caitriona_3 (![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
caitriona_3) wrote2013-03-15 08:12 am
caitriona_3) wrote2013-03-15 08:12 am
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A bit of a Catholic rant
I’m tired of the derogatory comments I keep reading on the Pope and his predecessors. Others are doing fine work defending Pope Francis and Pope Emeritus Benedict. However, people are reaching even further back to be insulting and inflammatory. So let me look for a moment on Pope Pius XII.
He is insulted and spit upon for being “Hitler’s Pope” – a charge which is untrue. The idea of him being a supporter of Hitler who sat back and watched as the Jews were slaughtered did not come out until a German playwright, Rolf Hochhuth, wrote a play called “The Deputy” in 1963. This play, a ficticious creation ignored the time, the situation, and the atmosphere of the world at the time.
Funny how no one remembers these quotes:
Pope Pius XII – Christmas 1942 – “Mankind owes that vow to the hundreds of thousands of persons who, without any fault on their part, sometimes only because of their nationality or race, have been consigned to death or to a slow decline.”
Chief Rabbi of Rome during the Holocaust – Emilio Zolli stated, “Volumes could be written on the multiform works of Pius XII, and the countless priests, religious and laity who stood with him throughout the world during the war.” “No hero,” he said, “in all of history was more militant, more fought against, none more heroic, than Pius XII in pursuing the works of true charity . . . and thus on behalf of all the suffering children of God.” – He was so moved by the work of Pope Pius XII that he converted to Catholicism after the war.
The New York Times – Christmas editorials of 1941 & 1942 – praised Pope Pius XII as a “lonely voice crying out of the silence of a continent” and for, among other things, assailing “the violent occupation of territory, and the exile and persecution of human beings, for no other reason than race.”
Albert Einstein – a Jewish physicist who escaped from Nazi hands – said this in 1944 - ”Being a lover of freedom, when the Nazi revolution came in Germany, I looked to the universities to defend it, but the universities were immediately silenced. Then I looked to the great editors of the newspapers, but they, like the universities were silenced in a few short weeks. Then I looked to individual writers . . . . they too were mute. Only the Church,” Einstein concluded, “stood squarely across the path of Hitler’s campaign for suppressing the truth. . . . I never had any special interest in the Church before, but now I feel great affection and admiration . . . . and am forced thus to confess that what I once despised, I now praise unreservedly.” Earlier, in 1940, he wrote an article for Time magazine stating, “Only the Church stood squarely across the path of Hitler’s campaign for suppressing truth. …The Church alone has had the courage and persistence to stand for intellectual truth and moral freedom.”
Chaim Weizmann, who would become Israel’s first president, wrote (in 1943) that "the Holy See is lending its powerful help wherever it can, to mitigate the fate of my persecuted co-religionists."
Moshe Sharett, who would become Israel’s 1st Foreign minister and then 2nd Prime Minister, met with Pope Pius XII in the closing days of World War II. On that meeting, he stated: "I told him [the Pope] that my first duty was to thank him, and through him the Catholic Church, on behalf of the Jewish public for all they had done in the various countries to rescue Jews…We are deeply grateful to the Catholic Church."
Rabbi Isaac Herzog, Chief Rabbi of Israel, sent a message in 1945 to Monseignor Angelo Roncalli (the future Pope John XXIII), expressing gratitude to Pope Pius XII for his efforts. "The people of Israel," wrote Rabbi Herzog, "will never forget what His Holiness and his illustrious delegates, inspired by the eternal principles of religion, which form the foundation of true civilization, are doing for our unfortunate brothers and sisters in the most tragic hour of our history, which is living proof of Divine Providence in this world."
Dr. Leon Kubowitzky, the Secretary General of the World Jewish Congress, in September of 1945, personally thanked the Pope in Rome for his interventions on behalf of Jews, and the World Jewish Congress donated $20,000 to Vatican charities "in recognition of the work of the Holy See in rescuing Jews from Fascist and Nazi persecutions."
In September of 1945, Dr. Joseph Nathan, representing the Hebrew Commission, stated, “Above all, we acknowledge the Supreme Pontiff and the religious men and women who, executing the directives of the Holy Father, recognized the persecuted as their brothers and, with great abnegation, hastened to help them, disregarding the terrible dangers to which they were exposed.”
