Catholic Caucus: How Pius XII defended the Jews

There is a contradiction I wish to explore, beginning with the following two editorials that appeared in the New York Times more than 50 years apart:

"The voice of Pius XII in the silence and darkness enveloping Europe this Christmas . . . . He's about the only ruler left on the Continent of Europe who dares to raise his voice at all." (New York Times, Dec. 15, 1941).

"A full exploration of Pope Pius's conduct is needed . . . . It now falls to John Paul and his successors to take the next step toward full acceptance of the Vatican's failure to stand squarely against the evil that swept across Europe." (New York Times, Mar. 18, 1998).

These two editorials cannot be reconciled. Can this be called an example of the unwavering voice of the media? Or is this historical revisionism par excellence? Taking swipes at the Catholic Church seems to be fashionable these days. How so?

In 1995, the National Conference of Christians and Jews did a major survey on prejudice against virtually every segment of the American population, and found that the number one prejudice in the United States is Anti-Catholicism' (Envoy p.15). This is why it is politically correct to bash, revise or malign Catholicism in America. It seems to me that the (1998) New York Times editor has just engaged in 'Chronological Snobbery' when he is juxtaposed with the 1941 editor's analysis of Pope Pius XII.

'Chronological Snobbery' is a phrase coined by C.S. Lewis to describe the shabby reasoning by which someone discounts or discredits an idea simply because it's an old idea ' (This Rock, 1990, Sept. issue, p.14). I would further propose that the anti-Catholic apologists are setting up 'straw man' arguments that misrepresent Pius XII's role in the holocaust and then criticize this caricature of him.

A straw man argument is an example of non sequitur reasoning, which is Latin for "it does not follow" (ibid, p. 18). On returning to my apologia, I have to note that the 20th century will be marked in the annals of history for this monstrous, terrible genocide of an estimated six million Jews and 'many' other victims of Nazi Germany under Adolf Hitler. During this dark time, the Catholic Church was being shepherded by Pope Pius XII, who proved himself an untiring foe of the Nazis. Pope Pius set out to save as many Jews as he could, yet today, the modern historians give him almost no credit for his actions before or during the Second World War.

Pius XII was no friend of the Nazis, as his opposition to them began years before the war. Before he was elected to the Papacy, he was Eugenio Cardinal Paceli, the Vatican secretary of State. On April 28, 1935, four years before the war even started, Paceli gave a speech that awakened the attention of the world press to the threat of Nazism. He spoke to an audience of about 250,000 pilgrims in Lourdes, France.

This future Pope stated that the Nazis "are in reality only miserable plagiarists who dress up old errors with new tinsel. It does not matter whether they flock to the banners of social revolution, whether they are guided by a false concept of the world and of life, or whether they are possessed by the superstition of a race and blood cult." (Graham, p.106). It was talks like this, in addition to numerous notes of protest that Paceli sent to Berlin in his capacity as Vatican Secretary of State, that earned him the reputation as an enemy of the Nazi Party.

The Nazis were very displeased with Pius XII, who showed himself as a relentless opponent of the Nazi Party. While still Vatican secretary of State, the future Pope Pius XII wrote the Papal encyclical in 1937, Mit Brennender Sorge (With Burning Sorrow). In fact, upon its publication, the Nazi press carried vulgar cartoons and claims that "Pius XI was half Jewish and Cardinal Pacelli was all Jewish." Two months before the anti-semitic horrors of Kristallnacht (The night of the broken glass), Pius XI stated "Anti-Semitism is inadmissable; spiritually we are all Semites." (O'Carrol, p.45).

Dr. Joseph Lichten, a Polish Jew who served as a diplomat and later as an official of the Jewish Anti-Defamation League of B'nai B'rith, writes: "Paceli had obviously established his position clearly, for the Fascist governments of both Italy and Germany spoke out loudly against the possibility of his election to succeed Pius XI in March of 1939, though the Cardinal Secretary of State had served as papal nuncio in Germany from 1917 to 1929.

The day after his election, the Berlin Morgenpost said: "The election of Cardinal Pacelli is not accepted with favor in Germany because he was always opposed to Nazism and practically determined the policies of the Vatican under his predecessor." (Graham p.107).

Former Israeli diplomat and now Orthodox Jewish Rabbi Pinchas Lapide states that Pius XI "had good reason to make Pacelli the architect of his anti-Nazi policy. Of the forty-four speeches which the Nuncio Pacelli had made on German soil between 1917 and 1929, at least forty contained attacks on Nazism or condemnations of Hitler's doctrines. . . . Pacelli, who never met the Fuhrer, called it 'neo-paganism.'" (Lapide, p.118).

A few weeks after Pacelli was elected Pope, the German Reich's Chief Security Service issued a then secret report on the new Pope. Rabbi Lapide provides an excerpt: "Pacelli has already made himself prominent by his attacks on National Socialism during his tenure as Cardinal Secretary of State, a fact which earned him the hearty approval of the Democratic States during the papal elections. . . . How much Pacelli is celebrated as an ally of the Democracies is especially emphasized in the French Press." (Ibid, p.121).

Unfortunately, joy at the election of a strong Pope who would continue Pius XI's defiance of the Nazis was darkened by the ominous political developments in Europe. War finally came on September 1, 1939, when German troops overran Poland. Two days later, Britain and France declared war on Germany. Early in 1940, Hitler made an attempt to prevent the new pope from maintaining the anti-Nazi stance he had taken before his election. He sent his underling, Joachim von Ribbentrop, to try to dissuade Pius XII from following his predecessor's policies.

"Von Ribbentrop, granted a formal audience on March 11, 1940, went into a lengthy harangue on the invincibility of the Third Reich, the inevitability of a Nazi victory, and the futility of papal alignment with the enemies of the Fuhrer. Pius XII heard von Ribbentrop out politely and impassively. Then he opened an enormous ledger on his desk and, in his perfect German, began to recite a catalogue of the persecutions inflicted by the Third Reich in Poland, listing the date, place, and the precise details of each crime. The audience was terminated: the Pope's position was clearly unshakable." (Lichten, p.107).

The Pope worked covertly to save as many Jewish lives as possible from the Nazis whose extermination campaign was stepped up more intensely after the Second World War had begun. It is at this juncture that the anti-Catholic revisionist try to make their indictment: Pius XII is charged with either cowardly silence or outright support of the Nazi extermination of millions of Jews. Much of the stimulus to vilify the Vatican regarding WWII came, appropriately enough, from a work of fiction. A stage play called The Deputy, written after the War by a little known German Protestant playwright named Rolf Hochhuth.

The play appeared in 1963, and it painted a portrait of a pope that was too fearful to speak out publicly against the Nazis. Ironically, even Hochhuth admits that Pius XII was materially very active in support of the Jews. Historian Robert Graham explains: "Playwright Rolf Hochhuth criticized the Pontiff for his (alleged) silence, but even he admitted that, on the level of action, Pius XII generously aided the Jews to the best of his ability. Today, after a quarter century of the arbitrary and one-sided presentation offered the public, the word 'silence' has taken on a much wider connotation. It stands also for 'indifference,' 'apathy,' 'inaction,' and, implicitly, for anti-Semitism." (Graham, p.18).

Hochhuth's fictional image of a silent (though active) Pope has been transformed, by the anti-Catholic spin-doctors, into the image of a silent and inactive Pope, and by other spin-doctors, into an actively pro Nazi accomplice. If there were any truth to the charge that Pius XII was silent, the silence would not have been out of moral cowardice in the face of the Nazis, but because the Pope was waging a subversive, clandestine war against them in an attempt to save Jews.

