You only THINK you know Pope Pius XII.

NRO's David Frum reads Rabbi David Dalin's new book The Myth of Hitler's Pope and discovers:

1) that both Pius XII and his predecessor Pius XI abhorred and repeatedly condemned Nazi doctrine;

2) that Pius XII used his diplomatic power to protect Jewish communities in Catholic countries like Hungary and Slovakia - with a measurable impact on the survival rate of the Jews in those countries;

3) that Pius XII defied the very real risk of his own abduction and arrest by the Nazis to protect the Jewish communities of Rome and Italy, including sheltering some 3,000 Roman Jews in his summer residence at Castel Gandolfo during the German occupation of Rome in 1943;

4) that the many Roman Catholic clerics who risked their lives to rescue Jews during World War II testified again and again that they were acting on the orders of the pope - and that letters in Pius XII's own handwriting confirm the claim;

5) that even by the most conservative estimate of the effect of his actions, Pius XII's personal interventions saved the lives of more European Jews than any other person outside the governments and armed forces of the allied powers - more than Oskar Schindler, more than Raoul Wallenberg.

Just this very year, the pope's memory was attacked by a new story: a claim that Catholic institutions that housed Jewish orphans refused to deliver the rescued children to their families after war's end, but instead tried to keep and raise them as Catholics. Dalin demonstrates convincingly that the documents on which the story was founded were forged.

The debate over Pius XII is not, Dalin argues, ultimately a debate about history at all. It is an internal debate over the character and future of the Roman Catholic Church - a debate in which attacks on the war record of Pius XII function as coded attacks upon Pius' great successor, John Paul II.