Plus XII & the Jews.

I commend Commonweal for publishing Michael R. Marrus's article, "The Missing" (January 13, 2006). It considerably advances our knowledge of the fate of Jewish orphans after World War II, and is far more nuanced than other pieces on the same subject. His conclusion that "today it seems clear that there was no campaign, at the very highest levels of the Catholic Church, to kidnap Jewish children in 1945-46," is welcome, even as Marrus criticizes the church on other issues. In light of those criticisms, I respectfully offer one of my own.

Toward the end of his article, Marrus comments: "It is only one of the ironies of this history that the laudatory passage about Pius written by Rabbi Isaac Halevi Herzog in March 1946 ('the Jewish people will remember eternally with profound gratitude the help rendered to so many of its suffering brethren ...') has been quoted again and again by the pope's defenders to advance the cause of Pius XII .... As we have seen from Jewish accounts of this meeting ... that sentence's effusive expression of gratitude to the Holy See, and to Pius personally, is more aptly seen as formulaic praise prefacing Rabbi Herzog's urgent petition for assistance from the Vatican" on the matter of postwar Jewish children. This is a serious error. First of all, the cause of Pius XII hardly rests on a single tribute; there are countless others--not to mention memoirs, oral testimonies, and primary documents on his behalf. Second, the letter that Pius's supporters have sometimes quoted is not the 1946 letter--which was released only recently, and which few know about--but a February 28, 1944 letter, written while the war was still raging, during the occupation of Rome, and is published in volume 10 of the Holy See's wartime Actes et Documents. It reads in part: "The people of Israel will never forget what His Holiness and his illustrious delegates, inspired by the eternal principles of religion which form the very foundations of true civilization, are doing for our unfortunate brothers and sisters in this most tragic hour of history, which is living proof of divine Providence in this world." This 1944 letter has nothing to do with postwar Jewish children, as it was not an issue at the time, and therefore cannot be explained away. It was a heartfelt, sincere expression of thanks to the Vatican for providing assistance to persecuted Jews. For Marrus to confuse this 1944 letter with the completely different 1946 letter, and give the worst possible interpretation to the latter, reveals how many historians--even very accomplished ones--are all too ready to indict Pope Pius XII, even when the facts dictate otherwise.

WILLIAM DOINO JR.

Weston, Conn.

THE AUTHOR REPLIES:

Mistakenly suggesting that my article on the Vatican and the Jewish orphans after the Holocaust seeks to "indict" the wartime pope, William Doino slips into a Manichean reading of the controversy over Jewish contacts with Pius XII on Holocaust-related matters. One either indicts or (with Doino) one praises unreservedly. With regard to Rabbi Herzog's letter to the pope of March 1946, the passage praising Pius XII has indeed been quoted repeatedly--although Doino is certainly correct that Herzog's equally effusive passage in a February 1944 communication has also been enlisted in the pope's cause. I urge readers to consider the desperate circumstances of the time, and that some Jews (and also, notably, Jacques Maritain) were pleading for papal help. Herzog wrote in March 1946, referring both to the issue of the children and to his call for forceful action against anti-Semitism by the Vatican: "Surely your Holiness will appreciate the poignancy and urgency of our historic appeal .... I leave the capital of Christendom confident in the hope that Your Holiness will stretch forth a helping hand to Israel, now undergoing its most grievous agony in the course of its two-thousand-year-old tragedy."

In my view, these and other communications call for a balanced interpretation, sensitive to the radically different perspectives of both sides.

MICHAEL R. MARRUS