Tag Archives: Steve Pressman

Review of Holy Silence (directed and produced by Steven Pressman, 2020)

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Contemporary Church History Quarterly

Volume 27, Number 3 (September 2021)

Review of Holy Silence, directed and produced by Steven Pressman (Seventh Art, 2020)

Rebecca Carter-Chand, United States Holocaust Memorial Museum*

* The views expressed are those of the author and do not represent those of the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum.

Filmmaker Steven Pressman often tells the story of the moment he heard Pope Francis’ announcement in March 2019 that Vatican archival materials related to the pontificate of Pius XII (1939-1958) would soon be made available to researchers for the first time. At the time, Pressman was in the editing stage for his new film, Holy Silence, which offers a fresh take on the longstanding questions about the role of the Vatican during the rise of Nazism and the Holocaust. Pressman has said that although he was initially concerned that the opening of the archives would eclipse his film and render it outdated before it was even released, he soon realized that the timing was fortuitous. With more than 16 million pages spread across several archives in Vatican City and Rome, historians will be filling in missing puzzle pieces and bringing nuance to polarized debates for years to come. COVID-related delays have extended these timelines even further. In this context, Holy Silence offers a balanced and accessible primer to audiences, both newcomers and those well-versed in this history.

The film features several academics familiar to CCHQ readers, including members of the editorial team Kevin Spicer and Suzanne Brown-Fleming. Interviews with Robert Ventresca, Susan Zuccotti, Michael Phayer, Maria Mazzenga, and many others are interspersed with historic footage, and occasional re-enactment to explore the actions of popes Pius XI and XII and some of the innerworkings of the Vatican. Pressman offers a range of voices, including a few outliers like Norbert Hofmann, Secretary of the Holy See’s Commission for Jewish Relations, who views Pius XII in a sympathetic light. We also hear contrasting viewpoints from Sister Maria Pascalizi of the Roman Convent of Santa Maria dei Sette Dolori and Micaela Pavoncello, a local Jew, about the Vatican’s role in sanctioning or encouraging the hiding of Jews in churches.

The film is centered on the Vatican, but it employs a distinctly American lens, featuring several American individuals who intersected with this history. The contribution of American Jesuit priest John LaFarge and the so-called “hidden encyclical” drafted in 1938 is explored in detail. Unfortunately, the film does not mention the pre-Vatican II supersessionist and anti-Judaic themes of Humani generis unitas (“The Unity of the Human Race”). Instead, it focuses on LaFarge’s formative experiences ministering in African-American communities, highlighting the transatlantic context in which some people were formulating their critiques of racism in the 1930s and 40s.

Holy Silence concludes with the end of World War II and does not address the postwar entanglements of the Vatican with Nazis fleeing Europe; doing so would require a much longer film than the current 55 minutes. Like any good documentary film, it presents a narrative but asks more questions than it answers. As the debates around the role of the Catholic church and Pope Pius XII in the Holocaust receive new breath due to the opening of the archives, this film provides an entry point for productive discussion about the role of religious leaders, the relationship between large religious institutions and governments, and local dynamics between religious majorities and minorities.

Holy Silence is available to stream through PBS and Amazon Prime. Recordings of multiple panel discussions about the film co-sponsored by the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum are available on YouTube.

 

 

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Conference Report: “Synagogue and Church: The Role of the Roman Catholic Church and the Holocaust”

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Contemporary Church History Quarterly

Volume 24, Number 1 (March 2018)

Conference Report: “Synagogue and Church: The Role of the Roman Catholic Church and the Holocaust.” The 10th Annual Powell-Heller Conference for Holocaust Education, Pacific Lutheran University, November 1-3, 2017.

By Beth A. Griech-Polelle, Pacific Lutheran University

The 10th Annual Powell-Heller Conference for Holocaust Education conference began with Steve Pressman, documentary filmmaker, showing clips of his soon-to-be released film, “Holy Secrets.” Pressman discussed his process in making the documentary which explores the actions and inactions taken by the Vatican during the Holocaust.

The first panel session continued this theme by exploring the “Pius Wars,” with papers by Robert Ventresca and Jacques Kornberg. Both presented critical re-assessments of Pius XII, suggesting the need for a framework for the proper historical and ethical evaluation of the choices made by the leader of the Roman Catholic Church.

Further panels included the exploration of Catholic antisemitism, with Kevin P. Spicer and Martina Cucchiara co-presenting their recent work on Erna Becker-Kohen, a Catholic of Jewish heritage. Martin Menke presented research on Weimar Catholic leaders who differentiated between being anti-racist and being anti-Semitic.

Jonathan Huener shared his latest research on the Reichsgau Wartheland and the diverse ways in which the Nazi occupation regime persecuted the Catholic Church in occupied Poland. This was followed by Brenda Gaydosh analyzing why Bernhard Lichtenberg resisted and protested Nazi anti-Semitic measures and why he prayed for the Jews.

The final presentation of the first day of panels was a keynote address by John Connelly: “How the Catholic Church Overcame Its Own Theology and Proclaimed God Loves Jews.” Connelly argued that Vatican II’s new teaching about God loving the Jews came about because of Nazi racism. Many of the theologians who advised the bishops at Vatican II were opponents of Hitler in the 1930s. Some of them were converts from Judaism and many had been targets of antisemitism themselves. Yet for them, the Church’s new teaching about Jews was not a revolution; it was a return to the ideas of the Jewish thinker, Saul of Tarsus. Far from a revolution, the new teaching of Vatican II was a return to the Church’s origins.

The final day of the conference featured a panel on post-Holocaust theology and the Jews with a presentation by Zuzanna Radzik, a Catholic theologian specializing in Christian-Jewish relations and feminist theology. Karma Ben Johanan from the Polonsky Academy at the Van Leer Jerusalem Institute then presented on the way in which the Catholic discourse on the Holocaust functioned in the construction of the Church’s identity and in the reforging of Jewish-Christian relations from the Second Vatican Council to the present.

Raymond Sun brought the conference into the present by analyzing the rhetoric, symbolism, and historical precedents employed by church leaders in urging Catholics to oppose the persecution or exclusion of targeted groups. He explored possible reasons for the absence of direct references to the Holocaust and pondered the implications of this for Catholic memory of the Holocaust. This was followed by Gershon Greenberg’s presentation on the restoration of Jewish faith in the displaced persons camps, beginning with the survivor’s question: “Why was I still alive?” The survivors’ answer was: in order to study Torah—which in turn nourished life. The fact that Jewish faith was revived necessitates the conclusion that somehow, some way, sacramental existence never totally disappeared, even in the midst of catastrophe.

The conference closed with a presentation from Marie-Anne Harkness, whose family members rescued Jews in France during the war. Mrs. Harkness’s grandmother, Madame Celine Morali, used the family’s hardware store to smuggle Jews out of danger. She and her daughter worked with Monsignor Joseph Moussaron, Bishop of Albi, and other Catholics to rescue Jews.

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