His 1942 Christmas or Christmas Eve broadcast was the only mention of the Holocaust, and it was so sanitized that it did not mention that many victims were Jewish, and did not mention that the bad guys were Nazis, Germans, the SS, or the like. Even the Allied governments went further than that with their public pronouncements in 1942, and they failed to bomb the train lines to the death camps. If actions speak louder than words, then the Allied governments could speak correctly but failed to act. The Pope however, could not even speak the truth.
He was afraid to speak out on one of the defining moral issues of the century, heck one of the greatest moral tragedies since Jesus lived
It is great that the Pope tried to help Jews privately, but his main mission is to speak the truth clearly and publicly, and this he failed to do.
I am not saying that he is Hitler's Pope, for that is a slander. It is great that he helped hundreds of Jews privately, but it he had spoken out, maybe millions of Jews and others would have had a chance to live.
"Whenever Pius XII spoke out, there was immediate retaliation by the Nazis. There were more than sixty protests! The so-called "silence" of Pope Pius XII is a myth."
his main mission is to speak the truth clearly and publicly, and this he failed to do.
Funny how those alive at the time understood his many statements perfectly.
“but if he had spoken out, maybe millions of Jews and others would have had a chance to live”. Now the truth.
http://www.catholicleague.org/the-real-story-of-pius-xii-and-the-jews-2/
“It is estimated that the actions of Pius XII directly led to the saving of 800,000 Jewish lives during the war. The estimate of 800,000 Jewish lives is based upon the testimony of the post-war government of the recently created State of Israel which recognized and honored that pope’s contribution. The Israelis recognized the figure and a forest of as many trees was planted in commemoration in the Negeb, SE of Jerusalem, and was shown to Pope Paul VI with some ceremony on his first state visit to Israel. Rev. Fr. Jean Charles-Roux, now a Rosininian priest living in London and whose father was French Ambassador to the Holy See in the 30’s, lived with his family in Rome during the fateful pre-war period. He recalls that the Pope told his father as early as 1935 that the new regime in Germany was “diabolical.” The Ambassador frequently warned his government but the general reaction in France seems to have been that it was good to see the back of the Prussian militarist and that it was no bad thing that an Austrian-Czech house painter was now Chancellor”.
He wasn’t. I have read some of his pieces that were in the NY Times. I used to have them bookmarked long ago but I haven’t been able to find them. The links were on FR about 2000.
I do think that he stopped after the Nazis started murdering Catholics every time he spoke up and his messages weren’t as forceful, but he did speak up. He was one of the first to do so even before he was pope.
I believe a retaliation (possibly when his predecessor spoke out) caused the Vatican to re-think that policy, though German clergy were persecuted for their pronouncement from the pulpit challenging National Socialism.
Don’t defend the Allies, especially the Soviets who forged their non-aggression pact with Hitler after Kristallnacht (and proceeded to divide eastern Europe with him according to that agreement, dooming countless Polish Jews in addition to other Poles).
As Jeno Levai, the foremost scholar of the Holocaust in Hungary, said of Pius XII that it was “a particularly regrettable irony that the one person in all occupied Europe who did more than anyone else to halt the dreadful crime and alleviate its consequences is today made the scapegoat for the failures of others.”
In 1937, Pius XI published the Encyclical “Mit Brennender Sorge,” stating that Catholics must never be anti-Semite.
On March 14, 1937, before it was fashionable to denounce the German Führer as a villain and long before the creation of the concentration camps and the gas chambers, Pius XI, ably seconded by his Secretary of State, wrote the Encyclical “Mit Brennender Sorge” meaning “with burning anxiety”. It dealt with the nazi threat to racial minorities and specifically the Jews addressing the Encyclical directly to the German people. The Encyclical exhorted that Catholics must never be anti-Semitic because “we are all Semites spiritually” and ought to hold the Jewish people in high regard accordingly.
The Encyclical exposed to the world the III Reich’s persecution of the Catholic Church as well as the incompatibility between the principles of the National Socialism and those of the Catholic faith. The German government prohibited the entrance of the Encyclical to the country and it became necessary to smuggle it into Germany under the nose of the ruthless Gestapo. On Sunday March 21, The Encyclical was read from 12,000 Catholic pulpits across Germany. As a result, the Nazi’s campaign of innuendoes against The Church as well as the persecution of Catholics worsened.
The German Catholic hierarchy thanked Pope Pius XI for the letter, which strongly condemned both, racism and anti-Semitism. The Pope pointed to Cardinal Pacelli saying that it was he who had been responsible for the Encyclical. It was the Secretary of State, who asked the German Cardinal Faulhaber to submit a draft text, which he amended carefully. Pacelli also bore the burden of its defense when the Encyclical was the subject of strong German diplomatic protests; he did so personally, not by delegation.
Pope Pius XII’s first Encyclical, “Summi Pontificatus”, in 1939, attacks Nazism and Communism
Pius XII’s first encyclical on October 27, 1939, “Summi Pontificatus” reiterated the attack on the German regime and the Gestapo was ordered to prevent its distribution. In it, the Pope declared his position “against exacerbated nationalism, the idolatry of the state, totalitarianism, racism, the cult of brutal force, contempt of international agreements”, against all the characteristics of Hitler’s political system; he laid the responsibility for the scourge of the war on these aberrations. The Allies airdropped 88,000 copies of the Encyclical over Germany.
WERE PIUS XII AND THE CHURCH REALLY SILENT DURING THE HOLOCAUST?
The Pope was well aware that any public denunciation against Hitler would make things even worse for the Jews. His polices were aimed at saving the Jews. In fact, that was the same policy followed by the International Red Cross and the World Council of Churches both based in Geneva as well as the one recommended by most of the International Jewish organizations involved in the rescue operations of Jews. Gerhart Riegner, the representative of the World Jewish Congress in Geneva, accepted the validity of this policy –preferring action rather than words, as the common goal.
Historian Fr. W. Saunders has stated that we must remember that any defiance of the Nazi regime meant immediate and severe retaliation. Jean Bernard, Catholic Bishop of Luxembourg, who was detained at Dachau, later wrote: “The detained priests trembled every time news reached us of some protest by a religious authority, but particularly by the Vatican. We all had the impression that our warders made us atone heavily for the fury these protest evoke (on them.)” (6)
Fr. Robert A.Graham, S.J., has said that: “it may surprise the contemporary generation to learn that the local Jewish communities and the world Jewish bodies did not, for the most part, urge the Pope to speak out. Their objective was far more concrete and down-to-earth… Appeals to world opinion, high-sounding though it may appear, would have seemed cheap and trivial gestures to those engaged in rescue work…The need to refrain from provocative public statements at such a delicate moments was fully recognized in Jewish circles.” (7)
When an Italian priest, Fr. Scavizzi, a chaplain on a military train travelling through Poland, told the Pope of the conditions in the camps, especially of the Jews, the Holy Father broke down and wept. Bitterly, Pius XII confided to him: “After many tears and many prayers I have judged that a protest of mine not only would fail to help anyone, but would create even more fury against the Jews, multiplying acts of cruelty. Perhaps my solemn protest would have earned me praise from the civilized world, but it would also have brought more implacable persecution of the Jews… I love the Jews.” (8)
With the existing proven facts, can in all consciousness, truly be said that Pope Pius XII remained silent throughout WWII while millions of Jews and gentiles were exterminated? I do not think so. The Pope was not silent during WWII, he was not even neutral-he was on the Allies’ side.