A
Nasty Piece of Work: Justus George Lawler,
Were
the Popes against the Jews:
Tracking
the Myths, Confronting the Ideologues
by
Kevin
Madigan
“Oh
how wrong and deluded are those who think that Judaism is just a religion, like
Catholicism, Paganism, Protestantism and not in fact a race, a people and a
nation! While it is certain that others
can be, for example, both Catholic and either Italian, French or English…it is
a great error to believe that the same is true of the Jews. For the Jews are not only Jews because of
their religion…they are Jews also and especially because of their race.”
—Father Giuseppe
Oreglia, S.J., (1823-1895)
Could it be true, as the church has argued over
the past two decades, that European antisemitism in the nineteenth and
twentieth centuries was more sociological or political than religious in origin
and could be distinguished from religiously-based antijudaism? Or that there was no link between Christian
antijudaism and the destruction, in the twentieth century, of European Jewry? In a number of documents issued by the
Vatican, most importantly its “reflection on the Shoah,” entitled “We
Remember,” the church has attempted to maintain that precisely this distinction
prevailed in the nineteenth century. In his widely-acclaimed The Popes against
the Jews, David Kertzer argued convincingly that the Vatican’s version of
the history of the development of nineteenth-century anti-Semitism “is a
history that many wish had happened, but it is not what actually happened” (4). The distinction made by ecclesiastical
writers in the late twentieth century was, rather, “an article of faith,”
Kertzer contended, “that relieved the Church of any responsibility for what
happened” after the nineteenth century.
In fact, all of the elements of modern anti-Semitism were “not only
embraced by the Church but actively promulgated by official and unofficial
Church organs” (7). In a church with
both liberal and conservative wings, it is not surprising that the latter
reacted with dismay and denial.
In the closing decades of the
twentieth century and in the opening years of the new millennium paloeoconservative
Catholics have tried, with great tenacity and often with appallingly boorishness,
to deny Kertzer’s thesis; and they have attempted to absolve the popes from any
blame in the antisemitic tragedies of the twentieth century. In the volume under review here, Justus
George Lawler contests Kertzer’s thesis, as well as those (including the
present reviewer) who have supported it. It is the latest in a long series of attacks
on historians by apologists with slight or no professional historical training
or standing. Based on a fair analysis of
the archival and published evidence, Professor Kertzer and his supporters have
the truth on their side. The
ecclesiastical and papal apologists, on the other hand, are transparently
driven by ideology, especially fear of the forces of religious liberalism and secularism,
against which they imagine themselves to constitute a bulwark. It is about the future of authority and the
papacy with which their angry screeds are truly concerned. In the end, historical evidence and
argumentation matters when it comes to representing truth in history; and this
truth cannot be obscured no matter how much smoke the apologists lay down,
regardless of the degree to which they distort evidence presented, their
willingness to try and bully historians into silence and the lack of good
manners, even nastiness, in their writings.
Regrettably, they simply cannot accept the hard—and painful—facts.
II.
In 2001, David Kertzer, the Paul
Dupee, Jr. University Professor of Social Science at Brown University,
published his volume on the Vatican’s role in the rise of modern anti-Semitism.
Kertzer is the author of The
Kidnapping of Edgardo Mortara (Knopf, 1977). A tour de force of scholarship and storytelling,
it was runner-up for the National Book Award in 1997. Ultimately, it was transformed into a play
by Alfred Uhry, who has won both the Pulitzer Prize and an Oscar. With this
volume, Kertzer firmly established himself as one of the world’s leading
historians of the church and antisemitism in the nineteenth century.
The first part of Kertzer’s The
Popes against the Jews begins with a sobering account of the treatment of
the Jews in domains under papal power from early in the nineteenth century until
early in the twentieth (basically the period marked at one end by the
abdication of Napoleon and the restoration of the Papal States and at the other
by the accession to power of Hitler).
After the restoration of the Papal States, debate ensued about the
rights and privileges Jews had enjoyed during the Age of Emancipation. Should these rights be sustained, or should
the ancient, repressive order be restored?
Despite appeals from his own secretary of state and the government of
Austria, Pius VII (1800-1823) re-established the most odious conditions for
Jews in papal domains. It is likely that
opposition to many modern ideas, especially as embodied by the French
Revolution, inspired this decision. But
Pius’ decision may also be interpreted as a vengeful reaction to the belief,
widespread in the Holy See, that Jews had both caused and profited most from
the loss of the Vatican’s temporal power.
