The Pope and the Jews
From Mr James McDonald Sir: I have just read Paul Johnson's review of John Cornwell's book Hitler's Pope: The Secret History of Pius XII (Books, 25 September). The tenor of this review is that Mr Cornwell is wholly unreasonable in his criticism of Pope Pius XII for keeping silent about the Holocaust. Mr Johnson's main point is that Soviet communism was at least as great a threat as Nazism, so the Pope would have been unwise to have embarked on 'a one-sided condemnation of Nazi barbarity while being silent about comparable crimes'.
There are a number of problems with this view. The first is that Pius XII was as one- sided as it was possible to be. He repeatedly threatened to excommunicate communists, but not Nazis. The encyclical Divini redemp- toris explicitly condemned communism, but a simultaneous encyclical directed at Ger- man Catholics, Mit brennender sorge, failed to make any explicit criticism of Nazism. The second is that the Pope could easily have condemned anti-Semitism without appearing one-sided to anyone. And, even if he thought that there was a danger of appearing one-sided, he could have made a point of criticising Nazism and communism with equal force and at the same time. The third is that considerations such as those suggested by Mr Johnson might be worthy of a politician, but hardly of a man claiming to be the highest moral authority on earth.
The Pope had a very clear duty to dis- tance his Church from anti-Semitism, par- ticularly in view of its own record. Before the war, Hitler had boasted to Bishop Berning of Osnabriich that he was doing what the Church had done for 1,500 years, only more effectively. Indeed, Nazi anti- Semitism was explicitly a state-sponsored version of traditional Christian practices — limiting the rights of Jewish citizens, oblig- ing them to wear yellow identification badges, expropriating their goods, confin- ing them to ghettos, burning their books and synagogues, propagating the blood- libel and expelling them from their home countries. The Holocaust itself can be seen as a traditional pogrom on a huge scale using modern technology.
It is notable that Mr Johnson's review is so hostile yet contains no criticism of any of the book's key facts or reasoning, only of trivial details. Perhaps it is a little unfair to expect Mr Johnson to provide a balanced opinion of a book critical of his Church. Would we expect a Stalinist to provide a balanced review of a book critical of Stalin? James McDonald Chfiteau de St-Ferriol, 11500 Aude, France
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