Blessed Pius XII and The Jewish Chronicle

My friend Ann Farmer has this letter in this week's Catholic Herald:

One hopes the beatification process of Pope Pius XII (Report, December 25, Letters, January 15) will explore whether he could have done more to save Jews from the Holocaust, but in fact this was not the Jewish emphasis during the War and for many years afterwards.

The Jewish Chronicle, in reporting his death in 1958, was more interested in his failure to recognise the State of Israel - especially in view of his role as "chief counsellor and intermediary" in obtaining a meeting between Nahum Sokolow and Pope Benedict XV in negotiations preparing the way for the Balfour Declaration - but recognised as a a redeeming factor that under "the Nazi occupation of Rome large numbers of Jews found refuge within the Vatican City".

On Pius XII's election as pope in 1939 he was seen by the Chronicle as following in the footsteps of Pius XI as regards anti-Nazism; at the same time the Nazis reacted with dismay.

For many years after the War the emphasis was on Jewish escape from total annihilation, and during the War the Chronicle reported that the Vichy government in 1942 intensified its round-up of Jews in spite of the Pope's protest.

In 1942 the Chronicle also referred to "the Pope's unequivocal pronouncements upon the curse which is anti-Semitism"; in 1943 he was reported as condemning the "vile and godless doctrine of race and blood and race".

Such pronouncements were seen by both Jews and anti-Semites as they were intended to be seen, as condemnations of Nazism - even before his election as pope, Cardinal Pacelli had been caricatured as a "Jew" in Nazi publications for his stance on race.