mcbride
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quote:
ORIGINAL: rulemylife
You mean the same Pope Pius XII that ignored Nazi atrocities?
Forgive me, but I think I'll go with Einstein on this one.
Einstein, who barely escaped the Nazis, had not been a friend of the Church, but was moved by what it did under Pius. "Only the Church,” said Einstein, “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.”
“Pope Pius XII probably rescued more Jews than all the Allies combined,” wrote Jewish writers John Loftus and Mark Aarons in their book “The Secret War Against the Jews.”
Books like John Cornwell's "Hitler's Pope" accused Pius of not being specific enough in attacking German actions. He had denounced the Nazis dozens of times in the 1920s and '30s, and when he was elected Pope in 1939, one leading Nazi newspaper expressed its anger "because he was always opposed to Nazism.” In his 1942 Christmas message, Pius XII denounced the Nazis' increasing killings and persecution of the “hundreds of thousands who without any fault of their own, sometimes only by reason of their nationality or race, are marked down for death or progressive extinction."
What he stopped doing was naming the Jews specifically, after it became clear that doing so was getting people killed. The Dutch Roman Catholic hierarchy named the Jews explicitly in 1943 in their condemnation of Nazi deportations: the Nazis responded with an all-out offensive against Jews, killing 40,000. Pius quickly cancelled a similar message: "If the protest of the Dutch Bishops has cost the lives of 40,000 people, my intervention would take at least 200,000 people to their deaths.”
But he ordered his bishops and priests to do even more, providing false birth certificates, religious disguises, and safe keeping in cloistered monasteries and convents, which kept hundreds of thousands of Jews from being shipped to Nazi death camps.
After the war, the government of Israel estimated the total number saved by Pius at 800,000 Jewish lives. A former Israeli diplomat in Italy testified that: "The Catholic Church saved more Jewish lives during the war than all the other Churches, religious institutions and rescue organizations put together. Its record stands in startling contrast to the achievements of the International Red Cross and the Western Democracies."
Emilio Zolli. the chief rabbi in Rome during the German occupation, said "no hero in all of history was more militant, more fought against, none more heroic, than Pius XII." Zolli was so moved by Pius XII’s actions that he became a Catholic.
Pius did it at a time when the Allied governments were silent about the fate of the Jews, and shockingly unhelpful when refugees turned up at their doors. The U.S. government, for example, accepted only of 10,000 to 15,000 Jewish refugees during the war.
And what of John Cornwell, who wrote "Hitler's Pope"? Independent critics lambasted the book for "errors of fact and ignorance of context...on almost every page." Cornwell himself recanted, ten years later, admitting his book lacked balance.
And my apologies to Hillwilliam for answering the wee hijack. It's a good thread, and the Beatitudes (the sermon on the mount) doesn't sound like anything you'd hear at a Tea Party rally.
< Message edited by mcbride -- 4/14/2011 2:18:59 PM >
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RE: Was He a Liberal? - 
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