Madam, - It is regrettable indeed that a Jesuit should indulge in what amounts, in my view, to special pleading where Pope Pius XII and the Jews are concerned.
Contrary to what Fr Edmond Grace (October 22nd) would have us believe, the British minister to the Holy See during the second World War, Sir Francis D'Arcy Osborne, was not solely or principally concerned with the neutrality of the Vatican state when, on December 14th, 1942, he strongly criticised the Pope, personally, in a meeting with the then Vatican Secretary of State.
He later recorded that he had made it clear that the Vatican officials "should consider their duties in respect to the unprecedented crime against humanity of Hitler's campaign of extermination of the Jews". (See Owen Chadwick: Britain and the Vatican in the Second World War, Cambridge University Press, 1986, p.216, quoted by Daniel Jonah Goldhagen in A Moral Reckoning: the role of the Catholic Church in the Holocaust and its unfulfilled duty of repair, Little, Brown, 2002, p. 42).
This protest was made in two contexts: firstly, of the murderous attack upon Roman Jewry taking place at that very time; and secondly, of the revelation to a packed and shocked House of Commons some weeks previously of a British Government report detailing the first known accounts of the Holocaust - a report of which the Pope, through the Papal Nunciature in London, cannot have been unaware.
It is also germane to point out here the very obvious, but overlooked fact that Eugenio Pacelli, Pope Pius XII, was by birth and upbringing an Italian, and therefore a native of a country then at war with Britain - a factor which might have influenced him to find D'Arcy Osborne, in Fr Grace's most unfortunate phrase, "a tiresome diplomat". The anti-Semitism of Pope Pius XII was by then, anyway, a fact of long standing, reflecting the widespread anti-Semitism of pre-war Europe.
Writing from Munich in April, 1919, during the rebellion led by the Jewish Communist Rosa Luxembourg, he described the insurrectionists in these disgusting and repellent terms: ". . .in the midst of all this [revolutionary activity], a gang of young women, of dubious appearance, Jews like all the rest of them, hanging around in offices with lecherous demeanour and suggestive smiles. This boss of this female rabble was Levien's mistress, a young Russian woman, a Jew and a divorcee, who was in charge. And it was to her that the nunciature was obliged to pay homage in order to proceed.
"This Levien is a young man, of about 30 or 35, also Russian and a Jew, dirty, with drugged eyes, hoarse voice, vulgar, repulsive, with a face that is both intelligent and sly." (See John Cornwell: Hitler's Pope, the secret history of Pius XII, Viking, New York, 1999, p.75, quoted in Goldhagen, op. cit., p.45).
It is hardly surprising that later, as Vatican Secretary of State in 1933, Pacelli almost rushed to sign the Catholic Church's concordat with the newly-elected Nazi regime in July of that year, giving internationally Catholic recognition to a regime of whose nature a man of his intelligence and contacts can hardly have been, by then, unaware.
He did not rescind this when, in 1935, the Jews of Germany had their citizenship cancelled by the Nazis; nor did he ever excommunicate Hitler (a baptised Catholic whose excommunication, while it would have meant nothing to such a man, would have sent a powerful moral message to the very numerous Catholics of the German-speaking world).
As for Fr Grace's quotation of various reports and comments in the New York Times in 1940 and 1941, he exhibits a naïve trust, in my view, tantamount to regarding such journalism as Holy Scripture. How could the NYT have known what took place between Ribbentrop, the Nazi foreign minister, and the Pope, as it claimed to do? Or between Ribbentrop and Hitler?
Your readers should know that the undersigned is not some raving secular or Protestant anti-Catholic bigot but, like Fr Grace, is someone who has much experience of the Jesuits, having been schooled by them in Belvedere College (1963-1972). - Yours, etc,
PETER THOMPSON,
Ferrybank,
Arklow,
Co Wicklow.