Roman Catholic Church and Nazi Thesis

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" And even though the "Nazi actions became increasingly brutal, anti-Semitic, and anti-Christian," Pius XII "failed to raise his voice against the German invasion of Poland" (Coppa, p. 9). Pius expressed "no public outrage against [Nazi acts of] mass extermination" nor did he speak out publicly to "elimination of the Jews" even after the horror of the Holocaust had been known for some time.

Coppa wondered on page 9 if Pius XII had actually issued Pius XI's encyclical "stressing the unity of the human race and the incompatibility of racism and Christianity, might more of the millions exterminated have been spared?" The question has no answer, of course. And as Coppa concludes, "We shall never know."

Benjamin Frankel edited the book History in Dispute, Vol. 11: The Holocaust, 1933-1945, and edited the essay in that book ("The Role of Pope Pius in the Holocaust"). Adding to that essay is Newman University's Robert McCormick, who claims that Pius XII "…chose to ignore reports of Jews being slaughtered rather than even run the risk of alienating any German Catholics" who may have been "sympathetic" to the agenda of the Nazis. "On many occasions" Pius XII had the chance to "avoid moral ambiguity and condemn the genocide being perpetrated by Nazi Germany and its satellites" (McCormick).

[Benjamin Frankel is a regular contributor to the journal Foreign Affairs, and has published numerous books, including: Realism: Restatement and Renewal; Worlds on Fire; Roots of Realism; and Opaque Nuclear Proliferation.]

Moreover, Pius XII could have been far more vocal in condemning "German persecution" and in fact could have used his power of "excommunication" in order to pressure Catholics into refraining from anti-Semitic behavior and murder," McCormick contributes in Frankel's essay.

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He chose to "vacillate" instead of denouncing the holocausts; and "most telling of all," McCormick goes on, was the position Pius XII took "during the arrest and deportation of Roman Jews" in October 1943. About 40,000 Jews had found hiding places in churches, monasteries, and even in the Vatican in Italy. However, when the Nazis came into Italy in 1943 and seized about a thousand Jews -- to be shipped off to Auschwitz and killed -- "Pius never uttered a word denouncing" the actions of the Nazis.

Meantime some Catholic scholars and other intellectuals in the U.S. And Europe have rebuffed assertions that Pius XII somehow helped Hitler or at least was soft on Nazism and failed to take a moral stand. John Gumpel, for example [Gumpel is a German Jesuit historian who has taken up the cause of beatification of Pius XII, which would make Pius XII a saint; Gumpel is a former official of the Congregation for the Causes of Saints] said that Cornwell's book has painted "a nasty caricature of a noble and saintly man." In fact Gumpel has fired back at those Jews who praise Cornwell's book as "massive accomplices in the destruction of the Catholic Church" (Allen, 1998). When Jews criticize Pius XII they "make one wonder what the Jewish faction has against Catholics"; Gumpel was quoted in the New York Times (Allen) as saying he would "not be surprised if [the criticism of Pius XII as a possible saint] led to a rise in anti-Semitic feeling."

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