I saw this on the site of HAARETZ.
My emphases and comments.
22 Jan 2010
Much-maligned pontiff
By Dimitri Cavalli
Some things never go away. The controversy over Pope Pius XII’s actions during World War II was recently reignited when Pope Benedict XVI signed a decree affirming that his predecessor displayed "heroic virtues" during his lifetime. When the pope visited the Great Synagogue of Rome on Sunday, Riccardo Pacifici, president of Rome’s Jewish community, told him: "The silence of Pius XII before the Shoah still hurts because something should have been done."This was not the first time the wartime pope, who is now a step closer to beatification, has been accused of keeping silent during the Holocaust, of doing little or nothing to help the Jews, and even of collaborating with the Nazis. To what extent, if any, does the evidence back up these allegations, which have been repeated since the early 1960s?
On April 4, 1933, Eugenio Cardinal Pacelli, the Vatican secretary of state, instructed the papal nuncio in Germany to see what he could do to oppose the Nazis’ anti-Semitic policies.
On behalf of Pope Pius XI, Cardinal Pacelli drafted an encyclical, entitled "Mit brennender Sorge" ("With Burning Anxiety"), that condemned Nazi doctrines and persecution of the Catholic Church. The encyclical was smuggled into Germany and read from Catholic pulpits on March 21, 1937.Although many Vatican critics today dismiss the encyclical as a light slap on the wrist, the Germans saw it as a security threat. For example, on March 26, 1937, Hans Dieckhoff, an official in the German foreign ministry, wrote that the "encyclical contains attacks of the severest nature upon the German government, calls upon Catholic citizens to rebel against the authority of the state, and therefore signifies an attempt to endanger internal peace."
Both Great Britain and France [Perhaps more questions should be asked about this rather than the absurd claim that Pius XII didn’t do enough.] should have interpreted the document as a warning that they should not trust Adolf Hitler or try to appease him.
After the death of Pius XI, Cardinal Pacelli was elected pope, on March 2, 1939. The Nazis were displeased with the new pontiff, who took the name Pius XII. On March 4, Joseph Goebbels, the German propaganda minister, wrote in his diary: "Midday with the Fuehrer. He is considering whether we should abrogate the concordat with Rome in light of Pacelli’s election as pope."
During the war, the pope was far from silent: In numerous speeches and encyclicals, he championed human rights for all people and called on the belligerent nations to respect the rights of all civilians and prisoners of war. Unlike many of the pope’s latter-day detractors, the Nazis understood him very well. [Exactly.] After studying Pius XII’s 1942 Christmas message, the Reich Central Security Office concluded: "In a manner never known before the pope has repudiated the National Socialist New European Order … Here he is virtually accusing the German people of injustice toward the Jews and makes himself the mouthpiece of the Jewish war criminals." (Pick up any book that criticizes Pius XII, and you won’t find any mention of this important report.) [Right!]
In early 1940, the pope acted as an intermediary between a group of German generals who wanted to overthrow Hitler and the British government. Although the conspiracy never went forward, Pius XII kept in close contact with the German resistance and heard about two other plots against Hitler. In the fall of 1941, through diplomatic channels, the pope agreed with Franklin Delano Roosevelt that America’s Catholics could support the president’s plans to extend military aid to the Soviet Union after it was invaded by the Nazis. On behalf of the Vatican, John T. McNicholas, the archbishop of Cincinnati, Ohio, delivered a well-publicized address that explained that the extension of assistance to the Soviets could be morally justified because it helped the Russian people, who were the innocent victims of German aggression.
Throughout the war, the pope’s deputies frequently ordered the Vatican’s diplomatic representatives in many Nazi-occupied and Axis countries to intervene on behalf of endangered Jews. Up until Pius XII’s death in 1958, many Jewish organizations, newspapers and leaders lauded his efforts. To cite one of many examples, in his April 7, 1944, letter to the papal nuncio in Romania, Alexander Shafran, chief rabbi of Bucharest, wrote: "It is not easy for us to find the right words to express the warmth and consolation we experienced because of the concern of the supreme pontiff, who offered a large sum to relieve the sufferings of deported Jews … The Jews of Romania will never forget these facts of historic importance."
The campaign against Pope Pius XII is doomed to failure because his detractors cannot sustain their main charges against him – that he was silent, pro-Nazi, and did little or nothing to help the Jews – with evidence. Perhaps only in a backward world such as ours would the one man who did more than any other wartime leader to help Jews and other Nazi victims, receive the greatest condemnation.
Dimitri Cavalli is an editor and writer in New York City. He is working on books on both Pope Pius XII and Joe McCarthy, the late manager of the New York Yankees.
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All very true. Part of the problem in getting the real events through the skulls of modern Americans is that they have no conception of diplomatic conventions, especially the old diplomatic conventions that constrained much of Pius’s public speaking and writing. Furthermore, they conveniently forget that there was more than one large, powerful nation with a nasty habit of butchering innocent people at the time. Pius sensibly put many of the Church’s anti-Soviet devices on hold during the war, but was never willing to sell out like Western Allied governments and just openly declare that Uncle Joe was the best guy on earth and mass murder was only a no-no when Germans did it. He did what he could within–and often even somewhat beyond—the very real constraints that he faced.
Quite true. Unfortunately, some folks aren’t looking for the truth so much as a stick to beat the Church with. And any stick will do, even a tremendous lie cooked up by the Kremlin and funded by the STASI.
If you show them documents, they will claim they are forged. If you show them the words of Golda Meir, Albert Einstein, the Chief Rabbi of Jerusalem, the Chief Rabbi of Rome, all praising Pius XII and thanking him for his strenuous (and successful) efforts to save the Jews of Rome, of Italy, of Romania . . . they’ll claim “oh, they just said that because they wanted the Pope to support the State of Israel.” That I have heard from the mouth of a liberal, Jewish anti-Catholic, to my face.
But this controversy has actually done some good. When Cornwell’s awful book first came out, in the 90s, it was one of the things that, paradoxically, turned us towards the Church. I was trained first as a historian, then as a lawyer, and all my alarm bells went off on that book. It was sloppily written, poorly sourced, in some instances deliberately false — yet it was praised everywhere in the press (it seemed) and by people who should have known better. Investigating the motivations of the attackers and learning about the life of Pius XII convinced me that the attackers feared and hated Pius XII and the Church for all the wrong reasons, that the attackers were wrong and the Church was right, and the Church was where we needed to be.
Drawing straight with crooked lines, again.