Scholars speaking in favour of Venerable Pope Pius XII and his wartime record managed to convince a significant number of people that the Pontiff did the best he could to save Jewish lives from the Holocaust, even if they failed to win over the majority of the audience at a recent lively debate in London.
The Intelligence Squared debate, held last Wednesday in front of a large audience of participants, heard four scholars debate the motion: “’Hitler’s Pope’: Pius XII did too little to save the Jews from the Holocaust”.
Speaking for the motion were the British historian Viscount John Julius Norwich and UN jurist Geoffrey Robertson. Speaking against were William Doino, a leading expert on Pius XII and his wartime record, and Professor Ronald Rychlak, a law professor at the University of Mississippi and also a leading scholar on Pius.
The “Oxford Style” debate in which scholars debate the motion and the audience votes at the beginning and at the end, predictably provoked some heated discussions (see above).
Doino and Rychlak spent much of the evening presenting fact after fact in defense of Pius XII and in an attempt to counter the so-called "Black Legend," but their opponents were master performers who managed to convince many in the audience through sheer force of rhetoric and style.
“Those in favor of the motion made an eloquent argument and gave a superb performance,” conceded Gary Krupp, founder of the Pave the Way Foundation which has been at the forefront of clearing Pius’s name. But he added: “Unfortunately, it was totally based on erroneous mistranslated rhetoric, which has been repeated over and over again. The documentation we have posted online discredit each of the statements made by Robertson and Norwich.”
“I also find it outrageous," Krupp continued, "when the revisionists make such eloquent conclusions about what Pius XII should have or could have done. They seem to be oblivious to the reality that the Pope acted in the middle of ground zero, under a constant threat against his Church and his life. I wonder, what did the Archbishop of Canterbury do to save Jews from the safety of London?”
Professor Rychlak and William Doino share their reflections on the debate with the Register below:
Professor Rychlak:
“Of course I was disappointed that the vote did not come out our way, but the room began about 3-1 against us and it ended about 2-1 against us, so there was some positive movement.
I had spent the two days prior to the debate at an international conference on Pius XII at the Sorbonne. At that conference, even the “critics” agreed that the term “Hitler’s Pope” was indefensible. Similarly, it was agreed that no one can seriously argue that he was anti-Semitic, and the facts show that he was in contact with and advanced the cause of the anti-Hitler resistance in Germany.
To move from that group of well-informed scholars who were discussing the latest archival findings to a debate over evidence that has long-since been disproven was somewhat problematic. Our opponents hit us with a slew of false charges that we felt obliged to rebut, but that put us on the defensive and made it hard to set forth the strong affirmative case that we have. I wish that I had been able to present our affirmative case, but that’s the way it goes when debating a pre-set resolution at a formal debate.
A few days after the debate, I spoke at the chancery at University College London. Several people there were aware of the debate and were actually quite happy that the vote came out as well as it did.”
William Doino:
"I think the debate went better than expected, considering the challenges Professor Rychlak and I faced. It was clear, given the pre-debate vote, that we began very heavily outnumbered, with a large amount of skeptics - if not very active critics - of the wartime papacy in the audience.
But by the end of the night, we were able to more than double the number of our original supporters (which, percentage-wise, at least, was more than the opposition gained), and win over a healthy number of “don’t knows,” even as there still remained, as was inevitable, those with opposing viewpoints.
Our opponents basically repackaged and recycled the now thoroughly-disproven claims of John Cornwell’s Hitler’s Pope. Because of the strict time limitations, and the structure of the debate, we were not able to answer every outdated error--though we answered many-- or present all the evidence we have, so much of which is new and compelling. But I do believe we effectively conveyed our main points:
--that Pius XII, well before he became pope, and well before the Second World War and the Nazi Holocaust broke out, was issuing major warnings about the madness of Hitler, and the evils of racism and anti-Semitism;
---that in the critical six months between his election as pope (March, 1939) and the outbreak of World War II (September 1939), Pius XII issued impassioned appeals to try to prevent the War (and therefore the Holocaust, which the War made possible) from ever happening-
--that Pius XII was emphatically not “silent,” and did in fact condemn the Nazis horrific crimes--through Vatican Radio, his first encyclical, Summi Pontificatus, his major addresses (especially his Christmas allocutions), and the L’Osservatore Romano
--that Pius XII intervened, time and time again, for persecuted Jews, particularly during the German occupation of Rome, and was cited and hailed by the Catholic rescuers themselves as their leader and director.
