There are some subjects before which the mind recoils and the imagination rebels, and which place inordinate, unwelcome demands upon our compassion. Generally we are on our guard, and to the intruder who by a trick passes our defenses and spells things out to us we accord scant thanks. Such an intruder is Rolf Hochhuth, whose play The Representative has been causing a great furor in Western Europe (see CHRISTIANITY TODAY, October 25, News, and November 8, Book Reviews). Incidentally, we might regard it as a curiously telling judgment upon all of us that the dramatist is listened to where the straight historian has to a large extent been brushed aside.
As all the world now knows, the Nazis deliberately murdered a vast number of Jews (perhaps the equivalent of the present population of Massachusetts), and from a quarter where we might have expected speech, there was only silence. François Mauriac put it thus: “We have not yet had the consolation of hearing Simon Peter’s successor clearly and sharply condemning, without a trace of circumlocution, the crucifixion of these countless ‘brothers of Christ.’ ” Is Pius XII to be condemned for not lifting his voice against this awful massacre? The Representative addresses itself to this problem. Hochhuth does not accuse the Vatican of anti-Semitism and does not say that the pope could actually have saved the Jews. In fact, he gives examples of Pius’s concern for the victims of Nazi anti-Semitism. Even the possible results of intervention are made secondary to the intolerable thought that Christ’s vicar, confronted by absolute evil, prevaricates, negotiates, and maintains the Concordat with Hitler, who was never denounced.
Nor, despite an allegation now familiar to us from other occasions, is Hochhuth trying to evade some of the German national guilt by placing blame on other shoulders. On the contrary, the play is unsparing in its revelation of what its author’s fellow countrymen did. Yet Hochhuth does not hold the German people accountable for the crimes of their rulers. Other people knew. A group of Polish Roman Catholic laymen, in a statement issued during the summer of 1942, in part said: “The world is watching this crime, which is more horrifying than anything history has known—and is maintaining silence.… Neither Britain nor the United States has raised its voice.… The Jews are dying surrounded on all sides by only hand-washing Pilates.”
To return to the play: much of it has to do with Father Riccardo, a young Jesuit priest, who is outraged by the pope’s failure to speak out. In one single interchange with his father, a Vatican official, Riccardo expresses the gist of the whole thing. “How you simplify …,” says Count Fontana; “can you believe the Pope can see without pain the hunger and suffering of a single person? His heart is with the victims.” The priest replies: “And his voice? Where is his voice?”
In an actual letter to Bishop Preysing of Berlin, Pius said that he had “exercised restraint” in condemning Nazism in order “to avoid greater evils.” But could anything have been worse than the relentless manhunt? Roman Catholic apologists make much of Nazi reprisals in Holland when some bishops there protested, but this is not the whole story.
In Denmark, on October 1, 1943 (the Jewish New Year), the occupying Germans swooped down to capture 8,000 Jews marked for extermination. The Teutonic thoroughness with which the operation was planned came to little, for after a tip-off from a German official, all but 300 Jews escaped through speedy and secret transportation to friendly Sweden. The whole thrilling story can be read in Harold Flender’s Rescue in Denmark. In Finland, Bulgaria, the Ukraine, and (to a lesser extent) Rumania, Hitler’s “Final Solution” for the Jews was resisted—and the Vatican’s expectation of dire revenge was not fulfilled. In Hitler’s Greater Germany were 35 million Roman Catholics. If Pius had threatened such an interdict as Innocent III centuries ago had clapped on France and England for much less reason, how can we say that millions of Jewish lives would not have been saved? The tragedy of Pius XII is that he should have thought in terms of a political decision. One fallible man with God might have fared better than an infallible one choosing to hide behind raison d’état.
Father Riccardo in the play, realizing that he is impotent to do anything to rescue the victims, identifies himself with them, pins on his soutane the Star of David, and becomes part of a great company of Italian Jews (there were ultimately nearly 20,000 of them) doomed to the gas chamber. “I have been hoping,” he says poignantly, “that, once for all, the S.S. and the Vatican would meet in bloody collision. But now the most terrible thing is happening that could possibly happen: they do not even disturb each other.… They live together in the Eternal City—because the Pope does not forbid the hangmen of Auschwitz to load up their victims, here under his windows.” The play ends in Auschwitz with a discussion between Father Riccardo and the camp doctor. The latter (based on real life, as are many other of the characters) is a renegade priest. He throws at Riccardo the charge that in the Spanish Inquisition the Roman church led the way in showing how human beings could be burned. And Father Riccardo confesses his involvement in the total guilt of humanity, just as Dostoevsky so often did, and just as all who read or see The Representative cannot escape doing.
The British Roman Catholic weekly, The Tablet, expresses in a petulant article the hope that those who blame Pius will look ahead and do something to ensure that “the Pope in the future, if confronted with some monstrous and inhuman tyranny, will know that he has the world behind him if he exerts his moral authority to the full.” This unguarded utterance will not stand close scrutiny, even though with Vatican Council II in progress we know very well what is implied.
Hochhuth’s play presents Pope Pius XII as obsessed by the menace of Russian Communism, against which he thought Hitler an effective bulwark, and as seeing it his chief duty to keep his international organization (investments and all) intact. Whatever we think of this, the fact that the Roman Catholic Church came through the war remarkably unscathed is no legitimate subject for boasting—indeed, one wonders if it is not the ultimate condemnation. Gerstein, the Christian S.S. man who in the play never seems quite convincing, is based on a historical figure who said in a letter to his father: “At some moment or other, you will have to stand up for the age you live in, and for what is taking place during it. We would no longer be able to understand each other, nor have anything more of importance to say to each other, if I could not say to you: Do not underestimate this responsibility, nor this obligation to account.” Whether we be pope, pastor, or layman, there is something in that plea for all of us to ponder.
