Contrary to the fabrications (originating with Rolf Hochhuth,
a playwright who was a member of the Hitler Youth, and continuing down
to the present with John Cornwell, a journalist who is "Rolf Hochhuth Redivivus,"
and others), there are
the following testimonies emphasizing the truth of what really
happened
in that period when Pope Pius XII was confronting the Holocaust.
******
"No Christmas sermon reaches a larger congregation
than the message Pope Pius XII addresses to a war-torn world at this season.
This Christmas more than ever
he is a lonely voice crying out of the silence
of a continent."
The New York Times, December 25, 1942
******
"I should like you to take this occasion to
express to His Holiness my deeply-felt appreciation of the frequent action
which the Holy See has taken on its own
initiative in its generous and merciful efforts
to render assistance
to the victims of racial and religious persecutions."
Franklin D. Roosevelt to Myron C. Taylor,
August 3, 1944
******
". . . I told him [the Pope] that my first
duty was to thank him , and through him, the Catholic Church, on behalf
of the Jewish public, for all they had done in the
various countries to rescue Jews, to save
children, and Jews in general."
Moshe Sharett, Later First Israeli Foreign
Minister (April 1945)
******
"In all these painful matters, I referred
to the Holy See and afterwards I simply
carried out the Pope's orders: first and foremost
to save human lives."
Angelo Cardinal Roncalli, Patriarch of
Venice, Later Pope John XXIII (1957)
******
"When fearful martyrdom came to our people,
the voice of the
pope was raised for its victims."
Golda Meir, Israeli Foreign (October 1958)
*******
"He was a great and good man, and I loved
him."
Field Marshal Bernard Law Montgomery,London
Sunday Times (October 12, 1958)
******
"It seems evident to me that the principles,
reaffirmed by Pope Pacelli in his first encyclical [Summi Pontificatus],
and repeated forcefully at every circumstance, above all in the Christmas
messages of the war years,
constitute the most concrete condemnation
of the Hitlerian type of absolutism."
Eugene Cardinal Tisserant, New York Times
(February 26, 1964)
******
"Pope Pius XII did not remain silent."
Jeno Levai (1966)
******
". . . the Catholic Church, under the pontificate
of Pope Pius XII was instrumental
in saving at least 700,000, but probably as
many as 860,000,
Jews from certain death at Nazi hands."
Pinchas E. Lapide, Three Popes and the
Jews (1967)
******
"Pope Pius XII, the one pontiff with whom
I was acquainted, was an interesting man who, after 1945, came in for what
almost surely is an unfair amount of criticism
because he didn't stop the conflict Hitler
started and because he didn't
do more to save Europe's Jews from Nazi extermination."
C. L. Sulzberger, Go Gentle Into the Night
(1976)
******
"What we can say already, in light of what
we have learned, is that
the Nazis considered Pius XII and his collaborators
as their greatest enemies,
and that, reciprocally, the Pope and his entourage
saw the Nazis as criminals
working for the destruction of the Church
and civilization."
Jean Chelini, Le Figaro (October 8, 1983)
******
"The gratitude [to Pope Pius XII] of the world
Jewish leaders, for deeds to which their own archives are witness, was
transformed after 1963 into totally negative commentary. The well-intentioned,
informed world Jewish community was downgraded to 'disgraceful testimonials
of a few Jews' (New York Times, September 27, 1989), Letters)."
Rev. Robert A. Graham, S. J. (October 1989)
******
". . . that there was no direction given by
the Pope in helping the Jews recalls the argument of David Irving,
the English author, who in 1977 tried to absolve Adolf Hitler of any responsibility
for the Final Solution simply because historians could not find a document
proving his responsibility for persecuting the Jews. The failure
of historians to find any explicit instructions does not necessarily consititute
proof that Hitler was not behind the persecution of the Jews or that Pius
XII did not encourage the help given by the Catholic clergy and laity to
the Jews, since, as any historian knows, directives can be given orally
as well as in writing [actually, as early as 23 December 1940, Pius did
send a secret instruction, Opere et caritate, to his bishops to
help victims like the Jews]."
