Thanks to Pius XII, some 80% of Rome’s Jews were saved. He also ran a network to save downed English and American pilots. After the war, the chief rabbi of Rome converted, he was so impressed. The pope also encouraged Catholic families to shelter Jewish children, which was a dangerous thing to do. The late archbishop/cardinal of Paris was one of those children.

At one point, the Vatican World War II archives was something like 2 million documents. People who knew predicted that as they were archived and became accessible Pius would be vindicated. So it’s happening.

Not that he should have needed vindication.

Unfortunately, it won’t matter much, Christopher. The idea of the conservative, backwards Church which cheered the idea of the Fascists in power is too deeply entrenched in popular culture. There will always be the demand “Why didn’t the Pope come right out and denounce Hitler?”, not to mention the ever-popular “Why didn’t the Pope excommunicate Hitler and say any German Catholic who joined or supported the Nazis or even joined the German Army was excommunicated?” (because that works so well, as we’ve seen when it comes to politicians and abortion; nope, no protests about the bishops interfering in politics and how dare they deny communion to people who are too Catholics!)

Hindsight is a great thing; we know the evil of Hitler and the Nazis, but back in 1930 a lot of people thought he was the greatest thing since sliced bread, and a lot more didn’t particularly like him but preferred him to the alternative (Communist Russia and Uncle Joe Stalin).

The trouble is, the Church does run on “Vatican time” and we have long memories; so part of the reason that the Church approached matters in regard to government and Germany with a diplomatic approach is that they remembered the last time a strong leader came along: Chancellor Bismarck and the Kulturkampf. At least we got a poem out of that one, The Wreck of the Deutschland by Fr. Gerard Manley Hopkins, S.J. about five nuns driven out of Germany by the laws which closed down Catholic schools, seminaries, convents and monasteries.

Never mind that when the Dutch bishops did issue a denunciation, the response of the German occupying army was to make a special effort to round up Jewish converts and those who were baptised (either genuinely or issued with baptismal certificates to spare them, since an exception for those of Jewish descent who had been baptised had been in force), particularly priests and religious, and deport them to Auschwitz. Amongst them was Edith Stein, St. Teresia Benedicta. So the Pope feared that if he issued such a direct condemnation, what would the Nazi response be, given what they had done in the Netherlands?

Yes, it would be great if we had the romantic, Hollywood film version of the Pope issuing a radio broadcast to the world where he poured fire and vitriol on Hitler – and if so, today there would be books written about “Hitler’s Pope” who was directly responsible for X amount of hundreds of thousands of deaths, if only he had not made that speech and kept his mouth shut and relied on diplomacy, all those rounded up in the purges afterwards would have been spared.

Since the above is a bit tl;dr I’ll just give an excerpt from the Wikipedia article on the Kulturkampf.

Why didn’t the Pope take a stronger line against Germany?

Last time a Pope got in a peeing contest with a German leader, this happened: confined to Prussia and not the whole of Germany, but “By the height of anti-Catholic legislation, half of the Prussian bishops were in prison or in exile, a quarter of the parishes had no priest, half the monks and nuns had left Prussia, a third of the monasteries and convents were closed, 1800 parish priests were imprisoned or exiled, and thousands of laypeople were imprisoned for helping the priests.”

Expand that up to the whole of 1930s Germany and Austria, and you see why the advice of the time would have been “Don’t make this into a trial of strength”.

The Jews at the time were also busy discouraging the pope from raising a fuss, since they bore the brunt of Hitler’s wrath. One of the instances including their pulling Jewish converts, including St. Edith Stein, out of monasteries.

For comprehensive information:

http://70.40.202.97/category/pope-pius-xii-and-the-hoocaust/

http://catholiceducation.org/articles/facts/fm0020.html

Cheers

The whole Hitler’s Pope meme was a deliberate Communist lie, originating with Krushchev and the KGB.

