The Catholic Church and the Holocaust, 1910-1965
Phayer, Michael
Pius XII: Not vindicated The Catholic Church and the Holocaust, 193O-1965 Michael Phayer Indiana University Press, $29S5,324 pp. Under His Very Windows The Vatican and the Holocaust in...
...LUKE TIMOTHY JOHNSON Large families & ideas I was pleasantly surprised by two pieces in the February 9 issue of Commonweal...
...But my point about genocide was linked to the absolute prohibition of condoms, including for people with aids...
...With one hand he blesses the faithful, but his face is turned away to the right, as if someone or something is distracting him...
...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...
...God will hear you...
...In Vatican properties...
...By resurrecting an outmoded ethical category, Johnson does little to further the debate about Humane vitae...
...Johnson wants church teaching to be based in ordinary life experience, but let him consider this basic problem: If a population of 1 million couples is using artificial birth control, one year the normal failure rate will result in at least fifty thousand unwanted pregnancies...
...I think perhaps with more admiration about an incident recounted in a letter to the New York Review of Books by an Israeli who survived the occupation of Poland...
...Since these couples have already decided to separate childbearing from sexual pleasure, abortion becomes the natural solution...
...Jeffreys connects my poor grasp of the pope's overall position with my suggestion that the church may be in danger of colluding in genocide...
...Why can't the consensual use of a condom be as holy an act as the consensual avoidance of fertility...
...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...
...In point of fact, has the author actually been willing to listen to and learn from people who give witness to the magnificent grace available to those 43 who foEow the church's teachings on sexuality...
...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...
...His thinking leads to a very confusing ethical point of view...
...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...
...If Pius XII intervened at all, "that intervention was limited almost entirely to Jews who had become Catholics...
...The work of a well-known Italian sculptor, Francesco Messina, 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...
...I am pleased to hear them...
...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...
...When, on October 9,1958, Pius XII died, he was immediately hailed by Catholics as a saint...
...At the least, it is a case not proved...
...What did he do after the October 1943 round-up to help hide Jews in Roman convents, monasteries, hospitals, and schools...
...It is precisely the connection between birth control and abortion that Johnson seems to disregard...
...As he suggests, we ought to revisit this encyclical, and we may end up concluding that John Paul II's personalism cannot support his opposition to artificial contraception...
...Robert hannon Fairbanks, Ark...
...Quoting from the private diary of the French Catholic writer Germaine Ribiere, Phayer finds Pius "psychologically and temperamentally incapable of decisive action...
...Just a small point in response to Popiel: I think that I called the pope's theology "deductive," whereas I would prefer a theology that was more "inductive...
...By the way, though certain passages of the book of Revelation are commonly used to support interpretations of the Rapture, the notion itself is drawn from 1 Thessalonians 4:17...
...The care with which they have been written makes them especially moving...
...Is Johnson sure that "absolutely everything we can learn about God must come to us" from our bodies...
...What part did he play in the attempts to rescue Jews in the North or Central Italy, in Venice or Trieste...
...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...
...REV...
...marian burkhart New York, N.Y...
...Marvin, S.D...
...I wonder what the mystics would say about this...
...I have no reason to think I would have had such courage...
...This, it seems to me, would go beyond repetition of the platitudes about access to a lover's body and the benefits of sexual enjoyment to a discussion about the real experiences of people who have made a serious attempt to conform to doctrinal standards...
...He is more in a position to address these issues than the pope...
...Jo McGowan's "Corporal Punishment" and A.W...
...History has done no such thing...
...Nevertheless, before drawing such a conclusion, we ought to at least represent the pope's position fairly...
...If natural family planners, surprised by pregnancy, are then open to God's will concerning a birth, why should we assume that those using condoms who are surprised whould then seek an abortion...
...Perhaps Phayer and Zuccotti's publishers may get their books to him in time...
...May it not be precisely because the "purpose of a catemodern sexual ethics...
...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...
...But even in his analysis, a dismissal of current theology would have to involve a serious attempt to confront the realities behind the church's teachings...
...Eureka moments I trust that Luke Timothy Johnson is too good a scholar not to be profoundly embarrassed that he failed to read Wojtyla's Love and Responsibility before penning his "A Disembodied 'Theology of the Body.'" In this 1960 work, the future pope convincingly establishes the "embodiedness" of his teaching on human sexuality, including a positive discussion on the role of pleasure in the conjugal act, the sheer candor of which was considered by many contemporaries as beneath the dignity of a prelate...
...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...
