This letter appeared in the New York Times on March 22,1998.:
Your March 18 editorial on the Vatican document on the Holocaust chastises Pope John Paul II for defending “the silence of Pope Pius XII during the Third Reich.”
If Pius was “silent” during the Holocaust, why did this newspaper congratulate him on Dec. 25, 1941, for being “a lonely voice in the silence and darkness enveloping Europe this Christmas”?
And why did it editorialize the following year that Pius “is a lonely voice crying out of the silence of a continent”? WILLIAM A. DONOHUE
