Pius XII, Righteous Gentile

Once again, the canard is resurrected that Pius XII failed to act or speak out against the Hitlerian genocide of the Jews. Once again, it must be refuted:

The claim that Pius XII was “silent” during the Holocaust is contradicted by his own wartime statements, and those who praised them after the war. When he died in 1958, the Jewish community hailed his wartime leadership, above all because he did “speak out.”

Golda Meir, then Israel’s Foreign Minister, reacted with this tribute: “We share in the grief of humanity at the passing away of His Holiness, Pope Pius XII. In a generation afflicted by wars and discords, he upheld the highest ideals of peace and compassion. When fearful martydom came to our people in the decade of Nazi terror, the voice of the Pope was raised in compassion for the victims.”(Reuters, October 10,1958)

In his first encyclical, Summi Pontificatus (October, 1939), in his Christmas addresses, in his radio appeals, in his allocution to the College of Cardinals on June 2, 1943, Pius XII condemned race-based murder, and thus came to the clear, public defense of European Jews - a fact recognized at the time, even if it is generally ignored or denied today.

On October 1, 1942, the Times of London editorialized: “A study of the words which Pope Pius XII has addressed since his accession in encyclicals and allocutions to the Catholics of various nations leaves no room for doubt. He condemns the worship of force and its concrete manifestation in the suppression of national liberties and in the persecution of the Jewish race.”

Charles Pichon, a leading wartime correspondent, described Pius XII’s wartime addresses succinctly: “The pontifical texts condemned most strongly the anti-Semitic persecutions, the oppression of invaded lands, the inhuman conduct of the war, and also the deification of the Race, the State and the Class.” (The Vatican and its Role in World Affairs, New York: E. P. Dutton, 1950, p. 167)

In reaction to his 1942 Christmas address, the Nazis themselves, furious about Pius XII’s public stand, railed: “That this speech is directed exclusively against the New Order in Europe as seen in National Socialism is clear in the Papal statement that mankind owes a debt to ‘all who during the war have lost their Fatherland and who, although personally blameless have, simply on account of their nationality and origin, been killed or reduced to utter destitution.’ Here he is virtually accusing the German people of injustice towards the Jews, and makes himself the mouthpiece of the Jewish war criminals.” (The Vatican in the Age of the Dictators, 1922-1945, by Anthony Rhodes, New York: Holt, Rinehart and Winston, 1973, p.273).

Similar examples of Pius’s anti-Nazi, pro-Jewish statements are found in the wartime issues of the Palestine Post, the New York Times, the Tablet of London and the Jewish press of various countries...

Much more where that came from. Read the whole thing. For more, check out Ronald Rychlak's Hitler, the War, and the Pope, or Rabbi David Dalin's The Myth of Hitler's Pope.