-Caveat Lector-
This is an article published in "The Oregonian" June 28, 2001.
David Reinhard
Hitler's Pope or the Good Samaritan?
Thursday, June 28, 2001
There it was again, tucked in an Associated Press story on Pope John
Paul II praying for Holocaust victims at Babi Yar, the Ukraine ravine
where Nazis slaughtered Jews en masse during World War II. There it
was, a libel slipped into straight news story and passed off as fact.
"Jewish leaders have criticized the Vatican's failure to condemn more
strongly the Roman Catholic Church's passive role during the
Holocaust," Victor L. Simpson reported in the story picked up by The
Oregonian. "Pope Pius XII kept silent in the face of reports of Nazi
atrocities, though some individual priests and nuns risked their lives
to shelter Jews."
Right after World War II, Hannah Arendt wrote that the Nazi death
machine demonstrated the "banality of evil" in its mundane operations.
Today's breezy calumnies against Pius XII and his church for
"passivity" and "silence" -- outrageous defamations that go unremarked
upon -- now showcase the banality of libel.
But let's not lay this all on "Jewish leaders." It's largely the work
of two groups -- lapsed or self-loathing Catholics who "have issues"
with the papacy and non-Catholics who traffic in today's casual
anti-Catholicism, the "thinking man's anti-Semitism."
In fact, rabbi and historian David G. Dalin has explored the recent
books on Pius XII and the Jews from such authors as John Cornwell
("Hitler's Pope") James Carroll ("Constantine's Sword"), Garry Wills
("Papal Sin") and Ronald J. Rychlak ("Hitler, the War and the Pope.")
His extended review in the Feb. 26 Weekly Standard should put to rest
the ahistorical notion that, as The New York Times put it recently,
"Pius XII's elevation of Catholic self-interest over Catholic
conscience was the lowest point in modern Catholic history." Dalin's
conclusion: "Pius' defenders have the stronger case."
That we're even debating Pius' complicity in the Holocaust would have
shocked past Jewish leaders and The New York Times itself. It would,
however, have delighted communist propagandists who spread "Hitler's
Pope" disinformation after the war.
Passivity? According to Dalin, "In his 1967 book "Three Popes and the
Jews," the diplomat Pinchas Lapide (who served as Israeli consul in
Milan and interviewed Italian Holocaust survivors) declared Pius XII
'was instrumental in saving at least 700,000, but probably as many as
860,000 Jews from certain death at Nazi hands.' "
Silence? "In January 1940 . . . the pope issued instructions for
Vatican Radio to reveal 'the dreadful cruelties of uncivilized
tyranny' the Nazis were inflicting on Jewish and Catholic Poles . . .
," writes Dalin, "The New York Times editorialized: 'Now the Vatican
has spoken, with authority that cannot be questioned . . . .' "
Or consider this New York Times headline from August 1942: "Pope Is
Said to Plead for Jews Listed for Removal from France."
Inaction? "In the months Rome was under German occupation, Pius XII
instructed Italy's clergy to save lives by all means. . . ., Dalin
notes, "Beginning in October 1943, Pius asked churches and convents
throughout Italy to shelter Jews."
Dalin cites example after example of Pius' work in behalf of Europe's
Jews. And contemporary notice of this work. In 1940, Albert Einstein
told Time magazine, "Only the Church stood squarely across the path of
Hitler's campaign."
Chaim Weizmann, later Israel's first president, wrote in 1943 that
"the Holy See is lending its powerful help wherever it can, to
mitigate the fate of my persecuted co-religionists."
Apparently, no good deed goes unpunished -- a half-century later.
"New oral-history centers have gathered an impressive body of
interviews with Holocaust survivors, military chaplains, and Catholic
civilians," Dalin writes. "Given the recent attacks, the time has come
for a new defense of Pius -- because, despite allegations to the
contrary, the best historical evidence now confirms . . . that Pius
XII was not silent and that almost no one at the time thought him so."
Before he became Pius XII, Eugenio Pacelli had taken Hitler's measure.
"This man, he told his secretary, "is capable of trampling on
corpses."
So too, it seems, are today's critics of Pope Pius XII.
<end>
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