The Magazine

Pius the Good

The brief for a much-maligned pope.

Jun 12, 2006, Vol. 11, No. 37 • By WILLIAM DOINO JR.
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The Myth of Hitler's Pope

How Pope Pius XII Rescued Jews from the Nazis

by David G. Dalin

Regnery, 256 pp., $27.95

EVER SINCE THE GERMAN PLAYWRIGHT Rolf Hochhuth produced The Deputy--a long, unwatchable 1963 production that depicted Pope Pius XII as indifferent to the Holocaust--the notion that the Vatican bears a large portion of the guilt for Hitler's murder of six million Jews has waxed and waned. But it seemed mostly to be fading away, one of the sillier ventures in historical misunderstanding.

And then, suddenly in the late 1990s, it was back--and back with a vengeance. James Carroll published a long essay in the New Yorker in 1997 called "The Silence," setting up his 750-page book, Constantine's Sword, using Pius XII to indict all things Catholic. With the success of John Cornwell's ingeniously titled Hitler's Pope in 1999, the I-hate-Pius-XII books came fast and furious. Garry Wills's Papal Sin, Michael Phayer's The Catholic Church and the Holocaust, Susan Zuccotti's Under His Very Windows, David Kertzer's The Popes Against the Jews, Daniel Goldhagen's A Moral Reckoning--who could keep up with them all?

Well, one person who managed was David G. Dalin, a rabbi and historian who became increasingly bothered by these attacks on the role of the Vatican during World War II. In 2001--in the pages of this magazine, as it happens--Dalin published "Pius XII and the Jews," a 5,000-word blast at the anti-Pius ideologues. Every so often an essay comes along that changes the way people approach a controversial topic. After it appeared, Dalin's essay became one of the most talked about statements ever published on Pius XII: widely praised, challenged, and reprinted throughout the world.

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