Six questions to John Paul II about Edith Stein

In St Peter's Square in the Vatican, on Sunday 11 October 1998, Pope John Paul II conducted the canonisation of Teresa Benedicta of the Cross (Edith Stein in her secular life), a Carmelite nun of Jewish origin who was born in Breslau, lower Silesia on 12 October 1896 and who, according to the official version, died at Auschwitz, upper Silesia on 9 August 1942. In the course of his homily the pope stated:

Because she was Jewish, Edith Stein was taken with her sister Rosa and many other Catholic Jews from the Netherlands to the concentration camp in Auschwitz, where she died with them in the gas chambers [1].

The end of this sentence implies that, for the pope, the Nazi gas chambers did indeed exist. Never until this time had John Paul II or any other pope before him thus taken the responsibility to assert the existence and the functioning of veritable chemical slaughterhouses in a German concentration camp. Pius XII in particular, who died in 1958, had always refrained from doing so and, like him, his contemporaries Churchill, Eisenhower, and de Gaulle refused to mention either genocide or gas chambers in the war memoirs which they wrote between 1948 and 1959.

Why did John Paul II take this extraordinary initiative, and what evidence did he have at his disposal to assert the existence of those gas chambers, then to specify that Edith Stein, her sister Rosa, and numerous other Jews from Holland had met their deaths in such gas chambers at Auschwitz?

Moreover, John Paul II added in the same homily:

From now on, as we celebrate the memory of this new saint from year to year, we must also remember the Shoah, that cruel plan to exterminate a people, a plan to which millions of our Jewish brothers and sisters fell victim.

There too, a question arises: what evidence did the pope have, on the one hand, to assert the existence of a programme aiming to eliminate the Jewish people and, on the other hand, to put forth the figure of several million victims of that programme? No historian (and particularly not Raul Hilberg) today dare claim to have found the least trace of such a plan, whether in the "Wannsee Protocol" or anywhere else; as for the millions of Jewish victims, where or when has the breakdown of Jewish losses ever been done?

With these questions and a few others in mind, I have consulted, in the vast bibliography devoted to E. Stein, first a work of reference published in France in 1990, then three recent books which have come out in 1998 and, finally, quite a number of articles in various languages. I am conscious of the fact that this has been a limited inquiry. Naturally, if permission to do so were granted to revisionists, I should consult, first, the extremely rich archives of the International Tracing Service (ITS), located at Arolsen-Waldeck in Germany; unhappily these archives are kept under close supervision, notably at the behest of the State of Israel. The dossier which was put together with a view to E. Stein's beatification, then her canonisation, would also interest me but the Vatican does not allow such consultation. I am thus reduced to requesting of the Vatican authorities, and of the pope in particular, the favour of a response to the six questions put forth in my conclusion and to certain others which may be noted in the body of the present text.

From the various publications I have consulted, it emerges that in reality it is not known where, when, or how E. Stein and her sister died. Thus it seems clear that one cannot rightly state as certain that they were 1) killed, 2) in one or more gas chambers at Auschwitz, 3) on 9 August 1942 (that being the date of death sanctioned by numerous authors as well as by the pope, who has expressed his desire to make the anniversary of E. Stein's demise a day of commemoration, for the entire Roman Catholic church, of the "Shoah").

The Auschwitz "calendar"

According to the 1989 edition of Danuta Czech's "Auschwitz calendar of events", E. Stein, her sister Rosa, and 985 other Jews were deported from the camp of Westerbork in the Netherlands, arriving at Auschwitz on the 8th (and not the 9th) of August 1942. D. Czech would have her readers believe that of these 987 Jews, 464 were registered for work (315 men and 149 women), while the other 523 were immediately gassed [2]. As always in the "calendar", this latter assertion is not supported by any evidence; thus, for that matter, a number of Jews who, as I have been able to show, survived the war are listed by this "calendar" as having been gassed. These 523 persons, of whom D. Czech seems to have found no trace in the camp archives, may well have been set down at Cosel (a stop along the way) or, just as well, been sent directly to one of the sub-camps of the Auschwitz complex, or to any other concentration or labour camp.

According to Sister Waltraud Herbstrith's book

In Das Wahre Gesicht Edith Steins (published in English under the title Edith Stein, a biography), generally considered as a work of reference, Sister Waltraud Herbstrith writes:

The Dutch official state journal of 16 February 1950 carried the names of all of the Jews who had been deported from Holland on 7 August [1942]. In list no. 34 one may read "Number 44074, Edith Theresia Hedwig Stein, born 12 October 1891 in Breslau [Silesia], [transported] from Echt [Netherlands], died 9 August 1942" [3].

