Child Abuse "On The Verge Of Torture" In The Name Of Christ

[Borachio]

Say what you like about him, he was clearly very popular. And very good at public speaking.

And liked dogs. And a vegetarian teetotaller.

(Not my favourite person of all time, though.)

 

[LightSpectra]

Well, you see, it isn't an inherent problem with endemic violence in the supposedly pacifist Christian religion. It is just that those Christians aren't really Christians at all, even though it seems that many Christians act quite similarly. And many of the others who do manage to act like Christians much of the time don't appear to have any problem at all trying to rationalize and defend the indefensible.

I'm willing to admit that evil people can legitimately be Christians. That doesn't mean they're correctly following the Christian faith however, and I find absolutely no impetus to blame Christianity for something that people in every society and culture in history have done. I can show you Christians that have tried their hardest, to the point of martyrdom, to stand against injustice. But show me how Christianity makes good people bad.

How so?

One can discard the Hebrew Bible and still be a Christian. As I've said, the defining trait here is that you believe in Jesus of Nazareth as the trueborn Son of God. Of course, one then has to explain why the Messiah clearly believed in the Hebrew Bible, fulfilled its prophecies, and came to redeem a people tainted by sin as described therein--and I'm doubtless that any kind of explanation would be filled with inconsistencies, doublethinks and factual errors--but it's possible. Albeit erroneously.

One such person in history was Marcion of Sinope, who rejected the Hebrew Bible because he was an antisemite. He was excommunicated for this.

So... help me understand this. Let's move away from Hitler as I'm willing to admit that the case that he is a Christian isn't very strong, beyond his public proclamations which seem contradicted by his private confessions. Do you mean to say that most people who claim to be Christian are not? That over 1.5 billion people who are allegedly Christian are lying about it?

Read the rest of the page. That's the same misinterpretation that Cutless made. I hope you're smart enough not to repeatedly scream that "it's what was written, not my fault if you didn't mean it" (since that's not actually what was written at all).

What is wrong with you? I don't have an "anti-Christian" agenda. Some of my best friends and closest family members are Christian. I break bread with them as readily as I would a member of any faith or creed. It makes no difference to me. The closest I get to "anti-Christian" is when I must stand in opposition to tyrannical pillars and proclamations.

While I don't think you're anti-Christian, do you admit the possibility that somebody can mean no explicit malice against a certain group of people while simultaneously expressing crippling bias against them (e.g. "I'm not racist but I think it's been proven that black people are less intelligent than white people")?

You need to get over your persecution complex.

Meanwhile, posts above yours, Formie is blaming Catholics for the Holocaust.

That being said, the people here that propagate the dumbest anti-Christian myths aren't nearly competent enough to be described as persecutors.

I don't think you can blame the Holocaust on Christianity per se, but you have to admit that the institution of the Catholic Church sure didn't make things easy what with the thousands of years of antisemitic teachings and practices.

From a 1938 homily by Pope Pius XI:

"Mark well that in the Catholic Mass, Abraham is our Patriarch and forefather. Anti-Semitism is incompatible with the lofty thought which that fact expresses. It is a movement with which we Christians can have nothing to do. No, no, I say to you it is impossible for a Christian to take part in anti-Semitism. It is inadmissible. Through Christ and in Christ we are the spiritual progeny of Abraham. Spiritually, we [Christians] are all Semites." (pg. 53, Marchione, Margherita (1997). Yours Is a Precious Witness: Memoirs of Jews and Catholics in Wartime Italy. Mahwah, NJ: Paulist Press. pp. 272 pages. ISBN 0-8091-0485-7).

 

[Traitorfish]

Yeah, pretty much... He was clearly a megalomaniac, and wanted to be worshipped... He also had some idea of neo-paganism, etc. He was all over the map.
Once you've slipped that far from reality and decency though, it is hard to even imagine what was actually going on in his head...
I imagine he was privately a deeply tortured soul. You can rationalize the hell out of things, but jeez... how did he even sleep? Oh, drugs.

Neo-paganism and occultism were really more Himmler's thing, I think. Hitler's shtick was "Positive Christianity", a sort of weird conglomeration of volkisch, National Socialist and heterodox Protestant philosophy. You can certainly debate whether it actually constitutes a form of Christianity, but he seemed to have been more or less sincere in it.

