Pope Pius XII neither caused the Holocaust nor did it lay within his reach to halt it. Why then is he the center of controversy? Why do writers want to make him either a saint or sinner? Rolf Hochuth demonized Pius XII in his famous play, "The Deputy". Outraged, apologists then rushed to defend the pope, not infrequently overreaching themselves in his justification. Above and beyond this controversy, why does the question of Christianity and the Holocaust still grip us at the beginning of a new century and millennium? One suspects that we who live today in a post-Holocaust world yearn for a champion - a martyr who would have been ready to risk all in defiance of Hitler. No person of stature ever did this - not Pius XII, not anyone else. Throwing the spotlight relentlessly on Pius XII has skewed the question surrounding Catholicism and the Holocaust, depriving us of a record of what the entire church did or did not do. Such a record is provided for the first time in the first half of "The Catholic Church and the Holocaust". European bishops displayed a shocking disparity in their attitudes toward Jews and in their bearing during the Holocaust.
On the positive side, the record of those who tried to help Jews is filled with the names of ordinary Christians, people of the pulpit and pews, among them many outstanding women. The Holocaust ended in 1945 but the Catholic Church did not come to terms with the Shoah until 1965. How this occurred is a story worth telling. Those who perpetrated the Holocaust committed suicide at the end of the war, or were tried and executed after it, or vanished into obscurity. But the men and women who resisted the Holocaust lived on after it to help bring an end to the church's equivocal stand on antisemitism. Theirs was a rich heritage that culminated in the Second Vatican Council's affirmation of the permanence of the covenant between God and his Chosen People.
- ISBN10 0253337259
- ISBN13 9780253337252
- Publish Date 1 September 2000 (first published 1 January 2000)
- Publish Status Out of Print
- Out of Print 29 March 2011
- Publish Country US
- Imprint Indiana University Press
- Format Hardcover
- Pages 328
- Language English