"It's in German," Gabriel said. "Would you like me to translate it, Your Holiness?"
Father Donati answered the question for the Pope. "The Holy Father and I both speak German fluently. Please feel free to read the document in its original language."
The memorandum from Martin Luther to Adolf Eichmann seemed to cause the Pope physical pain. At the halfway point, he reached out and took Father Donati's hand for support. When Gabriel finished, the Pope bowed his head and joined his hands beneath his pectoral cross. When he opened his eyes again, he looked directly at Shamron, who was holding Sister Regina's account of the meeting at the convent.
"A remarkable document, is it not, Your Holiness?" Shamron asked in German.
'I'm afraid I would use a different word," the Pope said, answering him in the same language. "'Shameful' is the first word that comes to mind."
'But is it an accurate account of the meeting that took place at that convent in 1943?"
Gabriel looked first at Shamron, then at the Pope. Father Donati
opened his mouth to object, but the Pope silenced him by gently placing a hand on his secretary's forearm.
"It's accurate except for one detail," said Pope Paul VII. "I wasn't really sleeping on Sister Regina's lap. I'm afraid I just couldn't bear to say another decade of the rosary."
AND THEN he told them the story of a boy--a boy from a poor village in the mountains of northern Italy. A boy who found himself orphaned at the age of nine, with no relatives to turn to for support. A boy who made his way to a convent on the shores of a lake, where he worked in the kitchen and befriended a woman named Sister Regina Carcassi. The nun became his mother and his teacher. She taught him to read and write. She taught him to appreciate art and music. She taught him to love God and to speak German. She called him Ciciotto--little chubby one. After the war, when Sister Regina renounced her vows and left the convent, the boy left too. Like Regina Carcassi, his faith in the Church was shaken by the events of the war, and he found his way to Milan, where he scratched out an existence on the streets, picking pockets and stealing from shops. Many times, he was arrested and beaten up by police officers. One night he was beaten nearly to death by a gang of criminals and left for dead on the steps of a parish church. He was discovered in the morning by a priest and taken to a hospital. The priest visited him each day and saw to the bills. He discovered that the filthy street urchin had spent time in a convent, that he could read and write and knew a great deal about Scripture and the Church. He convinced the boy to enter the seminary and study for the priesthood as a way to escape a life of poverty and prison. The boy agreed, and his life was forever changed.
Throughout the Pope's account, Gabriel, Shamron, and Eli Lavon sat motionless and enthralled. Father Donati looked down at his notebook but his hands were still. When the Pope finished, a deep silence hung over the room, broken finally by Shamron.
"What you must understand, Your Holiness, is that it was not our intention to uncover the information about the Garda covenant or your past. We only wanted to know who killed Benjamin Stern and why."
"I am not angry with you for bringing me this information, Mr. Shamron. As painful as these documents are, they must be made public, so that they can be examined by historians and ordinary Jews and Catholics alike and placed in their proper context."
Shamron laid the documents in front of the Pope. "We have no desire to make them public. We leave them in your hands to do with them what you will."
The Pope tilted his head down at the papers, but his gaze was distant, his eyes lost in thought. "He was not as wicked as his enemies have made him out to be, our Pope Pius the Twelfth. But unfortunately, neither was he as virtuous as his defenders, the Church included, have claimed. He had his reasons for silence-- fear of dividing German Catholics, fear of German retaliation against the Vatican, a desire to play a diplomatic role as a peacemaker--but we must face the painful fact that the Allies wanted him to speak out against the Holocaust and Adolf Hitler wanted him to remain silent. For whatever reason--his hatred of Communism, his love of Germany, the fact that he was surrounded by Germans in his papal household--Pius chose the course Hitler wanted, and the shadow of that choice hangs over us to this day. He wanted to be a statesman when what the world needed most was a priest-- a man in a cassock to shout at the murderers at the top of his lungs to stop what they were doing, in the name of God and all that was decent."
The Pope looked up and studied the faces before him--first Lavon, then Gabriel, then finally Shamron, where his gaze lingered longest. "We must face the uncomfortable fact that silence was a weapon in the hands of the Germans. It allowed the roundups and deportations to go forward with a minimum of resistance. There were hundreds, perhaps thousands, of Catholics who took part in rescuing Jews. But had the priests and nuns of Europe received instructions or simply the blessing from their pope to resist the Holocaust, many more Catholics would have sheltered Jews, and many more Jews would have survived the war as a result. Had the German episcopacy spoken up against the murder of Jews early on, it is possible that the Holocaust might never have reached its feverish pitch. Pope Pius knew that the wholesale mechanized murder of the European Jews was under way, but he chose to keep that information largely to himself. Why did he not tell the world? Why did he not even tell his bishops in the countries where roundups were taking place? Was he honoring a covenant of evil reached on the shores of a lake?"
The Pope reached for the pot in the center of the table. When Father Donati leaned forward to help him, he raised his hand, as if to say His Holiness still knew how to pour a cup of tea. He spent a moment reflectively stirring in the milk and sugar before resuming.
"I'm afraid the behavior of Pius is only one aspect of the war that needs examination. We must face the uncomfortable truth that, among Catholics, there were many more killers than there were rescuers. Catholic chaplains ministered to the very German forces committing the slaughter of the Jews. They heard their confessions and provided them the sacrament of Holy Communion. In Vichy France, Catholic priests actually helped French and German forces round up Jews for deportation and death. In Lithuania, the hierarchy actually forbade priests to rescue Jews. In Slovakia, a country ruled by a priest, the government actually paid the Germans to take away their Jews to the death camps. In Catholic Croatia, clergymen actually took part in the killings themselves. A Franciscan nicknamed Brother Satan ran a Croatian concentration camp where twenty thousand Jews were murdered." The Pope paused to sip his tea, as though he needed to remove a bitter taste from his mouth. "We must also face the truth that after the war, the Church sought leniency for the murderers and helped hundreds escape justice altogether."
Shamron stirred restlessly in his seat but said nothing.
"Tomorrow, at the Great Synagogue of Rome, the Catholic Church will begin to confront those questions honestly for the first time."
"Your words are compelling, Your Holiness," said Shamron, "but it might not be safe for you to venture across the river and say them aloud in a synagogue for the world to hear."
"A synagogue is the only place for these words to be spoken-- especially the synagogue in the Roman ghetto, where the Jews were rounded up beneath the very windows of the Pope without so much as a murmur of protest. My predecessor went there once to begin this journey. His heart was in the right place, but I'm afraid many segments of the Curia were not with him, and so his journey stopped short of its destination. I will finish it for him, tomorrow, in the place where he started it."