The Confessor

could read and write and knew a great deal about Scripture and the Church. He convinced the boy to enter the seminary and study for the priesthood as a way to escape a life of poverty and prison. The boy agreed, and his life was forever changed.
    Throughout the Pope's account, Gabriel, Shamron, and Eli Lavon sat motionless and enthralled. Father Donati looked down at his notebook but his hands were still. When the Pope finished, a deep silence hung over the room, broken finally by Shamron.
    "What you must understand, Your Holiness, is that it was not our intention to uncover the information about the Garda covenant or your past. We only wanted to know who killed Benjamin Stern and why."
    "I am not angry with you for bringing me this information, Mr. Shamron. As painful as these documents are, they must be made public, so that they can be examined by historians and ordinary Jews and Catholics alike and placed in their proper context."
    Shamron laid the documents in front of the Pope. "We have no desire to make them public. We leave them in your hands to do with them what you will."
    The Pope tilted his head down at the papers, but his gaze was distant, his eyes lost in thought. "He was not as wicked as his enemies have made him out to be, our Pope Pius the Twelfth. But unfortunately, neither was he as virtuous as his defenders, the Church included, have claimed. He had his reasons for silence-- fear of dividing German Catholics, fear of German retaliation against the Vatican, a desire to play a diplomatic role as a peacemaker--but we must face the painful fact that the Allies wanted him to speak out against the Holocaust and Adolf Hitler wanted him to remain silent. For whatever reason--his hatred of Communism, his love of Germany, the fact that he was surrounded by Germans in his papal household--Pius chose the course Hitler wanted, and the shadow of that choice hangs over us to this day. He wanted to be a statesman when what the world needed most was a priest-- a man in a cassock to shout at the murderers at the top of his lungs
    to stop what they were doing, in the name of God and all that was decent."
    The Pope looked up and studied the faces before him--first Lavon, then Gabriel, then finally Shamron, where his gaze lingered longest. "We must face the uncomfortable fact that silence was a weapon in the hands of the Germans. It allowed the roundups and deportations to go forward with a minimum of resistance. There were hundreds, perhaps thousands, of Catholics who took part in rescuing Jews. But had the priests and nuns of Europe received instructions or simply the blessing from their pope to resist the Holocaust, many more Catholics would have sheltered Jews, and many more Jews would have survived the war as a result. Had the German episcopacy spoken up against the murder of Jews early on, it is possible that the Holocaust might never have reached its feverish pitch. Pope Pius knew that the wholesale mechanized murder of the European Jews was under way, but he chose to keep that information largely to himself. Why did he not tell the world? Why did he not even tell his bishops in the countries where roundups were taking place? Was he honoring a covenant of evil reached on the shores of a lake?"
    The Pope reached for the pot in the center of the table. When Father Donati leaned forward to help him, he raised his hand, as if to say His Holiness still knew how to pour a cup of tea. He spent a moment reflectively stirring in the milk and sugar before resuming.
    "I'm afraid the behavior of Pius is only one aspect of the war that needs examination. We must face the uncomfortable truth that, among Catholics, there were many more killers than there were rescuers. Catholic chaplains ministered to the very German forces committing the slaughter of the Jews. They heard their confessions and provided them the sacrament of Holy Communion. In Vichy France, Catholic priests actually helped French and German forces round up Jews for deportation and death. In Lithuania, the hierarchy actually forbade priests to rescue Jews. In Slovakia, a country ruled by a priest, the government actually paid the Germans to take away their Jews to the death camps. In Catholic Croatia, clergymen actually took part in the killings themselves. A Franciscan nicknamed Brother Satan ran a Croatian concentration camp where twenty thousand Jews were murdered." The Pope paused to sip his tea, as though he needed to remove a bitter taste from his mouth.