Following Pope Pius XII's sermon at Christmas, 1942, the Reich Central Security Office prepared a detailed analysis of the Pope's address for Reinhard Heydrich which was submitted on January 22, 1943:
"In a manner never known before, the Pope has repudiated the National Socialist New European Order. His radio allocution was a masterpiece of clerical falsification of the National Socialist Weltanschauung. It is true, the Pope does not refer to the National Socialists in Germany by name, but his speech is one long attack on everything we stand for....God, he says, regards all peoples and races as worthy of the same consideration. Here he is clearly speaking on behalf of the Jews...That this speech is directed exclusively against the New Order in Europe as seen in National Socialism is clear in the Papal statement that mankind owes a debt to 'all who during the war have lost their Fatherland and who, although personally blameless have, simply on account of their nationality and origin, been killed or reduced to utter destitution.' Here he is virtually accusing the German people of injustice towards the Jews, and makes himself the mouthpiece of the Jewish war criminals."
But Deborah Dwork, Director of Clark University's Strassler Center for Holocaust & Genocide Studies, doesn't see it that way. Speaking of the fact that Pope Benedict XVI named Pope Pius XII as Venerable, Ms. Dwork replied, "Who the Church elevates is its business, but history is MY business, and Pius XII failed Europe's Jews miserably, unconscionably." See page 21 of this pdf file.
I think Ms. Dwork needs to find another line of business.
The Israeli consul, Pinchas E. Lapide, in his book, Three Popes and the Jews (New York: Hawthorn Books, Inc., 1967) critically examines Pope Pius XII. According to his research, the Catholic Church under Pius XII was instrumental in saving 860,000 Jews from Nazi death camps (p. 214). Could Pius have saved more lives by speaking out more forcefully? According to Lapide, the concentration camp prisoners did not want Pius to speak out openly (p. 247). As one jurist from the Nuremberg Trials said on WNBC in New York (Feb. 28, 1964), "Any words of Pius XII, directed against a madman like Hitler, would have brought on an even worse catastrophe... [and] accelerated the massacre of Jews and priests." (Ibid.)
Yet Pius was not totally silent either. Lapide notes a book by the Jewish historian, Jenoe Levai, entitled, The Church Did Not Keep Silent (p. 256). He admits that everyone, including himself, could have done more. If we condemn Pius, then justice would demand condemning everyone else. He concludes by quoting from the Talmud that "whosoever preserves one life, it is accounted to him by Scripture as if he had preserved a whole world." With this he claims that Pius XII deserves a memorial forest of 860,000 trees in the Judean hills (pp. 268-9). It should be noted that six million Jews and three million Catholics were killed in the Holocaust.
We must remember that the Holocaust was also anti-Christian. After Hitler revealed his true intentions, the Catholic Church opposed him. Even the famous Albert Einstein testified to that. According to the December 23, 1940 issue of Time magazine on page 38, Einstein said:
Being a lover of freedom, when the 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 Church stood squarely across the path of Hitler's campaign for suppressing 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.
I invite readers of this Blog to visit the website of The Catholic League for Religious and Civil Rights to read the extensive documentation on Pope Pius XII which shows clearly that this saintly Pontiff was nothing less than heroic. My father had an audience with Pope Pius XII in April of 1958, just six months before the Holy Father died. It was an experience he would always cherish.
All too often, the record of history is clouded with the prejudices and presumptions of those who are commenting and reporting on it. Often history is twisted and reinterpreted for ideological purposes. We have seen that Clark University has embraced the radical homosexual agenda. It would appear that the university also embraces historical revisionism. Is this an attempt to discredit the Catholic Church because of its moral opposition toward homosexuality and same-sex "marriage"?
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