Only the Church stood squarely across the path of Hitler's campaign for suppressing truth. I never had any special interest in the Church before, but now I feel a great affection and admiration because the Church alone has had the courage and persistence to stand for intellectual truth and moral freedom. I am forced thus to confess that what I once despised I now praise unreservedly."
Albert Einstein, Time, 23 December 1940, page 38
"The voice of Pius XII is a lonely voice in the silence and darkness enveloping Europe this Christmas... he is about the only ruler left on the Continent of Europe who dares to raise his voice at all... the Pope put himself squarely against Hitlerism... he left no doubt that the Nazi aims are also irreconcilable with his own conception of a Christian peace."
The New York Times, 25 December 1941, page 24
"This Christmas more than ever he is a lonely voice crying out of the silence of a continent... Pope Pius expresses as passionately as any leader on our side the war aims of the struggle for freedom when he says that those who aim at building a new world must fight for free choice of government and religious order. They must refuse that the state should make of individuals a herd of whom the state disposes as if they were lifeless things."
The New York Times, 25 December 1942, page 16
""When our people were subjected to a terrible martyrdom, the Pope's voice was raised to condemn the persecutors and to offer mercy to their victims. We mourn over the death of a great servant of peace."
Golda Meir, Foreign Minister of Israel, on the death of Pope Pius XII, in October 1958.
Rabbi Israel Zolli, the Chief Rabbi of Rome, was received into the Roman Catholic Church in 1945 after the war was over. He was baptised entirely of his own free will and asked Pius XII, with whom he had worked closely in the saving of Jewish lives, to be his godfather. Dr. Zolli chose the name Eugenio as his baptismal name precisely because it was Pius XII's own name.