Hitler's foe

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A man publicly labeled as "Hitler's pope" instead deserves to have his historical reputation cleared, according to a spate of recent scholarship on World War II and Pope Pius XII.

Indeed, the wartime pope should be recognized as a "righteous gentile" at Israel's most important Holocaust memorial, said scholar Ronald J. Rychlak, who made his case last year in his book "Righteous Gentiles: How Pius XII and the Catholic Church Saved Half a Million Jews from the Nazis."

"He deserves that designation," said Mr. Rychlak, a law professor and associate dean for academic affairs at the University of Mississippi in Oxford and an adviser to the Vatican's delegation to the United Nations. "When you ... look at all of the people who were sheltered and clothed by the Catholic Church under the inspiration and direction of Pius XII, he did tremendous work saving victims of the Nazis."

Rabbi David G. Dalin made a similar estimate and recommendation in his book "The Myth of Hitler's Pope: How Pope Pius XII Rescued Jews from the Nazis," citing Jewish historian and diplomat Pinchas Lapide's estimate that Pius and the Catholic Church rescued more than 700,000 Jews during the Holocaust.

Since 1962, Israel's Holocaust Memorial and Museum at Yad Vashem has honored as "righteous gentiles" about 11,000 non-Jews who risked their lives to save Jews during the Holocaust, and the rabbi said Pius should be honored among them.

"He probably rescued more Jews than any single individual. From that vantage point, Pius XII deserves recognition," said Mr. Dalin, professor of history and political science at Ave Maria University, a Catholic university in Naples, Fla.

Pius, born in 1876 as Eugenio Pacelli, reigned as head of the Catholic Church from 1939 until his death in 1958. During the war, the Vatican remained neutral, as required by the treaty with German ally Benito Mussolini that guaranteed church sovereignty over a small sliver of the city of Rome. But the Vatican sympathized with the Allied powers, said William Doino Jr., a Catholic researcher and writer living in western Connecticut and a contributing editor to Inside the Vatican, an international monthly Roman Catholic publication.

"He was on the right side of the struggle and an enemy of Hitler," Mr. Doino said.

After the war, Italian leftists responded to Vatican condemnation of communism with propaganda saying Pius was in league with the Nazis, but their attempts to blacken his reputation failed, Mr. Rychlak said.

"When Pius XII died in 1958, there were tributes from virtually every Jewish group around the world," he said.