HIDDEN ENCYCLICAL

Passelecq, Georges, & Bernard Suchecky. THE HIDDEN ENCYCLICAL OF PIUS XI. Introd. by Garry Wills. Harcourt Brace 1997. 319pp. $25
This book, translated from the French, is an incomplete history of a document prepared at the invitation of Pius XI. On June 22, 1938, Pius XI directly requested the American Jesuit, Father John Lafarge, to write "as if you were the pope" a statement on the matter of racism and anti-semiticism. After consulting with the Superior General of the Society of Jesus, Fr. LaFarge set to work with two other Jesuit fathers, the French Gustave Desbuquois and the German Gustav Grundlach. The result was three versions (from the American, the Frenchman, and the German) which were "not always coherent or identical" and "cannot be considered a true pontifical document, but at most a draft". Pius XII recast some parts for use in his first encyclical Summi Pontificatus issued in October 1939.
The dust jacket blurb, looking for a selling point, would turn this into a "smoking gun" to be used "against" Pius XI, and his successor, Pius XII, as yet another instance of their "failure" to address the persecution of Jews. With its careful documentation (apart the irrevelant animadversions), the book instead raises questions about the role of the Society of Jesus in the period. For six decades prior to Pius XI's request, the Italian Jesuit periodical La Civilta Cattolica had not been behind-hand in its suspicion of Jews. So much was this case that the official journal Il Regime Fascista in August 1938 mockingly reported that it would be reluctant to accept the suggestions of the Jesuit fathers for segregating and marking Jews. The Jesuit journal had maintained its suspicion and comments about Jews until it was silenced, probably by the pope in July 1938, when against the threats of the Fascist government, he openly condemned the racial laws adopted by Mussolini in June of that year.
It is not unlikely that the pope's direct request to the American Jesuit was an indirect reproach to the Superior General. In 1966, his successor, Father Pedro Arrupe, warned his Jesuit fathers against a "too rigid concept of truth where personal opinions are sometimes confused with Divine Revelation". The book itself is suffused with a spirit bordering on contempt for Pius XI, and hostility towards Pius XII. A useful antidote to this spirit is Pinchas Lapide's Three Popes & the Jews. Mr. Pinchas (who has not much love for the Church) gives a better balanced account, with much detail, of the unceasing activities of the popes in a period, marked by great economic depression and an explosively unstable condition of society, worldwide. The wonder is that the popes were able to do as much as they did in face of the direct hostility of the persecutors, and the all-too-human inertia of political and ecclesiastical institutions.

The American edition of this flawed book contains a preface by Professor Garry Wills. A 1957 graduate of the midwestern Jesuit school, St. Louis College, Professor Wills has been littering the American publishing scene with half-cooked opinions for several decades. He tells us that "the Gospels are not a historical record". (Cf. 1 Corinthians 15 on this theory). He refers to the trial of Jesus before the Sanhedrin as "fictive". What he probably means (the fuzziness of his prose makes it difficult to determine) is that the trial was a kangaroo court, with no standing in Jewish law: a "trial" that would be condemned by Jews. The preface is a fine example of Alexander Pope's dictum, with its careful choice of words: "A little learning is a dangerous thing".
The title of the first encyclical ever written in German, Mit brennender Sorge - a joint work of Pius XI and his successor Pius XII - expresses admirably their worry about the situation in Germany. An inadequate translation into English would be something along the lines of "With searing concern ...". (But a better understanding can only come with some study of the language). Mr. Pinchas wrote truly when he acknowledged that his three popes knew that "Synagogue and Church are hewn from the same rock". It is a great promise that the rock will not give way, much as the enemy will try. Those who would easily criticize the work of lighthouse-keepers during a great storm should try their hand at it. Monday morning quarterbacking is a harmless past-time for boyish amateurs; it treats but of football games. The situation in the late 1930s was a different kind of game, played for human souls.
The Gallicans - German and French - were annoyed at the interference of the popes in "internal politics". Mit brennender Sorge had to be smuggled into Germany; its publication led to many arrests. Just so now our Gallicans - Americans like Prof. Wills included - are annoyed at the interference of the pope in the "internal politics" of birth prevention and abortion and euthanasia and economic embargoes and the fictive, but not fictitious, debt of impoverished countries. The cheap chatter about the "failure" of the popes Pius XI and Pius XII to wave a magical encyclical which would bring to a sudden halt the persecutions of the 1930s comes across as an attempt to distract from the efforts of their successors - who also are not possessed of "magical" formulas - to admonish and to warn. They cannot do it for us.