On Pius XII, somebody needs to explain why

It is estimated that the lives of over 860,000+ Jews were saved thanks to Pius. On his direction, false travel documents were issued, shelters to hide Jews, etc.

Doing this in the heart of Facist Italy. It is little wonder why informed people consider him a hero. When the world turned its back, the Jews only friend was the Pope and the Church.

As a Jew I feel obliged to offer some context on this issue - to prevent misunderstanding and forestall Catholic words and actions that may appear insensitive or even anti-semitic. Most Jews understand that it is the Church's own business who it canonizes and why. But there is also the larger context of historical witness. The Jewish people still struggle caring for the broken families of the Holocaust and defending ourselves from a repeat of such events. The surviving Jewish people today remember what was done, and not done. That has bearing on the state of Catholic - Jewish relations, reconciliation and in the case of the Church, repair of its sorry anti-Jewish history. The issue of what Pius may or may not have done will only be settled once the suspiciously sealed Vatican archives for 1939 - 1945 are open to all scholars. Beyond that there are other issues relating to the Jews that the article does not mention.

Pius was the one who prevented the return of some 5 - 10 thousand Jewish children still unaccounted for despite repeated requests to investigate by family, the Jewish Agency and Israel. These children should have been returned to their people and faith in the aftermath of WW2, at a time when numbers were important to surviving Jews. Rabbi Eliezer Silver, of blessed memory, worked hard in post-war Europe to find these children with no help from the Vatican, and at times with hostility. In 1947, it was Pius' Vatican administration that participated in the documented attempt to prevent the creation of the State of Israel, at a time when the rescue of European Jews was on-going. His papacy lobbied the UN, the US and other nations to not vote for partition in Palestine - based largely on the now discredited anti-semitic notion that Jews are cursed to be a wandering people in some Christian theology. To add insult to injury, while Jews were often refused return to their European exile communities and even attacked, Pius attempted to convince the European governments (who had just participated in murdering Jews as accomplices to the Nazis) to prevent Jewish immigration to Palestine. And then there is the suspicious issue of how thousands of Nazi war criminals got Vatican passports to flee war crime tribunals to South America - seemingly unnoticed by the Vatican.

Taken together, these alone indict Pius in Jewish minds. These post-war efforts do not reflect philo-semitism, Catholic values, charity or good will. If Pius did help some Jews, but refused to help other Jews more broadly before the end of WW2, it would not be inconsistent with his post-war enmity towards the Jews. Jewish witness on this subject is about how Pius and the Church related to the Jews, not how he acted as a Pope towards Catholics. We have a right to proclaim historical truth to any power. His legacy is at best a mixed one - some good (for Catholics) and some bad (for Jews). Archives can be re-opened, hidden children can be found and offered a chance to reconnect with the Jewish people and familes and Catholic education can be made truer on such delicate subjects. That is the right way to approach reconciliation - with truth and honesty. The Vatican has finally recognized Israel, despite trying to actively stop its creation. The Vatican has begun the long process of reconciliation to come to terms with its anti-semitic past. All that is well and good, despite being long overdue. But as witnesses to history, the ancient Jewish people answer to the G-d of Israel and cannot approve, recommend or remain quiet on matters of truth about someone who in some ways was an enemy of Israel and the Jewish people. The Church can canonize whom it honors; truth does not require the rest of humanity to agree. On this, we can agree to disagree.

"Why" indeed?

Was it Pope Pius XII who came to an accommodation with Hitler in the matter of the Third Reich collecting church taxes and sending payments directly to Rome—which accommodation provided for automatic excommunication of Catholics who didn't pay the taxes? And didn't a recent Court judgment separate non-payment of tax from church membership?

If this happened it is something akin to "gaming God" ala Pope Leo X soliciting the German population to buy indulgences in order to raise funds to pay for building the basilica of St. Peter. Instilling emotions of guilt and fear is a powerful weapon — but not helpful for sanctity and credibility on the part of people who employ the weapons.

I was just turning 18 when Pius died. He has never been to me a figure deserving sainthood. He represents a period in the church to which some want to return. Not me.

Sorry, his record of silence during the war should disqualify him, particularly when the Jews of Rome were deported in Oct. 1943.

“A still more notable breach in moral terms, however, is the fact that once the roundup took place–”under the very windows of the Pope” in the words of Ernst von Weizsacker, the German Ambassador to the Holy See-and with the trains waiting to deport more than a thousand Roman Jews (the “Pope’s Jews”) to Auschwitz, not a single public word of protest was uttered then or subsequently by the Pope himself.

