The Church and the memory of the Shoah: the Catholic press in Italy, 1945-1947

Publications on Nazi atrocities against Jews appeared in Italy before the end of World War II, and by January 1945 the Vatican knew all about the outcome of the Final Solution. Despite this, the Catholic press in Italy maintained silence in regard to the Holocaust in 1945-47. There were reports on the atrocities of the war, without mentioning Jews as victims, and on crimes perpetrated against Catholicism. This stance of the Church was in keeping with the traditional Catholic philosophy of history, still prevalent in this period. Catholicism regarded history as a struggle of Christianity against the "forces of Satan", with Judaism belonging to the latter camp. Even if the Church was critical of Nazi genocidal antisemitism, it placed responsibility for the genocide partly on the Jews themselves. The main victim of the war, in the Church's conception, was Christianity.