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Were the Popes Against the Jews?

William B. Eerdmans Publishing Company

Contents

Introduction.........................................................................viii1. From Agreement to Discord.........................................................12. The (Supernatural) Power of the Press.............................................223. Anti-Semitism vs. Anti-Judaism....................................................484. Satanic Synagogues and Jewish Dogs................................................675. Ritual Murder and the Duplicity of Leo XIII.......................................966. Ritual Murder and the Villainy of Pius X..........................................1217. Popes, Poles, and Pogroms.........................................................1478. Pius XI, Pius XII, and Anti-anti-Semitism.........................................1949. Righteous Petitions and Doctored Texts............................................238Annex: Anti-Semitism and Theological Arrogance.......................................28810. Ideals, Institutions, and Reform — Toward a Conclusion.....................298Acknowledgments......................................................................372Index................................................................................374

Chapter One

When the first reviews of David I. Kertzer's The Popes Against the Jews: The Vatican's Role in the Rise of Modern Anti-Semitism appeared in the fall of 2001, the book's enthusiastic reception was not surprising. For more than half a century no historical event had so bewildered the general public, as well as scholars and journalists, as the unforgettable mass murder of six million European Jews. Regardless of the vast number of words devoted to exploring that unique catastrophe, anything new that shed even a small ray of light on it could only be universally welcomed. It merely heightened interest in Kertzer's book that it appeared in the immediate aftermath of a number of other widely read studies that had severely criticized the role of the papacy and the Catholic Church during the wartime period.

At the time of the book's publication, I was finishing Popes and Politics: Reform, Resentment, and the Holocaust, which appeared the following year. I had looked at Kertzer's book briefly, and it soon became clear that few historical assertions were less deniable than his opinion that Christian teaching was the soil in which the evil of racist anti-Semitism flourished. But it soon also became clear that a large element of the enthusiasm for the book among Catholics stemmed less from how it validated that opinion than from how it could be enlisted in such causes as reform of the American church and condemnation of the ecclesiastical structures created by various recent popes, particularly Pius XII and John Paul II. Since this reformist theme is a recurrent motif in the chapters that follow, how it was related to Kertzer's book merits a brief examination.

Among his early enthusiastic reviewers was Garry Wills in The New York Times (September 23, 2001), about whom I said in Popes and Politics:

Garry Wills writes of the author's "sickening task" covering "a stretch of two centuries" while not "giving way to the indignation most readers must feel," and resulting in a "staggeringly thorough job." To all of which anyone would probably say "amen," since the church's role in the horrors of anti-Semitism is a theme on which too much repetition or too many variations — of which Kertzer's book is clearly another — can never be enough.

Wills cited the eminent British historian of the modern church Owen Chadwick to the effect that Pius IX was the only pope who would have canonized the sixteenth-century inquisitor Pedro Arbués. The review ended withWills's conclusion that "there was only one pope who would have beatified Pius IX — John Paul II." Since Kertzer had mentioned the latter pope only a few times in the entire book, mainly regarding his progress in ecumenical matters and his advocacy of truth telling, his emergence at the end of the review was something of a surprise.

Similarly with Pius XII, whose presence could hardly be overlooked since he put in an appearance by way of a laudatory jacket blurb from the author of Hitler's Pope, John Cornwell. The importation of Pius XII into the ambit of the book was also an unexpected development, since Kertzer himself was dismissive of the role of that pope. "The debate over what Pius XII might have done during the Holocaust is a distraction." "With all the attention given to what he did or did not say about the Nazi-led campaign against the Jews — his influence was at best limited." According to Kertzer, Pius's wartime deeds or misdeeds diverted attention from "the more important question, what did the Catholic Church do to help bring on the Holocaust in the first place?" The response in Popes and Politics was: "'Much too much' is the obvious answer of history — an answer which has been reaffirmed again and again by the second Vatican Council and by two popes." As I mentioned in the introduction, it was only a few years later, after the appearance of the paperback edition of Popes and Politics (2004), that I finally got around to a closer examination of the book and its author.

I began with a brief search for information on Kertzer's own website and on that of his publisher. Both of these supplied the conventional biographical and bibliographical data along with interviews, quotations, links to other comments about the author, and reviews of the book itself. Two quotations — from personal interviews with the author — stood out. The first was the following: "If you're interested in what role the Church played in making the Holocaust possible, it's decades and decades of demonization of Jews." Some readers might have paused at such a sweeping statement being made about "the Church" in general, and some would probably cavil at the word "demonization," but the gist of the observation seemed as unexceptionable as the book's broader thesis mentioned above. However, what was surprising about Kertzer's quotation was its apparent generosity regarding that demonizing church. Most people familiar with the history of Christianity from its dark night of the soul in the Middle Ages and on into the twentieth century would have thought that the author's reference to decades and decades was a generous understatement; certainly this would have been true for those who wholeheartedly embraced the confession attributed to Pope John XXIII: "Across the centuries our brother Abel has lain in the blood which we drew, or shed tears we caused by forgetting Christ's love." But after examining the book itself, it became clear that the author's chronological frame was not intended to exonerate nearly a millennium and a half of Christian abuse of Jews, but rather to emphasize the responsibility of five recent popes for, in Kertzer's words, putting Europe's Jews on "the road to the Holocaust." Those popes were Pius IX, Leo XIII, Pius X, Pius XI, and, to a lesser degree, Benedict XV.

Nevertheless, I wouldn't have decided to analyze The Popes Against the Jews had it not been for the doubts raised by the second and much longer quotation I have already mentioned...