Living Up to Legitimate Expectations

by Fr. Roger J. Landry - October 10, 2008

No news story marking yesterday's 50th anniversary of the death of Pope Pius XII failed to include the controversy over his actions with respect to the Holocaust during the Second World War. While the accusations against him — thanks much to the work of Rabbi David Dalin and the Jewish scholars in the Pave the Way Foundation — are gradually being demonstrated to be calumnies orchestrated by Eastern bloc communists and introduced through literature to discredit the moral authority of the Church in the West, the question remains as to why so many so easily and uncritically believed the propaganda as historical fact rather than perfidious fabrication. Why were so many ready to interpret Pius XII's lack of an explicit condemnation of Nazism as an example of his and the Church's supposed moral cowardice — or worse, of his and the Church's sympathy toward Nazi designs?

Part of the reason can be ascribed to a lack of familiarity with all that Pius XII said and did, for which he was rightly praised by contemporary Jewish leaders and media, as detailed in the Putting Into The Deep column elsewhere on this page. Part of it as well is based on a series of naïve assumptions about what was achievable for the Pope in direct confrontation with a megalomanic psychopath who had already demonstrated himself not only incapable of correction but predisposed to respond with even greater anti-Semitic sadism to the merest provocation.

But much of the explanation likely lies in another factor, which began to grow in prominence after the heavy black fog hovering over the world after the Second World War started to dissipate. Once people had recovered from the daze accompanying the moral trauma of the Holocaust — which for obvious psychological reasons many just preferred to r rather than confront — they started to look back and question how something like the Shoah could ever have happened. How could the German people have elected a person like Adolf Hitler? How could so many people have collaborated with him in seeking his "final solution"? How could the vast majority of ordinary people have done so little as their neighborhoods were gradually depopulated of Jews, the mentally handicapped, gays, socialists, trade unionists, outspoken clerics and journalists, and basically anyone who criticized the regime? How could most of the world have looked the other way? These were all tough and important questions in an important historical examination of conscience.

Many simultaneously also began to ask why, in the face of such evil, Pius XII didn't say and do more. Despite the fact that his indirect approach probably saved tens of thousands of Jewish lives, people naturally had other expectations for the world's greatest moral authority. More than anyone else, they believed, he should have condemned Nazi evil with the ferocity of Jeremiah, no matter the cost. The fact that he didn't speak out more explicitly put the complicity of everyone else into context and somewhat assuaged the enormous collective guilt that the world was rightly feeling for so many sins of omission. If the pope were guilty of cowardly inaction in the face of such systematic wickedness, then no one could throw a stone at them. Pius XII in essence became a scapegoat to atone for the enormous evil of the concentration camps and everything that led to them.

The readiness of people unjustly to condemn Pius XII for his prudential approach during the Holocaust teaches us a very important lesson: the deep desire and need that people — and not just Catholics — have for the pope, for bishops and clergy, for the Church to speak out with courage and clarity in response to evil.

There's a famous story about a church built next to train tracks that led to one of the concentration camps. Each Sunday, churchgoers would be interrupted by the cattle cars transporting Jews to the incinerators. The train would rattle the church and the cries for help would unsettle the worshippers. The pastor and parishioners decided, in response to the screams, to "sing louder." This parish was one of many that tried to go on with life ignoring what was really happening, pretending that God would be pleased by their worship while they were behaving like the priest and the Levite in the parable of the Good Samaritan. Everyone knows that such inaction is unworthy of Christian faithful, of Christian clergy, of the Church as a whole.

All of this puts into context what the responsibilities of Catholic faithful, clergy and the whole Church are with respect to the ongoing holocaust of the unborn through abortion. Since Roe v. Wade, 48 million human beings, one out of every three children conceived in our country, has been executed in the womb in gruesome ways that not even Dr. Josef Mengele would have imagined doing to his dehumanized Jewish guinea pigs. Most of us would be horrified if we discovered that dogs were being systematically dismembered, or burned to death in caustic fluid, or blendered in superpower vacuum cleaners, or, after being half-delivered, were having their skulls pierced and brains evacuated. Yet these techniques are being used to abort a pre-born boy or girl every 23 seconds in the U.S. Most of us would never for a minute countenance giving mothers the right to have doctors kill their babies in the maternity ward. But many Americans support a so-called right of women to have doctors do so to their unborn babies, when the only real differences between a child in an incubator and a child in the womb are size and age — and sometimes, with premature children, not even size or age.

Future generations are going to look back on our time much like we look back at the 1930s and 1940s and ask similar questions. How is it that such carnage was allowed? How could people have voted for those who supported the systematic killing of their fellow human beings? How could they have believed the ridiculous propaganda that the unborn, like the Jews, were somehow less human than they were? How could so many who called themselves Christians, clergy and lay both, have simply "sung louder" as the demagogues of their era continued to justify the practice? How could they belong to a party that celebrates the inhuman practice? How could they have considered this systematic destruction of their fellow human beings just "one issue among many"? Historians tell us, of course, that one of the issues that brought Hitler to power was the economy: many Germans thought that the Nazis had a better economic strategy to return Germany to prominence after the punishments following the first World War. Many Germans looked the other way on Mein Kampf for the sake of mammon.

The bishops of the United States are now speaking out about the issue of abortion with the clarity and moral force that the ghastly subject matter requires. They have exposed the hypocrisy of those who claim to be "personally opposed" to the destruction of their innocent brothers and sisters but who in Congress or in the voting booth publicly cooperate with those who support or carry out the practice. They have been reminding the faithful that our duty before this evil goes beyond "singing louder," or praying in private, or being personally against the killing of other human beings, but involves living up to our baptismal call to be the salt of the earth without letting the lies of a secularized culture weaken our saltiness.

Not everyone is happy that the bishops are doing this. Many think that they should remain above or outside of politics. Everyone knows, however, that remaining on the sidelines would have been a totally inadequate response in Germany last century. It is totally inadequate today. The question is how long it will take Catholic faithful in America to learn from the omissions of Catholic and others in Germany and follow with courage and conviction their prophetic bishops' lead.

Father Roger J. Landry is pastor of St. Anthony of Padua in New Bedford, MA and Executive Editor of The Anchor, the weekly newspaper of the Diocese of Fall River.