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The Catholic Church has felt attacked by world opinion about the weakness of Pope Pius XII's response during the Holocaust. Here is their general position statement about his involvement. I have not written this, and I present it without comment.

PIUS XII AND THE JEWISH HOLOCAUST

Catholic apologetics must address the subject of Pope Pius XII and the Jewish Holocaust. Since 1963, when Rolf Hochhuth's play, The Deputy, indicted Pius XII for complicity in the Nazi genocide, it has been a commonplace of editorial writers that the Vatican was a silent, and therefore guilty, bystander to the murder of six million Jews. But an examination of the facts puts to rout all the charges that are made against the pope by certain parties, none of whom are serious historians. The following are the main points to consider:

• Before he became Pope Pius XII, Cardinal Pacelli drafted the papal encyclical, Mit Brennednder Sorge, in which Pius XI denounced Nazi paganism and racism; the document was smuggled into Germany in March, 1937 and read from all Catholic pulpits, which infuriated the Nazis;

• It is well documented by Jewish scholars like Joseph Lichten of B'nai B"rith that Pius used the assets of the Vatican to ransom Jews from the Nazis and that the Vatican under Pius ran an extensive network of hide-outs. Even the Pope's summer residence, Castel Gondolfo, was used to hide fugitive Jews. The Pope, moreover, took personal responsibility for the children of deported Jews;

• Largely as a result of the Church's efforts, the Jews in Italy had a far higher survival rate under Nazi occupation than was the case in other countries; estimates of the number of Jews saved by the Vatican's efforts range up to several hundred thousand; this was one reason why the chief Rabbi of Rome converted to Catholicism at the end of the war;

• In appreciation of what Pius did for the Jews, the World Jewish Congress made a large cash gift to the Vatican in 1945; in the same year, Rabbi Herzog of Jerusalem sent a "special blessing" to the Pope "for his lifesaving efforts on behalf of the Jews during the Nazi occupation of Italy"; and when Pius died in 1958, Israel's Foreign Minister Golda Meir gave a him moving eulogy at the United Nations for the same reason;

• What was to be gained by Pius's getting up on a soap box and lashing out at the Nazis? Both the International Red Cross and the World Council of Churches came to the same conclusion as the Vatican: relief efforts for the Jews would be more effective if the agencies remained relatively quiet; yet, you never hear anybody attacking the Red Cross for its "silence" about the Holocaust;

• In 1942, the Catholic hierarchy of Amsterdam spoke out vigorously against the Nazi treatment of the Jews; the Nazi response was a redoubling of round-ups and deportations; by the end of the war, 90 percent of the Jews in Amsterdam were liquidated. Jewish relief officials were in complete agreement that a public attack by the Vatican against the Nazis would a) not have the slightest effect on Hitler and b) would seriously jeopardize the lives of Jews who were being hidden in convents, monasteries, etc.;

• Nevertheless, Pius's Christmas message in 1942 decried the fact that hundreds of thousands were being persecuted "solely because of their race or ancestry." The German ambassador to the Vatican complained that Pius was "clearly speaking on behalf of the Jews." A New York Times editorial on Christmas day, 1942 praised Pius as "a lonely voice crying out of the silence of a continent";

• The scurrilous lie that Pius somehow quietly abetted the Final Solution began with Rolf Hochhuth's play, The Deputy, which is a total fabrication. One does not need to be a psychologist to understand why a German playwright might do this; it's called guilt transference;

• Finally, apropos of the Vatican's 1933 concordat with the Nazi government, which Pius XI signed with great misgiving: The Vatican throughout history has had to sign concordats with governments of which it disapproves; the Church has a fundamental duty to serve Catholics wherever they may be and it must have a modus operandi with all governments, even (or especially) bad ones. The German concordat guaranteed Catholic marriages, protected Catholic education and allowed the creation of new dioceses; it was not meant to endorse the Nazi government, which the Church condemned on many occasions.

I even include an email by a John Coady who defends Pius XII as follows (I quote verbatim his email):

"Maybe you should research the opinions of chief rabbi of Rome (Zolli) during WWII and his views on Pius XII. Since he was in contact regularly with the Pope, he was in a better position than most to determine what really happened there. Of course this means what you are saying here regarding Pius XII will have to be revised.

Drastically. Then you can find the audio tape on the Web where an escapee from the camps where this horrible stuff is going on tries to convince (Jewish Supreme Court Justice) Felix Frankfurter (in 1943) about what is going on, in the presence of the Polish ambassador, and Frankfurter tells him he is unable to believe him.

"So all the caterwauling about "remaining silent" has to do with the fact that virtually everyone did not have this horrible event on their radar in 1943. Sorry to burst your bubble. I'll check your page in a while and we will see how intellectually honest and truth seeking you really are. The Catholic Church is not perfect, but its many human imperfections can't be viewed objectively with scattershot and incomplete observations."

In response, I can only think that Pius XII (formally Eugenio Pacelli, chosen to the papacy in 1939) was a Pope, with his moral decisions supposedly beyond dispute. Somehow, his decisions should have been made more carefully.

On July 20, 1933, then as Vatican State Secretary Pacelli, he signed an accord with Hitler. There was no secret then what the Fuhrer had in mind and was doing. And on July 12, 1943 he entertained the German ambassador, Baron von Weizsacker (this is right in the middle of the war we were fighting).

Was Pius XII the only one guilty of making moral errors? Certainly not, poor choices were made in all the countries including our United States. But the result of his errors, because of who he was, became magnified so that eventually millions went to their death. When a pope makes a poor moral choice, his followers, in the millions, are given license to continue the pope's thinking and where it leads to could and did become a global disaster.