The Western Walls

The release of Contesting Zion is providential, ironic, or maybe just good marketing luck. Palestine, Israel, the slaughter of October 7, 2023, and the continuing horrors visited on Gaza are daily reminders that the Terra Santa — or the Holy Land — is a contested place with a tortured past.

Adrian Ciani, a historian who teaches at Seneca Polytechnic in Toronto as well as at St. Augustine’s Seminary in the Toronto School of Theology, does not shy away from tackling the complex, unsettled, and deeply controverted narratives attached to all things political and religious on the land once trod by Jesus of Nazareth. He does, though, largely limit his study to the span of time between the Balfour Declaration of 1917 and the seventh session of the United Nations General Assembly in 1952, a period when the Vatican fought the establishment of the State of Israel and campaigned vigorously for the internationalization of Jerusalem as well as other holy sites.

The list of players involved was striking, including three U.S. presidents (Franklin Delano Roosevelt, Harry S. Truman, and Dwight D. Eisenhower), four popes (Pius X, Benedict XV, Pius XI, and Pius XII), a mighty cohort of Vatican nuncios (or ambassadors), Israeli leaders, Zionists and anti-Zionists, and American civil servants. Also engaged was that formidable collective known as the American Catholic faithful, pitted against an equally formidable American alliance of Jewish organizations, liberal academics, and prominent Protestant and Episcopalian leaders. It was quite the mixed bag.

Ciani makes clear at the outset that the Vatican was hostile to the idea of a Jewish state in Palestine when he quotes Rafael Merry del Val, Pius X’s cardinal secretary of state, from an interview with the Viennese Zionist journal Die Welt, following a visit to the Vatican by the founder of the Zionist movement, Theodor Herzl. The cardinal observed that the Church could never “deliver up the country of our redeemer to people of a different faith.” But he also made clear that the Vatican would not oppose the emigration of Jews to Palestine to escape persecution, as the Holy See “never opposes an undertaking that alleviates human misery.” Herzl’s Vatican visit was in January 1904. He died in July of the same year. But the Zionist movement continued to gather strength, and two world wars did not quench its goals or its fervour. If anything, the conflicts fed them.

Ciani quite rightly locates the Vatican’s distrust of Zionism within a larger historical context. “Vatican reticence toward political Zionism was tied to papal fears of modern nationalism in general,” he writes. “The papacy’s nineteenth-century clash with Italian liberal nationalism, which resulted in a complete loss of the pope’s temporal authority, had created a deep and lasting Vatican mistrust of modernist ideologies (including socialism, secularism, and nationalism), which had only functioned to limit papal power and autonomy.” Although this backstory explains the Vatican’s wariness of political Zionism, the spiritual or theological dimension of the movement was not lost on the popes and their Curial advisers. Their opposition to relinquishing Catholic holdings, withdrawing any authority over the maintenance of the centuries-old shrines and holy sites “directly related to the life and death of Christ,” and conceding any residual temporal power to a new political state in Palestine was non-negotiable.

And so the skirmishing and scheming began. In order to counter the increasing support for Zionism among diverse constituencies in the United States, the Vatican deployed its top guns to advance its argument in favour of Resolution 181’s provision for a separated body — or corpus separatum — allowing the Old City of Jerusalem and the centre of Bethlehem to be protected as an international zone under the auspices of the United Nations. Those officials included influential cardinals in wealthy archdioceses: Francis Spellman of New York, Samuel Stritch of Chicago, Richard Cushing of Boston, Edward Mooney of Detroit, and Dennis Dougherty of Philadelphia. These prominent prelates, as well as the others who constituted the American episcopacy, were persistently instructed by the Vatican after the resolution was adopted in 1947 to apply pressure on Washington legislators and Catholic lobbyists to guarantee that the secular lawmakers, national media commentators, and influential columnists in the highest organs of consensus-shaping opinion were cognizant of the Church’s intractable resistance to the creation of a Jewish homeland on the Terra Santa. “On this issue, the American bishops, and a number of leading American Catholic organizations, clearly took their ideological and political lead from papal Rome,” Ciani writes.

The Vatican did gain traction with the Truman administration. The exponential postwar growth of the Catholic population and the Church’s rising power, mediated through its expanding canvas of hospitals, parochial schools, universities, and publications, combined to make Catholicism a potent political presence — especially during an election cycle. But in the end, Truman’s sympathies, Baptist eschatology, and political pragmatism aligned on behalf of Israel and for a Jewish Jerusalem and not for a corpus separatum. The shift signalled a defeat for the Holy See, but it wasn’t the end of the matter.

The Vatican continued to advocate for special status for Jerusalem and what it called the “imprescriptible rights” of the Catholic communion to its spiritual home. From 1939 to 1958, the pontificate of Pius XII was especially engaged in the matter of Israel’s statehood and the internationalization of the Holy City, resulting in the publication of three encyclicals — two in 1948 (Auspicia Quaedam and In Multiplicibus Curis) and one in 1949 (Redemptoris Nostri). These made a forceful case at the highest levels of authority. The amount of time and energy expended by Pius XII on the so‑called Jerusalem question stands in sharp contrast with the paucity of attention and publications that defined his handling of the Third Reich and the Shoah.

In his conclusion, Ciani provides a valuable synopsis of developments in recent decades, including the Second Vatican Council’s repudiation of the charge of deicide (the act of killing God) against the Jews; the cogent 1977 argument by the Jesuit priest, former Boston College law dean, and Democratic congressman Robert Drinan on the compelling need for Roman Catholic acceptance of Zionism; and the establishment of diplomatic relations between the Vatican and the State of Israel in 1993 during the pontificate of the most philosemitic pope of our time, John Paul II.

Contesting Zion is a solid work of scholarship that shines a light on the complex interrelationships between the Vatican and the American Church, which made common cause only to have that cause fail. It was, as the Canadian historian Peter C. Kent once noted, “a lonely Cold War” for the Vatican. Some of the Vatican’s apprehensions, however, have come to pass: fundamentalist settlers violating Palestinian rights; a morally atrophying Israeli leadership disposed to theocracy; and a seemingly irreversible diminishment of a Christian presence. The Vatican didn’t get it all wrong.