And she goes on to add:

As it was acknowledged legally that no-one from that convoy had survived, the 9th of August [1942] was declared the victims' date of decease [4].

It will be noted that this official journal does not specify the date of E. Stein's death and that W. Herbstrith declares that date to be "acknowledged legally" ("gerichtnotorisch feststand"), all of which implies that no real investigation has ever been carried out; this purported date of decease is the result of speculation, as happens in France with what is known as a "jugement déclaratif de décès" ("declaratory finding of decease") [5].

According to the French weekly La Vie

A passage in a recent article in La Vie (formerly La Vie catholique illustrée) reads as follows:

[E. Stein was] executed in obscure conditions, doubtless in Auschwitz, officially the 9th of August 1942 [6].

It will be noted that the author of the article acknowledges that the date and place of E. Stein's death are not really known; as for the choice of the word "executed", it is abusive since, as it is unclear where and when her death occurred, it can hardly be known how it occurred.

According to the book by Joachim Bouflet

In his Edith Stein, philosophe crucifiée, Joachim Bouflet writes:

[E. Stein was deported] to the East. To Auschwitz where she was to be gassed on arrival, the 9th of August, with her sister Rosa [7].

And adds, in his "chronology":

9 August 1942: gassed with her sister Rosa at Auschwitz-Birkenau.

It will be noted that the author (apparently unaware that the Steins' convoy arrived at Auschwitz on the 8th of August and not the 9th) points out, on the faith of one knows not what evidence, that the "gassing" took place at Birkenau; at that date, according to the vulgate, this "gassing" could have occurred either at Auschwitz I or at a Birkenau "farm".

According to the book by Bernard Molter

In Edith Stein, martyre juive de confession chrétienne, Bernard Molter writes:

On 7 August, the [Dutch] convoy departs. For the East. Then, silence. The great silence of Auschwitz-Birkenau where [E. Stein] is exterminated, probably upon arrival on 9 August [8].

And he adds, in his "Repères biographiques" ("Important dates"):

Probably on the 9th of August, she is gassed to death at Auschwitz-Birkenau.

One will note that the author who, once again, seems not to know that the convoy arrived at Auschwitz on 8 August rather than 9 August, has the honesty to write that it is "probably" on that latter date that E. Stein died. As for the word "exterminated", it is all the more abusive here as such a word can be applied only to a group of persons, not to an individual. In writing: "On 7 August, the convoy departs. For the East. Then, silence", the author has brushed against reality; he ought to have stopped there and not added the next sentence.

According to the book by Christian Feldmann

In Edith Stein; Jüdin, Philosophin, Ordensfrau ("Edith Stein; Jewess, Philosopher, Nun") German author Christian Feldmann writes:

According to the information of the Ministry of Justice [of which country?], Edith and Rosa Stein were gassed immediately after their arrival at Auschwitz, on 9 August 1942 [9].

According to Bernard Dupuy's study

In a study entitled "Edith Stein dans les griffes de la Gestapo/Précisions nouvelles sur son envoi en déportation" ("Edith Stein in the Clutches of the Gestapo / New Information on her Deportation"), Bernard Dupuy writes:

Two hundred forty Catholic Jews [among whom E. and R. Stein], identified, arrested, and deported together would seem to have been sent to the gas chambers just after arriving at Auschwitz-Birkenau on 9 August [10].

The author, who acknowledges his debt to W. Herbstrith's work of reference and to the book by J. Bouflet, has the prudence to put that sentence in the conditional but, unlike those by whom he is inspired, he is imprudent enough to tack on the assertion that all of the Catholic Jews would seem to have been, like E. and R. Stein, gassed on 9 August [for: 8 August].

A Widespread Plagiary?

In short, all of these authors seem to have copied one another, or drawn on the same poor and doubtful source, and each of them, finally, adorns the traditional account with a few inventions of his own.

One may consider the question whether the pope or his counsellors have not, in turn, merely repeated the same hackneyed story of the fate of E. Stein and the other Jews in her convoy without taking the trouble to verify any of it.

Another Question: May E. Stein have died of Typhus ?

If E. Stein did indeed arrive at Auschwitz in August 1942, may she not have perished in one of the dreadful typhoid epidemics which ravaged the camp at the time? Even the town of Auschwitz was touched by them. A number of Germans, including some SS physicians, died of typhus in the camp.

Another Question: Did any members of the Stein family survive the war?

The pope in his homily saluted:

the many pilgrims who have come to Rome, particularly the members of the Stein family who have wanted to be with us on this joyful occasion.

Admittedly, some members of her family had left Europe in time but others remained, in Breslau for instance. Thus one may read in W. Herbstrith's book:

On 28 July [1942] there came [to E. Stein's knowledge] the terrible news that Edith Stein's brothers and sisters in Breslau, the family of her brother Paul, and her sister Freida had been taken to Theresienstadt [11].