...Under His Very Windows The Vatican and the Holocaust in Italy Susan Zuccotti Ynle University Press, $29.95,396 pp...
...Johnson's failures to contextualize the pope's thought within its corpus as a whole and to understand the purpose of a catechetical address seem to be at the root of his embarrassingly off-base criticisms and misunderstandings...
...What exactly did he do, and what was in his power that he did not...
...Zuccotti's conclusion is as absolute and thorough as Phayer's...
...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...
...For example, Johnson's focus on the use of the rhetoric of self-control causes him to miss the larger point: many of us who follow church teachings do so joyfully and find that it has brought greater, not lesser, pleasure and happiness to our lives...
...JENNIFER POP1EL Green Bay, Wis...
...Yet they will not be the end of the story...
...Jeffreys says that the pope does not really have an "act-centered morality...
...This to me is the real problem of native...
...Roger Landry and Jennifer Popiel offer testimonies concerning the joy brought to couples who are introduced to papal teaching on sexuality or who practice natural family planning...
...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...
...The film rights to Hochhuth's 1963 play have recently been sold to a Spanish producer...
...JULIAN IRIAS Davis, Calif...
...There is now a shelf of books assessing Pius's career, the most contentious of which, John Cornwell's 1999 study Hitler's Pope, 29 may well have set back the Vatican's schedule for beatifying the pontiff...
...But there are other stories, voiced by people of equally deep faith and love for the church but with quite different experiences, and I would like them to be heard as well...
...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...
...Godfrey's opening sentences prepared me for a sentimental look at his ordeals as a single parent...
...Paul Hottinger asks why I don't work at all this stuff I said needed doing, since the pope is a busier guy than I am...
...Maybe I will...
...But why should we assume that using a condom is different than periodic abstinence with respect to intention concerning childbirth...
...It has authority, but of a daunting kind...
...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...
...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...
...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...
...I'm still looking for answers...
...Well, if he does not, then his persistence in supporting Humanae vitae becomes even stranger, for that composition is strictly act-centered...
...Consistent ethic Luke Timothy Johnson does offer some salient points in his critique of Pope John Paul II's theology, which he describes as "abstract" and idealistic...
...The criticism 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...
...Certainly, not everyone who uses natural family planning will find it easy...
...In November 1965, undaunted, Paul VI further instructed that the first steps should be taken toward declaring Pius XII a saint...
...Its lower half is finely formed, ascetic—the mouth small, symmetrical, full-lipped...
...There are considerable areas of overlap, particularly in the episode 30 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...
...An old woman on a crowded trolley in Warsaw, at a time and in a place where one could trust almost no one, replied to the anti-Semitic diatribe a fellow passenger was delivering by saying, "Hush up...
...DEREK s. JEFFREYS Green Bay, Wis...
...Why doesn't the professor provide a consistent ethic of sexual behavior taking into account the experience of married people, homosexuals, and those who are single "yet whose erotic desires find no legitimate or sanctified expression...
...Without taking up the philosophical issues behind his "deductive theology," I would push Johnson on his concluding claim that "we must, in all humility, be willing to learn from the bodies and the stories of those whose response to God and to God's world involves sexual love...
...I rather doubt that this generation's revisionists would have either...
...Godfrey's "Crowd Control" reimpressed on me how disparate elements can join to strike a blow to the solar plexus...
...The face itself commands attention...
...And we still love our partners and rejoice in our ability to demonstrate that physically...
...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...
...Disappointed As someone who believes in Humanae vitae but also agrees there is room for further development in this teaching, I found Luke Timothy Johnson's essay disappointing...
...The author replies: Derek Jeffreys and Roger Landry think that I have misrepresented Pope John Paul II because I did not take into account his other writings on the subject of human love, or grasp the "purpose of a catechetical address...
...This is borne out by documented facts: a high percentage of women seeking abortions were using birth control methods that failed...
...Pius XII is standing, in full regalia...
...It is a damning and convincing verdict that emerges...
...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...
...5 McGowan, by juxtaposing the general chaos of India's earthquake with the particular and personal moral challenge of a public interrogation, managed, for me at least, to convey how bewildering our world is and how great events find reflections in our everyday life...
...Until the critics of Humanae vitae address this, John Paul II will continue to win the philosophical argument while much of the population simply ignores him...
...For the Vatican to commemorate a past pope with such an effigy is extraordinary...
...I have no more objection to those who choose this path than I do to those who choose celibacy, in or out of marriage...
...ROGER J. LANDRY Fall River, Mass...
