The Vatican has withdrawn from a written agreement to join an international Holocaust memorial organisation because of tensions over the activity of Pope Pius XII, the pope during the second world war, American diplomatic cables show.
Relations
have become so frosty that the Vatican "rowed back on a prior written
agreement" to take up observer status on an international organisation
dedicated to remembering the Holocaust and transmitting its lessons to
the future, according to Julieta Valls Noyes, the number two at the
American embassy to the Holy See.
In October 2009, she reported
that the plans for the Vatican to take up observer status at the Task
Force for International Cooperation on Holocaust Education, Remembrance,
and Research "had fallen apart completely … due to Vatican
back-pedalling".
She was unclear whether this was attributable to
the newly-appointed deputy foreign minister of the Vatican, Mgr Ettore
Balestrero, whom she described as "relatively inexperienced", adding
that "this would not be the first time he has complicated Vatican
foreign relations".
But she thought it might also indicate that
the Vatican "may ... be pulling back due to concerns about ITF pressure
to declassify records from the WWII-era pontificate of Pope Pius XII".
Pius
XII has long been a controversial figure for his failure publicly to
denounce the Holocaust in 1941 or 1942, when the Vatican was first
informed of what was going on.
Before becoming pope, he had served
as the Vatican ambassador in Berlin.
Some Jewish groups have accused
him of anti-semitic attitudes; his defenders, among them many other
Jews, have argued that any more overt resistance to the Nazis would have
been counter-productive, citing the example of the church in the
Netherlands, where savage repression and the deportation of many more
Jews followed a denunciation of Nazi policies from the pulpit.
Both
sides believe they will be proved right by papers in the Vatican
archives, but their release has been extremely slow.
The American
diplomatic cables show a long and increasingly futile effort on behalf
of the embassy to mediate between the Vatican archivists and outside
historians, bedevilled by mutual mistrust.
The story starts in
2001, when the first attempt to negotiate a solution had already broken
down. Father Peter Gumpel, a German Jesuit priest and admirer of Pius
XII, who was keeper of the archives, threatened to sue a journalist who
suggested that he or his family had been Nazis, the cables show.
"Gumpel
also expressed concern about references in the media and in other
comments to him as the 'German Jesuit'. Gumpel [said] his family had
been victims of Nazi persecution and several had been killed by the
Nazis.
He himself had to flee Nazi Germany as a refugee, first to
France and then later to Holland.
He recalled that at one point a
reporter had planned to print an assertion that Gumpel was a Nazi
himself – something Gumpel said was libellous, and which he was more
than willing to go to court to fight."
The next year, Cardinal Walter Kasper, another German, attempted to restart
the dialogue over the papers.
The-then American ambassador, Jim
Nicholson, reported a conversation with him on December 18 2001.
"[Kasper] said that Father Gumpel was the Vatican's best informed living
expert on the papacy of Pius XII."
Two months later, partly responding to American pressure, Pope John Paul II,
who also wanted his predecessor canonised, authorised the early release
of documents relating to Pius XII's earlier career as the Vatican's
ambassador to Germany.
Nicholson reported: "The decision … appears
to be an attempt by the pope to silence accusations of anti-semitism
levelled against his predecessor Pius XII. It may also herald renewed
Vatican interest in beatifying Pius XII – free from the pall of scandal
and derision.
The decision by Pope John Paul II to dispense with
standard operating procedures in this case comes after years of Vatican
protestations that this material could not be released because it was
not yet properly catalogued. The decision shows that whatever the pope
wants, does in fact happen."
But this would not be true for very
much longer.
As John Paul II sank into the Parkinsonian condition that
would eventually kill him in 2005, the Vatican drifted.
There is
reference to the shortage of researchers, and by the time the subject
resurfaces in 2009 all hope of compromise seems gone.
Noyes
reported that only six or eight researchers were working on the 16m
documents, stored in hundreds of crates, that are left over from Pius
XII's papacy.
It had earlier taken a team of four Jesuits, working full
time, 17 years to produce 12 volumes of his diplomatic correspondence.
One
well-informed Jewish observer remarked that the desire to canonise Pius
XII stems almost entirely from internal Catholic dynamics.
What
really mattered in the struggle between liberals and conservatives was
the interpretation of the reforming Second Vatican Council, called by
his successor, John XXIII.
Was this a break with the past, as liberals believe, or merely a development, as conservatives see it?
So
long as John XXIII is on the road to sainthood, and Pius is blocked, it
is harder to maintain that the two men pursued that same policy.
In
this context, the Holocaust is not the most important fact about Pius's
pontificate, as for Jews it must be.
This kind of disagreement could
not be solved even if the archives were entirely open, and all the facts
were known, and agreed.
SIC: TG/UK