It would be interesting to know the fate of these persons. Did any of them survive the war? If so, were any of their children, born after the war, in attendance at the ceremony?

Were the Dutch bishops primarily responsible for this deportation?

We are often told that the occupying power cynically deceived the Catholic bishops of the Netherlands: that after having assured them that converted Jews would not be affected by any coercive measures, the Germans, suddenly going back on their word, decided to deport such Jews. But is the truth perhaps altogether different? Did the Dutch Roman Catholic Church perhaps first break its explicit or implicit commitments, then adopt a resolutely provocative attitude towards the occupying forces?

To reply to this grave question, let us compare passages in two of the biographies, referring first to words in C. Feldmann's book which express the anti-German point of view, then to an extract of a document in the book by W. Herbstrith, which shows the German wartime point of view.

C. Feldmann writes:

On 11 July 1942, the spiritual leaders of all [Christian] denominations sent a telegram to the Commissar of the Reich, Seyss-Inquart, in which they protested against the deportation of Jewish families. — To fool everyone, the authorities of the Reich had given assurances that converted Jews were not to be affected by coercive measures. But that did not deter the Churches of the Netherlands from declaring their solidarity with the persecuted Jews. A heated protest against the deportation of Jewish families was read out on 26 July in all the churches of Holland, of all denominations. In the Catholic churches, a pastoral letter asking that all believers make a self-criticism was read out in addition to the protestation: "[…] Have we not nourished feelings of impious hatred and bitterness?" The letter ended with a prayer which was quite provocative in regard to the occupying forces […]. Such outspoken resistance to the cowing of public conscience could obviously not be tolerated. Still less so as the clergy had violated Reich Commissar Seyss-Inquart's express prohibition of the reading out in church of the protest telegram which had been addressed to him. The Nazi occupying authorities reacted violently on 2 August […]. They arrested all Catholic Jews, priests and nuns included, 1,200 persons all told, according to some estimates [12].

The reader may note that, even in the eyes of an author very favourable to the cause of the Jews and Catholics, the attitude which the bishops had adopted, in this particular case, was a deliberately provocative one. "A heated protest… a prayer which was quite provocative… Such outspoken resistance… the clergy had violated Reich Commissar Seyss-Inquart's express prohibition": such are the words chosen by C. Feldmann. But there is another point, appreciably more important, which deserves to be stressed and which raises another question: how is it that the Germans arrested the Catholic Jews without at the same time arresting the Protestant ones? How is this difference of reaction to be explained? Is there not a precise reason for this anomaly?

The answer to these questions seems to lie in a German document which C. Feldmann passes over in silence and which W. Herbstrith, unfortunately, cites only in part. It emerges from this document that, for the Germans, the Catholic Church and the various Protestant denominations had been advised that they could intervene in favour of their brethren of Jewish descent but not in favour of unconverted Jews. If these churches looked after their flocks, the Germans would not take action against those among them who were of Jewish blood. A key passage reads:

The Protestant authorities are not averse to this way of seeing things and have not, for their part, incited any [such] demonstration or prayer in their churches. On the contrary, the Catholic Church, this past Sunday, spoke during its services of the deportation of the Jews. This, according to its leaders, was due to the fact that the Reich Commissar's point of view had not become known everywhere in time [13].

It can be seen there that, from the German authorities' standpoint, the Catholic Church had feigned ignorance of a warning, a promise, and an express prohibition which the Protestant churches, for their part, had heeded. It may well be that, in some Protestant houses of worship, the hierarchy's instructions were at times disregarded but it was the Catholic Church which, at the highest national level, chose not to take heed in the least of the occupying authorities' warning, promise, and express prohibition; it even added to its refusal an act of defiance: it had the protest telegram read out in public, along with the pastoral letter.

That being the case, can it not reasonably be said that it was this refusal to heed, this defiance on the part of the Church, which prompted Edith Stein's deportation? One may deem the Dutch Catholic Church's initiative courageous, just as one may consider bombings and assassinations, carried out by terrorists or resistance fighters, to be justified but, come the time for reprisals — inevitable in the case at hand, according to C. Feldmann himself— where are those who are primarily responsible to be found? Would not E. Stein, R. Stein, and the other Catholic Jews have been spared a deportation which, for some, resulted in death, if the Dutch Catholic Church had behaved in the same way as the Protestant churches? Without meaning to offend anybody, may one not rightfully pose that question?

Why are there such discrepancies between the various translations of the homily?

