Two great experts of the period break through prejudices
ROME, (ZENIT.org).- “The lynching of Pius XII? Filth.” The person speaking in this way is not a Catholic integralist, nor an intellectual with clerical sympathies. He is Paolo Mieli, one of the most distinguished figures in Italian journalism, former correspondent for «La Stampa» and former editor of the «Corriere della Sera», and today director of «RCS», Italy’s largest publishing house. He has a historian’s passion. Indeed, his latest book, which has already become a publishing phenomenon, is entitled «History and Politics: Risorgimento, Fascism and Communism».
Mieli is Jewish, uncompromising in the face of the terrible tragedy of the Holocaust, for which his family had to pay a painful price in blood.
“I come from a family of Jewish origin, and I had relatives who died in the concentration camps during the Second World War. Therefore, I speak about all this with great difficulty,” Mieli said when speaking in Rome on June 6 at the presentation of the book «Pius XII. The Pope of the Jews» («Pio XII. Il Papa degli ebrei», Piemme, 2001), written by Andrea Tornielli, Vatican affairs specialist for the Milan daily «Il Giornale».
“Andrea Tornielli’s book,” Mieli stated, “acts as a counterweight in order to reach a just balance regarding this much-debated pontiff. In reading the book, one can see that for a long period of time it was precisely the Jews who thanked that pontiff for what he had done during the Second World War.”
Since the 1960s, however, his figure has been called into question first by the stage play «The Deputy» and, recently, by the publication of the book by British journalist John Cornwell, «Hitler’s Pope».
And yet, “that Pope and the Church that depended so much on him did a very great deal for the Jews,” adds the director of the publishing house «RCS». “It is estimated that a little less than one million, between 700 and 800 thousand Jews, were saved by the Church and by that pontiff. This is a datum—from a Jewish source, since the calculation was made by Pinchas Lapide—that perhaps ought to precede every discussion about Pius XII. Six million Jews murdered by the Nazis and almost one million Jews saved thanks to the structure of the Church and to this pontiff. When one remembers the people who did something to save Jews physically, very few can be proud of what the Church of Pius XII did.”
“Pius XII is reproached for not having raised a cry in the face of the deportations from the ghetto of Rome,” Mieli continued at the presentation of the book, “but other historians have observed that no one saw the anti-fascists running to the station to try to stop the train of the deportees. And yet many studies, carried out after the war, show that it was possible to do something, and that the theory according to which the Resistance could do nothing for the Jews is totally unfounded.”
“Yet in the campaign against Pius XII the help that the Church offered to the Jews is silenced, help that was even logistical,” the editorial director explains. “Perhaps it is forgotten that the whole anti-fascist community enjoyed that help, as can be read in Enzo Forcella’s book ‘The Resistance in the Convent’ (‘La Resistenza in convento’).”
“I want to say this with the utmost clarity,” Mieli confessed: “placing the responsibilities on the shoulders of Pius XII is sheer villainy. Pius XII cannot be the person on whom blame is laid for something that corresponds in a complex way to the whole community. Obviously I am speaking of the community that produced the horrendous phenomenon of the extermination of the Jews, but also of those who looked on without reacting adequately. Israeli historians, for example, ask themselves why the Jews of Palestine were, so to speak, ‘deaf’ to what was happening in Europe. Why were there cases of collaborationism in the concentration camps, which objectively facilitated the extermination?”
In response to the implicit question about the reasons why Pius XII has become the target of so many attacks, Mieli replied: “One of the reasons why this important Pope was crucified is due to the fact that he took a stand against the Communist universe in a hard, strong and decisive way. In such a way that it was necessary to wait thirty years, with John Paul II, for that style to be resumed adequately, in a way that proved fatal to Communism.”
In conclusion, the former editor of the «Corriere della Sera» said: “I do not wish to propose, and I do not have the qualifications to propose, the beatification of this pontiff. Nevertheless, I consider it very cowardly to place on his shoulders responsibilities that he does not have. He has been treated almost as if he had stood beside Hitler, beside the Nazis, as if he were the only being in the world who bore responsibility for the Holocaust. I believe, and I repeat, that this is something monstrous, aberrant, something that ought to end.”
In support of Mieli’s theses, the political scientist and former Italian ambassador Sergio Romano also spoke at the book presentation. He is certainly not a man of Catholic culture, and he explained a curious paradox: at first Pius XII was “praised and acknowledged, above all by the Jewish communities, for the courage and generosity with which he defended and saved a large number of Jews from Nazi persecutions”; later, “unexpectedly, this judgment was completely overturned.”
For some authors, after his death, “Pius XII went from being the benefactor of the Jews to Hitler’s accomplice, to a cynical and indifferent spectator of the Jewish genocide.”
“There is an intimate relationship,” Ambassador Romano concluded, “between the judgment on Pius XII and the historical version that has progressively asserted itself over the last forty years: a version in which Nazism becomes the only evil of the century. In the dissemination of this version there collaborated Soviet propaganda, the opinion of the left in Western societies, and the part that the Jewish genocide played in the national legitimization of the State of Israel during the most controversial phases of its history. Today, after the end of the Cold War, the fall of Communism, and the opening of the Soviet archives, it is possible to write history in a more objective and neutral way, placing the protagonists within the climate in which they had to act and decide.”
