I am writing in reply to a letter published in your newspaper Feb. 18. I wish to set the record straight regarding Pope Pius XII and his alleged ignoring of the Jewish Holocaust.
Seldom has a Catholic leader been more maligned. Read the following quotes and consider.
The foremost Jewish scholar of the Holocaust, Jeno Leval, said, “It is 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.”
Israeli scholar Pinchas Lapids said, “The Catholic Church under the pontificate of Pius XII saved the lives of as many as 860,000 Jews from certain death at the Nazis.” He went on to say, “No pope in history has been thanked more heartily by Jews.”
The New York Times in its Christmas editorials of 1941 and 1942 praised Pius XII for his moral leadership and wrote, “a lonely voice crying out of the silence of a continent and assailing the exile and persecution of human beings for no other reason than race.”
Golda Meir said on the death of Pope Pius XII that “When fearful martyrdom came to our people in the decade of Nazi terror, the voice of the Pope was raised for its victims.”
Albert Einstein said in 1944, “Being a lover of freedom, when the Nazi revolution came in Germany, I looked to the universities to defend it, but the universities were immediately silenced. Then I looked to the great editors of the newspapers, but they, like the universities, were silenced in a few short weeks. Then I looked to individual writers… they too were mute. Only the Church stood squarely in the path of Hitler’s campaign for suppressing the truth… I never had any special interest in the Catholic Church before, but now I feel a great affection and admiration… and am forced to confess that what I once despised, I now praise unreservedly.”
‘Nuff said?
Tony Humeston
Albia
