The theater tent was packed for the session on Pius XII, with the American Rabbi David Dalin and Italian Senator Giulio Andreotti. Once again, his dark legend as “Hitler’s Pope” has been refuted

BY Alessandro Zangrando

«Pius XII has no need of defenders. He was a great Pope and what he did remains; it is right there before everyone’s eyes.” These were the opening words of Giulio Andreotti, a life senator of Italy, a friend of the Meeting since the beginning, and the editor of the magazine 30Days. On the speaker’s dais with him was Rabbi David Dalin, the Jewish scholar who, in a long, well-documented article in last February’s The Weekly Standard (cf. Traces, Vol. 3 No. 4, 2001), had the courage to reaffirm the historical truth about the actions of the Church during the Nazi persecutions, and who now has proposed that Pius XII be named “Righteous Among the Nations,” because “he saved many more Jews than Oscar Schindler.” The occasion for speaking of Pius XII was the presentation of Andrea Tornielli’s book, Pio XII. Il Papa degli ebrei [Pius XII. The Pope of the Jews], published by Piemme. The session, broadcast live by Vatican Radio and by RAI in their program “GR Parlamento,” lasted an hour and a half and took the form of an interview. The author of the book, who moderated the discussion, asked the two speakers questions in turn.

Andreotti–who wrote his doctoral dissertation in front of the door of the Pope’s study because Pius XII received him often, and each time the audience granted to the young President of the Federation of Italian Catholic University Students (Federazione Universitari Cattolici Italiani) was the last of the morning, so that it could last longer–has a precise idea about why the “Pastor Angelicus,” the pontiff whom all the highest Jewish authorities thanked after the war, from the 1960s onwards became the “Pope of Silence” and was even accused of “complicity with Nazism.” “Those accusations are more than foolishness, they are an historical falsehood. Pius XII took a very firm stance in front of the Communists, and this unleashed against him, on the part of the Communists and their sympathizers (including many intellectuals), a hostility that was then picked up by other spheres as well.”

Two examples
To refute, yet again, the dark legend which attempts to define Pius XII as “Hitler’s Pope,” Andreotti offered two very effective examples. The first was the Pope’s participation in the plot to overthrow the Führer of Berlin, an attempt made by a group of officers who wanted to negotiate a dignified peace with the Allies for Germany, which unfortunately failed because of the hesitation of the English. The other evidence, above all, is the plan that Hitler intended to put into action to deport Pius XII. Senator Andreotti spoke with documents in hand. He cited the testimony, contained in the records of the Pope’s beatification trial, of the German General Wolff, head of the SS in Italy. Wolff recounted that Hitler gave the order to “destroy the Vatican and arrest the Pope, who would then be deported out of Italy.” His destination, in all probability, would have been Liechtenstein. Andreotti said that Wolff went personally to warn the pontiff of the looming danger. “The operation was not carried out, precisely because of the general’s actions.”

As for the accusation of having remained “in silence” without launching dramatic threats of excommunication at the Führer, Andreotti observed, “An act of that kind would only have increased the persecution of Jews and Catholics.” At the other end of the speakers’ table, Rabbi Dalin listened and asked the interpreter for explanations. When it was his turn, he agreed with the judgment expressed by Andreotti. “There is sufficient proof,” he stated, “to demonstrate that a formal excommunication of Hitler would have had an opposite effect: a public condemnation would have placed in grave peril the lives of thousands of Jews hiding in the Vatican and in many churches, monasteries, and other ecclesiastical institutions. The position taken by Pius XII was an efficacious strategy for protecting the greatest number of Jews from deportation.”

The concert of the Philharmonic
Dalin then analyzed the Pope’s speeches during the war, concluding that Pius XII was never “Hitler’s Pope.” He recalled the unanimous homage and appreciation expressed by Jewish authorities all over the world after the war ended. He cited a little-known episode which is highly revealing of what the Jews thought of Pius XII. “On May 26, 1955,” he recounted, “the Israeli Philharmonic Orchestra traveled to Rome to give a special performance of Beethoven’s Seventh Symphony in the Sala del Concistoro in the Vatican, to express the perennial gratitude of the State of Israel for the aid given to the Jewish people by the Pope and the Catholic Church.” Dalin reminded his listeners that the Israeli Philharmonic, until just a few months ago, has always refused to play Wagner’s music, because he was considered “Hitler’s composer.” “It is inconceivable,” he added, “that the Israeli government would pay the cost of transporting the entire Philharmonic Orchestra to Rome to perform a special concert to pay homage to a religious leader considered to be ‘Hitler’s Pope.’”

Rabbi Dalin recalled that “no Pope in history has ever been thanked as warmly by the Jews. And it is precisely because of the great, exemplary humanity he showed toward Europe’s Jews that he earned so much gratitude.” Dalin concluded by maintaining that the “revisionist” historians, who today are placing the figure of Pius XII under scrutiny, have to consider the position of the Jews who were the pontiff’s contemporaries. “It is difficult to imagine that such a great number of Jewish leaders can have been misled or mistaken in praising the Pope’s conduct during the war.” In short, the words of Golda Meir, Elio Toaff, Chief Rabbi of Jerusalem Herzog, and the scientist Albert Einstein, pronounced during or immediately after the war and the persecution, have much greater weight than pseudo-historical reconstructions like that of the German playwright Rolf Hocchuth, author of The Deputy (1963), or that of the English journalist John Cornwell, author of the book Hitler’s Pope, published three years ago.

Paul VI
Concluding the session, Andrea Tornielli recalled a statement made by Paul VI in September 1965, when, during a visit to the catacombs of Santa Domitilla, he spoke of “those portions of the Church” that were forced by atheistic and totalitarian regimes to live in the catacombs. “The Holy See,” said Pope Paul VI, who during World War II was a very close collaborator of Pius XII, “abstains from lifting more frequently and vehemently the legitimate voice of protest and lament, not because it is ignorant of the reality of the matter, but so as not to cause even worse ills.” “So as not to cause even worse ills,” the same motive that twenty years earlier led Pius XII not to pronounce useless excommunications of the Nazis and to prefer instead a tireless underground action that enabled the lives–as Rabbi Dalin pointed out, citing the Jewish scholar Pinchas Lapide–of as many as 800,000 Jews to be saved.