The Southern Cross, Sunday, November 7, 1999
POPE PIUS XII
I refer to your report “English author says Pius XII
anti-Semite” (September 26 Southern Cross).
Jewish historians are not unintelligent but the
author, John Cornwell, ignores them all. But then Newsweek of September 27 dismisses this book as “bogus scholarship”
and him as an “ill equipped journalist.”
Five Jewish historians, Jene Levai (the greatest
authority on the Holocaust), Pinhas Lapide, Livia Rotkirken of Yad Vashem,
Joseph Lichten of the Anti-Defamation League and David Herstig, all show how
Pius was a unique benefactor to their race.
The new Israeli state recognised this when it honoured
Pius with a forest of 800 000 trees in Judaea, one for every life he
saved. Golda Meir spoke words of praise at the United Nations about Pius, and
the World Jewish Congress voted two million dollars to the Vatican in
gratitude. Did they get it all wrong? I doubt it very much.
We now know from released state papers that the
British knew of the genocide in 1941 but kept silent to protect their code
breakers. They would not even bomb the railway line to Auschwitz. Churchill did
not speak out against the Holocaust, nor did Roosevelt, and yet Pius is
attacked for being silent! Anti-Semitism is one evil and anti-Catholicism is
another!
Pius admitted that he wanted to say “words of fire”
but the situation forced him into “the silence of hope” to avoid reprisals.
Anne Frank in her diary praised the Dutch bishops’
protest against the Nazis but the protest served only to infuriate the Nazis
even more, and led to another violent round-up of lapsed or converted Jews to
destruction.
The Israeli writer Aryeh Gallin has said: “One mystery
of World War II (is) that while every single German ally,
almost without exception, the Finns, the Bulgarians, the Italians, the Japanese
and the allied neutral Spanish, went to heroic efforts to save Jews. Every
single one of the Anglo-Saxon allied nations, the Canadians, the Americans, the
British, the Australians and the New Zealanders, did everything possible to see
that nothing would interfere with the process of mass murder.”
I think that the British Cornwell should let the Italian
Pius sleep in peace and confine himself to getting the plank out of his own
nation’s eye first, before setting about others.
