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Conference Report: New Documents from the Pontificate of Pope Pius XII and their Meaning for Jewish-Christian Relations: A Dialogue between Historians and Theologians

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Contemporary Church History Quarterly

Volume 29, Number 3/4 (Fall 2023)

Conference Report: “New Documents from the Pontificate of Pope Pius XII and their Meaning for Jewish-Christian Relations: A Dialogue between Historians and Theologians,” Pontifical Gregorian University, Rome, October 9-11, 2023

 By Ion Popa, University of Manchester/Gerda Henkel Stiftung.

The Conference “New Documents from the Pontificate of Pope Pius XII” was the largest and most significant gathering of international scholars working on the Catholic Church and the Holocaust since the March 2020 opening of the Pope Pius XII collections. Organised by the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum (USHMM), the Yad Vashem International Institute for Holocaust Research, the Cardinal Bea Centre for Judaic Studies (CBCJS) at the Pontifical Gregorian University, the Centre for Catholic-Jewish Studies at Saint Leo University, and the Fondazione Centro di Documentazione Ebraica Contemporanea, the conference provided the first significant insight into the new documents.

As noted by Dr. Suzanne Brown-Fleming, Director of International Academic Programs, USHMM, and Fr. Etienne Vetö, Auxiliary Bishop, Reims (France), formerly Director of CBCJS, in their opening remarks, the new archives, estimated to be at least 16 million pages, will, for years to come, shed light on historical and theological debates over Pope Pius XII and the Holy See during the Holocaust, and on Jewish-Christian relations at multiple levels – from ordinary people to authority figures in Jewish and Catholic milieus, institutions, and power structures. The long-overdue decision of the Vatican to open these wartime era documents and Pope Francis’s words “The Church is not afraid of history” were referred to many times during the event.

The conference started on October 9th, two days after the Hamas terror attack, when the magnitude of atrocities was becoming clearer. This was mentioned in the address of Cardinal Pietro Parolin, the Vatican Secretary of State, who expressed his and Pope Francis’s “sorrow at what is happening in Israel.” He condemned “the despicable attack” against “many Israeli brothers and sisters,” and highlighted the plight of innocent Palestinian civilians. Most conference participants, having relatives and friends in Israel, followed the news with anxiety throughout the proceedings. The US and Israeli ambassadors to the Holy See and Rabbi Noam Marans, American Jewish Committee, also issued, in their remarks, strong condemnations of Hamas murders. Due to these extreme circumstances, the Yad Vashem delegation, including Dr. Iael Nidam-Orvieto, Director of the International Institute for Holocaust Research, one of the main organizers, could not participate in the conference.

Debates on Pius XII, the Catholic Church, and the Holocaust have, for decades, navigated between the apologetic and the more critical approaches. These sides were present at the “New Documents from the Pontificate of Pope Pius XII” conference too. In fact, before the beginning of the announced proceedings, the Pontifical Gregorian University advertised a pre-conference session titled “Jews Rescued in Ecclesial Houses During the Nazi Occupation of Rome: A Documentation Discovered at the Pontifical Biblical Institute.” This idea of Catholic/Holy See help for or rescue of Jews appeared in many talks, some speakers trying to present local, exceptional, limited cases of Catholic aid as the general attitude of the Church; see, for instance, the presentations by, amongst others, Dr. Grazia Loparco FMA, Pontificia Facoltà di Scienze dell’Educazione Auxilium, Rome, or Dr. Annalisa Capristo, Center for American Studies, Rome. Another example of this tendency was the presentation of Dr. Johan Ickx, Archive for Section for Relations with States, Secretariat of State, Vatican, who based most of his argument about the intervention of papal nuncios and the Vatican on only one archival example, a Jewish woman originally from Romania, who was in Rome in 1938, and asked for Holy See assistance. He, as others, tried to extrapolate such cases and argue that Pope Pius XII himself was behind these interventions, but there was no clear evidence in this sense in any of the conference presentations.

