This past week, while reading the New York Times, I came across a news item that discusses the Roman Catholic Church's purported attempt to elevate Pope Pius XII to sainthood. The report went on to say that various Jewish groups have expressed their opposition to Pius' canonization, and that Vatican spokesmen had responded by stating that the Roman Curia's standards for evaluation were Pius' "Christian Life", and the values and the teachings of the Church that Pius' life purportedly exemplified. What was needed, the spokesman explained, was a miracle that could be attributed to Pius, so that his canonization might proceed forward to completion.
This is not a Jewish issue, and attempts by news media to highlight Jewish opposition to Pius XII's beatification are an irrelevancy and a distraction. Indeed, one might suppose that among certain groups of Catholics, Jewish opposition Pius' sainthood might even be welcomed, both as justification for doing so, and, should that effort fail, blame the Jews for it. But Jews really have no say in the matter, and Christians, most particularly Catholics, should be mortally offended, as they, and not Jews, are ultimately linked to their church's historical record, and its past, present, and future reputation. What is at stake here in the 21st century is the good name of Christianity itself, as the insult that is implicit in this travesty will damage relations between Catholics and Jews for years to come, however this turns out. Protestants, and Orthodox Christians share a common heritage with the Roman Catholic Church, and common values which sainthood is supposed to exemplify, and they will be under pressure to oppose the Roman church's proposal as well, if they do not want to be seen as complicit. Why this is happening at this time is something of a puzzle, as none of the usual flashpoints of interfaith controversy, such as access to holy sites in Jerusalem and elsewhere, appear to be lacking. Relations with the Muslim world would not appear to have played a role, either. No, this is a European thing, and it arises from bad conscience over Pius' character and personal history.
Eugenio Pacelli reigned as Pius XII for some 20 years, from his accession to Pope in 1938 until his death in 1958, during which time the civilized world was literally turned upside down by military and social conflict whose echoes still resonate. In the decade before the outbreak of war in 1939, Msgr. Pacelli, as the papal legate in charge of negotiating the Vatican's diplomatic relationships with European governments, played a central role in establishing both the substance and tone of the Vatican's diplomacy, and in particular, toward a resurgent Germany that was aggressively seeking to retake the positions that Germany and the Habsburg Empire had occupied before World War I.
By all accounts, Pacelli succeeded in protecting the Vatican's legal positions in Germany and Austria, albeit through a cynical exercise of Realpolitik, only to see the fruits of his labors almost completely undone by the victorious Allied armies, whose governments tended to view the Vatican with suspicion, if not with outright hostility. If the Vatican factored into the Western Allies' plans at all, it was only because of the Roman Catholic Church's institutional hostility towards the Soviet Union and its ideological followers operating within the recently liberated Western European nations. In politics, the church was retrograde, if not entirely reactionary; it found its greatest support among monarchists, women, the elderly, and social groups that were fearful of, or antagonistic to, the profound changes that the war had made in their lives. If communism and its fellow travelers, Nazism and fascism, each claimed to represent the future, the Roman Catholic Church remained firmly rooted in the past, and it intended to stay there for so long as it could. With that kind of outlook, Pacelli's church could only oppose, and the world moved on without him.
By the mid-1950s, Western European Social Democratic political parties had regained their voice, and they were implementing an ambitious agenda of social reform that was only grudgingly accepted by the Roman church. It was only in Soviet-dominated Eastern Europe that the Vatican achieved any real success by opposing Communist social initiatives, when their Protestant counterparts were too politically compromised to effectively resist Soviet-inspired demands.
The reforms enacted by Vatican II merely made official what had already been acknowledged since the end of the war. The Roman Catholic Church could no longer compete for the loyalties of those who hoped for better future than what had gone before. Economic prosperity and State-run social welfare programs undercut what remained of the church's claims to social legitimacy.
But it was in matters of faith itself that the Church's authority effectively collapsed; while postwar attendance at Mass remained strong during the early years following the war, a generation later wholesale abandonment of the Catholic faith was the norm. Aside from resistance to Communism, the church had nothing to offer those who knew its history, and wanted something better for themselves and their children. The last bastions of Catholic orthodoxy were Franco's Spain and Salazar's Portugal, and until well into the 1970s they remained the poorest countries in Europe. Their repressive governments, and the prominent roles that churchmen played in them, were an ever present reminder to Western Europeans, of who these men were and what they stood for. Even Ireland, the most staunchly Catholic country in Northwestern Europe, has broken its official ties to the Roman Catholic Church, in the midst of a series of sordid scandals over the Church's misuse of its power and position.
Most particularly, the Roman Catholic Church felt compelled to abandon social and theological positions that it held for nearly 1,500 years towards Jews and other non-Christian religions. The Second Vatican Council's promulgation of Nostra Atate ("In Our Time") heralded a new attitude towards other religious faiths, committing the Church to engage in interfaith dialogue, based upon mutual respect, and to combat religious discrimination and bigotry. Of particular significance, Roman Catholic Church officially abandoned its previous teaching that Jews as a people bore continuing responsibility for the death of Jesus, and condemned anti-Semitism in all its forms.
