What the Church Was Thinking

...Reviewed by Michael R. Marrus Dean of Graduate Studies and Chancellor Rose and Ray Wolfe Professor of Holocaust Studies, University of Toronto...

...Anti-Semitism," he told a group of Belgians, "is...

...And during the Holocaust when Jews were being rounded up and slaughtered everywhere in Europe, the argument goes, Church leaders lent them whatever aid they could...

...Following Beilis' acquittal, Father Paolo Silva wrote in Civiltà cattolica—whose articles were sent in advance to the Cardinal Secretary of State—that the Jews had bribed the Russian authorities...

...Virtually everyone would agree that there is some overlap between the two, but defenders of the Church have emphasized the constraints of traditional antiJudaism...

...The matter was turned over to the Holy Office of the Inquisition, where deliberations went on for many months...

...DESPITE the abundance of such damning evidence, though, Kertzer's account charts, in my reading, the slow and painful emergence of more humane attitudes—often admittedly prompted by a commitment to the Jews' ultimate salvation, however much this was seen as a distant goal...

...Although opposing distinctions based on race and looking to the eventual conversion of Jews, traditional antiJudaism also accused the Jewish people of promoting the elements of modernity considered harmful to the Catholic faith: Bolshevism, capitalism, atheism, rationalism, liberalism, materialism—all were at one point or another ascribed to the influence of the Jews...

...Even Austria's powerful Foreign Minister, Prince Mettermeli, felt compelled to complain to the Pope...

...Responding to the desperate appeals of Jewish leaders to intervene in the 1913 trial of Mendel Beilis in Kiev, the Vatican grudgingly conceded that some popes in the distant past may have been at variance with the notion that the Jews were guilty of ritual murder, but it still refused to repudiate the allegation itself...

...and public humiliation and restrictions on Jewish life...

...The story that followed told of Jews in Hungary allegedly slitting the throat of a seven-yearold orphan to drain his blood...

...The same Monsignor Achille Ratti who, in his report to the Vatican on events in Poland after World War I, could betray an adherence to the idea that the Jews were, in Kertzer's summary, "an insidious foreign force eating away at the Polish nation," could as Pope Pius XI apparently burst into tears at the idea of Fascist anti-Semitism in the fall of 1938...

...the confinement of Jews in the ghettos of the papal territories in Italy...

...A previously unpublished note accompanying the inquisitors' ruling, found by Kertzer, declared: "ritual murder is a historical certainty...

...The year, Kertzer pointedly notes, was 1914...

...Going beyond his 1997 book, The Kidnapping of Edgardo Mortara, which just focused on the most famous instance, Kertzer shows how the 19th-century popes often approved forcible conversion in the cruelest circumstances, involving little children...

...Given all this, the Holy See cannot issue the statement that has been requested, which, while it may please a few dupes in England, would trigger widespread protests and scandal elsewhere...

...or that the leadership broke ranks with Catholic anti-Semites in the 19th century and the first half of the 20th...

...Most significant," says Kertzer, "by not taking this step, the Pope allowed the Catholic press, including that part of it viewed inside and outside the Church as communicating the Pope's true sentiments, to continue to tar the Jews with the ritual murder charge...

...Concentrating as he does on the Vatican and the Catholic press, he fails to persuade me that "'traditional' Catholic forms of dealing with the Jews became transformed into modem anti-Semitism," ultimately pointing to genocide (emphasis mine...

...What Kertzer does not do to my satisfaction is mobilize his evidence to elucidate our understanding of the Nazis' murder of the European Jews...

...The first was common enough in official Catholic circles before the Second Vatican Council's reforms in the early 1960s...

...Kertzer cautions us admirably against assuming that traditional Catholic antiJudaism was a simple matter of religious disagreement...

...From many areas," it said, "come reports of violent disorders aimed at the co-religionists of these barbarous slaughterers of children...

...Murder, certainly, was out...

...that] brings with it everywhere the pestiferous breath of treason," could also protest that the popes had always shown "charity, tolerance and love toward the Jews...

...Taking what seems to me to be the excessively simplified version of this thesis presented in the Vatican's 1998 official statement on the Holocaust, We Remember, Kertzer showers us with evidence that at the very center of the Church opposition to Jews was hardly limited to mild-mannered religious discourse...