 

[Borachio]

I read he distanced himself from Positive Christianity, somewhat, in order to have a wider public appeal.

 

[LightSpectra]

Neo-paganism and occultism were really more Himmler's thing, I think. Hitler's shtick was "Positive Christianity", a sort of weird conglomeration of volkisch, National Socialist and heterodox Protestant philosophy. You can certainly debate whether it actually constitutes a form of Christianity, but he seemed to have been more or less sincere in it.

Eh, not quite. Hitler personally liked Rosenberg so he let him do what he wanted with Positives Christentum. Thus it became the Nazi Party's official philosophy. But as far as I can tell, Hitler didn't really believe in it.

Again, Hitler's religious beliefs were really complicated and not easily expressed in any one word which generalizes them.

 

[Formaldehyde]

I'm willing to admit that evil people can legitimately be Christians. That doesn't mean they're correctly following the Christian faith however, and I find absolutely no impetus to blame Christianity for something that people in every society and culture in history have done. I can show you Christians that have tried their hardest, to the point of martyrdom, to stand against injustice. But show me how Christianity makes good people bad.

Then it's a good thing I clearly wasn't "blaming Christianity". But I see that certainly isn't going to stop you from coming up with yet another ludicrous straw man that I was.

Meanwhile, posts above yours, Formie is blaming Catholics for the Holocaust.

I am obviously doing nothing of the sort. There were millions of Catholics who did not take part at all in putting Hitler into power and who weren't antisemitic in the least. But there were also millions who were quite supportive of Hitler and were in favor of coming up with a "solution" which was typically far short of genocide. Again, antisemitism was rampant at the time. And the RCC really did nothing to stop it.

Your quite obvious bias, revisionist history, and attempts to rationalize and defend the indefensible are clearly being shown in this thread.

 

[LightSpectra]

Then it's a good thing I clearly wasn't "blaming Christianity". But I see that certainly isn't going to stop you from coming up with yet another ludicrous straw man that I was.

You blamed the Catholic Church for the Holocaust. That isn't a strawman at all.

And the Church did nothing to stop antisemitism? Are you ever going to acknowledge Mit brennender Sorge, ever? Your refusal to is hysterical.

 

[LightSpectra]

Meanwhile, posts above yours, Formie is blaming Catholics for the Holocaust.

I am obviously doing nothing of the sort.

That the RCC did little or nothing to stop the rampant antisemitism so pervasive in Europe and most other Christian countries until the 60s. That instead they continued to blame Jews for killing Jesus, both directly through Passion Plays and indirectly through other means, which led to so many pogroms and even the Holocaust.

I'll just let that sit there so everybody can decide for themselves if your rambling is incoherent and self-contradictory.

 

[Formaldehyde]

You blamed the Catholic Church for the Holocaust. That isn't a strawman at all.

And the Church did nothing to stop antisemitism? Are you ever going to acknowledge Mit brennender Sorge, ever? Your refusal to is hysterical.

Again, I did nothing of the sort. If you think I did, prove it. Otherwise stop with this quite obvious attempt at assassinating my character instead of even trying to discuss the issues.

From page 3 of this thread:

Originally Posted by Phrossack
As an atheist, however, I think religion is merely a combination of wishful thinking and an intent to make people treat each other better...

Emphasis mine.

If this part were only actually true the vast majority of time, I wouldn't be critical very much at all. I really don't care if believing in religion actually made people treat each other with dignity and respect. It is when they do just the opposite that I have to take great exception.

 

[Formaldehyde]

I'll just let that sit there so everybody can decide for themselves if your rambling is incoherent and self-contradictory.

Supporting Hitler and the Nazis quite clearly led to the Holocaust. Without that support, they would have never been able to take it any further than treating Jews and many others as sub-humans, which was quite popular at the time. Are you really trying to deny the obvious?

When you are going to stop trying to rationalize and defend the rampant antisemitism of that period?

 

[LightSpectra]

Supporting Hitler quite cklaerly led to the Holocaust. Without that support, he would have never been able to take it any further than treating Jews and many others as sub-humans. Are you really trying to deny the obvious?