In the intervening 45 years since the Council's declaration, it is apparent that the Church's change of heart has not been fully accepted, and within the Church's hierarchy there still exists a residual Jew-hatred which of late has become emboldened as a consequence of the Church's avowedly conservative leadership. Now, in a display of existential hubris, there are those within the Vatican who want to make their wartime leader a saint, as if the intervening years, and all that has been revealed about the Vatican's role in enabling Nazi Germany to suppress virtually all internal opposition, and also opposition to the Nazi program elsewhere, have taught them nothing. It appears that the only stumbling block to this wish-fulfillment fantasy is the lack of a miracle that the Roman Catholic Church can ascribe to Pius as evidence of his ascendancy into near divinity. In all truth, the real miracle was that Western civilization was able to get itself together in opposition to men like him, and at enormous cost to defeat Germany, Italy, and Japan. The cost in blood, treasure, and ruined lives alone is a standing rebuke to the very idea that Pius' memory warrants anything to celebrate. If there is such a thing as an anti-miracle, Pius and all that he stood for would be it. How else would we describe the catastrophe that Europe suffered from Norway to Greece, and from the Atlantic to the Urals? For a church that claims to be pro-life, how do we explain the 100 million lives lost, or which could never come into being because of its complicity in these events? Was this merely collateral damage to the church's fulfillment of its political ambitions? No, the miracle that the church is seeking is one that would enable the Vatican to rationally explain and justify what they want to do, while respecting the sensibilities, the intelligence, and informed opinions of others.
Pacelli's central role in carrying on that diplomacy, and in his later role as Pius XII, his silence and evasions for the cataclysm that followed, can hardly be described as the stuff from which a traditional hagiography could be fashioned by any fair-minded observer. Since 1961, when the dramatic play The Deputy first made its appearance on stage to accuse Pius of both complicity and willful failure to act upon indisputable evidence he had about Germany's extermination program, the Vatican has been on the defensive, and even now, remains in a state of denial, difficult as that might seem to be now some 65 years after the end of the war. But from all appearances, the backpedaling and prevarication continue.
So, how might we respond to this news? Outrage seems to be a little passé. Msgr. Pacelli's reputation is secure as the personification of every willful blindness and indifference on the part of statesmen and lesser officials during those years who could have done something, but did not, whether for reasons of state, personal and religious bias, or political calculation. My immediate thought was that this would be an opportune time for a Saturday Night Live sketch by Seth Myers', "Really!?!" But this is Christmas time, and nobody wants to mingle bad taste with good cheer. On the other hand, we and the rest of the world have gone through a decade in which hypocrisy on the grandest scale imaginable corrupted our body politic from top to bottom; our national lives were damaged, and perhaps irrevocably so, by a host of people in high places, and their assorted hangers-on, spin doctors, press agents, lobbyists, casuists and enablers of all descriptions, and all those who all stayed on message as they drove our nation, our reputations, and our economic prospects into a ditch. Surely these people deserve a patron saint, and at least from my standpoint, Pius and his apologists fill the bill very nicely.
It is said that hypocrisy is vice's tribute to virtue; but even within the Vatican there must be some whose sense of shame would cause them to acknowledge the utter perversity of this opera buffa. And to what effect? Is the church so deficient in hagiographic examples that they must stoop to this? What possible good can come of it? Communal warfare and attendant massacre are the curse of our age, and here we have the world's premier religious institution proposing to honor one who was at the helm during some of the worst years of our bloody history, and an enabler and fellow-traveler who was complicit in that evil in every way. Pacelli and his bretheren kept their fingernails and clothing clean, while leaving the messiness of mass deportations and industrial-scale murder to others.
During those years, it was possible to argue in favor of giving the Vatican the benefit of the doubt, as church discipline was stern and uncompromising, institutional loyalties were strong, and skepticism had a partisan, frequently Anti-Catholic edge. But no longer. The Vatican has lost its ability to suppress information and news reports damaging to its institutional interests, and it lacks both the will to discipline dissident clergy within its ranks who cling to extremist views, and moral authority to persuade others outside of the Church of the rightness of its position.
Wonder of it all, the ultimate success of this shameful and misbegotten farce depends entirely upon the ability of the Vatican to persuade people to ignore the history and documented evidence that have been piling up for the last eight decades. But that is not to be. The Vatican can no more cause others to forget Msgr. Pacelli's personal and institutional complicity in what he and they did, or failed to do, then it can reverse time itself. This tells us more about the current Roman Curia, then about anything that Msgr. Pacelli did as Papal Legate, or later as Pope. Let us hope, pray even, that responsible Vatican officials come to their senses, and recognize that this proposal has no legs, and will quietly bury it in a place where we will never see the light of day again.
