LETTERS TO THE EDITOR
JERUSALEM POST 11-5-1995
Sir, - I refer to your editorial of May 1st,
regarding the alleged “thunderous silence of the Vatican during the years of
the Holocaust.
Pope Pius XII, then head of the Vatican, did all that
he could at the time, and was honoured for it by the State of Israel with the
planting of 800,000 trees – one for every life that he saved. The Chief Rabbi of Rome was so impressed by
the Vatican that he actually became a Catholic, and personally showed his
appreciation of what the pope had done for his people by inviting him to be his
godfather.
Dr Pinchas Lapide, the Jewish biblical scholar, said
in Jerusalem in 1976 that from his research into Jewish sources and
documentation, he had found many instances where Pope Pius XII had helped
Jewish people escape from death during the Nazi regime. Dr Lapide said: “Pius XII may have misjudged
some situations, and may have missed numerous occasions to help save life, but
no document published up to now throws any kind of serious doubt on his
good-will.”
Another Jewish writer, Harvey Rosenfeld, in his book
on Raoul Wallenberg, condemns the attack on Pius XII by Ralph Hochhuth’s play The Representative, and praises the
pope, as does Virgil Blum in his essays on the subject.
Two English Protestant historians also exonerated the
pope – namely Owen Chadwick in a lecture at Canterbury in 1978, and Anthony
Rhodes in his book, The Vatican in the
Age of the Dictators.
Someone once observed that speculative attacks on Pius
XII will always be based on heads we win, tails he loses. If he had issued thunderous denunciations
which had misfired and resulted in even more deaths, we would probably now be
reading the following: “By his futile blathering, the pope sought to enhance
his own reputation, at the expense of many lives. Would it not have been wiser to have sought
covertly to save as many people as possible?”
