*** From [EMAIL PROTECTED] (Konrad M Lepecki) Copyright 2001 The Weekly Standard The Weekly Standard February 26, 2001 SECTION: BOOKS & ARTS; Pg. 31 HEADLINE: Pius XII and the Jews BYLINE: BY DAVID G. DALIN; A rabbi and historian, David G. Dalin is the co-author most recently of The Presidents of the United States and the Jews. Pius XII and the Second World War According to the Archives of the Vatican by Pierre Blet Paulist, 416 pp., $ 29.95 Constantine's Sword The Church and the Jews: A History by James Carroll Houghton Mifflin, 576 pp., $ 28 Hitler's Pope The Secret History of Pius XII by John Cornwell Viking, 430 pp., $ 29.95 Pope Pius XII Architect for Peace by Margherita Marchione Paulist, 256 pp., $ 22.95 The Defamation of Pius XII by Ralph McInerny St. Augustine's, 223 pp., $ 19 The Catholic Church and the Holocaust, 1930-1965 by Michael Phayer Indiana University Press, 328 pp., $ 29.95 Hitler, the War and the Pope by Ronald J. Rychlak Genesis, 470 pp., $ 26.95 Papal Sin Structures of Deceit by Garry Wills Doubleday, 326 pp., $ 25 Under His Very Windows The Vatican and the Holocaust in Italy by Susan Zuccotti Yale University Press, 352 pp., $ 29.95 Even before Pius XII died in 1958, the charge that his papacy had been friendly to the Nazis was circulating in Europe, a piece of standard Communist agitprop against the West. It sank for a few years under the flood of tributes, from Jews and gentiles alike, that followed the pope's death, only to bubble up again with the 1963 debut of The Deputy, a play by a left-wing German writer (and former member of the Hitler Youth) named Rolf Hochhuth. The Deputy was fictional and highly polemical, claiming that Pius XII's concern for Vatican finances left him indifferent to the destruction of European Jewry. But Hochhuth's seven-hour play nonetheless received considerable notice, sparking a controversy that lasted through the 1960s. And now, more than thirty years later, that controversy has suddenly broken out again, for reasons not immediately clear. Indeed, "broken out" doesn't describe the current torrent. In the last eighteen months, nine books that treat Pius XII have appeared: John Cornwell's Hitler's Pope, Pierre Blet's Pius XII and the Second World War, Garry Wills's Papal Sin, Margherita Marchione's Pope Pius XII, Ronald J. Rychlak's Hitler, the War and the Pope, Michael Phayer's The Catholic Church and the Holocaust, 1930-1965, Susan Zuccotti's Under His Very Windows, Ralph McInerny's The Defamation of Pius XII, and, most recently, James Carroll's Constantine's Sword. Since four of these -- the ones by Blet, Marchione, Rychlak, and McInerny -- are defenses of the pope (and two, the books by Wills and Carroll, take up Pius only as part of a broad attack against Catholicism), the picture may look balanced. In fact, to read all nine is to conclude that Pius's defenders have the stronger case -- with Rychlak's Hitler, the War and the Pope the best and most careful of the recent works, an elegant tome of serious, critical scholarship. Still, it is the books vilifying the pope that have received most of the attention, particularly Hitler's Pope, a widely reviewed volume marketed with the announcement that Pius XII was "the most dangerous churchman in modern history," without whom "Hitler might never have . . . been able to press forward." The "silence" of the pope is becoming more and more firmly established as settled opinion in the American media: "Pius XII's elevation of Catholic self-interest over Catholic conscience was the lowest point in modern Catholic history," the New York Times remarked, almost in passing, in a review last month of Carroll's Constantine's Sword. Curiously, nearly everyone pressing this line today -- from the ex-seminarians John Cornwell and Garry Wills to the ex-priest James Carroll -- is a lapsed or angry Catholic. For Jewish leaders of a previous generation, the campaign against Pius XII would have been a source of shock. During and after the war, many well-known Jews -- Albert Einstein, Golda Meir, Moshe Sharett, Rabbi Isaac Herzog, and innumerable others -- publicly expressed their gratitude to Pius. In his 1967 book Three Popes and the Jews, the diplomat Pinchas Lapide (who served as Israeli consul in Milan and interviewed Italian Holocaust survivors) declared Pius XII "was instrumental in saving at least 700,000, but probably as many as 860,000 Jews from certain death at Nazi hands." This is not to say that Eugenio Pacelli -- the powerful churchman who served as nuncio in Bavaria and Geccotti is not alone. There is a disturbing element in nearly all the current work on Pius. Except for Rychlak's Hitler, the War and the Pope, none of the recent books -- from Cornwell's vicious attack in Hitler's Pope to McInerny's uncritical defense in The Defamation of Pius XII -- is finally about the Holocaust. All are about using the sufferings of Jews fifty years ago to force changes upon the Catholic Church today. It is the abuse of the Holocaust that must be rejected. A true account of Pius XII would arrive, I believe, at exactly the opposite to Cornwell's conclusion: Pius XII was not Hitler's pope, but the closest Jews had come to having a papal supporter -- and at the moment when it mattered most. Writing in Yad Vashem Studies in 1983, John S. Conway -- the leading authority on the Vatican's eleven-volume Acts and Documents of the Holy See During the Second World War -- concluded: "A close study of the many thousands of documents published in these volumes lends little support to the thesis that ecclesiastical self-preservation was the main motive behind the attitudes of the Vatican diplomats. Rather, the picture that emerges is one of a group of intelligent and conscientious men, seeking to pursue the paths of peace and justice, at a time when these ideals were ruthlessly being rendered irrelevant in a world of 'total war.'" These neglected volumes (which the English reader can find summarized in Pierre Blet's Pius XII and the Second World War) "will reveal ever more clearly and convincingly" -- as John Paul told a group of Jewish leaders in Miami in 1987 -- "how deeply Pius XII felt the tragedy of the Jewish people, and how hard and effectively he worked to assist them." The Talmud teaches that "whosoever preserves one life, it is accounted to him by Scripture as if he had preserved a whole world." More than any other twentieth-century leader, Pius fulfilled this Talmudic dictum, when the fate of European Jewry was at stake. No other pope had been so widely praised by Jews -- and they were not mistaken. Their gratitude, as well as that of the entire generation of Holocaust survivors, testifies that Pius XII was, genuinely and profoundly, a righteous gentile. =============================================================== Lista 'Forum Zagraniczne' Administrator: [EMAIL PROTECTED] Archiwum: http://www.mail-archive.com/forum.zagraniczne@3w3.net
