Last June, the sociologist and anthropologist David Kertzer published “The Pope at War: The Secret History of Pius XII, Mussolini, and Hitler,” which drew from the newly published Vatican records. Kertzer implies in the book that the Vatican was mostly concerned with saving Jews who had converted to Catholicism and underlined the church’s problematic history with promoting antisemitism in Europe and beyond.
The book also revealed that the pope had engaged in private dialogues with Hitler though a German prince who was a Nazi sympathizer. Kertzer also reported that Pius’ advisers urged him not to openly challenge the racial laws enacted by the Italian fascist dictator Benito Mussolini.
When, in 1943, 1,260 Italian Jews were rounded up by the Nazis within earshot of Vatican City, Pius did not condemn the event but worked behind the scenes to aid the Jewish community, according to Kertzer’s book. About 250 of them could prove to be “non-Aryan Catholics” and were spared. Of those remaining, only 16 people returned from the concentration camps.
Ickx called Kertzer’s claim that the pope mostly focused on saving baptized Jews “false” but failed to present evidence to counter it. Many Jews saved by the church were baptized, he said, and sometimes were given fake baptism certificates to protect them from persecution or deportation. Ickx described it as a “door to safety for Jews,” as those who were baptized satisfied a legal loophole the Vatican could exploit to intervene more directly on their behalf.
But, Ickx added, “this does not exclude helping other Jews.”
Regarding Pius’ silence, the issue is more nuanced, the archivist said. It was Pius who first wondered if his “silence regarding the behavior of the Nazis would not be judged negatively,” during a meeting with Bishop Angelo Roncalli (later Pope John XXIII) at the Vatican in 1941.
According to Ickx, many historians today don’t understand the coded vocabulary used by the pope in his public pronouncements. He said Pius referred to Hitler and the Jews between 130 and 250 times in his speeches, without ever openly condemning them. But he admitted that the pope knew very well what was happening to Jews all over Europe.
“Was it silence? Yes, but it was an active silence,” he said.
This article originally appeared here.
