By Selwyn Duke

I truly cannot think of a more unfairly-maligned individual than Pope Pius XII, the pontiff during the darkest days of WWII.  Even Senator Joe McCarthy, who has been relegated to Dante’s seventh circle of Hell by revisionist historians, has not been demonized like Pius.  And the destruction of the Pope’s reputation is an even more brazen endeavor, for while McCarthy can perhaps be faulted for having made certain mistakes, the Pope was a hero in every sense of the word. 

You may be aware of the modern narrative about Pius XII; in a nutshell, it states that he was not only silent in the face of Nazi atrocities but also a Vichy-style collaborator.  Yet it is not the Pope who most closely resembles fascists here, but those who, Joseph Goebbels style, are repeating "a big lie often enough" so that people will believe it.

Ironically, a man who has done more than most anyone else to expose the lies surrounding this matter is not Catholic; in fact, he’s not even Christian.  He is Rabbi David  G. Dalin, "a widely-published scholar of American Judaism and
the history of Christian-Jewish Relations . . . [and] the author or co-author of five
books [could be six now] . . . ."

I have known about Rabbi Dalin’s good work for some years, and just yesterday, while doing research, I came upon his great essay, "A
Righteous Gentile: Pope Pius XII and the Jews."  In it, he illustrates the truth about this controversy, which is that the Pope not only was a bold opponent of the Nazi regime, but also was personally responsible for saving the lives of the better part of one million Jews. 

One of the most interesting parts of the rabbi’s piece is a paragraph wherein he addresses the character assassination of which Pius XII is a victim.  Dalin writes:

For Jewish leaders of a previous generation, this harsh portrayal of Pope Pius XII, and the campaign of vilification against him, would have been a source of profound shock and sadness.  From the end of World War II until at least five years after his death, Pope Pius enjoyed an enviable reputation amongst Christians and Jews alike.  At the end of the war, Pius XII was hailed as ‘the inspired moral prophet of victory,’ and ‘enjoyed near-universal acclaim for aiding European Jews.’  Numerous Jewish leaders, including Albert Einstein, Israeli Prime Ministers Golda Meir and Moshe Sharett, and Chief Rabbi Isaac Herzog, expressed their public gratitude to Pius XII, praising him as a ‘righteous gentile,’ who had saved thousands of Jews during the Holocaust.  In his meticulously researched and comprehensive 1967 book, Three Popes and the Jews, the Israeli historian and diplomat Pinchas Lapide, who had served as the Israeli Counsel General in Milan, and had spoken with many Italian Jewish Holocaust survivors who owed their life to Pius, provided the empirical basis for their gratitude, concluding that Pius XII ‘was instrumental in saving at least 700,000, but probably as many as 860,000 Jews from certain death at Nazi hands.’  To this day, the Lapide volume remains the definitive work, by a Jewish scholar, on the subject.

The truth is that the prevailing portrayal of Pope Pius — which, mind you, is the work of militant secularists — is a lie of breathtaking audaciousness.  It’s one big enough to be worthy of the very miscreants who the Pope’s enemies claim to so thoroughly despise.

Read the rest of Dalin’s piece here.

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