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Pius XII and the Jews Amid all the reporting of Pope John Paul's courageous attempts at reconciliation with the Jews, especially regarding the Holocaust, there is a constant undercurrent attacking the alleged "silence" and inactivity of Pope Pius XII concerning the Nazi atrocities but the attacks are totally unfounded and these are the facts. Even NEWSWEEK, March 30, 1998, commented with regard to Pius XII, "something shameful is going on." During World War II and for many years after his death, Pius XII was greatly praised by all kinds of Jewish organisations, chief Rabbis of diverse countries and especially from America. The Jewish historian, Pinchas Lapide, claimed Pius XII saved about 800,000 Jewish lives. Dr. Joseph Lichten, a Polish Jew, wrote in 1963: "The Pope did not speak out more strongly against Jewish persecutions by the Nazis because anything he would have said was liable to make matters even worse for the Jews." The most forceful witness is Dr. R. Kempner, most prominent jurist, former US Deputy Chief Prosecutor at the Nuremberg War crimes, who said in 1964. "Any words of Pius XII, directed against a madman like Hilter, would have brought on an ever worse catastrophe." And later: "Any act of propaganda on the part of the Church against the Reich Government would have been 'suicide by provocation' - apart from having accelerated the massacre of Jews and priests." Bishop Bernard, together with hundreds of his priests, spent two years in the concentration camp of Dachau. In his prison memoirs, he stresses the sentiments expressed above by Dr. Kempner. John Cornwell's recent book on Pius XII, viciously titled "HITLER'S POPE', a most superficial and incredibly inaccurate book, has been utterly refuted and demolished on virtually every issue by the brilliant German Jesuit historian, Fr. Peter Gumpel, certainly the world's leading authority on Pius. He dismisses the book as a "nasty caricature of a most noble and saintly man." When Pius XII died, no less a person than Israel's Prime Minister, Golda Meir, paid this tribute in a letter to the Vatican: "We share in the grief of humanity at the passing away of Pius XII. He upheld the highest ideals of peace and compassion. When fearful martyrdom came to our people in the decade of the Nazi terror, the voice of the Pope was raised for the victims….We mourn a great servant of peace." After the war, the Chief Rabbi of Rome became a Catholic and changed his name to Eugenio - after Eugenio Pacelli, Pius XII. The Israeli Orchestra gave a special concert at the Vatican by way of gratitude to Pius XII for all he did for the Jews… and there were countless other gestures. So Pius XII was not so "silent" and inactive after all! And there were countless other tributes from unexpected sources such as Field Marshal Lord Montgomery, sometimes a rather difficult person, a staunch Anglican and son of a Anglican bishop who had two pictures in his room - that of his father and Pius XII! The British diplomat, Sir D'Arcy Osborne, accredited to the Vatican, considered Pius XII the most saintly person it had been his privilege to meet and regretted that not being a Catholic, he could not receive communion from Pius XII. Cornwell's book, 'HITLER'S POPE', is given this final verdict by Fr. Gumpel: "Cornwell who is a rank amateur in the field of history, canon law, etc. has produced a shoddy, superficial and totally untrustworthy book, which, to say the very least, is objectively biased, tendentious and so unilateral and one-sided that one wonders what really prompted this man to write this book." |