I Stand with the Jews Part One of Two Parts

 

"I Stand with the Jews"

 

What does that mean?

 

First of two parts

 

The other day, an antisemitic comment came through my social media feed. I didn't want to debate the poster. People who say abysmally stupid things do not deserve the respect implied by debate, nor do they deserve the attention that debate generates. But I did not want his comment to go unanswered. All I said was, "I stand with the Jews."

 

"What does that mean?" the antisemite challenged.

 

This essay offers my response to his question.

Pressure Movie Review. Yes we do need another D-Day Movie

 

Pressure 2026

Yes, we do need another D-Day movie

I walk a lot. I check NOAA's forecast five times before heading out. If there's a ten percent chance of rain, I have a Gore-Tex slicker in my daypack. I'm always over-prepared for weather. One day I was walking down Ratzer Road, a road I've walked hundreds of times. I passed wide lawns and suburban McMansions, some of them costing a million dollars. I felt carefree. That did not last.

Boom. In the time it took me to type the word "boom," everything changed. The sky turned black. Forty-foot evergreens swayed so drunkenly I feared they'd lash me like the tail of a lunging tiger. Pelting hail obscured my vision. With every step I pushed against a locked door – the wind was that determined to prevent me from moving. I recognized that this is the kind of weather that kills. I frantically sought a nook where I could take shelter in this, not my neighborhood, and, again, that fast, it was all over. The sky was suddenly dove-gray. The hail relaxed to a light drizzle. The Apocalypse was canceled.

My best guess is that I was stuck in a dangerous phenomenon called a "microburst." Microbursts damage structures, cause car accidents and plane crashes, and they do kill. Ultimately, though, what it was, was weather.

In Indiana, after a tornado, I heard of a grandfather trying to hold back his grandson, to no avail. The tornado pulled the tyke out the window. In 2011, in Paterson, NJ, I was evacuated during Hurricane Irene. The Passaic River was coming up through the floorboards. Within hours the entire neighborhood, for a mile around, was under water. In 2012, after Hurricane Sandy, for most of two weeks, we had no electricity and substandard tap water. In 2021, thirty New Jerseyans died during Hurricane Ida. One victim drowned on the very non-aquatic Lackawanna Avenue, near a Best Buy and a Barnes and Noble. Two people tried to rescue her, but these Good Samaritans had to themselves be rescued by fire department crews. Her body was never found.

Weather.

We humans have dominated much of nature. We have extended average lifespans, conquered smallpox, and manipulated the landscape to our whim. But we are still mere playthings in the hands of weather. A new film, Pressure, examines the impact of weather on a history-making event: D-Day.

Perhaps no human accomplishment supersedes D-Day as an expression of humanity's power. D-Day was the largest seaborne invasion in history. On June 6, 1944, almost 160,000 Allied troops landed on Normandy's beaches. These included troops from the United Kingdom, Canada, and twelve other Allied nations. Over 7,000 naval vessels and 12,000 aircraft participated. An estimated 100,000 French resistance fighters coordinated, via coded messages, with overseas planners and carried out crucial and meticulous preparatory operations behind enemy lines. For example, the French derailed Nazi supply trains inside tunnels. Repairing a train derailment inside a tunnel is much harder than doing so in an open field. By the end of June, Allies had delivered 570,000 tons of supplies. By the end of August, two million Allied troops were in France.

In spite of this display of human might, D-Day's planners were still subject to weather. The new film, Pressure, makes this vulnerability to weather abundantly clear. If the Allies had attempted D-Day on the wrong day, with the wrong weather, D-Day might have failed, and the attempt to defeat Nazi Germany would have gone very differently.

The Left Demonizes the Name of a Duck: The Case of the Oldsquaw

 

The Left Demonizes the Name of a Duck
A word becomes a thought crime

 

Part I: Why Birdwatching, Beauty, Words, & History Matter

 

My mother was a foreigner and at the drop of a hat she and my dad would speak with totally different words. The Italians across the street, the Ukrainians across from them, the Spaniards next door to them, the Filipinos down the block – our town was crowded with words and the worlds that came with those words. I understood, young, that words are as diverse as the people who speak them. I felt an overwhelming craving to master all these words, and these various worlds.

 

We ate oskvarky. We visited with tetka. When swimming in the river, we had to resist the hastrman, lest he drag us down and drown us. My mother had words in English, Slovak, Polish, Russian, Hungarian, Yiddish, and German. When neighbors commented on how smart my mother was – and they did and still do so – I feel proud. This immigrant woman who had to work to support her five siblings and therefore could not go to school commanded words and the worlds that came with those words.

