Debunking the myth of ‘Hitler’s pope’
By Canton CitizenDear Editor:
Dr. John Tamilio III made some spurious comments about Pope Pius XII in his sermon at the Interfaith Thanksgiving Service held at B’nai Tikvah (Canton Citizen – November 29). I was surprised that at an interfaith meeting, hopefully designed to promote harmony and unity, he would use discredited writer John Cornwell’s Hitler’s Pope as accepted wisdom. A far better source of factual information on Pope Pius during World War II is Rabbi David G. Dalin’s 2005 book The Myth of Hitler’s Pope. In it, he points out the following:
As I have demonstrated, there is abundant firsthand, eyewitness testimony from Jewish contemporaries of Pius XII to further verify his historic role in rescuing Jews; as does the fact that he sheltered Jews at Castel Gandolfo and at the Vatican during the roundup of Italian Jews. “More than all others,” recalled Elio Toaff, an Italian Jew who lived through the Holocaust and later became chief rabbi of Rome, “we had the opportunity of experiencing the great compassionate goodness and magnanimity of the pope during the unhappy years of the persecution and terror, when it seemed that for us there was no longer an escape.” The perspective and judgment of Pius’s Jewish contemporaries, such as Rabbi Toaff and numerous other Holocaust survivors, are crucial to understanding how Pius’s pontificate and legacy should be viewed and evaluated by Jews and historians today.
Hitler’s pope? Hardly. Dan Kurzman, who wrote the book A Special Mission – Hitler’s Secret Plot to Seize the Vatican and Kidnap Pope Pius XII,” is a past winner of the National Jewish Book Award and a former Jerusalem correspondent for NBC News. His book points out that the mission was to seize the Vatican and kidnap the pope. Documentary evidence later revealed that all members of the Curia were to be assassinated, and that even the pope might share their fate.
Dr. Tamilio, I am sure, is aware that a significant thread in Germany’s history of anti-Semitism can be traced back to Martin Luther. A few years before his death Luther wrote a 65,000-word screed that cast in concrete his virulent anti-Semitism. I will not give the title of his paper because it is so offensive.
All of us should remember the truism: “Those who fail to understand their history are doomed to repeat it.”
Paul M. Blake
Short URL: https://www.thecantoncitizen.com/?p=47282
Posted by Canton Citizen
on Dec 15 2018. Filed under From One Citizen to Another, Opinion.
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