Journal Defends Pius XII During WWII

[Khephra]

VATICAN CITY -- The Vatican's wartime pope, Pius XII, learned of the Nazi roundup of Jews in Rome only after it had occurred and tried to gain their release and prevent further arrests, a Catholic journal reported Thursday, citing newly unearthed World War II-era documents.

The article, in the Italian Jesuit journal Civilta Cattolica, challenges claims that Pius did little or nothing to protect Jews from slaughter by the Nazis during the Holocaust.

more...........

http://www.newsday.com/news/nationworld/world/wire/sns-ap-vatican-pius-xii,0,4283366.story?coll=sns-ap-world-headlines

[molly]

1. "Hitler's Pope" is a well documented account

of this.

[Westegg]

2. Pope-a-Dope Rope-a-Dope

The Catholic hierarchy, defending itself against massive evidence to the contrary. Well I never...

[Liberator_Rev]

10. and far from the ONLY ONE !

Ms. Tinoire appears to have read ONE Catholic defense of Pius XII and never misses an opportunity -- based on HER CATHOLIC READING -- to call me a LIAR for relying on the scholarship of the following :
"German Catholics and Hitler's Wars", by Gordon C. Zahn (a Catholic)
{ U. of Notre Dame Press, 1989 L.O.C. 62-9102 }
"Hitler's Pope, The Secret History of Pius XII", by John Cornwell (a Catholic)
(See what a great many noteworthy critics say about "Hitler's Pope".)
"The Catholic Church in Germany", by Guenter Lewy
"The Popes Against the Jews : The Vatican's Role in
the Rise of Modern Anti-Semitism", by David I. Kertzer
"Under His Very Windows : The Vatican and the Holocaust in Italy"
by Susan Zuccotti
"Unholy Trinity: The Vatican, The NAZIs, and The Swiss Banks",
by Mark Aarons, John Loftus &
"The Secret War Against the Jews : How Western Espionage
Betrayed the Jewish People", by John Loftus, Mark Aarons
"The NAZI Holocaust", by Ronnie S. Landau
"Vatican Diplomacy and the Jews during the Holocaust : 1939-1943",
by Father John F. Morley
"Hitler's Willing Executioners",1996, by Daniel Jonah Goldhagen,
( particularly, pp. 431-441 ) and a whole new book on the topic
"A Moral Reckoning: The Role of the Catholic Church in the Holocaust and Its Unfulfilled Duty of Repair", 2002, by Daniel Jonah Goldhagen
The Abandonment of the Jews", by David Wyman
"Papal Sin : Structures of Deceit", by Garry Wills (a Catholic)
( Doubleday ISBN 0385494106, 2000)
and regarding the record of the Protestant churches,
some of which may have performed even more poorly, read :
"When the Witnesses Were Silent", by Wolgang Gerhach.
"NAZI Terror, The Gestapo, Jews and Ordinary Germans",
by Eric Johnson, a professor of history.
"Blowback : America's Recruitment of NAZIs
and Its Effects on the Cold War", by Christopher Simpson
---------------------------------------------------------------------One of the favorite books quoted in Defense of Pope Pius XII is
"Hitler, the War and the Pope"
by Ronald J. Rychlak ( an associate dean for academic affairs and professor of law at the University of Mississippi School of Law, i.e. not a historian, and also not a Catholic.)
-------------------------------------------------------------
In his latest book,"A Moral Reckoning: The Role of the Catholic Church in the Holocaust and Its Unfulfilled Duty of Repair", 2002, Goldhagen deals with the oft repeated claim that Pius XII was personally responsible for saving the lives of 860,000 Jews. He writes about another Holocaust researcher "Susan Zuccotti, for example, has recently exposed a central exculpating myth - in her view consciously fabricated or encouraged byt he Pope and others, and sustained by Jews who themselves were misled or wanted to placate the powerful Church - that the Pope gave orders for Italian Church officials to hide Jews in churches and monasteries. The priests and others who toook initiatives to save the lives of many Jews were certainly heroic, but there is no evidence of the Pope's guiding hand. Based on extensive, painstaking research into one locale after another, she methodically debunks claims that Pius XII was active on behalf of the Jews. These findings have devastated Pius XII's reputation." p. 40

See much more on what Pius XII did to earn the title of "Hitler's Pope" at
at http://www.LiberalsLikeChrist.Org/RCscandal.

[legin]

3. Another one

is the sort of support of the Croatian Ustache during WWII who were sort of a Hitler puppet government but who were quite able to wack people on their own initiative, mainly Serbs.

Archbishop Stepenic who was his man in Croatia who was sort of vaguely attached to the Ustache was recently beatified by the Pope. So it seems to be half-witted business as normal.

[Liberator_Rev]

4. Either Civilta Cattolica or "Hitler's Pope" are blattant liars !!!

The Catholic historian who wrote "Hitler's Pope" has a well-documented "blow by blow" description of the roundup and exile of the Jews of Rome, including these statements. Pius XII "was one of the first to learn of the roundup. . . When informed of the round up, he made an agitated phone call to Cardinal Maglione to contact (German) ambassador Weizsacker." p.303
According to this ambassador, on that morning, "pressure from all sides was building, calling for a demonsrative censure of the deportation of the Jews of Rome." Much of that pressure was coming from the German authorities, notably the German counsul in Rome, Albrecht von Kessel. Kessel urged Pacelli that day to make 'an official protest.' The fear of the German leadership in Rome was that a deportation would spell a violent reaction from the Italian populace. In Kessel's view, if Pacelli (Pius XII) were to protest immediately and achieve a successful outcome, the people would be pacified." p. 304

If you can't put your hands on Cornwall's outstanding book on "Hitler's Pope", you can at least see what you are missing by reading http://www.LiberalsLikeChrist.Org/RCscandal . And if you hear Catholic apologists bad-mouthing this book, check out what all of these reviewers have written about it :http://www.LiberalsLikeChrist.Org/about/HitlersPope.html .

