Jacques Kornberg, emeritus professor of history at the University of Toronto, has published and lectured extensively on the Holocaust, early Zionism, and modern Antisemitism. In recent years, he has focused particularly on Catholic-Jewish relations in the years preceding and during the Holocaust. Aspects of his research will be discussed in a forthcoming book, Why Pope Pius XII did not Save the Jews.
More than sixty years after the Holocaust, Pius XII’s cautious response to the destruction of the European Jews still provokes fierce debate. But was his reaction to events that different from that of preceding popes, when they had been confronted by the news of mass assaults on civilian populations? Who today debates Pope Benedict XV’s response to the Armenian genocide of 1915, or Pope Pius XI’s to the use of mustard gas as a terror tactic against civilians during the 1936 Italian conquest of Ethiopia? Some argue that Pius XII stands alone, that his policy was more an anomaly than a papal norm, an outcome of his timid and indecisive personality and of his training as a diplomat, a vocation that encouraged negotiation and compromise. In his talk on May 3, Professor Kornberg will test this argument by comparing Pius XII’s response to mass atrocities with those of his predecessors.
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