...For unlike the superficial study of Pope Pius XII by the British writer John Cornwell, for example, and unlike a series of polemical claims on both sides of the increasingly heated debate about the Vatican and the Holocaust, Kertzer's work rests solidly upon materials from the Holy See's own archives plus a careful reading of the Vatican's newspaper L'Osservatore romano and the Jesuit order's Civiltà cattolica—each as close to an official view of the leadership of the Catholic Church as one could wish...

...At the end of the 19th-century literally dozens of such tales surfaced across Europe—the Vatican press energetically spread their grisly, concocted charges— and a series of popes countenanced the most bloodcurdling accusations...

...Historians tend to distinguish between traditional Catholic anti-Judaism and modern anti-Semitism...

...or that Catholic religious teaching could inoculate its adherents against some of the most violent antiJewish fantasies...

...Modern antiSemitism, by contrast, is viewed as a populist political mobilization linked to nationalism, racism and other hate-filled programs...

...He might similarly have noted that in Italy, another Catholic country, and almost certainly more susceptible than Austria to papal influence, there was a remarkable unwillingness to join in Hitler's murderous campaign against the Jews...

...or that there were watertight boundaries between modern racist and populist rabble-rousers and the leadership of the Catholic Church...

...Even if Kertzer overshoots the mark, as I believe he does, The Popes Against the Jews should command serious attention...

...Consequently, while the Vatican may not have discouraged dark ruminations on the Jewish championing of modernity, world domination or what have you, it paid at least lip service to the need to love them and pray for their conversion...

...In his final pages Kertzer presents without context the conversation between Pacelli's Secretary of State, Cardinal Luigi Maglione, and the German Ambassador to the Holy See, Ernst von Weizsäcker, as if the words that we have on paper were the full story of this exchange or a confirmation of the Vatican's antipathy toward Jews...

...He offers no evidence for his suggestion that the Austrians' "disproportionately large role in the Holocaust" had something to do with the fact that this was a Catholic country...

...Looking to the Holocaust, he further warns us against focusing so exclusively on the wartime Pope, Eugenio Pacelli, that we lose the important perspective to be gained by looking at his predecessors...

...The second, a much more dangerous political movement that gathered steam in the late 19th century, was based on race and had its ultimate expression in the murderous campaign of the Nazis during World War II...

...Theoretically at least, in the Church's own language, efforts to restrict the influence of the Jews were always qualified by the need to act with justice and charity...

...Traditional anti-Judaism is understood to have sprung from religious doctrine: Its promoters saw the Jews as a people that had rejected Christ, conspired in his execution, and sought to undermine or obstruct the teachings of the Catholic Church...

...Leo XIII's successor, Pius X, whom some have seen as favoring more liberal attitudes toward Jews, nevertheless equivocated and lent comfort to the ritual murder slander...

...author, "The Holocaust in History" In his important new book David I. Kertzer, professor of anthropology and history at Brown University, challenges much of the received wisdom about the Holy See's role in the evolution of modern anti-Semitism...

...it leads to persecution, demands for expulsion, violent outbursts, and finally mass murder...

...The author of a welldocumented study of the mid-19th-century kidnapping of a Jewish child by the recently beatified Pope Pius IX's authorities, he charges a series of popes with stridently opposing Jews to the extent of helping to make the Holocaust possible...

...Worse, the resurgence of trumped-up charges of ritual murder against the Jews —the harebrained claim that they killed Christians, especially small children, to obtain their blood for ritualistic purposes—was not only widely supported by the Catholic press across Europe but persistently championed by the Holy See itself...

...Its decision, endorsed by the Pope, was to dismiss the petitions...

...A new ritual murder," headlined L'Osservatore romano in November 1899...

...Indeed, the closer Kertzer comes to the Holocaust, the less sure his contentions and conclusions become...

...As for the substance of the matter, Father Silva said that to Jews blood was "a drink like milk...

...Subsequently, petitions from several leading figures of the English Catholic Church protested the Vatican's participation in the blood libels and asked Pope Leo XIII to repudiate them...

...This stimulating book, therefore, should be read less as a contribution to "what made the Holocaust possible," and much more as an enrichment and a deepening of our understanding of Catholic antiJewish thought and commitment in the 19th and 20th centuries...

...a hateful movement, amovement that we cannot, we Christians, take any part in...

...Recognizing as it did the common humanity of Jews and non-Jews, they say, the Church resisted the temptation to radicalization, the most extravagant accusations and violent assaults...

...The same Osservatore romano that could condemn Alfred Dreyfus, for instance, as one of "the deicide people...