Several papers, including those of Dr. Giovanni Coco, Vatican Apostolic Archive, or Professor David Kertzer, Brown University, examined the role of Angelo Dell’Acqua in shaping Vatican policy towards Jews during the Holocaust. Dell’Acqua was a lower-level assistant in the Holy See Secretariat of State during WWII, but he was seen, it was argued, as a main adviser on Jewish matters. His wartime scepticism over reports about the mass-murder of Jews was often infused with vile antisemitic tropes. Later, he would climb the ladder of ecclesiastical career, becoming a deputy Vatican Secretary of State (1954), Archbishop of Chalcedon (1958), Cardinal President of the Prefecture for the Economic Affairs of the Holy See and vicar general of Rome (1967). The question of duplicity regarding his wartime antisemitism and contribution to the Vatican’s policy of silence vs his post-war successful ecclesiastical career was asked, but easily dismissed. The focus on Dell’Acqua, including by prominent scholars from the Vatican, marks a step forward in acknowledging that the Holy See did not do enough in speaking out against the murder of European Jews. However, the suggestion, implicit in some presentations, that he was the main responsible for the Vatican and Pope Pius XII’s inactions is misleading. The tendency to shift the blame away from the Pope and other major figures in the Vatican apparatus to this low-rank assistant is historically inaccurate, and the question of his influence on the Holy See’s policy on Jews will need more polished examination in the future.

More evidence from Pope Pius XII collections was presented, during the conference, on Holy See real-time knowledge about the murder of European Jews (such as the papers of Dr. Michele Sarfatti and Dr. Monika Stolarczyk-Bilardie), antisemitism in interwar Italian Catholic society and universities (Dr. Tommaso Dell’Era and Dr. Raffaella Perin), Pius XII and Vatican responses to requests for help (Prof. Dr. Hubert Wolf and his team at the University of Münster), the duplicitous attitude of papal nuncios in France or Romania (Dr. Nina Valbousquet and Dr. Ion Popa), the limits of Vatican humanitarianism (Dr. Robert Ventresca), Catholic contribution to escape of war criminals from Allied justice (Dr. Gerald Steinacher and Dr. Suzanne Brown-Fleming), or the theological issues raised by returning baptised children to their Jewish families (Dr. Matthew Tapie). The case of Romania was mentioned several times. Monsignor Andrea Cassulo, Holy See ambassador to Bucharest from 1936 to 1947, has often been praised and used as a good example of Catholic interventions in favour of Jews. While this is not under question, more evidence started to emerge about his own antisemitism, or about the duplicitous diplomatic attitude of the Vatican. In January 1938, Cardinal Eugenio Pacelli, then Vatican Secretary of State, expressed open desire to collaborate with the heavily antisemitic Romanian National Christian Party cabinet, and in July 1943 Mihai Antonescu, one of the most important actors in the murder of up to 380,000 Jews during the Holocaust in Romania, had an audience with Pope Pius XII.

Particularly interesting was the paper of Professor Philip Cunningham, Saint Joseph’s University, who examined the draft 1938 encyclical Humani Generis Unitas, and its possible adverse impact on later Catholic theological documents. Seen by some historians as Pope Pius XI’s laudable intention to condemn antisemitism, the proposed encyclical still maintained the distinction between “good” and “bad” antisemitism and continued to promote conspiracies about a Jewish plot to control the world. As Cunningham concluded, had the encyclical been promulgated, it would have in fact “raised the notion of divine malediction against Jews to the status of formal Catholic doctrine” and it would have created serious obstacles for the later Noastra Aetate declaration (1965), which repudiated antisemitism altogether.

Last, but not least, although the conference gathered a great number of excellent historians and theologians, some countries/regions were missing. There were no papers on/from Ukraine, Hungary, Croatia, Austria, Slovakia/Czechoslovakia, Belgium or the Netherlands. This is very likely because no scholars working on these countries have started to look at the new Pope Pius XII documentation yet. Nevertheless, this geographical gap seen at the October 2023 conference is an invitation for a re-union, in a not-so-distant future, where more insight and new updates can be shared by those researching these incredibly rich and meaningful archives.

The full conference is available to view on the Pontifical Gregorian University’s YouTube channel: https://www.youtube.com/@unigregoriana

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Article Note: Ion Popa, “Sanctuary from the Holocaust? Roman Catholic Conversion of Jews in Bucharest, Romania, 1942”

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Contemporary Church History Quarterly

Volume 23, Number 4 (December 2017)

Article Note: Ion Popa, “Sanctuary from the Holocaust? Roman Catholic Conversion of Jews in Bucharest, Romania, 1942,” Holocaust and Genocide Studies 29, no 1 (Spring 2015): 39-56.