Be that as it may, the doors to the
squalid Roman ghetto were soon slammed shut again; they would not be opened for
more than a half century, when, in 1870, Italian troops brought a decisive end
to the existence of the papal domains.
In that half century, most of execrable practices from which Jews had
been liberated by emancipation were reinstituted. Now again, Jewish travel was restricted, the
spectrum of occupations allowable narrowly defined, attendance at conversionary
sermons expected, distinctive clothing required, life in all its aspects hemmed
in, Jews isolated from their surrounding culture. In short, the promises of emancipation had
been taken back and the grim darkness of servitude, personal and professional
restriction and social quarantine once more enveloped the Jewish communities
under papal dominion.
Kertzer’s book is based on extensive
archival work. It is grounded as well in
published materials, including the Vatican’s daily l’Osservatore Romano
(founded in 1861), the Jesuit’s weekly Civiltà Cattolica (founded
in 1850), the French La Croix (a daily newspaper published by the
Assumptionists of France, which had rallied antisemitic sentiment against
Captain Dreyfus) and the works of Edouard Drumont (1844-1917), the doyen of
French antisemitism. Kertzer proved that, far from resisting the rise of modern
antisemitic ideas, Catholics (including popes, diplomats, priests, journalists
and writers) helped build the treasury of antisemitic slurs and libels and
their “Talmud-based religion”; and popes lent them the sacred imprimatur of the
Vatican. Late in his book, Kertzer
summarizes the ideas that either originated with or were supported by “the
highest Church authorities, including the pope”:
There is a secret Jewish conspiracy; the Jews
seek to conquer the world; Jews are an evil sect who seek to do Christians
harm; Jews are by nature immoral; Jews care only for money and will do anything
to get it; Jews control the press; Jews control banks and are responsible for
the economic ruination of untold numbers of Christian families; Jews are
responsible for communism, Judaism commands its adherents to murder defenseless
Christian children and drink their blood; Jews seek to destroy the Christian
religion; Jews are unpatriotic, ever ready to sell their country out to the
enemy; for the larger society to be properly protected, Jews must be segregated
and their rights limited (206).
Many
of these ideas, cited copiously in lengthier form by Kertzer, were published in
l’Osservatore Romano or Civiltà Cattolica between 1880 and 1938.
It is crucial to observe that Kertzer provides
convincing evidence that ecclesiastically-sponsored antisemitism also included
an element of racism. Kertzer reaches
back to sixteenth-century Spanish limpieza de sangre (“purity of blood”)
laws, which discriminated against Jews seeking work in government and
church. Ultimately, these would find
their way into the statutes of the Jesuit order; postulants would have to prove
purity of blood to five generations.
These rules remained in force until after the Second World War. The question that logically follows is, did
those racial elements work their way into Catholic anti-Semitismand beyond, to
the wider world?
As it turns out, Kertzer finds
evidence from Catholic periodicals that suggests writers had essentialized Jews
in racial terms. For example, in 1898, l’Osservatore
Romano complained about the Jew, who had abandoned “himself recklessly and
heedlessly to that innate passion of his race, which is essentially
usurious and pushy” (212; emphasis added).
Kertzer cites 36 articles from Civiltà Cattolica, by the late
nineteenth century “the unofficial voice of the Pope himself,” which he proves
convincingly were part of an anti-Jewish campaign and “crucial to the rise of
anti-Semitism” (135). One of the
characteristics of this form of antisemitism is that Jews are not just
religiously and culturally different but racially alien.
Dozens of anti-Semitic articles appeared in Civiltà
Cattolica, whose every number was reviewed by Vatican censors, in the last
two decades of the nineteenth century.
The Jesuit writers for this journal dreamt up or parroted many new
antisemitic ideas. They wrote with
conviction about the Jews’ secret conspiracy to achieve world domination—an
idea, as Kertzer points out, that would come to be a pillar of Nazi racial
ideology (138). Since the publication of
The Popes against the Jews, and because of the strength of Kertzer’s
argumentation and the abundance of his evidence, the traditional distinction
between religious anti-Judaism and modern “pagan” antisemitism, which the
Vatican has striven to maintain, has started to crumble.
