THE AMBASSADOR & THE POPE Maritain & the Vatican

...Much later, apparently, even as Pope Paul VI, Montini referred to Maritain as "mio maestro...

...It would not do, apparently, to repeat what had already been said on that occasion...

...An appeal such as he was proposing, in proclaiming "the true thought of the church, would therefore be a work of enlightenment, striking at a cruel and evil error, as well as being a work of justice and reparation...

...Kubowitzki recorded the exchange in his diary: I told [Maritain] of my interview with the pope and my ideas about an encyclical on the Jewish question...

...Your presence here," he said, is an intimate testimony of the gratitude on the part of men and women who, in an agonizing time, and often under the threat of imminent death, experienced how the Catholic Church and its true disciples know how, in the exercise of charity, to rise above the narrow and arbitrary limits created by human egoism and racial passions...

...Continuing into the war years, Maritain denounced the core ideas of anti-Semitism...

...Linked with Jews through his resistance and rescue activities, Maritain had thought about Judaism for many years, beginning in his student days at the time of the Dreyfus Affair...

...The Apostolic See remains faithful to the eternal principles of the law, written by God in the heart of every man, which shines forth in the divine revelation of Sinai and which found its perfection in the Sermon on the Mount and has never, even in the most critical moments, left any doubt as to its maxims and its applicability...

...It is impossible to make sense of Pius's response to Maritain's request without keeping in mind the supersession-ist theological context that was inescapably, at the time, associated with any Vatican-level discussion of the Jews...

...Article in the O[sser-vatore] R[omano] of yesterday on the 'pretext of Kielce' in which the Kielce pogrom is declared to be non racial" (emphasis in original...

...Kubowitzki did not succeed, and when he met with Maritain in Paris in August 1946, the two compared notes on a similar experience of frustration...

...Maritain's appeal was "urgent," he said...

...Giovanni Battista Montini was the wartime subordinate of the Cardinal Secretary of State Luigi Maglione and one of the very closest aides of Eugenio Pacelli, Pope Pius XII...

...It makes sense to refer to the pope's remarks here, since Pacelli himself apparently considered it an appropriate response to the kind of concerns that Maritain had articulated...

...From his point of view, Jews had a vital role to play in the history of the world...

...Pius took comfort in the delegation's appreciation of the charity of the church...

...but in the midst of your agonies, you have felt the benefit and the sweetness of love, not that love that nourishes itself from terrestrial motives, but rather with a profound faith in the heavenly Father, whose light shines on all men, whatever their language and their race, and whose grace is open to all those who seek the Lord in a spirit of truth...

...He was instrumental in founding the Ecole Libre des Hautes Etudes, a kind of university in exile that was, at the same time, the center of Gaullist resistance in the United States, hi 1944, with the Germans in retreat, Maritain returned to Paris to work in the French Foreign Ministry...

...Understood to be friends, both the ambassador and the papal aide were under some attack from the Catholic Right in 1946, partly because of Maritain's previous promotion of what was considered a culturally venturesome doctrine of "integral humanism," and likely because of his close association with de Gaulle's commitment to dealing severely with a defeated Germany...

...Maritain's letter to Montini is dated July 12,1946, I just two months after he had presented his cre-dentials as ambassador...

...The Western press reported these events, together with shocking loss of Jewish life, accusations of ritual murder and the complicity of Polish bishops, immediately before Maritain's letter to Montini on July 12...

...Pius remained unreceptive, though...

...he Monde relayed the story on July 7 and 8, and the New York Times on July 11...

...Following this incident, Maritain continued to make the case at the Vatican on behalf of the Jews...

...Strikingly, one of the reasons had to do with the Jews themselves: "the conscience of Israel is particularly troubled," Maritain noted, "[and] many Jews feel deeply within them the attraction of the grace of Christ, and the word of the pope would surely awaken in them echoes of exceptional importance...

...I asked Maritain whether the pope would not be interested in having his name connected with such an important document, which would be of considerable historical significance...

...The reasons behind the pope's refusal to make such a statement have to do with the way these matters were understood in the Vatican at that time, where a rigorous supersessionist theology went together with an unwillingness to extend any particular effort on behalf of the Jewish people...

...Moving to New York, Maritain became deeply involved in rescue activities, seeking to bring persecuted and threatened academics, many of them Jews, to America...

...Through his Jewish wife, Rai'ssa Oumansoff, who converted to Roman Catholicism with him in 1906, Maritain remained closely associated with a Jewish family, Jewish traditions, and the intellectual heritage of Catholic writing on the subject in France...