By Doris L. Bergen, University of Toronto

Of the many painful topics around Christianity and the Holocaust, one of the thorniest is conversion. Even basic questions remain unanswered. How many Jews sought baptism? How willing were Christian clergy to help? How did the situation differ across regions and confessions? Did converting actually save lives? Ion Popa’s important article addresses these questions for Romania and in the process reveals the complex tangle of religious, political, military, and diplomatic interests that determined life and death for Jews during the Holocaust.

Popa’s meticulous research deepens and complicates the picture drawn by John Morley, Lya Benjamin, and others. In 1941, conversion of Jews to any other religion was forbidden in Romania, but the state, acting on its perception that the Vatican wielded vast power and eager to keep its options open, made exceptions for the Roman Catholic Church. The papal nuncio, Monsignor Andrea Cassulo, tried to exploit this opening to shelter Jews from deportation and death. But as Popa demonstrates, contrary to claims made at the time (and by some scholars since), Roman Catholics, whom Romanian reports regularly and inaccurately described as “Magyars,” did not baptize tens of thousands of Jews. The actual number, Popa concludes, is impossible to ascertain, but it was small: he estimates perhaps 500 people.

Still, those Romanian Jews who were baptized into the Roman Catholic church “generally” avoided deportation. This was not the case for the smaller number who converted to other forms of Christianity, including the majority Romanian Orthodox church. In fact, Popa shows, many recent converts were rounded up as Jews, some even arrested for violating the law against conversion. Other grim scenes include Romanian Orthodox churchmen whining because they were denied the lavish sums of money Catholics supposedly made by charging Jews for their services. (Popa reserves judgment as to whether converts indeed paid.) In the wake of the Axis debacle at Stalingrad, Antonescu lifted the ban on conversions—but only for the Roman Catholics, and without announcing the decision outside Bucharest for six months. This is a chilling view of leaders who wanted it both ways: when it served their interests, they supported the destruction of Jews, and when it no longer seemed opportune, they might allow others to try to help Jews. Existing scholarship sheds light on conversion in other jurisdictions (Nina Paulovicova’s 2012 dissertation, Rescue of Jews in the Slovak State; Beate Meyer’s many publications on German-Jewish history), but much remains to be done. Popa’s excellent article provides a strong framework for drawing comparisons and analyzing connections.

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Conference Report: 8th Annual Summer Workshop for Holocaust Scholars, International Institute for Holocaust Research, Yad Vashem

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Contemporary Church History Quarterly

Volume 22, Number 1 (March 2016)

Conference Report: 8th Annual Summer Workshop for Holocaust Scholars, International Institute for Holocaust Research, Yad Vashem, Jerusalem, July 6-9, 2015

By Suzanne Brown-Fleming, United States Holocaust Memorial Museum*

The experiences of Christians defined as “non-Aryans” by Nazi and Axis racial laws remain among the most fascinating and under-researched aspects of the Holocaust, not least because this very specific category of Christians, made so by the sacrament of baptism, is sometimes still misunderstood/misrepresented. They are seen as Jews and are (literally) counted as “Jews” rescued or aided by Christian institutions, NGOs, and individuals.  In July 2015, the International Institute for Holocaust Research at Yad Vashem organized a workshop for seventeen scholars from eight countries (Austria, Germany, Israel, Italy, Netherlands, Poland, Serbia, the United States), to present their work-in-progress and compare their findings on this issue.

Monday, July 6, began with stimulating opening remarks by Head of the International Institute for Holocaust Research and Incumbent of the John Najmann Chair of Holocaust Studies at Yad Vashem, Dan Michman. The first panel focused on Christians defined as non-Aryans by Nazi laws residing in Germany. Assaf Yedidya (Yad Vashem and Efrata College, Israel) presented his research on hundreds of converts from Christianity to Judaism, and their treatment under Nazi law. True to the Nazi racial definition of a Jew as someone with Jewish parents and/or grandparents, a Christian of “Aryan” descent who asked to convert to Judaism was not only permitted to do so, but was shielded from deportation by state authorities on the basis of his or her “Aryan” race credentials. Nor could a religious convert to Judaism who was an “Aryan” marry another (racial) Jew, since this was prohibited by the Nuremberg Laws.

