Posted on 01/24/2010 1:32:01 PM PST by Mrs. Don-o
The controversy over Pope Pius XII's actions during World War II was recently reignited when... Riccardo Pacifici, president of Rome's Jewish community, told [Pope Benedict] : "The silence of Pius XII before the Shoah still hurts because something should have been done." [snip]
To what extent, if any, does the evidence back up these allegations, which have been repeated since the early 1960s?
On April 4, 1933, Eugenio Cardinal Pacelli, the Vatican secretary of state, instructed the papal nuncio in Germany to see what he could do to oppose the Nazis.
On behalf of Pope Pius XI, Cardinal Pacelli drafted an encyclical, entitled "Mit brennender Sorge" ("With Burning Anxiety"), that condemned Nazi doctrines and persecution of the Catholic Church. The encyclical was smuggled into Germany and read from Catholic pulpits on March 21, 1937.
[snip] March 26, 1937, Hans Dieckhoff, an official in the German foreign ministry, wrote that the "encyclical contains attacks of the severest nature upon the German government, calls upon Catholic citizens to rebel against the authority of the state, and therefore signifies an attempt to endanger internal peace."
[snip] On March 4, Joseph Goebbels, the German propaganda minister, wrote: "the Fuehrer... is considering whether we should abrogate the concordat with Rome in light of Pacelli's election as pope."
[snip] After studying Pius XII's 1942 Christmas message, the Reich Central Security Office concluded: "In a manner never known before the pope has repudiated the National Socialist New European Order ... Here he is virtually accusing the German people of injustice toward the Jews and makes himself the mouthpiece of the Jewish war criminals."
[snip] Perhaps only in a backward world such as ours would the one man who did more than any other wartime leader to help Jews and other Nazi victims, receive the greatest condemnation.
(Excerpt) Read more at haaretz.com ...
These were in fact legible, even to my old eyes, but if you get the technical abiility to make them even clearer, please post them again and let me know because I want to use them whenever I can.
“leftists, secularists”? The term is “COMMUNISTS”.
Well, to be technical, Communists, fellow travelers, and useful idiots.
Welcome to FR.
When you get to be responsible for saving 860,000 people from a mass-murdering madman, you might (maybe) have sufficient credibility to criticize Pope Pius XII.
Until then ...
Your opinions are mere flatulence.
KGB stooges have crawled out of the woodwork again.
Kudos to Haaretz for printing this defense of Ven. Pope Pius XII.
Although I would have wished Pope Pius XII had riegned in the Croatian Church, which did support the Ustashe, the numbers are irrefutable. Pius XII risked his life and the independence of the RCC to protect those the Nazis tried to exterminate.
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