The Vatican and its official daily newspaper l'Osservatore Romano are known for the great care they take in rendering papal documents into various languages. They have no shortage of expert translators. Yet, after a comparison of the different versions (English, French, German, and Italian) of the 11 October homily, two questions arise:

1) How is it that a passage in the German and English versions relates that Edith and Rosa Stein were deported along with "many other Catholic Jews from the Netherlands" whereas, in the French and Italian versions, the word "Catholic" does not appear in the corresponding sentence?

2) Why is the French version hebraised in the sense that, while the others mention the Lord ("der Herr", "il Signore"), it instead speaks of Yahvé?

Conclusion

Through the agency of l'Osservatore Romano, to which I address the present text in order that it be passed on to the proper authority in the Vatican, I hereby take the liberty, in summing up, of asking the following questions of John Paul II, in the hope of receiving a reply which I may, with his permission, duly make public:

1. What evidence have you that may establish the death of Edith Stein in an execution gas chamber at Auschwitz on 9 August 1942?

2. What evidence have you of the existence of a German government plan for the physical elimination of the Jewish people?

3. Have you ordered an investigation, particularly in conjunction with the International Tracing Service (ITS) at Arolsen-Waldeck, to determine whether, for example, Edith and Rosa Stein did not die elsewhere than at Auschwitz or did not fall victim to the typhus epidemics which, notably in 1942, ravaged the Auschwitz camp to the point of causing hundreds of deaths per day, sparing neither German guards nor SS camp physicians?

4. Did any members of the Stein family who were interned by the Germans survive the war, and, if so, were any such relatives present at the canonisation ceremony at the Vatican on 11 October 1998?

5. Does the primary responsibility for the German decision to deport the Catholic Jews of the Netherlands not lie with the country's wartime Roman Catholic bishops who, unlike the Protestant authorities, seem to have inspired — or at least knowingly allowed — actions which were likely to prompt such a decision?

6. Why are there such serious discrepancies between the various translations of the homily which you pronounced on 11 October 1998?

N.B. The young French historian Vincent Reynouard has recently published a revisionist examination of the case of Edith Stein; see "Sur Edith Stein", ANEC Informations (BP 21, 44530 ST GILDAS DES BOIS, France), October 29, 1998, p. 3-5.

November 4, 1998

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Notes

[1] L'Osservatore Romano, weekly English language edition, 14 October 1998, p.1.

[2] Danuta Czech, Kalendarium der Ereignisse im Konzentrationslager Auschwitz-Birkenau 1939-1945, Hamburg, Rowohlt, 1989, p. 269.

[3] Waltraud Herbstrith, Das Wahre Gesicht Edith Steins ("The True Face of Edith Stein"), Aschaffenburg, Kaffke-Verlag, 1987 [1971], verbesserte Auflage [revised and corrected edition], p. 176. (Work published in English translation under the title Edith Stein, a biography, San Francisco, Ignatius Press, 1992 [1985].)

[4] Ibid.

[5] When the date of a deportee's death is not known, the registry office holds it to be the date on which that person is ascertained or presumed to have arrived in a given camp. In certain Jewish cemeteries in Germany there are headstones bearing mention, in their inscriptions, of the same date of death and the same camp for two or three family members; thus the observer is led to believe that these persons were simultaneously murdered in one particular camp, whereas in reality they may well have perished separately, i.e. on different dates, of different causes, in different circumstances, even in different camps.

[6] Jean-Pierre Manigne, "Edith Stein, juive et martyre", La Vie, 8 October 1998, p. 71.

[7] Joachim Bouflet, Edith Stein, philosophe crucifiée, Presses de la Renaissance, 1998, p. 273.

[8] Bernard Molter, Edith Stein, martyre juive de confession chrétienne, Paris, Cana, 1998, p. 145.

[9] Christian Feldmann, Edith Stein : juive, athée, moniale ("Edith Stein: Jewess, Atheist, Nun", French translation by Yvan Mudry of Edith Stein; Jüdin, Philosophin, Ordensfrau ["Edith Stein: Jewess, Philosopher, Nun"], Freiburg, Herder, 1987) Paris, Saint-Augustin, 1998, p. 144.

[10] Bernard Dupuy, "Edith Stein dans les griffes de la Gestapo / Précisions nouvelles sur son envoi en déportation", Istina (Paris) no. XLIII (1998), p. 289.

[11] Waltraud Herbstrith, op. cit. , p. 165.

[12] Christian Feldmann, op. cit. , p. 138-139.

[13] Waltraud Herbstrith, op. cit. , p. 177.

A Fake: "John XXIII's Prayer for the Jews"

"We are conscious today that many many centuries of blindness have cloaked our eyes so that we can no longer either see the beauty of Thy Chosen People nor recognize in their faces the features of our privileged brethren. We realise that the mark of Cain stands upon our foreheads. Across the centuries our brother Abel has lain in the blood which we drew or shed the tears we caused by forgetting Thy Love. Forgive us for the curse we falsely attached to their name as Jews. Forgive us for crucifying Thee a second time in their flesh. For we knew not what we did..."

