\nKertzer makes the case that Pius XII\u2019s overriding dread of Communism, his belief that the Axis powers would win the war, and his desire to protect the church\u2019s interests all motivated him to avoid offending Adoph Hitler and Benito Mussolini, whose ambassadors had worked to put him on the throne. The pope was also worried, the book shows, that opposing the F\u00fchrer would alienate millions of German Catholics.<\/b><\/span><\/p>\nThe book further reveals that a German prince and fervent Nazi acted as a secret back channel between Pius XII and Hitler and that the pope\u2019s top Vatican adviser on Jewish issues urged him in a letter not to protest a fascist order to arrest and send to concentration camps most of Italy\u2019s Jews.<\/p>\n
\u201cThat was flabbergasting,\u201d Kertzer said about coming across the letter.<\/p>\n
Defenders of Pius XII, whose case for sainthood is still being evaluated, have long argued that he worked behind the scenes to help Jews and that anti-Catholic enemies have sought to stain the institution by sullying the pontiff.<\/p>\n
\u201cA more open protest would not have saved a single Jew but killed even more,\u201d Michael Hesemann, who considers Pius XII a champion of Jews, wrote in response to the evidence revealed by Kertzer, whom he called \u201cheavily biased.\u201d<\/p>\n
Hesemann, who is also the author of a new book about the wartime pope based on the Vatican archives, argued that the Vatican, while following its tradition of neutrality, worked to hide Jews in convents and distribute fake baptism certificates.<\/p>\n
Kertzer argues that the unearthed documents paint a more nuanced picture of Pius XII, showing him as neither the antisemitic monster often called \u201cHitler\u2019s Pope\u201d nor a hero. But the urge to protect Pius\u2019 reputation, according to Kertzer, reflects a more general refusal by Italy \u2014 and apologists in the Vatican \u2014 to come to terms with their complicity in World War II, the Holocaust and the murder of Rome\u2019s Jews.<\/p>\n
On Oct. 16, 1943, Nazis rounded up more than 1,000 of them throughout the city, including hundreds in the Jewish ghetto, now a tourist attraction where crowds feast on Jewish-style artichokes near a church where Jews were once forced to attend conversion sermons.<\/p>\n
For two days, the Germans held the Jews in a military college near the Vatican, checking to see who was baptized or had Catholic spouses.<\/p>\n
\u201cThey didn\u2019t want to offend the pope,\u201d Kertzer said. His book shows that Pius XII\u2019s top aides only interceded with the German ambassador to free \u201cnon-Aryan Catholics.\u201d About 250 were released. More than 1,000 were murdered in Auschwitz.<\/p>\n
In a nearby street, Kertzer bent down by one of the brass cobblestones memorializing the victims. Above him loomed the Tempio Maggiore, the Great Synagogue of Rome.<\/p>\n
\u201cI can\u2019t think of that synagogue,\u201d Kertzer said, \u201cwithout thinking of my father.\u201d<\/p>\n
When the U.S. Fifth Army reached Rome, Kertzer\u2019s father, Lt. Morris Kertzer, a Canadian-born rabbi, was with them and officiated at the synagogue.<\/p>\n
One U.S. soldier, a Jew from Rome who had immigrated to America when Mussolini introduced Italy\u2019s racial laws, asked Morris Kertzer if he could make an announcement to see if his mother had survived the war. The rabbi positioned the soldier at his side, and when the services started, a cry broke out, and the GI\u2019s mother rushed up to embrace her son.<\/p>\n
\u201cThat\u2019s the one I remember the most of my father telling,\u201d David Kertzer said.<\/p>\n
A year before Kertzer\u2019s birth in 1948, his parents took in a teenage survivor of Auschwitz. When footage of Nazi soldiers appeared on television, Kertzer and his older sister, Ruth, would leap to switch the set off to protect their foster sister, Eva.<\/p>\n
By then, his father had become the director of interreligious affairs for the American Jewish Committee, essentially to try to strip Christian churches of antisemitism. As part of the normalizing effort, a young David Kertzer appeared on Jack Paar\u2019s \u201cTonight Show,\u201d singing prayers at the family\u2019s Passover Seder.<\/p>\n
At Brown University, his organizing against the Vietnam War nearly got him kicked out and landed him in a jail cell with Norman Mailer. He stayed in school and became enamored with anthropology and with Susan Dana, a religion major from Maine.<\/p>\n
To stay close to her, he went in 1969 to graduate school at Brandeis, where an anthropology professor suggested that his interest in politics and religion made Italy a rich field of study.<\/p>\n
The result was a year of research in Bologna, Italy, with Susan, now his wife, and his first book, \u201cComrades and Christians.\u201d After earning his doctorate, positions at Bowdoin and Brown followed, as did two children, a lifelong connection to Italy and a growing familiarity with Italian \u2014 and then, by chance, Vatican \u2014 archives.<\/p>\n
In the early 1990s, an Italian history professor told him about Edgardo Mortara, a 6-year-old child of Jewish parents in Bologna. In 1858, the church Inquisitor ordered the boy seized because a Christian servant girl had possibly, and secretly, had him baptized, and so he could not remain in a Jewish family.<\/p>\n
The story represented what Kertzer called \u201ca dual career shift,\u201d toward writing for a general audience and about Jewish themes.<\/p>\n
The result was his 1998 book, \u201cThe Kidnapping of Edgardo Mortara,\u201d a National Book Award finalist in nonfiction. It caught the eye of his friend, playwright Tony Kushner, who later gave it to Steven Spielberg, who told Kertzer he wanted to make it into a movie. Mark Rylance came on board to play Pius IX. Kushner wrote the screenplay. All they needed was a boy to play Edgardo.<\/p>\n
\u201cThey auditioned 4,000 \u2014 not 3,900 \u2014 4,000 6-to-8-year-old boys in four continents,\u201d Kertzer said. \u201cSpielberg informs us that he\u2019s not happy with any of the boys.\u201d<\/p>\n
The project stalled, but Kertzer did not. He emerged from the archives to publish \u201cThe Pope Against the Jews,\u201d about the church\u2019s role in the rise of modern antisemitism. In 2014, he published \u201cThe Pope and Mussolini,\u201d examining Pius XI\u2019s role in the rise of fascism and the antisemitic Racial Laws of 1938. It won the Pulitzer Prize.<\/p>\n
Since then, Vatican archivists recognize and, sometimes, encourage him.<\/p>\n
\u201cPerhaps even they\u2019re happy that some outsider is able to bring this to light because it\u2019s awkward, perhaps, for some of them to do so,\u201d he said.<\/p>\n
After spending a recent morning in the archives, Kertzer emerged with a boyish grin. He had just discovered that even during the German occupation of Rome, Pius XII was still primarily focused on the dangers of Communism. The pope\u2019s top cardinals advised him \u201cto create a Catholic Party. It\u2019s the origins of the Christian Democrats party,\u201d Kertzer said, referring to the force that dominated Italy for decades to come.<\/span><\/b><\/p>\n\u201cI doubt anyone has seen it before,\u201d he said. \u201cWell, outside of the Holy Office.\u201d<\/p>\n
\u00a9 2022 The New York Times Company<\/span><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-117955","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/stateofthenation.co\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/117955","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/stateofthenation.co\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/stateofthenation.co\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/stateofthenation.co\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/stateofthenation.co\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=117955"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/stateofthenation.co\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/117955\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/stateofthenation.co\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=117955"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/stateofthenation.co\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=117955"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/stateofthenation.co\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=117955"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}