COMMENTARY: A rumor, the Vatican and money stolen by the Nazis

c. 1997 Religion News Service (Andrew M. Greeley is a Roman Catholic priest, best-selling novelist and a sociologist at the University of Chicago National Opinion Research Center. Check out his home page at http://www.agreeley.com, or contact him via e-mail at agreel(at)aol.com.) UNDATED _ Open season continues on the Roman Catholic Church. First there’s Sheila Rauch […]

c. 1997 Religion News Service

(Andrew M. Greeley is a Roman Catholic priest, best-selling novelist and a sociologist at the University of Chicago National Opinion Research Center. Check out his home page at http://www.agreeley.com, or contact him via e-mail at agreel(at)aol.com.)

UNDATED _ Open season continues on the Roman Catholic Church.


First there’s Sheila Rauch Kennedy’s attack on the church’s marriage annulment procedures, which provided the national media with an excellent opportunity to suggest that Catholicism was up to something crooked and corrupt. (No one seemed to grasp the point that the church has the right to set up its own marriage procedures.)

Then there’s the New Yorker article by ex-priest James Carroll that just about blamed the Holocaust on the Catholic Church because of its doctrine of papal infallibility. The New Yorker should have first checked out Catholic theology and history to determine whether the article was intellectually honest.

Add to the fray a new assault on the Vatican by B’nai Brith, the Jewish civil rights organization.

Deep in the files of the State Department, someone found a dispatch from the 1940s reporting a rumor that Nazi money stolen from Jews had ended up in the vaults at the Vatican. B’nai Brith, adopting the tone of a prosecuting attorney, has demanded access to the Vatican archives to determine whether the rumor is true.

Moreover, the group has informed the Vatican that failure to open up its archives is tantamount to an admission of the guilt. So once again, without any real evidence, the church has been accused, tried and convicted.

The evil persecution of Jews in the past does not somehow give B’nai Brith moral superiority today to make such a demand. The Vatican has every right to keep its archives secret for as long as it wants to. No one has the right to demand otherwise just to prove innocence from an vague rumor.

On the other hand, if I were Jewish, I wouldn’t trust the Catholic Church either _ not after the centuries of religious persecution (which, by the way, violated the church’s own teachings).

I, too, would be wary of the church’s newfound openness and offers of friendship. But I hope I would not demand permission to send in my investigators to ransack the church’s archives on a fishing expedition.


First, I would seek evidence that there is meat to the rumor, then leave the church to decide whether it wants to contest the charges with its own documentation.

Pope Leo XIII once said the church has nothing to fear from the truth. And Pope John Paul II once said the church should be as transparent as a house of glass.

Unfortunately, all too often the church still acts as if it has something to fear from the truth and draws tight the thick drapes inside its house. So naturally, people outside the church wonder what the church is trying to hide.

As one who knows the church from the inside, my guess is the Vatican has no idea whether there is anything to hide, but merely prefers secrecy to openness.

It seems to me that 50 years, even 25 years, is long enough to keep archives secret. Nonetheless _ and as counterproductive as it would be in the modern world _ the Catholic Church has every right to keep its archives secret forever. And to deny that right because of a vague and unsubstantiated rumor is to indulge in the old anti-Catholic paradigm. It is, in short, bigotry.

Let B’nai Brith assemble some solid evidence that the Vatican did hide _ and may still be hiding _ money taken from Jews during the Holocaust. Then it can make its demands for an accounting.


MJP END GREELEY

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