In his letter of Aug. 7, headlined “No apology,” William LaRochelle implies that no apology for the silence of the Catholic Church during the Holocaust was ever issued by Pope John Paul II.

To my knowledge, German, French and Polish bishops issued apologies, and so did Pope John Paul II, especially during his pilgrimage to Israel and the Holocaust Museum Yad Vashem.

The moral power of the pope was clearly demonstrated within recent memory.

Next to Ronald Reagan, Pope John Paul II is rightly credited with being instrumental in bringing down the scourge of communism and the mighty Soviet Union during the Cold War.

The anti-Semitic policies, harassment and persecution of Jewish citizens during the early Nazi years, and the following genocidal barbarity of the slaughter of 6 million Jews and many other victims, such as homosexuals, gypsies, political dissidents, Poles and Russians during the Holocaust, were well-known by the Vatican.

Surely, one would have expected Pope Pius XII to use his immense moral authority to passionately and explicitly express the moral outrage of the Catholic Church on a daily basis, to excommunicate Adolf Hitler and many of his followers, and issue daily prayers and missives in support of the victims of the greatest crime in the history of mankind. This was not done.

In this context, Mr. LaRochelle ends his letter with a quotation from Sidney Zion, “The leaders of American Jewry … did next to nothing to save the Jews of Europe …”

What was he thinking?

Klaus D. Kuck, Lewiston