Truth vs. Hype: The policies of the Vatican under John Paul II regarding Jews and the Holocaust, Yugoslavia and El Salvador   

Part 3: As the Pope flew to Israel, a top adviser attacked the Jews

In which we examine the antisemitic accusations made by “important papal adviser” Peter Gumpel in a Vatican interview on the eve of Pope John Paul II’s trip to Israel, where, we are told, the Pope apologized for... antisemitism  

Written by Jared Israel, edited by Samantha Criscione
[17 May 2005]

Other parts of this series published so far:

Part 1, "Did the Pope Really Reject Church Antisemitism? Mr. Foxman's Mistake," go to
http://emperors-clothes.com/vatican/pope-1.htm

Part 2: "Mr. Laughland's adulation"
http://www.emperors-clothes.com/vatican/pope-2.htm

Also see the photo essay, "The Pictures Accuse: The Vatican and Nazism in Germany and Croatia," at
http://emperors-clothes.com/vatican/cpix.htm

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In Part II of this series, I noted that a papal adviser named Reverend Peter Gumpel has received an unusually large amount of media coverage, and that the coverage has been rather uncritical, considering that:

a) Reverend Gumpel is the main public defender of (or, as some would say, apologist for) Pope Pius XII, the man accused of being “Hitler’s Pope”;

b) and Reverend Gumpel has made two bitter, public attacks on the Jews.

Gumpel launched his second attack on 26 July 2001. The occasion was an until-then mild argument the Vatican was having with six historians, 3 Catholics and 3 Jews, members of a commission organized by the Vatican, ostensibly to study Pope Pius XII’s relation to the Nazis. On 20 July 2001, the commission sent the Vatican a letter, explaining that they couldn’t go on unless the Vatican allowed them access to critical archives:

“Without some positive response to our respectful case for material in the archives that has not been published, we could not maintain our credibility with the many voices, Catholic, Jewish, and others, who have called for greater availability of archival material.” [1]

Gumpel responded furiously, attacking “some Jewish members” of the commission in the harshest terms, accusing them of making groundless criticisms, the “objective being publicity to the detriment of the Holy See.” Gumpel’s statement was virtually a declaration of war; it began with the sentence, “In recent days, a violent attack has been unleashed again against the Catholic Church.” This was printed in L’Osservatore Romano, the newspaper of the Holy See, as an official Vatican statement. [2]

In part 2, I discussed John Laughland’s London Spectator article, which extravagantly praised Gumpel. Concerning the dispute with the historical commission, Laughland wrote:

“For various reasons, this commission collapsed in mutual recriminations last August, and Gumpel was instructed by the pope to issue a sharp statement accusing the Jewish historians of professional misconduct, of bad faith and, effectively, of lying. ‘The whole experience was shattering,’ says Gumpel.” [3]

In Part Two, I suggested that one of the reasons Laughland wrote the Spectator article was to remind the public that in attacking the Jewish historians, Gumpel spoke for the Vatican - that is, for the Pope. The second purpose was I think broader, having to do with why the Vatican wants people to remember that Gumpel was speaking for the Catholic leadership. To grasp this purpose, one must grasp the Vatican’s political strategy regarding the Jews.  I have come to understand that strategy, not out of thin air or speculation, but by studying relevant media accounts and Vatican documents.  Rather than just tell you my view, permit me to continue to present the information I have uncovered, which provided the basis for my present understanding. Then, when I offer my solution to the puzzle of the Vatican’s “Jewish strategy,” you will be better able to evaluate my conclusions.

Let us now examine an important piece of that puzzle: Reverend Gumpel’s Television interview, 16 March 2000.

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As Pope leaves for Jordan, Gumpel attacks the Jews

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80% of Reverend Gumpel’s media coverage has occurred since 16 March 2000, just before the Pope began his famous Middle East trip.

That evening CBC, Canada’s main TV network, interviewed Gumpel in the Vatican. The interview was re-broadcast on CBS, the biggest US Television network, and the two networks had follow-up stories for a few days. Thus Reverend Gumpel got his message to millions of TV viewers.

[Excerpt from CBC news report starts here]

ROME - A shadow of anti-Semitism hangs over the Vatican, threatening to undermine the efforts of Pope John Paul.

[...]