Kertzer concludes his book with an
analysis of twentieth-century popes and the further evolution of modern
antisemitism. As nuncio to Poland from
1918-21, Monsignor Achille Ratti, wrote: “One of the most evil and strongest
influences that is felt here, perhaps the strongest and most evil, is that of
the Jews” (251). Ratti did nothing to
try to put a stop to popular pogroms then endemic in Poland, and he refused to
meet with Jewish emissaries hoping to procure Roman help in bringing an end to
the violence. When Ratti became Pope
Pius XI, he actually supported (as had his predecessor Benedict XV [1914-22])
the French monsignor Ernest Jouin, a champion of conspiracy theories, a “man
who had come to devote his life to alerting his fellow Catholics to the Jewish
threat” (267).
The way that Jouin did so was by
promoting the infamous forgery, The Protocols of the Elders of Zion. For Jouin, the discovery of the Protocols
was an occasion of joy and vindication.
It provided, as Kertzer puts it, “irrefutable evidence that the secret
Jewish conspiracy of which he had been warning for almost a decade was an
established fact” (268). Surely, this sort of thing played some cultural role,
however indirect, in the run-up to the racialist Nuremberg Laws of Nazi Germany
(1935) and to the Italian counterparts promulgated soon afterward (1938). Why was the church was silent about these
laws? Because they “embodied measures
and views long championed by the Church itself” (287). It was Kertzer, then, who has enabled us to
perceive, more clearly than before, that it was the papacy (along, as Kertzer
observes, with many of its foes) that monstrously dehumanized the Jews,
imagined them as a separate people and race (not just practitioners of a
different religion) and stimulated followers to view them as different,
treacherous and iniquitous.
Kertzer largely avoids the heated topic of the
pontificate of Pius XII (1939-58), instead emphasizing the role his
predecessors had played in “dehumanizing the Jews” and “in encouraging large
numbers of Europeans to view them as evil and dangerous” (16).
III.
Justus George Lawler achieved
considerable and well-deserved distinction as a man of letters in the twentieth
century. His work as an editor brought
to publication many fine and influential books (a fact of which, in the volume
under review, he never tires of reminding his readers), often with
Continuum. This was an independent
publishing house with which his name will be forever and honorably linked. Lawler was also founder and editor of the journal
Continuum, which during the sixties and seventies, and, especially for
the Catholic laity, was among the liveliest periodicals available on a wide
spectrum of religious, social and political issues. A literary critic by training, Lawler’s
readings of English poetry were little short of brilliant. Among the most perceptive critics of Gerard
Manley Hopkins, he also authored a volume of literary criticism, Celestial
Pantomine: Poetic Structures of
Transcendence (New Haven, CT: Yale, 1979). This was bravura performance which, though not
an easy read, astonished not only by the sheer range of its erudition. Lawler deftly treated, it seemed, almost
every major poet in the English tradition from the Restoration to the modern
era by keen, “New Critical” close readings of what seemed much of the
traditional poetic literary canon.
Unfortunately for literary studies
and even more for the discipline of history, Lawler in 2002 bent the
application of that New Critical, “close-reading” method to the study—not of
popes—but of historians of popes. History
is a field in which, Lawler would freely admit, he has had had no professional
training. Regrettably, it showed then;
as we shall see, it shows even more clearly now, with the extremely unfortunate
publication of the irascible and profoundly flawed Were the Popes against
the Jews? It is the rare autodidact
who can write or competently judge serious works of history. Lawler is not that rara avis.
While not uncritical of apologists
of twentieth-century popes, Lawler in Popes and Politics, a survey and
critique of papal critics, directed his strongest fire against critics of
several twentieth-century popes. He
charged the critics, startlingly, with “verbal legerdemain,” “doctored texts,”
“bogus scholarship,” “manipulation of data” and above all “fabrication”—-his
preferred, if rash and even reckless accusation. These allegations, some felt, bordered not
just on exaggeration but on invention themselves, so much so that some of his
critics responded that it was Lawler, not they, who had doctored data. In fact, that venture’s hypercritical tone,
the audacious charges of fabrication, the slender knowledge of the actual
subject matter, the complete ignorance of the recent scholarship and the
untraversable forest of tangled prose—all mar the latest book as well.
IV.
Kertzer’s book was published to
overwhelmingly positive reviews. A few
serious scholars raised objections to the latter part of the book. But the majority of the hostile reviews bore
much in common; they came from Catholics who are so defensive about
criticism of any popes that they bustle off to their word processors to fire an
angry fusillade the moment any serious historian deals with the sorry history
of papal anti-semitism. Among the many to bestow kudos on Kertzer’s The
Popes against the Jews was none other than Justus George Lawler. As Lawler himself concedes in his invective,
he had “mentioned it favorably in Popes and Politics.”
