Do you recall the Pius wars? The conflict over the legacy of Pope Pius XII is probably best known from John Cornwell’s highly-biased book Hitler’s Pope, a title that is also a shameless bit of name-calling. But that was in 1999. Since then so many scholars have leapt to the Pope’s defense that even Cornwell was forced to back off. Beginning in 2004, he has progressively reduced the force of his charges, stating that it is impossible to know the Pope’s reasons for silence about the plight of the Jєωs under Adolf Hitler, but continuing to damn him for not explaining that silence after World War II ended.

Sadly, Cornwell is more Rottweiler than historian, and even in his later critiques he overlooks the obvious. In fact, everybody who cared to resist anti-Catholic bias in the immediate post-War period knew exactly why Pius XII maintained a long silence after a few early condemnations of nαzι policy. It is because he was begged to do so by both Catholic and Jєωιѕн leaders in the countries under Hitler’s control. They repeatedly insisted that explicit papal denunciations would be met with an escalation of nαzι attacks on both Catholics and Jєωs.

Even I knew this as a small boy growing up in the 1950s, just as I knew that the most prominent Jєωιѕн leaders had publicly thanked the Pope after the War for all he had done behind the scenes to save the lives of European Jєωs. Cornwell should have remembered that the public narrative on Pius XII did not turn ugly until after Rolf Hochhuth wrote The Deputy, a popular play in 1963 which recreated the Pope as an evil collaborator with the nαzιs. The timing was very convenient, since Pius XII had died in 1958.

http://www.catholicculture.org/commentary/otc.cfm?id=1421