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U p F r o n t
Burden of History
by Karl Keating
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This Rock
Volume 11, Number 3
 March 2000 
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History hit us with a freight train,” Whittaker Chambers once wrote. When you are hit by a freight train, the freight train wins. If you are lucky, you are left dazed at the side of the tracks. If you are not so lucky, there is not much of you left at all. History can be a crushing force, and for many it is a burden—one they never are able to get off their shoulders. What they are is what their ancestors lived through; their lives are inseparable from lives lived decades or centuries ago.
This came home to me in a double way recently. I was asked to speak to a Jewish group about Pope Pius XII. We sat in a large circle, the two dozen or so of us who met in the community room at a mall, and I spoke at first about Eugenio Pacelli’s life, particularly his years as papal nuncio to Germany. Then I went through a long chronological list of his anti-Nazi comments and activities prior to his accession to the papal throne—how, for instance, as early as 1922 he was terming Hitler “obsessed” (this was a year before the attempted Nazi putsch in Bavaria). I noted that Cardinal Pacelli drafted Mit Brennender Sorge, the anti-Nazi encyclical issued by Pius XI in 1937.
Then to the war years. I went month by month, showing how Pius XII—he became pope six months before hostilities broke out—was ceaseless in his solicitude for persecuted Jews. I reviewed the plaudits he received during and after the war from Jewish leaders, such as future Israeli prime minister Golda Meir, and from Jewish scholars, such as historian Pinchas Lapide, who credited the Pope with saving 860,000 Jewish lives.
Then I discussed Rolf Hochhuth’s 1963 play The Deputy. Produced five years after Pius XII’s death, it was the first major blast against him. It has been followed up recently by John Cornwell’s book, Hitler’s Pope, a truly dishonest work of sham scholarship.
After my remarks came a discussion period. Several people said, in essence, “Yes, I can accept all you say, and I am pleased to learn what Pius XII did, but I remain wary of the Catholic Church because of what happened by my people in the middle ages.” There it was, the burden of history, even when it is a history of actions that the Church, in those very times, opposed. There was an intellectual willingness to distinguish between the Church’s teachings and the actions of some of her wayward members, but there was an affective incapacity to do so.
This point was reiterated later when I was reading Notes from the Underground, letters written between Whittaker Chambers and journalist Ralph de Toledano. Toward the end of the book, de Toledano, who is of Spanish and Jewish extraction, referred to Chambers’s “failure to come to terms with the Roman church—a failure shared by me for I could never forget what the Church and state had done to my ancestor, Daniel de Toledo . . . and to his family.” Nothing further is said of Daniel, who seems to have lived centuries ago. Whatever injustice was done to him has remained a historical burden on Ralph de Toledano’s shoulders. That burden has kept him from the Church, as similar burdens have kept others from the Church.
I wish I knew how to lighten the weight for them.
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