Why, then, would Lawler so comprehensively change his view now? And why compose
a book nearly 400 pages in length devoted largely to withdrawing praise and
dispensing churlish criticisms of the book he once lauded?
Lawler attempts to account for his volte-face
in the opening chapter. The chapter is long and opaque (something like 9000
words), as are all the chapters in this book, so it is difficult to winkle out
from it a clear response. It seems that
Lawler, on second reading (and practicing what he complacently designates “a
kind of engaged detachment” [7]), had suddenly and unexpectedly discovered that
Kertzer’s book deserved not praise but condemnation, not a brief statement of
admiration but a prolix refutation; and that he was the man for the job. After scrutinizing the beginning of the book,
Lawler purports to have discovered, for the first time, suspicious errors in spelling
and punctuation (7). Lawler then gives a most peculiar explanation of how he
interprets such “hints:”
These hints often take the form of errors in
spelling, in punctuation, or of less blatant mistakes having to do with
grammar, logic and chronology. In themselves, these may be insignificant and
readily corrected, but they are often a clue to something beneath the surface
of the author’s presentation that demands greater attention.
Then
the explanation turns quite bizarre:
The basic assumption behind this entire process
is that any minor disruptive element in the text of an experienced
writer—and here I return to David I. Kertzer—is a kind of ‘tic’ that betrays
preoccupation with some rhetorical or logical stratagem that may reveal more
about the author than his explicit statements (7; emphasis added).
For
Lawler, such minor and inevitable errors in orthography or punctuation are evidence
of nothing less than Kertzer’s anti-papal ideological agenda. Apparently nothing can escape this man’s
“close reading” of a text.
Lawler then refers to new works of scholarship
on the aid supposedly given to Jews in 1940 by Pius XII, the one pope between
1829-1958 upon whom Kertzer urges us not to focus attention. Then, as if to pile humiliation upon
misrepresentation, Lawler explicitly admits to learning about these new works
of scholarship from “the indispensable bibliography of William Doino” (11). Doino is a journalist for a periodical called Inside
the Vatican and his writings show him to be a remorseless papal apologist;
no professional historian would risk
relying on his partisan work . With
suspicions thus aroused, Lawler portentously declares, “It was around this
point in the process of evaluating the book that I decided to write a critique”
(18). Some readers will find
this account of sudden epiphanic insight credible.
In any event, all readers will soon
have discovered that Lawler delivers not a critique but a long, uninformed,
unfair, extremely tedious philippic. And
nasty. Very nasty. Lawler’s book is almost 400 pages long, or
more than one-third again as long as the book at which it takes aim. It is also
very poorly written. Indeed, the prose
is execrable. Reading the book is like
swimming through jello.
V.
The first issue on which Lawler cheats Kertzer of a fair
hearing is that of sources. Lawler
declares that the “publicized raison d'être” (8) of Kertzer’s book was
the cache of new revelations uncovered by Kertzer’s research in the Vatican
archives. Nonetheless, Lawler later
repeats, quite outrageously, “almost all of Kertzer’s archival material is
second-hand... and “in the most accessible area of that domain, newspapers and
magazines” (49-50). Reading the
acknowledgments to his book, it is clear that Kertzer spent quite a lot of time
in many archives. His notes are
chock-full of references to archival documents he had examined. In short, the book Kertzer wrote could not
have been written had he relied, as Lawler insinuates he had, solely on sources
in the public domain.
As
he read further into Kertzer’s book, Lawler realized (he tells us) that that
“Kertzer seemed [my emphasis] almost
entirely dependent on the scholarship of Giovanni Miccoli” (8). Born in 1933, Miccoli has become the dôyen of
scholars of popes and antisemitism in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, a
fact Kertzer does nothing to deny and which he actually emphasizes. But for Lawler, it “gradually became more and
more difficult to avoid the impression
[my emphasis]” that Miccoli had been “the source of almost every archival or
novel position and perspective in The Popes Against the Jews” (9). As if the reader had yet to receive the
message, Lawler, no enemy of repetition, says once more that Kertzer’s book was
“based as we have seen [as if Lawler had proven the point] on Giovanni Miccoli”
(49).
Now, in his
acknowledgments, Kertzer thanks Miccoli for his kindness. He observed, “Miccoli had done pioneering
work in the Vatican archives on papal policy toward the Jews, especially in the
period from Leo XIII to Pius XII” (294).