"The need to refrain from provocative public statements at such delicate moments was fully recognized in Jewish circles. It was in fact the basic rule of all those agencies in wartime Europe who keenly felt the duty to do all that was possible for the victims of Nazi atrocities and in particular for the Jews in proximate danger of deportation to 'an unknown destiny'". (Ibid, p.19). The negative consequences of speaking out strongly were only too well known. "In one tragic instance, the Archbishop of Utrecht was warned by the Nazis not to protest the deportation of Dutch Jews. He spoke out anyway and in retaliation the Catholic Jews of Holland were sent to their death. One of them was the Carmelite philosopher Blessed Edith Stein" (Lichten, p.30).

Today the historical 'armchair quarterbacks' in anti-Catholic circles have wished that the Pope had issued, in Axis territory and during wartime, a ringing propagandistic statement against the Nazis. But the Pope realized that this was simply not an option if he actually were to save Jewish lives rather than simply mug for the cameras.

The desire to keep a low profile was expressed by the people Pius XII helped. A Jewish couple from Berlin, who had been held in concentration camps but escaped to Spain with the help of Pius XII, stated: "None of us wanted the Pope to take an open stand. We were all fugitives, and fugitives do not want to be pointed at. The Gestapo would have become more excited and would have intensified its inquisitions. If the Pope had protested, Rome would have become the center of attention. It was better that the Pope said nothing. We all shared this opinion at the time, and this is still our conviction today." (Ibid., p.99).

While the U.S., Great Britain, and other countries often refused to allow Jewish refugees to immigrate during war, the Vatican was issuing tens of thousands of false documents to allow Jews to pass secretly as Christians so they could escape the Nazis. What is more, the financial aid Pius XII helped provide the Jews was very real. Lichten, Lapide, and other Jewish chroniclers record those funds as being in the millions of dollars, dollars even more valuable than they are now.

In late 1943, Mussollini, who had been at odds with the Papacy all through his tenure, was removed from power by the Italians, but Hitler, fearing Italy would negotiate a separate peace with the Allies, invaded, took control, and set up Mussolini again as puppet ruler. It was then, when the Jews of Rome themselves were threatened (those whom Pius XII had the most direct ability to help) that this Pope really showed his courage.

Joseph Lichten chronicles that on September 27, 1943, one of the Nazi commanders demanded of the Jewish community in Rome, payment of one hundred pounds of gold within thirty-six hours or three hundred Jews would be taken prisoner. When the Jewish Community Council was able to gather only seventy pounds of gold, it turned to the Vatican.

"In his memoirs, the then Chief Rabbi Zolli of Rome writes that he was sent to the Vatican, where arrangements had already been made to receive him as an 'engineer' called to survey a construction problem so that the Gestapo on watch at the Vatican would not bar his entry. He was met by the Vatican treasurer and secretary of state, who told him that the Holy Father himself had given orders for the deficit to be filled with gold vesels taken from the Treasury" (Ibid., p.120).

Pius XII also took a public stance concerning the Jews of Italy: "The Pope spoke out strongly in their defense with the first mass arrests of Jews in 1943, and L'Osservatore Romano carried an article protesting the internment of Jews and the confiscation of their property. The Fascist press came to call the Vatican paper 'a mouthpiece of the Jews'" (ibid., p.125).

Prior to the Nazi invasion, the Pope had been working hard to get Jews out of Italy by emigration; he now was forced to turn his attention to finding them hiding places. The Pope sent out the order that religious buildings were to give refuge to Jews, even at the price of great personal sacrifice on the part of their occupants; he released monasteries and convents from the cloister rule forbidding entry into these religious houses to all but a few outsiders, so that they could be used as hiding places.

Thousands of Jews (the figures run from 4,000 to 7,000) were hidden, fed, clothed, and bedded in the 180 known places of refuge in Vatican City, churches and basilicas, Church administrative buildings, and parish houses. Unknown numbers of Jews were sheltered in Castel Gandolfo, the site of the Pope's summer residence, private homes, hospitals, and nursing institutions, and the Pope took personal responsiblilty for the care of the children of Jews deported from Italy" (ibid.,p.126).

Rabbi Lapide records that "in Rome we saw a list of 155 convents and monasteries-Italian, French, Spanish, English, American, and also German-mostly extraterritorial property of the Vatican . . . which sheltered throughout the German occupation some 5,000 Jews in Rome. No less than 3,000 Jews found refuge at one time at the Pope's summer residence at Castel Gandolfo; sixty lived for nine minths at the Jesuit Gregorian University, and half a dozen slept in the cellar of the Pontifical Bible Institute" (Lapide, p.133).

Notice in particular that the Pope was not merely allowing Jews to be hidden in different church buildings around Rome. He was hiding them in the Vatican itself and in his own summer home, Castel Gandolfo.

His success in protecting Italian Jews against the Nazis was remarkable. Lichten records (p.127 of his book) that after the War was over, it was determined that only 8,000 Jews were taken from Italy by the Nazis, far less than in other European countries. In June 1944, Pius XII sent a telegram to Admiral Miklos Horthy, the ruler of Hungary, and was able to halt the planned deportation of 800,000 Jews from that country. The Pope's efforts did not go unrecognized by Jewish authorities, even during the War.

The Chief Rabbi of Jerusalem, Isaac Herzog, sent the Pope a personal message of thanks on February 28,1944, in which he said: "The people of Israel will never forget what his Holiness and his illustrious delegates, inspired by the eternal principles of religion which form the very foundations of true civilization, are doing for us unfortunate brothers and sisters in this most tragic hour of our history, which is living proof of divine Providence in this world" (Graham, p.62).

Other Jewish leaders agreed. Rabbi Safran of Bucharest, Romania, sent a note of thanks to the papal nuncio on April 7, 1944: "It is not easy for us to find the right words to express the warmth and consolation we experienced because of the concern of the supreme pontiff, who offered a large sum to relieve the sufferings of deported Jews. . . . The Jews of Romania will never forget these facts of historic importance" (Lichten, p.130).

The Chief Rabbi of Rome, Israel Zolli, also made a statement of thanks: "What the Vatican did will indelibly and eternally be engraved in our hearts. . . . Priests and even high prelates did things that will forever be an honor to Catholicism" (Amer-Jewish Yearbook p.233).

After the war, Zolli became a Catholic, and to honor the Pope for what he had done for the Jews and the role he had played in Zolli's conversion, he took the name "Eugenio" the Pope's given name, as his own baptismal name. Zolli stressed that his conversion was for theological reasons, which was certainly true, but the fact that the Pope had worked so hard on behalf of the Jews no doubt played a role in inspiring him to look at the truths of Christianity.

Lapide writes: "When Zolli accepted baptism in 1945 and adopted Pius XII's Christian name of Eugene, most Roman Jews were convinced that his conversion was an act of gratitude for wartime succor to Jewish refugees, and repeated denials notwithstanding, many are still of this opinion. Thus, Rabbi Barry Dov Schwartz wrote in the summer issue, 1964, of Conservative Judaism: 'Many Jews were persuaded to convert after the war, as a sign of gratitude, to that institution which had saved their lives'" (Lapide, p.133).

Lapide estimated the total number of Jews that had been spared as a result of Pius XII's throwing the Church's weight into the clandestine struggle to save them. After totalling the number of Jews saved in different areas and deducting the numbers saved by other causes, such as the praiseworthy efforts of some European Protestants, "The final number of Jewish lives in whose rescue the Catholic Church had been the instrument is thus at least 700,000 souls, but in all probability it is much closer to . . . 860,000" (ibid., p.215).