--that he instructed the bishops and nuncios in all the Nazi-occupied lands to take a strong stand against the racial persecutions
--that he inspired the Catholic faithful everywhere
-- that he was profusely praised by the Jewish community itself, both during and after the War, and especially at the time of his death, and that these testimonies stand, despite efforts to minimize or explain them away.
We also documented--though not nearly at the length we wanted, again because of time constraints--the Soviet Communist campaign to defame Pius XII, which began in order to turn people away from the Church.
Anything we were not able to cover is more than addressed in our respective books, Hitler, the War, and the Pope by Professor Rychlak, and The Pius War: Responses to the Critics of Pius XII (the anthology in which my 80,000 word annotated defense of Pius XII appears) - copies of both which were fortunately made available to the crowd at the end of the debate.
There were three other things I found revealing about the debate:
First, although our opponents repeatedly accused Pius XII of being “silent” during the Holocaust, this is what the Times of London--where our debate took place--declared in an editorial on October 1, 1942, in the very midst of the War: “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…”
Commenting on the wartime Vatican newspaper, L’Osservatore Romano, the Times continued: “Its generous and honorable citation of ‘forbidden’ Italian authors and its maintenance of the standard of Italian humanism against those of neo-paganism; its plain warnings as to the significance of Nazi-race-worship--all these tend to show where sympathy lies at the heart of the Roman Catholic Church. The millions of believers, lay and clerical, who maintain a stout front against the oppressions of Nazism and fascism in their own or in other countries themselves testify that the sympathies found at the heart of the vast system permeate the whole.”
Second, our opponents mentioned the Nuremberg War Crimes trials, but made no mention of the fact that Pius XII was a strong supporter of them, and in fact met with the lead prosecutor, Robert Jackson, providing the tribunal with evidence to help prosecute the Nazi war criminals. One of Jackson’s deputies, Robert M.W. Kempner-himself a victim of Nazi persecution-- became one of Pius XII’s strongest supporters, and answered the charge that Pius supposedly “never made an energetic protest” against the Holocaust. In fact, said Kempner, “the archives of the Vatican, of the diocesan authorities and of Ribbentrop’s Foreign Ministry contain a whole series of protests--direct and indirect, diplomatic and public, secret and open.” (From the forward to Jeno Levai’s book, Hungarian Jewry and the Papacy: Pius XII Did Not Remain Silent (London Sands, 1968), pp. IX-X)
Third, in the question and answer period, someone asked what St. Peter must have thought of Pius XII when he met him at the Gates of Heaven. There wasn’t any time left to address the gentlemen’s query, but had there been, I would have said:
“I am sure St. Peter was well aware of Pius XII’s high character and conduct, particularly during the War; but if he needed any further proof, he wouldn’t have to cite any Catholic sources, but simply listen to the wartime Jewish community itself. The 1943-1944 American Jewish Yearbook affirmed that Pius XII ‘took an unequivocal stand against the oppression of Jews throughout Europe.’ On February 18, 1944, Rabbi Maurice Perlzweig, the political director of the World Jewish Congress, wrote in a letter to the apostolic delegate in Washington: ‘The repeated interventions of the Holy Father on behalf of Jewish Communities in Europe has evoked the profoundest sentiments of appreciation and gratitude from Jews throughout the world. These acts of courage and consecrated statesmanship on the part of His Holiness will always remain a precious memory in the life of the Jewish people.’ And on February 28, 1944, Chief Rabbi Isaac Herzog, of Palestine, sent this message to Pius XII and the Church: ‘The people of Israel will never forget what His Holiness and his illustrious delegates, inspired by the eternal principles of religion which form the very foundations of true civilization, are doing for our unfortunate brothers and sisters in this most tragic hour of history, which is living proof of divine Providence in this world.”
