Abstract
Upon his arrival in Rome on 9 June 1960, Isaac received a visit from Israeli embassy staffer Hagai Dikan (whose acquaintance Isaac had made when Dikan had been the Israeli consul-general in Marseille), preparatory to a meeting on the following day with Israel’s ambassador to the Vatican, Eliyahu Sasson. The Israeli foreign ministry had been caught flatfooted by the Isaac papal audience. When Maurice Fisher, who would be posted to Rome two months later as Israeli ambassador to Italy, learned of the papal audience, his reaction in correspondence to the Israeli consul in New York City was, “There is no purpose, and in the foreseeable future, there will not be any.” Isaac then paid a visit to France’s ambassador to the Holy See, de la Tournelle, to discuss the personalities with whom he ought to meet preliminary to his audience with the Pope. “Mgr. de Provenchères told me,” Isaac told de la Tournelle, “to meet with his friend, Mgr. Baron, Rector of Saint-Louis des Français, in whom I would find the most knowledgeable of advisers. [de Provenchères] has alerted him of my arrival in Rome.” The French ambassador nodded his head, but cautioned, “He has the temperament of a mystic; you must meet him at Saint-Louis des Français together with Mgr. Arrighi, who is more grounded practically and has a greater network among the Italian clergy (he himself is Corsican).” De la Tournelle thought it unlikely Isaac would be able to meet with Cardinal Tardini, whose secretariat responsibilities left little time. Rather, de la Tournelle counseled Isaac to connect with Ottaviani, and among the French cardinals, with Tisserant and Julien. Unbeknownst to both de la Tournelle and Isaac, Tardini, who had declared in 1959 in conversation with Cardinal Tisserant, “there is no possibility of contact or negotiations with the killers of God,” was doing his utmost to derail what was to be a special, unpublicized encounter between Isaac and John XXIII.
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24 April 2019
The original version of this book was revised. Imprecisions have been corrected and the index backfilled with missing page references where relevant
Notes
- 1.
Quoted in Alberto Melloni, L’altra Roma: Politica E S. Sede Durante Il Concilio Vaticano II (1959–1965) (Bologna: Mulino, 2000), 87–88.
- 2.
Mgr. Charles de Provenchères (1904–84) was archbishop of Aix-en-Provence from 1946 to 1979. He was a close friend and ardent supporter of Jules Isaac. In the 1950s, de Provenchères was President of the Commission épiscopale du Catéchisme and collaborated with P. Paul Démann in the publication of the pamphlet titled, Les Juifs dans la catéchèse chrétienne (Editions des Cahiers sioniens, 1952). De Provenchères was a participant at Vatican II.
- 3.
After graduating from L’Ecole de Commerce de Narbonne, Mgr. André Baron (1893–1981) became a wine broker. In 1910, however, he discovered Léon Bloy whom he befriended. In 1917, he came to know Maritain. In 1920, Baron entered the Séminaire de Fontgombault as a mature noviciate, was ordained in 1930 and became a professeur de lettres there. On the seminary’s closure, he became a pastor out of Notre-Dame-de-Lorette in Italy. From 1949 to 1962, he was rector of the parish of Saint-Louis des Français in Rome. He passed away on 11 March 1981 and is buried in the abbey of Fontgombault cemetery.
- 4.
Isaac, “Note sur huit jours à Rome (juin 1960),” 19.
- 5.
Ibid., 19. Under-secretary Monsignor Jean-François Arrighi, together with Recording Secretary Fr. Thomas Stransky, Secretary Johannes Willebrands and President Augustin Bea, were the first four members of the Secretariat for Promoting Christian Unity.
- 6.
Quoted in Bialer, 69.
- 7.
Isaac, “Note sur huit jours à Rome (juin 1960),” 20.
- 8.
Ibid.
- 9.
Ibid.
- 10.
Ibid., 21.
- 11.
Ibid., 22.
- 12.
Reproduced as an Appendix.
- 13.
Isaac, “Note sur huit jours à Rome (juin 1960),” 22.
- 14.
