What are the Vatican secrets that an investigator unearthed?

VATICAN CITY – David Kertzer dropped his cappuccino, zipped up his backpack and dug up more Vatican secrets.

“It’s like looking for treasure,” said Kertzer, a 74-year-old historian.

Moments later, he walked into a crowd lined up to see Pope Francis, presented his permit to the Swiss Guard, and entered the archive of the former Holy Inquisition headquarters.

Over the past few decades, Kertzer has reversed Church responsibilities.

Thanks to the Vatican’s own archives, this gentle professor, researcher at Brown University, and trustee of the American Academy in Rome undoubtedly became an excavator. better ng hidden sins of the Vatican, especially those made before and during World War II.

Kertzer was the son of a rabbi who served as an army chaplain in liberation of rome and grew up in a home that adopted a girl whose family was murdered in Auschwitz.

That family background and his anti-Vietnam War activism in college gave him an awareness of moral outrage which is tempered by intellectual prudence.

As a product of it, we have several works that have won the Pulitzer Prize, captured the imagination of steven spielberg and exposed, sometimes very cruelly, one of the darkest institutions in the world.

Kertzer’s latest book examines the Church’s involvement in World War II and the Holocaustwhich he considered the formative event of his own life.

The book documents the personal decision -making that led to the pope Pius XII who had almost nothing to say about Hitler’s genocide and argued that the pontiff’s influence in the war was underestimated, and not in a positive way.

“One thing I want to do is show the importance of Pius XII’s participation,” he said.

In 2019, Francis, the current pope, said:

“The Church is not afraid of history”, when he ordered the opening of the archives of Pius XII.

But while Francis resolved how firmly to overthrow a dictator, this time Russia, Vladimir PutinKertzer discovered some disturbing evidence about the value of remaining silent about the mass murder.

Kertzer argued that was huge fear of communism Pius XII was, his belief that the Axis powers would win the war, and his desire to protect the interests of the Church motivated him not to argue or Adolf Hitler or Benito Mussolinithat the ambassadors collaborated to place him on the throne.

According to the book, the pope was also concerned that apostasy from the Führer would alienate millions of German Catholics.

The book also reveals that a German prince and the hardline Nazi acted as a secret back channel between Pius XII and Hitler and that he was urged by the Vatican’s senior adviser on Jewish affairs in a letter to do not speak against of the fascist regime’s order to arrest and send to concentration camps most Italian Jews.

“That left me dazedKertzer commented on that letter.

Proponents of Pius XII, whose arguments in favor of his canonization are still under scrutiny, have long argued that he worked behind the scenes to help the Jews and that the anti- Catholics tried to destroy the institution by defecating the pontiff.

“A more open challenge would not save any Jews, but could cause more death,” wrote Michael Hesemann, who believes that Pius XII defended the Jews, in response to the evidence released by Kertzer, which he described as a man “very biased”.

Hesemann, who is also the author of a recent book on the pope of war based on Vatican archives, argued that the pope, while remaining neutral, hid Jews in convents and distributed fake certificates of baptism.

Kertzer argues that the discovered documents painted a more nuanced picture of Pius XII, describing him neither as the anti-Semitic monster often referred to as “Hitler’s pope” or as a hero.

But, according to Kertzer, the effort to protect Pius ’reputation reflects the more general reluctance of Italy – and of Vatican defenders – to accept his complicity in World War II, the Holocaust and the murder of Roman Jews. .

On October 16, 1943, the Nazis captured more than 1000 Jews throughout the city, including hundreds in the Jewish ghetto, which is now a tourist attraction frequented by crowds celebrating Jewish-style artichokes near the church where Jews are forced to attend conversion sermons.

The Germans detained Jews for two days at a military college near the Vatican while they examined who had been baptized or married a Catholic.

“They don’t want to hurt the pope,” Kertzer said.

In his book he shows that the high advisers of Pius XII only intervened with the German ambassador to free the “non-Aryan Catholics”.

About 250 were released and more than 1,000 were killed in Auschwitz.

When the U.S. Army arrived in Rome, it was accompanied by Kertzer’s father, Lt. Morris Kertzer, a Canadian -born rabbi who presided over the synagogue.

An American soldier, a Jew from Rome who immigrated to America when Mussolini introduced racial laws in Italy, asked Morris Kertzer to make an advertisement to see if his mother had survived the war.

The rabbi placed the soldier beside him; at the start of the service, a scream was heard and the soldier’s mother ran to hug her son.

“That’s what I remember most of what my father said,” David Kertzer said.

A year before Kertzer was born in 1948, his parents adopted a teenager who had survived in Auschwitz.

Whenever images of Nazi soldiers appear on television, David and Ruth, his older sister, run to turn off the device to protect Eva, his adoptive sister.

During this time, his father became director of interfaith affairs at the American Jewish Committee primarily to try to remove anti-Semitism from the Christian churches.

As part of the normalization work, young David Kertzer appeared on the program “TonightShow ” by Jack Paar singing the family’s Passover Seder prayers.

His anti-Vietnam War activism at Brown University nearly had him expelled and imprisoned along with Norman Mailer.

He continued to study and fell in love with both anthropology and Susan Dana, a religion student from Maine.

To be close to him, in 1969 he enrolled in graduate school at Brandeis University, where an anthropology professor told him that his interest in politics and religion would find fertile ground for study in Italy. .

The results were a year of research in Bologna, Italy, with Susan, then his wife, and his first book “Companions and Christians.”

After obtaining his Ph.D., he found employment at Brown University and Bowdoin College, fathered two children, had a lifelong relationship with Italy, and grew familiar with Italian archives (and eventually, by chance, the Vatican). .

In the early 1990s, an Italian history teacher told him about Edgardo Mortara, a 6 -year -old boy from Bologna whose parents were Jewish.

In 1858, the Church inquirer ordered the arrest of the child because he had probably been secretly taken by a Christian servant to be baptized, so he could not remain in a Jewish family.

This history led him to what Kertzer calls a “double trajectory change”:

write for the general public and about Jewish topics.

Its product was his 1998 book, “The Kidnapping of Edgardo Mortara,” a finalist in the non-fiction category for the National Book Award.

The job caught the attention of his friend, playwright Tony Kushner, who later gave it to Steven Spielberg, who, in turn, told Kertzer he wanted to bring it to the screen.

Mark Rylance joined the team to play the role of Pius XII, and Kushner wrote the script; now, all they need is a boy to play the role of Edgardo.

“They tested 4,000 – not 3,900 – 6- to 8 -year -olds from four continents,” Kertzer said.

“Spielberg tells us he’s not happy with any of the boys.”

The project stopped, but Kertzer did not stop.

He went out of the archive to publish “The Pope Against the Jews,” about the role of the Church in the rise of modern anti-Semitism.

In 2014, he published “The Pope and Mussolini”where he discussed the involvement of Pius XII in the rise of fascism and the anti-Semitic racial laws in 1938.

Earn this bookl Pulitzer Prize.

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