Under His Very Windows
Cohen, Richard & Zuccotti, Susan
Pius X I I : Not vindicated Richard Cohen t is a peculiar statue. The I work of a well-known Italian sculptor, Francesco Messi_._ na, it is set about halfway into Saint Peter's to the right...
...He argues that Pius was a man "whose deep concern about communism and the intact physical survival of the city of Rome kept him from exploring options on behalf of the Jewish people...
...Thus while Phayer accepts that Pius XII made concerted efforts to help Italian Jews hide, Zuccotti takes every instance where Pius is said to have so acted and subjects it to scrutiny: What did he do for Jews in Italian-occupied Croatia, or for Jews in France...
...History has done no such thing...
...Phayer examines not only Pius's actions but those of other leading Catholics, and his study extends beyond the end of the World War II to follow the evolution of official Catholic thinking during the rebuilding of German...
...He was the object of praise, admiration, and gratitude...
...Further, Pius's fondness for Germany and his wish to play a major role in brokering peace meant that he favored "a diplomatic remedy for a moral outrage...
...In November 1965, undaunted, Paul VI further instructed that the first steps should be taken toward declaring Pius XII a saint...
...Then in 1960, as Michael Phayer writes in The Catholic Church and the Holocaust, Eugenio Pacelli's reputation underwent a change with statements by German Catholic bishops at the time of the Adolf Eichmann trial in Jerusalem and on the eve of the Second Vatican Council...
...Many Jews were far from pleased at Pius's stance, but only with German playwright Rolf Hochhuth's The Deputy in 1963 did the floodgates open...
...These two books, taken together, seem to me the most convincing, and thus the most important, summary of the church's involvement with the Holocaust from the early 1930s to the present day...
...Harleys...
...Toward the end of Phayer's book, his detached tone deserts him a little and anger breaks through...
...He may have been trying to provoke us by denouncing the most revered of all motorcycle brands in a sort of biker's version of dpater le bourgeois, but what1200 cc of Holy Spirit at work Commonweal 3 I March 9, 2001...
...Zuccotti's conclusion is as absolute and thorough as Phayer's...
...It was easy to accede...
...Susan Zuccotti, on the other hand, describes Hudal as "not a confidant of the pope" and having "little influence in the Vatican...
...Above it the eyes are hidden behind thick spectacles, like the goggles worn by racing drivers of fifty years ago, making the whole visage forbidding, even sinister...
...The Vatican "gambled, putting its moral authority at stake for the sake of a favorable diplomatic position...
...If Pius XII intervened at all, "that intervention was limited almost entirely to Jews who had become Catholics...
...Richard Cohen has written for the Tablet, among many other publications...
...When, on October 9, 1958, Pius XII died, he was immediately hailed by Catholics as a saint...
...It is a damning and convincing verdict that emerges...
...My brother and I had begun to agree upon a discreet, or even panicked exit when the drunken biker disgorged, among other things, the rest of his thought: "Harleys suck...
...Hudal was working in Rome throughout the Nazi era, and according to Phayer acted as an intermediary between Pius and the Nazi occupying forces...
...In Italy and all areas occupied by Italian troops, she summarizes, "large numbers of priests, nuns, monks, and Catholic laypersons risked their lives to save Jews with little guidance from the pope...
...She thus is critical of Pius XI as well as Pius XII, and she also goes further than any previous study in examining in detail every claim made in their defense...
...Yet they will not be the end of the story...
...Pius XII is standing, in full regalia...
...he bellowed, and, to our considerable relief, passed out on the laminated tabletop...
...Commonweal 30 March 9, 2001 Phayer, who is professor of history at Marquette University and the author of Protestant and Catholic Women in Nazi Germany, dismisses the argument that for Pius to speak out would have made matters worse...
...His argument that Pius not only was sympathetic to leading Nazis after the war, but also actively helped in organizing an escape route for them is not fully convincing...
...The cardinal of Munich, Julius Dopfner, spoke of regrettable decisions that had been made by church leaders during the Nazi era, and collectively German bishops apologized for the "inhumane extermination of the Jewish people...
...The film rights to Hochhuth's 1963 play have recently been sold to a Spanish producer...
...In the week of his election as pope, Paul wrote a public letter announcing, "History will vindicate the conduct of Pius XII when confronted by the criminal excesses of the Nazi regime...
...Disturbed by "the fundamental dishonesty of claims from ostensibly reputable sources that the Vatican helped refugees far more than in fact it did," she ends by confronting "the myth of papal involvement in the rescue of Jews...