This is a total larger than all other Jewish relief organizations in Europe combined, were able to save. Lapide calculated that Pius XII and the Church he headed constituted the most successful Jewish aid organization in all of Europe during the War, dwarfing the Red Cross and all other aid agencies.

This fact continued to be recognized when Pius XII died in 1958. Lapide's book records the eulogies of a number of Jewish leaders concerning the Pope, these Jewish leaders praised the man highly (following are quotes taken from Lapide, p.227-228): "We share the grief of the world over the death of His Holiness Pius XII. . . . During the ten years of Nazi terror, when our people passed through the horrors of martyrdom, the Pope raised his voice to condemn the persecutors and to commiserate with their victims" (Golda Meir, Israeli representative to the U.N. and future prime minister of Israel).

"With special gratitude we remember all he has done for the persecuted Jews during one of the darkest periods in their entire history" (Nahum Goldmann, president of the World Jewish Congress).

"More than anyone else, we have had the opportunity to appreciate the great kindness, filled with compassion and magnanimity, that the Pope displayed during the terrible years of persecution and terror" (Ellio Toaff, Chief Rabbi of Rome, following Rabbi Zolli's conversion).

Finally, let me mention an important quotation from Lapide's record that was not given at the death of Pius XII, but was given after the War by the most well-known Jewish figure of this century, Albert Einstein: "Only the Catholic Church protested against the Hitlerian onslaught on liberty. Up until then, I had not been interested in the Church, but today I feel a great admiration for the Church, which alone has had the courage to struggle for spiritual truth and moral liberty" (Ibid, p.251).

To "those who reflexively criticize . . . should ponder the words of Robert Kemper, the American who served as deputy chief of the Nuremburg war-crimes tribunal: 'All the arguments and writings eventually used by the Catholic Church against Hitler only provoked suicide; the execution of Jews was followed by that of Catholic Priests.' William Rubinstein, author of the new book, The Myth of Rescue, similarly maintains that the Church could not realistically have done more to save Jews during the war. To those who say that the Church could have done more, it is time to say, 'had others done as much, more Jews would have been saved'" (Catalyst, p.4).

"A sounding protest, which might turn out to be self-thwarting or quiet piecemeal rescue? Loud words or prudent deeds? The dilemna must have been sheer agony, for whatever course he chose, horrible consequences were inevitable. Unable to cure the sickness of an entire civilization, and unwilling to bear the brunt of Hitler's fury, the Pope, unlike many far mightier than he, alleviated, relieved, retrieved, appealed, petitioned, and saved as best he could" (Graham, p.90).

"Who but a prophet or a martyr could have done much more? The Talmud teaches us that "whosoever preserves one life, it is accounted to him by scripture as if he had preserved the whole world." If this is true, and it is as true as that most Jewish of tenets, the sanctity of human life, then Pius XII deserves that forest in the Judean hills which kindly people in Israel proposed for him in October, 1958. A memorial forest, like those planted for Winston Churchill, King Peter of Yugoslavia and Count Bernadotte of Sweden- with 860, 000 trees" (Lapide, p.267)

__Bibliography______________________________________________________________
Patrick Madrid, (1997, June). "Bad News for Bigots." Envoy Magazine, p.15.
Gerry Matatics, (1990, Sept). "How to stop fuzzy thinking." This Rock magazine, p.14.
Robert Graham, S.J., (1988). Pius XII and the Holocaust. Milwaukee, Wisconsin: A Catholic League Publication.
Michael O'Carrol, (1980). Pius XII: Greatness Dishonored, A Documented Study., Dublin: Laetare Press.
Joseph Lichten, (1963). A Question of Judgement: Pius XII and the Jews. Washington, D.C.: U.S. Catholic Conference.
Pinchas E. Lapide, (1967). Three Popes and the Jews. New York: Hawthorne Books.
William A. Donohue, (1998, April). "Vatican document on Holocaust deserves praise." Catalyst Journal, vol.25, No.3, p.4.
American Jewish Yearbook, (1944-1945). Philadelphia: Jewish Publication Society.

All essay text intellectual copyright property of Jesse Romero and JesseRomero.com

A Righteous Gentile: Pope Pius XII and the Jews

By Rabbi David Dalin, Ph.D.

About The Author

Rabbi David G. Dalin, a widely-published scholar of American Judaism and the history of Christian-Jewish Relations, is the author or co-author of five books, including Religion and State in the American Jewish Experience, published by the University of Notre Dame Press in 1997 and, most recently, The President of the United States and the Jews. His article, “Pius XII and the Jews,” was published in the February 26, 2001 issue of the Weekly Standard, and was reprinted in the August-September issue of Inside the Vatican, published in Rome. Rabbi Dalin is a member of the Editorial Advisory Board of the journal First Things, and a member of the Board of Governors of Sacred Heart University’s Center for Christian Jewish understanding. He is now writing a new book, tentatively entitled: Two Popes and the Jews: Pius XII and John Paul II.

In recent years, Eugenio Pacelli, who became Pope Pius XII in 1939, has been the subject of considerable public criticism, and even vilification, for his alleged failure to speak out against Hitler during the Holocaust. Pope Pius’ alleged “silence,” in the face of the worst Nazi atrocities, has led some of his harshest critics to accuse him of being a Nazi sympathizer or an anti-Semite. In 1999, the British journalist John Cornwell created an international sensation with the publication of his best-selling attack on Pius XII, vilifying Eugenio Pacelli as “Hitler’s Pope.”

The past couple of years have seen the publication of eight more new books dealing with Pius XII and the Holocaust. To be sure, Pius has had both his defenders and detractors. Four of these books, by the Catholic scholars Ronald J. Rychlak, Pierre Blet, Margherita Marchione and Ralph McInerny, have been written in defense of Pius, his life and legacy. They have succeeded, in varying degrees, in effectively responding to the allegations of Pius’ critics. Those vilifying Pius, and defaming his memory, however, have received the most media attention: Cornwell’s Hitler’s Pope, Garry Wills’ Papal Sin and James Carroll’s Constantine’s Sword have become huge best sellers, generating much public discussion and debate. Susan Zucotti’s unremitting attack on Pius, Under His Very Windows: The Vatican and the Holocaust in Italy, published by Yale University Press, received heightened media attention as well.

For Jewish leaders of a previous generation, this harsh portrayal of Pope Pius XII, and the campaign of vilification against him, would have been a source of profound shock and sadness. From the end of World War II until at least five years after his death, Pope Pius enjoyed an enviable reputation amongst Christians and Jews alike. At the end of the war, Pius XII was hailed as “the inspired moral prophet of victory,” and “enjoyed near-universal acclaim for aiding European Jews.” Numerous Jewish leaders, including Albert Einstein, Israeli Prime Ministers Golda Meir and Moshe Sharett, and Chief Rabbi Isaac Herzog, expressed their public gratitude to Pius XII, praising him as a “righteous gentile,” who had saved thousands of Jews during the Holocaust. In his meticulously researched and comprehensive 1967 book, Three Popes and the Jews, the Israeli historian and diplomat Pinchas Lapide, who had served as the Israeli Counsel General in Milan, and had spoken with many Italian Jewish Holocaust survivors who owed their life to Pius, provided the empirical basis for their gratitude, concluding that Pius XII “was instrumental in saving at least 700,000, but probably as many as 860,000 Jews from certain death at Nazi hands.” To this day, the Lapide volume remains the definitive work, by a Jewish scholar, on the subject.