This “prayer for the Jews” attributed to Pope John XXIII, who died on June 3, 1963, is a fake. This fake appeared in January 1965 in a “report” of the American Jewish magazine Commentary entitled “Vatican II and the Jews” under the by-line “F. E. Cartus” which, the reader was told, “is the pseudonym of a Roman Catholic observer who has watched developments at the Ecumenical Council very closely [1]”.

The text’s contents alone ought to have led the reader to think that a Pope, even one who was so very favourable to the Jews as Angelo Roncalli (1881-1963), could hardly express himself in such terms with regard to Catholics. The “prayer” amounts, in effect, to saying: the Jews are beautiful; they are God’s chosen people; on their faces they bear the traits of our privileged brothers. For centuries, the Jews have shed blood and tears. We Catholics have been blind to all this. Our own faces are hideous in that they bear the mark of Cain. We are responsible for the blood and the tears shed by the Jews. We have forgotten the love of God. We have lied in inventing the account telling that God cursed the Jews. It is we — and not the Jews ­— who have crucified God. We were men unaware.

This text is excessive: it exudes too much hatred for some and too much love for others.

In following the destiny of this “prayer” chronologically in the press, in France alone, from 1966 to the present day, one may notice that the fake was at first very quickly denounced, and that then, in the face of the repeated assaults by certain persons in favour of a text that was so interesting for the Jewish cause, the truth began to be silenced; soon the public was led to believe that it was an authentic document. The daily Le Monde, for instance, would try for a few years to put its readers on their guard against the fake, which it cautiously presented as “apocryphal”, then abandoned any effort at clarification and even, as will be seen below, ended up giving the fake its implicit endorsement.

1966

In October 1966, under the heading “Une prière de Jean XXIII pour les juifs”, La Documentation catholique published a text presented as the reprint of an article from La Liberté of Friburg (Switzerland) of September 9, which began thus:

Vatican circles confirmed on September 7 the existence and authenticity of a prayer drafted by John XXIII only a few days before his death in which he asks forgiveness of God for all the hardships that the Church has caused the Jews.

The existence of this prayer which, according to its author’s intentions, was to have been recited in all churches, had been announced recently during a lecture given in Chicago by Mgr John S. Quinn, who was one of the Council experts [2].

There followed the text of the “prayer”. No precision was supplied as to “the Vatican circles” that had, reportedly, confirmed the item’s authenticity, nor as to the source enabling the writer to state that, in line with the late Pope’s intention, the “prayer” was to have been read out in all churches.

A month later, La Documentation catholique published a disclaimer entitled “La prière de Jean XXIII pour les juifs est un faux” (“The prayer for the Jews is a fake”). Here is the full text of that disclaimer:

The office of the Secretary of State [of the Vatican] issued, on October 26, the following release concerning the so-called prayer of John XXIII published in our edition of October 2, col. 1728, in which we echoed certain press information, adding no comments of our own:

“La Documentation catholique (October 2, 1966, n° 1479, col. 1728) reproduced, after La Liberté of Friburg of September 9, a ‘prayer of John XXIII for the Jews’ and stated that Vatican circles had confirmed its authenticity.

“It is, in reality, a fake.

“La Liberté of Friburg took the text in question from the Dutch newspaper De Tijd of March 18, 1965. De Tijd had got it from American Commentary of Chicago (organ of the American Jewish Committee) of January 1965, where it had appeared under a pseudonym (‘F. E. Cartus’) without any indication of source or of authentification. The very fact of its publication under a pseudonym ought to have put readers on their guard. Mgr Quinn, who is from Chicago, made this prayer his own (in all good faith, one may believe) and spoke about it at an interfaith gathering.

“No bureau of the Vatican can have confirmed the authenticity of this prayer, which exists neither at the Apostolic Penitentiary, nor in the writings, whether printed or not, of Pope John XXIII.

“Mgr Loris Capovilla, the trustee of those writings, denies without hesitation this prayer’s authenticity.

“Moreover, a careful examination of the text makes it apparent that, in style and vocabulary, the prayer is alien to the late lamented Pontiff [3].”

Shortly before, the French daily Le Monde had published an article entitled “La prière de Jean XXIII pour les juifs est apocryphe” (“John XXIII’s prayer for the Jews is apocryphal”). The article was presented as coming from the paper’s own Rome correspondent and bore the date October 26. It began with the words:

“The prayer for the Jews attributed to Pope John XXIII is apocryphal”. Such is the categorical assertion that we have received from a competent Vatican source.