I do think history is moving gradually in favor of a much more responsible and sympathetic view of Pius XII, as more and more evidence appears. Of course, this is occurring in the context of the complex history of the Church, with all its light and shadows, particularly regarding interfaith relations. Fortunately, the Catholic-Jewish relationship has developed over the years and is now very strong-- and I pray it remains so, as I said at the end of the debate, hoping to end on an encouraging note."
William Doino also pointed out this article he wrote shortly after Pope Benedict XVI declared Pius XII Venerable in 2009. An abridged version appeared in the Times of London Jan. 4, 2010 under the title "Pius XII Did Help the Jews".
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There was a recent BBC article online about how the BBC failed to warn the Hungarian Jews about the Nazis.It sounded as though the British made the decision to not warn them & that choice helped insure the death of thousands of Jews.
I think pretty much everyone could have done more to save the Jews, America included.Didn’t we send back a boatload of Jewish refugees to certain death?
I personally believe more Jews would have been killed if Pius criticized the Nazi’s constantly. The OT and Christ warned against casting pearls before swine…lest they turn and tear you yet prudently paced fraternal correction is also needed. Pius probably struck what he felt was the balance that avoided making things worse via Nazi revenge. Rabbi Dalin made that point in showing areas where Jews suffered worse death tolls under very vocal Bishops.
On the other hand, it would help such controversies if Catholic authors were known to the West as people who do criticize Popes when they deserve criticism. We are not known for such authors. So we are mistrusted from the get go thanks to a culture of too much praise of Popes. George Weigel in two biographical books on John Paul II never connects that Pope to the wide sex abuse scandal that stretched from the US to the South Pacific. He faults him only for trusting Macial Maciel as though John Paul did not have responsibility over all countries if local bishops failed to arrest that problem in reasonable time which 4 decades is not. And the book purchasing Catholic is part of the problem if they stop purchasing a Catholic author who breaks with the 24/7 papal praise culture. You’ll notice Corapi criticized Canadian Bishops and theologians but never a Pope. He knew how to sell tapes and that meant never criticizing Popes. That type of calculation wisdom however is not virtuous but self serving.
I totally agree with Bill with regards to the way Popes have been defended from any criticism mostly the last Pope. YES he played a large role in the way he both acted and did NOT ACT in this regard both here and in other places (Austria) If you get and read “Man of the Century” that was Published in 1995 you will see though its not a “hatchet job” it tells the story of John Paul II (up till 1995) before the 2002 Boston Scandal Broke. I myself think after the recent news about the BBC comedian who turned out to be an abuser himself, that his whole process should be slowed down if not stopped. I am also tired of constantly hearing certain EWTN people call him “John Paul the Great” That’s for History to decide not them. Even the revised head of his statue in Rome is still wasted art.
A certain Saint who was a debator, when he would lose a debate would say, “Defeated but yet Victorious. Because I spoke the Truth”. I hope for the quick Canonization of Ven. Pius Xll, the Church is in much need of his intercession. Perhaps he could be named Patron Saint of Historians. Considering the beating he’s taken from many wayward historians. A good question was asked, “what did the Archbishop of Canterbury do to save Jews…?” I have wondered, why does it seem that the protection of the Jews was the sole responsibility of one man, namely Pope Pius Xll. Some seem to act like the Nazi persecution of Jews was the actual work of Pius Xll and the Vatican. I understand that as the Church did all she could to save Jewish lives during WWll, now there are Jews coming to the defense of Pius Xll and the Church, proving certain historians to be wrong, whatever those erring historians intentions are! When looking through the eyes of the world, I have asked, why was it the sole responsibility of the Roman Catholic Church to defend the Jews, why could’nt they defend themselves? But looking through the eyes of Christ’s Church, the Church is responsible for all of God’s Sons and Daughters, be they Catholic or not. Mankind has as a sweet Mother, the Church! Sad, so many dishonor Her.
