Pius XII's ‘Smoking Gun’?

In the midst of beatification efforts for Pope Pius XII, a new book by British journalist John Cornwell is being touted as offering new evidence that the World War II Pope was an anti-Semite.

It's false advertisement. Experts familiar with Cornwell's work say there is nothing new in it, and nothing that tars the Pope.

The media have focused on a few of the charges, including a 1918 quote in a letter that the young Eugenio Pacelli apparently wrote giving his assessment of a group of Bolsheviks he had met. He mentions more than once that they are distasteful, and he notices that many of them were Jewish.

But the quotes are hardly “smoking guns” proving anti-Semitism. The young Italian never makes any connection between the Jewish heritage of the group and their activities or their value as human beings.

The more serious charge is that as a papal nuncio to Germany for 13 years, the then Cardinal Pacelli negotiated a concordat with Hitler that won the Catholic Church many favors but created an ideal climate for persecution of German Jews. The process of its approval actually undermined potential Catholic resistance to Hitler in Germany, Cornwell claims.

But historians dispute the theory that the concordat helped Hitler to power — in fact his power was already consolidated by 1933, when the concordat was approved by Pius XI. In effect, argues historian Jesuit Father Pierre Blet, the concordat was virtually imposed on the Church, and the consequences of rejecting it would have been disastrous to Catholics.

There follow charges of the Pope's silence regarding the Holocaust. On Christmas Eve 1942, the Pope did denounce the Holocaust, but Cornwell describes his statement as scandalously vague for not mentioning the Nazis or the Jews by name.

This charge shows the book's greatest deficiency. Cornwell is a journalist of the '80s and '90s, not a historian of the '30s and '40s. He falls into the trap of judging the World War II Pope by Cold War and post-Cold War standards.

Today, Pope John Paul II cautiously and judiciously uses his position to counter oppressive systems. In occupied World War II Europe, to do so was more difficult.

Thus, on June 2, 1943, when Pius XII strongly protested in favor of innocent persons being sent to their death, he pointed out that his protest could not be any stronger “because we must to be careful not to harm those who we want to save.”

Cornwell does not even mention the June speech. As for the Christmas Eve condemnation, Cornwell is right, Pius never mentioned the Nazis by name. He didn't have to.

The New York Times wrote in a 1942 editorial “More than ever [Pius XII] is a lonely voice crying out of the silence of a continent. The pulpit from whence he speaks is more than ever like the Rock on which the Church was founded, a tiny island lashed and surrounded by a sea of war.”

While raising the profile of criticism against the Nazis, Pius also worked to help the Jews. After the war, Issac Herzog, chief rabbi of Jerusalem, praised “the Supreme Pontiff and the religious men and women who, executing the directives of the Holy Father, recognized the persecuted as their brother and, with great abnegation, hastened to help them, disregarding the terrible dangers to which they were exposed.”

If the Pope had acted more recklessly, he may have passed muster with modern critics like Cornwell, but probably not. The records of Pius XII's actions during World War II show methodical, behind-the-scenes efforts to end to the tragic situation in Europe, and to save Jewish lives.

It is a tribute to Pius that he sought to do all he could, without spectacle, to fight one of humanity's greatest crimes — and did not harm the cause by trying to create a public legacy for himself.

Culture of the Unwanted

In 1973, abortion was justified as a way to prevent “unwanted” children being born and to “save women's lives.”

But in the '90s, prenatal testing technology has expanded the meaning of “unwanted children” and lowered standard for reasons women abort.

What makes today's children “unwanted”? The Sept. 6 Los Angeles Times cited a March study of Israeli women, done for the Cleft Palate-Craniofacial Journal, that found that 23 out of 24 women who learned during their 15th week of pregnancy that their babies had cleft lips decided to have abortions.

In a California study, one out of four women aborted their babies with cleft palates. The San Diego patients learned of the defect in the sixth month of pregnancy, when it is more difficult to find a doctor who will perform an abortion, said the paper. Abortions for defects have become so common that “frequent lawsuits … are filed by parents whose baby is born with an abnormality that they think should have been detected during pregnancy,” said the Times.

To counter this deep-set mentality, it is not enough merely to push for a ban on abortion. An entire culture of life will have to be advanced on every level: in education, popular culture, politics and science.

Is such a thing impossible? Certainly not. In 30 years, our culture went from a place where “abortion” was a dirty word to where it is casually excepted by many. It should take far less time for the culture to embrace life. After all, truth, if we are willing to advance it, is much stronger than lies.