The rest of the article showed that the Le Monde reporter and the author of the piece published in La Documentation catholique of November 6 had drawn on the same source, in Rome. But Le Monde made three “smoothings-over”. Instead of a clear heading, it chose an obscure and inexact one; “apocryphal”, a rather rare word, signifies: of doubtful authenticity. Instead of mentioning that the text had originated with Commentary, organ of the American Jewish Committee, it was content with saying “[this prayer] has been published in the United States.” Finally, to depreciate a bit more what it called “the assertion” (proposition put forth as true) of a competent Vatican source, the newspaper added the following remark:

This disclaimer concerns quite precisely solely this text. It should hardly call into question the attitude of Pope John who expressed, as is known, his desire to include in the Council’s documents a declaration on the Jews the main author of which was Cardinal Béa [4].

1967

Six months after that word of caution from Le Monde, Henri Fesquet, its special correspondent in Lyon at the French Congress of Judeo-Christian Friendship, nevertheless began his piece in these terms:

The epic event of the State of Israel’s rebirth, despite the ambiguity of its significance, surpassed the world’s expectations whilst the Roman Church gave itself a Pope who was truly attentive to the beseeching of Jules Isaac, author of L’Enseignement du mépris [English edition: The Teaching of Contempt: Christian roots of anti-Semitism]; did John XXIII not admit: “The sign of Cain is etched on our foreheads. Centuries and centuries of blindness have closed our eyes. Forgive us, Lord, for having crucified Thee a second time in the flesh of the Jews. For we knew not what we did [5]”?

Henri Fesquet’s version may be compared with the counterfeiters’ original.

Some days later, Le Monde issued a rectification under the simple heading “Jean XXIII et les juifs”. It confided that the bit of the “prayer” quoted by its correspondent had been “taken from Mr P.E. Lapide’s book Rome et les Juifs, just published — translated from the English [English title: The Last three Popes and the Jews] — by the éditions du Seuil”. After this advertisement for a work containing a forgery, it added that Mgr Capovilla had “belatedly [sic] denied the [prayer’s] authenticity [6]”.

1974-1975

In its issue dated December 31, 1974, Le Monde printed a letter from “Mr Paul Samuel, of Paris” under the heading “L’UNESCO, le Vatican et Israël”. It was a protest against the Vatican’s award of the John XXIII prize to UNESCO. Mr Samuel considered that UNESCO, in excluding Israel, had obeyed “the dictatorship of oil totalitarianism”; as for the Vatican’s decision, he criticised it, deeming that “the greatest Pope of the twentieth century, John XXIII, would not have acted in this way”. And he proceeded to quote the text of the “prayer”. Le Monde agreed to publish this letter although it contained a fake: a fake against which the paper no longer thought it necessary to put its readers on guard [7].

Irony had it that some Jews, probably moved and delighted at discovering the “prayer”, should write to the newspaper expressing their surprise at the silence hitherto surrounding that document. Such was the case with “Mr and Mrs Léon Zack of Vanves”. It was necessary indeed to resign to issuing a disclaimer. But Le Monde’s assumed such a form that the reader might believe that the “apocryphal text” had been circulated with the good (or bad) faith by Commentary (there being no indication of the review’s Jewish character) and “various organs in Europe, including La Documentation catholique”. The headline chosen was “À propos de la prière apocryphe de Jean XXIII sur les juifs [8]”.

1983

In Le Monde of January 30, 1983, Alexandre Szombat wrote a purported “Inquiry into the murder of Theodor Erich von Furtenbach who called himself a Nazi”. One sentence read:

After the war, the Church quit the path of error along which it had strayed and a Pope himself acknowledged “the sign of Cain on our foreheads”.

Those words were attributed to a “witness” to the murder, a murder which, let it be said in passing, was to earn the perpetrator but a single day in jail; he had done a pious deed [9].

1989

In September of 1989, in a programme on the French television channel La Cinq about the Auschwitz Carmelite convent, Jean Kahn, president of the Conseil représentatif des institutions juives de France (CRIF), read aloud John XXIII’s “prayer” before the Jesuit theologian Father Martelet. Father Martelet steered clear of pointing out that it was a forgery.

The following month, on the occasion of the Jewish new year, the same Jean Kahn gave an interview to two Le Monde reporters, Patrice Jarreau and Henri Tincq, during which he stated:

[Mgr Decourtray] has decided, also, to send all parishes [of his diocese] a copy of the last prayer composed by John XXIII, regretting the centuries of the Church’s contempt for the Jewish people, for it to be read aloud by the priests [10].