Of interest, there’s a new book out titled “The Pope’s Jews” by Gordon Thomas. It covers the Vatican’s efforts to help Jews in Rome during WWII.
This is the second time in recent months that the controversial subject of Pope Pius XII has been highlighted. We are talking about one man who may have or may not have made efforts to speak out about the Nazi regime particularly as it affected the Jewish population. What’s all the fuss about? Some Roman Catholics want Pius XII canonized. Fine, but what will we have learned about anti-Semitism and the deaths of 4-6 million Jewish victims at the end of WWII?
At stake is the much bigger issue of anti-Semitism.
The Roman Catholic Church once the persecuted became, almost without exception, the persecutors of the Jews beginning in the 4th. Century. Because this dark part of Church history remains unresolved the question of Pope Pius XII canonization will continue to contribute to keep this controversy alive.
The fact that Jesus was born, raised and died as a Jew should make Christians think twice about what religion is all about.
Trebert, When it comes to anti-semitism one must also remember the anti-catholicism. Bl. John Paul ll offered an apology to all who may have been offended by Catholics. The disgrace is that the Catholic Church was not apoligized to by anyone. You speak of the deaths of 4 to 6 million Jews during WWll. Don’t fail to mention that 12 million Catholics died in the Nazi consentration camps. Jews have prohibited that the 12 million Catholics murdered in those camps be mentioned. Certain Jews and others falsly accuse Ven. Pius ll for the death of 6 million Jews. Who then is responsible for the death of the 12 million Catholics. Many speak of the dark history of the Church, what they don’t speak about is the dark history of those who have persecuted the Catholic Church for 2000 years and continue to do so. Yes Christ was a Jew, He is the King of the Jews, and Our Most Holy Mother is Queen of the Jews. Ven. Pius Xll stated that one cannot be an anti-semite and Catholic at the same time, as we are semites by adoption. We are the continuation of the Jewish Religion in its fullfilment. The biggest disgrace against the Holy Venerable Pius Xll is the fact that his canonization has been held back because of packs of lies and too many Catholics are complacent about it.
I think there are a lot of people with ulterior motives accusing Pius XII of either doing things he didn’t do or of doing to little of things he should have. That said, the Church’s record on a lower level in WW II is not pristine. In France, for example, there were several bishops who cooperated willingly with the Vichy government and never denounced its rancid anti-Semitism, criticized the Allies but never the French collaborators or their German masters, and in general gave very bad example to their flocks. It is legitimate to ask why Rome neglected to tell those mitered traitors to shut up at least, and why it did not move to have them take an early retirement after the war.
Jack Gordon, It is also a fact that many Jews collaborated with the Nazis against their own people. Who’s bad example is worse?
Angelo: I am well aware of what you say, but since the lives of those Jews were in immediate danger, their cooperation is more understandable than that of powerful bishops who were merely currying favor with the thugs in the Vichy government. Many of those collaborating Jews were people of no special importance, unlike the bishops in question. The Jewish collaborators did not have thousands of people around them looking to them for guidance and direction. The same cannot be said of the collaborating bishops. So, to answer your question, the bad example of the bishops was far worse.
