| Pope Pius XII and the Holocaust |
Pope Pius XII and the Holocaust |
|
Understanding the Vatican During the Nazi Period
by Michael Marrus at The "Jewish Virtual Library" The strongest argument Catholics can come up with are not from the FACTS of the case, but from what JEWS have said in praise of Pope Pius XII, and their claim that many people agreed during the Holocaust that the best approach was not to publicly challenge the Nazis, but to act quietly in the shadows. Is there any merit is such claims ? as in http://www.catholic.net/rcc/Periodicals/Issues/pius12.html "--What was to be gained by Pius's getting up on a soap box and lashing out at the Nazis? Both the International Red Cross and the World Council of Churches came to the same conclusion as the Vatican: relief efforts for the Jews would be more effective if the agencies remained relatively quiet; yet, you never hear anybody attacking the Red Cross for its "silence" about the Holocaust; --In 1942, the Catholic hierarchy of Amsterdam spoke out vigorously against the Nazi treatment of the Jews; the Nazi response was a redoubling of round-ups and deportations; by the end of the war, 90 percent of the Jews in Amsterdam were liquidated. Jewish relief officials were in complete agreement that a public attack by the Vatican against the Nazis would a) not have the slightest effect on Hitler and b) would seriously jeopardize the lives of Jews who were being hidden in convents, monasteries, etc.; " Response to the "Powerless Church" excuse: of Constantine's Sword, by James Carroll : [p. 476] "To imagine that the Catholic Church was craven in the face of the challenge posed by Adolf Hitler, that it failed to oppose him out of cowardice, is to ignore, as we shall see, the brave history of Church resistance in the not too distant past - this Church was not cowardly." . . . [p. 487] "As the (19th) century unfolded, the various Germanic states vied with one another until Prussia's decisive victory over France in 1870 put Chancellor Otto von Bismarck in the position to establish a new German empire. Bismarck, born in 1815, the pivotal year of the Congress of Vienna, was the son of Prussian aristocrats. He was a cynical visionary who put everything second to the restoration of German glory. On January 18, 1871, with Bismarck calling the shots, the king of Prussia, William I, was crowned emperor of Germany in the Hall of Mirrors at Versailles. A new Reichstag was convened in Berlin. It would be an elected body, drawing representatives from the more than two dozen states, kingdoms, duchies, and free cities that Bismarck would now begin to stitch together into one nation. He immediately hit upon a way to do that, by uniting the various political and regional factions against what he called "the enemy within," which was the Catholic Church. [p. 486] Recall that the Peace of Augsburg in 1555 had ended the religious wars of the Reformation by drawing clear lines between Protestant and Catholic states within the German world, and those divisions were still rigidly observed. Prussia was the Protestant stronghold and Austria the Catholic stronghold, but Bismarck had deliberately kept Austria out of the new empire, to keep Catholics a decided minority in his Germany. The proportion was two-thirds Protestant, one-third Catholic, most of whom were concentrated in border regions like the Saar, the Rhineland, Alsace and Lorraine, all of which had been in dispute with France, and in Silesia, which was culturally attached to Catholic Poland. The Germanic patriotism of border Catholics was readily called into question, and indeed, many of them hated Prussia. Bismarck already controlled the Protestant churches, and he knew that in order to control his empire, he was going to have to control the Catholics. . . The assault can be said to have begun with the elimination, in mid 1871, of the Catholic bureau in the Prussian education ministry, and then with the so-called Pulpit Law, passed by the Reichstag late in the year. This statute outlawed criticism of the state from the pulpit - a statute aimed at Catholic priests. From then on, the anti-Catholic campaign was carried on at many levels, and would involve the banishing of priests and nuns from the country, the driving of bishops from their chairs, the closing of schools, the confiscation of church property, the disruption of Church gatherings, the disbanding of Catholic associations, and an open feud with the Vatican. The campaign was called the Kulturkampf, a word invented, ironically, by a progressive politician and meaning "cultural struggle," or, as the conservative American politician Patrick Buchanan might put it, "culture war." The Kulturkampf lasted from 1871 until about 1887, and was characterized by a Catholic who lived through it as "Diocletian persecution:' [p. 488] Among the reasons to consider it closely is to see the kind of resistance the Roman Catholic Church can mount, both locally and from the Vatican, when confronted with a ruthless, calculated, and systematic attempt to destroy it. The Church's response to Bismark, in that sense, sets a standard against which its later behavior, in response to Hitler, must be measured. In 1871, the wily Bismarck appointed as imperial Germany's first ambassador to the Vatican, an aristocrat named Gustav von Hohenlohe an appointment that on its face seemed rather politic, since Hohenlohe was a Roman Catholic cardinal. But the pope was furious at the appointment since this cardinal had vociferously opposed the doctrine of infallibility at the General Council the year before. (Dollinger had just been excommunicated for his similar position.) The pope rejected Hohenlohe, and following further Vatican protest, Bismarck severed diplomatic relations with the Holy See in 1872. "We shall not go to Canossa," he said, displaying the long German memory: Henry IV had been humiliated in the mountain snows of Canossa by Pope Gregory VII in 1076. Instead, the anti-Church campaign escalated. In 1872, priests and nuns were banned from teaching posts in schools, and all Jesuits were ordered out of Germany. The next year, other religious orders were expelled, and in May the so- called "May Laws" were passed in the Prussian legislature. These statutes gave to the government authority to oversee the training and assignments of priests, and put bishops under the direct control of the state. Nearly the entire Catholic clergy of Prussia reacted to these laws with adamant rejection, simply refusing to obey. The state responded ruthlessly, arresting, jailing, and exiling priests and even bishops. Eighteen hundred priests were imprisoned or banished from the state, and a vast fortune in church holdings was confiscated by the government. The Catholic people supported their clergy, and in many towns spontaneous rallies occurred as angry demonstrators gathered to protest when police or soldiers hauled away curates. In 1875, Pius IX issued an encyclical from Rome that amounted to a counterattack on the Kulturkampf, and its fierce provisions remain striking. The pope declared the May Laws null and void, "since they are completely contrary to the God-given institutions of the church." He urged the Catholics of Germany to engage in a strategy, as he called it, of "passive resistance." And, most telling, he decreed that priests who cooperated with the German government's implementation of these policies, the so-called state-priests, were ipso facto excommunicated." "Many millions " of German Catholics, in the phrase of one contemporary, did just as the pope asked, and passive resistance became the prevalent response even to the escalations of the Kulturkampf. " |
