ADSS 6 Document 3 and the Attachments

Gabriel Wilensky alerted to me Michael Hesemann's latest attempt at historical revisionism.  I went to Gabriel's blog on his website - Six Million Crucifixions - and read Michael Hesemann's response to the original post.  It makes for VERY interesting reading (for those who are interested in the minutiae of papal archives - like me!)  On a serious note, Hesemann's manipulation of historical records to make claims that just don't bear closer scrutiny ruin his own integrity, not that of historians undertaking research into papacy of Pius XII. 

Rather than launch into a polemic, I am posting a summary of what this particular collection of documents does say.

ADSS Volume 6, Document 3. (pages 45-52)

Context: 

Upon his election as pope on 3 March 1939, Pius XII was approached by many different groups, similar to lobby groups, appealing for papal support for various works.  Among them was a representation sent to Pius by a Dutch-based committee for refugees.  The two men who wrote to the pope were both well known in refugee circles in the late 1930s.  The letter is followed by several attachments.  The six documents are footnoted with considerable details regarding the people mentioned and other relevant facts.  For brevity's sake I have left most of them out.  The interested reader can find them online at the Vatican's website or Pave The Way. (Registration is required to access material via PTW).

The authors:

Josef Ignaz Julius Schmutzer (1882-1946), was a geology professor at the university of Utrecht. He was also President of the National Committee for Refugees (founded 1936) and President of the International Catholic Bureau for Refugee Affairs (founded 1938).  He was also active in the Roman Catholic State Party, a Dutch Catholic political party that attempted to incorporate Catholics into full participation in the life of the state.  After the German invasion of Holland in May 1940, Schmutzer was arrested and sent to Sachsenhausen and then Buchenwald concentration camps before being returned to Holland and incarcerated in local camps from where he eventually escaped.  As Holland was liberated, Schmutzer, who had been in hiding, was appointed minister of overseas territories.  He returned to Utrecht but the effects of the war proved too much and he died in September 1946.

The second author of the March 1939 letter was Fr Francis Mary Strathmann, (1883-1971) a German Dominican.  The following information was supplied by Fr Elias Füllenbach, Dominican archivist in Düsseldorf and the Dominican history found on the German provincial website.  Strathmann entered the Dominicans in 1905 and shortly after his ordination in 1914 became active in peace movements.  He remained a convinced pacifist all his life.  In 1933 he wrote to Cardinal Faulhaber in Munich recounting his experience of the government organised boycott of Jewish businesses and his dismay at the role played by more than a few Catholic priests in supporting antisemitic action.  His outspoken criticism of the regime led to his arrest in July 1933.  The Dominicans were able to secure Strathmann's release and sent him to Rome where he remained until November of that year before heading to Holland where he became involved in refugee assistance.  At some point Strathmann met Schmutzer and the two men began collaborators.  Strathmann survived the war avoiding contact with the Germans largely through the assistance of the Dominican nuns in Belgium.  He returned to Germany in 1947 and attempted to revive his peace activities.

Francis Strathmann OP (1938)

The document:

Holy Father,


On 09.01.1939 while Your Holiness was still Cardinal Secretary of State to Pius XI, you wrote a letter to the Bishops [Attachment 2, pp 48-49], which referred to the necessity demanded of brotherly love to care for the many non-Aryan Catholics forced to emigrate and become refugees.

Your Holiness remembers that in 1936 in Utrecht the first Catholic Committee for Refugees was the first one founded. In these two years our committee has undertaken a very extensive activity and has been able to help numerous refugees find new lives abroad.

It hardly requires the mention that the committee acts in a completely non-political manner and is purely concerned with charitable works.

The welfare service work for refugees performed by our committee has helped many emigrate overseas, particularly to Brasil.

The emigration problem has become so large of late that it is need of extension and expansion as the existing auxiliary equipment is short. The most urgent need appears at present centralization of the existing Catholic refugee committees in a yet to be created international head office.

The Protestant and Jewish Committees have done this and are, consequently, much better able to work consistently and in a positive relationship with the League of Nations High Commissioner for Refugees for the care of the refugees.

The High Commissioner, Sir Herbert Emerson, has personally expressed that it is not possible for him to negotiate with all individual Catholic Committees, and asks for a single central Catholic agency similar to the Protestant and Jewish agencies.

