Holy Land and Holy See

1 HOLY LAND AND HOLY SEE PAPAL POLICY ON PALESTINE DURING THE PONTIFICATES OF POPES PIUS X, BENEDICT XV AND PIUS XI FROM 1903 TO 1939 PhD Thesis Gareth Simon Graham Grainger University of Divinity Student ID: 200712888 26 July 2017 2 CONTENTS Chapter 1: Introduction – Question, Hypothesis and Methodology Chapter 2: A Saint for Jerusalem – Pope Pius X and Palestine Chapter 3: The Balfour Bombshell – Pope Benedict XV and Palestine Chapter 4: Uneasy Mandate – Pope Pius XI and Palestine Chapter 5: Aftermath and Conclusions Appendix 1.The Roads to the Holy Sepulchre – Papal Policy on Palestine from the Crusades to the Twentieth Century Appendix 2.The Origins and Evolution of Zionism and the Zionist Project Appendix 3.The Policies of the Principal Towards Palestine from 1903 to 1939 Appendix 4. Glossary Appendix 5. Dramatis Personae Bibliography 3 CHAPTER 1: INTRODUCTION – QUESTION, HYPOTHESIS AND METHODOLOGY 1.1. THE INTRIGUING QUESTION Invitation to Dr Theodor Herzl to attend Audience with Pope Pius X On 25 January 1904, the Feast of the Conversion of St Paul, the recently-elected Pope Pius X granted an Audience in the Vatican Palace to Dr Theodor Herzl, leader of the Zionist movement, and heard his plea for papal approval for the Zionist project for a Jewish national home in Palestine. Dr Herzl outlined to the Supreme Pontiff of the Catholic Church the full details of the Zionist project, providing assurances that the various Holy Places in Palestine would be “ex-territorialised” to ensure their security and protection, and sought the Pope’s endorsement and support, preferably through the issuing of a pro-Zionist encyclical. Pope Pius X gave an immediate response to Dr Herzl, vigorously stating that he was “not able” [non possumus] to accede to this request, though the Catholic Church would not oppose Jewish emigration to Palestine on humanitarian grounds. The Pope promised that the Catholic Church would have churches and priests ready in Palestine to receive the incoming Jewish immigrants into the Christian faith. Herzl left the Audience disappointed in his hopes of approval from the Holy See for the Zionist project. The intriguing question which this episode poses is:- 4 what was the Holy See’s subsequent response to being made aware of the Zionist project for a Jewish national home in Palestine? Did the Holy See take it seriously, and develop a policy and strategy for dealing with a proposal whose implementation would ultimately lead to the establishment of the State of Israel? Was the Holy See’s response shaped by anti-Semitism? And all of these questions invite the initial question:- just what was the Holy See’s policy regarding the Holy Land, Palestine, up to the time of this momentous Audience between Pius X and Dr Herzl in 1904? And did that policy subsequently change as the implementation of the Zionist project unfolded with vigour and determination through the pontificates of Popes Pius X, Benedict XV and Pius XI? 1.2. THE CLEAR HYPOTHESIS TO ANSWER IT A review of the history of the Holy See’s approach to the Holy Land from the pontificate of Pope Urban II [1088-1099] to Pope Leo XIII [1878-1903] is explored in Appendix 1. This review shows that the overriding policy of the Holy See to the Holy Land was, from the promulgation of the first Crusade by Urban II at Clermont on 27 November 1095, the protection of the Christian Holy Places in the Holy Land and the safety of Christian pilgrims visiting those Holy Places. From the Seventeenth Century a secondary policy slowly developed within the Holy See, especially within its Propaganda Fide dicastery from 1622, of nurturing an indigenous Latin [and later Greek] Catholic population within Palestine. Following the failure and fall of the Crusader Kingdom of Jerusalem in 1187 the principal agent of the Holy See for the securing and protection of the Christian Holy Places in Palestine came to be the Franciscan Order, which arrived in Palestine in 1217. In 1847, following decades of disruption within the Franciscan Custody of the Terra Santa and the establishment in 1841 of a Protestant bishopric of Jerusalem jointly supported by the British and Prussian governments, the Holy See re-established a resident bishop in Jerusalem, the Latin Patriarch, with responsibility for the indigenous Latin Catholic population of Palestine, Transjordan and Cyprus. From the arrival of the first Latin Patriarch of 5 Jerusalem in early 1848 the two policies of the Holy See for Palestine, protection of the Holy Places and nurturing of the indigenous Latin and Greek Catholic population of Palestine, were administered respectively through the Franciscan Custody of the Terra Santa in Jerusalem and the Latin Patriarch of Jerusalem, with the Congregation of Propaganda Fide as the principal dicastery of the Holy See dealing with each of those entities. From 1862 the Congregatio de Propaganda Fide pro negotiis ritus orientalis, located within Propaganda Fide, would be given the role of overseeing the Oriental [non-Latin, often referred to as