The campaign of vilification against Pope Pius can be traced to the debut in Berlin in February 1963 of a play, by a young, Protestant, left-wing West German writer and playwright, Rolf Hochhuth. The Deputy, in which Hochhuth depicts Pacelli as a Nazi collaborator, guilty of moral cowardice and “silence” in the face of the Nazi onslaught, is a scathing indictment of Pope Pius XII’s alleged indifferences to the plight of European Jewry during the Holocaust.

Hochhuth’s play ignited a public controversy about Pius XII that continues this day. Despite the fact that The Deputy was a purely fictional and highly polemical play, which offered little or no historical evidence for its allegations against Pope Pius XII, it was widely discussed and acclaimed. Indeed, it inspired a new generation of revisionist journalists and scholars, who were intent on discrediting the well-documented efforts of Pope Pius XII to save Jews during the Holocaust. Their denunciation of Pius received widespread publicity with the commercial success of Hitler’s Pope, in which John Cornwell denounced him as “the most dangerous churchman in modern history,” without whom “Hitler might never have…been able to press forward with the Holocaust.” Although an unusually harsh and bitter judgment, it was one with which Pius XII’s other recent detractors, such as Wills and Zucotti, implicitly concur. Moreover, in their persistent efforts to vilify Pius, and defame his memory, his detractors have largely dismissed or completely ignored Pinchas Lapide’s seminal and comprehensive study that so conclusively documents the instrumental role played by Pope Pius XII in rescuing and sheltering Jews during the Holocaust.

The Historical Record: What Pius XII Did for the Jews

Despite allegations and misrepresentations to the contrary, it can now be documented conclusively that Pope Pius XII was responsible for saving hundreds of thousands of Jews during the Holocaust. Although the villainous “silence” of the Pope has been repeatedly alleged since the early 1960’s, there is much historical evidence to confirm that he was not silent, that before and after he became Pope he spoke out against Hitler and that he was almost universally recognized, especially by the Nazis themselves, as an unrelenting opponent of the Nazi regime.

Pius XII publicly and privately warned of the dangers of Nazism. Throughout World War II, he spoke out on behalf of Europe’s Jews. When Pius learned of the Nazi atrocities in Poland, he urged the bishops of Europe to do all they could to save the Jews and other victims of Nazi persecution. On January 19, 1940, at the Pope’s instruction, Vatican radio and L’Osservatore Romano revealed to the world “the dreadful cruelties of uncivilized tyranny” that the Nazis were inflicting on Jewish and Catholic Poles. The following week, the Jewish Advocate of Boston reported the Vatican radio broadcast, praising its “outspoken denunciation of German atrocities in Nazi [occupied] Poland, declaring they affronted the moral conscience of mankind.”

In his 1940 Easter homily, Pius XII condemned the Nazi bombardment of defenseless citizens, aged and sick people, and innocent children. On May 11, 1940, he publicly condemned the Nazi invasions of Belgium, Holland, and Luxemburg and lamented “a world poisoned by lies and disloyalty and wounded by excesses of violence.” In June 1942, Pius spoke out against the mass deportation of Jews from Nazi-occupied France, further instructing his Papal Nuncio in Paris to protest to Marshal Henri Petain, Vichy France’s Chief of State, against “the inhuman arrests and deportations of Jews from the French occupied zone to Silesia and parts of Russia.”

The London Times of October 1, 1942, explicitly praises him for his condemnation of Nazism and his public support for the Jewish victims of Nazi terror. “A study of the words which Pope Pius XII has addressed since his accession,” noted the Times, “leaves no room for doubt. He condemns the worship of force and its concrete manifestations in the suppression of national liberties and in the persecution of the Jewish race.”

Pius XII’s Christmas addresses of 1941 and 1942, broadcast over Vatican radio to millions throughout the world, also help to refute the fallacious claim that Pope Pius was “silent.” Indeed, as The New York Times described Pius’ 1941 Christmas address in its editorial the following day, it specifically applauded the Pope, as a “lonely” voice of public protest against Hitler: “The voice of Pius XII is a lonely voice in the silence and darkness enveloping Europe this Christmas…In calling for a ‘real new order’ based on ‘liberty, justice, and love’…the Pope put himself squarely against Hitlerism. Recognizing that there is no road open to agreement between belligerents ‘whose reciprocal war aims and programs seem to be irreconcilable,’ Pius XII left no doubt that the Nazi aims are also irreconcilable with his own conception of a Christian peace.” The Pope’s Christmas message of 1941, as reported by The New York Times and other newspapers, was understood at the time to be a clear condemnation of Nazi attacks on Europe’s Jews.

So, too, was the Pope’s Christmas message of the following year. Pope Pius XII’s widely-discussed Christmas message of December 24, 1942, in which he expressed his passionate concern “for those hundreds of thousands who, without any fault of their own, sometimes only by reason of their nationality or race, are marked down for death or progressive extinction,” was widely understood to be a very public denunciation of the Nazi extermination of the Jews. Indeed, the Nazis themselves interpreted the Pope’s famous speech of Christmas 1942 as a clear condemnation of Nazism, and as a plea on behalf of Europe’s Jews: “His [the Pope’s] speech is one long attack on everything we stand for…he is clearly speaking on behalf of the Jews…he is virtually accusing the German people of injustice toward the Jews, and makes himself the mouthpiece of the Jewish war criminals.”

In his recent history of the modern papacy, Professor Eamon Duffy of Magdalen College, Oxford University, substantiates the fact, ignored by Pius’ critics, that the Nazi leadership viewed the Pope’s 1942 Christmas message as an attack on Nazi Germany and as a defense of the Jews. “Both Mussolini and Ambassador Ribbentrop were angered by this [the Pope’s December 24, 1942] speech,” notes Duffy, “and Germany considered that the Pope had abandoned any pretence of neutrality. They felt that Pius had unequivocally condemned Nazi action against the Jews.”

Critics of Pius minimize the significance of the Pope’s 1942 Christmas message and fail to note (or analyze) the German reaction to the Pope’s address. To do so, as Pius’ defenders have aptly noted, would destroy their image of Pius as a “silent” Pope, and would demonstrate that the Nazis were very much aware of, and angered by, the Pope’s condemnation of the Final Solution.

This awareness and danger on the part of the Nazis, moreover, had potentially dire consequences for the safety and security of Pope Pius XII during the remaining years of the war. The Pope’s condemnation of Nazi actions against the Jews, led to considerable speculation at the time that Hitler would seek revenge on the papacy, and attack the Vatican.

There was, to be sure, ample historical precedent for Pius XII to have feared for his safety and security, if not his very life, should the Nazis be provoked to besiege the Vatican. As Rychlak has recently pointed out, the possibility of German invasion of Vatican City was very real: Napoleon had besieged the Vatican in 1809, capturing Pius VII at bayonet point and forcibly removing him from Rome. Pope Pius IX fled Rome for his life following the assassination of his chancellor, and Leo XIII was also driven into temporary exile during the late nineteenth century.

In fact, Hitler spoke publicly of wanting to enter the Vatican and “pack up that whole whoring rabble.” It has long been known that at one point Hitler planned to kidnap the Pope and imprison him. And, as several scholars have noted, Pius XII knew that the Nazis had a plan to kidnap him. In addition to minutes from a meeting on July 26, 1943, in which Hitler openly discussed invading the Vatican, Ernst von Weizsacker, the German Ambassador to the Vatican, has written that he heard of Hitler’s plan to kidnap Pius XII, and that he regularly warned the Pope and Vatican officials against provoking Berlin. So, too, the Nazi Ambassador to Italy, Rudolf Rahn, has described the kidnapping plot and attempts by Rahn and other Nazi diplomats to prevent it.