 

One day I was five – maybe – maybe four, or even three. The age when you have imaginary friends. When you talk to the family dog and understand his replies. My mom and I were kneeling on a bed and looking out a window facing east and the green hills that were a minute's barefoot walk from our front door. I gazed at pink, purple, and white blobs that I'd recently learned to name, or would soon learn to name: rose-of-Sharon, bridal veil, Oswego tea, peach blossom, mountain laurel. How did my mother fit all those fruits and flowers into our tiny plot? With her strong hands she worked her dreams-deferred of streets-paved-with-gold into dirt crowded with flowers.

 

Brown blobs scattered before us.

 

"Sparrows," my mother said.

 

I knew the word "bird." She knew the word "sparrow." She could take a big general class of things – "birds," – and divide it into a more specific sub-class – "sparrows." I resolved to master magical power like hers.

 

"Sparrow:" the sound fed me. The sibilant "s" sliding sensuously into the earthbound, explosive "p;" "arrow" providing a liquid-vowel soft place to land. "Sparrow:" sensuous and yet authoritative. "Sparrow," according to one online source, comes from a Proto-Germanic word meaning "flutterer." In Slovak, "vrabec" is onomatopoetic, that is, an attempt to imitate the sound sparrows make when they chatter together. Germans saw sparrows. Slavs heard them.

 

I know so little about my Slavic ancestors. Peasants and serfs don't leave much in the way of written records. To know that they named sparrows vrabec in an attempt to recapitulate the bird's sound touches me deeply. I get a hint of how they made sense of their world.

The Story of Everything 2026 Movie Review

 

The Story of Everything 2026

 

A new documentary argues that science supports the concept of a creator God

 

The Story of Everything is a 2026 documentary addressing the question of whether or not science supports the possible existence of a creator God. Before I get too deep in the weeds of this review, let me say, I loved The Story of Everything. The Story of Everything is a polished, professional, engrossing documentary that any thinking person, including high school students, could enjoy. Please go see it in a theater if you can, and if you can't, grab it up as soon as it appears in other formats. Its run is limited, and in the theater where I saw it, there was only one showing. Otherwise, I would have happily sat through this film three times. I was on the edge of my seat. I want a miniseries continuing the work of the documentary, complete with supplemental materials, including question-and-answer notebooks viewers can fill in to review, test, and reinforce all they've learned.

 

The Story of Everything is not just a series of scientific talking heads, utterly fascinating and authoritative though these talking heads might be. It includes animations so unique, so valuable, and so engrossing I cannot wait to purchase the DVD of this film so that I can watch these animations repeatedly. The inner workings of the cell are depicted in minute detail. All lifeforms are made up of cells; those complicated little factories constitute our physical forms. Thanks to these animations, we can see ourselves as never before.

 

The Story of Everything travels from the microcosm to the macrocosm. The film includes gorgeous footage of life on planet Earth, from tiny hummingbirds to majestic blue whales. The film adjures the viewer to again take up the previously discarded awe of a child, and to be bowled over by the powerful mystery that is life. We are made up of billions of miracles occurring every second. We are part of a larger miracle we can never fully understand but can always be inspired by. This movie gave me chills and it caused me to tear up.

 

I love engrossing discussions of big ideas, and that's what you get in The Story of Everything. I love finishing a film determined to do some research on ideas presented therein. Since watching The Story of Everything, I've been gorging on science podcasts. I've been asking questions I didn't ask before, questions about why the carbon molecule shook Fred Hoyle's worldview, and how the Hubble telescope does or does not support the Big Bang.

Mark Fuhrman: A Remembrance

 

Mark Fuhrman Dies at Age 74
A Remembrance

 

On the morning of Tuesday, May 19, 2026, I was listening to NPR. Reporter Steve Futterman announced that Mark Fuhrman had died. Fuhrman was a media anti-hero during the trial of O.J. Simpson. LAPD Detective Fuhrman found a bloody glove at the crime scene. Simpson's defense attorneys sought to render Fuhrman's testimony unreliable. They accused Fuhrman of being a bad cop, a racist, who planted fake evidence because he hated black people. To prove their point, they produced audiotape of Fuhrman using the N-word. NPR's report of Fuhrman's death reduced Fuhrman's entire life to these bare facts. Fuhrman was an alleged bad cop, a white supremacist, who allegedly "planted" the bloody glove to frame an innocent black man of the stabbing murder of his white ex-wife, Nicole Brown, and her friend, Ronald Goldman.

