Reflections of a stormy petrel

...is not altogether without precedent. Apart from the case of Celestine VI, Pius XII wrote and signed, but left undated, an act of resignation, to be activated in case the Nazis kidnapped him. That is to say that it is not completely out of the order of things. And the fact that people live longer now than they ever did before means that sooner or later something like this would have had to be considered. The job has got more rather than less demanding; from what I understand, one thing that helped Pope Benedict make up his mind was that his doctors had recommended no more intercontinental journeys, which are an essential part of the modern Papacy. I am still unhappy about it, because I love and admire the man so much, but I don't know what it is like to be in his shoes. And considering the storms that are about to engulf the Church from many sides (I refer to certain curious legal enactments passed in various countries including Britain), he may have felt that he could no longer summon the strength to fight and lead the people of God.

This is a passage from the introduction to Notes on the Diplomatic History of the
Jewish Question, by Lucien Wolf, written in 1919 for the use of the Versailles Peace Conference:

Besides helping to indicate the lines on which Jewish action should travel in this matter, the State Papers here quoted may also serve to remind the Plenipotentiaries themselves that the Jewish Question is far from being a subsidiary issue in the Reconstruction of Europe, that they have a great tradition of effort and achievement in regard to it, and that this tradition, apart from the high merits of the task itself, imposes upon them the solemn obligation of solving the Question completely and finally now that the opportunity of doing so presents itself free from all restraints of a selfish and calculating diplomacy. It is not only that the edifice of Religious Liberty in Europe has to be completed, but also that some six millions of human beings have to be freed from political and civil disabilities and social and economic restrictions which for calculated cruelty have no parallels outside the Dark Ages. The Peace Conference will have accomplished relatively little if a shred of this blackest of all European scandals is allowed to survive its deliberations.

[vi]This collection does not pretend to be complete. The aim has been only to illustrate adequately the main lines of the theme with a view to practical questions which may arise in connection with the Peace Conference. American documents have been only sparely quoted, for the reason that the American Jewish Historical Society has already published a very full collection of such documents. (Cyrus Adler: "Jews in the Diplomatic Correspondence of the United States.") The many generous interventions of the Vatican on behalf of persecuted Jews have also been omitted partly for a similar reason (see Stern: "Urkundliche Beiträge über die Stellung der Päpste zu den Juden") and partly because they have very little direct bearing on the diplomatic activities of the Great Powers during the period under discussion.


Guess what? There really does seem to be a tradition of "Hitler's Popes". I for one had never even heard that the Vatican had ever intervened in favour of Jews before and during the First World War (when the main butcher was Russia, not Germany). Guess there are things that are not mentioned in polite society.