...Among the many other crimes that have ravaged and debased humanity," Maritain went on, this was a "mysterious tragedy" that expressed "a hatred of Christ," targeting as it did "the people who gave to the world Moses and the prophets and from whom Christ himself came...

...But now that nazism has been defeated, and that the circumstances have changed," he asked, "could it not be permitted, and that is the reason for this letter, to transmit to His Holiness the appeal of so many anguished souls, and to beg him to make his voice heard...

...Still, Maritain's request was denied...

...Or was this inseparable from the Vatican's conventional idiom-the posture (not to mention the prolix expression) adopted not only with Jewish issues but with virtually everything that the Holy See communicated...

...Nazism had simply carried the ancient campaign to new levels of atrocity...

...He challenged the defeatist policies of the collaborationist Vichy regime, despite its ostentatious support for the institutions of the Catholic Church...

...The author of an influential essay in 1937, "L'impossible antisemitisme," Maritain assailed anti-Jewish prejudice, notably the tendency by Fascists and those on the extreme Right to identify Jews with communism and revolution...

...And there the matter rested...

...Fascism, he believed, had singled out Jews because they were the harbingers of Christianity: "In our day the passion of Israel takes on more and more distinctly the form of a cross," he said in a broadcast to the Free French in 1944...

...Maritain accepted that during the war, "for reasons of prudence and a higher good, and in order not to make persecution even worse, and so as not to create insurmountable obstacles in the way of the rescue that he was pursuing, the Holy Father had abstained from speaking directly to the Jews and from calling the solemn and direct attention of the whole world to the iniquitous drama that was unfolding...

...It is also important to ponder Maritain's deep unhappi-ness with the pope's unwillingness to take up his suggestions on the Jewish issue...

...However"-and this was obviously the point of the letter-"what Jews and also Christians need above all [at this juncture] is a voice-the paternal voice, the voice par excellence, that of the Vicar of Jesus Christ-to tell the truth to the world and shed light on this tragedy...

...Thomas Aquinas and a leading Catholic thinker in his own right, but also one of the most influential laymen in the postwar Catholic world...

...THE AMBASSADOR & THE POPE Pius XII, Jacques Maritain & the Jews Michael R. Narrus In the intense debates of recent years surrounding Pope Pius XII, anti-Semitism, and the Holocaust, fresh perspectives can advance our understanding...

...He replied, "I would not hesitate to answer in the affirmative, if we were speaking about his predecessor...

...Concluding, Pius used the occasion both to project his own understanding of what Holocaust survivors should feel, and also the role of the Catholic Church in that process: You have experienced yourselves the injuries and the wounds of hatred...

...This has been, permit me to say it, greatly lacking in the world today...

...Maritain's old friend Msgr...

...Shortly after his return, a reluctant Maritain was prevailed upon to accept the post of French ambassador to the Holy See...

...The pope's stock reply ("we have already spoken") was of a piece with the wartime answers given when the Vatican was reluctant to speak, or to speak explicitly, as Maritain also noticed...

...Maritain's prophetic voice pointed toward the Second Vatican Council in the mid-1960s, with its radical transformation of Catholic perspectives on Jews and the Jewish people...

...Finally, Maritain underscored, he was making his appeal "as a Catholic and as one humbly devoted to His Holiness and as a Christian philosopher who has taken the liberty to write...

...It was particularly important for Paris to solidify relations with the Vatican since the new French government intended to purge from the episcopacy many high-ranking churchmen who had compromised themselves during the German occupation...

...Unfortunately, Maritain himself had no explanation, and none of the available evidence is able to provide a conclusive answer...

...Maritain either took the trouble to research the pope's words to the Jewish delegation or was given a copy by the pope-we know this because he referred the statement to some petitioners three days later...

...And on the other hand, as he observed, "the anti-Semitic psychosis has not vanished, on the contrary one sees that everywhere in America and in Europe anti-Semitism is spreading in segments of the population, as if the poisons issuing from Nazi racism continue to do their work...

...Framed in the highly apologetic and convoluted rhetoric of the day, Pacelli's speech appeared in the Vatican daily L'Osservatore Romano the following day: "Your presence, gentlemen, seems to us an eloquent testimony to the psychological transformations that the world conflict has, in its different aspects, created in the world," he began...

...In the postwar situation, as Maritain observed, there were no apprehensions that speaking out could prompt retaliation or provoke even worse persecution by the Germans...

...Montini first encountered Maritain in Paris in the 1920s, when the latter was teaching at the Institut Catholique...