[...] Go here to read the rest.  The book has been out since October in this country.  Go here to see it on Amazon.  I have not yet read it yet, the eternal problem of too many books and too little time, but I shall, as I have read endless books and articles on this subject.  Of all the historical controversies that I have examined over the years, the one over Pius XII has to be the most mendacious.  Everyone, the Nazis, the Allies and the Jews, knew where Pope Pius XII stood during the War.  Pope Pius was regarded as a hero by all who opposed the Nazis and the Nazis regarded him as a bitter enemy.  The controversy arose after his death, instigated by playwright Rolf Hochhuth and his historically worthless anti-Catholic diatribe The Deputy (1963) sought to cast Pius XII as coldly indifferent to the fate of the Jews, a mirror image of the actual historical record.  Haters of the Church eagerly seized upon this thesis as a club to belabor the Jew for her stances in current controversies.  There has never been any historical validity to the thesis:  zilch, zero, none.  Its persistence has much to do with anti-Catholicism and nothing to do with History. [...]

Of all the historical controversies that I have examined over the years, the one over Pius XII has to be the most mendacious. Everyone, the Nazis, the Allies and the Jews, knew where Pope Pius XII stood during the War. Pope Pius was regarded as a hero by all who opposed the Nazis and the Nazis regarded him as a bitter enemy. The controversy arose after his death, instigated by playwright Rolf Hochhuth and his historically worthless anti-Catholic diatribe The Deputy (1963) sought to cast Pius XII as coldly indifferent to the fate of the Jews, a mirror image of the actual historical record. Haters of the Church eagerly seized upon this thesis as a club to belabor the Jew for her stances in current controversies. There has never been any historical validity to the thesis: zilch, zero, none. Its persistence has much to do with anti-Catholicism and nothing to do with History.

(This corrects some errors that crept into my initial comment.)

Of all the historical controversies that I have examined over the years, the one over Pius XII has to be the most mendacious. Everyone, the Nazis, the Allies and the Jews, knew where Pope Pius XII stood during the War. Pope Pius was regarded as a hero by all who opposed the Nazis and the Nazis regarded him as a bitter enemy. The controversy arose after his death, instigated by playwright Rolf Hochhuth and his historically worthless anti-Catholic diatribe The Deputy (1963), a play which sought to cast Pius XII as coldly indifferent to the fate of the Jews, a reverse mirror image of the actual historical record. Haters of the Church eagerly seized upon this thesis as a club to belabor the Church for her stances in current controversies. There has never been any historical validity to the thesis: zilch, zero, none. Its persistence has much to do with anti-Catholicism and nothing to do with History.

Many of us have known for years about the Pope’s efforts to save Jews and his condemnations of Nazi policies, but it’s nice to see it in a left-wing organ like the Guardian. This “Hitler’s Pope” slander is a lot like the “Protocols of the Elders of Zion,” a Tsarist forgery. It’s based on nothing, but Jew-haters or Catholic-haters believe these things because they want to.

This is kinda like trying to teach a pig to wrestle; it only get you dirty and the pig enjoys it!

Historic justice will not have been done until Eugenio Pacelli is listed at Yad Vashem as Righteous Among The Nations.

“By the height of anti-Catholic legislation, half of the Prussian bishops were in prison or in exile, a quarter of the parishes had no priest, half the monks and nuns had left Prussia, a third of the monasteries and convents were closed, 1800 parish priests were imprisoned or exiled, and thousands of laypeople were imprisoned for helping the priests.”

And my mother’s ancestors fled to Russia at the invitation of the Czarina, where they lived until Bolsheviks came knocking on the door to send their young men of questionable allegiance to the revolutionary frontlines. When they refused, the Bolsheviks shot one dead on the doorstep, so his brother went with them to meet his fate within a month. Stalin later starved the remaining inhabitants (along with millions more of course) and had the village plowed under.

I do not have too many relatives on that side of the family.

“that priests were instructed to issue baptism certificates to hundreds of Jews hidden in Genoa, Rome and elsewhere in Italy. More than 2,000 Jews in Hungary were given fabricated Vatican documents identifying them as Catholics and a network saved German Jews by bringing them to Rome. The pope appointed a priest with extensive funds with which to provide food, clothing and medicine. More than 4,000 Jews were hidden in convents and monasteries across Italy.”

Seriously, this is not news. These are not startling new revelations. All of this has been out there for some time now. Maybe it’s just breaking free from the Loon Left that only wants to discredit the RCC.

Oh,c’mon. Everyone knows Eugenio Pacelli, a/k/s Pope Pius XII, hid thousands of Jews in the Vatican and in monasteries and convents throughout Italy during WWII, The Big One, so he could kill them later and take credit for it instead of Hitler.

And the grove of trees in Israel planted in honor of Pius XII for saving Jews was planted by self-hating Jews.