On April 5, 1946, the Union of Italian Jewish Communities sent an official message of thanks to the Pope: “The delegates of the Congress of the Italian Jewish Communities, held in Rome for the first time after the Liberation, feel that it is imperative to extend reverent homage to Your Holiness, and to express the most profound gratitude that animates all Jews for your fraternal humanity toward them during the years of persecution when their lives were endangered by Nazi-Fascist barbarism. Many times priests suffered imprisonment and were sent to concentration camps, and offered their lives to assist Jews in every way. This demonstration of goodness and charity that still animates the just, has served to lessen the shame and torture and sadness that afflicted millions of human beings. “
On May 26, 1955, the Israeli Philharmonic Orchestra flew to Rome to give a special performance of Beethoven’s Seventh Symphony at the Vatican to express the State of Israel's enduring gratitude for the help that the Pope and the Catholic Church had given to the Jewish people persecuted by the Nazis during the Holocaust. This is the orchestra who would not play Wagner’s music because he was Hitler’s favorite musician and a virulent anti-Semite. They would hardly pay tribute to “Hitler’s Pope”. “On the contrary: The Israeli Philharmonic's historic and unprecedented visit to Rome to perform for Pius XII at the Vatican was a unique Jewish communal gesture of collective recognition and gratitude to a great world leader and friend of the Jewish people for his instrumental role in saving the lives of hundreds of thousands of Jews. “
In 1958, when Pope Pius XII died, Golda Meir, at the time Israel’s representative to the United Nations and later to become Prime Minister, stated, “We share in the grief of humanity at the passing away of His Holiness, Pope Pius XII. In a generation afflicted by wars and discords he upheld the highest ideals of peace and compassion. When fearful martyrdom came to our people in the decade of Nazi terror, the voice of the Pope was raised for its victims. The life of our times was enriched by a voice speaking out about great moral truths above the tumult of daily conflict. We mourn a great servant of peace.”
Israeli diplomat and scholar, Pinchas Lapide reviewed the wartime activities of Pope Pius XII and said, “The Catholic Church under the pontificate of Pius XII was instrumental in saving lives of as many as 860,000 Jews from certain death at Nazi hands.” He went on to add that this “figure far exceeds those saved by all other Churches and rescue organizations combined.”After recounting statements of appreciation from a variety of preeminent Jewish spokespersons, he noted. “No Pope in history has been thanked more heartily by Jews . . . .Several suggested in open letters that a Pope Pius XII forest of 860,000 trees be planted on the hills of Judea in order to fittingly honor the memory of the late Pontiff (“Three Popes and the Jews” pp. 214–215).” Levai in his own book did not hesitate to argue that the attacks on the Pope’s wartime record are “demonstrably malicious and fabricated . . . . The archives of the Vatican of diocesan authorities of Ribbentrop’s foreign ministry, contain a whole series of protests—direct and indirect, diplomatic and public, secret and open. The nuncios and bishops of the Catholic Church intervened again and again on the instructions of the Pope,”. He also noted, that the Church “in an endless flood of sermons, allocutions, pastoral letters and encyclicals was a clear and unrelenting foe to all forms of racism at the time, and everyone knew it—Jews, Poles, Russians and most ominously the Nazi secret police.”
Leonard Bernstein, famous conductor at Carnegie Hall, learned of the Pope’s death and tapped his baton for a moment of silence "for the passing of a very great man, Pope Pius XII."
David G. Dalin, an American Rabbi, points out:
In January 1940, for instance, the pope issued instructions for Vatican Radio to reveal "the dreadful cruelties of uncivilized tyranny" the Nazis were inflicting on Jewish and Catholic Poles. Reporting the broadcast the following week, the Jewish Advocate of Boston praised it for what it was: an "outspoken denunciation of German atrocities in Nazi Poland, declaring they affronted the moral conscience of mankind." The New York Times editorialized: "Now the Vatican has spoken, with authority that cannot be questioned, and has confirmed the worst intimations of terror which have come out of the Polish darkness." In England, the Manchester Guardian hailed Vatican Radio as "tortured Poland's most powerful advocate."
