Christians, Jews, and Pius XII

One of the most successful big lies of our day, ever more widely believed, has it that Christians are natural haters of Jews. A new book, The Pope’s Jews, by Sam Waagenaar, serves the myth well with its titillating observations. It is so bad that it may go far: full page advertising, a scandalhinting title, and, for the opening, a four-page vulgar joke about Jews and a pope—all these are designed to ensure it a certain success. But the book is still only a minor piece in the grand campaign, based on anti-Catholicism but fueled by the hope of sales to a credulous public. This campaign is damaging the community and savaging the truth.

According to the myth, Christians were silent partners of Nazi executioners, and the partnership was a logical conclusion of the anti-Jewish vindictiveness encouraged by the New Testament and Christian theology. Their literature and piety (the myth continues) remind Christians that Jews are deicides, a damned people worthy of punishment; consequently Christians condoned the savage Nazi persecution of the Jews. Their moral failure—or treachery—is typified in “the silence of Pope Pius XII.” Many broadcasters of the myth now simply assume the “responsibility” of Pius and the Catholic community for the massacre of the Jews. The success of this myth is a matter of deep regret to all who treasure reason, truth, and justice. It must also pain those who had rejoiced in improved relations between the Jewish and Catholic communities, a rapprochement inspired in part by the obvious willingness of millions of American Catholics to lay down their lives fighting Hitler, whose chief immorality in Catholic eyes was the murder of innocent Jews. President Roosevelt could never have won Catholic support for his declaration of war against Germany in 1941 if Catholics had not already seen Hitler as a moral monster. Catholics of Irish, Italian, and German stock, isolationists in 1939, needed a stronger moral casus belli than the danger to England. They found it only in the atrocities perpetrated

PW

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Peter Wells

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One of the most successful big lies of our day, ever more widely believed, has it that Christians are natural haters of Jews. A new book, The Pope’s Jews, by Sam Waagenaar, serves the myth well with its titillating observations. It is so bad that it may go far: full page advertising, a scandalhinting title, and, for the opening, a four-page vulgar joke about Jews and a pope—all these are designed to ensure it a certain success. But the book is still only a minor piece in the grand campaign, based on anti-Catholicism but fueled by the hope of sales to a credulous public. This campaign is damaging the community and savaging the truth.

According to the myth, Christians were silent partners of Nazi executioners, and the partnership was a logical conclusion of the anti-Jewish vindictiveness encouraged by the New Testament and Christian theology. Their literature and piety (the myth continues) remind Christians that Jews are deicides, a damned people worthy of punishment; consequently Christians condoned the savage Nazi persecution of the Jews. Their moral failure—or treachery—is typified in “the silence of Pope Pius XII.” Many broadcasters of the myth now simply assume the “responsibility” of Pius and the Catholic community for the massacre of the Jews. The success of this myth is a matter of deep regret to all who treasure reason, truth, and justice. It must also pain those who had rejoiced in improved relations between the Jewish and Catholic communities, a rapprochement inspired in part by the obvious willingness of millions of American Catholics to lay down their lives fighting Hitler, whose chief immorality in Catholic eyes was the murder of innocent Jews. President Roosevelt could never have won Catholic support for his declaration of war against Germany in 1941 if Catholics had not already seen Hitler as a moral monster. Catholics of Irish, Italian, and German stock, isolationists in 1939, needed a stronger moral casus belli than the danger to England. They found it only in the atrocities perpetrated