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fpb...some new and interesting evidence turned up.
In 1938, just as the persecution of Jews was moving into high gear, the Vatican not only came near breaking point with Italy about its new "racial laws" (and it was not the Vatican that blinked), it also bashed Catholic Poland for some similar bright ideas. And the man who did the bashing was the future Pope Pius XII - yeah, right, "Hitler's Pope" according to the vile propaganda of creatures best left unnamed.
In 1938, the freshly-nominated French Cardinal Tisserant brought to the attention of the Secretary of State, Eugenio Pacelli - soon to be Pope Pius XII - some worrying enactments by Poland's authoritarian military government. According to newspaper reports that reached Tisserant, the Polish Government had passed a law forbidding Jewish ritual butchery. This was more harrassment than real persecution, when compared with the horrors that Hitler had already enacted and that Mussolini was in the process of imitating; but it would be a serious issue to practicing Jews (the vast majority in Poland at the time), who would have to break the law or turn vegetarian in order to obey their religion. Of course, there are plenty of non-criminal reasons to find Jewish ritual slaughter distasteful. But in that time and place, in a country that had traditionally been a refuge to Jews, it was a scarily significant straw in the wind, at least to Tisserant. At this point, the Polish government was friendly with Nazi Germany in the hope of getting a part of the impending partition of Czechoslovakia (and they did, briefly); to a French Cardinal living in Rome, it sounded unpleasantly as though they were preparing to imitate Mussolini's contemptible imitation of Hitler and introducing anti-Jewish racial laws.
Why did Tisserant go to Pacelli? Well, for a start, this sort of thing was Pacelli's responsibility as Secretary of STate. There is also the fact that Tisserant was definitely Pacelli's man. He had been nominated Cardinal before he was a Bishop, and when he was eventually promoted to Bishop, it was Pacelli who consecrated him. Evidently he expected his friend and patron to react; and react Pacelli did.
Pacelli demanded a report from the Pope's Nuncio in Poland, Archbishop Filippo Cortesi, stating clearly that "any act of anti-Semitic persecution or violence must be condemned" by the Church. Archbishop Cortesi answered with his Report no.89, dated May 7, 1938, stating that the newspaper report that had reached Tisserant was "not exact": the law had indeed cleared one of the chambers of Poland's tame Parliament, but had then been effectively dropped. The Archbishop (who does not seem to have felt the instinctive anger felt by Tisserant, Pacelli, and for that matter by the reigning Pope Pius XI) repeated a government excuse that the law had "been mainly intended to reduce the near-monopoly of the Jews on the meat trade, since the Jews slaughter well beyond their own needs", as though even a military tyranny such as Poland's could not achieve such a goal by means other than assaulting Jewish religious observances! However, he clearly got the idea of what Rome wanted, and agreed that "As Your Eminence rightly remarks, of course any violence or persecution of Jews must be condemned". Pacelli passed the report to Tisserant, and the matter, so far as I can see, ended there. One hopes that Archbishop Cortesi, who seems to have been rather less sympathetic to Jews himself, did not neglect to pass on to the Polish leadership a strong hint of the Vatican's displeasure.
What, in this story, stands out to me, is that Cardinal Pacelli reacted as I would react - condemning what he had heard vigorously and taking immediate action, before even making sure of the validity of the report. (Yes, we know; never condemn so much as a dog on newspaper evidence, etc...) This is the reaction of someone to whom Jew-bashing is a sore point, a matter of personal anger and disgust, not just an opposing policy. I imagine that the rise of Nazi Germany, and the increasingly slavish imitation by Mussolini, must have heightened whatever sensitivity to the issue there already was. But one way or anothher, only a dishonest writer (unfortunately, honesty is the last thing the English-speaking media look for in dealing with the Church) could possibly read these documents and imagine that Eugenio Pacelli had anything but detestation for Jew-bashing.
In 1938, just as the persecution of Jews was moving into high gear, the Vatican not only came near breaking point with Italy about its new "racial laws" (and it was not the Vatican that blinked), it also bashed Catholic Poland for some similar bright ideas. And the man who did the bashing was the future Pope Pius XII - yeah, right, "Hitler's Pope" according to the vile propaganda of creatures best left unnamed.
