I know a guy who is debating this, he thinks he didn’t really do anything and was a nazi collaborator. However my understanding, although superficial, says that he saved about 700,000 jews from the Nazis by hiding them and encouraging south american countries to accept them.
Conservative estimates show us that about 860,000 souls were saved by the Vatican’s actions, more than all of the relief organizations in Europe combined.
According to my understanding, he did what he thought he could, tho in retrospect maybe he could have done more, and I will also grant that the Vatican played politics with Nazi Germany & of course Mussolini’s regime as a survival mechanism.
I think we can agree that the site in the OP may be biased as it apparently is produced by a Catholic organization.
In my opinion, Pius XII didn’t encourage anti-semitism or the Holocaust, so he can’t be said to have harmed the Jews. But his efforts to prevent anti-semitism and the Holocaust were minimal, so he didn’t do anywhere near as much as he could of to help the Jews. The Pope’s main concern was protecting the Roman Catholic Church and he was willing to turn a blind eye towards what was happening to Jews and other non-Catholics in order to minimize attacks against the Church.
The usual defense given in defense of Pius was that if he had spoken out against the Nazi persecution of the Jews, it would have made things worse for the Jews. First, there’s no reason to believe this was true; in fact, Germany had a large Catholic population which might have heeded a Papal decree. (The OP’s site claims the Pope’s actions prevented persecution against the Jews in Hungary and Italy without explaining why similar actions wouldn’t have worked in Germany.) And second, considering the scope of the Holocaust it’s difficult to see how much worse things could supposedly have gotten.
And while there were certainly Jews who were saved by Catholics, this doesn’t mean that the Vatican can claim the credit for having saved these people. The number of Jews directly saved by the Vatican probably numbers in the hundreds not hundreds of thousands.
The simple answer is, helped- but not much. Not nearly enough.
Pius XII certainly was not complicit in the Holocaust, and book title’s like “Hitler’s Pope” are inaccurate and unfair. Pius had no love for Hitler, and wasn’t a supporter of the Nazis. However, Pius was usually more concerned with preserving the power, prestige and perks of the Church than he was in anything else, and he regarded Hitler as a wretched little man, but one with whom he could do business.
I don’t think Pius grasped the lengths to which antisemitism would drive Hitler. I don’t believe he ever could have conceived of Dachau or Auschwitz, nor wo0uld he have condoned the extermination of Jews. But I do think he shared the widespread disdain for Jews, and wasn’t about to get too excited about “normal” European antisemitism. As long as he perceived only routine pogroms and resettlement (things that had occurred in Europe for centuries), he was willing to turn a blind eye.
In my opinion, Pius XII wasn’t malicious, and took actions now and again to help individual Jews, or small groups of Jews. To that extent, he “helped.” But given the scale of the Holocaust, I think his actions look pretty feeble. I don’t regard him as evil, but I DO regard him as an embarrassment to the Church.
Astorian, having read some of Tom’s links, allow me to ask what exactly you would have had the Pope do and to what end? Tom’s links claim that some 860,000 Jewish lives were saved by the Pope’s actions. Not so feeble. I am sure that elements of the Church were complicit with the Nazis and that others worked quietly to do what they could. Some Church leaders were no doubt antisemitic; and some not. The institution of the Church certainly has been complicit with antisemitic actions through much of its history. But this particular Pope as a leader of the Church at that particular time, this individual human being? What more would you have had him do?
The evidence presented by Tom makes a strong case for the lack of a blind eye; instead it makes the case that the Pope (correctly or not) felt that more harm than good would result from direct public challange whereas he worked fairly well at saving lives without fanfare.
In Hungary, Father Giovanni Battista Montini, the future Paul VI, was working with authorities on a scheme that would guarantee safety to the country’s 800,000 Jews on condition they submit to baptism.