Rev. Vincent A. Lapomarda, S. J. (July
31, 1992)
******
"Anyone who does not limit himself to cheap
polemics knows very well what
Pius XII thought of the Nazi regime and how
much he did to help countless people
persecuted by the regime."
Pope John Paul II (1995)
******
"He was a great pope."
Pope John Paul II (March 21, 1998)
******
"In his 1942 Christmas message, which The
New York Times among others
extolled, the pope became the first figure
of international stature
to condemn what was turning into the Holocaust."
Kenneth Woodward, Newsweek (March 30, 1998)
******
"Before any more fingers are pointed at Pius
XII --- who did more to save the Jews than anyone else --- let him first
take a hard historical look at what his ideological kinfolk did at the
time of the Holocaust. The New Republic, like The New York Timesand
The
Washington Post, are the ones who need to apologize for their shameful
silence in the face of genocide and stop with the scapegoating of Pius
XII."
William A. Donohue, President, Catholic
League for Religious and Civil Rights
Catalyst, 27, No. 4 (May 2000),
10
******
". . . Pius XII was, genuinely and profoundly,
a righteous gentile."
Rabbi David
G. Dalin, The Weekly Standard, February 26, 2001
(also see his "History as Bigotry," in the
February 10, 2003 issue).
******
*******
Did
Pius XII Do Enough?
Years
of Praise, Years of Blame
We
Remember: A Reflection on the Shoah
Pius
XII is Victim of Calumny, Scholar Says
Pius XII and the Holocaust
Pius XII Was Not Hitler's Pope
The
Cause of Pope Pius XII
____________________
**********
Regarding recent books on Pope Pius XII, the
division of interpretations about him continues: John Cornwell's Hitler's
Pope (1999), Garry Wills' Papal
Sin (2000), Michael Phayer's
The
Catholic Church and the Holocaust (2000), James Carroll's
Constantine's
Sword (2001), Daniel
J. Goldhagen's essay in The New Republic (January 21,
2002) along with his A
Moral Reckoning (2002), and Paul O'Shea's A
Cross Too Heavy (2008) are critical of the Pope while
and Ronald J. Rychlak's
Hitler,
the War, and the Pope (2000), Ralph McInerny's
The
Defamation of Pius XII (2000), Michael F. Feldkamp's
Pius
XII und Deutschland (2000), and M. L. T. Brown's
Eugenio (2001) defend him. For those, sympathetic to Pope
Pius XII, like Hans Jansen, who has written The
Silent Pope? (2000), no explanation is necessary; for those
who are not, like Susan Zuccotti, author of the work, Under
His Very Windows (2001), no explanation is satisfactory. Yet, anyone
who studies the objective evidence with an open mind and understands the
whole
context of those times will conclude that Pope Pius XII did just about
all that was humanly possible in those inhumane circumstances of
World War II. Recent works by Jose M. Sanchez, Pius
XII and the Holocaust (2001) and Justus George Lawler's Popes
and Politics (2002)
show how really outrageous are the positons of many of those who have attacked
Pope Pius XII. To condemn Pius for not seizing every opportunity
to protest the crimes against the Jews overlooks the fact that he could
not even save his own priests. What is amazing is that the Catholic
Church under the Pope's leadership did far more to help Jews than any other
international agency or person, a fact generally recognized by both Jewish
(Richard
Breitman, David
G. Dalin, Patrick
J. Gallo, Martin
Gilbert, Pinchas
E. Lapide, Jeno
Levai, Livia
Rothkirchen, and Michael
Tagliacozzo) and Christian (Pierre
Blet, Antonio
Gaspari, Robert
A. Graham,
Peter Gumpel, Matteo
Luigi Napolitano, Margherita Marchione,
Michael
O'Carroll,
Pietro
Palazzini,Ronald
J. Rychlak, and Kenneth
D. Whitehead) scholars as well as by many of his contemporaries, not
to mention a number of recent works by Andrea Tornielli, that
