Word: pius
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...Historian Saul Friedlander, 34, was researching the archives of the German Foreign Office for his doctoral thesis on Hitler and the United States when he came across a misfiled memorandum on German relations with the Vatican. In his mind it raised the question of the failure of Pope Pius XII to protest Hitler's extermination of Jews-and the possibility of compiling official German documents on the subject. From these and other sources-but not from Vatican documents, which were not available to him-Friedlander wrote Pius XII and the Third Reich (Knopf; $4.95). It seems likely to create...
Hochhuth, basing his play on a hit-or-miss reading of history, argued that Pius stayed silent because he wanted Germany preserved as a bulwark against the conquest of Europe by Russian Communism. Friedlander, an Israeli citizen whose parents died at Auschwitz and who is now associate professor at Geneva's Graduate Institute of International Studies, comes to much the same conclusion...
Protest Would Do No Good. He cites Pius' attempt to help save the Jews of Rome from deportation by the Germans, takes note of papal statements that indicate Pius' personal anguish over Nazi atrocities. Friedlander also quotes from a long letter that the Pope wrote to Berlin's Bishop Konrad von Preysing in 1943 suggesting that an open protest would do no good, since it would only stir Hitler to worse evils. He includes the argument made by Vatican diplomats that for Pius to attack Hitler during the war would involve German Catholics in a crisis...
...McKenzie, and the error that he refers to is the fundamentalist misreading of Scripture. A witty and outspoken Jesuit scholar from Indiana, McKenzie considers it his right and duty to set his fellow churchmen straight about the Bible, which was not open to critical study by Roman Catholics until Pius XII encouraged it in his 1943 encyclical on Scriptural studies. In so doing, McKenzie, at 55, has become the nation's most controversial and quotable Catholic theologian-perhaps because there is all of a sudden so much of his work to quote from...
...going up everywhere, sarcastically captioned: "Grant and beg forgiveness"-a quote from the letter sent by Polish prelates last fall inviting German bishops to Czestochowa in a gesture of reconciliation. As an added touch, the government last week opened in Warsaw The Deputy, the Rolf Hochhuth play that attacks Pius XII for not fighting Nazism...