Vatican Reels From New Revelation About Pope John XXIII
John Hooper, The Guardian (London), 1/06/05
In 1940, after Nazi troops marched into France, the future Pope John XXIII, darling of liberal Roman Catholics, took up his pen to comment. Did he, as one might expect, warn of the dark shadow of the jackboot spreading over Europe? Did he fret over the fate of the Jews who had just fallen into Hitler's grasp? No. What he wrote was that German society was made up of"alert, strong" men, who fully deserved their victory over a"worn-out French democracy".
Skeletons have been rattling in the Roman Catholic church's wartime cupboard for years. In particular, the Vatican's inaction over the Holocaust, its failure to condemn openly and specifically the Nazis' attempted genocide, has cast a long shadow over the reputation of the austere wartime pontiff, Pius XII.
Now, however, a new row is threatening to engulf a man of a very different sort - his benign successor, John XXIII. The man Italians call"il papa buono" ("the good Pope") was as much a symbol of the mould-breaking 60s as John Kennedy, Che Guevara or the Beatles: a cuddly, grandpa figure who was also an audacious moderniser.
Time magazine, which made him its 1962 Man of the Year, called him"the most popular Pope of modern times". Whereas his predecessor had moved almost exclusively among prelates and diplomats within the Vatican's walls, John XXIII escaped them to visit orphanages and hospitals and, on one celebrated occasion, Rome's main prison. This was the Pope who fathered ecumenism, who launched the Second Vatican Council and who seemed to be pointing the world's biggest Christian church down a path very different from the narrow one it has since followed under Pope John Paul II.
As the Vatican's envoy, or nuncio, in Turkey, Monsignor Angelo Roncalli, as he then was, had rescued Jews escaping from Nazi Germany. As Pope, he made a profound impression on a group of Jewish visitors - and, through them, on the entire Jewish world - when he approached them with the simple Biblical greeting:"I am Joseph, your brother."
But last month, the Italian daily Corriere della Sera published a letter apparently sent by the Vatican to the papal nuncio in France in 1946. It concerned the thousands, possibly tens of thousands, of Jewish children in Europe who had been handed over by their parents to Roman Catholic couples or institutions during the war to save them from the Nazis' death camps. The Vatican's letter said that children who had been baptised in the meantime ought not to be handed back. It ended with the words:"Please note that this decision has been approved by the Holy Father." The recipient of the letter was Roncalli, who had recently been posted to France from Turkey.
Amid the controversy prompted by the letter, two questions have been asked. The first, posed by Father Peter Gumpel, the Jesuit who built up the case for Pius XII's beatification, is why the Vatican's instructions should have been written in French. The working language of all Vatican departments is Italian and the recipient, too, was an Italian. Father Gumpel believes the letter may have been a so-called" communicazione abbreviata" - a summary of the instructions in French, carried out by Roncalli so that he could pass them on to the French bishops.
Whatever the exact status of the letter, though, it does not detract from the force of the second question: why, if Pope John XXIII was such a friend of the Jews, did he apparently obey the letter's blood-chilling instructions without question? Matteo Luigi Napolitano, an expert on church-state relations, has noted that in Roncalli's diaries there was no trace of concern about the Holocaust, let alone the Jewish children who survived it in Catholic families and orphanages.
The explanation provided by some fellow historians is that there was always a vast gap between the man and his image. He may have been born the son of a sharecropper, but he soon became a sophisticated and adroit diplomat. Cesare Cavalleri, the editor of Studi Cattolici, argued in yesterday's Corriere della Sera that"all John XXIII's speeches and doctrinal documents bear witness to his narrow and rigorous orthodoxy". He originally entrusted the preparation of the Second Vatican Council to an arch-conservative cardinal but was swept into more liberal territory by the demands it drew to the surface.
No one is arguing that the"good Pope" was an anti-semite. But, according to Pier Giorgio Zunino, a lecturer in contemporary history at the university of Turin, the Angelo Roncalli of the 1940s was"fully at home with the majority Catholic culture: aligned with fascism, opposed to Soviet communism, but also suspicious of western democracy".
Some of the evidence for his views was published in 2003 in a book about the Italian republic that went unnoticed outside academic circles. It includes a letter written in 1943 that raises further disturbing questions. By 1943, many of the horrors perpetrated by the Axis would have been known to an international diplomat such as Roncalli. Yet his advice to his relatives back in Italy was to keep"unchanged faith" in the fascist regime. Their best course, he said, was"to work, pray, suffer, obey and keep quiet, keep quiet, keep quiet".