show how Pius was, in fact, "The Pope of the Jews" as evident from the
latter's work, Pio
XII: Il Papa degli Ebrei (2001). At the same
time, there is the strange logic of some who criticize Pius XII by alleging,
on the one hand, without proof that individual priests, not the Pope, helped
the Jews, and, on the other hand, by alleging without proof that the Pope,
not individual priests, helped Nazis escape justice while others
go so far as to charge, without any solid evidence,
that the Vatican held Nazi
gold during World War II. Of course, such scapegoating
of the Pope, as his defenders point out, turns the focus away from
those upon whom the blame chiefly rests for the Holocaust, namely, the
Nazis and their collaborators, and dishonors the victims. While the
Pope's critics like Susan Zuccotti have resorted to the charge that the
statistics set forth by Pinchas Lapide claiming that the Catholic Church
under Pius XII was responsible for rescuing 700,000 to 860,000 Jews during
the Holocaust cannot be supported by the objective evidence, the fact is
that those same historians have not been able to document and support their
claim as much as the author who made it was able to reason to it as a conservative
estimate. This was based on the research he had done at Yad Vashem,
the interviews he had conducted with survivors, and on a comparision
of the number of Jews who existed before World War II with
the number who survived after the Holocaust. "It's a big number,
to be sure," wrote Sidney Zion in the Houston Chronicle (March 16,
2000), "but even if we halve it and then substract by two, we have more
Jews saved by the Vatican than by the Allies." For a thorough
survey of the literature on Pope Pius XII, see` "An Annotated Bibliography
by William Doino, Jr., in The
Pius War (2004) edited by Joseph Bottum and David G. Dalin.
**********
LITTLE KNOWN FACTS ABOUT
CATHOLICS AND THE HOLOCAUST:
NEWSPAPER HEADLINES
*****
"Nazi Protest U. S. Cardinal's Hitler Attack"
Thursday, May 20, 1937, The Houston Press
on George Cardinal Mundelein of Chicago
*****
"Assails Nazi Persecution of Jews, Prelate
Dares Der Fuhrer to Complain"
Monday, November 4, 1938, The Baltimore
Sun on its own Archbishop Michael J. Curley
*****
PAPAL DIPLOMATS WHO HELPED JEWS
Filippo Bernardini in Switzerland
Giuseppe Burzio in Slovakia
Andrea Cassulo in Rumania
Angelo Roncalli in Turkey
Angelo
Rota in Hungary
Valerio Valeri in France
*****
FRENCH BISHOPS WHO HELPED JEWS
Pierre-Marie Cardinal Gerlier of Lyons
Archbishop Jules Saliege of Toulouse
Bishop Piere Theas of Montaubaum
*****
HUNGARIAN BISHOPS WHO HELPED JEWS
Bishop Vilmos Apor of Gyor
Archbishop Jozsef Mindszenty of Vesprem
*****
ITALIAN BISHOPS WHO HELPED JEWS
Bishop Carlo Agostini of Padua
Archbishop Pietro Boetto of Genoa
Archbishop Elia Dalla Costa of Florence
Bishop Federico Dalla Zuanno of Cardi
Archbishop Maurillo Fossati of Turin
Bishop Giuseppe Placido Nicolini of Assisi
Bishop Antonio Santin of Trieste
Archbishop Ildefonso Schuster of Milan
Bishop Antonio Torrini of Lucca
Archbishop Mario Vianello of Perugia
*****
POLISH BISHOPS WHO HELPED JEWS
Archbishop Romuald Jalbrzykowski of Wilno
Bishop Todor Kubina of Czestochowa
Bishop Jan Kanty Lorek of Sandomierz
Bishop Stanislaw Lukomski of Lomza
Bishop Karol Niemira of Pinsk
Archbishop Adam Sapieha of Krakow
Archbishop Boleslaw Twardowski of Lwow
*****
OTHER BISHOPS WHO HELPED JEWS
Archbishop
Jozef-Ernest van Roey of Mechlin
Archbishop Aloysius Stepinac of Zagreb
Archbishop Andrzey Szeptyckyj of Lwow
*****
KEY CATHOLICS WHO SAVED JEWS
Pere Marie-Benoit / Padre Benedetti
Giorgio Perlasca
Aristides des Sousa Mendes
Padre Pietro Tacchi-Venturi
*****
OTHER DETAILS
1. In two of the seven plots to overthrow
Adolf Hitler, Pius XII was involved
in at least two of them.