 

On October 3, 1995, I was shopping in a hippie store in Bloomington, Indiana. An announcement came over the intercom. O.J. Simpson had been found not guilty. A thin, very pretty, very well dressed white girl, maybe twenty or so years old, jumped up, clapped her hands, and began hugging shoppers and dancing around the store. She was celebrating the verdict. I was astounded. O. J. Simpson had a documented history of beating Nicole Brown. There were photos of her bruised face. There was a chilling 911 call of Nicole crying and begging for help and O.J. screaming and threatening her. Evidence suggested that he stabbed her to death, possibly because she was in the company of Goldman, a handsome young man. This college-town white girl was dancing around a hippie store to celebrate Simpson's exoneration. What I understood as feminism had utterly failed, at least in the mind of that white girl. A very different ideology had parasitized her brain.

 

In 1997, Mark Fuhrman made the rounds of talk shows. He appeared with Larry King and Oprah Winfrey. As a grad student, I had to focus on my own work. I thought of myself as a committed leftist and I had no inkling that that would ever change. But something really bugged me about that dancing white girl. Something really bugged me about how we were treating Mark Fuhrman. By "we" I mean Americans, my friends, my fellow grad students, and popular culture figures and mass media. I felt like I was in the middle of a cognitive traffic jam. Of course white supremacy was bad. No argument. Of course the N-word was offensive. Of course, as a leftist feminist, I found it easy to make ugly comments about police officers, about macho masculinity, and about former Marines like Fuhrman. Fuhrman was a virtual poster boy for the white male power figure we all assumed was our ultimate enemy. So far, so clear.

 

And yet. And yet.

 

I remember the day I sat down at a campus computer – computers were expensive in those grad school days and I didn't own my own computer – and typed up the essay, below.

 

With every word, I was thinking of cherished friends who were participating in the national show trial of Fuhrman. I was thinking of how my words violated our unspoken social contract. We applauded each other for being righteous, and we never questioned the approved narrative. If we did, we would accuse ourselves of the crimes of racism or sexism or merely wrong think, and we would be cast out.

 

And yet I was thinking things I shouldn't be thinking, feeling discomfort, even outrage, I shouldn't be feeling. I felt compelled to write the essay, below, partly to clarify to myself why the treatment of Fuhrman bugged me so much. I had to struggle for words, because none of my friends and no mainstream media were saying anything like this. I had to struggle for words because I didn't want to lose friends or paint a target on myself.

 

I finished the essay and sent it off to potential publishers. I never found a publisher and the essay has been sitting in my files ever since. I reread it today, the day that Fuhrman's death has been announced.

 

Since I wrote this, the prediction I made in the final sentences has come true. There have been many show trials, many narratives that one dare not question, at the risk of losing friends and accusing oneself. In 2013, Justine Sacco made an unfunny and harmless attempt at humor on Twitter. She made a clumsy comment about AIDS and Africa. Within hours, the tweet went viral, and Sacco was hated, and threatened, around the world. People rushed to hate Sacco. Hating Sacco somehow was a righteous thing to do.

 

These internet show trials have happened to many others. There's nothing righteous about them. They don't help anyone. Hating Mark Fuhrman or Justine Sacco did nothing to help black people.

 

Below is my 1997 essay about Mark Fuhrman.

 

***

 

We knew everything we needed to know about Mark Fuhrman. Even those of us too pure, too intellectual, to follow the trial knew that Mark Fuhrman was not a man. Like a fairy tale ogre, he was our bête noir personified, without individuality or motivation. He was racist, if not racism itself. David Letterman joked about racism using the name as shorthand; a reporter equated him with Hitler. Forces usually in opposition, like the iconoclast Bill Maher and conservative pundits, were united in their vilification of Mark Fuhrman.

Defiance: A Memoir of Awakening, Rebellion, and Survival in Syria Book Review

 

Defiance: A Memoir of Awakening, Rebellion, and Survival in Syria

A must-read book by a Syrian heroine

Defiance: A Memoir of Awakening, Rebellion, and Survival in Syria was published by Viking on February 24, 2026. It is 432 pages long.