He then respectfully adds: “In doing the work that I have for this book,
I stand on his shoulders” (295). All of
that sounds like sincere thanks and respect for a revered scholar. Yet Lawler criticizes Kertzer because, “unlike
others using that imagery...the acknowledgment was of dependence on previous
tradition of scholarship, not on the research of one person” (9).
This is a no trivial charge. In effect, Lawler is accusing Kertzer at best
of recycled work, at worst of plagiarism.
Does he have a case? Hardly. The “close reading” of Kertzer’s book that
Lawler promises at the beginning, and in which he reposes such self-satisfied
faith, seems to have betrayed him.
Lawler’s “method,” he informs us, with characteristic self-congratulation,
“is mainly explication de texte” (9)—that is, close, presumably precise,
competent and comprehensive glossing of the author’s arguments and
narrative. Inspecting Kertzer’s
bibliography, it is clear that he occasionally searched out and read archival
documents cited in Miccoli’s work, as any responsible historian of this period
would. That said, Miccoli never
published, or even studied, much of the history Kertzer covers. Miccoli’s main interests were in diplomatic
history. Kertzer examines ecclesiastical
policy toward Jews in territories in which it preserved temporal power, above
all in the Papal States and nineteenth-century Rome.
Though no Homer, Lawler nodded
here. On the very first page of Kertzer’s
notes there, right there in caps, is Kertzer’s “GUIDE TO CITATION OF ARCHIVAL
SOURCES,” the first of which is explicitly identified as “the newly opened
archive of the Inquisition at the Vatican” (299). Kertzer’s notes are also chock-full of
references to sources from the archive. How
could Lawler have possibly missed this?
Lawler’s vaunted close reading failed him here. That it happened so very early in his
critique and that he failed immediately to ascertain Kertzer’s sources—one of
the principal jobs of a professional historian reviewing a colleague’s work—-suggests
that more such failures are to come; and, unfortunately, an abundance of them
awaits the tenacious reader not drugged by Lawler’s hard-to-follow and cantankerous
argumentation, pompous and irrelevant self-references, and needlessly
grandiloquent prose—and, above all, his tiresomely scornful tone.
Less excusable, indeed morally and
intellectually reprehensible, are Lawler’s repeated charges that Kertzer leaned
slavishly on Miccoli. Actually, the main
reason Kertzer’s book came out to such justly enthusiastic reception was that
it had made compelling new arguments and came to fresh conclusions; and that it
did so precisely because it relied so heavily on sources consulted by virtually
no one at the time, as the relevant archives had just been opened in early
1998. Moreover, the main reason that
historians today fruitfully debate the utility of the antisemitism/anti-Judaism
distinction is that Kertzer, relying on newly-available documents, enabled
historians to wonder if there really was any tangible foundation to the
conventional abstract distinction the church had long exploited to exonerate
itself from twentieth-century atrocities.
Even more serious than the charge of
overreliance on another scholar is the allegation that one has “doctored” or
“fabricated” texts.
Lawler’s first charge in this connection
is in response to the response of Rabbi A. James Rudin, a noted scholar of
interreligious relations, to the book: “Those who challenge his disturbing
conclusions will have to match Mr. Kertzer’s scholarship, research and command
of the Italian language.” Lawler makes the grave error of suggesting
that Kertzer doctored texts because he was not fully competent in Italian. In response to Rudin, Lawler asserts: “The
only issue here has to do with ‘command of the Italian language’ in the sense
of doctoring texts” (180 n. 42). Later
he refers to Kertzer’s “alleged command” of Italian (182). Finally, circling back to Rudin’s comment,
Lawler, in an ill-considered moment of folly, declares: “The commendation by
Rabbi Rudin is particularly noteworthy since there are few errors that are as
flagrant as Kertzer’s assault on ‘the Italian language.’” These are dangerous
claims to make, as one’s own Italian has to be good enough to detect errors in
the translations of the author under review.
In addition, Lawler is charging Kertzer with falsifying or inventing
texts based on his knowledge of Italian.
Unfortunately for Lawler, not only
is Kertzer’s Italian unassailable; but Lawler’s flawed control of Italian seems
to be the “only issue here” having “to do with ‘command of the Italian
language.’” Kertzer quotes Achille Ratti
(the future Pius XI) expressing his fears for the Polish people, potential
victims, in his mind, of ritual murder:
the more I have come to admire the goodness and
faith of their people…the more I fear that they may fall into the clutches of
the evil influences(cattive influenze) that are laying a trap for them
and threatening them (161).
