New evidence shows how badly Pope Pius XII was maligned in the matter of the extermination of Jews by the Nazis. (Happy are you when people abuse you and persecute you and speak all kinds of calumny against you on my account,” as it says in Matthew.

A recent development has taken place in Holocaust studies. Newly two years ago, the international Raoul Wallenberg Foundation, a historical research institute, set out on a modest project. It wanted to mark with “House of Life” memorial plaques places where Jews were sheltered during the war. It found more than 500 such houses of life in Italy, France, Hungary, Belgium, and Poland.

Eduardo Eurnekian, chairman of the Foundation, wrote: “ …to our surprise, we learned that the overwhelming majority of Houses of Life were institutions related to the Catholic Church, including convents, monasteries, hospitals, boarding schools, etc.”

In Rome alone, some 4,500 people found refuge in churches and basilicas. In Warsaw, All Saints Church sheltered Jews, which was remarkable because the penalty for Poles who rescued Jews was the death camp or, more likely, instant execution.

The Raoul Wallenberg Foundation was named for a Swedish diplomat in Budapest during the war. He and Angelo Rotta, the papal nuncio, saved 120,000 of the city’s 150,000 Jews. Wallenberg was arrested by the Red Army and never seen again.

In August 1939 I had left Mexico for Spain to enter the seminary directed by the Redemptorist Fathers. I was grieving the death of Pius XI who had died on Feb. 10 that year. How mysterious are the designs of the Lord! I am convinced that if I had delayed my entrance into my vocation I would never have become a priest because my parents would not have allowed me to go to Europe once the Second World War had started.

I was sad because my parents and entire family were very upset that I was in the midst of the horrors of war and chaos, but in the depths of my heart I knew that God would protect and defend me.

Although we were not allowed to listen to the radio except on Sunday during lunch, the rector told us that the German army had invaded the faithful Catholic country of Poland. News on the radio was also strictly controlled. Adolf Hitler wanted to prevent Eugenio Pacelli’s election as Pope in 1939, and referred to him as “Jew loving.”

Facing huge difficulty, Pius XII did what no one else did to save the lives of Jews during the war. He knew early on what was really happening to the Jewish people. At the time, too many were in denial and neither Britain nor America made it easy for Jews to escape to safety. Not surprisingly, there is no firm number recorded of those who were saved by the Pope, but it is estimated as between 500,000 and 860,000. 

The news about the Houses of Life is only surprising because the truth about the Church and the Jewish people in the Second World War has been suppressed. Several aides of the wartime Pope acknowledged they had worked to rescue Jews on his direct instructions.

A plan to kidnap Pius XII in 1944 was averted. The Pope was also utterly clear about the evils of communism and vicious Stalinist religious persecution. But he said nothing about it during the war. Allied diplomats in the Vatican understood this, realizing that it was only the Pope’s preservation of the Holy See’s neutrality that enabled him to give refuge to thousands of Jews in religious houses in Italy and in the Vatican itself.

Albert Einstein, who had escaped Nazi Germany, said in 1940: “Only the Church stood squarely across the path of Hitler’s campaign for suppressing the truth … I am forced thus to confess that what I once despised I now praise unreservedly.”

Israel Zolli, chief Rabbi of Rome, became a Catholic and took the Pope’s Christian name, Eugenio, in tribute to him. After Pius XII’s death in 1958, Golda Meir, then the Israeli foreign minister, wrote: “We mourn a great servant of peace.”

The negative view of Pius XII marked an astonishing reversal of reputation. In 1963, Rolf Hochhuth, an unknown German, published a play called The Deputy, using false and inaccurate information that blamed Pius XII for the Holocaust. In 1964, Pope Paul VI commissioned detailed research on the subject and when its findings were eventually published in 1981, it showed the degree of papal and Catholic support for the Jewish people.

Let the final words be what Pius XII himself wrote in 1943 about Nazi propaganda: “The time will come when unpublished documents about this terrible war will be made public. Then the foolishness of the accusations will become obvious in clear daylight. Their origin is not ignorance but contempt for the Church.”