Plus, when Ratzinger, a/k/a Pope Benedict XVI, doesn’t give Communion to Orthodox Jews, it is because he wants to kill them.

Some argue Christ was a Jew – ONLY on his Mother’s side.

Wake up, people!

The archives are supposed to become available in 2014. It will be fun to watch the spin. I also enjoyed reading the hysterics from when Pius was declared the Servant of God and Venerable. Two miracles and lefty heads will start exploding!

So Muller, did the Czarina send your ancestors to the Black Sea or the Volga? If the Volga, the hilly side or the meadow side? Ja, no more Volga Deutsche along the Volga.

@ Donald R. McClarey
February 10, 2013

“The controversy arose after his death,instigated by playwright Rolf Hochhuth and his historically worthless anti-Catholic diatribe The Deputy (1963), a play which sought to cast Pius XII as coldly indifferent to the fate of the Jews,…….”

You have nor gone far enough in your analysis of the motives of Rolf Hochhutt in writing “The Deputy”, He was a representative of the generation of Germans who reached maturity in the 50′s, when the horrendous crimes against humanity committed by the Germans under the Nazi Regime in the Second World War was established beyond doubt, not least by the general availability of the documentary and film evidence of Nuremberg Trials. That generation could not understand nor would they accept that their nation, “the most cultured in Europe” and more particularly their very own parents, could have descended to such barbarism and be responsible for deliberately committing these atrocities. So it cast around for someone else to blame and Hochhut, following the tenets Kuturkapmf set in motion by Bismarck at the very birth of a United Germany in 1870, seized on the “foreign” influential position of the Papacy in the person of Pius XII, and despite all the established facts on the ground blaming his purported “silence” and inactivity for the catastrophe, especially the vilest of them all, the Holocaust. As usual,within and outside of Germany, every other person and social, political and religious movement and even entire nations,with an axe to grind against Catholicism or the Papacy, jumped on the band wagon and enabled the intellectual and historical fraud. The fact is that the post War surviving Jewish leaders recognised the wartime work of Pius XII,as the greatest and most widespread effort made for their their survival,and many had benefited personally from the effort from the Still many Jewish activists themselves participated in the exercise of blaming an innocent man, without realising that the process was an endeavour to lift the blame from their real oppressors and salve the conscience of their oppressors’ children. Their motive has been interpreted as retaliation for the Papacy’s even-handed public stand against indiscriminate oppression,by extremists of both sides, including Jewish extremist, against innocent Arabs, including Christian Arabs, in the Israeli/Palestinian conflict.

Minor Correction: I wrote: ” Kuturkapmf set in motion by Bismarck at the very birth of a United Germany in 1870,” That should be “KULTURKAMPF set in motion by Bismarck……”

I’m part of the way into the book and am enjoying it. It’s very well written, with contributions from various diarists adding to it’s depth.

So Muller, did the Czarina send your ancestors to the Black Sea or the Volga? If the Volga, the hilly side or the meadow side? Ja, no more Volga Deutsche along the Volga.

That I do not know. I always assumed that they were part of the Wolgadeutsche just because, to my knowledge, that was the largest and most identifiable group = easiest target.

I always thought it bizarre that the exhaustive Rise and Fall of the Third Reich, written by a nominal Protestant who was actually there during the Nazi rise to power, had no hint of the Vatican supporting the Nazis. Actually quite the opposite.

Then some Communist sympathizing playwrite makes a work of fiction in the ’60′s claiming the Pope was complicit, and suddenly that is all the evidence anyone needs.

So stupid only an intellectual could believe it.

What is scarry about things like this is how short a memory some people have when they want to be lied to. Liberals might say they are against Nazis and the like, but really they are cut from the same cloth. It was no secret that Pope Pius XII did not support Nazism and acted against their evil plans. Hiter’s Pope? Please, the Nazis and the Italian Fascists hated him, because they hate all men that do not bow to the State as their god. The Head Honcho of the main religion that will go to their martyrdom rather than offer their pinch of incense to the Emperor (State) is the Pope. If they thought they could have gotten away with killing him, they would have.

No matter what Pope Pius XII would have done, Statists would hate him. Had he issued some scathing condemnation of Nazism and they decided to retaliate in kind, the current Statists would have condemned him for speaking out. For what he did behind the scenes and not so behind the scenes, they condemn him. There is absolutely no way to please liberals, let us always remember that!