An approved Catholic Central Bureau for Refugee Affairs could then also be far more ambitious in the carrying out of the instructions set out in Your Holiness’ letter of 9 January 1939 to the reverend bishops.

We take our task to show the whole world, in serving Christ in the persecuted, as an apostolate which is significant enough to join, even as a smaller agency, the great work of Catholic mission. We believe this work to be the will of God, a “crusade for God and neighbour”.

We would be very happy if your Holiness would approve and bless this work. The inner and outer support of this work will be more valuable with the express approval and recommendation of Your Holiness.


Humbly prostrate at the feet of Your Holiness we ask for this grace and remain with deepest reverence and perfect obedience.

The Attachments:

1. (pages 47-48) Cover letter from Paolo Giobbe, Internuncio to the Hague to the Secretary of State. Cardinal Luigi Maglione, supporting the request from Professor Schmutzer.

2. (pages 48-49) Circular letter of Cardinal Pacelli, 09.01.1939 relaying instructions from Pius XI recommending the formation of committees of assistance for an estimated 200,000 Non-Aryan Catholics.  This letter was sent to the Archbishops of England, Ireland, Scotland, Canada, the USA, Costa Rica, Chile, Columbia, Argentina. (Footnote 2, page 45)

3. (pages 49-50) Circular letter from Cardinal Pacelli, 30.11.1939 , addressed to the representatives of the Holy See in Ireland, Argentina, Chile, Peru, Bolivia, Columbia, Cuba, Costa Rica, the USA, Australia, Turkey, Belgian Congo, French Indo-China, Lebanon, Egypt and South Africa.  Pacelli relayed instructions from Pius XI asking the papal representatives to do whatever they could for converted Jews forced to flee Germany and Italy.

4. (pages 50-51) Circular letter from Cardinal Pacelli, 10.01.1939, addressed to the Cardinal Archbishops of Boston, Philadelphia, Chicago, Quebec and Buenos Aires.  Pacelli relayed  instructions from Pius XI to help Jews forced to leave Germany.

5. (pages 51-52) Undated promemoria of Cardinal Giovanni Mercati (1866-1957), Vatican Archivist and Librarian, writes of the precarious situation of Jewish scholars in Germany and makes an appeal to American universities.

Michael Hesemann's claim:

I never denied that the main document of the stock I found in the Vatican Secret Archives was already quoted in the “Actes et Documents du Saint Siege relatifs a la Seconde Guerre Mondiale”, vol. 6, Citta del Vaticana 1972, p. 48-50.



What I discovered and what was NEVER published before is the distribution list, the list of recipients: For the telegraph of November 30, 1938, asking the Nuntiatures in Ireland, Argentina, Chile, Peru, Bolivia, Columbia, Cuba, Central America and Lithuania as well as the Apostolic Delegations in the U.S., Australia, Albania, Belgish Congo, Indochina, Syria, Egypt and Central Africa for urgent help to request invitations, jobs and visa German Jews, as well as for the letter to the Bishops and Archbishops of the Catholic World of January 9, 1939, namely of Lima/Peru; Quito/Ecuador; Merida and Santiago/Venezuela; Hobart, Adelaide, Brisbane, Melbourne,Perth, Sydney/Australia; Westminster, Birmingham, Cardiff, Liverpool/England; Armagh, Cashel, Dublin, Tuam/Ireland; Edinburg/Scotland; Kaunas/Lithuania; Utrecht/Netherlands; Luxemburg; Winniped, Edmonton, Halifax, Kingston, Moncton, Montreal, Ottawa, Regina, Quebec, San Bonifaz, Toronto, Vancouver/Canada; Baltimore, Cincinatti, Detroit, Dubuque, Los Angeles, Boston, Chicago, Philadelphia, Louisville, Milwaukee, Newark, New Orleans, New York, Portland, San Francisco, S. Louis, S. Paul, Santa Fe, San Antonio/USA; San Jose/Costa Rica; San Salvador; Bolivia; Santiago del Chile; Bogota, Cartagena, Medellin, Popayan/Clumbia; Cordoba, La Plata, Parana, Salta, San Juan, Santa Fe, Buenos Aires/Argentina, asking them to obtain Visa for 200.000 German Jews!

Hesemann places great emphasis on the discovery of the list of people to whom Pacelli's circular was sent.  Impressive as the list is, why should this be a focus for contention? 

Yes, the papal diplomatic network was extensive.  The footnotes of the documents cited above already set out the broad parameters of the recipients. 