Any fair and thorough reading of the evidence demonstrates that Pius XII was a persistent critic of Nazism. Consider just a few highlights of his opposition before the war:
• Of the forty-four speeches Pacelli gave in Germany as papal nuncio between 1917 and 1929, forty denounced some aspect of the emerging Nazi ideology.
• In March 1935, he wrote an open letter to the bishop of Cologne calling the Nazis "false prophets with the pride of Lucifer."
• That same year, he assailed ideologies "possessed by the superstition of race and blood" to an enormous crowd of pilgrims at Lourdes. At Notre Dame in Paris two years later, he named Germany "that noble and powerful nation whom bad shepherds would lead astray into an ideology of race."
• The Nazis were "diabolical," he told friends privately. Hitler "is completely obsessed," he said to his long-time secretary, Sister Pascalina. "All that is not of use to him, he destroys; . . . this man is capable of trampling on corpses." Meeting in 1935 with the heroic anti-Nazi Dietrich von Hildebrand, he declared, "There can be no possible reconciliation" between Christianity and Nazi racism; they were like "fire and water."
• The year after Pacelli became secretary of state in 1930, Vatican Radio was established, essentially under his control. The Vatican newspaper L'Osservatore Romano had an uneven record, though it would improve as Pacelli gradually took charge (extensively reporting Kristallnacht in 1938, for example). But the radio station was always good—making such controversial broadcasts as the request that listeners pray for the persecuted Jews in Germany after the 1935 Nuremberg Legislation.
• It was while Pacelli was his predecessor's chief adviser that Pius XI made the famous statement to a group of Belgian pilgrims in 1938 that "anti-Semitism is inadmissible; spiritually we are all Semites." And it was Pacelli who drafted Pius XI's encyclical Mit brennender Sorge, "With Burning Concern," a condemnation of Germany among the harshest ever issued by the Holy See. Indeed, throughout the 1930s, Pacelli was widely lampooned in the Nazi press as Pius XI's "Jew-loving" cardinal, because of the more than fifty-five protests he sent the Germans as the Vatican secretary of state.
To these must be added highlights of Pius XII's actions during the war:
• His first encyclical, Summi Pontificatus, rushed out in 1939 to beg for peace, was in part a declaration that the proper role of the papacy was to plead to both warring sides rather than to blame one. But it very pointedly quoted St. Paul—“there is neither Gentile nor Jew”—using the word "Jew" specifically in the context of rejecting racial ideology. The New York Times greeted the encyclical with a front-page headline on October 28, 1939: "Pope Condemns Dictators, Treaty Violators, Racism." Allied airplanes dropped thousands of copies on Germany in an effort to raise anti-Nazi sentiment.
• In 1939 and 1940, Pius acted as a secret intermediary between the German plotters against Hitler and the British. He would similarly risk warning the Allies about the impending German invasions of Holland, Belgium, and France.
• In March 1940, Pius granted an audience to Joachim von Ribbentrop, the German foreign minister and the only high-ranking Nazi to bother visiting the Vatican. The Germans' understanding of Pius's position, at least, was clear: Ribbentrop chastised the pope for siding with the Allies. Whereupon Pius began reading from a long list of German atrocities. "In the burning words he spoke to Herr Ribbentrop," the New York Times reported on March 14, Pius "came to the defense of Jews in Germany and Poland."
• When French bishops issued pastoral letters in 1942 attacking deportations, Pius sent his nuncio to protest to the Vichy government against "the inhuman arrests and deportations of Jews from the French-occupied zone to Silesia and parts of Russia." Vatican Radio commented on the bishops' letters six days in a row—at a time when listening to Vatican Radio was a crime in Germany and Poland for which some were put to death. ("Pope Is Said to Plead for Jews Listed for Removal from France," the New York Times headline read on August 6, 1942. "Vichy Seizes Jews; Pope Pius Ignored," the Times reported three weeks later.) In retaliation, in the fall of 1942, Goebbels's office distributed ten million copies of a pamphlet naming Pius XII as the "pro-Jewish pope" and explicitly citing his interventions in France.
• In the summer of 1944, after the liberation of Rome but before the war's end, Pius told a group of Roman Jews who had come to thank him for his protection: "For centuries, Jews have been unjustly treated and despised. It is time they were treated with justice and humanity, God wills it and the Church wills it. St. Paul tells us that the Jews are our brothers. They should also be welcomed as friends."