Soon after the event, then, Weizsacker could, accurately and in good conscience, report back to Berlin that the Pope “has not allowed himself to be carried away making any demonstrative statements against deportation of the Jews… he has done all he could… not to prejudice relationships with the German government.”
http://www.commonwealmagazine.org/blog/?p=5968&cpage=2#comment-60360

More:

"Throughout the beginning part of WWII, Pius XII was consistently besieged with pleas for help on behalf of the Jews and was informed about the Holocaust.

In the spring of 1940, the Chief Rabbi of Palestine, Isaac Herzog, asked the papal Secretary of State, Cardinal Luigi Maglione to intercede to keep Jews in Spain from being deported to Germany. He later made a similar request for Jews in Lithuania. The papacy did nothing.

Within the Pope’s own church, Cardinal Theodor Innitzer of Vienna told Pius XII about Jewish deportations in 1941. In 1942, the Slovakian charge d’affaires, a position under the supervision of the Pope, reported to Rome that Slovakian Jews were being systematically deported and sent to death camps.

In October 1941, the Assistant Chief of the U.S. delegation to the Vatican, Harold Tittman, asked the Pope to condemn the atrocities. The response came that the Holy See wanted to remain “neutral,” and that condemning the atrocities would have a negative influence on Catholics in German-held lands.

In late August 1942, after more than 200,000 Ukrainian Jews had been killed, Ukrainian Metropolitan Andrej Septyckyj wrote a long letter to the Pope, referring to the German government as a regime of terror and corruption, more diabolical than that of the Bolsheviks. The Pope replied by quoting verses from Psalms and advising Septyckyj to “bear adversity with serene patience.”

On September 18, 1942, Monsignor Giovanni Battista Montini, the future Pope Paul VI, wrote, “The massacres of the Jews reach frightening proportions and forms.” Yet, that same month when Myron Taylor, U.S. representative to the Vatican, warned the Pope that his silence was endangering his moral prestige, the Secretary of State responded on the Pope’s behalf that it was impossible to verify rumors about crimes committed against the Jews.

Wladislaw Raczkiewicz, president of the Polish government-in-exile, appealed to the Pope in January 1943 to publicly denounce Nazi violence. Bishop Preysing of Berlin did the same, at least twice. Pius XII refused.

Here is an extensive listing of statements made by Pius during the course of the war, many of which are subject to dispute as to their meaning: http://wapedia.mobi/en/Public_statements_of_Pope_Pius_XII_on_the_Holocaust

The issue, of course, is what caused Pius to be so reticent about doing what he could have done to at least mitigate some of the actions against the Jews.

I simply cannot see where his actions, or lack thereof, are any example of “heroic virtue” declared on his behalf on December 19th that one can reasonably expect of a saint."
Jimmy Mac at the same dotCommonweal thread.

From the Shoah Center at Yad Vashem
http://www1.yadvashem.org.il/odot_pdf/Microsoft%20Word%20-%20684.pdf

The Pope was aware of criticism during the war, and it was not
confined to Jewish spokespersons, who tended to be quite reserved. At the
highest level, the French Cardinal Tisserant wanted a forthright condemnation
of Nazism, and Jacques Maritain was a notable post-war critic of papal policy.

Other dissenters included the leader of the Polish Government in exile and the
United States representative in the Vatican. It is important to note that
criticism was not only voiced by Jews, but by others who were looking for a
forthright religious stand on Nazism and German behavior in occupied
Europe...

At its strongest, the case for this policy (silence) is that explicit attacks on the Nazi regime would have had serious consequences for Catholics throughout occupied Europe, and might have made the situation even worse for Jews and anyone the Church sought to defend. The example usually cited is the
reprisals taken against Catholics of Jewish origin in Holland in 1942, after an outspoken condemnation by Holland's Catholic bishops of the deportation of
Dutch Jewry. Catholic institutions were able to shelter victims of Nazism, only provided their neutrality was respected by German forces.

This is a substantial argument, albeit one that has in turn been open to
controversy. The Dutch example, when the bishops clearly decided where
their duty lay, is not the only instance of religious protest in occupied Europe and there are equally well-known cases when no reprisals were taken, notably Cardinal von Galen's indictment of the Nazi euthanasia policy in 1941."

Too much in question, and the archives might indeed add important information.

I remember the day Pius XII died. I wrote about it in Convent. (Search term: Eugenio.)

