ORIENTALIA CHRISTIANA PERIODICA
Edmund A. Walsh: la Missio Iraquensis
STUDIA PATAVINA
Patulli Trythall Marisa, Edmund Aloysius Walsh: la Missio Iraquensis
http://www.projo.com/religion/content/PIUS_XI_10-30-10_ETKLE9A_v10.1f9a901.html
01:00 AM EDT on Saturday, October 30, 2010
By Richard C. Dujardin
Journal Staff Writer
PROVIDENCE –– An international conference of scholars seeking to better understand the papacy of Pope Pius XI opened a two-day meeting at Brown University Friday, using newly released documents from the Vatican archives to examine his increasingly warm relationship with the U.S. and a disdain for Nazi and fascist leaders in Europe.
Drawing scholars from Italy, Canada, England as well the U.S., the gathering here represents the third such meeting since Pope Benedict XVI opened the archives on Pius XI four years ago and the first to be held in the United States.
Brown University’s David Kertzer, chairman of the organizing committee, said that while the main theme was to be the relationship between the Church in Rome and the United States, the English- and Italian-speaking participants could not avoid making comparisons between Pius XI, who led the church from 1922 to his death in 1939, and his successor, Pius XII, who is still accused by many as having been too “silent” about the Holocaust.
Throughout his own papacy Pius XI did not mince words and wrote an encyclical about the Nazi ideology of racism and totalitarianism, which he ordered read from church pulpits.
At the meeting Friday, Marisa Patulli Trythall, a professor at the Oriental Institute in Rome, observed that one of Pius XI’s first acts upon being installed as pope in 1922 was to dissolve the National Catholic Welfare Conference, which the U.S. Catholic bishops had established as a way for the bishops to work together.
Though such national conferences are now part of the way the Catholic Church operates, the notion of bishops coming together and making decisions by majority vote didn’t sit well, she observed, with Church leaders in Europe accustomed to having the decisions handed down through the Church’s respective cardinals, the so-called “princes of the church.”
Still, when it came to dealing with the United States and the presidency of Franklin D. Roosevelt, there is a consensus that the president and the pope were very much on the same page — beginning with the deep admiration that Roosevelt had for Pius XI’s social encyclical, Quadragesimo Anno, in which the pope criticized capitalistic greed, and the pope’s looking to the U.S. to help stop Italy’s invasion of Ethiopia.
One embarrassment for both sides was the popularity of the Rev. Charles Coughlin, a priest with his own radio show that was listened to by millions. Though Coughlin started out as an FDR supporter, he quickly turned and became vitriolic in his attacks.
The Rev. Gerald P. Fogarty, a Jesuit priest at the University of Virginia, said that while many if not most prelates wanted him off the air, they could not because under the rules of the Church all the priest needed was the approval of his local bishop, which he had. Fogarty said Church officials felt they were in a no-win situation because if the Vatican tried to silence him it would be seen as a violation of the American right of free speech, while on the other hand, his increasingly anti-Semitic views were giving the Church a bad name.
Father Coughlin eventually went off the air after the bishop died.
At the same time, Monsignor Robert Trisco of the Catholic University of America, observed that Pius XI was in no mood to censure the Catholic Archbishop of Chicago, George William Mundelein, for having called Hitler an “Austrian paper hanger, and a poor one at that.” The reason he did not, said the monsignor, is that the pontiff saw the cardinal as saying exactly what needed to be said.
rdujardi@projo.com
Copyright 2010 mpytrythall. All rights reserved.