Rehabilitating Pius XII

'Hitler's Pope' revealed as a secret friend to Holocaust victims (Guardian)

Pope Pius XII helped Jewish refugees to hide from the Nazis, claims new book

One lovely quote in the Grauniad article which is relevant not only to this story: "The church thinks across centuries. If there's a dispute for 50 years, so what?"

While there are extremists on both sides—people who call him "Hitler's Pope" or assert that he did everything he could—the core issue is whether or not he approached the public side of the issue correctly, or missed opportunities to do something.

Let's not set the standards too low. The Pope is the Pope. If we are to regard the pope as the focus of loyalty and as someone whose opinions about personal morals must be followed by observant Catholics—and in some cases cannot even err!—he should have behaved quite differently. If speaking out against the Holocaust—in general or at least when the Jews of his own diocese were rounded up!—meant the violation of Vatican sovereignty, or even the martyrdom of the Pope himself, he would have done the right thing, and every Catholic today would be praising him for it. Many a priest and nun went to the camps for a courageous stand, and nobody ever argues that it would have been better if they had avoided it by laying low.

Indeed, I rather suspect the church would be far stronger today if it had opposed the Nazis definitively and suffered, not muddled through and presented no great witness to love and justice.

Would I have spoken out. Who knows? Maybe I wouldn't. And you know what? I'm not the Pope.

Obviously neither of you have ever read the book Hitler's Pope. You might want to do so. The thesis of the book is not that Pius XII was a secret Nazi of overwhelmed by his hatred of Jews. (Albeit neither was he exempt from the traditional Roman Catholic attitude toward Jews.) The thesis of the book is that before he was Pope, while he was still Papal nuncio, he destroyed the Catholic parties and youth groups in Germany by direct agreement with Adolph Hitler. The explanation that Cornwell gives for this act is that Eugenio Maria Giuseppe Giovanni Pacelli was the latest representative of a line of Papal lawyers who had fought for centralization of the Catholic Church and supremacy of the Papacy over the local-national Catholic Churches ever since the Italian revolution. He was thus quite willing to negotiate a Reichskonkordat that both destroyed traditional national Catholic institutions in Germany that promoted such local independence, while gaining official recognition from Hitler of the supremacy of the Pope in all matters ecclesiastical. He was thus the person most responsible for selling out Catholic Germans to Hitler.

The latter part of his career as Pope was a footnote, but a footnote that contained many episodes of his continuing subservience to Hitler. Cornwall does not even deny that he may have participated in hiding a few Jews - but what are effectively private and sporadic acts are one thing, official policies are another. Although it is a fictionalized account of some of those private acts, I would highly recommend the German movie Amen!

While there's certainly a good argument that Pius XII wasn't perfectly wise in his actions in WWII, Hitler's Pope and similar books are historically faulty, and not all have been written with good faith. There's good reason why anti-Catholicism has been called the last acceptable prejudice. As an aside, Cornwell, in the years after the publication of Hitler's Pope came to a more nuanced view of Pius XII, considering his actions highly constrained by his circumstances.

The criticism of Pius XII only really began 20 years after the fact with The Deputy, a work of fiction cooked up by Communist propagandists, while virtually all contemporary Jewish leaders regarded Pius XII as having strongly supported the Jewish people during the Holocaust.

Pius XII is not beyond reproach, but the attacks on him have gone well beyond what is reasonable. While it is easy to criticise his failure to speak publicly as forcefully as many would have liked, it is important to recall that Pius XII didn't publicly condemn the 1-2m Polish Catholics killed by the Nazis either for much the same reason: that public condemnation would not so much result in his martyrdom or that of Church hierarchs, but of unknown numbers of lay Catholics.

"The criticism of Pius XII only really began 20 years after the fact with The Deputy, a work of fiction cooked up by Communist propagandists, while virtually all contemporary Jewish leaders regarded Pius XII as having strongly supported the Jewish people during the Holocaust."

Really.

Well perhaps you could list those "virtually all contemporary Jewish leaders" for us, I am only aware of one rightwing rabbi whose books was published by Henry Regnery Company press, since, apparently, no academic press would touch it. (Other delightful Regnery titles include Michelle Malkin's In Defense of Internment: The Case for Racial Profiling in World War II and the War On Terror )

So lets look at some Jewish commentary on Pius XII

http://www.jewishvirtuallibrary.org/jsource/anti-semitism/pius.html

http://www.ushmm.org/museum/press/archives/detail.php?category=07-general&co...

http://www.nytimes.com/1982/10/26/opinion/l-what-golda-meir-thought-of-pope-pius...

