Proclaiming The Good News

Thu, 12 Mar 2009 00:00:00 -0400

Dean Inge was right. The preacher’s primary task is not to tell people what to do. It is to proclaim good news. Inge’s younger colleague at St. Paul’s, Canon V.A. Demant, put it thus in his book Christian Polity :

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For Pro-Lifers, A New Day

Tue, 11 Nov 2008 00:00:00 -0500

The worst aspect of an Obama presidency, I have been telling friends for months, will be his Supreme Court appointments. They will set the so-called constitutional right to an abortion in concrete for years to come. While this remains true, Sen. Obama’s victory challenges pro-lifers in two ways.

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Hitler, the War, and the Pope

Sun, 01 Oct 2000 00:00:00 -0400

Amid the flood of tributes to Pope Pius XII following his death on October 9, 1958, those of Jewish leaders were especially warm. “During the ten years of Nazi terror,” said Golda Meir, then Israeli representative to the United Nations and later Prime Minister of Israel, “the Pope raised his voice to condemn the persecutors and to commiserate with their victims.” Elio Toaff, who as Rome’s Chief Rabbi would one day welcome another pope to his synagogue, said that Italian Jews “more than anyone else . . . had the opportunity to appreciate the great kindness, filled with compassion and magnanimity, that the Pope displayed during the terrible years of persecution and terror.” The tributes of major rabbis in New York alone were so numerous that it took three issues of the New York Times to report them all. Praise came also from the Jewish press. “There was probably not a single ruler of our generation,” wrote the Winnipeg Jewish Post, “who did more to help the Jews in their hour of greatest tragedy . . . than the late Pope.”

The triumphal car got off to a good start. But vengeance came limping after in the form of the German playwright Rolf Hochhuth. His play The Deputy , first performed and published in 1963, portrayed Pius XII as indifferent to the Holocaust, concerned chiefly to preserve the financial interests of the institution over which he presided in imperial isolation. Born in 1931, Hochhuth was too young to have experienced the events of which he wrote. But his play captured the imagination of a generation starting to protest against authority in all forms. Ever since, the wartime Pontiff has been the antihero of a Black Legend. He has been cast as the one wartime leader who might have stopped the slaughter of six million Jews, but who failed to do so out of cowardice, cynicism, indifference, and even (in the recently expanded version of the indictment) anti“Semitism.

Acceptance of this legend is now so widespread that the Pope’s supposed “silence” during the Holocaust was the starting point for all media comment on John Paul II’s prayer for forgiveness of Catholic sins in March of this year and his subsequent visit to Israel. There are even Catholics willing to propagate the myth of Pius XII’s silence. Mercy Sister Carmel McEnroy, who holds professorships at a Catholic college and seminary, wrote in an article replete with feminist anger in the National Catholic Reporter : “It would have been nice if [John Paul II] had denounced the Holocaust and Rome’s silent acquiescence in it.”

Ronald J. Rychlak, a professor and dean at the University of Mississippi’s School of Law, claims that he had never heard of the Black Legend until a few years ago, when a friend of his “accused Pope Pius XII of having been a Nazi.” Suspecting that his friend might be onto something, Rychlak began to investigate. This book is the result. Starting in the 1920s and concluding with Pius XII’s death, Rychlak presents the judgment of the Pope’s contemporaries in rich detail. A concluding chapter analyzes the charges against the Pontiff in the form of ten questions and finds them without foundation.

“It is not true that contemporaries misjudge a man,” George Santayana wrote. “Contemporaries judge him much better than posterity, which is composed of critics no less egotistical, and obliged to rely exclusively on documents easily misinterpreted.” The New York Times is in the forefront today of those propagating the myth of Pius XII’s “silence.” As the story unfolded, however, the “newspaper of record” saw things differently:

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Proclaiming The Good News

For Pro-Lifers, A New Day

Hitler, the War, and the Pope