Pius XI's "Hidden Encyclical" on Anti-Semitism: An Appraisal

by George Sim Johnston

For decades there have been rumors of a unpublished encyclical attacking anti-Semitism, drafted for Pius XI shortly before his death in 1939 and apparently shelved by his successor Pius XII. The failure to release this encyclical has often been adduced as evidence for Pius XII's alleged compliant attitude toward anti-Semitism. Now that the draft of the encyclical has been published, it is clear why its publication would have been a step backward in the Church's relations with the Jewish community.

Review of The Hidden Encyclical of Pius XI, edited and with an introduction  by Georges Passelecq and Bernard Suchecky; Harcourt Brace, 319 pp., $25.00. George Sim Johnston

Although the Catholic Church has been around for two thousand years, its history, according to the media, boils down to three episodes: the Inquisition, the Galileo affair, and the "silence" of the Vatican during the Jewish Holocaust.

The preoccupation with the Vatican's role in the Holocaust is recent phenomenon. It was Rolf Hochhuth's 1962 propaganda play, The Deputy, that popularized the idea that Pius XII was a silent, and therefore guilty, bystander of the Nazi's murder of six million Jews. Before Hochhuth, nobody had made this accusation. Jewish groups, in fact, had expressed only gratitude for the number of Jewish lives which Pius had helped save.

But Pius's heroic efforts on behalf of the Jews are now largely forgotten.   Nobody, for example, seems aware that in 1945 the World Jewish Congress made a large cash gift to the Vatican in appreciation for what Pius did for the Jews, or that when Pius died in 1958, Israel's Foreign Minister Golda Meir gave him a moving eulogy at the United Nations for the same reason. Editorial writers instead harp on his "silence," which has become part of the standard iconography of the Holocaust.

For decades, there were dark hints of a missing piece of the story. An encyclical denouncing anti-Semitism was said to have been drafted by Pius XI shortly before his death in 1939 and then buried by his successor, Pius XII. The alleged suppression of this document, if true, was deemed to be further damning evidence that Pius XII had no real concern for the plight of the Jews under the Nazis.

The publishers of The Hidden Encyclical of Pius XI, which presents the full text of the aborted document, are eager to promote this anti-Vatican spin.  In fact, they recruited Gary Wills, the intellectual elite's favorite anti-Catholic Catholic, to write the introduction. But even Wills cannot  avoid the conclusion that it is a very good thing that this encyclical on
anti-Semitism never saw the light of day.

Whatever their intention, the editors, Georges Passelecq and Bernard Suchecky, have given us a story of the Holy Spirit at work, preventing the Church from making a serious blunder. In a long introduction, they present what is known of the history of the draft entitled Humani Generis Unitas (The Unity of the Human Race). And the facts they have dug up make it clear why, regrettably, it was necessary that the Church wait a few more decades before addressing its relationship with Judaism in a serious public document.

In the summer of 1938, Pope Pius XI heard that an American Jesuit named John LaFarge was visiting Rome. Pius, an omnivorous polymath, had read and been impressed by a book LaFarge had written on racial justice. He summoned LaFarge to his summer residence and asked him to draft a papal encyclical denouncing racism and anti-Semitism, a topic Pius considered to be "most burning at the present time."

LaFarge was joined by two other Jesuits who had experience drafting papal documents. The three men went to work in Paris during the ominous summer of 1938. A lengthy manuscript was delivered to the Vatican in the autumn.  We do not know whether Pius read it. The document was shelved and Pius died a few months later. That is the end of story, so far as the "hidden encyclical" is concerned.

We do know that in September Pius made the famous declaration that "anti-Semitism is inadmissible. We are spiritually Semites." His successor, Pius XII, who had been the Vatican ambassador to Germany, loathed the Nazis. In 1935, he told a crowd of pilgrims at Lourdes that the Nazis were "possessed by superstition of race and blood" utterly opposed to the "principles of Christian faith." At the start of his pontificate, he issued the encyclical Summi Pontificus which denounced the idolatrous principles on which Nazism rested.