In
the quote above, Kertzer quotes cattive influenze, accurately, as “evil
influences.” Lawler retaliates by
arguing, in a way no honest scholar fully competent in Italian could, that
Kertzer’s translation is wrong because one would never translate cattivo
tempo as “evil weather.” This is utter
nonsense. Giuseppe Zanichelli’s
authoritative dictionary translates cattivo as “evil,” “bad,” “mean,” or
“nasty,” among other definitions.
Kertzer has of course chosen the correct adjective, and one could only
translate cattivo tempo using the adjective “bad” (“bad weather”). Similarly, Lawler complains that Kertzer
translates nefaste influenze as “evil influences.” But, again, Zanichelli’s translates nefasto
as “evil.” Lawler writes at length about
Kertzer’s translating “avversione” as antipathy. Yet again, Zanichelli cites antipatia
(“antipathy”) as a synonym for avversione. While criticizing Kertzer’s supposed errors
in translation, Lawler makes three errors in Italian on just one page of his
own pseudo-scholarly book. He has Revista
for Rivista; dei modernista rather than dei modernisti;
and Bonaiutti for Bonaiuti (35). As readers of Alexander Pope should know, a little
learning is a dangerous thing.
Now to Lawler’s very grave charges
of “doctoring,” “fabricating” or “rigging” of arguments and texts. Given limitations of space, I will focus only
on the two cases Lawler takes to be Kertzer’s most serious misrepresentations. However, Lawler accuses him of such scores
and scores of times.
Lawler writes at length about the
so-called Beilis case. In this case,
Mendel Beilis (1874-1934), a Ukrainian Jew, was in 1913 accused of ritual
murder and put on trial at Kiev. Of
Kertzer’s treatment of this case, Lawler concludes severely but, again,
falsely: “This treatment entails Kertzer’s most clearly demonstrable rigging of
arguments and doctoring of texts—at least up to that point in his book”
(102). Later he adds, “as we will also
see, Kertzer is not above mistranslating or doctoring crucial texts”
(117). Lawler speaks of Kertzer’s
“effort to convict a pope and his secretary of state of having refused to save
the life of an innocent Jew at the ritual murder trial in Kiev” (258).
In Lawler’s telling, Kertzer
“pre-designated” (131) the villain of this narrative: it was Merry del Val, the
Cardinal Secretary of State (1865-1930).
It was he, in Lawler’s presentation of Kertzer’s account, who wished to
see Beilis convicted of the ritual murder charge. Now, Kertzer’s reading of the Inquisition’s
archives leaves little doubt that del Val, a notorious anti-Semite,
was never happy to see Jews acquitted of charges of ritual murder. Indeed, a letter he wrote suggests that he
did nothing to stop certain Frenchmen from using the Beilis trial to “renew the
ritual murder campaign against the Jews” (233).
Other archival documents relating to the philosemitic Catholic sodality,
Friends of Israel, supply abundant evidence of del Val’s aversion for
Jews.
Here, however, Kertzer argues that
it was likely that del Val’s letter, which may have been read by the Czar, was
instrumental in exonerating Beilis (231). Far, then, from arguing that anyone at the
Vatican attempted to convict him, Kertzer actually contends that Cardinal del
Val and Pope Pius X attempted to defend him.
Kertzer concludes, “After decades of papally approved campaigns smearing
the Jews with the brush of ritual murder, a pope had stood up and defended
them” (231). Kertzer goes on to show
that the pope would attempt by every means to prevent such fatal charges from
being brought again and concluded, “I pray that the trial will end without harm
to the poor Jews” (232). Again, Lawler is egregiously guilty precisely of that
of which he accuses Kertzer: misrepresentation of the evidence.
We conclude with Lawler’s argument
regarding what he solemnly condemns as “the most blatant distortion of the
pope’s words in the entire book” (178). Lawler charges Kertzer, per usuale, with
“concoction,” “slander” “ventriloquial
virtuosity,” and all manner of scholarly dereliction (183, 184). The question at stake is whether, and how,
Ratti’s experience as nuncio in Poland shaped the views of European Jews he
would hold as pope. Lawler charges that it
was really Kertzer, utilizing his “ventriloquial virtuosity,” not the pope, who
had emphasized the distinction between Italy’s Jews and the Jews of Central and
Eastern Europe. In order to prove this,
Lawler contends, “words are simply invented by the author [i.e., Kertzer] to be
put in this pope's mouth” (184). He is
particularly upset with Kertzer’s conclusion:
The Pope [Pius XI] thought that the Jews in
Italy—a few of whom he had met—were basically good. But the mass of the Continent’s Jews, the
hordes of Jews who lived in central and eastern Europe, were something quite
different, a threat to healthy Christian society, a lesson he learned in Poland
(263)
Again,
it is hard to know what Lawler means by “blatant distortion.” The fatal problem with Lawler’s argument is
that Kertzer’s twelfth chapter is filled with distinctions by Ratti and by
those writing in his name between Eastern and Western Jews. Ratti complains that the Jews have a
disproportionate element in Poland (251).
