Madam, - In response to Peter Thompson (October 30th) let me make two points. Firstly, Eugenio Pacelli, the future Pius XII, was anti-Semitic. Secondly, he changed.
In a report from Munich in 1919 a bout Rosa Luxembourg and her companions he used such terms as "a gang of young women. . . Jews like all the rest of them" and "a Russian and a Jew, dirty, with drugged eyes". He himself was Italian, but his casually racist attitudes would have found an echo throughout Europe at that time and not just towards Jews. If the word "Irish" were to replace "Jew" in the above quotations, it would have fitted comfortably in the mouths of many of Pacelli's English contemporaries.
Those same Englishmen, along with many of the "despised" Irish, would also have spoken disparagingly of Jews. This was an age when few would have objected to such attitudes - an age which had yet to encounter Adolf Hitler and had yet to witness the industrialised slaughter of the concentration camps.
Between 1919 and 1939, when he became pope, Pacelli changed. By the time he left Germany in 1929 he had denounced Nazi ideology in no fewer than 40 speeches and this continued after Hitler came to power. In Lourdes in 1935 he spoke of ideologies "possessed by the superstition of race and blood". At Notre Dame in Paris two years later he spoke of Germany as "that noble and powerful nation. . . led astray into an ideology of race".
Peter Thompson is sceptical about the New York Timesreport of the meeting between Ribbentrop and Pius XII in March 1940. The New York Timesprides itself on being a reliable journal of record. So does the Times of London and it too reported on that same meeting. In the edition of March 12th, 1940, its Rome correspondent wrote: "to judge by Ribbentrop's face as he drove away, he had to listen to some plain speaking".
The report adds that, "according to a trustworthy source", Ribbentrop was told that any papal support for a German peace initiative "would be conditional upon due reparation being made not only to Roman Catholics but to the non-Catholics who had been ill-treated in Poland". The only significant non-Catholic group in Poland at that time were Jews; the NYTis more explicit on this point.
When both the NYTand the Timesreports are taken together, there can be little doubt that on March 11th, 1940 there was a confrontation between Pius XII and Ribbentrop in which Pius spoke of the plight of the Jews with formidable conviction. In other words, in the two decades between 1919 and 1939 Eugenio Pacelli had risen above the limitations of his background to grow as a man and a spiritual leader. Surely this is good news for all of us.
Sir Martin Gilbert, official biographer of Churchill, who is a Jew and a leading authority on the Holocaust, has said that Pius XII, far from deserving obloquy, should be a candidate for Yad Vashem's order of "righteous Gentiles". - Yours, etc,