In a brief letter of the following day, a reader of the paper wrote to its managing editor, André Fontaine:

Jean Kahn, president of the Conseil représentatif des institutions juives de France (CRIF), has asserted to you (Le Monde, October 3, 1989) that Cardinal Decourtray has decided to send “John XXIII’s prayer for the Jews” to all [his] parishes. I am surprised that on this occasion your paper, which printed that statement in an “interview” with Jean Kahn, should not have thought it necessary to recall, as it has done at least once in the past, in 1974 or thereabouts, that this prayer is nothing but a fake; you spoke euphemistically at the time of an “apocryphal” text. I await your rectification [11].

The rectification never came and the letter “for publication” was not published. I am unaware whether Cardinal Decourtray ever intended to circulate the bogus prayer or whether that was a project abusively ascribed to him by Jean Kahn. Perhaps the Cardinal of Lyon had that intention and perhaps he even put it into effect. Jean Kahn is a case. He would seem to be endowed with a “particular sensitivity” and with an “extra bit of soul”; amongst his coreligionists there would seem to exist, in effect, “a particular sensitivity that makes the Jewish voter a voter with an extra bit of soul [12]”. For him, French Jews are “Frenchmen often more patriotic than the others [13]”.

Thus was the daily Le Monde, following a tradition of its own observed in such cases, to have dealt with the subject in an oblique manner all throughout the period from 1966 to 1989.

The officials of the American Jewish Committee took part, in their style, in the campaign directed towards the Vatican and Paul VI to have the Catholic Church proceed to unburden the Jews of their responsibility in “the sentencing to death of Jesus Christ”. As the reader may recall, texts in the Good Friday service denounce the “perfidious Jews” who had demanded that sentence of Pontius Pilate:

[The Jews] wished to lay all the blame for their crime on the person of the [Roman] judge; but could they fool God, who is also a judge? Pilate was a participant in their crime to the extent of what he did: but, if compared with them, he is to be found much less criminal [14].

In 1965, organised Jewry was hoping that the Vatican II Ecumenical Council would declare unambiguously the non-perfidy of the Jews and their absence of responsibility in Christ’s being condemned to death. But, the longer the Council ran on, the more it appeared that the Vatican was hesitating, especially in the face of pressure from the Eastern Catholics.

All told, the “Declaration on the Relation of the Church to Non-Christian Religions (Nostra Ætate)” of October 28, 1965 made broad concessions to the Jews but disappointed them.

This is a little-known point and, today, rumour will have it that the Church, in 1965, withdrew the charge of perfidy along with that of any responsibility in Christ’s sentencing. The truth is different. The Council remembered “the bond that spiritually ties the people of the New Covenant to Abraham's stock”, decried and deplored anti-semitism, said that “Christ underwent His passion and death freely, because of the sins of men and out of infinite love, in order that all may reach salvation”. It insisted that “the Jews should not be presented as rejected or accursed by God, as if this followed from the Holy Scriptures”.

But some words — eight in the Latin text — recalled all the same, in a concessive clause, that “the Jewish authorities and those who followed their lead pressed for the death of Christ (auctotitates Judæorum cum suis asseclis mortem Christi urserunt). The Council fathers could not, after all, alter the contents of the Gospel account [15].

Jacob Kaplan, chief rabbi of France from 1955 to 1980, whilst expressing his gladness at certain features of the declaration, would write:

What was hoped of Vatican II was above all a rejection of the charge of deicide brought against the Jews. One was entitled to hope for it. As is known, there were three projects on the matter. The first in 1963, the second in 1964, the last which became definitive in 1965. However, the 1964 version (the second) effectively rejected the charge of deicide, but in the last one there was no mention of it. It was quite simply eliminated. What had happened? An article in Le Monde (June 19, 1987) lets us know. In the review of a book written in English by an orientalist of some authority, Bernard Lewis, a passage of the author’s Sémites et Antisémites [Semites and Anti-semites: an inquiry into conflict and prejudice] is given in which he reports on the pressures brought to bear on the Vatican by Arab nations in order that the Jews not be exculpated from the crime of deicide. The Vatican yielded. Regretting the elimination, Cardinal Liénart of Lyon could not help saying: “One might believe that the Council did not wish to clear the Jewish people of the charge of deicide [16]”.

1990

Today other struggles mobilise the Jews in their demands on the Catholics.

A recent article in Le Monde by Henri Tincq recalls that, in the affair of the Auschwitz Carmelites, the Jews have obtained satisfaction and the nuns will have to leave their place of prayer on the edge of the camp for a centre of dialogue and research on the Shoah [17]. The Catholics have already laid out large sums of money for the centre’s construction but Pope John Paul II has announced the freeing of an additional $100,000 to speed up the work.