In critically assessing what actions Pius XII might have taken, but did not take, on behalf of the Jews of Europe, his defenders and critics alike point to his “failure” to excommunicate Hitler and other Nazi party leaders. Indeed, many of the Pope’s “defenders,” including this writer, wish (and believe) that papal excommunication should have at least been attempted. Such sentiments notwithstanding, there is abundant evidence to suggest that the excommunication of Hitler would have been a purely symbolic gesture, and would not have accomplished what its proponents hoped for. Hitler, Himmler and other Nazi leaders were, to be sure, baptized Catholics who were never excommunicated. Had Pius XII excommunicated them, his critics claim, such an act might have prevented the Holocaust, or significantly diminished it. On the contrary. There is much evidence to suggest that a formal order of excommunication might very well just have achieved the opposite.

When Don Luigi Sturzo, the founder of the Christian Democratic movement in wartime Italy, was asked by Leon Kubovny, an official of the World Jewish Congress during the Holocaust era, why the Vatican did not excommunicate Hitler, he recalled the cases of Napoleon and Queen Elizabeth I of England, “the last time a nominal excommunication was pronounced against a head of state.” Pointing out that neither of them had “changed their policy after excommunication,” he feared, Sturzo wrote Kubovny, “that in response to a threat of excommunication,” Hitler would have even killed more Jews than he had. Writers and scholars familiar with Hitler’s psychology share Sturzo’s fear, believing that any provocation by the Pope, such as an order for excommunication, “would have resulted in violent retaliation, the loss of many more Jewish lives, especially those then under the protection of the Church, and an intensification of the persecution of Catholics.” This is, I believe, a compelling argument that cannot be ignored. It is one, moreover, that is supported by the testimony of Jewish Holocaust survivors, such as Marcus Melchior, the former Chief Rabbi of Denmark, who attests that “if the Pope had spoken out, Hitler would probably have massacred more than six million Jews and perhaps ten times ten million Catholics, if he had the power to do so.”

His “failure” to excommunicate Hitler, Pius XII’s critics assert, is only one instance of his larger failure to make sufficiently forceful denunciations of the Nazis. The critics who have accused Pius XII of “silence” have claimed that in other ways, also, he failed to forcefully condemn the Nazi regime. Had he done so, they argue, it might have reduced, or even halted the anti-Jewish atrocities. Had he spoken out more forcefully and publicly, they maintain, more Jewish lives would have been spared. Their contention, however, “fails to consider the brutal realities in the wake of Nazism, as well as the retaliatory consequences sure to follow any condemnatory action.” More stringent protests, or denunciations, on the part of the Vatican might quite possibly have backfired.

An example frequently cited by defenders of the Vatican is the public protest of Dutch bishops in July 1942 against the deportation of Dutch Jews from the Netherlands. When Pius XII first learned of the Nazi atrocities in Poland, he urged the Catholic bishops of Europe to do all they could to save the Jews and other victims of Nazi persecution. The bishops of Holland distributed a pastoral letter that was read in every Catholic Church in the country, denouncing “the unmerciful and unjust treatment meted out to Jews by those in power in our country.” In no other Nazi-occupied country did local Catholic bishops more furiously resist Nazism than in Holland. But, their well-intentioned pastoral letter—which explicitly declared that they were inspired by Pope Pius XII —backfired. As Pinchas Lapide notes: “The saddest and most thought-provoking conclusion is that whilst the Catholic clergy in Holland protested more loudly, expressly and frequently against Jewish persecutions than the religious hierarchy of any other Nazi-occupied country, more Jews—some 110,000 or 79 percent of the total—were deported from Holland to death camps.” The protest of the Dutch bishops thus provoked the most savage of Nazi reprisals: The vast majority of Holland’s Jews—and the highest percentages of Jews of any Nazi-occupied nation in Western Europe—were deported and killed.

With the advantage of hindsight, Pius XII’s revisionist critics have been judging the Pope’s “silence” without considering the likely consequences of his having “spoken out” more loudly and explicitly. These critics do not know (or have chosen to ignore the fact) that the Pope had been strongly advised by Jewish leaders and by Catholic bishops in Nazi-occupied countries not to protest publicly against the Nazi atrocities. When the bishop of Munster wanted to speak out against the persecution of the Jews in Germany, the Jewish leaders of his diocese begged him not to because it would result in even greater persecution for them. Pinchas Lapide quotes an Italian Jew who, with the Vatican’s help, managed to escape the Nazi deportation of Rome’s Jews in October 1943, as stating unequivocally twenty years later: “none of us wanted the Pope to speak out openly. We were all fugitives and we did not want to be pointed out as such. The Gestapo would have only increased and intensified its inquisition…it was much better the Pope kept silent. We all felt the same, and today we still believe that.” Bishop Jean Bernard of Luxembourg, an inmate of Dachau from February 1941 to August 1942, notified the Vatican that “whenever protests were made, treatment of prisoners worsened immediately.”

There is much evidence to suggest that had Pius XII more vigorously opposed or denounced Hitler’s policies, there would have been serious and devastating retaliation. Undoubtedly, a stronger public condemnation of the Final Solution by the Pope would have provoked Nazi reprisals against Catholic clergy in Nazi-occupied countries and in Germany itself. Undoubtedly, also, such a public condemnation by the Pope would have severely jeopardized the lives of the thousands of Jews hidden in the Vatican, in Rome’s many churches, convents and monasteries, and in numerous Catholic churches and other religious institutions throughout Italy, along with the lives of their Catholic protectors who were trying to save them. Many Italian Jewish Holocaust survivors have agreed with Michael Tagliacozzo, a Roman Jew hidden for several months at the Seminario Romano, the pontifical seminary, who approved of the papal policy that enabled him and many others to survive. A clearer public denunciation of the Nazis, they believe, would also have jeopardized the lives of the priests and Catholic laity who were sheltering and protecting them. Indeed, as even Susan Zucotti in her recent critique of Pius XII admits, “the pope’s inclination to silence might well have been influenced by a concern for Jews in hiding and for their Catholic protectors.”

To the very end, Pope Pius XII believed that a public denunciation of the Holocaust would have made matters worse by further enraging the Nazis and provoking even more violent reprisals against Europe’s Jews, and against tens of thousands of Catholics as well. In retrospect, historians have come to appreciate this tactical caution on the part of Pius XII and the Holy See. His “silence,” they recognize, was an effective strategic approach to protecting more Jews from deportation to the Nazi death camps. A more explicit and forceful papal denunciation of Nazism might have invited even more Nazi reprisals and made things even worse for the Jews of Nazi occupied Europe. One might ask, of course, what might have been worse than the mass murder of six million Jews? The answer is abundantly and horrifically clear: The slaughter of hundreds of thousands more.

Pinchas Lapide documents conclusively the extraordinary relief and rescue efforts conducted by Pius XII and his diplomats during the Holocaust. Through his country-by-country analysis of Papal efforts to rescue European Jews throughout Nazi Europe, Lapide demonstrates, beyond any reasonable doubt, that “the Catholic Church saved more Jewish lives during the war than all other churches, religious institutions and rescue organizations put together.”

While approximately 80 percent of European Jews perished during World War II, 80 percent of Italy’s 40,000 Jews were saved. The Nazi deportations of Italy’s Jews began in October 1943, after the German army occupied Rome and entrusted internal security matters to the S.S. On October 16, more than a thousand of the city’s Jews were rounded up and deported to Auschwitz, where they were murdered a week later. From October 1943 until the Allied capture of the city in June 1944, the deportations continued, with 2,091 Roman Jews eventually being exterminated in Nazi death camps.