...But if these are the pope's sentiments, why is there no trace of them in the multiple addresses making up Theology of the Body...
...Perhaps it's the general intellectual numbness of coming off a hotly contested election with its high polemics, but I find personal reflections by such sensitive narrators more persuasive these days than the closely reasoned certainty of experts...
...The director will be the world-famous Greek filmmaker, Constantine CostaGavras, whose credits include Z and Missing...
...Readings of Scripture that force it into a fortune-telling role do not have a good track record...
...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...
...Since Alleva's own concerns have to do with the verisimilitude of the Left Behind series as thrillers, he is certainly entitled to be selective in his quarrels...
...Matthew Kowalski makes the point that allowing artificial birth control would lead inevitably to abortion, since for people whose sexual activity already excludes the thought of having a child, "abortion becomes the natural solution...
...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...
...Instead he offered a gentle argument for the large family, that carried all the more weight for avoiding the hectoring arguments of church apologists...
...Carroll's irony The ultimate irony of James Carroll's theories [see Robert Wilken's review of Constantine's Sword, "Dismantling the Cross," Janurary 26] about the inevitability of Christian anti-Semitism is that those Christians who risked their lives to save Jews did so not in spite of their faith but because of it...
...Finally, in regard to the Theology of the Body, I found one of Johnson's principles rather hard to accept: "Human bodies are part of God's image and the means through which absolutely everything we can learn about God must come to us...
...They did so in response to the belief that Christ died to save all of us— Jews, gypsies, homosexuals, and the handicapped as well...
...I would not be surprised to find them multiplied...
...My experiences lead me to believe that the answer would not be as dismal as the author assumes...
...But Christians reading the New Testament as a source of divine revelation may demand more of a proposed exegesis than that it be sincere and interesting...
...Richard Cohen It is a peculiar statue...
...D 31 (Continued from page 4} personhood undermines the utilitarian reasoning pervasive in debates about artificial contraception...
...moments among young engaged and married couples not to be convinced of the Theology of the Body's great pastoral utility...
...In what way is God's image connected to the human body...
...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...
...Moreover, I have witnessed too many joy-filled "Eureka...
...his papal cloak envelops him, draped over his shoulders like a protecting towel as if he had just emerged from a swim...
...If he did little, why did so many Jews after the war go out of their way to thank him...
...REV...
...MATTHEW KOWALSKI, O.S.B...
...This is true enough, but I wonder if Johnson has really offered an alter44 chetical address" was to support, as I suggest, Humanae vitae...
...I wonder how this squares with the experience of believers...
...We are more in tune with one another's desires...
...For the most part, however, Zuccotti, who has written two previous books on the Holocaust, has a different ambit than Phayer...
...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 Germany, the cold war, and the gradual theological reforms that led to Vatican II...
...PAUL A. HOTTINGER Downers Grove, III...
...The joys of Catholic sex Luke Timothy Johnson's article left me with a nagging unease...
...Alleva's rapture It is irenic of Richard Alleva ["Beam Me Up," January 12] to seek no quarrel with the idea of the Rapture or even with the LaHaye-Jenkins interpretation of it...
...The Vatican "gambled, putting its moral authority at stake for the sake of a favorable diplomatic position...
...Susan Zuccotti, on the other hand, describes Hudal as "not a confidant of the pope" and having "little influence in the Vatican...
...It was as though you were touching heaven with your little finger just to get an audience with him," a Vatican archivist has recalled...
...the nose straight, Roman, slightly humped in the center of the bridge...
...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 the end, some might well agree with Johnson...
...He is known for his highly politicized semifactual approach, and has stated that he wants "to reach a mass audience with films about oppression and injustice...
...He was the object of praise, admiration, and gratitude...
...I think of Jan Korski skiing across the Alps, a consecrated host in a pendant on a chain around his neck, to tell the Allies who couldn't have cared less what was happening at Auschwitz...
...Toward the end of Phayer's book, his detached tone deserts him a little and anger breaks through...
...As couples, we communicate more, not less...
...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...
...Zuccotti's book, Under His Very Windows, is almost a companion volume to Phayer's...
...Hudal was working in Rome throughout the Nazi era, and according to Phayer acted as an intermediary between Pius and the Nazi occupying forces...
...Even then there was little or no criticism of Pius XII from Jewish organizations...
...What is pertinent is a reexamination of the moral issue in light of medical disaster, not a reexamination of the pope's entire corpus to justify the church's present stance...
...Landry praises what the pope had said about pleasure and the rest in 1960...
Vol. 128 • March 2001 • No. 5
