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Here are some headlines from the New York Times back in the day. It's odd that the NYT of today is one of the biggest critics of Pius XII when 60 years ago they applauded him.

"The people of Israel will never forget what His Holiness is doing for us," Chief Rabbi Herzog of Palestine wrote in one of his many wartime communications to the Holy See. On October 11, 1945, the New York Times reported a gift to the Vatican of $20,000 from the World Jewish Congress "in recognition of the work of the Holy See in rescuing Jews from Fascist and Nazi persecution."

· "NAZIS WARNED IN LOURDES": reporting the protest in 1935 of then Cardinal Pacelli against "superstitions of race and blood." When Pacelli was elected Pope on March 2, 1939, the Times reported "nearly general applause around the world," except in Germany.

· "POPE CONDEMNS DICTATORS, TREATY VIOLATORS, RACISM": three–column front–page headline reporting the Pope’s first encyclical, October 28, 1939.

· "VATICAN DENOUNCES ATROCITIES IN POLAND; GERMANS CALLED EVEN WORSE THAN RUSSIANS" (January 23, 1940).

· "JEWS’ RIGHTS DEFENDED": reporting the Pope’s "burning words to [Nazi Foreign Minister] Ribbentrop in defense of the Jews in Germany and Poland" (March 14, 1940).

· "Pius XII is a lonely voice in the silence and darkness enveloping Europe this Christmas. . . . The Pope put himself squarely against Nazism" (December 25, 1941).

· "The papacy is throwing the whole weight of its publicizing facilities into an exposé" of Nazi atrocities (through Vatican radio): January 24, 1942.

· "POPE IS SAID TO PLEAD FOR JEWS LISTED FOR REMOVAL FROM FRANCE" (August 6, 1942). And on August 27: "VICHY SEIZES JEWS; POPE PIUS IGNORED."

· "This Christmas [1942] more than ever [the Pope] is a lonely voice crying out of the silence of a continent": editorial on the Pope’s reference to "the hundreds of thousands who, . . . solely because of their nation or race, have been condemned to death or progressive extinction."

· On August 21, 1944, Pulitzer Prize laureate Anne O’Hare McCormick wrote in the Times that the Pope had given "first priority" to saving Jews.

· "Under the Pope’s direction the Holy See did an exemplary job of sheltering and championing the victims of the Nazi–Fascist regime. . . . None [in Rome] doubts that the general feeling of the Roman Curia was anti–Fascist and very strongly anti–Nazi": Times reporter Herbert L. Matthews, October 15, 1944.