What is of greater concern is the figure of "200,000" and the use of the word "visa".

I have written of the 200,000 figure before and so will not re-visit it here. 

The document is a general appeal to the bishops to do whatever they can to help Jewish Catholics leave Germany and re-establish themselves in new countries.  It may be inferred that Pacelli asks the bishops to work to obtain visas, but that is "drawing a long bow" and I do not think the document, as it stands, can be said to focus on visas.  There is no instruction asking bishops to obtain visas.

In short, I believe Hesemann's claims to "discovery" are not of great import in our understanding of the issue, but, more importantly, his inaccurate focii on the 200,000 and "visas" is not supported by the published documentary record or secondary pieces of information that lie in the Vatican Archives. 

What is of importance in these documents is the record of a serious papal attempt to coordinate refugee agencies and rally the bishops to work to help get converted German and, to a lesser extent, Italian Jews out of Europe.  The dates are significant - post Reichskristallnacht (the pogrom of 8-9.11.1938).  We must also be wary of letting hindsight, cloud judgement.  What remains a glaring fact is the late-1938 and early-1939 Vatican refugee work was the most global reaching of any government and certainly, the most active.  The great sadness is our knowing that it was far too little, far too late - bit it was something.

Responding to Gary Krupp

After yesterday's post I received an email from Gary Krupp, founder of Pave The Way, on organisation with an impressive record of philanthropic work designed to build bridges between, among others, different faith communities.  PTW has invested much time and effort in collecting an enormous amount of data on Eugenio Pacelli.  I have corresponded with Gary over the last couple of years and while I respect his desire to build bridges over Pius XII, I do not agree with the conclusions PTW have reached and published. 

After reading Gary's email, which is published below in the previous post, I thought that his challenges deserved a more serious response.

My comments appear in red type.

Paul, Let me make this simple for you. Here are just a few of the actual documents, which support Michael Hesemann's claim:


http://www.ptwf.org/Downloads/Jan_39%20_Docs.pdf

The documents presented consist of -

1.  A dispatch list, dated 30 November 1938, indicating, in Italian, to whom a message was to be sent.  In this case it is the list of Nuncios and Apostolic Delegates asking their assistance in helping persecuted converted Jews from Italy and Germany.  (It is reproduced in Actes et Documents Volume 6, pages 49-50)  It was sent under Pacelli's signature.

2.  Document 9 January 1939.  Latin letter requesting in the name of the Pope, Pius XI, the formation of assistance committees for non-Aryan converts.  (ADSS 6, pages 48-49)

3.  A dispatch list, dated 9 January 1939, indicating, in Italian, to whom the previous appeal was to be sent.

4. Letter 16 January 1939, in English, from the Archbishop of Saint Andrews and Edinburgh, Scotland, Andrew Thomas McDonald OSB (1871-1950) acknowledging receipt of Pacelli's letter.  McDonald informed Pacelli that a committee to assist the "stricken sufferers" has been operating for several weeks.  McDonald said he would try to encourage a national response.

5. Cutting from The Irish Press, 10 December 1938.  Report on the London meeting to address the worsening situation in Germany attended by the Archbishop of Westminster, Cardinal Arthur Hinsley.  Cardinal Pacelli's message from the Pope was mentioned. (Referred to in ADSS 6, page 539)
Do you claim that these documents are doctored or fraudulent or that they do not say what they say?

The documents are not doctored or fraudulent.  However what they say is markedly different from what Michael Hesemann has alleged they say.  See my comments in an earlier post.

http://paulonpius.blogspot.com/2010/07/pius-xii-saved-200000-jews-after-1938.html

Hesemann's claim that Pacelli may have been responsible trying to get 200,000 Jews, converted or not, out of Germany is simply not supported by these documents.


Paul, Do you believe that there were 200,000 converted Jews in Germany November 30, 1938 just after Kristallnacht?

No I do not. The Jewish population in the Old Reich was around 202,000.  The statistics were collected by the Nazis.  They had no reason to lie.  It was official policy to get as many Jews out of Germany as physically possible.


If so, what documented evidence do you have which, can prove your theory?