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pope_Pius_XII_and_Yad_Vashem

http://theweek.com/article/index/105605/the-pope-and-the-nazis

Typical Catholic whitewash response:

http://www.renewamerica.com/columns/abbott/121109

"contemporary" means "of the time" not "of our time".

Isaac Herzog

Pinchas Lapide

Moshe Sharett

Golda Meir

Leon Kubowitzky

William Zukerman

I am sorry, I didn't make myself clear. I was asking for citations, not names.

Your naming of Golda Meir is, for instance, false if you will read the links I gave in the previous post.

It appears that many of the other names you mention are similarly false attributions. For instance read this bio sketch on Isaac Herzog (who was in no way a contemporary of Pius XII)) http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Isaac_Herzog

Pinchas Lapide I'd never heard of previously, but he was hardly a "Jewish leader".

Mosche Sharett was both a Jewish leader and roughly a contemporary of Pius XII, but I see no information on the net regarding his attitudes toward Pius XII. Perhaps you have something that is not from a Catholic apologetics page?

Leon Kubowitzky was a leader of the World Jewish Congress during WWII and had one audience with Pius XII. Again, I can find no reference to his appraisal of Pius XII. Commenting on John Paul IIs "We Remember" this author states:

"Furthermore, "We Remember" makes use of a meeting between Pius XII and Dr. A. Leon Kubowitzky of the World Jewish Congress on 21 September 1945. According to the official Vatican newspaper Osservatore Romano, Kubowitzky came to thank the Pope "for the efforts of the Catholic Church on behalf of Jews"34 during the war. But Kubowitzky himself wrote that the two issues he raised during the meeting were obtaining a declaration of the Church's position toward the Jews and, most important, securing the Pontiff's assistance in the restitution of Jewish children who had been hidden by Christian institutions during the war.35 The Pope's only response was to ask for a memorandum on the problem of the children - many of whose lives, apparently, were saved only at the price of their souls."

http://www.jcpa.org/phas/phas-minerbi-s06.htm

William Zukerman was a journalist, not a "Jewish leader". Again, there appears to be no readily accessible record to his views on Pius XII

So, one cannot rank the truth of your above comments very highly, can one?

O, please.

It's like reading the complaints of a child.

Firstly, you've misidentified Isaac Herzog. The librarything link is to the proper fellow- apparently on Wikipedia he goes by Yitzhak Herzog (he was linked to from the page you found). He was the first chief rabbi of Israel.

Among the links you gave were two affirmations that Meir indeed said very complimentary things about Pius XII, and no contradiction of the fact. Those were the only two mentions of Golda Meir.

I'm not under any burden to provide you citations, especially when you condescendingly asked for a list.

You can't be taken seriously. You attack David Dalin because of his publisher (no, Hitler's Pope wasn't published by an academic press either) while giving credence to a movie based on the propaganda piece "The Deputy". You quibble about the "leader" qualifications of a notable Jewish journalist and an Israeli diplomat on a list also populated by three Israeli Prime Ministers and a Chief Rabbi of Israel.

It's clear you're only interested in attempting to score rhetorical points for reasons I do not care to know.

>8 gabriel: It's clear you're only interested in attempting to score rhetorical points

That does often appear to be the case with lawecon. It's very difficult to conduct a conversation with him, I find. Good luck, gabriel!

~8

On Rabbi Herzog (it is conventional to add the ecclesiastical designation to the name of someone who holds that designation, particularly if the person's name is not that unusual) we find this on his relationship with Pius XII http://daledamos.blogspot.com/2008/11/rabbi-isaac-halevy-herzog-and-holy.html

On Golda Meir http://www.nytimes.com/1982/10/26/opinion/l-what-golda-meir-thought-of-pope-pius...

Given the accuracy of your representation of the views of these "Jewish Leaders" (an interestingly ambiguous term) you think it is unreasonable to ask you for citations to your characterization of the views of the other "Jewish leaders" you cite? Really? I suspect that the reason that you won't give such citations is that you have never had them, and in fact lifted your list from one of the numerous Catholic webpages advocating for the Canonization of Pius XII. Isn't that right?

Added later: I did a Google search under "Jewish leaders + Pius XIII" and came up with the following articles on "Jewish leaders" attitudes toward Pius XII

http://www.cnn.com/2009/WORLD/meast/12/22/vatican.israel.pope.pius/index.html

http://blogs.reuters.com/faithworld/2010/11/21/jewish-leaders-dismayed-over-pius...

http://usatoday30.usatoday.com/news/religion/2009-12-22-popepius22_ST_N.htm

~9

Yes, John, very difficult. On matters of theory I am always pesky in seeking clear definitions. On facts I am seeking citations to where one got the facts. Very difficult. It is so much nicer when one just gets along and muddles along.