by Dan Flynn

"These ideologues are in fact only miserable plagiarizers who dress up ancient errors in new tinsel," explained Cardinal Eugenio Pacelli, the man who would be Pope Pius XII, in 1935. "It matters little whether they rally round the flag of social revolution or are possessed by the superiority of race and blood." He was speaking, of course, about Communism and Nazism.

So why, in light of these sentiments, did Pope Pius XII become public enemy number one just a few years after his death in 1958? Progressives who showed enthusiasm for Nazism-W.E.B. Du Bois and Margaret Sanger to name but two-are seemingly immune from criticism. Pius, on the other hand, uniformly condemned Nazism yet is held in contempt by many self-proclaimed "anti-Nazis."

Why?

According to Ralph McInerny's The Defamation of Pius XII, it is not the Church's action during World War II that Pius's critics object to, but rather the Church's stand against "sexual liberation" and other aspects of modernism that have sparked the defamation of Pius XII. McInerny asserts, "the facts have never stopped calumny when there are receptive ears to hear it." Unable to use the Church's stand against sexual anarchy to effectively discredit it, enemies of the traditional order have attempted to paint Pius XII-who served as Pope from 1939 until 1958- as an ally of Hitler.

Beginning with Rolf Hochhuth's 1963 play The Deputy, which portrayed Pius as a lackey for Hitler, the past 38 years have seen a steady stream of anti-Pius diatribes from the intelligentsia, culminating in 1999's Hitler's Pope by John Cornwell. Cornwell, McInerny points out, has made a career out of bashing Catholicism's stand on sexual morality and is hardly an objective source. McInerny finds it ironic that Hochhuth's play would garner so much influence, if not because it is fiction then certainly because Hochhuth himself was a member of the Nazi Youth during the war. "Since hisory could not provide him with the Pius XII he wanted, Hochhuth invented one of his own, keeping the same name, of course, in order to damage the innocent," the book notes. Far more credible than The Deputy or Hitler's Pope, McInerny contends, are the scores of Hitler's victims who praised Pius XII's efforts during and after the war years.

"Only the Church stood squarely across the path of Hitler's campaign for suppressing the truth," Albert Einstein wrote in Time magazine in late 1940. "I never had any special interest in the Church before, but now I feel a great affection and admiration because the Church alone has had the courage and persistence to stand for intellectual truth and moral freedom. I am forced thus to confess that what I once despised I now praise unreservedly." Pinchas Lapide, an author and Israeli diplomat, observed, "the Catholic Church, under the pontificate of Pius XII was instrumental in saving at least 700,000, but probably as many as 860,000 Jews from certain death at Nazi hands." Similarly enthusiastic was Golda Meir, who had an entire forest of trees planted in Israel in honor of the Pope, with each tree representing a live saved by the Vatican. Rome's chief rabbi, Israel Zolli, even converted to Catholicism after the war with the Pope's name, Eugenio, becoming his baptismal name.

Why did Pius XII's contemporaries garnish him with praise?

The Pope directed his bishops to issue fake baptismal certificates to Jews seeking to escape the death camps. He sent dozens of letters of protest to the German government throughout the 12-year reign of the Thousand Year Reich. Pius spent not only the Vatican's money on aid to the Jews, but a great deal of his personal wealth as well. The Pope, as the Nazis incessantly pointed out, employed numerous Jews in the Vatican and urged Catholic universities outside of the Reich to hire fleeing Jewish scholars. Thousands of Jews found refuge in the churches of Rome and the Pope directed his foot soldiers to provide similar accommodations for Hitler's targets elsewhere in Europe.

Not mentioned in The Defamation of Pius XII are the Pope's efforts on behalf of the Allies. As is documented in the anti-Pius book, Hitler's Pope, the Pope delivered intercepted Nazi war plans to the Allies and participated in a plot to assassinate Hitler. Rather than just criticize Hitler's Pope, McInerny would have been well served to read it too.

The idea that the Pope stood silent during World War II, McInerny proves, is simply not true. The very opposite view prevailed during the war years. "Pope Is Said To Plead For Jews Listed For Removal From France," "Vichy Seizes Jews; Pope Pius Ignored," "Pope Said To Help In Ransoming Jews," and "Pope Decries War Dictators and Racism" were just a few of the headlines that could be read in the New York Times during World War II.

If Hitler's victims saw the Pope as a beacon amidst darkness, how did the forces of darkness view Pius XII and his Church?

A leading Nazi publication labeled Pius "The Deputy of the Jew-God," while Hitler aide Martin Borman stated bluntly, "The ideas of National Socialism and of Christianity are irreconcilable." Thousands of Catholic priests died in concentration camps. The Nazis shut down scores of churches. The Nazis jammed the signal of Vatican Radio. Catholic schools, convents, and organizations were also targeted for eradication. "Of the 441 churches of the archdiocese" of Posen in Poland, McInerny notes, "only 30 were still open" after the Nazis had taken over. Hitler even had Borman devise a plan called "Operation Pontiff," in which the real Pope would be deposed in favor of a pro-Nazi "Pope." Needless to say, the Fuhrer would have hardly needed to take such action if he had already had "Hitler's Pope" in the Vatican.

The 1939 Papal Encyclical, "Darkness Over the Earth" so infuriated the Nazis that it was only allowed to be printed in the Reich after the word "Germany" was substituted for the word "Poland," to make it seem that the Pope was sympathizing with the Nazis. Generating a great fury of anger was the Pope's Christmas message of 1941 in which he "deplored the dishonor to human dignity, liberty and life ... which cry out for vengence." The next year he cried for mercy for "the hundreds of thousands who, through no fault of their own, only because of their nationality or descent, are condemned to death." The Nazis censored both holiday messages and had print shops that dared to publish it closed down. The fact that the Pope lived in a country surrounded by the Axis Powers made his words and deeds all the more courageous.

If the Pope could not stop such offenses against members of his own flock, why do critics of Pius XII believe that he could have stopped an enormity on a much grander scale against those outside of the Church?

The Vatican, of course, possessed no tanks or bombers. Its only weapon was the power of persuasion over its followers, who were a minority in many of the countries in question, including Germany. The idea that the Pope could do without armament what took Britain and its later allies the Soviet Union, the United States, etc., more than five years to do is simply delusional. Assigning the Pope undue temporal power is a fantasy shared by many of the Catholic Church's friends and enemies alike. The truth is that the Pope's ability to counteract Hitler's evil designs was very limited.

McInerny's strident tone and digressive attacks upon abortion, homosexuality, and birth control reveal that like the wartime Pontiff's critics, the truth about Pius XII may be less important to the author than "larger" questions. One senses that McInerny sees the issue of Pius XII's vindication as a brickbat to beat opponents on issues unrelated to the Pope's World War II-era sympathies. This is disappointing, yet if it is so, he chose his issue wisely as the case for Pius XII is airtight. Despite the book's flaws, McInerny makes the case in a concise and highly readable way.

Whatever its motivations, The Defamation of Pius XII serves as an effective antidote to the fiction that has masqueraded as fact regarding the Vatican and World War II. It is not likely to persuade the Church's most closed-minded enemies, however, who are more interested in promoting ideology than in promoting fact. This is unfortunate. The case that is commonly presented, as The Defamation of Pius XII concludes, is full of "lies so large they would have embarrassed Goebbels himself."