Syrian photojournalist Loubna Mrie was born in 1991. Mrie's father was an assassin for the Assad regime. Mrie describes a relatively privileged childhood followed by more straitened circumstances after her parents' divorce. She witnessed, and then participated in, the Syrian civil war (2011 - 2024). Her participation alienated her father. Eventually Mrie moved to the United States where she remains.

Defiance is one of the most remarkable books I have ever read. The writing is exquisite. Sensuous vignettes engage the reader's sight, hearing, scent, taste, and touch. Descriptions initially evoke a privileged girl's Syria: the smell of the bills in cash gifts from daddy, and the smell of hairspray on date night as girls stroll along a seaside corniche. The book progresses, and we enter a courageous journalist's Syria at war. We visit an apartment that Loubna has never bothered to clean, until a date with a sexy American aid worker inspires her to tidy up before his arrival. We witness protesters, shot by government thugs, bleed to death on Syria's streets. We cringe as ulcers pock the faces of victims of leishmaniasis, caused by sand-fly bites.

Defiance is intimate, written with an unflinching courage and profound insight found only in the highest literature. Too many other authors, recounting their adventures in danger zones, depict themselves as purely heroic. Mrie is humble enough, and values truth enough, to expose the good, the bad, and the ugly in her own character. I suspect that she is far more admirable than she herself realizes. In her writing, she reveals her own admiration for others who gave the ultimate sacrifice for their ideals. I hope she overcomes whatever survivor guilt that may haunt her.

Carl Rogers' dictum "the more personal, the more universal," applies to Mrie's writing. As Mrie explores her own motivations, reactions, and perceptions, she increases our own insight into ourselves. Yes, if we had been raised as she was raised, we, too, would find it hard to voice a protest against even a monster like Hafez al-Assad. Yes, if we had lived through what she had lived through, we, too, might succumb to alcoholism, one-night stands, and blackouts.

Pope Pius XII and World War II. Historian Filip Mazurczak replies

 

“Pius XII’s Complicated Wartime Legacy: A Response to Danusha Goska”

This is my response to Danusha V. Goska’s review of David Kertzer's book The Pope at War: The Secret History of Pius XII, Mussolini, and Hitler. I have not read the work under review; I have, however, read many books on the papacy and World War II, so here are my two cents.

Arguably no other pope from the last 150 years has been as controversial as Pius XII. Books on him are either apologetic or damning. A year after Kertzer's book came out, Belgian historian Johan Ickx published The Pope's Cabinet: Pius XII's Secret War for Saving Jews, published in English by Sophia Institute Press. Ickx used the same recently opened archives as Kertzer, yet he arrived at radically different conclusions and claims that new evidence casts Pius in a positive light.

It is not entirely accurate that the pontiff was totally silent on the atrocities of Nazi Germany. In his first encyclical, Summi pontificatus, published in 1939, just a month after the Soviet-German dismemberment of Poland, he writes: “The blood of countless human beings, even noncombatants, raises a piteous dirge over a nation such as Our dear Poland, which, for its fidelity to the Church, for its services in the defense of Christian civilization, written in indelible characters in the annals of history, has a right to the generous and brotherly sympathy of the whole world, while it awaits, relying on the powerful intercession of Mary, Help of Christians, the hour of a resurrection in harmony with the principles of justice and true peace.” Meanwhile, in his Christmas message of 1942 broadcast on Vatican Radio, Pius XII said: “Likewise to be banned is the theory which claims for a particular nation, or race, or class, a juridical instinct against whose law and command there is no appeal.”

It is true, however, that such statements were few, and they tended to be vague. By contrast, Pius XII denounced Stalinism in Eastern Europe after World War II rather explicitly. He elevated many archbishops who would be fearless, outspoken anti-communists to the College of Cardinals: József Mindszenty in Hungary, Stefan Wyszyński in Poland, Josef Beran in Czechoslovakia, and the Croat Alojzije Stepinac in Yugoslavia. All these men would suffer greatly for their outspokenness. When the Stalinist regime in Poland arrested Cardinal Wyszyński, Pius XII excommunicated those involved.

Could Pius have excommunicated Hitler? Raised in traditionally arch-Catholic Austria, Adolf Hitler was a neo-pagan whose religion was German nationalism; he stopped practicing his faith as a teenager and hated the Pfaffe (insulting German term for priests). (For an informative study of Hitler’s religious worldview, I recommend Richard Weikert’s book.) He and Eva Braun were married in a civil wedding. Would Hitler have cared if he were excommunicated? Probably not, but then most likely Bolesław Bierut, the Stalinist leader of Poland and an atheist, wasn’t terribly upset either when the Holy See excommunicated him in 1953.

