Douglass Cassel’s March 24 Op-Ed commentary “Remembering the Holocaust selectively” represents the kind of “monstrous calumnies” against Pope Pius XII that Kenneth Woodward rightly deplored in the March 30 Newsweek.
Accusing Pope Pius XII of silence in the face of the Holocaust ignores the multitude of Jewish voices, including the World Jewish Congress, the Hebrew Commission, Golda Meir, Albert Einstein and Chief Rabbi Emilio Zolli of Rome, who heaped praise and gratitude upon Pius XII for being what The New York Times, in a Christmas 1941 editorial, called “a lonely voice . . . the only ruler left on the Continent of Europe who dares to raise his voice at all.”
It ignores the testimony of Israeli diplomat and scholar Pinchas Lapide, who credited Pope Pius XII with “saving the lives of as many as 860,000 Jews from certain death at Nazi hands.”
It ignores the attacks on Pius XII by the Gestapo, who, as Woodward notes, labeled the Pope’s 1942 Christmas message “one long attack against everything we stand for. He is clearly speaking on behalf of the Jews.”
Those who insist that the church could have done more to oppose the Holocaust should consider that if others had done as much, many more lives could have been saved. As Jewish scholar Jeno Levai said about Pope Pius XII some years ago, it is a “particularly regrettable irony that the one person in all of occupied Europe who did more than anyone else to halt the dreadful crime and alleviate its consequences is today made the scapegoat for the failures of others.”
