Commentary: Did Gerstein suffer for this?

WASHINGTON, Feb. 14 (UPI) -- One must wholeheartedly share the Catholic's anger. Finally, a film has been made about a Christian in Germany who went to great length to expose National Socialism's evil and experienced his own Calvary.

And what does the French filmmaker of Greek origin Constantin Costa-Gavras do? He twists this story to turn it into an indictment of Pope Pius XII. Worse still, to advertise this film, Italian designer Oiliviero Toscani invents an offensive poster that blends the Cross of Christ with the swastika.

To be sure, Kurt Gerstein who joined the SS to expose its crimes to the world was a Protestant Christian, but he was a Christian nonetheless, someone to whom the Cross is every bit as holy as it is to Catholics.

Toscani and Costa-Gavras, who had approved the revolting poster, thus commingled what was sacred to the film's hero with what has become the universally acknowledged symbol of evil.

While some Catholic -- and indeed Protestant -- leaders did not live up to Gerstein's foolhardy level of courage, others sacrificed themselves in an almost Christlike manner opposing National Socialism.

Priests were slaughtered, tortured, assigned to penal battalions with suicide missions, incarcerated in concentration camps.

And Pius XII? It is has become fashionable to portray him as a wimp who would not speak up.

Yet historians such as John Toland, Sir Martin Gilbert and others have shown that this pope has managed to save tens of thousands of Jewish lives.

It may not be modern or postmodern enough to say this -- but sometimes the greater hero is the one who acts rather than speaks.

The latter-day braves such as Costa-Gavras, Toscani and Rolf Hochhuth, on whose play, "The Deputy," the film is based, were sufficiently blessed by a late birth not to have to ponder this verity.

The truth is, though, that Pius XII is not really the target of their wrath, which goes to such incomprehensible length as to distort history to the point that the pope allegedly triggered Gerstein's suicide.

The truth is that the real target is Christianity itself. For almost 50 years now the despisers of the faith that has created Western civilization, art, and ethical standards, have tried to do exactly what Toscani has now accomplished: weld together the symbols of two incompatible worldviews.

It can be done, of course, but only on a poster. However, Protestants and Catholics together have an infinitely more powerful argument -- more powerful because it is true:

The Cross of Christ symbolizes the extent of God's love for man.

The swastika, wrote Adolf Hitler in 1920, symbolizes "the struggle for the victory of Aryan man."

Not to be able to see this distinction bespeaks one of two things: either a muddled brain or a sinister heart.