Contemplating the enemies of the church in Poland, Ratti fears (in his
own words, not Kertzer’s) they may fall “into the clutches of the evil
influences” that he has now seen “close up” in Poland, of which, “perhaps the
strongest and most evil, is that of the Jews.”
Jews in the East were subject to pogroms because of their “link to the
Bolsheviks” (252)—a pillar of antisemitic rhetoric. The Jews in Warsaw are “incredibly numerous”
(256); it is on this basis that Kertzer can refer to papal fear of “hordes,” which
Lawler somehow imagines Kertzer has simply concocted. The Final Report of the Ratti Mission in
Poland, based on letters Ratti had written to the Secretary of State, asserts
“Poland is the most Judaized country in the world” (259). Jews, it says, form “the principal force” of
Bolshevism in Poland (260). The Ratti
report, Kertzer argued, “painted a picture of the Jews as an insidious foreign
force eating away at the Polish nation” (260).
In short, the reports on the Polish Jews Ratti himself wrote, along with
the final report on his mission based on those reports, “allow us,” according
to Kertzer, to comprehend “the attitudes that Pius XI brought with him when he
became pontiff” (262-63).
As it happens, we
have a particularly precious piece of evidence regarding Ratti’s distinction
between Eastern and Western European
Jews. The source is a letter Mussolini
wrote summarizing the only meeting he ever had with the Pope (February 11,
1932). After complaining about the Protestants as propagandists, proselytizers
and foreigners in Italy, the Pope turned his attention to Russia and the
East: “When I was in Warsaw” [the Pope
said], “I saw that the Bolshevik Commissioners...were all Jews.” He hastened to add that the Italian Jews
represented an exception (In
Italia, tuttavia, gli ebrei fanno eccezione) . If this is not a distinction between Eastern
and Western Jews by the pope, what could count as one? Along with the wealth of other evidence
Kertzer introduces in this chapter, it amply justifies his conclusion that
Ratti brought with him to Rome a fear of numerous hordes of so-called Ostjuden who, Bolshevized, represented a threat to
Christian society—something Ratti explicitly affirms that he learned in
Poland. Sadly, Lawler cannot assimilate
the abundance of the evidence. “These threatening hordes are nonexistent save
in the author’s imagination,” he concludes (183).
VI.
In a recent post on
the attacks by papal negationists on Kertzer and this reviewer, Dr. Paul O’
Shea questions:
those who have for some time now enjoyed engaging in a largely unchallenged polemic
against historians who do as their craft demands, namely seek the truth. For several years now apologists, that is, a
group of neo-conservative writers and journalists, some with academic qualification,
many with none, have taken it upon themselves to ‘set the record straight’ on
Pius XII, the Catholic Church and everything related to it. In their extremely limited understanding of
Catholic theology and history, they believe they have the right to impose their
version of a ‘fatwa’ on those with whom they disagree. In email correspondence with colleagues in
more than a few places around the world there is a growing anger that these
‘snake oil’ merchants and bullies have gone too far. I have taken deep offence
at their unbridled attacks on historians.
I have also taken deep offence at their appalling lack of customary good
manners and basic decency.
After
declaring, sensibly, that “it is time for this nonsense to stop,” O’Shea goes
on to wonder, “What on
earth did David Kertzer do to warrant such vitriol and venom in [Lawler’s]
book? ...Where does the anger that fuels Lawler’s writing originate? It can’t be in the history, it must come from
somewhere else. It has the vehemence of
someone spurned.”
One can only wonder. One possibility has to do with the painful
private acknowledgment of scholarly inferiority and publishing failure; none of
the apologists is recognized as an authority by professional historians, and
none has published a book taken seriously by them. Another has to do with the certainty that the
professional historical community holds them in collective contempt, as indeed
it does. One papal apologist, Joseph
Bottum, who described himself as “a minor member of the chattering classes,”
acknowledged these possibilities.
