Books revisit the 'Pius war'

These three books, taken together, absolutely decimate the attacks on the reputation of Pope Pius XII made in the spate of books by James Carroll, John Cornwell, Daniel Goldhagen, Michael Phayer, Gary Wills and Susan Zucotti. They meticulously re-examine the charges against Pope Pius, charges which sadly have become deeply embedded in the very grain of our culture.

David G. Dalin is a rabbi, while Ronald J. Rychlak and Patrick J. Gallo are Catholics. This fact is of some significance since much has been made of the fact that the anti-Pius attackers are, with the exception of Goldhagen, Catholics. Protestants, in the main, have stayed out of the papal fray, having their own complex history during the Holocaust to deal with.

Rychlak's book, "Righteous Gentiles: How Pius XII and the Catholic Church Saved Half a Million Jews From the Nazis," in a sense comes closest to that goal, narrating Pope Pius' life within the context of his times. (The Rychlak estimate of 500,000 Jews saved by the church -- in its convents and monasteries, through papers given to Jews by its diplomats enabling them to escape Europe, and the like -- is a moderate one. Others range up to 800,000.)

Rabbi Dalin, in "The Myth of Hitler's Pope: How Pope Pius XII Rescued Jews From the Nazis," agrees with Rychlak that Pope Pius in fact meets the criteria for a "righteous gentile" as defined by Yad Vashem, Jerusalem's Holocaust museum, which Pope John Paul II visited so reverently during his pilgrimage in 2000.

Gallo's book, "Pius XII, the Holocaust and the Revisionists," is composed of essays, half of which were written by him, half by others such as Matteo Napolitano of Italy and Juno Levai of Hungary. Half the essays are new for this book; half were published earlier in journals.

Each volume, in its own way, attempts as well to explain why the attacks on Pope Pius' reputation were made. Rabbi Dalin, not without reason, calls it a phenomenon of the culture wars of our time in which the secular media latched onto the discrediting of Pope Pius as part of its not-so-subtle attempt to discredit not just Catholicism but religious faith in general. Gallo notes the continuity between the current charges against Pope Pius and those made by the Soviet Union in its Cold War propaganda against the West, again with Pope Pius as a symbolic target for a larger agenda.

Rabbi Dalin and Rychlak are both critical of the work of the International Catholic-Jewish Historical Commission, launched with great hope by the Holy See and the International Jewish Committee for Interreligious Consultations in December 1999. I was asked by Cardinal Edward I. Cassidy, then president of the Vatican's Commission for Religious Relations With the Jews, to coordinate on the Catholic side of this commission. I would like to state that Professor Michael Marrus, on the Jewish side, and all three Catholic scholars acted with integrity and professionalism throughout what turned out to be for us all a grueling ordeal. Papers of this group were published in the May 2002 issue of the documentary journal Catholic International.

The underlying issue of the "Pius war" is the connection between traditional Christian teaching on Jews and Judaism and the mindset of the Holocaust perpetrators and bystanders. Whatever the ultimate historical judgment of Pope Pius, we Catholics must acknowledge our history, repent its sins, and ensure that it never happens again. This deeper issue is addressed in "Catholic Teaching on the Shoah: Implementing the Holy See's 'We Remember'" published by the U.S. bishops in 2001.

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Fisher is an associate director of the U.S. bishops' Secretariat for Ecumenical and Interreligious Affairs in Washington.

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