Again, I have written on this subject.  In summary, there were not 200,000 converted Jews in the Greater German Reich at the end of November 1938.  The total Jewish population, based on Nazi statistics in the 1939 census, came to 259,000.  It is beyond the realms of any realistic assertion to suggest that 200,000 of these Jews were converts. Read my post.

http://paulonpius.blogspot.com/2010/07/population-figures-on-non-aryan.htmlBy the way, anyone who accesses our website will only see actual documents and eyewitness testimonies. They are free to draw their own conclusions. The mainstream historians books you believe this person should read, seemingly to be from those who only condemn Pope Pius XII.

"Condemn" is far too harsh a word and unfair.  Mainstream historians do what Michael Hesemann does not.  They examine the evidence and attempt to reconstruct the historical record without a predetermined agenda.  The crusade to canonise Pius XII is sinking rather badly when claims such as those promoted by Hesemann are published as historical fact.

Let me recommend Prof. Ron Rychlak’s recently updated book Hitler the War and The Pope.

I read the earlier edition and was unconvinced by his arguments.  Any endeavour that begins with a presumption or conclusion runs the risk of prejudicing any line of argument from the outset.  Reproducing copious amount of newspaper reports and published documentation with no serious contextual work is not satisfying.
Gary, I admire your commitment to seeking resolution for many of the world's trouble spots, but I ask, yet again, to allow historians to get on with what they do.  Having read Michael Hesemann's "claims" I believe he is doing your organisation damage and eroding your credibility.
 
Regards,
 
Paul

"... or start a rumour"

Charles Aznavour's "What makes a man a man?" (1973) has these lines:
We love to pull apart someone And spread some gossip just for fun Or start a rumour.  And I can't help but think the same is true for Pius XII.  The rumour that has now been circulating cyberspace is one that I wrote about at length earlier, namely the allegation by Michael Hesemann that Eugenio Pacelli was responsible for saving 200,000 Jews. My google alert on Pius has been hauling in many blogs and websites where this unsubstantiated material has been given some coverage. 

One example uses the original article from the London journalist Simon Caldwell. 

Others such as the article by Jeanette Pryor on David Horowitz's News Real Blog take critics of Pius to task using the attention grabbing headline It's Time to Retire "Hitler's Pope" Lie.  I agree with Ms Pryor completely, but wonder why she resorts to the "non sectarian" work of Pave The Way as her main source of historical evidence. Surely she would have been better served by reading what mainstream historians have been writing for some years?  But then again, Ms Pryor believes Golda Meir was the first Prime Minister of Israel.  It might be a good idea to read some accurate history first, before accusing others of promoting "lies" about Pius XII. 

I read the article and found it contained nothing new in fact one part borders on the offensive.  She attempts to parallel the experience of the Judenrat and their "choiceless choices" and the Vatican.  There is one huge difference between the Judenrat and the Vatican.  Regardless of what the Judenrat did or did not do, the end result would always be the same - they were doomed to destruction.  Whatever the Vatican did or did not do, they would survive. 

Yet another blog ruminates on the old Lapide chestnut of the 860,000 as well as Hesemann's "facts". I wonder where it will end, if it ends at all. Even the new Protect the Pope site in the United Kingdom to counter anti-papal visit feeling has entered the fray with a startlingly ahistorical response to the questions about Pius XII. On what is otherwise a quite moderate site that does attempt to respond with logical and clearly researched answers, the comments about Pius XII are particularly jarring:
Peter Tatchell said:



Benedict has also paved the way for eventual sainthood of Pope, Pius XII, despite the war-time pontiff’s failure to speak out publicly, either during or after the Holocaust, against the Nazi mass murder of six million Jews and millions of others, including Russians, Poles, disabled, gays, Roma and many more. Pius XII was no saint. The fact that Pope Benedict wants to makes him a saint shows how far he has strayed from the moral and ethical values of most Catholics and most of humanity.

Protect the Pope comment:

During the war, the New York Times called Pius XII “the only ruler left on the Continent of Europe who dares to raise his voice at all…the Pope put himself squarely against Hitlerism…he left no doubt that the Nazi aims are also irreconcilable with his own conception of a Christmas peace.” (Christmas 1941).

New research has found that Pope Pius XII may have arranged the exodus of about 200,000 Jews from Germany just three weeks after Kristallnacht. The research is being carried out by Dr. Michael Hesemann, a German historian who is combing through the Vatican archives for the Pave the Way Foundation, a U.S.-based interfaith group. (Haaretz, 7/7/10).