Maria von der Heydt (Centre for Antisemitism Research, Technical University Berlin, Germany) followed with her research on so-called “Geltungsjuden,” defined in Nazi racial law as those born into mixed marriages and who met three conditions: if they belonged to a Jewish religious community after September 1935; if they were married to a Jews; or if they were born out of wedlock to a Jewish mother after July 1936. The number of Germans meeting this set of criteria was small, numbering only about 2,000 in 1943, at which time essentially they were subjected to the same fate as so-called “Mischlinge.”

In a session moving across the Vatican city-state, France, and Romania, Suzanne Brown-Fleming (USHMM) opened with her early findings from Vatican records generated during the key latter half of 1938, when the annexation of Austria, the Italian racial laws, and the Kristallnacht pogrom in Germany drove many Catholics in mixed marriages or who were themselves defined as “non-Aryan” to write to the Vatican for aid and succor. Many of these letters reflected a feeling of belonging neither to the Catholic nor to the Jewish communities. As such letters mounted rapidly in the latter half of 1938, Pope Pius XI contacted the United States National Catholic Welfare Conference to request aid for Catholics impacted by the racial laws and attempting emigration. Internal correspondence between the Vatican and various nunciatures (diplomatic headquarters) around the world revealed a clearly stated lack of willingness to offer help to either practicing or secular Jews.

Eliot Nidam Orvieto (Yad Vashem) followed with a nuanced and fascinating presentation about rescue of Jews, Catholics defined as such by Nazi/Axis racial laws, and so-called “Mischlinge” by the Congregation of Priests of Notre Dame de Sion and their sister community, the Congregation for Religious of Notre Dame de Sion. Founded in the mid-nineteenth century by Jewish converts to Catholicism, both communities were originally founded to seek the conversion of Jews. Nidam Orvieto examined the broader issues of conversion and the motivations for it, the preference given or not given to the baptized, and the way Catholics impacted by the racial laws were treated in the case of Notre Dame de Sion in France.

Ion Popa (Free University Berlin, Germany) discussed the case of Romanian Jews who sought conversion to Roman Catholicism, and attempted to do so in large numbers after 1941 in the hopes for Vatican protection. Describing the bans on conversion in Romania issued in 1938 and 1941 and the fight against these measures by papal nuncio Andrea Cassulo, Popa highlighted the acceptance of the ban against conversation by the Romanian Orthodox Church and the open opposition to it by the Roman Catholic Church. He also described the particular case of Bukovina, where Jews converted in large numbers to a small Evangelical Church before 1940, providing the context of the vicious persecution of Jews in Romania in the 1930s driving such trends.

On Tuesday, July 7, the case of Poland was the focus of three presentations, the first by Rachel Brenner (University of Wisconsin-Madison, USA). Brenner gave a moving presentation on the interwar “intellectual-artistic Polish-Jewish” milieu in Warsaw and rescue efforts by three Polish-Gentile members of this circle: Zofia Nałkowska, Jarosław Iwaszkiewicz, and Aurelia Wyleżyńska, focusing specifically on the psychological crises, emotional stresses, and intellectual justifications used by the Polish-Gentile diarists under study as their behavior toward friends considered as equals prior to the stresses of the war and Holocaust changed, often not for the better. Katarzyna Person (Jewish Historical Institute Warsaw, Poland) presented her research on the Jewish Order Service in the Warsaw Ghetto, often described in contemporary accounts by other Jews as consisting largely of “converted” or “highly assimilated” Jews. Using lists of members in the Jewish Order Service in Warsaw, Person found that its membership also included orthodox Jews and Jews with strong Zionist backgrounds. Emunah Nachmany Gafny (Independent Scholar, Israel) discussed Jewish children in hiding on the “Aryan side” in Poland, their experiences in formulating a false Christian identity, their reception by Polish Catholics, and their own conflicted feelings as they professed to become part of the Christians community.

A session on Serbia followed. Jovan Ćulibrk (Jasenovac Committee of the Holy Assembly of Bishops of the Serbian Orthodox Church) presented a picture of the small Jewish community in pre-war Yugoslavia, which consisted of the Zagreb Jewish community that in large numbers converted in Roman-Catholicism in 1938; the Sephardi community with its strong identification with the Serbian national cause; and the “new” generation that embraced Zionism. Ćulibrk argued that where one understood oneself–and was understood by others–to fall on this spectrum had a distinct impact on one’s fate. Bojan Djokic (Museum of Genocide Victims, Belgrade, Serbia) presented a list of over 657,000 individuals who died during World War II, some of whom had at least one Jewish parent but are not understood to be “Jewish” victims. Djokic outlined the complex research required to better document which victims were, in fact, of Jewish origin.

