Yet you losers don't know about stories like this.
More like it wasn't relevent to the point I was making. I have a cousin who was a Catholic Priest who said something the Nazis didn't like and found himself in Nordhausen...
But here's what didn't happen. Pope Pius XII didn't denounce what the Nazis were doing, not once. He didn't call on Good Catholics to put down their arms and stop fighting for the Axis. Nor did the leaders of the various Protestant Denominations in Germany. They all put on their "Gott Mit Uns" belt buckles and fought for the Fuhrer...
Chaim Weizmann, Israel’s first president, and Isaac Herzog, chief rabbi of Israel, paid generous tributes. Israel Zolli, Rome’s chief rabbi, became a Catholic and took the pope’s Christian name, Eugenio, in tribute to him. After Pius’s death in 1958, Golda Meir, then Israeli foreign minister, wrote: “We mourn a great servant of peace.”
The Nazis hated the Church. Thousands of Catholic priests were imprisoned, especially in Dachau, the “priests’ camp”. It is true that some bishops followed a policy of appeasement: Cardinal Adolf Bertram of Breslau supposedly ordered a Requiem Mass for Hitler in 1945. Some Catholics betrayed Jews and even, as in Jedwabne in 1941, massacred them. But others, notably Bishop Clemens August von Galen of Münster and Bishop Konrad von Preysing of Berlin, did all they could to resist Nazism. Preysing’s agent, Bernhard Lichtenberg, the provost of Berlin cathedral, was judicially murdered and is now recognised as a martyr.
Yet in the nearly 60 years since Pius XII’s death, his reputation has been traduced. One recent example was the BBC’s report that the silent prayer of Pope Francis at Auschwitz was in reparation for the silence of the Catholic Church. The corporation was simply repeating what had become the received view of Pius XII and of the Church’s record during the war.
Lord Alton of Liverpool immediately protested, and together he and I made a formal complaint to the BBC. A considerable correspondence ensued. In early December, the complaint was upheld. Fraser Steel, head of the editorial complaints unit, wrote: “This did not give due weight to public statements by successive popes or the efforts made on the instructions of Pius XII to rescue Jews from Nazi persecution, and perpetuated a view which is at odds with the balance of evidence.”
The negative view of Pius marked an astonishing reversal of reputation. In 1963, a previously unknown German, Rolf Hochhuth, published a play called The Deputy which blamed Pius XII for the Holocaust. Hochhuth claimed it was historically accurate. The play was premiered in West Berlin and performed by the Royal Shakespeare Company in England and America.
The provenance of Hochhuth’s play, and the degree of communist support, aroused suspicion. The USSR had a strong interest in destroying the moral authority of the pope and the Catholic Church. As Khrushchev, a mass murderer in his own right, said at the time, dead men cannot defend themselves.
Confirmation of these suspicions came only in 1998, with the publication of the memoirs of Ion Mihai Pacepa, a Romanian three-star general in the Securitate who defected in 1978. According to Pacepa, the project, known as Seat 12, originated in Moscow with Khrushchev. From 1959, Pacepa had directed his spies, posing as priests, to pilfer Vatican archives. They found nothing they could use, but Ivan Agayants, the KGB’s disinformation chief, had been able to feed Hochhuth with false information, which he was only too ready to use. The Soviets’ aim was to discredit Pope Pius and wreck the growing understanding between the Church and Judaism.
The American writer Ronald Rychlak, who has done the most detailed work on the story, concludes that Hochhuth was heavily dependent on such Soviet disinformation. Not that Hochhuth was the only author: his play was rewritten and heavily abridged by Erwin Piscator, a famous producer and communist agent of influence.
In 1964, Blessed Paul VI commissioned detailed research, eventually published in 1981, which showed the degree of papal and Catholic support for the Jewish people during the war. This should have been the end of the matter. It was not. A number of Jewish scholars, such as Daniel Goldhagen, publishing in the 1990s, endorsed the accusations.
This had its effect. The distinguished historian Sir Martin Gilbert wrote that he repeatedly received applications for support for PhD study which usually included a reference to the “silent” or even “anti-Semitic” Pius XII.
John Cornwell’s Hitler’s Pope, published in 1999, was seriously misleading. He implied that Pacelli held “stereotypical” anti-Semitic views. This was based on, among other things, mistranslating, misconstruing and selectively quoting a long letter written by Pacelli in 1919, reporting on a meeting with the chairman of the Bolshevik administration in Munich. Cornwell’s book was overdependent on the understandably embittered recollections of Heinrich Brüning, the exiled former German Chancellor. Hitler’s Pope was really part of a campaign against St John Paul II. But that is a different argument and has no business in an evaluation of Pius XII.
First, the BBC should prepare a major documentary on the pope who was responsible for saving thousands of Jewish lives. I am advised that the corporation will consider this. The BBC has acknowledged that there should be closer scrutiny. Which of course there already has been: the question is whether minds are open.
Secondly, the critical statements about Pope Pius at Yad Vashem, Israel’s official memorial to Holocaust victims, should be substantially revised. Many of the pope’s helpers have now been named Righteous among the Nations. It is time that Pius was recognised himself as among the Righteous. He needs not a tree, but a whole forest planted in his memory. The story of the Houses of Life adds further weight to the evidence for his bravery.
Israel's Vatican envoy backtracks on praise of Pope Pius XII
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You are a loser Joe and spread lies.