I've already posted a link to a document from 1937 read in every German Catholic Church at Sunday Mass that explicitly condemned Nazism and antisemitism, it's called Mit brennender Sorge. You have repeatedly refused to acknowledge this fact in any way.

But let's not diverge from the issue. Right now the claim is that I'm attempting to assassinate your character. Please account for this exchange then:

Meanwhile, posts above yours, Formie is blaming Catholics for the Holocaust.

I am obviously doing nothing of the sort.

That the RCC did little or nothing to stop the rampant antisemitism so pervasive in Europe and most other Christian countries until the 60s. That instead they continued to blame Jews for killing Jesus, both directly through Passion Plays and indirectly through other means, which led to so many pogroms and even the Holocaust.

 

[Formaldehyde]

I already did explain it. But you are clearly not interested in the least even reading my posts and responding to my actual opinions, instead of these which you continue to concoct for me based on your interpretation of what I have written, even after I have clarified them numerous times.

 

[Traitorfish]

I really hate debates when both parties are so busy affecting an air of aloof disinterest that they hardly bother saying anything to each other.

 

[LightSpectra]

I already did explain it. But you are clearly not interested in the least even reading my posts and responding to my actual opinions, instead of these which you continue to concoct for me based on your interpretation of what I have written, even after I have clarified them numerous times.

Every post since then, you've made the exact same claims about the Catholic Church refusing to condemn antisemitism (demonstrably false as I've repeatedly shown but you have not even remotely acknowledged), it's just that you only said it caused the Holocaust in #89.

I hope everybody on this board sees how hard you're trying to weasel out of this. Each post is more pathetic than the last.

I really hate debates when both parties are so busy affecting an air of aloof disinterest that they hardly bother saying anything to each other.

Agreed.

 

[MobBoss]

Well, you see, it isn't an inherent problem with endemic violence in the supposedly pacifist Christian religion. It is just that those Christians aren't really Christians at all, even though it seems that many Christians act quite similarly. And many of the others who do manage to act like Christians much of the time don't appear to have any problem at all trying to rationalize and defend the indefensible.

Onward Christian soldiers marching as to war, and who frequently use corporal punishment on their own children, indeed.

Yeah, wow, Christians are human too. Imagine that.

 

[Formaldehyde]

Every post since then, you've made the exact same claims about the Catholic Church refusing to condemn antisemitism (demonstrably false as I've repeatedly shown but you have not even remotely acknowledged), it's just that you only said it caused the Holocaust in #89.

The sordid history of rampant anti-Semitism in the RCC, and Christianity in general for the most part, and their refusal to really even deal with it at all until the 1960s is quite well documented. Details regarding this history have been posted in this forum numerous times in the past in similar threads to this one.

But here are some additional facts to yet again show the quite clear history of the period, as well as the continuing attempts to rewrite that history to hide the facts:

Jewish Virtual Library: Pope Pius XII and the Holocaust

Pope Pius XII's (1876-1958) actions during the Holocaust remain controversial. For much of the war, he maintained a public front of indifference and remained silent while German atrocities were committed. He refused pleas for help on the grounds of neutrality, while making statements condemning injustices in general. Privately, he sheltered a small number of Jews and spoke to a few select officials, encouraging them to help the Jews.

Pacelli lived in Germany from 1917, when he was appointed Papal Nuncio in Bavaria, until 1929. He knew what the Nazi party stood for, and was elected Pope in 1939 having said very little about Adolf Hitler’s ideology beyond a 1935 speech describing the Nazis as “miserable plagiarists who dress up old errors with new tinsel.” Pacelli told 250,000 pilgrims at Lourdes on April 28, “It does not make any difference whether they flock to the banners of the social revolution, whether they are guided by a false conception of the world and of life, or whether they are possessed by the superstition of a race and blood cult.” He believed National Socialism was “profoundly anti-Christian and a danger to Catholocism.”(1)

Even as Cardinal, Pacelli's actions regarding Hitler were controversial. Hitler took power on January 30, 1933. On July 20 that same year, Pacelli and German diplomat Franz Von Papen signed a concordat that granted freedom of practice to the Roman Catholic Church. In return, the Church agreed to separate religion from politics. This diminished the influence of the Catholic Center Party and the Catholic Labor unions. The concordat was generally viewed as a diplomatic victory for Hitler.(1a)