Jack Gordon, What I don’t understand is why is so much blame is placed on the Catholic Church for the Jewish Holocaust. I have read that the US, new what was happening then after the war acted surprised. I have read of how Catholics in obedience to Ven. Pius Xll risked their lives to save Jews. When the Nazis demanded a ransom of gold for the lives of Jews, Vatican City did not have enough so they called on the people who gave all their gold in the form of jewelry until they had enough for the ransom. Many Bishops publicly remained silent for obvious reasons, but behind the scenes they worked feverishly to save the lives of the Jewish people. Here we have 2 peoples who historicaly both exchanged bitter words and actions against each other. And when it came to the extermination of the enemy by the Nazis, Catholics did what they could to save them. A sign of God’s love in the lives of souls. After the war Jews showed their humble gratitude to those who were supposed to be their enemies. Then after about 16 years after the war, there are those who spread venom about the Church’s responsibility. There were many Jewish victims who tried to dispel the lies, but the liars got the upper hand. The Vatican by rule does not open up archives to the public until 80 years after the death of the Pope, thats 21 years away for Ven. Pius Xll. When those Archives are finally opened on the wartime Pope, mouths will drop, and I hope there will be public pennace. The Canonization will be the most spectacular of all Papal Canonizations in the history of the Church. The fact in a nutshell is that the Roman Catholic Church did more to save Jews than any other group. What of the wars today, will some of evil intent devise a way to blame the Pope and the Church in the future?
Angelo, good comments. Why doesn’t anyone ask - what did the US do to help the Jews?
Angelo:
You seem to ignore that I am not saying Pius was remiss in his personal behavior, only that the official Catholic Church in France (I am familiar with the French record, therefore I choose to discuss it rather than that of other countries)hardly covered itself in glory during those years. You cannot change what is verified history, rearrange bishops’ words to suit your view of matters. The simple fact is that, while many individual Catholics there behaved splendidly, many more either ignored the plight of their Jewish brothers and sisters or, worse, threw in with their persecutors. And, sad to say, several prominent bishops were known as sympathizers with the anti-Semitic policies of the Vichy government (don’t forget that the French in Vichy often out “Nazied” their Nazi brethren in Germany and north of the line of demarcation of June 1940. I think Albert Camus, an atheist but an honest one, summed it up best: “What the world expects of Christians is that Christians should speak out, loud and clear, and that they should voice their condemnation in such a way that never a doubt, never the slightest doubt, should rise in the heart of the simplest man. That they should get away from abstraction and confront the blood-stained face history has taken on today”. The plain truth is, the official voice of the Catholic Church of those times was timid and hesitating, and that wan voice emboldened clerics who had simply thrown in with the wrong side of this moral issue. It wasn’t the first time the official Church erred in its long history and it probably won’t be the last.
TG: If someone outside your house were beaten and robbed while you watched and did nothing, and if later the press denounced your inaction, seemingly you would respond, “Hey, Joe across the street was watching the the attack too and HE didn’t do anything!” That’s a defense?!? By the way, since when in your mind did the Vatican fall to the low level of morality and decency that characterizes the US government?
Dionne and Rychlak are good men but frankly I was dissapointed with their performance. It is not enough to be right; you must also be competent and skillful. They complain that their opponents used merev ‘rhetoric’. Critics of Pius XII have always relied on ‘rhetoric’. So they must be defeated with that understanding.
Jack Gordon,
You might be right about certain Catholic Bishops, but his a discussion about Pope Pius X11. The irony is that people first called for the archives to be opened and when they have been opened they refuse to accept what’s in front of them.
Joanie,
I will be eternally grateful to Pope John Paul 2 for many things. The Theology of the Body, outreach to Jews and Muslims, Helping end communism, intervening to cancel the debt of third world countries etc. Nobody is perfect.
Savvy
No, what you say is simply evasion. You cannot on the one hand cite in his defense evidence that the pope ordered members of the hierarchy to oppose anti-Semitism (from this very article: “...he instructed the bishops and nuncios in all the Nazi-occupied lands to take a strong stand against the racial persecutions”), and then on the other quickly dismiss as irrelevant clear evidence that bishops acted in a contrary manner with seeming impunity. Your argument is little more than an example of “heads I win, tails you lose” legerdemain.
Jack,
If the Bishops acted in a contrary manner, it’s because they refused to listen to the Pope and teachings of the church, like many Catholics who always think they know better than their backward church.
Undoubtedly so, but can you cite me evidence that the wayward prelates were somehow disciplined for this outrageous behavior even after the war? A nagging voice in my mind tells me that, had the offending bishops recommended, say, that the faithful in their diocese join the local Communist Party, there might have been very unpleasant official consequences. (I am sure you are aware of Pius XII’s well-known detestation of that political creed.) Was the championing of Petain’s loathsome regime and its raw anti-Semitic politics somehow not worthy of similarly unpleasant consequences?
