Of
late it’s been a tough time for those working to prevent genocide.
Darfur has been off the world’s radar screen for months. Then there’s
the poor Armenians. It wasn’t enough that 1.5 million were murdered in
a genocide perpetrated by the Ottomon Turks during the First World War.
Turns out that for the sake of appeasing Turkey and its increasingly
militant Islamist Prime Minister, Recep Tayyip Erdogan, President Obama
is prepared to rewrite history and deny there was ever a genocide in
the first place. Breaking his campaign promise of January, 2008, where
he said that he “stood with the Armenian American community in calling
for Turkey’s acknowledgement of the Armenian Genocide” and that “as
President I will recognize the Armenian Genocide [which is] not an
allegation, a personal opinion, or a point of view, but rather a widely
documented fact supported by an overwhelming body of historical
evidence,” President Obama changed his tune last week. After the House
Foreign Affairs Committee approved a resolution that declares the 1915
mass killings of Armenians in the Ottoman Empire as genocide, the Obama
Administration urged the committee not to pass the measure. Secretary
of State Hillary Clinton has vowed to stop the resolution where it
stands for fear of angering Turkey.

Then there was the curious
story in the New York Times about Gary Krupp. A Jewish medical
machinery salesman from Long Island who has no formal training in
history but who has emerged as “the Vatican’s most outspoken Jewish
ally in a heated debate at the crux of tensions between Roman Catholic
and Jewish leaders and historians: whether Pope Pius XII, the pontiff
during World War II, did as much as he could have to save Jews from the
Holocaust.” Having already been knighted by John Paul II for medical
services to the Church, Krupp has now set up a foundation whose purpose
it is to whitewash the sins of the man know to the world as ‘Hitler’s
Pope.’ The Times’ article quoted leading Vatican officials as saying
that if not for Krupp it would be extremely difficult for the Church to
move forward with its plans to declare Pius XII a saint.

Now, it’s not difficult to understand why the Catholic Church would
seek a court Jew to help them clean up Pius. And it’s not particularly
difficult to understand why a Jewish businessman, ignorant of history,
would be willing to perform the role and take pictures with Pope
Benedict at Castel Gandolfo. What is perplexing is how the mighty
Catholic Church would have to fall back on a Long Island nobody to help
them canonize a man who served as Pope for almost twenty years.

Could it be desperation?

Pius was, of course, the man who, as Cardinal Secretary of State,
became the first statesman, in 1933, to sign an agreement with the man
he called “the illustrious Hitler,” sending him a letter expressing his
confidence in his leadership. His concordat with Hitler forced the
Catholic Centre Party into dissolution, not only removing the last
obstacle to Hitler’s goal of absolute power in Germany but also
destroying any further resistance by Germany’s Catholic bishops to the
Nazis.

He was the Pope who famously refused, amid unmistakable evidence of
thousands of Jews being shipped to slaughter in Nazi concentration
camps, to ever speak out against the holocaust. This followed Pius’
successful efforts to prevent the publication of an encyclical
commissioned by his dying predecessor to condemn Nazi anti-Semitism.
This is also the Pope who sent Hitler birthday greetings every single
year and who refused to excommunicate Hitler or any other top Nazis who
were on official Catholic rolls (to give this context, the singer
Sinead O’Connor was excommunicated). He ignored the pleas of President
Roosevelt and Winston Churchill to denounce the Nazis. He later refused
to endorse a joint declaration by Britain, U.S and Russia condemning
mass murder of Europe’s Jews, claiming that he simply could not condemn
“particular” atrocities. The most he ever did was a single
pronouncement during the war on the murder “of hundreds of thousands.”
By then, of course, there were millions, and he did not mention Hitler,
Nazi Germany, or the Jews in the statement. Most infamously, he was
silent when the Germans rounded up Rome’s Jews in October 1944 for
slaughter. They were being processed for extermination in a military
school a few hundred yards from his window in St. Peter’s. An Italian
princess, Enza Pignatelli, forced her way into the Pope’s study and
warned him about the imminent assault on the city’s Jewish citizens.
“You must act immediately,” she cried. “The Germans are arresting the
Jews and taking them away. Only you can stop them.” The Pope assured
her, “I will do all I can.” He made no protest and nearly all were
later gassed in Auschwitz. Curiously, amid the Pope’s inability to find
his voice to condemn the extermination of European Jewry, when the
Catholic archbishop of Berlin issued a statement mourning Hitler’s
death, the Pope did not reprimand him.

Author John Cornwell unearths letters from Pius’ early career in
Germany which reveals a stubborn, even distasteful disposition toward
Jews. While Papal nuncio in Germany, Pius refused to perform favors for
the Jewish community on the flimsiest of grounds and describes the
Munich chapter of the German Communist Party as being filthy and full
of Jews. Pius refers derisively to “a group of young women, of dubious
appearance, Jews like all the rest of them” and he describes Communist
leader Max Levien as a Jew, “pale, dirty, with drugged eyes, hoarse
voice, vulgar, repulsive…” Perhaps this would explain why, in one of
the greatest acts of mass-kidnapping in history, Pius, in 1946,
instructed the French Church to refuse return of entire classes of
Jewish children who were entrusted to the Church for safekeeping during
the holocaust if they had already been baptized.

Now, if, as the Church maintains, Pius is being falsely maligned by
his critics as a pious fraud and moral coward who disgraced a great
world religion, then why doesn’t the Vatican fix the error by simply
opening their archives on his pontificate that would reveal Pius’s
correspondence and actions during the War? It has thusfar released a
very select and carefully scrubbed collection of wartime documents that
reveal next to nothing about the Church’s interactions with the Third
Reich.

There is a comical element to this debate, which would be more
humorous if it weren’t so tragic. It involves Pius’ defenders arguing
that Pius purposefully refrained from condemning the holocaust because
the Jews would have fared even worse had the Pope spoken out.

Worse than the holocaust? Now that’s funny.

Rabbi Shmuley Boteach is founder This World: The Values Network, and has just published “The Blessing of Enough.” http://www.shmuley.com