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Let's spread the real story of Pius XII
By Michael Coren
July 27, 2009
Michael Coren
I will never forget Pope John Paul II’s visit to Britain, my home country. Not because of the crowds and the cacophony but because of my father. I walked into the sitting room of our small house and there was dad, a proud, strong working-class man, crying as he saw the Holy Father on television.
The layers or relevance and emotion are almost overwhelming. My father was from a Polish Jewish family and had lost most of his relatives during the war. His personal history obliged him to pursue truth rather than sordid hyperbole and in particular to understand the role of Pius XII during the Holocaust. The lies about the man made him extremely angry. It makes his son angry as well.
The layers or relevance and emotion are almost overwhelming. My father was from a Polish Jewish family and had lost most of his relatives during the war. His personal history obliged him to pursue truth rather than sordid hyperbole and in particular to understand the role of Pius XII during the Holocaust. The lies about the man made him extremely angry. It makes his son angry as well.
The latest nonsense is profoundly damaging not only to the memory of Pope Pius but also potentially to Catholic-Jewish relations. Headlines announce that Jewish groups are applying pressure to delay or prevent the pontiff’s canonization. Problems abound. First, what is meant by pressure? Second, sensitivity is vital but this is a Catholic rather than a Jewish issue. Third and most important, the criticisms are simply unfounded.
Before he became Pope Pius, Cardinal Pacelli drafted the papal encyclical condemning Nazi racism and had it read from every pulpit. The Vatican used its assets to ransom Jews from the Nazis, ran an elaborate escape route and hid Jewish families in Castel Gandolfo. All this is confirmed by Jewish experts such as the B’nai Brith’s Joseph Lichten.
The World Jewish Congress donated a great deal of money to the Vatican in gratitude and in 1945 Rabbi Herzog of Jerusalem thanked Pope Pius “for his lifesaving efforts on behalf of the Jews during the occupation of Italy.” When the Pope died in 1958, Golda Meir, then Israeli foreign minister, delivered a eulogy at the United Nations praising his work on behalf of her people.
For 20 years it was considered a self-evident truth that the church was a member of the victim class during the Second World War and Pope Pius was mentioned with Churchill and Roosevelt as part of a triumvirate of good. It was as late as the 1960s that the cultural architecture began to be restructured around this issue and it’s deeply significant that the attacks on the pope were largely initiated by the German playwright Rolf Hochhuth, who claimed in his play The Deputy that the Vatican had ignored the plight of the Jews. What is seldom mentioned is that Hochhuth was a renowned anti-Catholic who would later champion Holocaust-denier David Irving.
While it is true is that the pope did not issue an outright attack on the Nazis, this was because the leaders of the Catholic Church in Holland had made a public statement condemning Nazi anti-Semitism and protesting the deportation of the Jewish people and in response the German occupiers arrested and murdered every Dutch Jewish convert to Catholicism they could find. The group included Edith Stein, who was dragged from her convent to the slaughterhouse of Auschwitz. She was gassed in August 1942.
Hundreds of thousands of Catholic religious and lay people risked their lives, and sometimes gave them, to help the Jewish victims of the Nazis. To a very large extent their sacrifices have gone uncelebrated, even ignored. Shamefully much of the criticism of the church comes from within and from critics who use the issue to vicariously attack orthodoxy and Popes John Paul and Benedict. This was precisely the case with John Cornwell’s risible book Hitler’s Pope. In a scholarly response, Rabbi David Dalin’s The Myth of Hitler’s Pope stated that people are trying to “exploit the tragedy of the Jewish people during the Holocaust to foster their own political agenda of forcing changes on the Catholic Church today.”
But the last word should go to another Jewish man. In 1945 the Chief Rabbi of Rome, Israel Zolli, publicly embraced Roman Catholicism. This extraordinary conversion was partly due to Zolli’s admiration for the pope’s sheltering and saving of Italian Jews.
The battle for Pope Pius’s reputation will continue and, I think, my good, grand, deceased father’s tears will continue to flow until the truth is known and celebrated.
Before he became Pope Pius, Cardinal Pacelli drafted the papal encyclical condemning Nazi racism and had it read from every pulpit. The Vatican used its assets to ransom Jews from the Nazis, ran an elaborate escape route and hid Jewish families in Castel Gandolfo. All this is confirmed by Jewish experts such as the B’nai Brith’s Joseph Lichten.
The World Jewish Congress donated a great deal of money to the Vatican in gratitude and in 1945 Rabbi Herzog of Jerusalem thanked Pope Pius “for his lifesaving efforts on behalf of the Jews during the occupation of Italy.” When the Pope died in 1958, Golda Meir, then Israeli foreign minister, delivered a eulogy at the United Nations praising his work on behalf of her people.
For 20 years it was considered a self-evident truth that the church was a member of the victim class during the Second World War and Pope Pius was mentioned with Churchill and Roosevelt as part of a triumvirate of good. It was as late as the 1960s that the cultural architecture began to be restructured around this issue and it’s deeply significant that the attacks on the pope were largely initiated by the German playwright Rolf Hochhuth, who claimed in his play The Deputy that the Vatican had ignored the plight of the Jews. What is seldom mentioned is that Hochhuth was a renowned anti-Catholic who would later champion Holocaust-denier David Irving.
While it is true is that the pope did not issue an outright attack on the Nazis, this was because the leaders of the Catholic Church in Holland had made a public statement condemning Nazi anti-Semitism and protesting the deportation of the Jewish people and in response the German occupiers arrested and murdered every Dutch Jewish convert to Catholicism they could find. The group included Edith Stein, who was dragged from her convent to the slaughterhouse of Auschwitz. She was gassed in August 1942.
Hundreds of thousands of Catholic religious and lay people risked their lives, and sometimes gave them, to help the Jewish victims of the Nazis. To a very large extent their sacrifices have gone uncelebrated, even ignored. Shamefully much of the criticism of the church comes from within and from critics who use the issue to vicariously attack orthodoxy and Popes John Paul and Benedict. This was precisely the case with John Cornwell’s risible book Hitler’s Pope. In a scholarly response, Rabbi David Dalin’s The Myth of Hitler’s Pope stated that people are trying to “exploit the tragedy of the Jewish people during the Holocaust to foster their own political agenda of forcing changes on the Catholic Church today.”
But the last word should go to another Jewish man. In 1945 the Chief Rabbi of Rome, Israel Zolli, publicly embraced Roman Catholicism. This extraordinary conversion was partly due to Zolli’s admiration for the pope’s sheltering and saving of Italian Jews.
The battle for Pope Pius’s reputation will continue and, I think, my good, grand, deceased father’s tears will continue to flow until the truth is known and celebrated.
Michael Coren