The Pope at War by David I. Kertzer

Author:David I. Kertzer [Kertzer, David I.]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Random House Publishing Group
Published: 2022-06-07T00:00:00+00:00

The letter never did reach Lucia. Abramo, his mother, and his sister Rosa would all die at Auschwitz.[30]

As the roundup of Italy’s Jews intensified, it was impossible for the pope to ignore. In mid-December, the archbishop of Ferrara became the latest to implore the Vatican’s intervention in favor of the victims, “especially those members of mixed families.” A note in the Secretariat of State files reveals the reply sent to the archbishop: “one can respond saying that the Holy See, as it had done in the past, tries in the current circumstances as well to aid the non-Aryans to the extent it can, particularly those in mixed families.” It was unlikely that they would achieve any result, “but, if nothing else, one will always be able to say that the Holy See has done everything possible to help these unfortunates.” The note added, “One might also ask Mons. Nuncio to say a word or arrange to have a word said, confidentially, with Marshal Graziani[*] or with Buffarini asking that mercy be used especially toward the mixed families.”[31]

The dramatic new order to arrest all of Italy’s Jews, confiscate their property, and send them to concentration camps made the pope’s continuing silence ever more embarrassing. Believing some kind of Vatican action was called for, Father Tacchi Venturi decided to take the initiative and sent the pope a lengthy appeal. He did not go so far as to call for a public papal protest, but he urged that a Vatican brief be presented to the German ambassador calling on his government to end its homicidal campaign against Italy’s Jews. In mid-December 1943 the Jesuit prepared a draft of the brief.

While the appeal was to be made on behalf of Italy’s Jews, it did not stray from the church’s longtime teachings: Jews should be kept separate from Christians and prevented from acquiring positions of social influence. However, it was not permissible to physically harm them. In pleading to have the deportations and murders stopped, Tacchi Venturi argued that Mussolini’s racial laws, instituted five years earlier, had successfully kept the Jews in their proper place, and as a result there was no need for these new measures. Jews did not present the grounds for serious government concern in Italy that they did elsewhere. Nor had they engendered the same hostility from the “Aryan” population that they did in other countries. This was partly, he argued, because there were so few Jews in Italy and partly because so many of them had married Christians. The new laws confining Italy’s Jews to concentration camps offended the “good sense of the Italian people,” who believed that “the racial laws enacted by the Fascist Government against the Jews five years ago are sufficient to contain the tiny Jewish minority within the proper boundaries.”

“For these reasons,” wrote the pope’s Jesuit envoy, “one trusts that the German Government will want to desist from the deportation of the Jews, whether those done en masse, as happened last October, or those done individually.”

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