This is, in my opinion, the most problematic aspect of Pius XII’s legacy: that he condemned Stalinism much more openly than he did Nazism. If I were to guess the reason for this, it would probably be what you mention in your review of Kertzer’s book: this pope was a cultural Germanophile, and he considered communism to be a bigger threat to the Church than Nazism.

A few months ago, I watched the film Nuremberg with a couple friends, both historians like me; you reviewed it here. My friends and I had several issues with it, including the depiction of Pius XII. In the film, he is portrayed as a craven hypocrite who opposes the Nuremberg trials. First of all, his cinematic meeting with American prosecutor Robert H. Jackson depicted in the film never took place; it’s pure fantasy. In the scene, Pius is depicted as defending his concordat with Nazi Germany by claiming that he signed when he was a papal diplomat in Bavaria as meant to protect the rights of German Catholics. The viewer is supposed to sneer and say, “Riiiight.”

In fact, the concordat was an attempt at protecting the rights of German Catholics, as Hitler dissolved the Catholic Center Party and harassed outspoken Catholics. You mention the many Polish priests interned at Dachau and other camps. While less numerous than the Polish martyrs, German Catholic priests opposed to Hitler were also imprisoned and killed; they include the Jesuit martyr Alfred Delp; Blessed Bernhard Lichtenberg, the heroic and outspoken martyred rector of St. Hedwig's Cathedral in Berlin; or the future Pope Benedict XVI's seminary rector.

You mention the Netherlands. I do think this case presents a legitimate reason why other churchmen were prudent. The Archbishop of Utrecht Cardinal Jan de Jong wrote a pastoral letter protesting the deportations of Dutch Jews; the Protestant churches also read his letter during services. While history has rightly remembered Cardinal de Jong as a hero, his bold words had the opposite consequences than those intended; I can imagine other bishops being frightened and prudent after the Germans then deported Jewish converts (including St. Edith Stein) from the Netherlands to Auschwitz.

I also wanted to discuss a tangential issue from your book review: you mention Andrey Sheptytsky in a positive way. I would argue that he was instead a very complex figure. Indeed, Sheptytysky did send Pius XII reports on German atrocities against Jews, and he also helped place many Jewish children in Greek-Catholic monasteries run by the Basilian order, thus saving their lives; they included Adam Daniel Rotfeld, Poland's foreign minister in 2005. In occupied Poland/Western Ukraine, helping Jews, like Sheptytsky did, was punishable by death, and his defense of the Jews merits praise.

At the same time, Sheptytsky was born Andrzej Szeptycki, to a Ruthenian noble family that had become Polonized centuries ago. He changed his identity and became a Ukrainian nationalist. During the interbellum, he protested against the Second Polish Republic's chauvinistic policies towards the Ukrainian minority. However, while Volhynia has become synonymous with the genocide of Poles by Ukrainian nationalists, the OUN-UPA slaughtered tens of thousands of Poles in Eastern Galicia (now western Ukraine) as well. This was right under Sheptytsky's windows, and most of the perpetrators were his very own faithful; Stepan Bandera himself was the son of a Greek-Catholic priest.

On the one hand, Sheptytsky was old and had suffered a stroke, but on the other the Latin Archbishop of Lwów at the time, Bolesław Twardowski, informed him about the slaughter of Poles. Yet Sheptytsky said nothing, at least not publicly. If we want to condemn Pius XII for silence, Sheptytsky also should be criticized.

Equally problematic is the fact that, after Nazi Germany invaded the Soviet Union in the summer of 1941, Sheptytsky sent a letter to Hitler himself, thanking the Führer for “liberating” Ukraine from those pesky Poles and Russians; ordered the celebration of a thanksgiving Mass for Hitler in the Lwów Greek-Catholic cathedral; and assigned Greek-Catholic military chaplains to SS-Galizien units. Could such an erudite, well-educated man as Andrey Sheptytsky, who learned Hebrew to read the Bible and corresponded with rabbis on sophisticated theological problems in the language, been totally unaware of Hitler’s crimes? Just two years earlier, Hitler had destroyed Poland; Sheptytsky was, his ethnic identity notwithstanding, a Polish citizen, and so after Operation Barbarossa he acted disloyally. This is why Yad Vashem has refused to title Sheptytsky as Righteous Among the Nations, despite the numerous testimonies of Jews like Rotfeld who owe their lives to him. While historians like Timothy Snyder claim that the SS-Galizien was not involved in atrocities, only fighting the Red Army on the Eastern Front, that is untrue. The SS-Galizien murdered approximately 1,000 Poles and the Jews they were hiding in the village of Huta Pieniacka near Brody; in Huta Pieniacka, many more people were killed than in Lidice or Oradour-sur-Glan.