I totally agree with John l Allen's article that there is no compelling reason for the canonization of Pope Pius the XII. Indications point that Pope Pius was aware of the Holocaust and did nothing to speak out or utilize his power to stop it. As an outsider and layperson, this speaks more of the Vatican's disconnection from common person and thier reality. Ron

It's time for a rival narrative to be told about John Paul. He wasn't all that warm and fuzzy. He was self-absorbed and spiteful to anybody who questioned him or disagreed with him. Yes, he did have his strong points, but in my opinion, not holiness or saintliness, but pride. Stop the rush. If they are in heaven, fine, and that is all that matters. But this whole process of canonization was corrupted by John Paul II to the point that many question the saintliness of the people he canonized.

The baseline for this discussion brings up what has bothered me with our intentions in identifying sainthood since I was a very young man and the notion of conferring sainthood first took place -- the very same Pius X11. I was only 10 at the time, but I remember the discussions and wondered not at the hesitancy, but at the very imagination that would imagine any Christ follower as anything but a saint. It is not that we conquer our sin, but that we accept Jesus' forgiveness and embark (even in our human dysfunctional nature as sinner) to follow that Christ.

This, Pius XII did, and most publicly.

The identification of miracles is the most fascinating element of this process, establishing the ongoing relationship of the community of saints interceding for us in shared prayer. Thus, or status caste system of potential sainthood stopping first at "Blessed" before "Sainted." To use this as proof to confirm an individual's actual sainthood is a remarkable admission of God's interplay through us in both life and after-life, but has an appearance more of popularity and politics rather than God's revelation.

The whole thing never ceases to amaze and fascinate me.

Well, why you are at it, perhaps you can explain how on earth (and heaven?) Pope Pius IX was ever canonized? Even considered within the context of his times, how exactly was he heroically virtuous to start with? He struggled with the newly formed Italian government, lost some Papal States (a good thing). He called Vatican I into being and defined the dogma of the infallibility of the Pope. I mean, he did kidnap that little Jewish boy (that a Catholic servant said she had baptized), and used to hide him under his vestments during public appearances (so it is said). I think JPII had and continues to have pop culture appeal and this is a bridge between people and the church - and he canonized Pius IX. Pope Pius XII - I think we need more information and I hope the Vatican archives will provide this. Otherwise, I think I'd be happier with ordinary people being considered for canonization. And some who are not male and not European. Where's that open window with the fresh air blowing through when you need it? I recommend reading "A Humble Christian" by Ignazio Silone, indeed anything by Silone.

My own father should well be considered for Sainthood for all of the sacrifices he made, hardships he endured in his life. Who in their life has not made sacrifices or endured any hardship? What was most notable about my father was that he could forgive. But I am not clamoring for him to be canonized a Saint in the Catholic Church, even though I know he is in heaven.

Some questions to consider regarding Sainthood might be "who did Pope Pius XII forgive? Was he political in his choices of who he forgave? Whose sins did he retain?" Sainthood should express and demonstrate the capacity to forgive others, as Jesus forgave even those who persecuted and executed him.

In my opinion canonizing the WWII Pope is just more politics as usual from a Church hierarchy with nothing better to do and with no real sense of urgency to occupy their time in trying to understand the time and people who are now living. They should be considering their own acts in the Church and the world and whether or not they are being Christ-like, rather than promoting people to Sainthood. I wish they would become Saints.

Jesus says "Let the dead bury their dead and Follow Me."

The baseline for this discussion brings up what has bothered me with our intentions in identifying sainthood since I was a very young man and the notion of conferring sainthood first took place -- the very same Pius X11. I was only 10 at the time, but I remember the discussions and wondered not at the hesitancy, but at the very imagination that would imagine any Christ follower as anything but a saint. It is not that we conquer our sin, but that we accept Jesus' forgiveness and embark (even in our human dysfunctional nature as sinner) to follow that Christ.

This, Pius XII did, and most publicly. Of course the man’s a saint!

The identification of miracles is the most fascinating element of this process, establishing the ongoing relationship of the community of saints interceding for us in shared prayer. Thus, we end up with our status caste system of potential sainthood stopping first at "Blessed" before "Sainted." To use this as proof to confirm an individual's actual sainthood is a remarkable admission of God's interplay through us in both life and after-life, but has an appearance more of popularity and politics rather than God's revelation.

The whole thing never ceases to amaze and fascinate me.

Jewish sentiment should be irrelevant. It suits the political purpose of some in the Jewish population to keep this bogus narrative about Pius XII alive and festering, so they will continue to anger and decieve their brethren with their lies, thus turning Jewish opinion against us. We aren't going to change their minds, irregardless of the evidence.

