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A rabbi defends Pius XII
Finally there are signs of a turnaround in the years-long liberal and Jewish smear campaign against Pope Pius XII. David Frum at NRO has very positive comments on a new book, The Myth of Hitler’s Pope, by Rabbi David Dalin, which shows the full extent of the pope’s assistance to Jews. Among other things, Dalin says that Pius XII risked arrest by the Nazis to hide several thousand Jews at his summer residence; that the recent charge that Catholics refused to give up Jewish children at war’s end to their families and tried to raise them as Catholics was based on forgeries; and that, in Frum’s words, “even by the most conservative estimate of the effect of his actions, Pius XII’s personal interventions saved the lives of more European Jews than any other person outside the governments and armed forces of the allied powers—more than Oskar Schindler, more than Raoul Wallenberg.”
Frum is to be congratulated for publicizing what sounds like a very important book that may help remove some of the poisons that have been injected into Jewish-Christian relations in recent years by the false charges against Pius XII. I wonder if we can expect the same from Commentary, a magazine that under the editorship of Neil Kozodoy has participated in what can fairly be called a hate campaign not only against Pius XII but against the entire Church (for example, Kozodoy a few years ago published a review agreeing with James Carroll, author of the vicious anti-Catholic diatribe, Constantine’s Sword), that the Christian religion itself is the ultimate source of the Holocaust). In all fairness, such promotion of anti-Catholic bigotry would have been inconceivable under Commentary’s previous editor, Norman Podhoretz. Email entry |