Vatican Apology on Holocaust Too Vague, Some Say

VATICAN CITY —  The Vatican repented Monday for the “errors” of Roman Catholics who failed to help Jews during the Nazi slaughter of World War II. But it strongly defended Pius XII, the wartime pope faulted by many for his public silence on the Holocaust.

Jewish leaders voiced dismay that the Vatican’s long-awaited document on the Holocaust stopped short of the institutional mea culpas offered in recent years by Catholic bishops in several European countries.

Instead, the Vatican Commission for Religious Relations with the Jews focused its 12-page report on the passivity of unnamed and uncounted Catholics who watched as Hitler’s Germany sent 6 million Jews to death camps across Europe.

“We cannot know how many Christians in countries occupied or ruled by the Nazi powers or their allies were horrified at the disappearance of their Jewish neighbors and yet were not strong enough to raise their voices in protest,” the report said.

“We deeply regret the errors and failures of those sons and daughters of the church,” it added.

“This is an act of repentance,” Edward J. Cassidy, the Australian cardinal who heads the Vatican commission, told reporters. “This is more than an apology, since as members of the church, we are linked to the sins as well as to the merits of her children.”

The commission’s landmark document, promised more than a decade ago by Pope John Paul II, is titled “We Remember: A Reflection on the Shoah,” a reference to the Hebrew word for the Holocaust. In a brief introduction, the pontiff said he hoped that the report will “help heal the wounds of past misunderstandings and injustices” and purify his church on the eve of the third millennium of Christianity.

John Paul also wrote: “May it enable memory to play its necessary part in the process of shaping a future in which the unspeakable iniquity of the [Holocaust] will never again be possible.”

But amid praise for that purpose, the pope who has done more than any predecessor to improve Catholic-Jewish relations found himself accused by many Jewish leaders of endorsing a cover-up.

“If you study for 10 years the Vatican role during the Holocaust and you do not comment about the failure of Pius XII to do anything to save the Jews in the critical years, when it really counted, then that itself is a major flaw and will help this document achieve insignificance,” said Rabbi Marvin Hier, dean of the Los Angeles-based Simon Wiesenthal Center.

Rabbi Lawrence Goldmark, president of the Southern California Board of Rabbis, echoed Cassidy in calling the report “a sincere attempt at repentance” and said it is the Jewish custom to accept a person who sincerely repents. But the repentance must always be for specific crimes, sins or wrongful acts, he said, and the report lacks that specificity.

And Yisrael Meir Lau, a Holocaust survivor who is chief rabbi of Ashkenazi Jews in Israel, said: “It is too little, too late. I have no doubt that the church did not do everything it could have to save people. . . . [Pius XII’s] silence cost millions of human lives.”

Pius reigned from 1939, the first year of the war, until his death in 1958. Critics of the Vatican view his silence as evidence of the church’s indifference to the fate of Jews. The Vatican has rebuffed repeated demands to open its wartime archives.

“We Remember” is the Vatican’s answer. Cassidy said the church was satisfied that its own historians had studied the period thoroughly and that “their conclusion would be very strongly that Pius XII does not have a case to answer.”

Cassidy’s commission noted that Pius’ first encyclical, in 1939, “warned against theories that denied the unity of the human race and against the deification of the state” and predicted that those tenets of Nazism were leading Europe to an “hour of darkness.”

The report also praised what it called the “wisdom” of Pius’ quiet diplomacy, saying Jewish communities and Jewish leaders, including the late Israeli Prime Minister Golda Meir, have given the wartime pope and his intermediaries credit for saving hundreds of thousands of Jewish lives.

But many Jewish leaders said the 1939 encyclical was too ambiguous to be effective and that Pius’ salvation efforts began only in late 1943, after the tide of war had turned against the Nazis. By then, they noted, Nazi gas chambers had claimed most of their victims.

“Undoubtedly, many people in the church helped Jews, including Pope Pius XII, but quietly,” said Stanislaw Krajewski, a leader of the Union of Jewish Communities in Poland, where about 3 million Jews died in Nazi camps. “The church as an institution did not make a loud gesture. . . . Maybe it wouldn’t have helped, but the victims did not have the feeling that someone was thinking of them with sympathy.”

Bishops in Poland and Germany have apologized for their predecessors’ silence during Hitler’s campaign to exterminate the Jews. Expectations that the Vatican would follow suit rose last fall when French bishops issued a detailed apology, saying: “Today we confess that silence was a mistake.” German bishops offered Cassidy’s commission a draft document that assumed Vatican responsibility for the silence.

James Carroll, a Vatican analyst and former Catholic priest, speculated that John Paul was reluctant to criticize his wartime predecessor because that might undermine the authority of the papacy. During a 1995 trip to Germany, one of John Paul’s speeches contained a passage--which he did not read aloud--attacking Pius’ detractors.

Other Vatican watchers believe that John Paul is concerned about the feelings of Arab Christian leaders, who opposed his decision to recognize the state of Israel in 1993, and those of other Catholics outside Europe for whom the Holocaust is remote.

“There are pressures [on the pope] from the Third World, especially the Arab world, which feels that this is European guilt, not theirs,” said Rabbi David Rosen, director of the Israel office of the Anti-Defamation League, the league’s Vatican liaison.

The authors of Monday’s report felt compelled to note--and condemn--other mass killings in this century, including those of Armenians, Gypsies and Cambodians.

On the Holocaust, they criticized “governments of some Western countries of Christian tradition” for being “more than hesitant to open their borders to the persecuted Jews.” They also made a distinction between anti-Judaism practiced by some Christians over the past 2,000 years and 20th century anti-Semitism, particularly as practiced by the Nazis.

The Holocaust, they wrote, “was the work of a thoroughly modern neo-pagan regime. Its anti-Semitism had its roots outside of Christianity and, in pursuing its aims, it did not hesitate to oppose the [Catholic] Church and persecute her members also.”

Rosen echoed the views of many Jewish leaders in saying the document “has a great deal of significance and unquestionably contributes to combating anti-Semitism and anti-Jewish sentiments.”

“But most Jews will be disappointed,” he added. “It is nowhere near as direct as the French bishops’ statement. . . . There is hope that the pope will fill in the gaps. Hopefully, this is not the end of the story but another chapter in Catholic self-examination in past teaching and conduct.”

Times staff writer Marjorie Miller in Jerusalem and Times religion writer Larry B. Stammer contributed to this report.