On the day of Pius XII’s death in 1958, Golda Meir, Israel’s Foreign Minister, cabled the following message of condolence to the Vatican: “We share in the grief of humanity…When fearful martyrdom came to our people in the decade of Nazi terror, the voice of the Pope was raised for the victims.” (Wikipedia).

As early as December of 1940, in an article published in Time magazine, the renowned Nobel Prize winning physicist Albert Einstein, himself a Jewish refugee from Nazi Germany, paid tribute to the moral “courage” of Pope Pius and the Catholic Church in opposing “the Hitlerian onslaught” on liberty.

Sir Martin Gilbert described as “a British historian and the world’s leading expert on the Holocaust”, is quoted as saying that the Pope should be considered as a “Righteous Gentile” by Yad Vashem, the Israeli Holocaust remembrance authority.

In his classic study, Three Popes and the Jews, Israeli historian and diplomat Pinchas Lapide, concluded that Pope Pius XII ‘was instrumental in saving at least 700,000, but probably as many as 860,000 Jews from certain death at Nazi hands’.

Protect the Pope comment: Peter Tatchell’s concludes that ‘The fact that Pope Benedict wants to makes him a saint shows how far he has strayed from the moral and ethical values of most Catholics and most of humanity.’ This one sentence alone reveals Peter Tatchell’s hatred of Pope Benedict and the Catholic Church he represents as the Vicar of Christ. Tatchell reveals his extremism in all its ugliness when he wickedly seeks to portray Pope Benedict as an immoral man, even a monster, beyond the moral and ethical values of humanity. No fair minded person could accept such an absurd accusation!

Protect the Pope would be advised to do some serious reading before launching onto the high seas of the internet where it appears most of their response evidence came from!

Galus Australia and Pius XII

On 20 May 2010 the Australian Jewish blog Galus Australia published an article entitled Jewish Knight Defends Pius XII.  In the days following there has been a lively and often heated discussion going on between several people notably Gary Krupp, founder of Pave The Way Foundation; Gabriel Wilensky, author of Six Million Crucifixions: How Christian Teachings about Jews Paved the Road to the Holocaust; Michael Hesemann, an independent historian in Germany, and a number of others.  It is a tribute to each of the contributors that each has remained polite and considered in their questions, positions and responses - a welcome relief when confronted with much online behaviour. 

However, I have observed a number of interesting things as I read through the comments.  At the time of writing this entry, there are 99 comments and it does not look as though the debate is anywhere near being over.

The first observation relates to documentation.  Documents tell historians a lot, and they can also conceal.  Documents cannot be examined in isolation - they did not originate in vacuums - they have contexts, and often the contexts are complex crossing several disciplines, languages, cultures, political and economic barriers as well as religious dimensions.  Since the ASV German files for 1922-1939 have only been opened since 2003, it is still too early to make anything approaching final judgement - something I fear is all too evident in some of the posts I have read.  Certainly the broad strokes appear fairly clear, but the details that are emerging also help clarify and illuminate.

One example.  The distinction between traditional Catholic anti-Judaism as expressed in the late Tridentine era (before the reforms of Vatican II) and racial based Antisemitism that enjoyed great popular and "scientific" currency from the early 19th century until its obscene apogee in the Holocaust.

No serious scholar asserts Eugenio Pacelli was an Antisemite.  He was not.  To claim he was is risible and contradicts the historical record.  However, to assert that Pacelli was immune to many of the cultural stereotypes about some Jews is also unsupportable.  There are occasions when Pacelli's diplomatic pose slips as he writes about the characteristics of the 1919 Munich revolutionaries, many of whom were Jews.  His distaste reflects a cultural hostility towards some Jews, not all Jews.  And in some of the 1919 reports sent to Rome describing the Bavarian Soviet, the nuncio does engage in using the Jewish-Bolshevik-Russian labels that were fast becoming accepted as fact by many right-wing Germans and others in Europe.

Another observation has to do with the questions related to context.  In many of the posts there is a fixation with one issue with scant regard to the surrounding issues.  To ask the question "How did Pacelli view Jews?" cannot rely on one or two documents. 