Speaking of Rychlak’s work, Bottum goes on to observe that one:
can reasonably point out that Our Sunday
Visitor is not quite at the level of distribution, advertising and
influence enjoyed by Doubleday, Houghton Mifflin, Knopf and Viking...The
commentator Philip Jenkins recently suggested that this disparity in publishers
sends a message that the mainstream view is the guilt of Pius XII, while praise
for the Pope belongs only to the cranks, nuts and sectarians.
Bottum concludes: “Jenkins’ suggestion is worth
considering.”
It
certainly is.
Aside from personal resentments, professional
disappointments and collective failure in the realm of publishing, it seems
likely that many of the apologists are using the popes as ciphers in a larger
cultural war. Some may be
paleoconservative, throne-and-altar Catholics, restorationists longing for
simpler days when the human failings of those who occupy the See of Peter were
not publicly recognized, and papal teachings were taken seriously and obeyed. Some
may be opposed to the epoch-making changes of Vatican II and the dramatic
improvement in Jewish-Christian relations they ushered in; perhaps some want to
shut the windows of aggiornamento John XXIII memorably invited the
church to open. Others may long to restore
the clericalism and papalism of the pre-Vatican II era.
But mostly, the apologists for the
popes discussed strike me simply as people who find the truth too painful to
confront. Rather than admit the failings of these popes, they prefer to attack
the bearers of the bad news, often viciously. Ironically, their furious denial
of the disease makes a cure less likely. But, fortunately, in many quarters of
the Roman Catholic Church, including the papacy itself, a reassessment of the
traditional “teaching of contempt” has proceeded nonetheless, with results that
all should applaud.
Kevin
Madigan is Winn Professor of Ecclesiastical History at Harvard University.
See, e.g., Ronald Ryclak’s review, “Spins of Omission: A Review of
the Popes against the Jews,” in Crisis Magazine (March/April,
2002), written with wanton cruel personal spite. His Hitler, the War and the
Pope, the vade-mecum of papal apologists, was brought out in 2000 by
Our Sunday Visitor, a Catholic weekly with a book publishing arm. Like Lawler, Rychlak is not an historian; he
is a professor of law at the University of Mississippi. While praised by fellow apologists for his
trial-lawyer approach, Rychlak’s forensic dichotomies and false alternatives of
good and evil (Pius XII: Hitler’s Pope or Righteous Saint?) cannot illuminate
the complexities of lived history, which must almost always be painted in
shades of gray.
Doino’s work makes one wonder why
Lawler would want to rely on him to the exclusion of professional—and vastly
more comprehensive—historians. For
powerful and persuasive posts on these apologists, their bullying of
professional historians and their lack of basic decency and good manners
(especially for those accustomed to Catholic norms of discourse), see Dr. Paul
O’Shea at http://paulonpius.blogspot.com/2012/03/apologists-pius-wars-rest-of-us-do.html
and http://paulonpius.blogspot.com.au/2012/04/first-madigan-now-kertzer-open-season.html.
Lawler also
denies that that anti-semitic articles were
published Civiltà Cattolica with
papal approval—and this despite recent archival discoveries indicating requests
from the pope, as well as the secretary of state. Lawler also argues, preposterously, that Civiltà Cattolica was simply repeating what its writers heard in
the ambient culture. Even if true, how
would that excuse Jesuit writers and editors and Vatican officials from the
charge of antisemitism? Equally ludicrous—risible, actually—is
Lawler’s suggestion that a multi-decade campaign of dozens of anti-Semitic
articles were issues about which the popes were not happy but powerless to
stop.
Regrettably,
Rychlak’s tonality is
remarkably like Lawler’s. Almost
standing in judgment of one who is by far his professional superior, Rychlak
says of Kertzer’s book, e.g.,: he “contorts
an interview given to a French journalist...Kertzer is not delving into history
here; he is advancing a thesis. He does not weigh the evidence impartially but tries
to make it fit his theory. In a strategy remarkably similar to that of
Cornwell [associating any author with Cornwell, author of the
widely-discredited Hitler’s Pope, is a common guilt-by-association ploy
of papal negationists] in his book on Pius XII Kertzer takes some selected
quotes from a letter written by Monsignor Ratti before he became Pope Pius
XI, notes some uncomfortable language, and, on this foundation, attempts
to build his case that the future pope was a lifelong anti-Semite” (“Spins of
Omission,” emphasis added). Note that virulently anti-Semitic language has been
downgraded to merely “uncomfortable.”
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