Pius XII The righteous Pope

David Dalin
In an article published in the February 26, 2001, issue of The Weekly Standard (published in the United States), Rabbi David Dalin called for Pius XII to be recognized as “righteous,” because of his efforts to save Jews from the Holocaust. We publish here excerpts from the article.
Even before Pius XII died in 1958, the charge that his papacy had been friendly to the Nazis was circulating in Europe, a piece of standard Communist agitprop against the West. It sank for a few years under the flood of tributes, from Jews and gentiles alike, that followed the Pope’s death, only to bubble up again with the 1963 debut of The Deputy, a play by a left-wing German writer (and former member of the Hitler Youth) named Rolf Hochhuth.
Still, it is the books vilifying the Pope that have received most of the attention. ...
Einstein, Golda Meir, Herzog…
Curiously, nearly everyone pressing this line today–from the ex-seminarians John Cornwell and Garry Wills to the ex-priest James Carroll–is a lapsed or angry Catholic. For Jewish leaders of a previous generation, the campaign against Pius XII would have been a source of shock.
“Spiritually Semites”
Any fair and thorough reading of the evidence demonstrates that Pius XII was a persistent critic of Nazism. Consider just a few highlights of his opposition before the war: of the forty-four speeches Pacelli gave in Germany as Papal Nuncio between 1917 and 1929, forty denounced some aspect of the emerging Nazi ideology.
The New York Times
His first encyclical, Summi Pontificatus, rushed out in 1939 to beg for peace, was in part a declaration that the proper role of the papacy was to plead to both warring sides rather than to blame one.
“Provoking suicide”
Holocaust survivors such as Marcus Melchior, the Chief Rabbi of Denmark, argued that “if the Pope had spoken out, Hitler would probably have massacred more than six million Jews and perhaps ten times ten million Catholics, if he had the power to do so.”
In Rome, 155 convents and monasteries sheltered some five thousand Jews. At least three thousand found refuge at the Pope’s summer residence at Castel Gandolfo.
Goodness and magnanimity
In 1955, when Italy celebrated the tenth anniversary of its liberation, the Union of Italian Jewish Communities proclaimed April 17 a “Day of Gratitude” for the Pope’s wartime assistance. ...
No other pope had been so widely praised by Jews–and they were not mistaken. Their gratitude, as well as that of the entire generation of Holocaust survivors, testifies that Pius XII was, genuinely and profoundly, a righteous gentile.