| from the F.A.Q. page: CATHOLIC LEAGUE for Religious and Civil Rights Pope Pius XII and the Holocaust from CatholicLeague.org/pius/framemain.htm First Question:"The general charge against Pope Pius XII is that he maintained a �continued attitude of silence� in the face of Nazism and the horror of the Holocaust. Was the Pope silent? "
Reply :"Pope Pius XII was not silent in the face of Nazism, either before he was elected pope in 1939 or during the war years. . . The record goes on and on. Pius XII and the Church were neither silent nor complacent in the face of the Nazi horror. "
Here is what the Jewish scholar, Daniel Goldhagen says about such claims in his 2002 book, A Moral Reckoning (pp. 39-40): "The Pope�s defenders also eagerly interpret public statements by Pius XII that were critical of violence or racism in general - no matter how glancing, weak or tardy - as powerful and unequivocal defenses of the Jews, even though any mention of Jews is conspicuously absent. Pius XII's Christmas message of 1942 is, for them, Exhibit A. At the end of a forty-five-minute speech dealing with other themes, the Pontiff calls for a just society: "We owe it to the innumerable dead . . . to the suffering groups of mothers, widows, and orphans . . . to the innumerable exiles . . . to the hundreds of thousands who, without personal guilt, are doomed to death or to a progressive deterioration of their condition, sometimes for no other reason than their nationality or descent . . . to the many thousands of noncombatants whom the air war has [harmed]." Laudable as this statement might seem, its platitudinous vagueness is striking. By Christmas 1942, the Germans and their helpers had been slaughtering millions of Jews across Europe for almost a year and a half. They were well on their way to annihilating the three million Jews of Catholic Poland. The Einsatzgruppen, the German army and other German units, and the German�s local auxiliaries had machine-gunned and gassed a good portion of the million Jews in the Soviet Union whom they would ultimately kill. With the aid of locals, they had also killed most of the Jews of Catholic Lithuania, and of Latvia and Estonia, and had begun destroying the Jews of Romania. The German army had slaughtered most of the Jews of Serbia. Catholic Slovakia and Catholic Croatia had for months been "solving� their �Jewish Problem," the Slovaks by deporting the Jews to their deaths and the Croats by killing them themselves. The Germans had begun to annihilate the Jews of greater Germany itself, including prewar Austria, and the annexed territory that today is the Czech Republic. With their local helpers, they were annihilating the Jews of western Europe, of Belgium, France, Luxembourg, and the Netherlands. The death factories, with their gas chambers and crematoria, had long been consuming their victims day after day. For all this time that the Germans and their helpers were killing all these Jewish men, women, and children across the continent, Pius XII publicly said nothing. He uttered no protest even though he knew the broad contours of the destruction, having received a stream of detailed reports about the ongoing mass murder. He watched in detached silence. Now, when he finally said something, he made no mention of Jews as victims, or Germans or Nazis as perpetrators, and no condemnation of racism or anti-Semitism. Pius XII made no attempt to provide usable information to the European peoples about the extent of the mass murder, and made no call to them to resist further slaughters. Why, after such a long and lethal period of purposeful silence, did Pius XII say something, even something as inadequate as he did? He spoke out only after he had been strongly pressured by the Americans and the British to explicitly condemn the mass murder of the Jews, which he nevertheless steadfastly refused to do. Two weeks before his Christmas message, the British minister to the Vatican, Francis d'Arcy Osborne, was completely exasperated by the Pope's silence. On December 14 he even took the extraordinary diplomatic step of censuring Pius XII bluntly while speaking to the Vatican Secretary of State. Osborne recorded that he virtually commanded that the Vatican "should consider their duties in respect to the unprecedented crime against humanity of Hitler's campaign of extermination of the Jews." But during the years when the Germans were mass-murdering the Jews, Pius XII chose again and again not to mention the Jews publicly. Nevertheless, his defenders insist that, his purposeful omission notwithstanding, he was speaking about them all along; they ignore that until his vague Christmas utterance well over a year after the Germans initiated that mass murder, Pius XII had been absolutely silent."
Here is what the Simon Wiesenthal Center has to say on the subject:
Answer: The head of the Catholic Church at the time of the Nazi rise to power was Pope Pius XI. Although he stated that the myths of "race" and "blood" were contrary to Christian teaching (in a papal encyclical, March 1937), he neither mentioned nor criticized antisemitism. His successor, Pius XII (Cardinal Pacelli) was a Germanophile who maintained his neutrality throughout the course of World War II. Although as early as 1942 the Vatican received detailed information on the murder of Jews in concentration camps, the Pope confined his public statements to expressions of sympathy for the victims of injustice and to calls for a more humane conduct of the war. The Concordat of 1933 signed by Hitler & the future Pius XII is such an important issue that we devote an entire web page to it at :RC_concordat-1933.html |
We've had our say. Now it's your turn :  [email protected]
Click here to  this page or here to
to others (or yourself), There is much more where this came from at
|