2. Bishops in the Third Reich who vigorously
opposed the Nazis: Wilhelm Berning of Osnabruck, Clements von Galen of
Munster, Joseph Maschens of Hildesheim, Johannes B. Sproll of Rottenburg,
and Konrad von Preysing of Berlin.
3. More than 4,000 priests were killed by
the Nazis, incuding 868 Poles at Dachau,
780 from various nations at Mauthausen, and
123 shot in France (one estimate holds
that at least 4,000 were killed at Buchenwald
alone).
4. Israel Zoller (Zolli), Rome's Chief Rabbi
during World War II, converted to
Roman Catholicism and took the same baptismal
name, Eugenio, as Pius XII
in appreciation of what the Pope had done
for the Jews.
*****
THE DOCUMENTS OF THE HOLY SEE
The eleven volumes, Actes et Documents
du Saint Siege Relatifs a la Seconde Guerre Mondiale (Libreria Editrice
Vaticana, 1865-81), edited by Pierre Blet and other Jesuits, deal with
the victims of the war (especially volumes 6, 8, 9, and 10) and show
that Pius and the Church, more than any individual or international agency
rose to the challenge of the Holocaust and used the resources of the Roman
Catholic Church to help the Jews. This was at a time when the Pope
and the Church were engaged in a struggle for survival against the Nazis
who imprisoned, tortured, and killed thousands of clergy and religious,
not to mention many more of the laity. Unfortunately, while scholars
like Walter Adolph and Ulrich von Hehl acknowledge this in their studies,
others like John F. Morley and John T. Pawlikowski do not appear to understand
this crucial aspect of the problem. Though doubts have been raised
in recent years, about the validity of these documents, they can be reviewed
in general through John S. Conway's "Records and Documents of the Holy
See Relating to the Second World War," Yad Vashem Studies, 15 (1983),
327-345. In La Civilta Cattolica (March 21, 1996), in face
of the criticism raised about these documents, Pierre Blet, one of the
original editors of those documents, said: "But when a legend is created
from unrelated elements and with the aid of imagination, discussion is
meaningless. The only thing possible is to counter the myth with
the historical reality proved by incontestable documentation. For
this reason, Pope Paul VI, who was Substitute of the Secretariat of State
had been one of the closest collaborators of Pius XII, as early as 1964
authorized the publication of the documents of the Holy See relating to
the Second World War." Doubts were raised about gaps in the documents
selected as, for example, v. 8, p. 466, which refers to the controversial
letter of Gerhart Riegner of the World Jewish Congress about the Nazi extermination
of Jews, but that document was not included among the papal ones because
it had already been published (pp. 105-109) in Saul Friedlander's Pius
XII land the Third Reich (1964). Consequently, a Catholic-Jewish
Commission was set up in November of 1999 to review those same documents
with three Catholic scholars (Eva Fleishner, Gerald Fogarty, and John Morley)
and three Jewish scholars (Michael Marrus, Bernard Suchecky, and Robert
Wistrich) which, divided in its reports, went out of existence in July
of 2001. Yet, to paraphrase Pierre Blet, even if "a smoking gun"
were to be found in any review of the Vatican Archives, it is not clear
how this would absolve Pius XII of his alleged failure during World War
II. This revisionist view of the pope has tended towards irrational
behavior since ideas do have consequences. Today this is evident
in the outrageous interference in the internal affairs of the Roman Catholic
Church when some Jewish leaders, to the pubic embarrassment of their own
religious colleagues, have called for a halt to any process leading
to the beatification of Pius XII.
*****
THE PERPETUATION OF LEGENDS
Doubts, then, about the validity of the papal
documents of World War II are just ways of perpetuating "the black legend"
about Pope Pius XII. "Every historian knows that once a story or
a legend is out there, you can't kill it," said Peter Hoffman, an historian
writing in the February 2000 issue of Inside the Vatican. "Never.