Greek] Catholic Churches, evolving in 1917 into the separate Congregation for the Eastern Churches [Pro Ecclesia Orientalis], adding an additional dicastery of the Roman Curia to the political and decision- making matrix. My clear hypothesis is that Pope Pius X did not understand the significance of what Dr Herzl told him on 25 January 1904 about the Zionist project for a Jewish national home in Palestine; did not take it seriously; and did not develop an effective and meaningful response to dealing with the Zionist project. Rather, the policies of the Holy See remained what they had been for almost seven hundred years, the protection of the Christian Holy Places through the agency of the Franciscan Custody of the Terra Santa, and since the pontificate of Pope Pius IX, the nurturing of the indigenous Catholic population in Palestine largely through the agency of the Latin Patriarch of Jerusalem and the Congregation for the Propagation of the Faith in Rome but with the additional involvement from 1862 of the office for the Eastern Churches which dealt with Palestine’s Eastern or Greek Catholics. The Holy See did not foresee the Balfour Declaration, and never at any time openly opposed the Zionist project for a Jewish national home in Palestine though it did oppose the establishmentof a separate Jewish state in Palestine. Its focus remained on the primary question of the Holy Places, and secondarily, the wellbeing and growth of the indigenous Catholic population of Palestine. My primary hypothesis therefore is that:- 6 the Holy See adhered throughout the period in question to its two long- established policies towards the Holy Land of protecting the Christian Holy Places and nurturing the indigenous Catholic population, never adopting a different policy in response to the unfolding of events in Palestine from 1903 to 1939. My subordinate hypothesis is that the Holy See never opposed the Zionist project in any meaningful manner, and that its responses to the unfolding of the Zionist project for a Jewish national home were never driven by anti-Semitism, but rather were guided by its two long-established policy priorities for Palestine, the protection of the Holy Places and the care for and nurturing of the indigenous Catholic population. 1.3. THE BACKGROUND CONTEXT OF THE HYPOTHESIS Catholics until 1959 were accustomed to the prayer in the Good Friday liturgy “for the faithless [perfidious] Jews…. That they may be delivered from their darkness”. Pope John XXIII only required on 21 March 1959 that the word “faithless/perfidious” be removed from this prayer. The Catholic faithful during the period covered by this work were therefore accustomed to hearing Jews and the Jewish faith spoken of in negative terms, which undoubtedly must have impacted on the thinking of Catholics everywhere. Theodor Herzl in his Diaries [at 5] said that: “In Austria and Germany I constantly have to fear that someone will shout ‘Hep, Hep’ at my heels”, repeating a traditional anti-Semitic taunt. For Herzl the fear of anti-Semitism, and its manifestation in such episodes as the Dreyfus Affair in France, was the fuel which powered his development of the Zionist project for a Jewish national home in Palestine. John Pollard, in his 2014 work The Papacy in the Age of Totalitarianism,1 and David Kertzer, in his 2014 work The Pope and Mussolini,2 each traverse in great and unarguable detail the persistent manifestations of anti-Judaism and anti-Semitism within the upper reaches of the Catholic Church in Italy and within the Vatican, not 1 John F. Pollard, The Papacy in the Age of Totalitarianism, (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2014). 2 David I. Kertzer, The Pope and Mussolini, (New York: Random House, 2014). 7 least within the Jesuits who were led through much of this period by a virulently anti-Semitic Pole, Wlodimir Ledochowski SJ. The journey of Pope Pius XI, in particular, away from this disturbing vice within the Catholic Church is one which has been continued by Pope John XXIII and subsequent Supreme Pontiffs. On 28 October 1965 Pope Paul VI proclaimed the Declaration of the Second Vatican Council on the Relation of the Church to Non-Christian Religions, Nostra Aetate, which eloquently acknowledged the origins of the Christian faith and the Catholic Church within Judaism, its patriarchs and prophets; owned the debt due to the Jewish faith, the “Ancient Covenant”, and the origins of Jesus, Our Lady and the apostles “from the Jewish people”; and therefore declared that “the Jews should not be presented as rejected or accursed by God, as if this followed from the Holy Scriptures”. Flowing naturally from this, the 1970 edition of the Roman Missal has included the prayer for the Good Friday liturgy as follows: “Let us pray for the Jewish people, first to hear the word of God, that they may continue to grow in the love of his name and in faithfulness to his covenant … that the people you first made your own may arrive at the fullness of redemption”.

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