Wednesday, July 8, began with a set of presentations on Austria and Germany. Michaela Raggam-Blesch (Austrian Academy of Sciences) focused on the living conditions of those classified as so-called “Halbjuden” (half-Jews) and their parents in so called “Mischehen” (mixed marriages) during the Nazi regime in Austria. With dramatic changes to their situation and status in 1938 with the Anschluss, in 1941 with the introduction of the yellow star, and during the war with the deportations of Jews, the remaining population of Christians defined as Jews by the racial laws could suddenly find themselves in positions of authority in the Jewish Council of Elders, even though they held no religious ties to the Jewish community.

Maximilian Strnad (Ludwigs-Maximilians-University of Munich, Germany) presented his research on the over 12,000 Jews in “privileged” mixed marriages who had been spared deportation and were still living in the so-called Altreich in September 1944. In the final year of the war, the Nazi regime established labor battalions in the Rhineland, Westphalia and Breslau, followed by orders for deportation to Theresienstadt in the spring of 1945. Strnad laid out the internal dynamics within the Nazi regime driving the increasingly radical, though not necessarily successful, policy in the final months of the war.

Geraldien Von Frijtag (Utrecht University, Netherlands) discussed the fascinating case of Hans Georg Calmeyer, the figure within the German administration in the Netherlands authorized to decide upon 5,500 cases of Jews who petitioned for a change in their administrative status from so-called “Volljude” (full Jew)  to “Mischling” or non-Jew. Von Frijtag discussed how Calmeyer treated these cases, based on his own background and political inclinations.

Jaap Cohen (NIOD Institute for War, Holocaust and Genocide Studies) presented a large-scale rescue operation, the Action Portuguesia, set up by a group of Sephardic Jews in the Netherlands in order to evade deportation. The Action Portuguesia formulated an argument that because they were of a different “race” than Ashkenazi Jews, Sephardim should not be regarded as Jews under Nazi and Axis racial law. Cohen examines the precedents, arguments and ultimate fate of this school of thought as espoused by members of the d’Oliveira family.

The final day of the workshop, July 9, began with a presentation by Susanne Urban (International Tracing Service, Bad Arolsen, Germany), who examined the postwar fates of so-called “Halbjuden” and “Mischlinge.” She discussed their own “self-understanding/self-perception” as expressed in their applications to the International Refugee Organization (IRO) for displaced persons (DP) status, and analyzed how IRO officials categorized such applicants. This depended on many factors, including whether they had spent the war years in forced labor, in a concentration camp, or even as draftees into the German Wehrmacht.

Joanna Michlic (University of Bristol, United Kingdom and Brandeis University, United States) presented what she called “atypical” histories of Polish Jewish children during and after the war. The children she studied came from highly culturally assimilated middle-class Jewish families, from ethnically mixed marriages between Polish-Jews and ethnic Poles, and from relationships between Jewish fugitives and their rescuers.

The workshop concluded with two presentations relating to Italy. Valeria Galimi (University of Tuscia, Italy) examined the Italian racial laws of 1938 and how they were understood and implemented by the Mussolini regime and during the Republic of Salò. Especially interesting was her analysis of petitions for exemption in “cases of special merit” (benemerenze particolari), which often contained letters directly to Mussolini reflecting the petitioner’s thoughts on the “Fascist cause” and their own place within it. Maura de Bernart (University of Bologna, Italy) examined the fate of Jews and Christians defined as such in Forlì, culminating in the massacres at the Forlì airport (June to September 1944).

Dina Porat (Chief Historian, Yad Vashem and Tel Aviv University, Israel) offered closing comments, remarking on the difficulties of making any broad generalizations about those Nazi and Axis victims who found themselves defined, in whole or in part, as Jews under the racial laws. Factors included conversion to Christianity (and the date at which it took place), level of implementation at the local level, attitudes of the local population and religious institutions, radicalization of the Nazi and Axis regimes in the face of defeat, and many other influences discussed over the four days of the conference. Workshop participants agreed on the need to continue study of what the organizers called “non-Jewish Jews” at the city/community, regional and national levels, so as to be able to best contextualize these victims within the larger history of the Holocaust.

 

* The views as expressed are the author’s alone and do not necessarily represent those of the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum.

 

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