[Pope] Pius [XII] has widely been accused of silence in the face of the Holocaust and indifference to Jewish suffering.

But the Catholic Church is proceeding to make him a saint.

Priest: ‘Jews have killed Christ’

The priest designated by the Vatican to oversee the canonization of Pope Pius XII is a German Jesuit, Father Peter Gumpel. In an interview with CBC TV this week, Father Gumpel made comments that are sure to exacerbate the allegations of Catholic anti-Semitism.

“It is a fact that the Jews have killed Christ. This is an undeniable historical fact,” Gumpel told CBC.

“I have discussed this with a Jewish colleague, a university professor and he said, ‘Well, my dear professor,’ he said, ‘what do you want? Our forefathers found out that Christ was a false prophet, so we killed Him. And then of course, why should we have changed our attitude with regard to those who followed this false prophet’,” Gumpel said.

Those sorts of comments were officially disavowed as anti-Semitic by the church more than 30 years ago.

[...] [4]

[Excerpt from CBC news report ends here]

Notice that Gumpel not only claims that the Jews killed Jesus; he also claims that an unnamed Jew told him that Jews want to do the same thing to Christians today.  People often ask, “What is antisemitism.”  Well, the drive wheel of antisemitic bigotry is precisely this slur: that Jews hate and want to hurt Christians. 

As CBC noted dryly, “Those sorts of comments were officially disavowed as anti-Semitic by the church more than 30 years ago [in Vatican II- J.I.].” That raises the important question, did the Vatican authorize Gumpel’s remarks?  The Vatican is a centrally-controlled organization, so if they did authorize Gumpel’s remarks, the claim by Israeli President Moshe Katsav and others, that Pope John Paul II “officially disavowed the prejudices and accusations - for which our people and our faith had suffered,” is untrue. The best thing one could then say is that the Vatican speaks out of both sides of its mouth.  We will consider this question a bit later. [5]

First a few points about what Reverend Gumpel said.

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Who is Reverend Gumpel’s ‘colleague’?

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Gumpel makes his key antisemitic attack - the accusation that Jews want to kill Christians - by supposedly quoting the casual confession of an unnamed Jewish professor.

It is a convenient rhetorical device to quote an opponent saying something that proves one is right.  Indeed, this device is so convenient that such claims have zero credibility unless a) one names the opponent and b) one provides evidence that he said it.

Since Reverend Gumpel provides zero evidence that his Jewish professor exists, let alone that he said what Gumpel claims he said, we must assume that Gumpel invented him, meaning that Reverend Gumpel is lying.  His ‘colleague’ is Peter Gumpel.

Now for the content of Gumpel’s remarks.

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Is Gumpel’s claim that, “…the Jews have killed Christ,” truly “an undeniable historical fact”?

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It is a rule of honest scholarship that one must acknowledge opposing views. If one markets one’s ideas by claiming that nobody disputes them, when in fact competent scholars do dispute them, then one is a conman, not a scholar. Gumpel told his TV audience that it is an undeniable historical fact that “the Jews killed Jesus,” but in fact his claims are denied. Let us examine some of the opposing arguments.

Gumpel’s would-be historical fact rests on certain assumptions, absent which it collapses.

For example, for the “Jews-killed-Jesus” story to be true, the Roman governor, Pontius Pilate, has to have been a weak and indecisive man, wiling to do anything to please the Jews, trembling at their wrath. But this doesn’t jibe with the Pilate we know from the Jewish philosopher, Philo, who was Pilate’s contemporary, and it doesn’t jibe with the reality of life in Judaea following the Roman conquest.

Concerning the historical Pontius Pilate:

“Philo of Alexandria, the great Jewish philosopher, quotes this judgment of Pontius Pilate: ‘He was cruel by nature and hard-hearted and entirely lacking in remorse.’ Philo also gives the following account of Pilate’s rule in Judaea: ‘…bribes, vainglorious and insolent conduct, robbery, oppression, humiliations, men often sent to death untried, and incessant and unmitigated cruelty.” [6]

In the traditional account, which Gumpel claims is historically undeniable, Pilate is presented as killing a man whom the Jews view as a heretic because he was desperate not to offend the Jews' religious sensibilities. Not so, according to both Philo and the ancient Jewish historian, Josephus:

“Josephus portrays Pilate as deliberately seeking to outrage the religious feelings of the Jews.  He took the unprecedented step of marching his army of occupation from its usual quarters in Caesarea to the Holy City, ‘in order,’ says Josephus, ‘to abolish the Jewish [religious] laws.’ The standards of the Roman troops contained images of Tiberius Caesar pictured as a god.  To the Jews the presence of these idolatrous images in Jerusalem was an affront to the One God.” [7]

In the Christian gospels, Pilate and his Roman troops are present only as bit players, tools of the Jews, who supposedly enjoy such a privileged position in the Empire that when Pilate hesitates to crucify Jesus, lest he kill an innocent man, the Jewish mob threatens to tell the Roman emperor that he is soft on subversives. Supporting this view, an important Vatican document claims that, “In the pagan Roman Empire, Jews were legally protected by the privileges granted by the emperor…” [8]

This view has been strongly denied. For example, Prof. Hyam Maccoby writes this about Judaea at the time of Jesus:

“It was a time when distress, despair, apocalyptic yearnings and helpless resentment of the Roman tyranny were at their height.  It was a time when no Jew could avoid sharing the deep unhappiness caused by the Roman presence, when the Jewish people and especially the poorest among them were being driven to despair by exorbitant taxes, and when the Jews were compelled to compare the reality of constant humiliation with their soaring aspirations as a people.” [9]

Remarkably, the Vatican claims that the Jews were privileged until the 4th century C.E.: “Later, when the emperors themselves converted to Christianity, they at first continued to guarantee Jewish privileges.” [8]

This is much like claiming that the American Indians enjoyed a privileged status, protected by laws, in the 19th century United States. In fact, beginning before the time of Jesus, and for 200 years thereafter, Judaea was a fierce center of opposition to Rome; it stopped being a fierce center of opposition because most of the Jews had been killed. Catholic writer John Carroll describes how Rome reacted to the anti-Roman attitudes (and actions) of all but a few Jews, such as those employed as quisling police officials by Rome:

“Nor should we fail to emphasize that Rome’s brutal response to that refusal [to accept Rome- J.I.], especially in the climactic war of 66-73 C.E. when Jerusalem was laid waste and hundreds of thousands of Jews were killed ([ancient writers] Josephus and Tacitus put the number of Jewish dead in this first war at around 600,000; in the second ‘Jewish war’ sixty years later, the tally for Jewish victims is put at 850,000) traumatized all Jews, including the followers of Jesus.”  [10]

1.5 million Jewish dead. Estimates vary, but let us say for the sake of argument that in the first century, there were 250 million people in the world, or 1/26th of today’s population.  Adjusting for today’s population, the number of Jews killed fighting Rome would be 39,000,000. This may have been the worst genocide in history.

Perhaps the most shocking thing about the claim that the Jews enjoyed a privileged status in ancient Rome is that it appeared in the much-heralded 1998 statement in which the Catholic Church supposedly came to grips with antisemitism and the Holocaust, “We Remember: A Reflection on the Shoah.” [8]

Gumpel claims that first century Jews viewed Jesus as a dangerous false prophet.  He must know that the biblical historian/analyst Hyam Maccoby has presented a strong case that Jesus was in the Jewish mainstream. [11]

To believe that “the Jews killed Jesus,” one must accept the Gospel account according to which Jewish mobs clamored to have Jesus killed specifically by crucifixion. But is that how 1^st century Jews would have behaved?  For the Jews, crucifixion was a symbol of Roman oppression - including of them - and of Roman barbarism.  In 4 B.C.E., Rome put down a rebellion by the followers of the Pharisees, killing about 2000 people by tying them to crosses. (Rope was more brutal than nails because the victims lived, and therefore suffered, longer.)

“To the Jews, crucifixion was a particularly loathsome and horrifying form of inhumanity.  It was outlawed in Jewish law to such an extent that it was forbidden even to crucify a dead body (see Deuteronomy, xxi, 23).” [12]

If the Jews had betrayed their own law by pressing the Romans to execute this innocent man using the hated method of crucifixion, wouldn’t the followers of Jesus have left the land of Israel in disgust and fear?  But in fact, the original followers of Jesus continued to live as a Jewish sect, among the Jewish people, led by Jesus’ brother James.

