General Linden, 42nd Rainbow Division, organizing things April 29/30, 1945 Dachau.
Posted on 12/20/2002 3:16:07 PM PST by RCW2001
| Story from AFP / Bruno Bartoloni Copyright 2002 by Agence France-Presse (via ClariNet) |
VATICAN CITY, Dec 20 (AFP) - The Vatican has for the first time acknowledged the shortcomings during the Holocaust of controversial wartime Pope Pius XII, who is accused by critics of not speaking out against the Nazi extermination of the Jews.
"Pius XII probably did not possess the qualities of a prophet," influential Italian Jesuit magazine Civilita Cattolica, which is controlled by the Vatican, said in its Friday edition.
Many historians and Jewish groups accuse the pope of failing to use his position to head off the extermination of European Jews by the Nazis, although his supporters say he used quiet diplomacy to help them.
Civilita Cattolica said documents by diplomats and prelates in Rome in 1942 showed that Pius, who was pope from 1939 until his death in 1958, was perfectly aware that Jews were being deported and exterminated.
By the end of 1942, the Vatican knew two million Jews had already been killed in Europe, gas chambers were being used in Poland and between 70,000 to 80,000 Jews had been deported from Czecheslovakia, the magazine said.
But the strongest public statement Pius made on the Holocaust was a Christmas 1942 message that merely talked of innocents dying and never specifically mentioned the persecution of the Jews.
The pope's message alluded to "hundreds of thousands of people who are destined to die or waste away without having committed any error, sometimes merely because of their nationality or origins".
Civilita Cattolica quoted witnesses as saying the pope believed he had done his best and was furious when the then Polish president, Wladyslaw Raczkiewicz, wrote to him in January 1943 asking him to intervene on behalf of the Jews.
"I wonder if the president read my (Christmas) message. I am surprised and vexed. Yes, vexed. Not a single word of gratitude or recognition that I said everything, everything. I was clear and precise," Pius told the Polish ambassador to Rome, according to an account by the latter found by Civilita Cattolica in London.
One prominent Jewish historian described the pope's vague Christmas message as "one of the darkest moments of his pontificate", said the article's author, Father Giovanni Sale.
Sale said the Vatican may have downplayed the "extremely significant" information it received on the persecution of Jews out of "excessive caution" or a belief that the reports were "somewhat exaggerated".
He pointed out that the training Catholic priests received at that time was deeply anti-semitic and the Church saw Jews as "Christ killers", a belief only abolished in the 1960s.
Secret Vatican archives on Pius XII's activities when he was a cardinal in pre-war Germany are due to be made public in 2003 and could shed further light on the Catholic Church's role during World War II.
The documents concern the conduct of Cardinal Eugenio Pacelli, who was the Vatican's representative in Germany from 1922-1929 before he became Pope Pius XII at the outbreak of the war in 1939.
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Vatican-Holocaust
Civilta Catholica is a publication of the Jesuits.
It is not an official organ of the Vatican.
Giovanni Sale is not a Vatican spokesperson and is a well-known leftist.
The language of this artcile is prejudicious and ludicrous.
It's shameful that the speeches and sermons of Cardinal Faulhaber, the slaughter of almost every Jesuit in Germany and the sacrifices and death of the Roman Catholic lay organization known as WeiBe Rosa are now forgotten in this rush to bash the heroic Catholics of WWII.
No sovereign in occupied Europe besides Pope Pius XII rescued 800,000 Jews from murder. No one except him.
As the WWII veteran and Israeli Ambassador to London Pinchas Lapide has testified, Pius XII saved almost a million lives.
There are also a large number of Catholic priests who died at Auschwitz, but a good number of priests were shipped to Gusen from Auschwitz, so the bulk of interned priests were sent there to be killed - mostly through exposure, by being forced to work quarries in the mountains during the winter without winter clothing.
They were also, along with Jews, subjected to some gruesome heart-injection experiments there.
Johnson's book notably downplays the Catholic resistance to Hitler as well.
Johnson may be a conservative by English standards, but he's still a sweetness-and-light John XXIII man.
First, Pius XII was around during the merciless mass slaughter of Ukrainian Catholics by the Communists during the 1930s. He wanted to make sure that Catholics in Europe did not meet the same fate in Germany.
Second, Pius XII had no military resources. The only resources he had were financial and diplomatic. Through his diplomacy 800,000 Jews survived and through his treasury thousands of starving Jews were fed.
By maintaining his diplomatic network, the Church delivered meaningful information to the Allies and provided resources to the officers' plot against Hitler.
Lots of people who like to talk big today don't have much to show for themselves other than their big words.
Pius XII preferred to act rather than grandstand for the microphones. People who talked big in Occupied Europe got killed before they did any good - you might as well ask why Oskar Schindler didn't mouth off to the Nazis like he should have.
Because of Pius XII's modesty and humility, he never trumpeted his own humanitarian successes or boasted of his accomplishments. But they are a matter of historical record - a record which Catholic-bashing leftists are now trying to flush down the memory hole.
The New York Times editorial
12/25/41 (Late Day edition, p. 24)
**************************************
"This Christmas more than ever he is a lonely voice crying out of the silence of a continent... Pope Pius expresses as passionately as any leader on our side the war aims of the struggle for freedom when he says that those who aim at building a new world must fight for free choice of government and religious order. They must refuse that the state should make of individuals a herd of whom the state disposes as if they were lifeless things."
New York Times editorial
12/25/42 (Late Day edition, p. 16)
We are to believe that Pius abandoned the Jews because he didn't mention them specifically, but the fact of the matter is that the Jews weren't the only ones dying.
I took these quotes from another thread, the original is courtesy of Aquinasfan.
General Linden, 42nd Rainbow Division, organizing things April 29/30, 1945 Dachau.
What does that mean?
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