Amnesia at the Paper of Record

November 16, 2000

One of the persistent big lies of our time holds that the Catholic Church, and Pope Pius XII in particular, failed to oppose Hitler and were “silent” during the Holocaust. This would have come as news to Hitler.

The myth has been repeated in two recent books and is often echoed in the New York Times, our semi-official “paper of record.” But in fact, the Times is flatly contradicted by its own reporting before and during World War II.

A new study, “Pius XII and the Jews: The War Years,” by Stephen M. DiGiovanni, shows that Pius and his bishops engaged in a prolonged duel with Hitler’s regime. Far from being secret, the tension between the Third Reich and the Church was quite public — and DiGiovanni describes it almost entirely from stories published in the Times while it was going on.

Pius’s predecessor, Pope Pius XI, had condemned the German National Socialist philosophy because its exaltation of race and nation was opposed to what the Church calls “the natural law,” the eternal moral order that even God cannot change. No race or nation has the right to subjugate another. Pius XI and Pius XII both condemned Communism for similar reasons: no state may put itself above the divine law.

Upon becoming Pope in March 1939, Pius XII issued an encyclical reiterating that the state must respect the divine law, without prejudice to any race. This was taken by everyone as a rebuke to Hitler. In 1940, over the protests of Hitler’s ally Benito Mussolini, the Vatican appointed two Jewish scholars to its academy of science and another to its library. Louis Finkelstein, a prominent Jewish theologian, praised the Pope for these measures. All these facts appeared in the Times, which also praised the Pope generously in several editorials.

In 1942, Pius intervened to save French Jews from deportation; two French cardinals and several bishops also made what the Times called a “spirited written protest against racial and religious persecution.” The following year Pius assured the chief rabbi of Jerusalem that he would, as the Times put it, “do all in his personal power to aid persecuted Jews in Europe.” Throughout the war Catholic leaders sheltered Jewish children in France, producing what the Times called “an open rift between the Vichy government and priests.” After the war, Pius removed several French bishops who had cooperated with the German and Vichy governments; this too was reported in the Times.

In June 1943 the Times ran a story headlined “Reich Churches Resist Nazi Rule,” relating that the Catholic bishops in Germany had protested the persecution of Poles and Jews. The Nazi press fired back with charges that the Church was instigating unrest. A month later the German regime put three Catholic bishops under house arrest and seized several convents, hospitals, and other Church property. Thousands of priests and nuns were eventually arrested, many of whom died in concentration camps.

In December the Vatican protested the internment of Italy’s Jews; in early 1944 Rome’s Fascist police forced entry into a basilica and arrested Jews taking sanctuary there along with the priests who had sheltered them, over Pius’s protests. Again, you could have learned all this from the Times.

When the Allies conquered Rome in June 1944, the city’s chief rabbi formally thanked the Pope on behalf of the Jews. After the war the World Jewish Congress gave the Vatican a gift of $20,000 “in recognition of the work of the Holy See in rescuing Jews from Fascist and Nazi persecution.” Early in the war, Albert Einstein had testified: “Only the Church stood squarely across the path of Hitler’s campaign for suppressing the truth.”

This is just a sampling of what the Times told its readers during the war years. It also quoted both Nazi and Soviet authorities blaming the Church for the war they had started together before their falling out, each accusing Pius of favoring the other side. Later the victorious Soviets and Communists within Western Europe charged the Pope with indifference to the mass murders of Jews.

The Times, in a 1944 editorial, severely criticized the Soviets for their “reckless,” “unjust,” and “intemperate” anti-Vatican propaganda. Since then, for some reason, the Paper of Record has forgotten its own meticulous contemporary accounts and adopted the crude Soviet version.

Joseph Sobran

Current Column

Return to the SOBRAN’S home page