History[edit]
In June 1938, Pius XI assigned American Jesuit John LaFarge to prepare a draft of Humani generis unitas. Jesuit Superior-General Wlodimir Ledóchowski assigned two other Jesuits, Gustav Gundlach and Gustave Desbuquois, to assist LaFarge.[1] Working in Paris,[2] they produced a draft of approximately 100 pages.[3] Another Jesuit translated the draft into Latin and presented it to Ledóchowski.[4] The draft was delivered to the Vatican in September 1938.[1]
Some secondary sources, including Cardinal Tisserant,[5] claim that the draft was on Pius XI's desk when he died of a heart attack on February 10, 1939.[3]
Pius XI's successor, Pope Pius XII, did not promulgate the draft as an encyclical. Critics of Pius XII (notably John Cornwell in his controversial work Hitler's Pope) cited this decision as evidence of his alleged silence toward anti-Semitism and The Holocaust. He utilized parts of it in his own inaugural encyclical Summi Pontificatus on the unity of human society, in October 1939, the month after the outbreak of World War II,[1][2] and analysis of the draft figures prominently in most comparisons of the policies of Pius XII and his predecessor.[4]
In June 2006, Pope Benedict XVI ordered all documents from the reign of Pius XI in the Vatican Secret Archives to be opened,[6] and on September 18, 2006 over 30,000 documents were made available to researchers.[7]
According to the authors, Pius XII was not aware of the text before the death of his predecessor.[20] He chose not to publish its specific statements regarding Judaism and regarding persecution of Jews. However, his first encyclical Summi Pontificatus (On the Supreme Pontificate, October 12, 1939), published after the beginning of World War II, has an echo of the previous title in its title: On the Unity of Human Society and uses many of the general arguments of the text.
Summi Pontificatus sees Christianity as universalized and opposed to every form of racial hostility and every claim of racial superiority. There are no real racial differences: the human race forms a unity, because "God 'hath made of one [man], all mankind, to dwell upon the whole face of the earth.'"[21]
This divine law of solidarity and charity assures that all men are truly brethren, without excluding the rich variety of persons, cultures, and societies.[22]