"Pius the hero"

Excellent article on Pope Pius XII in The Spectator, July 20:

.... Throughout the 1940s and 1950s, Pius XII was the object of adulation by Jews and Gentiles alike because of the Catholic Church’s role in saving more than 700,000 Jewish lives. As Rabbi David Dalin has shown, the people who showered official and public praise on Pius XII include Albert Einstein in 1940; Chaim Weizmann in 1943; the Chief Rabbi of Israel in 1944; the secretary of the World Jewish Congress in 1945; Moshe Sharett, Israel’s second prime minister, in 1945; the Union of Italian Jewish Communities in 1955; the State of Israel via the Israeli Philharmonic Orchestra, which gave a special concert for the Pope in the Vatican in 1955; and Golda Meir on his death in 1958. The Chief Rabbi of Rome, Israel Zolli, converted to Catholicism in 1944 and took the Christian name Eugenio in recognition of the Pope’s personal record in saving Jews.

Jewish historians and experts have followed suit in their praise of Pius: the list of his defenders includes Sir Martin Gilbert and the former deputy chief US prosecutor at Nuremberg, Robert Kempner. A brilliant lawyer of German Jewish origin, Kempner wrote a preface and epilogue to Jenö Levai’s 1968 book on Hungarian Jewry and the Papacy: Pope Pius XII Did Not Remain Silent, in which he says that the book ‘depicts truthfully the part played by the Catholic Church in the struggle against the “Final Solution of the Jewish question in Hungary”’. Kempner denounced ‘a deliberately fabricated myth’ that the Church had remained silent and done nothing — a myth he equates with pro-Nazi revisionism because it attempts to displace blame for the Holocaust from the Nazis on to the Catholic Church.

This unanimously favourable view of Pius XII was singlehandedly overturned in 1963. The cause was not a new piece of historical research but instead a fictional play by a former member of the Hitler Youth, Rolf Hochhuth....

The author makes an interesting observation about "Catholic" subversive traitors:

.... Yet, according to Fr Gumpel, ‘This is not a Jewish–Catholic argument.’ Indeed, Rabbi Dalin accuses three of Pius’s attackers, two former seminarians and a former priest, of using their accusations to conduct an internal argument within the Catholic Church about the future of the Papacy after John Paul II....

(Thanks Kathryn.)

Lane Core Jr. CIW P — Fri. 07/26/02 11:33:02 AM
Categorized as Classic.