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Locked on 04/13/2007 1:17:11 PM PDT by Religion Moderator, reason:
Childish behavior |
Posted on 04/03/2007 2:32:00 AM PDT by NYer
ROME, APRIL 2, 2007 (Zenit.org).- Adolf Hitler's No. 1 enemy was the Vatican's secretary of state, Eugenio Pacelli, future Pope Pius XII, according to documents recently found in Europe.
In an article published last Thursday by La Repubblica, reporter Marco Ansaldo announced that he has a dossier on Pius XII that complements documentation found in the Vatican Archives.
According to the newly discovered documents, Pius XII was considered an enemy of the Third Reich. Memos and letters unearthed at a depot used by the Stasi, the East German secret police, show that Nazi spies within the Vatican were concerned at the Pope's efforts to help displaced Poles and Jews.
One document from the head of Berlin's police force tells Joachim von Ribbentrop, the Third Reich's foreign minister, that the Catholic Church was providing assistance to Jews "both in terms of people and financially."
Russia's motives
In a commentary on the new documents, Sister Margherita Marchione, author and expert on Pius XII, explains the campaign against the Pope was the work of the Soviets.
"Russia's plans were to control Europe after the war. The only outspoken obstacle to Russia's plan in Europe was the Catholic Church," Sister Marchione wrote.
"The first attacks claiming that the Church had endorsed silently the atrocities of the Nazis came from Communist Russia," she explained. "Soon to control Poland, and other vast areas in Eastern Europe, Russia saw the need to break the loyalty to the Pope of Catholic majorities in those countries.
"The plan was a simple one: convince everyone that the Pope supported the hated Nazis during the war and, therefore, neither he nor the Church could be trusted after the war. The destruction of the Church would leave the field wide open for Russian influence and control."
There was nothing in your answer about the actions taken by your church to save the Jews from the Holocaust.
You have none to present. You've been exposed.
Really, this is past being ridiculous, you're just flinging mud at the wall now.
False baptismal certificates and identity papers were forged by the Vatican for some Italian Jews. That's not a conversion. No-one was required to convert. Others were simply physically concealed in convents, the Vatican, Castel Gandolfo, the Swiss Guards, etc.
The most famous conversion, that of Rabbi Zolli, took place after the war was over.
. . . and, by the way, what did YOUR church do in Italy or in Germany to resist the Nazis?
Neither is denying the truth like the fact that the Vatican was running ratlines for Nazi war criminals to escape prosecution. Are you going to deny that this???
Would you like to document that assertion?
OMG!
Is that what he means?
Thank you.
I don’t even dignify that Ustasha smear with a response anymore.
I suppose the postwar dispute about whether or not to turn over orphans to co-religionists who were not their relatives might enter into it as well. But again, that's not forced conversion, that's a child custody issue, and that all happened after the war was over. Nobody was asking too many questions about conversion while trying to figure out where to squeeze in another couple of refugee families.
And of course, meanwhile, the Kraut commander in Italy just barely talked Hitler out of kidnapping or assassinating Pope Pius . . .
IMHO, it, along with the Communist Manifesto should be required reading so people can see how evil often masquerades as good.
It amazes me that Tito’s filthy defamation campaign continues to this day, right here on Free Republic.
It's amusing . . . although I'm getting a little tired of both the "Hitler's Pope" and the "Ustache" stories. Never any documentation, just tired old recycled rumors from Communists anxious to discredit the church. Says more about people who credulously swallow the stories whole, than anything else.
WRONG.
The Scarlet Pimpernal of the Vatican.
Here is the historical record.....again.