...Perhaps in consequence, Maritain became increasingly disillusioned with his post...

...Without doubt, in a world which only little by little and in struggling against numerous obstacles must confront and resolve the multiple problems that are the unhappy heritage of the war, the church, conscious of its religious mission, can only maintain a wise reserve in the presence of the different questions, inasmuch as they have a purely political and territorial character...

...He does not want to broach the issue of the mystere d'Israel," the ambassador recorded in his diary in February 1948...

...There is, however, a remarkable Maritain encounter that suggests his experience was far from unique...

...Both had been very friendly though his impression was that they were afraid to carry out the idea...

...It seems to me-and I hope that your Excellency will not see any presumption in what I am writing in all humility-it seems to me that this is a particularly opportune moment for such a sovereign declaration of the thought of the church...

...The pope carefully wove into his address some discrete allusions to what separated his Jewish listeners from the Catholic faith...

...Deeply respected because of his association with General Charles de Gaulle and the French Resistance, he played an important role in the evolution of postwar Christian Democratic movements in France and Italy...

...The two shared important commitments-to Thomist philosophy, but also to the effort to renew the spiritual authority of the Catholic Church, which they hoped, in the postwar period, to disentangle from the apparatus of states...

...The pope was wary of political involvement...

...On July 16, the day he saw the pope, Maritain received an appeal from the Jewish Labor Committee in New York deploring the silence of the Catholic Church and appealing to him to denounce the atrocities...

...Why else would the pope, when meeting with Jewish survivors of the concentration camps, have felt obliged to insist on the church's fidelity to "the divine revelation of Sinai...which found its perfection in the Sermon on the Mount...

...He reminded me how much he had been saddened by the pope's silence during the war concerning the persecution of the Jews and by his attempts to evade any direct mention of the matter, confining himself to roundabout statements...

...In doing so, it is important to be especially attentive to language, particularly the Catholic vernacular of an earlier era, the Vatican's own mode of discourse at the time, and the susceptibility of these words to a variety of understandings...

...It is well to keep this in mind, both to understand the correspondence between Maritain and Montini, and the much more desperate wartime events that preceded it...

...Catholic conscience is poisoned, something has to be done...

...Respectfully, Maritain went on to make the case to Montini that the time was indeed ripe...

...Pius delivered the address in question on November 29, 1945, to an audience of seventy Jewish refugees from German concentration camps, who had asked for "the great honor of personally thanking the Holy Father for the generosity that he had shown them when they had been persecuted during the terrible period of Nazi-Fascism...

...From the standpoint of the new authorities in Paris, Maritain was unquestionably the right man for the job-stoutly republican and associated with de Gaulle, but prominently Catholic and highly respectful of the institution to which he would be accredited...

...A good example comes from a seldom-discussed letter written in the summer of 1946 by Jacques Maritain, the most prominent Catholic philosopher of his day, to his longtime friend and associate Giovanni Montini, the future Pope Paul VI, then sostituto in the office of the Vatican's Secretariat of State-effectively the pope's chief of staff...

...hi the spring of 1940, when the ordeal of France under Nazi domination began, Maritain was in Canada teaching at the Pontifical Institute for Medieval Studies in Toronto...

...Pius then referred to: the abyss of discord, the hatred, and the folly of persecution which, under the influence of erroneous and intolerant doctrines, in opposition to the noble human and authentic Christian spirit, have engulfed incomparable numbers of innocent victims, even among those who took no active part in the war...

...There is more than a hint, in Maritain's unsuccessful effort, that Pope Pius XII felt obliged to link any declaration about the Jews with an assertion of Catholic rectitude and universal spiritual hegemony...

...Apparently informed of Maritain's request, Pius chose not to act...

...And while the letter went to Montini, it was clearly the pope to whom the message was directed...

...Some fifteen years younger than Mar-itain, Montini considered the philosopher his teacher and, as a famous interpreter of Aquinas, one of the key promoters of a Catholic response to the challenge of modernity...

...For many years, the diplomat reminded Montini, Maritain had been aware of the most savage hatred directed against "Israel...

...In the letter, Maritain formulated a plea to Pius XII for a solemn declaration denouncing the great scourge of anti-Semitism in the context of the Nazis' destruction of European Jewry and the widespread complicity of Catholics in those events...

...Maritain subsequently expressed his disappointment to Montini...

...When he finally did step down, in the spring of 1948, he confided to his friend Charles Jourdan about his "heart-rending ambivalence": a "growing affection for the person of the pope," on the one hand, but a "growing disappointment with regard to his actions," on the other...

