Catholic Heroes… Pope Pius XII (1876-1958)

By DEB PIROCH

Part 2

We spoke in last week’s column, part one, about the encyclical of Pope Pius XII’s Predecessor, entitled Mit Brennender Sorge, in which he had a role. This evidenced part of a continuum shown by the Church, in which Pacelli, the future Pope, showed the Church’s antipathy toward and disgust with the evil of Hitler’s ideology.
One of the most vile and most repeated lies perpetuated today is that the Church, along with Pope Pius XII, remained “silent” while Jews and others were killed during the Holocaust. Most who repeat this falsehood do not realize no one thought to invent this fiction until the 1960s. It was introduced in the German work, Der Stellvertreter, a play by Rolf Hochhuth, a Protestant.
The badly written and lengthy play is translated to mean The Deputy. Those who opted to translate it into major languages had to edit it.
The playwright also loved to embrace controversy, sadly not history or facts.
Some might say there have been other works on Pius since then that perpetuate this mistaken history. They misrepresent information, and fail to include much in the way of data.
In contrast, during the years I worked at EWTN, I was privileged to meet Sr. Margherita Marchione, a nun who wrote ten books dedicated to telling the truth about Pius XII. Religious orders routinely hid Jews to save them from capture and deportation on the orders of the Pope. Hers was one of them, the Filippini order, which saved 114 Jews. A plaque marks this in Rome and Sr. Margherita spoke to older members of her order as a younger nun, fascinated to learn of the history of those days.
Other authors who have written substantially and factually about on the history behind Pius XII are Ron Rychlak, author of Hitler, the War and the Pope, as well as Rabbi David Dalin, author of The Myth of Hitler’s Pope. For those who want a complete overview of the life and work of Pope Pius, I would urge them to seek out videos online of such authors or, preferably, to read some of their books.
For those who ask, why did the Pope not excommunicate Hitler? Those who pretend he was Catholic misrepresent him: Hitler was not practicing and he hated the Church, hated even his own father, and did not participate in the life of the Church.
Additionally, condemnations of the Nazis had to be rationed because Nazis took reprisals in vengeance. One example is the statement from the Dutch bishops dated July 26, 1942 condemning anti-Semitism. This sparked imprisonment of all “non-Aryans” in Holland, including St. Edith Stein and her sister, murdered within two weeks in the gas chambers at Auschwitz.
For those who think these reprisals did not continue, Jewish historian Pinchas Lapide stated the Dutch Catholic protests led to the harshest response:
“The saddest and most thought-provoking conclusion is that whilst the Catholic clergy in Holland protested more loudly, expressly and frequently against Jewish persecutions than the religious hierarchy of any other Nazi-occupied country, more Jews, some 110,000 or 79 percent of the total, were deported from Holland to the death camps” (quoted by Rabbi David Dalin).
From the beginning, the people at the time knew Pius XII was anti-Hitler, there are countless newspaper headlines and radio programs from the time which frequently state the Pope’s and the Church’s position. To say the Church did nothing is ignorance.
Those who say there were no statements need to go to an old-fashioned library and look at a little microfilm! The New York Times, for a start, contained numerous references, starting even six weeks after the start of the war. A front-page headline on October 20, 1939 reads: “Pope Condemns Dictators, Treaty Violators, Racism; Urges Restoration of Poland.” Is that silence? This headline is far from an isolated one.
Another? The Christmas message of The New York Times from 1941: “The voice of Pius XII is a lonely voice in the silence and darkness enveloping Europe this Christmas . . . the Pope put himself squarely against Hitlerism.”
Yet one point should remain clear: What leader reveals everything he does in the headlines? Do not some policies remain secret? Of course. So, too, with Pius XII.
The Pope’s first encyclical, Summi Pontificatus, clearly condemns divisions of race or placing an absolutist government before God and was suppressed by the Nazis. It says in part:
“But there is yet another error no less pernicious to the well-being of the nations and to the prosperity of that great human society which gathers together and embraces within its confines all races. It is the error contained in those ideas which do not hesitate to divorce civil authority from every kind of dependence upon the Supreme Being” — Summi Pontificatus.
The Church supplied baptismal certificates to Jews so the Nazis would think they were Christians, based on their identity papers.
And yes, this was based on the Concordat the Pope had negotiated. Hitler had granted the Church the sole role of determining who was baptized or not, and these certificates had succeeded in saving lives. One of the most famous examples was “Operation Baptism,” undertaken by Angelo Giuseppe Roncalli, the future Pope St. John XXIII. Roncalli was the nuncio in Ankara, Turkey, 1944-1945.
When informed of the imminent danger to Hungarian Jews by Ira Hirschmann of the United States War Board, Roncalli asked if Jews would be willing to undergo a voluntary ceremony, making clear this baptism was solely to save lives, not force conversions. Hirschmann responded that he was sure they would. In the end, baptismal certificates issued in 1944 would spare 200,000 Jewish lives in Hungary. These were distributed through a Church network of nuns to nuncios, authorized by the Pope.
Despite the Pope being confined to the Vatican during the Nazi occupation, Hitler did not dare assassinate him. The Church had deep roots in Rome and all listened to the Holy Father.
Pius XII managed to secretly hide 5,000 Jews throughout the city at religious institutions, including in the Vatican itself and Castel Gandolfo, the Pope’s summer residence. Thus 80 percent of Jewish lives in Rome were saved.
In conclusion: There were many, many Jews of the time who praised the Pope for his work, including Golda Meir. Most prominently, the chief rabbi of Rome, Israel Zolli, converted and took the Christian name Eugenio after the Pope’s Christian name.
To quote Jewish rabbi and author, David Dalin: “It needs to be more widely recognized and appreciated that Pius XII was indeed a very ‘righteous gentile,’ a true friend of the Jewish people, who saved more Jewish lives than any other person, including Raoul Wallenberg and Oskar Schindler.”
Oh, and did you know that Pius XII was also involved in plots to overthrow the German regime? But that is another column for another day. Meanwhile, see Mark Riebling’s book, Church of Spies: The Pope’s Secret War Against Hitler.