With that said, I am a firm believer in a deliberative, prudent process towards canonization. If Pius XII is to be declared a saint, so be it...PC be damned. If John Paul II meets the criteria, than so it should be with him as well.

"Why St. Pius XII Now," John Allen wisely asks. I agree with this basic question, but I believe there is a greater distinction between Pius XII and John Paul II than what John Allen offers. And more heroic subjects for canonization.
Pius XII was personally remote from the public, and his writings were not for reading by most lay people. In his day, American Catholics regarded Pius XII as an extremely lofty, quasi-divine figure, and we now understand that this image was exactly what he cultivated. For even high Vatican officials were obligated, when approaching him in the course of their duties, to genuflect three times as they reverently approached him in his offices. American Catholics heard little about Pius XII -- or about the Vatican -- in the American media of the 1930s and 1940s. What contemporary American Catholics did hear about Pius XII was mostly through their archdiocesan newspapers and their parish pulpits, which of course were most restrained.
By the dawn of John Paul II's papacy, so very much had changed in terms of the American Catholics' and non-Catholics' awareness of the papacy and recent popes. And most recently, many religious-minded Catholics have severely diminished respect for popes and high clergy, as a result of the arrogant and hypocritical positions taken (we now know, for decades) by many local bishops and Vatican dignitaries towards the desperate need for real remediation of the widespread clerical sexual abuses.
To elevate Pius XII to "sainthood" now -- or to make any other pope a "saint" for the foreseeable future -- would be to needlessly torture our fragile faith.
Most of us think of our own faith as poor and unworthy of comment, compared to the thousands of twentieth-century Catholics, living and deceased, who despite suffering sexual abuse at the hands of clergy, heroically persevered in whatever twilight of faith that they managed to keep. It is they who deserve our public prayers during the Canon of the Mass. They are the ones who next deserve to be "canonized". (But don't hold your breath.)
John Allen probably writes with tongue in cheek, and actually agrees with the line of thinking offered here, although he has the task of continuing to deal up close and personally with Vatican personnel and so, must take a cautious approach.

Vincent

John,

To find out some positive reasons for canonizing Pius XII in the same stroke that we canonize John Paul II, please look at my blog, The Catholic Comedy, from last week.

http://bit.ly/PropPius

May you and yours have a blessed Christmas--Randy

Well it sounds like the case is moving forward, assumedly on compelling evidence. And I would trust Pope Benedict XVI's scholarship. Hence, we need somebody to do some research and present to us the evidence which is being set forth. NCR?

Pius XII was prudent in the wartime crisis, and personally morally heroic and courageous in the number of people he saved from the Nazis. In addition, looking over his body of work and GENIUNE reforms, some of which you mentioned, and his truly heroic and articulate defense of orthodox Catholicism in the face of eponentially mounting modernism within and without the Church, why shoudn't he be a saint? Additionally, I don't see how opening up the Vatican archives on him certainly wouldn't have an impact; are we being a bit presumptuous? Finally, being a young man I cannot relate to the "insider" crowd that you mention, and I will say that most young Catholics I know are thrilled to finally see Pius XII's moral courage and saintliness recognized. As for the older crowd, in my part of the country, they're generally liberal before they are Catholic, and so they are highly vulnerable to any prejudice that might discredit a saintly son of the Church. Frankly, given the evidence of Pius XII's moral courage, it seems to me that any scepticism as to his saintliness is just such a prejudice. Conversely, I see substantially less evidence of John Paul II's heroic virtues, especially in light of his forays into unorthodox ecumania. I guess in my case, and for most Catholics I know, you got the demographic backwards. Hmm, maybe your view here is a bit skewed?

What most people seem to not realize is that the Catholic Church doesn't "make" somebody a Saint, God does. The Church only makes known to the Faithful what God has done. If God grants the miracles necessary for someone to be declared a Saint then the Church has no right to deny the honor to that person, no matter what the consequences. God knows what He is doing and we shouldn't get in His way.

Remember, John, Jesus had an "image problem" and was reviled by the rank and file non believers of his day. St. Athanasius had an "image problem" among his contemporary bishops and had many death threats against him and was exiled 5 times. The Arians would have howled over his beatification.

Those who are "in the fight" are going to get dirty. B16 has just sent the contemporary dissenters a strong message: You don't decide who we declare as saints. The Church does. It ain't a popularity contest.