...But what are we to make of his appreciative reference to the "tireless charity with which the Holy Father has tried with all his might to save and protect the persecuted...

...Montini translated one of Maritain's works into Italian, and remained a champion of Maritain's philosophy during the 1930s, when confrontations between the church and fascism intensified, and when, in 1937, he entered the papal curia...

...He then referred to "the tireless charity with which the Holy Father had tried, with all his might, to save and protect the persecuted," and to his "condemnations of racism that have won for him the gratitude of the Jews and all those who care for the human race...

...He referred to "the part that many Catholics had in the development of anti-Semitism," both in the more distant past, during the war, and in the present...

...He urged Montini to address the anti-Jewish prayer pro perfidis Judaeis in the Good Friday liturgy...

...Nevertheless, that does not prevent that, in proclaiming the grand principles of a true humanity and fraternity, it establishes the bases and sure foundation for a solution of those same problems with justice and equity...

...Indeed, Maritain, Montini, and the pope rarely speak with our own idiom...

...Maritain responded sympathetically three days later...

...Such a statement would not have posed any danger of retaliation against the Jews, a reason frequently given for why the pope did not speak out explicitly about the Nazi genocide during the war...

...each adopts a particular convention of speech that we must keep in mind for analytical purposes...

...He appealed to the pope to issue a major statement on the Jews...

...Was this a considered judgment, intended as an accurate summary of the pope's wartime efforts, or was it a formulaic appreciation of the overall standing and general good intentions of the Holy See...

...Maritain (1882-1973) was not only a respected expert on St...

...From our perspective, Pius's admonishing Holocaust survivors about the great benevolence of the church and that in the midst of their agonies they "have felt the benefit and sweetness of love" would be an unpardonable presumption if spoken today...

...In September 1945, Leon Kubowitzki, then secretary general of the World Jewish Congress, appealed to the pope himself to make a grand statement in support of the Jews, whose ordeal was finally over...

...The pope had, he told the philosopher, "already spoken on this issue while receiving a Jewish delegation...

...So why the refusal...

...That day, with the dreadful events in Poland much on his mind, Maritain saw Montini and then gave vent, in his diary, to his frustration: "Visit to Montini...

...He wrote to Montini a month after these events, focusing on what he felt was the collective responsibility of Germans for the genocidal crimes of Nazism...

...Maritain was writing, he told Montini, as a friend and not as an ambassador, "feeling impelled as a Catholic to present an appeal at the feet of the Holy Father, together with [his] sentiments of filial and profound devotion...

...He smiled and told me that he had urged a similar proposal on the pope and on Monsigniore Montini...

...Jews and Christians are persecuted together and by the same enemies: the Christians because they are faithful to Christ, and the Jews because they have given Christ to the world...

...Was this discourse understood at the time as the haughty, patronizing condescension it might seem to us...

...During the war six million Jews have been liquidated," he wrote, "thousands of Jewish children have been massacred, thousands of others torn from their families and stripped of their identity....Nazism proclaimed the necessity of wiping the Jews off the face of the earth (the only people that it wanted to exterminate as a people)" (emphases in original...

...And why, for that matter, would Jacques Maritain, whose good will toward the victims of the Holocaust cannot be doubted, nevertheless have told Montini, perhaps as an inducement for the pope, that "the conscience of Israel is particularly troubled, [that] many Jews feel deeply within them the attraction of the grace of Christ, and the word of the pope would surely awaken in them echoes of exceptional importance...

...We are, as these words were spoken, still twenty years from the Second Vatican Council and its revolutionary transformation of Catholic-Jewish relations, in which God's abiding covenant with the Jewish people was affirmed rather than repudiated...

...The Holy Father never even named them (emphasis in original...

...For whatever reason, the Vatican was unwilling to respond positively to Maritain's appeal...

...Four days after writing to Montini, Maritain had an audience with the pope...

...There is some additional, pertinent context for this point: just as Maritain was pursuing his appeal on behalf of the Jews he was learning of new outbursts of anti-Semitism in Eastern Europe, culminating in the atrocious outburst of communal violence in the Polish town of Kielce, on July 4, 1946...

...There seems little doubt about the emotion and sincerity of Maritain's letter to Montini, and his hopes for a positive answer...

...I speak to him of Jews and anti-Semitism...

...Maritain's call for a papal statement is plain enough, to be sure...

...n think it is plain that Maritain's attitudes and observations, as well as the pope's perspective, can help us better understand the Vatican's actions with regard to the Holocaust...