In 1940, after Nazi troops marched into France, the future Pope John XXIII, darling of liberal Roman Catholics, took up his pen to comment. Did he, as one might expect, warn of the dark shadow of the jackboot spreading over Europe? Did he fret over the fate of the Jews who had just fallen into Hitler's grasp? No. What he wrote was that German society was made up of"alert, strong" men, who fully deserved their victory over a"worn-out French democracy".
Skeletons have been rattling in the Roman Catholic church's wartime cupboard for years. In particular, the Vatican's inaction over the Holocaust, its failure to condemn openly and specifically the Nazis' attempted genocide, has cast a long shadow over the reputation of the austere wartime pontiff, Pius XII.
Now, however, a new row is threatening to engulf a man of a very different sort - his benign successor, John XXIII. The man Italians call"il papa buono" ("the good Pope") was as much a symbol of the mould-breaking 60s as John Kennedy, Che Guevara or the Beatles: a cuddly, grandpa figure who was also an audacious moderniser.
Time magazine, which made him its 1962 Man of the Year, called him"the most popular Pope of modern times". Whereas his predecessor had moved almost exclusively among prelates and diplomats within the Vatican's walls, John XXIII escaped them to visit orphanages and hospitals and, on one celebrated occasion, Rome's main prison. This was the Pope who fathered ecumenism, who launched the Second Vatican Council and who seemed to be pointing the world's biggest Christian church down a path very different from the narrow one it has since followed under Pope John Paul II.
As the Vatican's envoy, or nuncio, in Turkey, Monsignor Angelo Roncalli, as he then was, had rescued Jews escaping from Nazi Germany. As Pope, he made a profound impression on a group of Jewish visitors - and, through them, on the entire Jewish world - when he approached them with the simple Biblical greeting:"I am Joseph, your brother."
But last month, the Italian daily Corriere della Sera published a letter apparently sent by the Vatican to the papal nuncio in France in 1946. It concerned the thousands, possibly tens of thousands, of Jewish children in Europe who had been handed over by their parents to Roman Catholic couples or institutions during the war to save them from the Nazis' death camps. The Vatican's letter said that children who had been baptised in the meantime ought not to be handed back. It ended with the words:"Please note that this decision has been approved by the Holy Father." The recipient of the letter was Roncalli, who had recently been posted to France from Turkey.
Amid the controversy prompted by the letter, two questions have been asked. The first, posed by Father Peter Gumpel, the Jesuit who built up the case for Pius XII's beatification, is why the Vatican's instructions should have been written in French. The working language of all Vatican departments is Italian and the recipient, too, was an Italian. Father Gumpel believes the letter may have been a so-called" communicazione abbreviata" - a summary of the instructions in French, carried out by Roncalli so that he could pass them on to the French bishops.
Whatever the exact status of the letter, though, it does not detract from the force of the second question: why, if Pope John XXIII was such a friend of the Jews, did he apparently obey the letter's blood-chilling instructions without question? Matteo Luigi Napolitano, an expert on church-state relations, has noted that in Roncalli's diaries there was no trace of concern about the Holocaust, let alone the Jewish children who survived it in Catholic families and orphanages.
The explanation provided by some fellow historians is that there was always a vast gap between the man and his image. He may have been born the son of a sharecropper, but he soon became a sophisticated and adroit diplomat. Cesare Cavalleri, the editor of Studi Cattolici, argued in yesterday's Corriere della Sera that"all John XXIII's speeches and doctrinal documents bear witness to his narrow and rigorous orthodoxy". He originally entrusted the preparation of the Second Vatican Council to an arch-conservative cardinal but was swept into more liberal territory by the demands it drew to the surface.
No one is arguing that the"good Pope" was an anti-semite. But, according to Pier Giorgio Zunino, a lecturer in contemporary history at the university of Turin, the Angelo Roncalli of the 1940s was"fully at home with the majority Catholic culture: aligned with fascism, opposed to Soviet communism, but also suspicious of western democracy".
Some of the evidence for his views was published in 2003 in a book about the Italian republic that went unnoticed outside academic circles. It includes a letter written in 1943 that raises further disturbing questions. By 1943, many of the horrors perpetrated by the Axis would have been known to an international diplomat such as Roncalli. Yet his advice to his relatives back in Italy was to keep"unchanged faith" in the fascist regime. Their best course, he said, was"to work, pray, suffer, obey and keep quiet, keep quiet, keep quiet".