La Iglesia Católica ante el Holocausto: España y América Latina, 1933-1945

Abstract

The controversies surrounding the ties between Catholicism and fascisms during the period between the first and second world wars have given rise to some important studies in recent years. On the one hand, the attitude of Pius XII concerning the Nazi persecution of the Jews has received special attention. This theme has brought together historians with divergent stances, such as John Cornwell, author of Hitler’s Pope: The Secret History of Pius XII (Viking Penguin, 1999), and Giovanni Miccoli, author of I dilemmi e i silenzi di Pio XII (Rizzoli, 2000). There has also been an effort, on the other hand, to transfer attention from the attitude of the Pope and of the Holy See toward Catholicism as a whole, as is the case with the recent and polemical book by Daniel Jona Goldhagen, The Role of the Catholic Church in the Holocaust and Its Unfulfilled Duty of Repair (Alfred Knopf, 2002), in which the author formulates a severe condemnation of the silences and complicities of bishops, priests, and laypersons in the face of the Nazi’s “final solution.” Soon, when Vatican documents concerning the papacy of Pius XI become available to researchers, new elements of judgment will fuel these debates.This book by Graciela Ben-Dror, professor at the University of Haifa in Israel, extends her doctoral research on the Catholic Church in Argentina to include the cases of Brazil, Uruguay, and Spain. Her intention is to investigate “the study of the public voice of the church and of Catholics allied with the church hierarchy, as it is reflected in the instructions and writings of bishops, clergy, and laypersons, educated persons who wished to make their voices heard in such a way that their message would be received as a spiritual guide by the faithful” (pp. 15 – 16). The investigation is based primarily on church documents and periodical publications, including a notable sample of parish newsletters from Argentina and Uruguay. In this regard, readers should recognize the merits of this study’s attempt to formulate a comparative analysis that does not limit itself to exploring the better-known territory of institutional relations between the church and the state, but rather seeks to explore the political, cultural, and religious particularities that characterized Catholicism in each of the countries within a broader perspective.The research nevertheless demonstrates weaknesses that we cannot overlook. Among them I would point to the lack of fixity in the object of study, which vacillates between theological anti-Semitism, attitudes regarding the extermination of the Jews, relations between Catholics and nationalist groups, and their opinions concerning Jewish immigration, among other themes of diverse nature that are not necessarily related in any direct manner. This imprecision gives rise to some inconsistencies that weaken the explanatory power of the book. For example, the fact that certain Catholic figures in Argentina were critical of the merits of Jewish immigration is not necessarily related to the “Holocaust.” To start with, these qualms went hand in hand with other criticisms leveled against an immigration policy that was judged to have been too permissive, in certain aspects, ever since the nineteenth century. Jews certainly figured among the group of foreigners considered “undesirable,” but the concerns of anti-immigration voices were leveled, above all, against Italians, who arrived in Argentina in truly massive numbers and who never enjoyed the favor of the cultural and political elite. On the other hand, criticism of Jewish immigration was not the legacy of only the Catholic Church: in 1881, the very liberal newspaper La Nación, together with other publications completely separate from the church, put forth the opinion that “to bring this race of men to our soil . . . is to construct an unrelated bloc within the population, without any connection to the national society.”We can say, furthermore, that the author takes certain assertions at face value that should have been the object of more careful inquiry. For example, starting with the idea that in each of the national churches she studied there exists a dominant “position” or “tendency” that expresses the positions of the hierarchy, she perhaps too easily lends the opinions of certain figures or publications a semiofficial character, which is at the very least debatable. A similar process takes place with the books that display the official stamp of approval from their diocese’s censor: such books must not be considered an automatic reflection of an “official position.” Church censors established the orthodoxy of assertions directly related to the doctrines and teachings of the church, but not of the entirety of the authors’ personal opinions (Codex iuris canonici, c. 1393).These limitations, which are generally due to the not-always-rigorous use of certain concepts that then give rise to sometimes hasty conclusions, do not negate the value of Ben-Dror’s study, which offers an interesting approach based on a massive amount of archival work.