A rediscovered history” “” “

The Pope intends to continue the opening up of the archives, and all the documents relating to the pontificate of Pius XI (1922-1939) will probably be made accessible to scholars at the beginning of 2006, thus furnishing unpublished sources for a new crop of studies on the Church and its relations with the countries of Eastern Europe”. So said Father SERGIO PAGANO , prefect of the Vatican Secret Archives on inaugurating the meeting held in the Teutonic College (Vatican City) on the evening of 13 December for the presentation of the book “The Holocaust in Slovakia and the Catholic Church” written by Msgr. Walter Brandmüller and published by the Vatican publishing house (Libreria Editrice Vaticana). The author, who is also chairman of the Pontifical Committee for Historical Sciences established by Pius XII in 1954, was able to draw on historical sources in the archive of the Congregation for Extraordinary Ecclesiastical Affairs of the Vatican Secretariat of State and on the collection “Actes et documents du Saint Siège relatifs à la seconde guerre mondiale”. The new documents published in the book testify to the efforts made by the Slovak episcopate and the intensive diplomatic activity of the Holy See, which together enabled some 20,000 Jews to be saved from deportation during the Second World War. PRUDENCE AND VIRTUE. “The Holy See is proud to be able to offer, albeit with all the necessary prudence, new historiographical sources for the study of the countries of Eastern Europe”, continued the prefect of the Vatican Archives. “Those who rebuke her for ‘excessive caution’ – he explained – should know that it is not in anyone’s interest to force the Vatican’s hand on the opening of the archives. The reorganization and cataloguing of the sources, indispensable for their proper use by historians, are still in progress. In this case ‘prudence’ is revealed as a virtue”. A QUALITATIVE LEAP. “A significant qualitative leap for historiography”: that’s the judgement of Brandmüller’s book expressed by EMILIA HRABOVEC, historian at the University of Vienna. After “the school of Marxist inspiration which right down to the 1990s showed little interest in the Catholic Church or tried to debase her or distort her actions” and after “the neglect of Slovakia by Western historiography of liberal stamp, in the absence of detailed studies on the holocaust of the Slovak Jews and on the consequent attitude of the Church”, at last we have a book “that tackles the question, made even more complex by the context in which the events took place: a ‘young’ country (Slovakia won its independence from the Czechoslovak Republic, formed after the collapse of the Habsburg Empire, on 6 October 1938), a country with a Catholic majority (90%), with a constitution whose legal foundations were inspired by Christian principles and natural law”, and what is more with a very controversial leader, the Catholic priest Monsignor Jozef Tiso. THE DIPLOMATIC ACTIVITY OF THE HOLY SEE. The Slovak bishops took three main public positions following the promulgation in September 1941 of the so-called Juden Codex (Ante-Jewish Code) , which was never debated or approved by the Slovak Parliament and which represented the application in the country of the Nuremberg Laws (the race laws promulgated in Nuremberg in 1935). The Memorandum sent by the bishops to the President of the Council of Ministers Tuka (October 1941) was followed by a first pastoral letter in April 1942, a month before the beginning of the deportations in May. A second pastoral letter followed in March 1943. More incisive was the Vatican’s diplomatic activity, which Hrabovec called “courageous and very able”. The Holy See, he explained, received detailed information of what was happening in Slovakia through the nunciatures in Berlin, Budapest, Bern and Madrid” and was able to save some 20,000 people, a third of the country’s Jewish population, by diplomatic memoranda and ‘exhortations’ to the Tiso government. THE POPE’S POSITION. ANNA FOA, lecturer in modern history at the University of Rome “La Sapienza”, agrees. She remarks: “in its attempt to oppose the racial laws, the ‘voice’ of the Holy See was actually stronger than that of the Slovak Catholic hierarchy. In particular, it is worth recalling the efforts made by the then Secretary of State, Cardinal Luigi Maglione, and by Msgr. Giuseppe Burzio, Vatican chargé d’affaires in Bratislava”. According to WALTER BRANDMÜLLER, “the position of the Pope was very delicate in those years, given that in the wartime situation he had to maintain a severe impartiality so that no one could accuse him of supporting either the one side or the other”. Only in this way “could the presuppositions be created for the Holy See to play a mediating role, by avoiding any false steps that could have compromised its operation and been exploited for propaganda purposes”. The Pope, besides, “possessed no means of political or economic power, other than the force of arguments”. That explains, according to Brandmüller, the “caution” of the diplomatic language and “public expressions of the Pope”, aimed at “not precluding any channel and maintaining open any opportunity for dialogue”.