Just because the puny minds at NCR can't get wrapped around the beatification doesn't make the process null and void. Get over it, John

John,
I don't know where you are getting this claim that Catholics now in their seventies just assumed he would be a saint. I know many many Catholics in their seventies and have never run across this sentiment. In fact Catholics in their seventies viewed someone becoming a saint as something that took years and years, hundreds of years for this to happen. And if anyone tells you different I'd be very suspicious of their memories. In fact it was a joke in those days (and I don't mean to be sacrilegious) that he looked like Harry Truman in full masonic regalia).

I agree with our author, John Allen, that the case FOR canonization needs to be made. I might quibble about what people say negatively about the war years, because I think Americans lack an appreciation, generally, for what it is like to live in a totalitarian state like Nazi Germany particularly, and Nazi occupied Europe, including Italy. The Nazi state had it in its power to destroy the Christian churches, to demolish every church, execute every priest and bishop, including the Bishop of Rome, and to send resistant Christians to the camps - indeed, some priests and some dissident religionists did get sent to the camps. So, as then Prof. Ratzinger noted, the Church faced "Moloch" in those days.

One cannot defy the Nazi or Stalinist state to its face. If the Pope then spent 20 hours a week figuring out how to frustrate the Nazis, it would all have to have been sub rosa, with objectively rational deniability. It would indeed be nice to read all the internal documents of those days, but there may be many things in those documents having nothing to do with the Holocaust that are sensitive in entirely different ways. It may well be run exactly like the Presidential records in the US and the real reasons for privacy cannot be known until it's safe for all those reasons to reveal the records.

Both those items being said, it remains to be shown why Pius XII should be a Saint.

Why not? The then Chief Rabbi Zolli of Rome praised Pope Pius XII for his actions during WWII. The evidence about the pope and World War II is in, and it's favorable toward the pope. Why would we allow popular anti-Catholic culture decide who the Catholic Church does or does not proclaim a saint?

The real point is whether Pope Pius lived his life in an holy, upright fashion and is worthy of emulation by the faithful. I've never read anything of substance that "disproved" his holiness. The job of the canonization process is to prove his saintliness. Let them do their work without all this whining, please!

Did you hear the Vatican official on The Today Show this morning? (Dec 24) He said, in English, that Pope Pius XII is being considered for his personal heroic virtues of faith, hope, charity and love and not for his "operational" decisions as pope.

How can this be? If his "operational" actions as pope don't figure into his holiness, then why does the church in the US deprive politicians of communion for their views on abortion? The politicians almost all say they personally deplore abortion.... This is a glaring double standard on the part of the Church then.

Then "Pius saved the Church" during terrible times. The Vatican? Preserved the buildings? It is true that the German bishops chose to save Catholics by not criticizing the Nazi's in the early 30's, and we do not know the decisions and dilemmas Pius faced. But if Paul's theological teaching about the Body of Christ means anything, then distinctions between saving Catholics and Jews ought not to have been an issue.

I understand that there is an issue of the context of the times; what I do not get is the dichotomy between what a Pope believes and does in the privacy of his apartments and chapel and the consequences of decisions and obligations he places on the People of God. How can this not matter in a consideration of holiness? How can this be a model for us to follow?

It seems people are already following Pius' example or at least the moral reasoning of those promoting his cause for canonization. Someone please explain ...

While we speculate about what Pope Pius might or might not have done, or might have done more of (and remember the US troops might have done much more and were quite slow in getting to Auschwitz, beaten as they were by the Soviets), we do know somewhat what Wojtyla and the Ratzinger family were doing.

Karol would appear to certain cynical eyes a collaborator, controlling for the occupier's benefit production, and also perhaps operating as a double agent.

The Ratzingers to the same cynical eyes might appear a police agent for the occupiers and a propagandist, both so pleased to place little Jozef among the Nazi Youth files.

Both who certainly brought their special and control freak spirituality to the Vatican.

And we speculate about Pope Pius, having the biographical facts at hand of these unRoman successors?

No wonder there is such a rush to Santo Subito, before we catch our breath, look twice, and resurrect the much-needed office of the Devil's Advocate!

I certainly agree with Northcounttry1.. I am one of those Catholics of the 1940s and 1950s who lived under Pius XII. At that time, the whole sainthood process was different. Sainthood did not require 1 miracle for beatification and 1 more for sainthood. It required much more. It did not happen within years, or even decades, but centuries. And considerable effort was made to examine the negative evidence to make certain the candidate was truly saintly. There was none of this rush to sainthood introduced by JP2.(and applied to Pope Pius IX - inappropriately in my view). So as one of those 70 something Catholics I am not.in a hurry to see Pius XII canonized quickly - or John Paul II either for that matter. We need the test of time to ensure the legitimacy of the process. Sainthood has become too political.