Pius XII Prioritized Ties with Hitler over Helping the Jews

June 13 2023

Since 1965, there has been discussion in Catholic circles about the possibility of conferring sainthood on Eugenio Pacelli, who held the title of Pope Pius XII from 1939 until 1958. Besides the lack, thus far, of verifiable miracles ascribed to Pius—a prerequisite for sainthood—there is the matter of his checkered, and highly controversial, wartime record. Abraham Foxman and Ben Cohen write:

The foremost problem with the historical debate up until recently has been the absence from public view of definitive documentation about the Vatican’s wartime role; locked out of its archives for decades, the many reputable historians and scholars who took one side or the other had no access to the critical records concerning Pius that were finally unveiled by Pope Francis in 2019, who declared as he did so that the Church should “not be afraid of history.”

Thanks to the opening of the archives, the authoritative account of Pius’s actions (or lack of them) with regard to the Nazi extermination program was finally published last year. The Brown University historian David Kertzer’s book The Pope at War . . . astonishingly has made no impact on the deliberations of the two main parties to the dispute. [Pius], Kertzer writes, manifestly failed ever to “denounce the Nazis clearly for their ongoing campaign to exterminate Europe’s Jews, or even allow the word ‘Jew’ to escape from his lips as they were being systematically murdered.”

That does not mean that Pius did not privately disapprove of the Nazi persecution nor make his objections discreetly clear in personal encounters. What Kertzer shows us, though, is that Pius’s direct back channel to Hitler—opened early on during the war—made him even more wary of displeasing the Nazi dictator. For example, he relates how, when the Nazis began rounding up Rome’s Jews under Pius’s very nose in October 1943, the pope sent an emissary to the German ambassador at the Vatican to inquire whether the operation was strictly necessary at that moment. When the ambassador explained that the round-up had been ordered by Hitler himself and asked whether the Vatican still wanted to protest, Pius’s emissary demurred.

Ultimately, Pius made a conscious decision from the beginning of his papacy to prioritize the retention of good relations with Mussolini and avoid offending Hitler, in order to “plan for a future in which Germany would dominate continental Europe,” as Kertzer writes.

Read more at Times of Israel

More about: Catholic Church, Holocaust, Jewish-Catholic relations, Pius XII

Egypt Is Trapped by the Gaza Dilemma It Helped to Create

Feb. 14 2025

Recent satellite imagery has shown a buildup of Egyptian tanks near the Israeli border, in violation of Egypt-Israel agreements going back to the 1970s. It’s possible Cairo wants to prevent Palestinians from entering the Sinai from Gaza, or perhaps it wants to send a message to the U.S. that it will take all measures necessary to keep that from happening. But there is also a chance, however small, that it could be preparing for something more dangerous. David Wurmser examines President Abdel Fatah el-Sisi’s predicament:

Egypt’s abysmal behavior in allowing its common border with Gaza to be used for the dangerous smuggling of weapons, money, and materiel to Hamas built the problem that exploded on October 7. Hamas could arm only to the level that Egypt enabled it. Once exposed, rather than help Israel fix the problem it enabled, Egypt manufactured tensions with Israel to divert attention from its own culpability.

Now that the Trump administration is threatening to remove the population of Gaza, President Sisi is reaping the consequences of a problem he and his predecessors helped to sow. That, writes Wurmser, leaves him with a dilemma:

On one hand, Egypt fears for its regime’s survival if it accepts Trump’s plan. It would position Cairo as a participant in a second disaster, or nakba. It knows from its own history; King Farouk was overthrown in 1952 in part for his failure to prevent the first nakba in 1948. Any leader who fails to stop a second nakba, let alone participates in it, risks losing legitimacy and being seen as weak. The perception of buckling on the Palestine issue also resulted in the Egyptian president Anwar Sadat’s assassination in 1981. President Sisi risks being seen by his own population as too weak to stand up to Israel or the United States, as not upholding his manliness.

In a worst-case scenario, Wurmser argues, Sisi might decide that he’d rather fight a disastrous war with Israel and blow up his relationship with Washington than display that kind of weakness.

Read more at The Editors

More about: Egypt, Gaza War 2023