Vatican stance on the
issue are limited, though he could try and take up the issue of recognition
of the efforts of Pius XII as righteous. For this he would have to offer a
profound apology on that episode, if recognition is the prize.
There is however an aspect of things that neither the pope nor his Israeli
hosts when he chooses to visit the Holy Land can resolve, unless a mindset
shift occures either in both parties or at least in the way Israel
understands its history. When it grasps that the misfortune engulfing the
‘remnants of Jacob’ did not simply raise from actions of Cardinal Pacelli
to have given Hitler the confidence he needed to do as he pleased with the
Jews, they will see the reason for reconciliation, via a formal recognition
of his wartime efforts. They will have grasped that his pact with the
Nazis was decreed from above, dictated by European realpolitik legacies.
The reason for the Reichskonkordat wasn’t less consideration for the Jewish
people but rather because the Nazis were the only effective force against
the communists – whom like the Jews the Nazis put to systematic
extermination. But it must be said that neither the cardinal nor anyone
else would have been perfectly aware of the real dimensions of Nazi plans,
and thus Rome may have expected persecutions and emigration, scarcely total
extermination. Saying he was party to the whole thing due to the pact would
beg the issue: did Nazis also offer to save Jews, frantically?
When one visits the Bible in the Book of Daniel, chapter 12 there is a
forewarning of the Holocaustm but Biblical criticism has usually seen it
merely as ‘prophesy of the last days.’ Daniel 12:1 says (on the basis of
the New King James Version) that “At that time Michael shall stand up, the
great prince who stands watch over the sons of your people; and there shall
be a time of trouble, such as never was since there was a nation, even to
that time. And at that time your people shall be delivered, everyone (whoe
name) is found written in the book,” which means that all those whose names
won’t be found shall perish. That totals six million of them.
This line clearly says the period shall be the worst since the nation of
Israel came into being, which has seen pogroms and near exterminations,
like the plot to put all Jews to knife during their exile in Babylon, then
under Persian rule. It was the time that the Lord raised Esther, who
obtained favor in the eyes of King Darius, and thus with encouragement from
the priest Mordechai, pleaded with the king against the plot, and the
king’s minister, Hamani, was hanged in the place of Mordechai, by the pole
he had himself erected for the purpose. The Lord raised no one near Hitler,
such that the remnant of Israel was without help, but a few as Daniel said.
At the moment the total population of Jews around the world is around six
million, and evidently Jews are some of the people who still have children
as a matter of duty, unlike many liberated women in Europe and North
America or the Far East. If the total births given to Jews over the past 70
years comes to six million, one can figure out what significance the
Holocaust had on European Jewry, and the cold blooded manner in which it
was conducted. When one reads Daniel 12 line 4, the reason for this
situation emerges, “But you, Daniel, shut up the words, and seal the book
until the time of the end; many shall run to and fro, and knowledge shall
increase.” This translation has a few problems, but it underlines the
coming of the globalization period, where communication around the world is
much easier. It means that the Holocaust was meant to precede
globalization, global human rights,
Since the Jews were the toughest adversaries of Christ, their decimation
lessens the danger to the spread of the Gospel, than if a hundred thousand
voices would today fill tbe airwaves, denying the divinity of Christ as a
few dozen are doing now. In addition, the brazen character of pagan
nationalism in Europe had to explode in the eyes of everyone, not just in
devastating warfare (which leaves people exhausted but proud) but having
committed horrendous crimes – thus leaving them ashamed. The Lord had use
of this shame, so as to reach the Universal Declaration of Human Rights in
1948, and total transformation of European civilisation, to abhor all sense
of nationalism and affinities with its pagan gods, the core of Operation
Barbarossa, This figure, planted into German history, was the same Barabas
the Jews had freed instead of Jesus – and this spirit has hounded the
Jewish people down to this day.
Correction by the editor:
His father emigrated to Argentina and he
was born there, and his father ran away from fascism, not moved along
with escaping Nazis and Mussolinians. This changes his relationship to
history to become normal, though with Catholicism under pressure to
keep its conservative fringes especially in Europe, he will be just
relatively less tied down in relation to the Holocaust in comparison
with Benedict XVI.