The previous Pope John [XXII] had been a Frenchman, son of a savetier de cahors.
- 15.
Isaac, “Note sur huit jours à Rome (juin 1960),” 23–4.
- 16.
Related to the author at a meeting with Fr. Thomas Stransky in New York City on (Good) Friday 3 April 2015.
- 17.
Le Fonds Jules Isaac, bibliothèque Méjanes d’Aix-en-Provence.
- 18.
Instituto per le Scienze Religiose, ed., Edizione Nazionale Dei Diari Di Angelo Guiseppe Roncalli – Giovanni XXIII: Agende Del Pontefice 1958–1963 (Roma: 2001).
- 19.
Cardinal Tisserant is reported to have reacted to Rolf Hochhuth’s play, The Deputy in which Pius XII is pilloried for not having done more to assist European Jews, by remarking to William F. Rosenblum, rabbi of Manhattan’s Temple Israel, “I do not like it when the truth is not told and you know that it [the play] is not the truth” (reported by Milton Bracker, New York Times Rome bureau chief, 17 October 1963).
- 20.
Isaac, “Note sur huit jours à Rome (juin 1960),” 26.
- 21.
Ibid., 27.
- 22.
Connelly, 192.
- 23.
Luckner’s name seems nowhere to be found in the official list of Seelisberg participants, a list published by le Conseil des Juifs et des Chrétiens, Genève, 1947.
- 24.
Connelly, 192. Luckner is a Yad Vashem Righteous among the Nations.
- 25.
Ibid., 179.
- 26.
Johannes Oesterreicher was born in 1904 of Jewish parents, veterinarian Nathan and wife Ida, in Stadt Liebau in northern Moravia. He had been raised with some modicum of Jewish tradition, including instruction in the Hebrew language, in proximity to nine other Jewish families. In 1924, he was baptized by peace activist and priest Max Josef Metzger (arrested repeatedly and finally executed by the Nazis in 1944) in the sacristy of the Graz Cathedral after which he abandoned his medical studies (which he had been pursuing in Vienna) and entered the seminary. Oesterreicher graduated and was ordained a priest in Vienna on 17 July 1927.
- 27.
A descendant of Protestant theologians, Karl Thieme was born in Dresden. After graduating from Leipzig University in history, theology and philosophy, Thieme (by then a member of the Social Democratic Party of Germany) followed his teacher, Jewish legal scholar Hermann Heller, to Berlin’s Deutsche Hochschule fur Politik. Following his postgraduate studies, he joined the faculty of the Pedagogical Academy in East Prussian Elbing, where he taught until March 1933, after which Social Democrats were banned from public service. On 30 January 1934 in the Liebfrauenkirche in Leipzig-Lindau, Karl Thieme converted to Catholicism. In the same year, he became a co-editor with Johannes Maassen and Waldemar Gurian of the weekly, Junge Front, an anti-Nazi Catholic review founded in 1932 and placed into liquidation in January 1936. In August 1935, facing imminent arrest, Thieme took flight across the German-Swiss frontier and moved into his mother’s home at Laufelfingen, near Basel, where he would reside for the next decade. In 1953, Thieme joined the faculty of the University of Mainz where he taught European history, philosophy and German studies.
- 28.
The very same Fr. Charles Boyer about whom the Rome correspondent of the Jewish Chronicle would report on 11 November 1960, “Father Boyer described as ‘exaggerated and false’ the theory, propounded by Jules Isaac, that antisemitism derived from the Christian teaching which attributed the death of Jesus to the entire Jewish people. He stated that Christians did not object to Jews because of Jesus’s death, but because they refused the New Testament.”
- 29.
Quoted in Connelly, 123.
- 30.
Isaac, “Note sur huit jours à Rome (juin 1960),” 28.
- 31.
Quoted in Oesterreicher, “Declaration on the Relationship of the Church to Non-Christian Religions,” 26.
- 32.
Isaac, “Survol,” 232–33.
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Tobias, N.C. (2017). Mission Accomplished. In: Jewish Conscience of the Church. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-46925-6_10
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