Pope Pius XII's 1942 Christmas address
Pope Pius XII's 1942 Christmas address was a speech delivered by Pope Pius XII over Vatican Radio on Christmas 1942. It is notable for its denunciation of the extermination of people on the basis of race, and followed the commencement of the Nazi Final Solution program to exterminate the Jews of Europe. The significance of the denunciation is a matter of scholarly debate.
Background
The 1942 Christmas Address by Pope Pius XII was made shortly after the war had turned decisively against
The Catholic Church had offered condemnations of Nazi racism since the earliest days of the Nazi movement. The 1942 Christmas address is significant for the light it throws on the ongoing scholarly debate around the war time policies of Pius XII in response to what would later be termed
Two Popes served through the Nazi period:
Pius XI's Secretary of State, Cardinal Pacelli (future Pius XII), made some 55 protests against Nazi policies, including its "ideology of race".[5] As Cardinal Pacelli, Pope Pius XII had assisted Pius XI draft the Mit Brennender Sorge encyclical, a powerful critique of Nazi ideology. Pius XI also commissioned an encyclical demonstrating the incompatibility of Catholicism and racism: Humani generis unitas ("The Unity of the Human Race"). Following his death however, the less confrontational Pius XII did not issue the encyclical, fearing it would antagonize Fascist Italy and Nazi Germany at a time when he hoped to act as an impartial peace broker.[6]
With Europe on the brink of war, Pius XI died on 10 February 1939 and
Following the outbreak of war, Pius followed Vatican precedent and pursued a policy of "impartiality". Despite this official policy, Pius passed intelligence to the Allies and made a series of general condemnations of racism and genocide through the course of the war,[6][7] and chose diplomacy to assist the persecuted during the war.[6] For this he was scorned by Hitler as a "Jew lover"[8] and a blackmailer on his back, who he believed constricted his ally Mussolini and leaked confidential German correspondence to the world.[9]
Largely posthumously (and controversially), Pius has been criticized for not "doing enough" to prevent the Holocaust – and by others of being "silent" in the face of it. According to the Encyclopædia Britannica, depictions of the Pope as anti-Semitic or indifferent to the Nazi Holocaust lack "credible substantiation". Upon the death of Pius XII in 1958, he was praised by world leaders for his wartime leadership, with the Israeli Foreign Minister Golda Meir saying: "When fearful martyrdom came to our people in the decade of Nazi terror, the voice of the Pope was raised for the victims. The life of our times was enriched by a voice speaking out on the great moral truths above the tumult of daily conflict. We mourn a great servant of peace."[5][10]
One scholarly critic of the legacy of Pius XII has been Michael Phayer (author of The Church and the Holocaust, 1930–1965 (2000)). He has written that the Catholic Church possessed a specific knowledge of the Holocaust that rivaled that of the Allied governments.[11] The Vatican possessed information on the systematic nature of deportations and atrocities, compiled from its own diplomatic corps in Eastern Europe, from Catholic bishops in Germany, the Netherlands, and Eastern Europe, from ordinary Catholics, priests, and laity, from the Polish government-in-exile, the foreign diplomats to the Holy See, and various Jews and Jewish organizations.[11] A variety of historians have comprehensively examined the data received by the Vatican, which "covered not just the activity of mobile killing squads but every aspect of the Nazis' murdering process".[11]
However, according to Phayer, until 1942, Cardinal Secretary of State
A defender of Pius, the eminent historian of the Holocaust,
Content
The 1942 Christmas address was 26 pages and over 5000 words long and took more than 45 minutes to deliver.
The Pope addressed the issues of racial persecutions in the following terms:
Humanity owes this vow to those hundreds of thousands who, without any fault on their part, sometimes only because of their nationality or race, have been consigned to death or to a slow decline[20] [also translated: "marked down for death or gradual extinction"].[19]
Rittner and Roth described these as the "pivotal words that remain one of the key flashpoints in the Holocaust-related controversy that continues to swirl around him", and came near the end of the speech.[19] Phayer, Rittner and Roth see it as significant that Pius XII did not address the perpetrators or victims by name.[22][23] Nor did he mention Jews or antisemitism.[23]
Contemporary reception
The immediate reaction to the speech was generally positive, with the exception of the Nazis and Jewish victims in Poland.