Still, the Pope remains suspect and, as the Le Monde reporter says, “proceedings for ‘revisionism’ have been instituted against John Paul II”. The Pope is taking too long to bring out a document that he had, in September 1987, promised to draft on the “Holocaust” and that was to endorse the notion of the Nazi gas chambers’ reality [18]. He is too interested in the project of Queen Isabella the Catholic’s beatification. The Jews, with the support of Mgr Lustiger, Cardinal of Paris and an ethnic Jew himself, are striving to prevent the beatification of a “too Catholic” Queen, guilty of having, in 1492, issued the edict banishing the Jews from her realm, a deed done under the influence of Grand Inquisitor Torquemada who, it is said, had abjured his original faith: Judaism.

The myth of “John XXIII’s prayer for the Jews” is far from vigorous, but it lingers discreetly and, thanks to that very discretion, it may yet survive for a fair number of years.

As for the American Jewish Committee, still in good stride, it has recently announced two false news items: according to its Paris correspondent (?), Roger Kaplan, the Fabius-Gayssot bill has not been passed and Faurisson is deceased.

November 29, 1990

The original French text of this article was first published in the Revue d'histoire révisionniste, n° 3, November 1990-January 1991, p. 20-32. This English translation has appeared in print as an appendix to the author's booklet Pope Pius XII's Revisionism, Historical Review Press, Uckfield, United Kingdom, 1996 (www.ety.com/HRP). — Translator's note

Notes

[1] Commentary, monthly of the American Jewish Committee (New York, Chicago, Los Angeles), January 1965, n° 1, vol. 39, p. 19-29; the “prayer” appears on page 21.

[2] La Documentation catholique, October 2, 1966, col. 1728.

[3] La Documentation catholique, November 6, 1966, col. 1908-1909.

[4] Le Monde, October 27, 1966, p. 9.

[5] Le Monde, April 21, 1967, p. 11.

[6] Le Monde, May 7-8, 1967, p. 17.

[7] Le Monde, December 31, 1974, p. 4.

[8] Le Monde, February 2, 1975, p. 8.

[9] Le Monde, January 30, 1983, supplement, p. I, IV-V. Concerning the individual going by the name of “Szombat”, one may read an article that I devoted to him entitled: “Une enquête du Monde diplomatique sur les chambres à gaz (mars 1988)” in the Annales d’histoire révisionniste, n° 4, Spring 1988, p. 135-149, reprinted in volume II of my Écrits révisionnistes, op. cit., on pages 751-763.

[10] Le Monde, October 3, 1989, p. 16.

[11] Letter from Mr G. D., kindly conveyed to me by its author.

[12] Le Quotidien de Paris, February 11, 1986, p. 6.

[13] Le Figaro, November 20, 1989, p. 16. A piece to be read in parallel with André Glucksmann’s “L’Europe sera ‘juive’ ou ne sera pas” (Libération, April 16, 1982, p. 14) and with a statement by chief rabbi Sitruk: “Every French Jew is a representative of Israel” (Le Monde, AFP, July 12, 1990, p. 7), a remark that was to be distorted and softened by two Le Monde journalists who subsequently asked him: “During your latest trip to Israel, did you not state that every French Jew had to consider himself as a representative of Israel?” (Le Monde, report by Jean-Michel Dumay and Henri Tincq, September 30, 1990, p. 9).

[14] Dom Gaspard Lefebvre, Missel vespéral romain (quotidien), 1946 [1920], Good Friday, Tenebrae Service, 6^th lesson, p. 674.

[15] http://www.vatican.va/archive/hist_councils/ii_vatican_council/documents/vat-ii_decl_19651028_nostra-aetate_en.html.

[16] “Dossier juifs et catholiques en dialogue”, La Documentation catholique, July 3, 1988, p. 680.

[17] Le Monde, December 7, 1990, p. 1, 14.

[18] Nonetheless, on August 26, 1989, in a message to Polish bishops, he at last evoked the extermination of the Jews in the gas chambers. Then, on September 27, 1990, L’Osservatore Romano published on its front page an article about a “meditation of the Pope at Jasna Gora [Poland]”. John Paul II, it read, speaking of the Jews, had stated, in Polish: “This people underwent the terrible death of millions of their sons and daughters. At first they were stigmatised in a particular way. Later, they were pushed into the ghetto in separate neighbourhoods. Then they were taken to the gas-chambers, and put to death -- simply because they were children of this people (Poi portati alle camere a gas, dando loro la morte — soltanto perché erano figli di questo popolo)”. Barring an error on my part, John Paul II will thus have been the first Pope to sanction in that way — timidly, it is true — the existence of the homicidal gas chambers. (An English translation of the passage as quoted by a January 1991 “Pastoral Letter of the Catholic Bishops in Poland” appears at http://www.jcrelations.net/en/?id=1037 — Translator’s note)