P>... Prior to the Nazi invasion, the Pope had been working hard to get Jews out of Italy by emigration; he now was forced to turn his attention to finding them hiding places. "The Pope sent out the order that religious buildings were to give refuge to Jews, even at the price of great personal sacrifice on the part of their occupants; he released monasteries and convents from the cloister rule forbidding entry into these religious houses to all but a few specified outsiders, so that they could be used as hiding places. Thousands of Jews—the figures run from 4,000 to 7,000—were hidden, fed, clothed, and bedded in the 180 known places of refuge in Vatican City, churches and basilicas, Church administrative buildings, and parish houses. Unknown numbers of Jews were sheltered in Castel Gandolfo, the site of the Pope’s summer residence, private homes, hospitals, and nursing institutions; and the Pope took personal responsibility for the care of the children of Jews deported from Italy."[14]
... Rabbi Lapide records that "in Rome we saw a list of 155 convents and monasteries—Italian, French, Spanish, English, American, and also German—mostly extraterritorial property of the Vatican . . . which sheltered throughout the German occupation some 5,000 Jews in Rome. No less than 3,000 Jews found refuge at one time at the Pope’s summer residence at Castel Gandolfo; sixty lived for nine months at the Jesuit Gregorian University, and half a dozen slept in the cellar of the Pontifical Bible Institute."[15]
Notice in particular that the Pope was not merely allowing Jews to be hidden in different church buildings around Rome. He was hiding them in the Vatican itself and in his own summer home, Castel Gandolfo. His success in protecting Italian Jews against the Nazis was remarkable. Lichten records that after the War was over it was determined that only 8,000 Jews were taken from Italy by the Nazis[16] —far less than in other European countries. In June,1944, Pius XII sent a telegram to Admiral Miklos Horthy, the ruler of Hungary, and was able to halt the planned deportation of 800,000 Jews from that country.
The Pope’s efforts did not go unrecognized by Jewish authorities, even during the War. The Chief Rabbi of Jerusalem, Isaac Herzog, sent the Pope a personal message of thanks on February 28, 1944, in which he said: "The people of Israel will never forget what His Holiness and his illustrious delegates, inspired by the eternal principles of religion which form the very foundations of true civilization, are doing for us unfortunate brothers and sisters in the most tragic hour of our history, which is living proof of divine Providence in this world."[17]
Other Jewish leaders chimed in also. Rabbi Safran of Bucharest, Romania, sent a note of thanks to the papal nuncio on April 7, 1944: "It is not easy for us to find the right words to express the warmth and consolation we experienced because of the concern of the supreme pontiff, who offered a large sum to relieve the sufferings of deported Jews. . . . The Jews of Romania will never forget these facts of historic importance."[18]
The Chief Rabbi of Rome, Israel Zolli, also made a statement of thanks: "What the Vatican did will be indelibly and eternally engraved in our hearts. . . . Priests and even high prelates did things that will forever be an honor to Catholicism...
In Three Popes and the Jews Lapide estimated the total number of Jews that had been spared as a result of Pius XII’s throwing the Church’s weight into the clandestine struggle to save them. After totaling the numbers of Jews saved in different areas and deducting the numbers saved by other causes, such as the praiseworthy efforts of some European Protestants, "The final number of Jewish lives in whose rescue the Catholic Church had been the instrument is thus at least 700,000 souls, but in all probability it is much closer to . . . 860,000."[21] This is a total larger than all other Jewish relief organizations in Europe, combined, were able to save. Lapide calculated that Pius XII and the Church he headed constituted the most successful Jewish aid organization in all of Europe during the war, dwarfing the Red Cross and all other aid societies
Jack Chick is not a reliable historian. As much fun as it might be to repeat his lies, they are just that, lies. But you know that.
Pius XII saved eight hundred times as many.
Quit bringing facts into this conversation....there’s no room for them here!
Were those ratlines running through Pius XII’s Vatican for Nazi war criminals to escape to South America lies as well???
What do Tito's archives have to say on the topic? Surely the UDBA must have compiled a juicy dossier describing this topic.
Once we have agreed that the Catholic Church, in particularly PIus XII, acted in a heroic and brave manner throughout WWII and single handedly saved more Jewish souls than all other European charities combined WITHOUT DEMANDING CONVERSION as you falsely accused them of, them we will move to actions after WWII.
The archives are in Washington, DC -—
John Loftus, is that you?
Pathetic.
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