During the months that Rome was under German occupation, Pius XII, who secretly instructed Italy’s Catholic clergy “to save human lives by all means,” played an especially significant role in saving thousands of Italian Jews from deportation to Auschwitz and other Nazi death camps. Beginning in October 1943, Pope Pius asked the churches and convents throughout Italy to shelter Jews. As a result, although Italian dictator Benito Mussolini and the Fascists who remained loyal to him yielded to Hitler’s demand that Italy’s Jews be deported, in churches, monasteries and private homes throughout the country Italian Catholics defied Mussolini’s orders and protected thousands of Jews until the Allied armies arrived. Although their lives were endangered by helping to save Jews, Italian Catholic Church leaders, from Cardinals to parish priests, hid Jews from the Nazis. In Rome, 155 convents and monasteries sheltered some 5,000 Jews throughout the German occupation. No less than 3,000 Jews found refuge at one time at the Pope’s summer residence at Castel Gandolfo, and thus, through Pius’ personal intervention, escaped deportation to German death camps. Sixty Jews lived for nine months at the Jesuit Gregorian University, and many were sheltered in the cellar of the Pontifical Bible Institute. Pope Pius himself granted sanctuary within the walls of the Vatican in Rome to hundreds of homeless Jews. Following Pope Pius’ direct instructions, individual Italian priests and monks, cardinals and bishops, were instrumental in saving hundreds of Jewish lives.

In Tribute to Pius XII: Praise From the Jewish Community

During his lifetime, and for several years after his death in 1958, Pope Pius XII was widely praised as having been a true friend of the Jewish people, who saved hundreds of thousands of Jewish lives during the Holocaust. As early as December of 1940, in an article published in Time magazine, the renowned Nobel Prize winning physicist Albert Einstein, himself a Jewish refugee from Nazi Germany, paid tribute to the moral “courage” of Pope Pius and the Catholic Church in opposing “the Hitlerian onslaught” on liberty:

Being a lover of freedom, when the Nazi revolution came in Germany, I looked to the universities to defend it, knowing that they had always boasted of their devotion to the cause of truth; but, no, the universities immediately were silenced. Then I looked to the great editors of the newspapers, whose flaming editorials in days gone by had proclaimed their love of freedom: but they, like the universities, were silenced in a few short weeks. Only the Catholic Church stood squarely across the path of Hitler’s campaign for suppressing the truth. I never had any special interest in the Church before, but now I feel a great affection and admiration because the Church alone has had the courage and persistence to stand for intellectual truth and moral freedom. I am forced thus to confess that what I once despised, I now praise unreservedly.

Throughout the 1940s and 1950s, tributes to Pope Pius came from several other Jewish leaders who praised him for his role in saving Jews during the war. In 1943, Chaim Weizmann, who would become Israel’s first president, wrote that “the Holy See is lending its powerful help wherever it can, to mitigate the fate of my persecuted co-religionists.” Moshe Sharett, who would become Israel’s first Foreign Minister and second Prime Minister, reinforced these feelings of gratitude when he met with Pius in the closing days of World War II: “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…We are deeply grateful to the Catholic Church.” In 1945, Rabbi Isaac Herzog, the Chief Rabbi of Israel, sent a message to Msgr. Angelo Roncalli (the future Pope John XXIII), expressing his gratitude for the actions taken by Pope Pius XII on behalf of the Jewish people. “The people of Israel,” wrote Rabbi Herzog, “will never forget what His Holiness and his illustrious delegates, inspired by the eternal principles of religion, which form the foundation of true civilization, are doing for our unfortunate brothers and sisters in the most tragic hour of our history, which is living proof of Divine Providence in this world.” In September 1945, Dr. Leon Kubowitzky, the Secretary General of the World Jewish Congress, personally thanked the Pope in Rome for his interventions on behalf of Jews, and the World Jewish Congress donated $20,000 to Vatican charities “in recognition of the work of the Holy See in rescuing Jews from Fascist and Nazi persecutions.” Dr. Raffael Cantoni, head of the Italian Jewish community’s wartime Jewish Assistance Committee, who would subsequently become the President of the Union of Italian Jewish Communities, similarly expressed his gratitude to the Vatican, stating that “six million of my co-religionists have been murdered by the Nazis, but there could have been many more victims had it not been for the efficacious intervention of Pius XII.” On April 5, 1946, his Union of Italian Jewish Communities, meeting for the first time after the War, sent an official message of thanks to Pope Pius XII:

The delegates of the Congress of the Italian Jewish Communities, held in Rome for the first time after the Liberation, feel that it is imperative to extend reverent homage to Your Holiness, and to express the most profound gratitude that animates all Jews for your fraternal humanity toward them during the years of persecution when their lives were endangered by Nazi-Fascist barbarism. Many times priests suffered imprisonment and were sent to concentration camps, and offered their lives to assist Jews in every way. This demonstration of goodness and charity that still animates the just, has served to lessen the shame and torture and sadness that afflicted millions of human beings.

Many other Jewish tributes to Pius came in the years just proceeding, and in the immediate aftermath, of the Pontiff’s death. In 1955, when Italy celebrated the tenth anniversary of its liberation, the Union of Italian Jewish Communities proclaimed April 17 as a “Day of Gratitude” for the Pope’s wartime assistance in defying the Nazis. Dozens of Italian Catholics, including several priests and nuns, were awarded gold medals “for their outstanding rescue work during the Nazi terror.”

A few weeks later, on May 26, 1955, the Israeli Philharmonic Orchestra flew to Rome to give a special performance of Beethoven’s Seventh Symphony, at the Vatican’s Consistory Hall, to express the State of Israel’s enduring gratitude for the help that the Pope and the Catholic Church had given to the Jewish people persecuted by the Nazis during the Holocaust. That the Israeli Philharmonic Orchestra so joined the rest of the Jewish world in warmly honoring the achievements and legacy of Pope Pius XII is of more than passing significance. As a matter of state policy, the Israeli Philharmonic has never played the music of the nineteenth century composer Richard Wagner because of Wagner’s well-known reputation as an anti-Semite and as Hitler’s “favorite composer,” and as one of the cultural patron saints of the Third Reich, whose music was played at Nazi party functions and ceremonies. Despite requests from music lovers and specialists, the official state ban on the Israeli Philharmonic’s playing Wagner’s music has never been lifted. During the 1950’s and 1960’s, especially, a significant sector of the Israeli public, hundreds of thousands of whom were survivors of the Nazi concentration and death camps, still viewed his music, and even his name, as a symbol of the Hitler regime. That being the case, it is inconceivable that the Israeli government would have paid the travel expenses for the entire Philharmonic to travel to Rome for a special concert to pay tribute to a church leader who was considered to have been “Hitler’s Pope.” On the contrary: The Israeli Philharmonic’s historic and unprecedented visit to Rome to perform for Pius XII at the Vatican was a unique Jewish communal gesture of collective recognition and gratitude to a great world leader and friend of the Jewish people for his instrumental role in saving the lives of hundreds of thousands of Jews.

On the day of Pius XII’s death in 1958, Golda Meir, Israel’s Foreign Minister, cabled the following message of condolence to the Vatican: “We share in the grief of humanity…When fearful martyrdom came to our people in the decade of Nazi terror, the voice of the Pope was raised for the victims. The life of our times was enriched by a voice speaking out on the great moral truths above the tumult of daily conflict. We mourn a great servant of peace.” Before beginning a concert of the New York Philharmonic Orchestra, conductor Leonard Bernstein called for a minute of silence “for the passing of a very great man, Pope Pius XII.”