We don't know precisely why Pius XII chose not to pursue the drafting of Humani Generis Unitas, but it's not hard to guess. Just as Paul VI rejected the so-called Majority Report on Birth Control in 1968, so Pius could have had no use for a document which, as Wills admits, exhibits the serious limitations of what passed for Catholic "liberalism" in the 1930's.

The draft of Humani Generis Unitas starts off well enough, making cogent arguments against racism on the basis of the "unity" of the human race.  The authors are eloquent about the dignity of the human person and how this dignity is subverted by, among other things, modern racialist philosophies.

When the document gets to the specific subject of the Church's relationship with Judaism, however, the authors drop all talk about human dignity and come perilously close to treating the Jews as religious and social pariahs. Imagine the reaction today if John Paul II were to say that the Jews' rejection of Christ is "the authentic basis of the social separation of the Jews from the rest of humanity." Or if he were to warn Catholics of "the spiritual dangers to which contact with Jews can expose souls."

The authors of the draft rightly condemn racial anti-Semitism, but then condone religious anti-Semitism. They buy into to the outdated idea that there is a historic curse on the Jews, one that makes them outcasts from humanity. It is an idea that was roundly rejected by the Second Vatican Council in Nostra Aetate-and by John Paul II, who recently condemned "erroneous and unjust interpretations of the New Testament relative to the Jewish people and their presumed guilt …"

One lesson of the document is that even "enlightened" Catholic opinion in the 1930's had a long way to go in its understanding of the Church's relationship with Judaism. Jesuit intellectuals like LaFarge still subscribed to a retrograde theology of the Jews. They also tended to be suspicious of the Jews as "carriers" of the germ of modernity. It would be several decades before Catholic thinkers like John Courtney Murray coaxed them out of their fortress mentality.

Since mainstream reviews of The Hidden Encyclical of Pius XI will inevitably be framed around the issue of Pius XII's "silence" during the Holocaust, it is worth recalling a few facts. Jewish scholars like Joseph Lichten have carefully documented how the Vatican ran an extensive network of hide-outs. Even the Pope's summer residence, Castel Gondolfo, was used to hide Jewish fugitives. Pius, moreover, took personal responsibility for the children of deported Jews.

Largely as a result of the Church's efforts, the Jews in Italy had a far higher survival rate under Nazi occupation than was the case in other countries. Estimates of the number of Jews throughout Europe saved by the Vatican's efforts range up to seven hundred thousand. This was one reason why the chief Rabbi of Rome, Israel Zolli, converted to Catholicism at the end of the war, taking as his baptismal name Pius's own, Eugenio, in gratitude for what Pius had done.

Modern opinion condemns Pius for not having gotten up on a soap box and loudly condemned the Nazi treatment of the Jews. But what was to be gained by such an action? Both the International Red Cross and the Jewish relief agencies came to the same conclusion as the Vatican: relief efforts for the Jews would be more effective if the agencies remained relatively quiet. In 1942, the Catholic hierarchy of Amsterdam spoke out vigorously against the Nazi treatment of the Jews; the Nazi response was a redoubling of round-ups and deportations; by the end of the war, 90 percent of the Jews in Amsterdam were liquidated. 

The Church's record during the Holocaust was far from perfect. And as John Paul II has pointed out, a flawed theological understanding of Judaism, not just by Catholics but Christians in general, "contributed to the lulling of many consciences" with the result that the "spiritual resistance" of many Christians to Nazi persecutions "was not what humanity expected of Christ's
disciples."

The "hidden encyclical" drafted for Pius XI bristles with these theological errors. And so its belated publication really marks a fortuitous non-event. If it had been issued in anything like the draft we now have, Humani Generis Unitas would in subsequent decades have hung from the Magisterium like an albatross. Its treatment of the "Jewish question" would have made the drafting of Nostra Aetate almost impossible. And it would have severely handicapped John Paul II's attempts at rapprochement
between the Church and the Jewish community. 

This review appeared originally in Our Sunday Visitor.