In 1938, the freshly-nominated French Cardinal Tisserant brought to the attention of the Secretary of State, Eugenio Pacelli - soon to be Pope Pius XII - some worrying enactments by Poland's authoritarian military government. According to newspaper reports that reached Tisserant, the Polish Government had passed a law forbidding Jewish ritual butchery. This was more harrassment than real persecution, when compared with the horrors that Hitler had already enacted and that Mussolini was in the process of imitating; but it would be a serious issue to practicing Jews (the vast majority in Poland at the time), who would have to break the law or turn vegetarian in order to obey their religion. Of course, there are plenty of non-criminal reasons to find Jewish ritual slaughter distasteful. But in that time and place, in a country that had traditionally been a refuge to Jews, it was a scarily significant straw in the wind, at least to Tisserant. At this point, the Polish government was friendly with Nazi Germany in the hope of getting a part of the impending partition of Czechoslovakia (and they did, briefly); to a French Cardinal living in Rome, it sounded unpleasantly as though they were preparing to imitate Mussolini's contemptible imitation of Hitler and introducing anti-Jewish racial laws.
Why did Tisserant go to Pacelli? Well, for a start, this sort of thing was Pacelli's responsibility as Secretary of STate. There is also the fact that Tisserant was definitely Pacelli's man. He had been nominated Cardinal before he was a Bishop, and when he was eventually promoted to Bishop, it was Pacelli who consecrated him. Evidently he expected his friend and patron to react; and react Pacelli did.
Pacelli demanded a report from the Pope's Nuncio in Poland, Archbishop Filippo Cortesi, stating clearly that "any act of anti-Semitic persecution or violence must be condemned" by the Church. Archbishop Cortesi answered with his Report no.89, dated May 7, 1938, stating that the newspaper report that had reached Tisserant was "not exact": the law had indeed cleared one of the chambers of Poland's tame Parliament, but had then been effectively dropped. The Archbishop (who does not seem to have felt the instinctive anger felt by Tisserant, Pacelli, and for that matter by the reigning Pope Pius XI) repeated a government excuse that the law had "been mainly intended to reduce the near-monopoly of the Jews on the meat trade, since the Jews slaughter well beyond their own needs", as though even a military tyranny such as Poland's could not achieve such a goal by means other than assaulting Jewish religious observances! However, he clearly got the idea of what Rome wanted, and agreed that "As Your Eminence rightly remarks, of course any violence or persecution of Jews must be condemned". Pacelli passed the report to Tisserant, and the matter, so far as I can see, ended there. One hopes that Archbishop Cortesi, who seems to have been rather less sympathetic to Jews himself, did not neglect to pass on to the Polish leadership a strong hint of the Vatican's displeasure.
What, in this story, stands out to me, is that Cardinal Pacelli reacted as I would react - condemning what he had heard vigorously and taking immediate action, before even making sure of the validity of the report. (Yes, we know; never condemn so much as a dog on newspaper evidence, etc...) This is the reaction of someone to whom Jew-bashing is a sore point, a matter of personal anger and disgust, not just an opposing policy. I imagine that the rise of Nazi Germany, and the increasingly slavish imitation by Mussolini, must have heightened whatever sensitivity to the issue there already was. But one way or anothher, only a dishonest writer (unfortunately, honesty is the last thing the English-speaking media look for in dealing with the Church) could possibly read these documents and imagine that Eugenio Pacelli had anything but detestation for Jew-bashing.
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no subject
Date: 2008-06-04 02:34 pm (UTC)Nazism began its rule by seeking a Concordat with the Vatican, to which the Vatican agreed - and breaking it before the ink was dry on the signatures. State pressure began piling up on the Churches immediately, with arrests and murders; and the Confessional Lutherans, having come to see all too clearly what was loose in Germany, staged their doomed attempt at forming an independent Church. This gave them honour, martyrdom, and no practical success.
Both Lutherans and Catholics, in general, tended to collaborate, because neither church was willing or able to establish a genuine opposition. But more outstanding Lutherans were wholly convinced supporters of Hitler than Catholics, and no Catholic leader of any importance ever gave himself away. The Nazi assault on the Catholic tyranny of Dollfuss in Austria showed the underlying hatred of the Party for the Catholic Church and horrified Catholics throughout the world. (Dollfuss, a strange kind of dictator whom even his enemies respected, was denied a priest and allowed to bleed to death for hours by Nazi thugs.) In 1937, Pope Pius XI's condemnation of the Nazi regime, the encyclical Mit Brennender Sorge, was smuggled into Germany by a masterpiece of secret planning, placed in the hands of every priest in the country, and read on the same Sunday from every pulpit: the worst slap in the face that Hitler suffered until the War. Even if the Lutherans had wanted to do anything like this, they would not have been able to, because they did not have the supranational organization of the Catholic Church.