Pius XII and the Jews

I left the religious and political debate community mentioned in the Obligatory Journey Post over a debate on infallibility. That debate was what first led me to formulate the argument used in my post here, Regarding Doctrine.

After I made that argument, the debate quickly degenerated into an endless series of ad hominem attacks against every member of the Catholic clergy and religious to make the news for their grave and egregious sins. I am very sorry that I wasn't wise enough to point out that these were in fact ad hominem attacks, that the sinfulness of the clergy has nothing to do with whether the Church's doctrines are correct, and that the burden of proof was on the other person to demonstrate that the evil those people did was in fact supported by Catholic Doctrine, rather than letting stand my opponent's contention that their vows of obedience to the Church were prima facie evidence that everything they did was supported by Church doctrine. Instead, to my lasting regret, I made the mistake of trying to defend the indefensible. This mistake made the debate so horrible for me that I left the community over it.

Perhaps part of the reason I found myself on this path is that one of the first victims of these attacks was Eugenio Pacelli, Pope Pius XII. The attack against him was the libel first accepted because of Rolf Hochhuth's defamatory play, The Deputy: that Pope Pius XII had been deliberately silent regarding the Shoah, because he was an anti-Semite.

I was able to refute this argument quite easily, even then. Between Rabbi David G. Dalin, Professor Ronald J. Rychlak, and Sir Martin Gilbert, there was plenty of material from non-Catholic sources. From learning about Pope Pius XII's actions during WWII, and from reading his encyclicals regarding the Third Reich (particularly Mit Brennender Sorge, which he wrote for his predecessor), I came to love him greatly. It gives me heartache that the lies against him are so much more widely believed than the truth.

One of the most telling arguments I had was a pair of maps.

This one shows where the NSDAP got their votes in 1932:



This one shows where the 1934 census found Catholics:



Still, it would have been very nice, back then, to have had this article on Catholic Exchange, which cites and quotes much of the historical evidence (and here I mean testimony of his contemporaries) that Pope Pius XII was one of the best friends that Jews had, during the Shoah. My love for the Jew-loving Pope (as he was called by his NSDAP enemies) drives me to post these links.