You can come up with the best arguments, it will stay there, especially
if it's one that goes down easily." Fabrications of documents against
the Catholic Church arouse during the Cold War in both Eastern and Western
Europe, as Robert A. Graham's refutation of Virgilio Scattolini's writings
make clear in La Civilta Cattolica (1973: III, 467-478. These
were also reported by Agostino Bono in The Boston Globe (February
1, 1992). Such allegations, including one mentioned in US News
& World Report (March 30, 1998) alleging that the Vatican had stashed
away gold taken from the Jews during the Holocaust or similar stories
found in the works of writers like Avro Manhattan and Edmond Paris that
one Dragutin Kamber (1901-69) was a Jesuit who was a leader of the executions
that took place in the concentration camp at Jasenovac in Croatia during
World War II (in this connection, see "The Inventions and Lies of Dr. [Milan]
Bulajic on the Internet," as refuted by Vladimir Zergavic in 1997).
If these writers can be found lacking in the essential components of historical
accuracy, specificlaly, knowledge and truth, how can they be trusted to
portray what really happened in the past? Obviously, such historians
have their own agenda and forget that objective evidence is the fundamental
criterion of historical truth.
*****
THE VATICAN AND THE STATE OF ISRAEL
The Vatican, from Pius XII through John Paul I, had refused to recognize
the State of Israel. This was underscored in Pius' major disciple,
Pope Paul VI who, during his trip to Israel in January of 1964, refrained
from even mentioning Israel other than to refer to it in terms of the Holy
Land. Since those popes insisted on the internationalization of Jerusalem,
the effect was to harden Israel's view towards the Vatican and even towards
Pius XII forgetting that the latter had sympathy for the Zionist dream
of a homeland for the Jews. In fact, the pope's position was
minor compared to the opposition of leading Americans like Dean G.
Acheson, George C. Marshall, and James V. Forrestal in opposing the creation
of the State of Israel. That the pope's position was based on his
legitimate concerns for the Roman Catholics living in Israel and for the
holy shrines in Jerusalem itself were not taken into account. Some
contemporary Jewish leaders think that Pius was more concerned about safeguarding
the Church, objectively his primary obligation as pope, than in saving
Jews during the Holocaust when, in fact, he was even handed in his attempts
to help both Christians and Jews. While it is easy today for the
pope's critics to put the Catholic Church on the defensive by saying that
Pius XII coud have done more, this was not so clear during those horrible
days of World War II when he was recognized as "a lonely voice" (and the
only voice) raised in defense of those victims, among them many Catholic
priests whom he could not save from extinction. Yet, despite what
his critics say today to confuse the issue and to belittle the testimones
from prominent Jewish agencies and their representatives during the life
of Pius, such opponnents cannot annul the historical redcord of his help
during the Holocaust. All this was recognized and affirmed by the
World Jewish Congress, the World Zionist Organization, and the State of
Israel itself, not to mention such a prominent newspaper as The New
York Times. Even a revisionist approach to the study of the past
can help enrich our understanding of it, it cannot reject a basic principle
of historical study, that is, to evaluate a person not only according to
one's own times but also according to the times in which he lived.
According to his own times, Pope Pius XII was a hero, but according to
our own times, in the opinion of these revisionists, he is a villain.
In fact, at the pope's death, some Israelis had suggested that a forest
be planted in Israel for all that Pius had done to save Jews during the
Holocaust. To this day, that expectation remains unfulfilled to the
amazement of those who know how widespread was the expression of gratitude
by Jews at the end of World War II and at the time of his death.
This is particularly so when one recalls that the State of Israel wanted
to honor a chief assistant to Pius, the future Pope Paul VI, who did not
think that he should accept a distinction for merely doing his duty in
organizing the papal relief efforts during World War II. However,
Pope John Paul II turned all that around by recognizing the State of Israel
in the agreements signed on December 30, 1993 and by following up this
with his historic trip to Israel in March of 2000, thereby dramatically
turning around relations between Israel and the Vatican.
*****
************