The question demands research into the situation in Germany at the end of World War One, the relationship between the Church and the Jews (if one can speak of such a thing), the perceptions of Jews within various Catholicisms, the German Catholic experience of the Kulterkampf and how that shaped attitudes towards authority and helped fashion the way German Catholics responded to government policy under the Third Reich, the attitude of the Holy See and its nuncios, and finally, Pacelli himself and how he viewed Jews as individuals, as a religious group and the reality of secular Jews.  It is terribly complex.  The simple statement "Pacelli was not anti-Jewish" is too bald.  It needs qualifying.  The documents emerging from ASV help us define Pacelli's attitudes to an extent; but we also rely on other sources as well.

I will not be joining in the conversation on Galus Australia - I don't have the time or energy.  I will stick to the steady plod through the documents and the steady flow of scholarly works that help place these documents firmly within their contexts.

Pius defenders gathered to answer questions about Pope Pius XII

This is the heading of an article about a gathering Rome.  I have taken it from Catholic News Service.  At this stage I know nothing of the proceedings and cannot make any comment on what was discussed.  I post this article because it is important to attempt to hear all the voices about Pius, even the ones I don't necessarily agree with.  When I learn more about the Rome meeting I will make some considered comments.

I met Andrea Tornielli and Matteo Luigi Napolitano.  Andrea is a delightful and articulate journalist with whom I dicussed a number of issues related to Pius at the Jerusalem symposium in March 2009.  Matteo is likewise very affable and keen to listen to other points of view.  While I do not agree with all their conclusions about Pius, I respect their work as historians. 

I have read Ronald Rychlak's book, "Hitler, the War and the Pope" (2000) and consider it more apologia than history along the lines of other "pro-Pius" writers.   I did not find much that had not been written before and little use of references outside the war years to help understand the mindset of the Vatican.


The article follows:

By Sarah Delaney - Catholic News Service


Wednesday, 28 April 2010


Defenders of Pope Pius XII gathered in Rome to answer a list of questions about his actions in the face of Nazi persecution of Jews in Europe during World War II, an organizer of the event said.

Gary Krupp, founder of the Pave the Way Foundation, a nondenominational organization that seeks to improve interfaith relations, said a panel of five experts on the wartime period met April 26-27. The object of the videotaped meeting was to answer 47 questions about the Catholic Church and World War II that had been posed but never officially answered by a Catholic-Jewish commission disbanded about 10 years ago.

Krupp said the experts enlisted were Jesuit Father Peter Gumpel, a top promoter of the canonization cause of Pope Pius; Ronald J. Rychlak, professor of law and associate dean at the University of Mississippi, and the author of two books on Pope Pius' wartime role; Matteo Luigi Napolitano, an Italian associate history professor at the University of Molise and a Pope Pius biographer; Andrea Tornielli, who covers the Vatican for an Italian daily and a Pope Pius biographer; and Michael Hesemann, a German author of several books about the church, including one defending Pope Pius' wartime record.

Krupp, an American Jew, has maintained that Pope Pius has been unfairly judged by Jewish groups and some historians who say that he did not speak out forcefully to try to stop Adolf Hitler's persecution of Jews. Krupp joins many Catholics who say the pope did all he could behind the scenes to try to save Jewish lives and that a direct confrontation would have provoked worse reprisals against Jews.

Krupp supports Pope Pius' sainthood cause. Pope Benedict XVI recently declared the wartime pope venerable, one of the first steps toward sainthood, a move that angered many Jewish groups who say that Pope Pius' role remains ambiguous and that it should be studied before the cause goes further.

The questions addressed by the panel originated with a joint commission of scholars formed in 1999 by the Vatican and the International Jewish Committee for Interreligious Consultation to study the issue of Pope Pius and the Jews during the war. After examining published materials for a year, the commission suspended its work amid controversy over access to still-closed Vatican archives from that period. I suggest the journalist could have done a better job with her homework and written a little more accurately about the International Catholic Jewish Historical Commission and their work.  The hyper-link takes you to the report on which this Rome meeting appears to be gathered to answer.  The IHCJC story is worth taking the time to read, if only to experience something of the difficulties confronting historians.

Krupp said he would make the nine hours of recorded material available on DVD and on his foundation's website.

He and four other Jewish figures who had been present during the taping of the panel's discussions spoke briefly with Pope Benedict at the end of the weekly papal audience in St. Peter's Square April 28.

They also met with German Cardinal Walter Kasper, president of the Pontifical Council for Promoting Christian Unity, Krupp said. They discussed an interfaith effort to promote a tradition of families eating together on Friday night, he said. They also expressed their fear of a nuclear Iran and Iran's hostile attitude toward Israel, Krupp said.