http://www.uexpress.com/ups/opinion/column/js/text/1998/03/js980319.html
March 19, 1998
The 'Silence' of Pius XII
By Joseph Sobran
WASHINGTON -- The Vatican has finally released its long-awaited statement on
the Holocaust, "We Remember: A Reflection on the Shoah." It has been
greeted by the predictable complaint that it's too soft on Pope Pius XII.
According to a persistent myth, Pius maintained an indifferent silence to the
Nazi mass murder of Jews. The Vatican statement rebuts this myth, reminding us
that Pius' diplomatic efforts saved "hundreds of thousands of Jewish lives."
This was no secret after the war: Pius was subsequently praised and honored by
"Jewish communities and Jewish leaders." One of the latter was Golda Meir.
But so entrenched has this myth become that The New York Times, in the lead
paragraph of its lead story, stated as simple fact that "the document skirted
the painful issue of the Vatican's long silences during the Nazi reign of
terror."
The Times has forgotten its own 1942 editorial praising Pius as a "lonely
voice" for his Christmas message deploring the racial persecution then in
progress. It also seems to have forgotten that during the early 1930s,
its own star correspondent in Moscow, Walter Duranty, was not merely "silent,"
but mendaciously denied, in its pages, that Joseph Stalin was deliberately
starving millions of Ukrainians. Yet the Times now perpetuates the myth of Pius'
"silence."
In 1937, before he became Pius XII, Cardinal Eugenio Pacelli had drafted an
encyclical for his predecessor, Pius XI, denouncing Nazi racism -- in German,
rather than the customary Latin. From then on, anyone who cared knew what the
official position of the church was. But not many cared.
And today, not many remember. Elan Steinberg of the World Jewish Congress
complains of the statement's "gratuitous defense of the silence of Pius XII, and
(its) failure to discuss the role of the church as an institution." Meir Lau, a
leading Israeli rabbi, charges that "(Pius') silence cost us millions of
lives. One who stands upon the blood and does nothing to avoid the bloodshed is
like a partner to the mass murder of human beings. He didn't do it, but he
didn't stop it."
Stop it? Does anyone think Adolf Hitler, an apostate Catholic who despised
Christianity for its Jewish origins, would have obeyed a directive from the
Vatican?
Pius XII said relatively little about current events because he knew how
ineffectual, even self-defeating, his comments might be. He and Pius XI also
condemned communism in principle, but they never issued statements about such
specifics as the Ukrainian famine and the immense Gulag in which tens of
millions perished. Neither did many political and religious leaders,
Catholic, Protestant or Jewish. Were they all indifferent, or did they simply
doubt that denunciations would have any positive impact on totalitarian regimes?
The celebrity of two TV-era popes, John XXIII and especially John Paul II (who
knows how to use the media), has led many people to assume that papal
utterances can have huge immediate impact. But even John Paul II has been
unable to have any visible effect on the current evil he has repeatedly spoken
out on: abortion. No more than German soldiers do abortionists lay down their
weapons at his command. It was during his very popular papacy that Italians
voted overwhelmingly for legal abortion.
And if John Paul II couldn't deter Bill Clinton, who has courted his favor, how
could Pius XII have deterred Hitler?
If only Christians were as obedient to the papacy as Pius' defamers suppose. It
was never so even when the popes had considerable political power; it
certainly wasn't so when the Vatican stood within an Axis capital during the
most enormous war of all time. Pius XII had sufficiently difficult duties to
Christendom, despite which he made considerable exertions to help Jews and
other victims of persecution.
One result of Pius' love for the Jews deserves to be recalled: Israel Zolli,
chief rabbi of Rome, became his devoted friend and converted to Catholicism.
It's impossible to imagine Rabbi Zolli taking such a step if he had thought
Pius and the Catholic Church had passively assented to the destruction of
the Jewish people. His response is the most eloquent judgment on Pius XII.
COPYRIGHT 1998 UNIVERSAL PRESS SYNDICATE
Copyright (c) 1998
