The Order (Gabriel Allon #20) - Daniel Silva Page 0,115

in 1970 by Bishop Marcel-François Lefebvre. Bishop Lefebvre was the son of a wealthy French factory owner who supported the restoration of France’s monarchy. During World War II, then–Father Lefebvre was an unapologetic supporter of the Vichy regime of Marshal Philippe Pétain, which collaborated with the SS in the destruction of France’s Jews. Paul Touvier, a senior officer in the notorious Vichy militia known as the Milice, found sanctuary at an SSPX priory in Nice after the war. Arrested in 1989, Touvier was the first Frenchman to be convicted of crimes against humanity.

Not surprisingly, Bishop Lefebvre also expressed support for Jean-Marie Le Pen, leader of France’s far-right National Front and a convicted Holocaust denier. Monsieur Le Pen shared that distinction with Richard Williamson, one of four SSPX priests whom Lefebvre elevated to the rank of bishop in 1988 in defiance of a direct order from Pope John Paul II. Williamson, who is British, routinely referred to Jews as “the enemies of Christ” whose goal was world domination. While serving as rector of the SSPX’s North American seminary in Winona, Minnesota, Williamson declared: “There was not one Jew killed in the gas chambers. It was all lies, lies, lies.” He was expelled from the Society of St. Pius X in 2012, but not for his anti-Semitic views. The SSPX called his removal a “painful decision.”

By the time of his death in 1991, Bishop Lefebvre was a doctrinal outcast and something of an embarrassment. But during the 1930s, as storm clouds gathered over Europe’s Jews, a prelate who espoused views similar to Lefebvre’s would have found himself largely in the Catholic mainstream. The Church’s preference for monarchies and right-wing dictators over socialists or even liberal democrats has been painstakingly documented, along with the appalling anti-Semitism of many of the Vatican’s leading spokesmen and policymakers. While few Catholic clerics supported the physical elimination of Jews from European society, the Vatican newspaper L’Osservatore Romano and the Jesuit journal La Civiltà Cattolica cheered laws—in Hungary, for example—that purged Jews from professions such as the law, medicine, banking, and journalism. When Benito Mussolini enacted similar restrictions in Italy in 1938, the men of the Vatican could muster scarcely a word of protest. “The terrible truth,” wrote historian Susan Zuccotti in her remarkable study of the Holocaust in Italy, Under His Very Windows, “was that they wanted the Jews put in their place.”

That was certainly true of Bishop Alois Hudal, rector of the Austrian-German church in Rome. It was Bishop Hudal, not my fictitious Father Schiller, who wrote a viciously anti-Semitic book in 1936 that tried to reconcile Catholicism and National Socialism. In the copy he sent to Adolf Hitler, Hudal penned an adulatory inscription: “To the architect of German greatness.”

An Austrian national who was said to be obsessed with Jews, Bishop Hudal moved about Rome throughout the war in a chauffeured car that flew the flag of Greater Germany. Two and a half years after the Allied victory, he hosted a Christmas party attended by hundreds of Nazi war criminals living in Rome under his protection. With Hudal’s help, many would find sanctuary in South America. Adolf Eichmann received assistance from Bishop Hudal, as did Franz Stangl, the commandant of the Treblinka extermination camp. All with the knowledge and tacit support of Pope Pius XII, who believed such monsters to be a valuable asset in the global fight against Soviet communism.

Pius’s critics and apologists have engaged in a decades-long quarrel over his failure to explicitly condemn the Holocaust and warn Europe’s Jews about the death camps. But his indefensible support of wanted Nazi mass murderers is perhaps the clearest evidence of his innate hostility toward Jews. Pius opposed the Nuremberg Trials, opposed the creation of a Jewish state, and opposed postwar attempts to reconcile Christianity with the faith from which it had sprung. He excommunicated every Communist on earth in 1949 but never took a similar step against members of the Nazi Party or the murderous SS. Nor did he ever explicitly express remorse over the death of six million Jews in the Holocaust.

The process of Jewish-Christian reconciliation would therefore have to wait until Pius’s death in 1958. His successor, Pope John XXIII, took extraordinary steps to protect Jews during World War II while serving as papal nuncio in Istanbul, including issuing them lifesaving false passports. He was old when the Ring of the Fisherman was placed on his finger, and sadly his reign was brief. Not long before his death in 1963, he was asked