In this engaging clip, Cy Kellett welcomes apologist Marcellino D’Ambrosio to discuss the controversial papacy of Pius XII during World War II. Marcellino addresses the complexities of the Pope’s neutrality and the misconceptions surrounding his actions, shedding light on the historical context and the significant support he received from the Jewish community after the war.
Transcript:
Caller: The position adopted by the papacy, specifically Pius XII during World War II. Why did the Pope immediately adopt a position of neutrality in light of the known terrible actions of the Nazis? It’s a loaded question. I’ve done a lot of reading on it, but it’s not a bad question. It’s a perfectly fair question.
It’s very disturbing that the Church wasn’t more strident in opposition.
Cy: Okay, Dr. D’Ambrosio.
Marcellino: You have to kind of understand, first of all, that Pius XII after the war was hailed as a hero by Jews and was hailed as a hero by a lot of people. And it really is kind of a black legend that came about later through a play in the 1960s that painted him as Hitler’s Pope. So there has actually been a very slanderous kind of revisionist history to paint him as a collaborator or as a fan of Hitler and not having done enough.
On the other hand, the Chief Rabbi of Rome not only converted to Catholicism after the war, but he took the Pope’s name. His baptismal name is Eugenio. That’s how much he thought the Pope did for the Jewish community in World War II.
Now, I just have to say that being vehement or taking a stand against Hitler publicly led to the imprisonment of a large number of the Catholic clergy. I don’t know if you know this, but Dachau was the place for Catholic clergy to be sent. Over 1,000 priests died there, and many more thousands were there. It’s kind of a fascinating story, honestly, the whole Dachau thing.
But Hitler knew that his greatest opponent, his greatest adversary, the greatest trouble he was going to have, was going to be from the Catholic Church. So the Pope had to walk a very fine line because actually, when his predecessor, Pius XI, sent an encyclical *Mit Brennender Sorge*, which was anti-Nazi, and he had it read in German pulpits, those who read it were thrown into Dachau or worse.
You know, in Holland, when the Catholic community spoke out against the rounding up of Jews, the Nazis responded by rounding up Catholic Jews, including Edith Stein, the very next day, and making them the first ones to be shipped off to Auschwitz. So, you know, speaking out against Hitler sounds great, but unfortunately, it actually can lead to very just the wrong kind of results for Catholics and non-Catholics, Jews and Gentiles alike.
So in order to preserve neutrality and preserve Vatican City, which was actually sheltering Jews and hiding not U.S. prisoners, but Allied prisoners, it was not done by the Pope directly. There were 4,000 people being hidden around Rome, stashed in houses and in convents. Assisi was full of Jews in convents.
One of the fascinating things about World War II and Italy is that the Nazis came into all the major cities in Italy and took over, and the Gestapo took over and they started rounding up Jews. But Italians, with the Church leading the Italians, were able to save 70 to 80% of the Jews of Italy.
Seventy to eighty percent of the Jews everywhere else the Nazis occupied were killed. But 70 to 80% were saved through an underground railroad that was operated largely by the Catholic Church. And so Pius couldn’t overtly say he was doing this and couldn’t overtly oppose Hitler, or Vatican City would have been overrun and Catholics would have been made worse examples of. You know, it would have been counterproductive.
So it had to be somewhat undercover in order to be successful and to minimize the loss, minimize the reprisals of Hitler against the Church.
So, anyway, that’s what I can tell you. I’m not an absolute expert on this, but I will just tell you that a Protestant historian has done a great job in writing a book. I don’t know if you let me see. I have the book right here, as a matter of fact, a historian named Rodney Stark. Rodney Stark, okay. He’s in Baylor. I think he may have passed on, and I’m not sure if he’s still alive.
But he is a Protestant, a Lutheran historian, and he wrote a book. He was so sick of this nonsense about Pius XII not, you know, being Hitler’s Pope that he debunked it in a book where he debunks other myths that are bad history about the Catholic Church. Now, he’s not Catholic, but he’s a historian.
So the name of the book is *Bearing False Witness*, and you can get it on Amazon. *Bearing False Witness* by Rodney Stark. Phenomenal book. Hits the Crusades, hits Pius XII and the Nazis, hits a lot of topics that we deal with all the time when we talk to people about the Catholic Church. And these objections are brought up time and time again. You know, the Spanish Inquisition.
So anyway, it’s a fascinating read, very well documented, and these questions are addressed, including your question.
It’s a pointed question, but not a bad question. These are good things to talk about. One of the things you do discover, though, is one of the things I get a kick out of the Second World War is the Italian general staff. They just ignored the Nazi orders to turn over the Jews. It wasn’t until the Italians had lost to the Allied invasion that the Jews were turned over under Nazi command.
But I love it that the Italian generals were just like, “I’m not turning over Jews.” And I know it’s a horrible story of fascism in Italy, but turning over the Jews was not an Italian proclivity. That was not something that they got involved in.
Absolutely not. And they certainly weren’t interested in cooperating a whole lot with Hitler, even when they were forced to be allies.
I feel like the Italian attitude was, “Why would we turn over the Jews? Leave us alone.”
Why would we turn them over? They just didn’t do it. And I know that in Croatia, where the Italian section in Croatia, the Jews tried to get to the Italians because the Italians just wouldn’t do it. They were like, “We’re not interested in turning over Jews to the Nazis.”