As these and hundreds of other examples are disparaged, one by one, in recent books attacking Pius XII, the reader loses sight of the huge bulk of them, their cumulative effect that left no one, the Nazis least of all, in doubt about the pope's position.
Enough is enough.
He is insulted and spit upon for being “Hitler’s Pope” – a charge which is untrue. The idea of him being a supporter of Hitler who sat back and watched as the Jews were slaughtered did not come out until a German playwright, Rolf Hochhuth, wrote a play called “The Deputy” in 1963. This play, a ficticious creation ignored the time, the situation, and the atmosphere of the world at the time.
Funny how no one remembers these quotes:
Pope Pius XII – Christmas 1942 – “Mankind owes that vow to the hundreds of thousands of persons who, without any fault on their part, sometimes only because of their nationality or race, have been consigned to death or to a slow decline.”
Chief Rabbi of Rome during the Holocaust – Emilio Zolli stated, “Volumes could be written on the multiform works of Pius XII, and the countless priests, religious and laity who stood with him throughout the world during the war.” “No hero,” he said, “in all of history was more militant, more fought against, none more heroic, than Pius XII in pursuing the works of true charity . . . and thus on behalf of all the suffering children of God.” – He was so moved by the work of Pope Pius XII that he converted to Catholicism after the war.
The New York Times – Christmas editorials of 1941 & 1942 – praised Pope Pius XII as a “lonely voice crying out of the silence of a continent” and for, among other things, assailing “the violent occupation of territory, and the exile and persecution of human beings, for no other reason than race.”
Albert Einstein – a Jewish physicist who escaped from Nazi hands – said this in 1944 - ”Being a lover of freedom, when the Nazi revolution came in Germany, I looked to the universities to defend it, but the universities were immediately silenced. Then I looked to the great editors of the newspapers, but they, like the universities were silenced in a few short weeks. Then I looked to individual writers . . . . they too were mute. Only the Church,” Einstein concluded, “stood squarely across the path of Hitler’s campaign for suppressing the truth. . . . I never had any special interest in the Church before, but now I feel great affection and admiration . . . . and am forced thus to confess that what I once despised, I now praise unreservedly.” Earlier, in 1940, he wrote an article for Time magazine stating, “Only the Church stood squarely across the path of Hitler’s campaign for suppressing truth. …The Church alone has had the courage and persistence to stand for intellectual truth and moral freedom.”
Chaim Weizmann, who would become Israel’s first president, wrote (in 1943) that "the Holy See is lending its powerful help wherever it can, to mitigate the fate of my persecuted co-religionists."
Moshe Sharett, who would become Israel’s 1st Foreign minister and then 2nd Prime Minister, met with Pope Pius XII in the closing days of World War II. On that meeting, he stated: "I told him [the Pope] that my first duty was to thank him, and through him the Catholic Church, on behalf of the Jewish public for all they had done in the various countries to rescue Jews…We are deeply grateful to the Catholic Church."
Rabbi Isaac Herzog, Chief Rabbi of Israel, sent a message in 1945 to Monseignor Angelo Roncalli (the future Pope John XXIII), expressing gratitude to Pope Pius XII for his efforts. "The people of Israel," wrote Rabbi Herzog, "will never forget what His Holiness and his illustrious delegates, inspired by the eternal principles of religion, which form the foundation of true civilization, are doing for our unfortunate brothers and sisters in the most tragic hour of our history, which is living proof of Divine Providence in this world."
Dr. Leon Kubowitzky, the Secretary General of the World Jewish Congress, in September of 1945, personally thanked the Pope in Rome for his interventions on behalf of Jews, and the World Jewish Congress donated $20,000 to Vatican charities "in recognition of the work of the Holy See in rescuing Jews from Fascist and Nazi persecutions."
In September of 1945, Dr. Joseph Nathan, representing the Hebrew Commission, stated, “Above all, we acknowledge the Supreme Pontiff and the religious men and women who, executing the directives of the Holy Father, recognized the persecuted as their brothers and, with great abnegation, hastened to help them, disregarding the terrible dangers to which they were exposed.”