[legin]

5. Article by John Cornwell

http://emperors-clothes.com/analysis/hitlerspope.htm

[Liberator_Rev]

11. Thanks, legin, for this link, one of the most important

paragraphs of which is this summary of John Cornwell's shocking findings:
"By the middle of 1997, 1 was in a state of moral shock. The material I had gathered amounted not to an exoneration but to an indictment more scandalous than Hochhuth's. The evidence was explosive. It showed for the first time that PaceIli was patently, and by the proof of his own words, anti-Jewish. It revealed that he had helped Hitler to power and at the same time undermined potential Catholic resistance in Germany. It showed that he had implicitly denied and trivialized the Holocaust, despite having reliable knowledge of its true extent. And, worse, that he was a hypocrite, for after the war he had retrospectively taken undue credit for speaking out boldly against the Nazi persecution of the Jews."

I don't recall Cornwell going into the matter of "Underground Railway" that was set up by the former SS to sneak as many NAZI war criminals as possible out of Europe after the fall of the IIIrd Reich, but what possible excuse can any Catholic produce for the crucial role the Vatican played in helping the vilest of Ustashi and Nazi mass murders escape prosecution for their crimes, other than the fact that they were (or at least claimed to be) fellow Catholics??? Thanks to their Vatican connections, many vile murderers like Kaus Barbi, Adolf Eichman and Anton Pavlic were able to escape to Catholic countries in South America.

[Tinoire]

6. This isn't really new. Pius XII was responsible for saving 800,000 Jews

Pius XII personally saved about 800,000 Jews from the Nazi clutches by melting Vatican gold to buy them from the Nazis, hiding them out at Castel Gandolfo (the papal retreat), hiding them in the Vatican iteself, and arranging for all the monasteries and convents to offer sanctuary and serve as safe places for the transfer out of the country.


========================

So well known, in fact, was his disgust for the Reich that when he assumed the Chair of Peter, the Berliner Morgenpost newspaper wrote, "the election of Cardinal Pacelli is not of Germany's liking, as he has always been opposed to Nazism." After becoming pope, Pius XII's attitudes did not change at all. In 1940, Albert Einstein wrote of his efforts: "Only the Church stood squarely across the path of Hitler's campaign for suppressing truth. 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." Historians estimate that thanks to Catholic efforts to shelter them—including hiding them in convents and having fake passports made for them—between 740,000 and 860,000 Jews were saved.

<snip>


Upon the pope's death in 1958, Israeli leader Golda Meir recognized his greatness, saying "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." The Chief Rabbi of Rome, who converted to Catholicism after the war, took "Eugenio" as his baptismal name in honor of the pope.

<snip>

http://www.yaleherald.com/archive/xxix/2000.04.07/opinion/p11pope.html

[legin]

7. Tinoire

you realise we actually have a difference of opinion on something. :*

[Tinoire]

8. Finally? Lol

That's good... I need to be able to have differences of opinion with some of the brightest posters here. There would be no discussion otherwise ;)

This isn't one of the things I feel passionately about though... not like Israel/Palestine, Iraq, homelessness (etc).

I have a lot of respect for Pius XII because he was theologically sound. My uncle was an Oblate (OMI) and was a Vatican Mariologist under Pius XII. As a young girl, I got a rare perspective of the church from him and others in my family who became nuns, priests, and brothers at the service of the Church. Anyway, because of the respect I had of him and Pius XII, I researched this subject instensely at one period and was disgusted to see how Pius had started out as a Saint and praised for his assistance, for speaking out, and for personally intervening but that, for political reasons, the rhetoric later changed. There is a book about this subject that I keep wanting to read but never do, it's called "Greatness Dishonored".

Here are a few quick links... http://www.prweb.com/releases/2000/3/prweb13180.htm

You can also research Israel scholar and diplomat, Pinchas Lapide. He found that Pius was responsible for saving 860,000 Jews during the Holocaust.

Damn, gotta go. Late for meeting! Peace

[MrPrax]

9. Was the Pope still in Captivity?

So he missed Kristallnacht and the speeches as well, but tried to help out after the war started and the camps were in full swing. The Turks and Sweden saved Jews as well, but they thankfully, did bless Mussolini's troops...
So after they tried to save them, forgive and forget the whole thing! And then set up extensive ratlines for the Nazis and Croats to evade justice, set up shop in Latin America, on Vatican passports...etc etc.

I really can't think of another human institution, except maybe monarchism, that has survived into the modern day with such a despicable history...

[section321]

12. In a class I took on the Holocaust, the people who were there..

seemed to think the pope left them high and dry.

Most of those people are dead now, so it seems like a convenient time to start rewriting history.

I don't remember the names, but I watched the interviews. This one lady had connections and was calling the vatican while the her neighbors were being taken away. She said she pleaded with the vatican to intercede, to do something.

Nothing happened and the Italian jews were carted off to the death camps.