The possible canonisation of Pius XII is arousing intense controversy. The debate centres on the Pope?s public silence about the Holocaust. Responding here to the critics, the Jesuit relator of the cause asks for a fair assessment of the Pope?s record. ATTACKS against Pius XII and the cause of his canonisation continue to be launched. I feel bound in conscience to subscribe to the judgement made in Newsweek for 30 March last year, that with regard to Pius XII something shameful is going on.

In my capacity as relator ? that is, the independent, autonomous judge ? appointed by Pope John Paul II to examine the materials presented by the promoters of the cause of Pius XII, I have carefully examined an enormous mass of materials by historians of various backgrounds and points of view.

In this exacting work, I have been helped by the fact that as a German I know the history of my country and have lived under the Nazi regime in both Germany and Holland. The fact that several members of my family were killed by the Nazis and that I myself had twice to go into exile in order to avoid a similar fate, allows me to be particularly sensitive to the monstrous crime of the Holocaust and to the justified reactions of Jews to what millions of their people have suffered.

The materials in my possession confirm that no one of whatever station or organisation did as much to help the Jews as did Pius XII and, at his explicit instructions, the Roman Catholic Church.

Jews from all over the world have recognised this fact, including the World Jewish Congress. As Fr Michael O?Carroll recorded in his book Pius XII: Greatness Dishonoured, published in 1981: On 12 October 1945 the World Jewish Congress made a gift of 2,000,000 lire to the Vatican as a token of gratitude. Among those who mourned the death of Pius XII, pronouncing notable tributes, were President Ben-Zevi of Israel, Dr Nahum Goldmann, president of the World Jewish Congress and the World Zionist Organisation, and many rabbis, including Dr Israel Goldstein of New York. Golda Meir?s cablegram to the Vatican read: ?We share in the grief of humanity at the passing away of His Holiness Pope Pius XII. In a generation afflicted by wars and discords, he upheld the highest ideals of peace and compassion. When fearful martyrdom came to our people in the decade of Nazi terror, the voice of the Pope was raised for the victims. The life of our times was enriched by a voice speaking out on the great moral truths above the tumult of daily conflict. We mourn a great servant of peace.? Already in 1945 Moshe Sharett, Israel?s first Foreign Minister and second Prime Minister, met Pius XII and said later: ?I told him that my first duty was to thank him, and through him, the Catholic Church, on behalf of the Jewish public, for all they had done in various countries to rescue Jews, to save children and Jews in general.?

The list is by no means exhaustive, and similar statements were made by rabbis, Jewish organisations and countless individual Jews. As contemporaries and survivors of the Nazi persecution, they had firsthand experience and direct knowledge of what they were saying. Nevertheless, their witness is today largely ignored by many who were still children or not yet born at the time of the Holocaust.

The public attacks on Pius XII began with a young German playwright, Rolf Hochhuth, in his play Der Stellvertreter (The Deputy), published in 1963. From the essay that Hochhuth wrote to substantiate his accusations, it is clear that he is an amateur in the field of history. Well-informed Jews such as Dr Marcus Melchior, the chief rabbi of Denmark, the historian Pinchas Lapide, and the Hungarian scholar Jen? Levai, strongly criticised Hochhuth.

Sir d?Arcy Osborne, British envoy to the Vatican before and during the Second World War, strongly protested against the play.

Hochhuth was publicly disgraced in Britain and elsewhere when, with exactly the same anti-historical methods which he used against Pius XII, he wrote the play Die Soldaten (The Soldiers) in which, without a shred of evidence, he accused Winston Churchill of having ordered the murder of the Polish General Sikorski and then that of the pilot, whose plane crashed close to Gibraltar, causing the death of the general. But the pilot, in fact, survived and brought charges against Hochhuth. After serious examination of the case, Hochhuth was discredited.

Another irresponsible critic of Pius XII is Robert Katz, author of Death in Rome (New York, 1967). When in 1968 the book was translated into Italian, and made into a film in Italy, Katz was condemned by the Italian Supreme Court for defamation. The sentence of the court reads: Robert Katz wished to defame Pius XII, attributing to him actions, decisions and sentiments which no objective fact and no witness authorised him to do.

In the 1960s two books by Jewish historians were published that were unfavourable to Pius XII: G?nter Lewy?s The Catholic Church and Nazi Germany (New York, 1964) and Saul Friedlander?s Pius XII and the Third Reich (New York, 1966). Fr Robert Graham SJ, an internationally recognised historian and specialist in this period, reviewed Lewy?s book in the journal of the American and Canadian Jesuits, America. He expressed amazement at the extraordinary credulity of Lewy where the Nazi documents about church and Vatican matters are concerned. Nowhere does he display any awareness that he is dealing with tendentious and mendacious documents. . . . The liberties he takes with the original texts are an insult to serious historians. In an even longer review of Friedlander?s book in America, Graham concluded: In my reasonably wide reading of professionally written history books, never have I found such massive uncritical use of primary sources, such wholesale arbitrary and ill-informed commentary, such carelessness in checking the basic facts on which speculation is based, so many irrelevancies erected into significant events.

Another unimpeachable source, Dr Robert Kempner, also criticised the books of Lewy and Friedlander. Kempner, a fugitive from Nazi Germany and later deputy chief US prosecutor at the Nuremberg trials, interrogated the top Nazi leaders and studied the relevant documents.