I could continue presenting the case for the opposition, but this should be sufficient to show the falsity of Gumpel’s claim that it is “undeniable” that the Jews killed Jesus, i.e., that there is no opposition.

Now let us turn to Gumpel’s second, perhaps more dangerous assertion.

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Gumpel accuses the Jews of wanting to kill Christians

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For many years, the Catholic Church has distinguished anti-Judaism, (religious attacks on Jews) from antisemitism (openly racist attacks, portraying Jews as inhuman monsters.) But Gumpel provides a living illustration of the connection between the two.  Thus he starts with the religious fable that “the Jews killed Jesus.” Then he employs a classic antisemitic device, a fictional Jewish professor who conveniently confesses that Jews have the same “attitude with regard to those who followed this false prophet,” meaning that Jews want to kill Christians today.

As a leading Jesuit scholar, Gumpel must know that he is repeating the two-step argument - first, that the Jews killed Jesus; then, that the Jews want to do the same to Christians today - that has spawned violence against Jews throughout the Christian era.

He must be familiar with the series of articles written by his fellow Jesuit, Father Giuseppe Oreglia, and published during the 1880s by the leading Jesuit journal, Civiltà Cattolica. According to the Vatican, articles slated to appear in Civiltà Cattolica have first to be approved by the Vatican Secretary of State; moreover, "In the past, up to the time of Pius XII, the Pope himself received the director of Civiltà Cattolica twice a month." [13]

Since Catholics knew that Civiltà Cattolica spoke for Pope Leo XIII, Oreglia’s articles had an immense impact. Here’s an excerpt from a typical piece by him, published in 1881. Is it anti-Judaic, or antisemitic?

“The whole sinew of modern Judaism - that is of the antisocial, antihumanitarian, and above all anti-Christian law that the Jews now observe believing that they are obeying Mosaic Law - consists essentially in that fundamental dogma according to which the Jew cannot and should not ever recognize as his fellow human being anyone other than a Jew.  All others, whether Christian or non-Christian, must be considered, by every good Jew observing his law… as hateful enemies, to be persecuted and, if possible, exterminated…While the Christian asks forgiveness for his sin, the Jew must ask forgiveness if he does a good deed.” [My emphasis] [14]

How similar this accusation is to the one Reverend Gumpel made through the device of his imaginary Jewish professor.  The religious attack, which the Vatican might minimize as only "anti-Judaic," flows seamlessly into a horror-movie image of Jews, pictured as wanting - indeed, needing - to murder Christians.

This accusation, whether made in 1881 by Civiltà Cattolica or in 2000 by Reverend Gumpel, is not merely bigoted and slanderous.  It has material consequences, leading to mistreatment and even mass murder of Jews. Consider the Nazi attempt to kill all Jews. How could it have happened?

Consider this cartoon:

The title of this cartoon from the cover of the June 1933 issue of Julius Streicher's infamous Nazi magazine, Der Stürmer, is "Revenge." A Nazi throws a Jew off a cliff, saying ""Go where you wanted me to go, you evil spirit." Der Stürmer, June 1933

Notice that in the cartoon from Der Stürmer, posted above, the Nazi is huge and physically powerful; the Jew is little and out of shape.  We are shown nothing to make us feel the Jew has done anything to deserve this murderous attack.  And yet, the cartoon has the title "Revenge." Revenge for what? Der Stürmer does not tell its readers because editor Julius Streicher reasoned he did not have to tell his readers - neither the ones who supported the Nazis, nor the ones who did not yet support the Nazis because all of them knew. They knew that "the Jew cannot and should not ever recognize as his fellow human being anyone other than a Jew," and that non-Jews had "to be persecuted and, if possible, exterminated." That's what the highest authority of the Church had been telling them and their fathers before them, and that was why, when Germany was hit by terrible social-economic problems in the 1920s and early 1930s, the Nazis could so easily blame it all on "the Jews." The many years of indoctrination in antisemitism, conducted by the Catholic Church and other Christian churches, made Nazism possible.

It is chilling that, on the eve of Pope John Paul II’s trip to the Middle East, Rev. Gumpel, a German, and a leading Papal adviser, incited TV viewers with this horror story, straight out of the German Nazi tradition, about an imaginary Jewish professor wanting to murder Gentiles. John Laughland says Gumpel was speaking for the Pope in 26 July 2001, when he attacked the Jewish historians. Was he speaking for the Pope as well on 16 March 2000, when he accused the Jewish people of wanting to kill Christians?