The speech elicited the strongest reaction in the
Others were more guarded in their reactions. Bishop Konrad von Preysing of Berlin agreed that the address referred to Jews, but considered it not specific enough.[28] Catholic Poles believed that the address referred to them alone and wished that the pope had identified the Germans as the perpetrators.[32] The Polish government-in-exile in London remained dissatisfied with the address, wishing for a "more trenchant papal condemnation" that named the perpetrators.[33]
The German government expressed displeasure at the Christmas address and boycotted the pope's
Phayer argues that contemporaries and scholars have viewed the speech differently because "we know that the pope would not take up the matter again, but contemporaries did not know that this would be the case. In fact, to assert that Pope Pius himself intended this to be his one and only statement is incorrect."[35]
Scholarly interpretation
According to Rittner and Roth, the speech remains a "lightning rod in debates about Pius XII and the Holocaust", and its interpretation remains "unsettled and unsettling".[23]
To the eminent Holocaust historian, Sir
Phayer agrees that the 1942 speech did denounce genocide, but argues that "it is still not clear whose genocide or which genocide he was referring to, and we can do no more than speculate as to why he spoke out".[37] Phayer states that "although the word genocide would not be coined until 1944, Pius XII denounced what we now commonly understand as genocide".[38] In 2000, Phayer wrote that "Pope Pius's radio talk contained twenty-seven words about the Holocaust out of twenty-six pages of text".[39] While Phayer's views of the speech changed between 2000 and 2008 ("Pius did speak out"), his dismal assessment of the "Vatican's essential passivity in collecting and disseminating genocide information" did not.[38][40] Phayer states that his change of views came after he was invited by Michael Marrus to participate in a University of Toronto conference about the Holocaust and the Netherlands.[37] Phayer cites the address as evidence of the "adaptability rather than uniform rigidity at the Vatican in the middle of the Holocaust years. The Holy See was in search of a new path for papal policy".[35] He argues that historians (himself included) have been "too dismissive of the 1942 address" although he agrees that "Pius never spoke out again".[35]
See also
- Pius XII and the German Resistance
- Catholic resistance to Nazi Germany
- Rescue of Jews by Catholics during the Holocaust
Footnotes
Notes
- ^ Encyclopædia Britannica : "World War Two - German-occupied Europe"
- ^ Encyclopædia Britannica: "Roman Catholicism - the period of the world wars".
- Ronald Rychlak; InsideCatholic.com; 8 October 2007.
- ^ Encyclopædia Britannica : Pius XI
- ^ a b c "The American Spectator: Hitler's Pope?". Archived from the original on 2008-10-27. Retrieved 2013-06-23.
- ^ a b c d Coppa, Frank J. (April 28, 2005). "Pius XII: Biography, Papacy, & Facts: Early Pontificate". Encyclopædia Britannica. Britannica.com. Retrieved December 6, 2017.
- ^ a b http://www.yadvashem.org/odot_pdf/Microsoft%20Word%20-%20684.pdf[bare URL PDF]
- ^ Vatican hopes secret files exonerate 'Hitler's pope'; Dalya Alberge; The Observer; 9 February 2013
- ^ Hitler's Table Talk 1941-1944: "Religion in Eastern Territories", Cameron & Stevens, Enigma Books pp. 269, 671
- ^ "Encyclopędia Britannica's Reflections on the Holocaust". www.britannica.com. Archived from the original on 2007-04-28.
- ^ a b c Phayer, 2008, pp. 44-45.
- ^ Phayer, 2008, p. 46.
- ^ Phayer, 2008, p. 47.
- ^ Phayer, 2008, pp. 48-49.
- ^ Phayer, 2008, p. 50.
- ^ Phayer, 2008, pp. 51, 53.
- ^ Galatians 3,28.
- ^ Hitler's Pope? Archived 2013-10-16 at the Wayback Machine by Martin Gilbert; The American Spectator; 18.8.06
- ^ a b c d e Rittner and Roth, 2002, p. 3.
- ^ a b Phayer, 2008, p. 53.
- ^ Vatican Archive - Homily by Pope Benedict XVI; 9 October 2008
- ^ Phayer, 2008, pp. 52-53.
- ^ a b c Rittner and Roth, 2002, p. 4.
- ^ Phayer, 2008, p. 56.
- ^ Phayer, 2008, pp. 56-57.
- ^ New York Times. 25 December 1942. "The Pope's Verdict." p. 16.
- ^ New York Times. 25 December 1941. "The Pope's Message." p. 24.
- ^ a b Phayer, 2008, p. 58.
- ^ Phayer, 2008, p. 57.
- ^ Phayer, 2008, p. 59.
- ^ a b c Phayer, 2008, p. 60.
- ^ Phayer, 2008, pp. 58-59.
- ^ a b c Phayer, 2008, p. 63.
- ^ Lapide, 1980, p. 137.
- ^ a b c Phayer, 2008, p. 43.
- ^ Hitler's Pope? by Martin Gilbert; The American Spectator; 18.8.06
- ^ a b Phayer, 2008, p. xii.
- ^ a b Phayer, 2008, p. 42.
- ^ Phayer, 2000, p. 49.
- ^ Phayer, 2008, p. 252.
References
- Lapide, Pinchas. 1967. Three Popes and the Jews. London and Southampton: Souvenir Press.
- ISBN 0-253-33725-9.
- Phayer, Michael. 2008. Pius XII, The Holocaust, and the Cold War. Indianapolis: Indiana University Press. ISBN 978-0-253-34930-9.
- Ritner, Carol and Roth, John K. (eds.). 2002. Pope Pius XII and the Holocaust. New York: Leicester University Press. ISBN 0-7185-0275-2
External links
- English translation by the Eternal Word Television Network