...Paul VI, who had been one of Pius's closest advisers, ordered that all Vatican documents relating to the war be made public (twelve volumes have now been published, the final one in 1981, though as Phayer makes clear, several important papers have not been released...
...Of course, most of these criticisms have been made before, but Phayer's evenhanded approach to Pius's character and the breadth of his analysis, taking in the Vatican's role throughout Europe from well before the Holocaust to the postwar years and beyond, gives his book an authority that is greater than any other work since John Morley's 1980 study, Vatican Diplomacy and the Jews During the Holocaust (Ktav Publishing House...
...He was built like a defensive end, shirtless except for a sweatstained leather vest, intricately tattooed, and evidently hallucinating under the influence of the nearly empty bottle of Jos6 Cuervo Tequila which an unprincipled bartender had surrendered to him much earlier...
...Its lower half is finely formed, ascetic--the mouth small, symmetrical, full-lipped...
...Zuccotti's book, Under His Very Windozes, is almost a companion volume to Phayer's...
...There is now a shelf of books assessing Pius's career, the most contentious of which, Jot'm Cornwell's 1999 study Hitler's Pope, Commonweal 29 March 9, 2001 may well have set back the Vatican's schedule for beatifying the pontiff...
...This enables Phayer to show how the church "completely reversed its position relative to the Jews," but it also gives him a more thorough reading of Pius XII's overall record...
...What did he do after the October 1943 round-up to help hide Jews in Roman convents, monasteries, hospitals, and schools...
...What exactly did he do, and what was in his power that he did not...
...At the least, it is a case not proved...
...For the Vatican to commemorate a past pope with such an effigy is extraordinary...
...If he did little, why did so many Jews after the war go out of their way to thank him...
...Perhaps Phayer and Zuccotti's publishers may get their books to him in time...
...She is interested in looking at the papacy's record concerning the Jews under Italian control from 1928 on, even before Hitler's coming to power...
...What part did he play in the attempts to rescue Jews in the North or Central Italy, in Venice or Trieste...
...his papal cloak envelops him, draped over his shoulders like a protecting towel as if he had just emerged from a swim...
...Phayer's book particularly strong on German source material, is at pains to list Pius's strong points--his piety, his loathing of Hitler, the instances of personal warmth, the occasions when he criticized Nazism...
...The I work of a well-known Italian sculptor, Francesco Messi_._ na, it is set about halfway into Saint Peter's to the right of the main nave, next to a painting of Saint Sebastian and immediately opposite a statue of Pius XI...
...It was as though you were touching heaven with your litfie finger just to get an audience with him," a Vatican archivist has recalled...
...In Vatican properties...
...the nose straight, Roman, slightly humped in the center of the bridge...
...he roared at us several times, as the other customers continued nonchalantly to converse...
...He is kno~ for his highly politicized semifactual approach, and has stated that he wants "to reach a mass audience with films about oppression and injustice...
...Even then there was little or no criticism of Plus XII from Jewish organizations...
...the cold war, and the gradual theological reforms that led to Vatican II...
...The crib icism from all sides grew so intense, including people walking out of churches at the mention of Pius's name, that the Vatican ordered a special defense...
...It has authority, but of a daunting kind...
...For the most part, however, Zuccotti, who has written two previous books on the Holocaust, has a different ambit than Phayer...
...With one hand he blesses the faithful, but his face is turned away to the right, as if someone or something is distracting him...
...The director will be the world-famous Greek fitmmaker, Constantine CostaGavras, whose credits include Z and Missing...
...The face itself commands attention...
...Quoting from the private diary of the French Catholic writer Germaine Ribiere, Phayer finds Pius "psychologically and temperamentally incapable of decisive action...
...The care with which they have been written makes them especially moving...
...There are considerable areas of overlap, particularly in the episode which gives her book its title--when, in October 1943, 1,959 people were rounded up and detained within half a mile of the Vatican, the majority carted off in cattle trucks to die in Auschwitz, without the pope making any effective protest...
...One of the many virtues of the two books under review is that, although the authors have read Cornwell and use some of his research, they do not make the same mistake of stacking the evidence...
...WE BRAKE FOR GOD Michael O. Garvey O ne summer night a few years ago, as my brother and I were having a couple of beers in a local biker bar, I became uncomfortably aware that a conspicuously enraged patron at a nearby table was demanding our attention...
...Much rests on the exact standing of the proNazi Austrian bishop, Alois Hudal, who on his own admission harbored Nazi war criminals--including Adolf Eichmann...
...but then finding the right way to see a man who was known in his lifetime as "the most holy one" has been a perennial problem...
Vol. 128 • March 2001 • No. 5