We will consider that question shortly.

- Continued in Part  4 -

Jared Israel
Editor, Emperor’s Clothes

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Footnotes and Further Reading

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[1] The Vatican launched its attack through Reverend Gumpel on July 26^th. But prior to that attack, the Catholic media calmly quoted  from the letter that members of the historical commission had sent the Vatican. For example, the harshest criticism by the Catholic World news service was that “the committee was not willing to wait” for the Vatican to release the desired archives.  Yet within two days, the Vatican-Gumpel statement would condemn the letter as the work of “some Jewish” historians, charging that by releasing the letter to the media, “some Jews” were trying to destroy the Church. In other words, the Vatican was picking a fight.
Committee Stops Holocaust Research Without Access to Vatican Archives; New York, Jul 24, 01; Catholic World News
http://www.katolsk.no/nyheter/2001/07/25-0002.htm

[2] L’Osservatore Romano claims that the Vatican never suggested the desired archives would be made available.  As I will show later, it is important that this claim is false. L’Osservatore Romano’s article is at http://www.ewtn.com/library/ISSUES/P12HISTO.HTM

[3] Pius the Hero; The Spectator, July 20, 2002, Pg. 16 17, 1331 words, John Laughland

[4] Shadow of anti-Semitism hangs over Vatican; CBC News; Thursday 16 March 2000
http://www.cbc.ca/story/world/national/2000/03/16/pius000316.html

[5] http://tinyurl.com/8vspc 

[6] Maccoby, Hyam. “Revolution in Judaea: Jesus and the Jewish Resistance.” New York: Taplinger, 1973. 45. This book is out of print but is in libraries and can be purchased used, for example here http://tinyurl.com/dxmjz and here http://tinyurl.com/e456b

[7] Ibid., 45-46.

[8] “We Remember: A Reflection on the Shoah” http://www.jewishvirtuallibrary.org/jsource/Holocaust/poperep.html

[9] Maccoby, 46.

[10] Carroll, James. “Constantine’s Sword.” New York: Mariner, 2001. 89-90.

[11] See for example Hyam Maccoby’s “Jesus The Pharisee.” This is available new from UK booksellers, for example at http://tinyurl.com/cx3ts
In the US I could only find it used, for example at http://tinyurl.com/9hjah and http://tinyurl.com/covs9 

[12] Maccoby, 36.

[13] Go to http://www.zenit.org/english/archive/9903/ZE990322.html and scroll down to “Century and a Half Of  ‘Civiltà Cattolica’”

[14] Oreglia, Civiltà Cattolica, 1881, I, p.727.  Quoted in Kertzer, David I. “The Popes Against the Jews.” New York: Vintage, 2001. 139. I have not yet read the original texts of the Civiltà Cattolica articles attacking the Jews (Emperor's Clothes hopes to translate and post some in the future) so I cannot say from first-hand knowledge that a) his translation is completely accurate and b) his use of ellipses (three dots) is justified. However, I have read several Catholic Church criticisms of “The Popes Against the Jews,” all aimed at discrediting Kertzer, and none of them have charged him with mistranslation or improper use of ellipses.  Rather, they claim he is one-sided. For example, the Catholic League's review states that Kertzer fails to cite a papal attack on antisemitism, which they say was published by Civiltà Cattolica, “though he does seem to quote every anti-Jewish comment published by that journal.”  So, although with important documents like this I would like to see photocopies of the original texts, and excerpts without ellipses, nevertheless I think we can assume that if Kertzer has erred in his handling of this and other excerpts, it is not against the Church (or they would surely have jumped on his errors.)

Note added 10 July 2006: And by the way, the Catholic League refutation of Kertzer, linked below, also uses ellipses and, as we shall prove in a soon-to-be-published study of Vatican mistranslation and mis-description of key Church documents from the 1930s, its implication, that the 1938 Papal statement, Mit brennender Sorge, was an attack on Nazi racial theories, is false. Quite the contrary, while Mit brennender Sorge challenged the  deification of the Nazi party and State, it did so - as we shall demonstrate - in language which chillingly echoed that of National Socialism. In any case, the Catholic League review is at http://www.catholicleague.org/research/kertzer.htm

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