When Jen? Levai published his book Hungarian Jewry and the Papacy (English edition: London, 1968) in which he refutes Hochhuth?s falsehoods, he asked Kempner to write a prologue and epilogue to his book. Kempner accepted the invitation and on this occasion strongly defended Pius XII and the Catholic Church. In the epilogue he curtly dismisses the books written by Lewy and Friedlander, stating that neither provides any reason for changing this standpoint. Kempner also attested that Pius XII repeatedly protested against the persecution of the Jews and that the assumption that these protests could have stopped Hitler is completely unfounded.

Today these assertions are further vindicated by an enormous mass of documents. In fact, in 1964 Pope Paul VI ordered that all Vatican documents regarding the Second World War be made public. Subsequently, a highly qualified team of historians produced the monumental work Actes et Documents du Saint Si?ge relatifs ? la Seconde Guerre Mondiale. The 12 volumes contain 5,100 documents edited according to exacting scientific standards. People who demand that the Vatican publish the documents regarding this period are ill informed.

I was surprised when several Jewish friends, university professors like myself who have written about Pius XII and the Holocaust, candidly told me that they had never studied this important work; some did not even know it existed. They also admitted that they had never read the Acts of the Nuremberg trials. This unjustifiable insouciance explains why Pius XII is still being unjustly accused and why these accusations are routinely repeated in the mass media.

For example, there is the alleged silence of Pius XII with regard to the Nazi persecution of the Jews. The truth is that Pius XII repeatedly and publicly condemned the persecution of innocent people for the sole reason of their race. At that time, everyone understood to whom he was referring. This is even affirmed by the Nazis themselves, who accused the Pope of acting as the mouthpiece of the Jewish war-mongers. One only needs to read Hitler?s Secret Conversations (New York, 1953), the diaries of Goebbels, the crude statements of Rosenberg and Bormann and other Nazi leaders to understand their hostility to Pius XII and the Catholic Church. Other very revealing sources in this respect are the Nazi newspapers and journals such as Der V?lkische Beobachter, Der Angriff, Der St?rmer and Das Schwarze Korps.

It is true that Pius XII in his public protests never used the term Jew. He had excellent reasons not to do so. He knew that Hitler was a pathologically obsessed anti-Semite. Whenever the word Jew was mentioned in his presence, he flew into a rage and intensified the criminal persecution of the latter. In such circumstances a truly responsible leader thinks before he speaks, and does not simply go ahead saying, Let wisdom be damned, and cause an explosion. Pius XII also avoided more vehement public declarations because experience had taught him not only that they did not save a single Jewish life, but, on the contrary, that they triggered even more violent persecutions of the Jews.

A case in point is the denunciation of the Nazis by the Dutch Catholic bishops. In July 1942 they ordered their priests to read from the pulpits of all their churches a fiery protest against the deportation of their Jewish co-nationals. Originally the leaders of all the Christian Churches in Holland had agreed to make such a public protest, but when the Gestapo were informed, they immediately threatened to deport Jews who had been baptised as Christians, which hitherto had not occurred. The Roman Catholic bishops alone did not give in to this blackmail. The consequences were disastrous: Jews who had joined the Lutheran, the Calvinist, or other Christian Churches were not deported in August 1942, whereas those who had become Catholics were. The Gestapo forced the Dutch newspapers to publish a statement affirming that because of the public protest of the Catholic clergy, Jews who had become Catholics would henceforth be considered our worst enemies and be deported at the earliest opportunity.

One of the 600 Catholic Jews who were murdered in Auschwitz as a result was St Edith Stein. On 2 August 1942 she was arrested by the Gestapo with her sister, deported to Poland and killed a week later. It has been repeatedly stated by some Jewish authors that the only reason for her violent death was the fact that she was of Jewish blood. This version is not the complete story. Certainly, Edith Stein would not have been killed if she had not been of Jewish origin. But it is equally certain that she would not have been arrested at that time if the Dutch bishops had not protested.

The action of the Dutch bishops had important repercussions. Pius XII had already prepared the text of a public protest against the persecution of the Jews. Shortly before this text was sent to L?Osservatore Romano, news reached him of the disastrous consequences of the Dutch bishops? initiative. He concluded that public protests, far from alleviating the fate of the Jews, aggravated their persecution and he decided that he could not take the responsibility of his own intervention having similar and probably even much more serious consequences. Therefore he burnt the text he had prepared. The International Red Cross, the nascent World Council of Churches and other Christian Churches were fully aware of such consequences of vehement public protests and, like Pius XII, they wisely avoided them.

The only effective way of helping the Jews consisted in shielding them secretly from the Nazis. This was the strategy adopted by Pius XII. Pinchas Lapide, after many years of research in Jewish sources, came to the conclusion that the Catholic Church, at Pius XII?s instructions, saved between 700,000 and 860,000 Jewish lives.

The cause of the beatification and canonisation of Pope Pius XII, who is rightly venerated by many millions of Catholics, will not be stopped or delayed by the unjustifiable and calumnious attacks against this great and saintly man.

There is another consideration to be made in this context. We welcome any information and documented criticism. But those who launch these gratuitous attacks should realise that they are trampling on the sensibilities of Catholics and in doing so they hinder efforts to build better relations between the Catholic Church and Jews. This is most regrettable. May truth, justice and fairness finally prevail with regard to Pius XII, to whom so many Jews and their descendants owe their lives.

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