Similar sentiments were expressed in the many tributes and eulogies for Pius by numerous rabbis and Jewish communal leaders, as well as by most of the Israeli press, several of whose readers suggested in open letters that a “Pope Pius XII Forest” be planted in the hills of Judea “in order to perpetuate fittingly the humane services rendered by the late pontiff to European Jewry.” During and for close to two decades after World War II, Jewish praise and gratitude for Pius XII’s efforts on behalf of European Jewry were virtually unanimous. Indeed, as Pinchas Lapide has so aptly stated: “No Pope in history has been thanked more heartily by Jews.” Because of Pius XII’s exemplary humanity toward European Jewry, no other Pope has earned such gratitude from the Jewish people.

Pius XII: A Righteous Gentile, Not Hitler’s Pope

I believe that a new, Jewish historical account of Pope Pius XII and the Holocaust—a comprehensive, yet critical scholarly “defense” of what Pius did for the Jews—needs to be written. Such a true account of what Pius XII really did for the Jews would arrive, I believe, at exactly the opposite of Cornwell’s conclusion: Pius XII was not Hitler’s pope, but the closest Jews had come to having a papal supporter—and at the moment when it mattered most.

Such a new Jewish historical evaluation and “defense” of Pius, needs to be based on how Pius’s Jewish contemporaries viewed his efforts—his accomplishments and failures alike—during his lifetime, and how Jewish Holocaust survivors have evaluated (and reevaluated) his life and legacy in the decades since. Such a book must incorporate the first hand testimony of Jewish leaders in Israel, Europe and America, and of Holocaust survivors and former chaplains who served in Nazi occupied Europe, which bear eloquent witness to the heroic and often forgotten role played by Pius XII as a “righteous gentile,” who was responsible for sheltering and rescuing hundreds of thousands of Jews.

In recent decades, new oral history centers have been established, to record and preserve the oral histories and personal testimonies of Jewish Holocaust survivors and their Catholic rescuers. As a result, an impressive body of new oral history interviews, with Jewish Holocaust survivors and military chaplains, Catholic clergy and laity, in Italy and other countries of Nazi occupied Europe, have been conducted and transcribed. These provide a new basis for understanding Pius XII’s role in the Holocaust, and his relationship to Italy’s Jews. An invaluable archival resource, these provide the basis for the new Jewish understanding of Pius XII and the Holocaust that cries out to be written.

The new and existing oral history testimony of Jewish leaders in Israel, Europe, and America, as well as that of Jewish chaplains and of numerous Jewish Holocaust survivors, bear elegant witness to the heroic and often forgotten role played by Pope Pius XII in sheltering and rescuing hundreds of thousands of Jews. It is hard to imagine that so many of the world’s greatest Jewish leaders, on several continents, were all misguided or mistaken in praising the Pope’s wartime conduct. Their enduring gratitude, as well as that of a generation of Holocaust survivors, to Pius XII was genuine and profound, and bespoke their sincere belief that he was one of the world’s truly “righteous gentiles.”

The Talmud, the great sixth century compendium of Jewish religious law and ethics, teaches Jews that “whosoever preserves one life, it is accounted to him by Scripture as if he had preserved a whole world.” More so than most other twentieth century leaders, Pius XII effectively fulfilled this Talmudic dictum when the fate of European Jewry was at stake. Pope Pius XII’s legacy as a “righteous gentile,” who rescued so many Jews from Hitler’s death camps cannot and should not be forgotten. Nor should the fact that the Jewish community, and so many of its leaders, praised the Pope’s efforts during and after the Holocaust, and promised never to forget.

These points are especially significant in evaluating Pope Pius XII’s enduring legacy for twentieth, and twenty-first, century Jews. It needs to be remembered, as noted earlier, that no other Pope in history has been so universally praised by Jews. So, too, the compelling reason for this unprecedented Jewish praise for, and gratitude to, a Pope needs to be better remembered than it has been in recent years: Today, more than fifty years after the Holocaust, it needs to be more widely recognized and appreciated that Pius XII was indeed a very “righteous gentile,” a true friend of the Jewish people, who saved more Jewish lives than any other person, including Raoul Wallenberg and Oskar Schindler. A new authentically Jewish history of Pope Pius XII and the Holocaust, emphasizing his historic role and accomplishments as a “righteous gentile,” may help to bring some long-overdue recognition to his too little known and appreciated legacy as one of the century’s great friends of the Jewish people.

Godman’s allegation that the Vatican maintained a weak opposition to Hitler’s Nazism that contrasted with its categorical condemnations of Stalin’s Communism is factually incorrect.

For the Church, both were equally diabolic; but that assertion is not based on a serious scholarly historical research but in the Comintern’s worldwide campaign of defamation against the Church and Pius XII that poisoned to these days the real history of the position and actions of the Church during the Holocaust.

Nobody, nor organization was stronger in the condemnation of the National Socialism (Nazis) than the Church and Eugenio Pacelli who for 12 years was Nuncio Apostolic of the Holy See in Germany before Hitler took power. On December 16, 1929,the Nuncio Pacelli was recalled to Rome and elevated to the Sacred College of Cardinals,and on February 7, 1930, he was named Secretary of State, and then elected on March 2, 1939 succeeded Pius XI under the name of Pius XII.

Before becoming Pope, and as early as 1935, Cardinal Pacelli had described as “diabolical” the new German Regime in conversations with the French Ambassador to the Holy See, Charles-Roux, while the rest of the world were willingly accepting Hitler’s power grasp upon the German government. The Duke of Windsor visited Hitler and Lloyd George even went so far as to call him the “greatest living German”! In the U.S. there were also people in high positions who were openly sympathizers of Hitler, such as Henry Ford I, who was also a strong anti-Semitic.

During Pacelli’s twelve years as Apostolic Nuncio in Germany (1917-29), he made 44 public speeches and in 40 of these attacked the fundamental tenets of the Communism and National Socialism. Already in April 1933, as Secretary of State of Pope Pius XI, he sent an urgent request to the new Nazi government “not to let it be influenced by anti-Semitic aims.”

On April 28, 1935, at Lourdes, where he went as the Pope Legate, Pacelli said to 250,000 pilgrims: “They (the Nazis) are in reality only miserable plagiarists who dress up old errors with new tinsel. It does not make any difference whether they flock to the banners of social revolution, whether they are guided by a false conception of the world of life, or whether they are possessed by the superstition of a race and blood cult.” Certainly, these were very strong words coming from such a consummated diplomat.

Hitler’s discussions with his closest collaborators, as well as the diaries and decrees by Goebbles, Bormann, Rosenberg and Himmler, denote that from the beginning Hitler and his followers were motivated by a pathological hatred toward the Catholic Church. All those who did not adhere unconditionally to their way of thinking and acting were considered and treated as enemies, who had to be annihilated.

There was never any ambiguity on the Vatican Secretary of State’s feelings about Hitler’s regime, and the Nazis knew it. When Cardinal Pacelli was elected Pope on March 2, 1939, the next day the Berlin Morgenpost (the Nazi party’s newspaper) wrote: “The election of Cardinal Pacelli is not accepted with favor in Germany because he was always opposed to Nazism and practically determined the policies of the Vatican under his predecessor.”

As Jewish historian Dr. Joseph L. Litchen wrote in the Anti-Defamation Bulletin for October, in 1958, commenting on Pius XII, “the new Vicar of Christ” said Litchen, “showed no softening after his election toward Hitler’s brutal policies; Pius the Pope was the same as Pacelli the priest.”