            But back to Pius XII. We also should remember that Pius XII did directly save many Jews, something neither Churchill nor Roosevelt, as you quote me as saying, did. The UK and US had the capacity to help the Jews by increasing quotas for Jewish refugees, bombing the railway tracks to death camps, or bombing German cities in retaliation (Dresden, Hamburg, Cologne, and others were bombed at the end of the war, when most camp inmates had been already killed and most camps had been liberated). Despite knowing perfectly well what Hitler was doing, they did nothing.

In Italy, about 80% of the nation's Jewish population survived the Holocaust. With the exceptions of Denmark and Albania, that’s probably the highest proportion of any country occupied by the Third Reich. There are numerous reasons for this. One is that the deportations of Italian Jews – by both Germans and Italian Fascist gendarmes, soldiers, and police – began late compared to the rest of Europe, in the second half of 1943, more than a year after the Jews in most other European countries had been sent to death camps and two years after two million Soviet Jews were shot in the “Holocaust by bullets.”

While Mussolini implemented antisemitic legislation depriving Italian Jews of basic human rights and liberties, employment, and the right to marry non-Jews, he was not interested in deporting them to Auschwitz until Hitler invaded Italy and brought Mussolini back to power in the fascist puppet state based in Salò (earlier in 1943, the Italian marshal Pietro Badoglio had deposed Mussolini and joined the Allies). Another reason for the high survival rate of Italian Jews was the fact that Italy bordered neutral Switzerland, a nearby haven. Furthermore, Italy’s Jewish population was small (about 35,000 people in a nation of 44 million) and well-assimilated, which made hiding it easier.

And there is the role of the Church. A great many Italian nunneries and monasteries rescued Jews. In Assisi, the town of St. Francis, Italian Franciscans saved hundreds of Jews in what one Polish-Jewish writer has dubbed the “Assisi Underground.” In Rome, about one in ten Jews were deported to Auschwitz, less than the Italian and European average. If you've been to Rome, you know that there as hundreds of churches in the Eternal City. Pius XII appealed to convents, including cloistered ones, to hide them. In Castel Gandolfo, the papal summer residence, Pius XII hid thousands of people: Jews, Allied POWs, and local Italians whose homes were bombed by the Allies. The famous film The Scarlet and the Black stars Gregory Peck as Father Hugh O'Flaherty, the real-life Irish priest and Vatican official, a close confidante of Pius XII, who rescued many Jews and Allied POWs. O’Flaherty acted with Pius' approval. Many Jews were hidden in the Vatican, some dressed up as Swiss Guards. About half of the Roman Jews who survived the war owed their lives to Church institutions. The Pontifical Gregorian University in Rome was also another haven for many Roman Jews.

Pius XII was a career diplomat. He did use the Holy See's diplomatic corps to save Jews. One example is Giuseppe Burzio, the Vatican's representative to Slovakia, at this time a Fascist puppet state run by Mons. Jozef Tiso, a Catholic priest and Slovak nationalist. Tiso signed decrees sending tens of thousands of Slovak Jews to Auschwitz; he even paid the Germans 500 Reichsmarks for every Jew they murdered. Mons. Burzio lodged numerous protests to Tiso, imploring him to spare the Jews; at the end of the war, Tiso finally stopped deporting them to death camps (he was nevertheless an ignoble figure who also sent 50,000 Slovak troops to help the Germans invade Poland from the south). Meanwhile, the Vatican's representative to Italy, Greece, and Bulgaria, Mons. Angelo Roncalli, the future Pope John XXIII, issued many baptismal certificates that saved Jews, as did Mons. Angelo Rotta in Budapest, who has been named a Righteous Among the Nations by Yad Vashem. These were all Pius' men, much like Father O’Flaherty.

            In sum, Pius XII’s wartime record is not perfect, but he doesn’t deserve the opprobrium he has received over the past decades.