Posted on 08/18/2006 6:56:57 AM PDT by Alex Murphy
AS A HISTORIAN OF THE HOLOCAUST, I frequently receive requests from Jewish educators, seeking support for grant applications for their Holocaust programs. Almost all these applications include a sentence about how the new program will inform students that the Pope, and the Vatican, "did nothing" during the Holocaust to help Jews.
The most recent such portrayal reached me while I was writing this review. It is part of a proposal to a major Jewish philanthropic organization, and contains the sentence: "Also discusses the role of the Vatican and the rabidly anti-Semitic Pope Pius XII, who were privy to information regarding the heinous crimes being committed against the Jews, and their indifferent response."
That the Pope and the Vatican were either silent bystanders, or even active collaborators in Hitler's diabolical plan -- and "rabidly anti-Semitic," as stated above -- has become something of a truism in Jewish educational circles, and a powerful, emotional assertion made by American-Jewish writers, lecturers, and educators.
David G. Dalin, professor of history and political science at Ave Maria University, Naples, Florida -- and an ordained rabbi -- demonstrates in his recent book, The Myth of Hitler's Pope, that this is a false and distorted portrayal. He also shows its long pedigree, starting more than 40 years ago, in 1963, with Rolf Hochhuth's play The Deputy. Although that play was fiction, it was widely regarded as based on fact in its strident assertion of the moral cowardice and silence of Eugenio Pacelli, who in 1939 became Pope as Pius XII.
(Excerpt) Read more at spectator.org ...
Can't help thinking of the lyrics..."lunatic fringe, I know you're out there...."
Catholic ping!
It's nice to see a little accuracy, but it probably won't get a big play. Is some of this due to the RC Church helping Nazi's flee to So. America at the end of WWII?
A point I'd like to emphasize: the slander against Pope Pius XII began, not with Jews, but with apostate Catholics -- Cornwell and Carroll in particular. Their goal was to destroy the reputation and credibility of the Papacy in general, and of the Catholic Church as a whole.
You mean like the CIA did?
"You mean like the CIA did?"
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It's obvious you can't have a conversation about your denomination. You are so defensive it's silly.
Maybe, but Hochhuth who was raised as a Protestant and later a Marxist came 35 years before either Cornwell or Carroll.
In the 1960's, ironically, Jews strenuously defended Pius XII after the release of Hochhuth's play. Pinchas Lapide and Jeno Levai immediately come to mind.
The people who pushed the idea that Pius was bad from the 1960's to the 1990's were almost entirely left-wingers (no matter what their supposed religious affiliation).
I just spoke to a student from Ave Maria university two nights ago. I gave a presentation on Pius XII and the Jews. The yound student, coincidentally, had taken a class with Dalin at AMU. She says he is obsessed with baseball, talks about it in class all the time. That was a surprise to me.
God works in mysterious ways!
Good for Martin Gilbert. I love his books! So intensely researched, and yet readable and emotionally involving.
The Catholic Church is NOT a denomination.
And yes, some Catholics did everything they could to help get former Nazi officer and their allies out of Europe and away from the Soviets and Allies.
The Church had nothing to do with it.
I don't belong to a "denomination".
I've watched you. You post negative comments about the Catholic Church on practically every thread concerning Catholicism. You aren't exactly a dispassionate, neutral observer.
And it's a fact that CIA operatives aided former Nazis.
You bet. I was just pointing out that the persecution by the RC Church began almost immediately after the persecution of Christians by Diocletian (sp). The point being, the RC Church has NO history of freedom of speech, free association and most importantly freedom of religion.
I call that an attack, and also a slander. I defend against attackers. Deal with it, friend.
Oh, and your claim that "the persecution by the RC Church began almost immediately after the persecution of Christians by Diocletian" is a bizarre one, since the Christians persecuted by Diocletian were Catholics, and Catholicism didn't become the state religion of Rome until a century after Diocletian.
But history is not obstacle for the trained anti-Catholic attacker. Never has been, never will be. It's sad that so-called "Christians" seem to base their "Christianity" almost entirely on attacks and slanders against other followers of Christ.
Now that tells you something!!
If that doesn't convince even the biggest skeptic that Pius XII was in big with Hitler, I don't know what will.
I don't belong to a "denomination".
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Denomination n. (a) a unit of money (on a bank note/coin). (b) a religious sect; church.
Webster's Student Dictionary 1999 edition.
There were some priests and nuns who were Nazis. There were some priests and nuns who were communists. There are some priests and nuns who are radical liberals. Rotten apples in the barrel.
But the basic problem is with people who are above all German, American, French...before they are Catholic. Give to Caesar what belongs to Caesar but....
A denomination is something that is a smaller unit of something larger.
The Catholic Church comes from a person, Christ, not a thing. Protestant sects come from the Catholic Church and from each other. They are denominations. The Catholic Church is not.
"Denomination" is a word that comes out of the period before the Civil War when protestants influenced by evangeliists such as Finney began to minimize the specific doctrinal /liturgical differences between Baptists, Methodists ,Presbyterians, and speak of them as "nominal." But I suspect that many Baptists would also reject the notion of their being a sect.
It doesn't seem likely to get much beyond the pages of American Spectator. It's a review of a book published in 2005.
It's rather astonishing that Gilbert continues to get requests for support from 'educators' who seek to rely on fairy tales and further calumny.
Maybe that's why we call fairy tales enchanting. Perhaps these 'educators' have been enchanted.
It was the imperial government not the Church that pressured the heretics, But recall that its was the Catholic bishop Athanasius who is the most famous victim of imperial persecution between 330 and 395. The Donatists were a special case, because they had a great following among local terrorists hostile to imperial authority. St. Augustine as bishop tried persuasion for more than ten years before he concluded that only the rod would work.
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