Pius XI’s Encyclical letter condemning the Nazis preceded the one condemning Communism. On March 14, 1937, before it was fashionable to denounce the German Führer as a villain and long before the creation of the concentration camps and the gas chambers, Pius XI, ably seconded by his Secretary of State, wrote the Encyclical “Mit Brennender Sorge” meaning “with burning anxiety”. It dealt with the nazi threat to racial minorities and specifically the Jews addressing the Encyclical directly to the German people.

The Encyclical exhorted that Catholics must never be anti-Semitic because “we are all Semites spiritually” and ought to hold the Jewish people in high regard accordingly.

The Encyclical exposed to the world the III Reich’s persecution of the Catholic Church as well as the incompatibility between the principles of the National Socialism and those of the Catholic faith.

The German government prohibited the entrance of the Encyclical to the country and it became necessary to smuggle it into Germany under the nose of the ruthless Gestapo. On Sunday March 21, The Encyclical was read from 12,000 Catholic pulpits across Germany. As a result, the Nazi’s campaign of innuendoes against The Church as well as the persecution of Catholics worsened.

The German Catholic hierarchy thanked Pope Pius XI for the letter, which strongly condemned both, racism and anti-Semitism. The Pope pointed to Cardinal Pacelli saying that it was he who had been responsible for the Encyclical. It was the Secretary of State, who asked the German Cardinal Faulhaber to submit a draft text, which he amended carefully. Pacelli also bore the burden of its defense when the Encyclical was the subject of strong German diplomatic protests; he did so personally, not by delegation.

Pius XI and his Secretary of State were following the Magisterium of the Church when they published on March 19, 1937, the Encyclical “Divini Redemptori.” It was a most comprehensive and devastating condemnation of Communism as “intrinsically perverse.” Already Pius IX, as early as 1846, pronounced in the Encyclical “Qui pluribus,” a solemn condemnation of Communism “that infamous doctrine which is absolutely contrary to natural law itself, and if once adopted would utterly destroy the rights, the property and possessions of all men, and even society itself.” Pope Leo XIII in his Encyclical “Quod apostolici muneri,” defined communism as “the fatal plague that insinuates itself into the very marrow of human society only to bring about its ruin.”

Pius XI and later, Pius XII were highly active, energetic and zealous opponents of totalitarianism and oppression in every form-for them, National Socialism and Communism were both intrinsically evil.

Pope Pius XII’s first Encyclical, “Summi Pontificatus”, published on October 27, 1939, attacks both, Nazism and Communism - Pope Pacelli reiterated the attack on the German regime and the Gestapo was ordered to prevent its distribution. In it, the Pope declared his position “against exacerbated nationalism, the idolatry of the state, totalitarianism, racism, the cult of brutal force, contempt of international agreements”, against all the characteristics of Hitler’s political system; he laid the responsibility for the scourge of the war on these aberrations. The Allies airdropped 88,000 copies of the Encyclical over Germany.

To those seeking the truth, what a better witness than the testimony of Albert Einstein, the great Jewish physicist, who had first hand experience of the horrors of Nazism? In 1944 he said: “Being a lover of freedom, when the Nazi revolution came in Germany, I looked to the universities to defend it, but the universities were immediately silenced. Then I looked to the great editors of newspapers, but they, like the universities were silenced in a few short weeks. Then I looked to individual writers…they too were mute. Only the Church,” Einstein concluded, “stood squarely across the path of Hitler’s campaign for suppressing the truth…I never had any special interest in the Church before, but now I feel great affection and admiration…and am forced thus to confess that what I once despised, I now praise unreservedly.”

On October 12, 1945, Leo Kubwitsky, on behalf of the World Jewish Congress made a gift of 2 million lire (the equivalent of over one million dollars at present value) to the Vatican as a token of gratitude. Pius XII decided that the sum should go exclusively to needy people of Jewish origin. Jews who had first hand knowledge, or participated in the extraordinary efforts of Pius XII and the Catholic Church in saving Jewish lives during this most tragic period, were not short in publicly expressing their profound gratitude while this great Pope was still alive.

Moshe Sharett, Israel’s first Foreign Minister, (and later the second Prime of Minister), met Pius XII in 1945 and said later: “I told him that my first duty was to thank him, and through him, the Catholic Church, on behalf of the Jewish people, for all they had done in various countries to rescue Jews, to save children and Jews in general.”

The Founders of the State of Israel express their condolences at the death of Pius XII
Among those who mourned the death of Pius XII pronouncing heartfelt tributes were the President of Israel Ben-Zevi, Dr. Nahum Goldmann, president of the World Jewish Congress and the World Zionist Organization, and many Rabbis including Dr. Israel Goldstein of New York.

Rabbi Elio Toaff, Chief Rabbi of Rome, said: “More than anyone else, we have had the opportunity to appreciate the great kindness, filled with compassion and magnanimity, that the Pope displayed during the terrible years of persecution and terror, when it seemed that there was no hope left for us.”

Rabbi Israel Zolli stated: “What the Vatican did will indelibly and eternally engraved in our hearts…Priests and even high prelates did things that will forever be an honor to Catholicism.”

The Israeli’s Minister of Foreign Affairs, Mrs.Golda Meir’s cablegram to the Vatican read; “We share in the grief of humanity at the passing away of His Holiness Pope Pius XII. In a generation afflicted by wars and discords, he upheld the highest ideals of peace and compassion. When fearful martyrdom came to our people in the decade of Nazi terror, the voice of the Pope was raised for the victims. The life of our times was enriched by a voice speaking out on the great moral truths above the tumult of daily conflict. We mourn a great servant of peace.”

The Chief Rabbi in Rome during the German occupation, Israel Zolli, once said, “No hero in history was more militant, more fought against, none more heroic, than Pius XII.” In fact, Zolli was so moved by Pius XII, with whom he worked closely in the saving of Jewish lives, that he converted to Catholicism after the war and took the Pope’s own name, Eugenio, as his baptismal name.

Israeli senior diplomat and now Orthodox Jewish Rabbi, Pinchas Lapide, with access to Yad Vashem’s archives, has stated in his book, “Three Popes and the Jews”, that “The Catholic Church relief and rescue program under the pontificate of Pius XII was instrumental in saving the lives of as many as 860,000 Jews from certain death at Nazi’s hands. That was more than all other Churches, religious institutions and international rescue organizations put together.” (17) The Israelis recognized the lives saved by planting a forest, in commemoration, of as many trees in the Negeb, SE of Jerusalem. This forest was shown to Pope Paul VI during his first state visit to Israel.

Unfortunately, today we are witnessing a campaign against this great benefactor of Humanity. His memory is being slandered and dishonored through falsehoods and innuendoes. This matter should be open to honest analysis and discussion. Legitimate discrepancies might exist while studying historical facts, but that should not be of excuse for those people who are moved by the same great evils of ignorance, hatred, and bigotry that made possible the brutal onslaught of innocent people by the Nazis and the Communists.

Godman’s allegation that the Vatican maintained a weak opposition to Hitler’s Nazism that contrasted with its categorical condemnations of Stalin’s Communism is factually incorrect.

The Encyclical exhorted that Catholics must never be anti-Semitic because “we are all Semites spiritually” and ought to hold the Jewish people in high regard accordingly.

Rabbi Israel Zolli stated: “What the Vatican did will indelibly and eternally engraved in our hearts…Priests and even high prelates did things that will forever be an honor to Catholicism.”

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