On April 5, 1946, the Union of Italian Jewish Communities sent an official message of thanks to the Pope: “The delegates of the Congress of the Italian Jewish Communities, held in Rome for the first time after the Liberation, feel that it is imperative to extend reverent homage to Your Holiness, and to express the most profound gratitude that animates all Jews for your fraternal humanity toward them during the years of persecution when their lives were endangered by Nazi-Fascist barbarism. Many times priests suffered imprisonment and were sent to concentration camps, and offered their lives to assist Jews in every way. This demonstration of goodness and charity that still animates the just, has served to lessen the shame and torture and sadness that afflicted millions of human beings. “
On May 26, 1955, the Israeli Philharmonic Orchestra flew to Rome to give a special performance of Beethoven’s Seventh Symphony at the Vatican to express the State of Israel's enduring gratitude for the help that the Pope and the Catholic Church had given to the Jewish people persecuted by the Nazis during the Holocaust. This is the orchestra who would not play Wagner’s music because he was Hitler’s favorite musician and a virulent anti-Semite. They would hardly pay tribute to “Hitler’s Pope”. “On the contrary: The Israeli Philharmonic's historic and unprecedented visit to Rome to perform for Pius XII at the Vatican was a unique Jewish communal gesture of collective recognition and gratitude to a great world leader and friend of the Jewish people for his instrumental role in saving the lives of hundreds of thousands of Jews. “
In 1958, when Pope Pius XII died, Golda Meir, at the time Israel’s representative to the United Nations and later to become Prime Minister, stated, “We share in the grief of humanity at the passing away of His Holiness, Pope Pius XII. In a generation afflicted by wars and discords he upheld the highest ideals of peace and compassion. When fearful martyrdom came to our people in the decade of Nazi terror, the voice of the Pope was raised for its victims. The life of our times was enriched by a voice speaking out about great moral truths above the tumult of daily conflict. We mourn a great servant of peace.”
Israeli diplomat and scholar, Pinchas Lapide reviewed the wartime activities of Pope Pius XII and said, “The Catholic Church under the pontificate of Pius XII was instrumental in saving lives of as many as 860,000 Jews from certain death at Nazi hands.” He went on to add that this “figure far exceeds those saved by all other Churches and rescue organizations combined.”After recounting statements of appreciation from a variety of preeminent Jewish spokespersons, he noted. “No Pope in history has been thanked more heartily by Jews . . . .Several suggested in open letters that a Pope Pius XII forest of 860,000 trees be planted on the hills of Judea in order to fittingly honor the memory of the late Pontiff (“Three Popes and the Jews” pp. 214–215).” Levai in his own book did not hesitate to argue that the attacks on the Pope’s wartime record are “demonstrably malicious and fabricated . . . . The archives of the Vatican of diocesan authorities of Ribbentrop’s foreign ministry, contain a whole series of protests—direct and indirect, diplomatic and public, secret and open. The nuncios and bishops of the Catholic Church intervened again and again on the instructions of the Pope,”. He also noted, that the Church “in an endless flood of sermons, allocutions, pastoral letters and encyclicals was a clear and unrelenting foe to all forms of racism at the time, and everyone knew it—Jews, Poles, Russians and most ominously the Nazi secret police.”
Leonard Bernstein, famous conductor at Carnegie Hall, learned of the Pope’s death and tapped his baton for a moment of silence "for the passing of a very great man, Pope Pius XII."
David G. Dalin, an American Rabbi, points out:
In January 1940, for instance, the pope issued instructions for Vatican Radio to reveal "the dreadful cruelties of uncivilized tyranny" the Nazis were inflicting on Jewish and Catholic Poles. Reporting the broadcast the following week, the Jewish Advocate of Boston praised it for what it was: an "outspoken denunciation of German atrocities in Nazi Poland, declaring they affronted the moral conscience of mankind." The New York Times editorialized: "Now the Vatican has spoken, with authority that cannot be questioned, and has confirmed the worst intimations of terror which have come out of the Polish darkness." In England, the Manchester Guardian hailed Vatican Radio as "tortured Poland's most powerful advocate."
Any fair and thorough reading of the evidence demonstrates that Pius XII was a persistent critic of Nazism. Consider just a few highlights of his opposition before the war:
• Of the forty-four speeches Pacelli gave in Germany as papal nuncio between 1917 and 1929, forty denounced some aspect of the emerging Nazi ideology.
• In March 1935, he wrote an open letter to the bishop of Cologne calling the Nazis "false prophets with the pride of Lucifer."
