Endless Inquisition

The debate over Pope Pius XII and the Jews in World War II refuses to die. For more than a decade, critics like Rolf Hochhuth (The Deputy), Saul Friedlander (Pius XII and the Third Reich) and Carlo Falconi (The Silence of Pius XII) have speculated on the question: Why did the Pope fail to denounce Hitler and mobilize his invisible legions, as Winston Churchill once called the world's 400 million Catholics, against the Nazi terror? Whatever their conclusions, Pius' critics have conceded that he partially made up for his public silence by quietly using Vatican agencies and his personal intervention to save thousands of Jews from extermination. Now a new voice has been added to the chorus of the Pope's inquisitors that seeks to shatter even that notion.

In The Ghetto on the Tiber, a history of Rome's Jewish community recently published in Italy, Dutch-American Jew Sam Waagenaar argues that Pius did almost nothing privately for Jewish refugees under the very windows of the Vatican in Rome. One of the main targets of Waagenaar's attack is a 1961 article by the late Father Robert Leiber, the German Jesuit who for more than 30 years was the Pope's private secretary and confidant. Leiber's article told of large numbers of Jews who were hidden inside the Vatican during the German occupation of Rome. Waagenaar could only trace one family of eleven who were given safe harbor, and in that case one of the daughters was engaged to a young Catholic who was related to a priest living in Vatican City.

True Jews. Leiber cited as evidence of Pius XII's wartime ministrations to Jews a society called The Good Works of St. Raphael, which supposedly aided thousands of Italian Jews to emigrate to Brazil before the Black Sabbath in October 1943, when the Gestapo entered the Roman ghetto. But Waagenaar quotes the wartime head of the society, Father Anton Weber, as explaining that his group "was concerned only with baptized Jews of non-Italian nationality, not with true Jews."

Waagenaar also disputes the widely held view that Pius aided the organization known as DELASEM (Delegation for Assistance to Jewish Emigrants). He reports that Father Marie-Benoit, the now legendary Capuchin friar who headed DELASEM and risked his safety daily during the war to hide, feed and help thousands of Jews, twice approached the Vatican for loans--to no avail. After the publication of Waagenaar's book, Marie-Benoit, now living in Paris, wrote to the author to confirm his account: "DELASEM never received anything from the Vatican."

Waagenaar, a freelance journalist who lives in Rome, has documented his case sufficiently to withstand all counterattacks so far. The Vatican has made only perfunctory denials of his charges, perhaps hoping to undermine them by appearing unimpressed. Many Jews in Italy, instead of being inflamed by Waagenaar's book, seem to wish that the whole argument could be ended. But as long as the wartime generation lives, the inquisition of Pius (now a candidate for Catholic sainthood) is likely to go on; and despite new evidence like Waagenaar's, there is little prospect of a final verdict. During the war the Pontiff himself described his dilemma over Jews as "a door that no key could open." The image still seems apt.

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