Jack,
Pave The Way Foundation has all the official documents pertaining to this issue.
http://www.ptwf.org/Projects/Education/Pope Pius XII.htm
Savvy
I truly appreciate your effort to continue a dialogue and I remain open to persuasion on this question. I have taken an initial look at the site you sent. I do not find there an answer to the question I posed to you, viz, where is the evidence that the Vatican ever disciplined during or after the war the many wayward bishops who cooperated at least by silence and inactivity with the persecution of the Jews. Just today I read news that Benedict is (rightly) cracking down on a dissident Austrian priest. Where is the evidence that Pius XII even quietly reprimanded clerics guilty of a horrendous lack of charity towards their neighbors, or perhaps even of grave offenses against the 5th Commandment?
As a member of the audience at the Pius XII debate in the Royal Institution, I was extremely happy with both Bill Doino and Professor Ronald Rychlak’s defence of the wartime pope’s record.
If we were to believe the opening statements of John Julius Norwich and Geoffrey Robertson, we would be castigating Pius for referring to Jews in 1919 (during the so-called ‘Soviet’ of Munich) and then again for not referring to Jews in 1941-1945 during the Holocaust. Of course neither of these opening remarks are based on fact, but are certainly handy tools in a rhetorician’s cabinet.
Another aspect that both Bill Doino and Ron Rychlak had to contend with was the ghost of John Cornwell’s infamous ‘Hitler’s Pope’. The supporters of the motion quite clearly had swallowed the original Cornwell thesis hook line and sinker. Equally, they failed to recognise Cornwell’s own later admission that he had been too keen to condemn Pius and that, at the very least, further research was needed to arrive at a properly nuanced judgment.
Given that the time to develop detailed argument was severely limited and that the audience was, in the main, hostile, at the end of the debate it was clear to me that Bill and Ron had convinced even the sceptics to question their basic assumptions.
Good account of the debate by Karol. I think most of us reading this site agree that Pius has been unfairly maligned by people who hate the Catholic Church and will use any means to denigrate it. That said, I still sense that there is here a story of neglect similar to what happened in the recent homosexual scandals. No one seriously believes the Vatican was complicit in these recent scandals, but one can doubt that its supervision of local bishops’ handing of same was top flight. That’s the case with Pius and the persecution of the Jews, at least so it seems to me. He was in no way antisemitic, but he did not appear to be as alarmed by Nazis as he did by Communists; he may have let fear of the latter trump sound judgement concerning the Church’s dealings with the former.
Thanks for your compliment, Jack, on my previous post. The theory that Pius was more alarmed by Communism than Nazism has been put forward numerous times. I don’t believe there is much evidence to support this but I do think that Pius, like others, revised his opinions in the light of wartime experience - as any thinking person would.
To give one brief example: Hitler came to power by constitutional means in January 1933, appointed by President Hindenburg. The new government was recognised as legitimate by the United States and many others. Contrast that with the Bolshevik Revolution of 1917 and the bloodbath that immediately followed.
Initially, the Nazis were a minority in the government and promised to adhere to the Weimar constitution. Even many German Jews were not unduly alarmed to begin with as Hitler appeared to be eager to ‘rein in’ the radical wing of the Nazi Party. Clearly, Pius was alarmed by the core Nazi ideology and expressed his horror of the racial doctrines promoted in the unexpurgated version of ‘Mein Kampf’. The question in 1933 was - how far would Hitler actually instigate his master plan to exterminate Jews? The conditions to enable that horrific slaughter were provided solely by the onset of total war after June 1941.
Taking the longer-term view (which Pius clearly could not as he died in the 1950s) it is only now becoming clearer what the body count under Communism actually was. A recently published book on the famine engineered by Mao Zhe Dong estimates 50 million dead in China alone.
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