• That same year, he assailed ideologies "possessed by the superstition of race and blood" to an enormous crowd of pilgrims at Lourdes. At Notre Dame in Paris two years later, he named Germany "that noble and powerful nation whom bad shepherds would lead astray into an ideology of race."
• The Nazis were "diabolical," he told friends privately. Hitler "is completely obsessed," he said to his long-time secretary, Sister Pascalina. "All that is not of use to him, he destroys; . . . this man is capable of trampling on corpses." Meeting in 1935 with the heroic anti-Nazi Dietrich von Hildebrand, he declared, "There can be no possible reconciliation" between Christianity and Nazi racism; they were like "fire and water."
• The year after Pacelli became secretary of state in 1930, Vatican Radio was established, essentially under his control. The Vatican newspaper L'Osservatore Romano had an uneven record, though it would improve as Pacelli gradually took charge (extensively reporting Kristallnacht in 1938, for example). But the radio station was always good—making such controversial broadcasts as the request that listeners pray for the persecuted Jews in Germany after the 1935 Nuremberg Legislation.
• It was while Pacelli was his predecessor's chief adviser that Pius XI made the famous statement to a group of Belgian pilgrims in 1938 that "anti-Semitism is inadmissible; spiritually we are all Semites." And it was Pacelli who drafted Pius XI's encyclical Mit brennender Sorge, "With Burning Concern," a condemnation of Germany among the harshest ever issued by the Holy See. Indeed, throughout the 1930s, Pacelli was widely lampooned in the Nazi press as Pius XI's "Jew-loving" cardinal, because of the more than fifty-five protests he sent the Germans as the Vatican secretary of state.
To these must be added highlights of Pius XII's actions during the war:
• His first encyclical, Summi Pontificatus, rushed out in 1939 to beg for peace, was in part a declaration that the proper role of the papacy was to plead to both warring sides rather than to blame one. But it very pointedly quoted St. Paul—“there is neither Gentile nor Jew”—using the word "Jew" specifically in the context of rejecting racial ideology. The New York Times greeted the encyclical with a front-page headline on October 28, 1939: "Pope Condemns Dictators, Treaty Violators, Racism." Allied airplanes dropped thousands of copies on Germany in an effort to raise anti-Nazi sentiment.
• In 1939 and 1940, Pius acted as a secret intermediary between the German plotters against Hitler and the British. He would similarly risk warning the Allies about the impending German invasions of Holland, Belgium, and France.
• In March 1940, Pius granted an audience to Joachim von Ribbentrop, the German foreign minister and the only high-ranking Nazi to bother visiting the Vatican. The Germans' understanding of Pius's position, at least, was clear: Ribbentrop chastised the pope for siding with the Allies. Whereupon Pius began reading from a long list of German atrocities. "In the burning words he spoke to Herr Ribbentrop," the New York Times reported on March 14, Pius "came to the defense of Jews in Germany and Poland."
• When French bishops issued pastoral letters in 1942 attacking deportations, Pius sent his nuncio to protest to the Vichy government against "the inhuman arrests and deportations of Jews from the French-occupied zone to Silesia and parts of Russia." Vatican Radio commented on the bishops' letters six days in a row—at a time when listening to Vatican Radio was a crime in Germany and Poland for which some were put to death. ("Pope Is Said to Plead for Jews Listed for Removal from France," the New York Times headline read on August 6, 1942. "Vichy Seizes Jews; Pope Pius Ignored," the Times reported three weeks later.) In retaliation, in the fall of 1942, Goebbels's office distributed ten million copies of a pamphlet naming Pius XII as the "pro-Jewish pope" and explicitly citing his interventions in France.
• In the summer of 1944, after the liberation of Rome but before the war's end, Pius told a group of Roman Jews who had come to thank him for his protection: "For centuries, Jews have been unjustly treated and despised. It is time they were treated with justice and humanity, God wills it and the Church wills it. St. Paul tells us that the Jews are our brothers. They should also be welcomed as friends."
As these and hundreds of other examples are disparaged, one by one, in recent books attacking Pius XII, the reader loses sight of the huge bulk of them, their cumulative effect that left no one, the Nazis least of all, in doubt about the pope's position.
Enough is enough.