What did they want him to do, send the Swiss guard after the Germans?
The Vatican was surrounded, and if they haven’t noticed, it’s a nation smaller than some celebrity estates!
The guy did what he could with what he had.
He was on the same level as Churchill, Roosevelt and yeah, Hitler. He had a world audience. He could have spoken louder and more frequently. Sorry, I'm a Catholic and greatly respect our current Pope. But I'm not enough of a sheep to buy everything the Vatican puts out. Not all our Popes were perfect. In this case, I believe much more info is needed. That doesn't make me a hater. It makes me a thinker.
What I would especially like to point out to honestly interested parties is this:
Think of all the institutions in 1930's-40's Germany who could have exerted themselves to save Jews from the Hitler regime: Universities and other schools, churches, labor unions, business and professional organizations, the Red Cross and other humanitarian groups, etc.
According to Jewish historian and scholar Pinchas Lapide ("Three Popes and the Jews,") the Catholic Church, at Pope Pius XII's urging and with some Vatican coordination, saved 800,000 Jews by sheltering them in churches, convents, orphanages and other Catholic institutions, and by issuing fake Baptismal certificates and helping transport them out out zones of Nazi occupation. Both the Pope's summer residence at Castelgandalfo and the buildings of the Vatican itself were used as sanctuaries for hunted Jews.
Lapide, an Israeli who has researched extensively on this subject, says the Catholic Church saved more Jewish lives than all the other institutions in Europe put together.
Yet Pius XII's reputation has been relentlessly trashed since the 1962 debut of a work of theatrical fiction by East German Communist Rolf Hochhuth, "The Deputy," which portrayed Pius XII --- in a kind of ironic and horrible "blood Libel"---as a kind of crypto-Nazi at worst, or a coward at best.
I am grateful to all those historians, Catholic and Jewish and of any religious or secular persuasion, who have labored to set the record straight.