“I, a Jew, for Pius XII”
ROME, Nov. 23, 2002 (ACI).- In an article published in the Italian newspaper L’Avvenire, the prominent Jewish historian David G. Dalin points out that the true history makes it clear that Pope Pius XII was an ardent defender of the Jews and a critic of Nazism, and that those who claim the contrary are former priests or former Catholics who have doctrinal “accounts to settle” with Pope Pacelli.
In the article entitled “I, a Jew, for Pius XII,” Dalin states that “any honest and complete reading of the sources shows that the Pontiff was a tenacious critic of Nazism”; and he indicates that “strangely, all those who slander him are former priests or Christians estranged from the Church, but new documents prove that the Führer distrusted the Holy See precisely because it was hiding rabbis.”
The historian’s article comes in response to the fact that in the last 18 months 9 books have been published on Pius XII, of which 4 defend the Pope and 2 deal with him only within a broad attack against Catholicism.
“Despite this, it is the books that slander the Pope that have received the greatest attention from the press, particularly ‘Hitler’s Pope,’ a widely reviewed and marketed book,” says Dalin, for whom “curiously, almost all those who today place themselves in this line —from the former seminarians John Cornwell and Garry Wills to the former priest James Carroll— are Catholics or people who have left the Church or are critical in their relationship with it.”
By contrast, according to the historian, “for the Jewish leaders of a previous generation the campaign against Pius XII would have caused enormous surprise. During and after the war, many famous Jews —Albert Einstein, Golda Meir, Moshe Sharett, Rabbi Isaac Herzog and many others— publicly expressed their gratitude to Pius XII.”
The Jewish historian even cites the work “Three Popes and the Jews,” by the Jewish diplomat Pinchas Lapide, Israeli consul in Milan, according to whom Pius XII certainly saved the lives of 700,000 Jews, and probably managed to save as many as 860,000 from the Nazis’ murderous machinery.
For this reason, the historian states that “to make Pius XII a target for our moral disdain against Nazism and to drag Catholicism among the institutions delegitimized by the horror of the Holocaust means betraying the task of understanding history.”
“Almost none of the books on Pius XII and the Holocaust are really about Pius XII and the Holocaust,” says Dalin. “The real subject turns out to be an internal discussion within Catholicism about the meaning of the Church today, where the Holocaust simply becomes the biggest club that progressive Catholics can wield as a weapon.”
For Dalin, the debate over the future of the papacy is not a subject in which non-Christians should involve themselves; nevertheless, he believes that “Jews, whatever their feelings regarding the Catholic Church, have the moral duty to reject every attempt to instrumentalize the Holocaust and to use it in a partisan way within such a debate. And this is particularly so when such an attempt denigrates the testimonies of Holocaust survivors and extends to the wrong people the condemnation that belongs to Hitler and the Nazis.”
Dalin then offers the testimony of numerous Jewish figures from Europe and the United States who today firmly oppose the denigration of Pius XII by some of their co-religionists, among them Sir Martin Gilbert, Michael Tagliacozzo —the foremost authority of Rome’s Jewish community on the Holocaust— and Richard Breitman —the only historian with access to the secret American archives— and especially Lapide himself.
For this reason, the historian concludes that “a serious investigation of Pius XII would, I believe, reach conclusions exactly opposite to Cornwell’s: Pius XII was not Hitler’s Pope, but the Pope who stood closest by the Jews at the moment when that truly mattered.”