Pacelli was elected Pope on March 2, 1939, and took the name Pius XII. As Pope, he had three official positions. He was head of his church and was in direct communication with bishops everywhere. He was chief of state of the Vatican, with his own diplomatic corps. He was also the Bishop of Rome. In theory, at least, his views could influence 400 million Catholics, including those in all the occupied eastern territories - the Poles, Baltics, Croatians, Slovaks and others.(2)

As soon as he was appointed Pope, Pacelli did speak out against the 1938 Italian racial laws that dealt with mixed marriages and children of mixed marriages.(3) However, he issued no such condemnation of Kristallnacht (the night of broken glass) which occurred in November 1938, and which recent evidence shows he was informed of by Berlin's papal nuncio. As the security of the Jewish population became more precarious, Pius XII did intervene the month he was elected Pope, March 1939, and obtained 3,000 visas to enter Brazil for European Jews who had been baptized and converted to Catholicism. Two-thirds of these were later revoked, however, because of "improper conduct," probably meaning that the Jews started practicing Judaism once in Brazil. At that time, the Pope did nothing to save practicing Jews.(4)

Cries for Help

Throughout the Holocaust, Pius XII was consistently besieged with pleas for help on behalf of the Jews.

In the spring of 1940, the Chief Rabbi of Palestine, Isaac Herzog, asked the papal Secretary of State, Cardinal Luigi Maglione to intercede to keep Jews in Spain from being deported to Germany. He later made a similar request for Jews in Lithuania. The papacy did nothing.(5)

Within the Pope's own church, Cardinal Theodor Innitzer of Vienna told Pius XII about Jewish deportations in 1941. In 1942, the Slovakian charge d'affaires, a position under the supervision of the Pope, reported to Rome that Slovakian Jews were being systematically deported and sent to death camps.(6)

In October 1941, the Assistant Chief of the U.S. delegation to the Vatican, Harold Tittman, asked the Pope to condemn the atrocities. The response came that the Holy See wanted to remain "neutral," and that condemning the atrocities would have a negative influence on Catholics in German-held lands.(7)

In late August 1942, after more than 200,000 Ukrainian Jews had been killed, Ukrainian Metropolitan Andrej Septyckyj wrote a long letter to the Pope, referring to the German government as a regime of terror and corruption, more diabolical than that of the Bolsheviks. The Pope replied by quoting verses from Psalms and advising Septyckyj to "bear adversity with serene patience."(8)

On September 18, 1942, Monsignor Giovanni Battista Montini, the future Pope Paul VI, wrote, "The massacres of the Jews reach frightening proportions and forms."(9) Yet, that same month when Myron Taylor, U.S. representative to the Vatican, warned the Pope that his silence was endangering his moral prestige, the Secretary of State responded on the Pope's behalf that it was impossible to verify rumors about crimes committed against the Jews.(10)

Wladislaw Raczkiewicz, president of the Polish government-in-exile, appealed to the Pope in January 1943 to publicly denounce Nazi violence. Bishop Preysing of Berlin did the same, at least twice. Pius XII refused.(11)

Papal Reasons and Responses

The Pope finally gave a reason for his consistent refusals to make a public statement in December 1942. The Allied governments issued a declaration, "German Policy of Extermination of the Jewish Race," which stated that there would be retribution for the perpetrators of Jewish murders. When Tittman asked Secretary of State Maglione if the Pope could issue a similar proclamation, Maglione said the papacy was "unable to denounce publicly particular atrocities."(12) One reason for this position was that the staunchly anti-communist Pope felt he could not denounce the Nazis without including the Communists; therefore, Pius XII would only condemn general atrocities.(13)

The Pope did speak generally against the extermination campaign. On January 18, 1940, after the death toll of Polish civilians was estimated at 15,000, the Pope said in a broadcast, "The horror and inexcusable excesses committed on a helpless and a homeless people have been established by the unimpeachable testimony of eye-witnesses."(14) During his Christmas Eve radio broadcast in 1942, he referred to the "hundreds of thousands who through no fault of their own, and solely because of their nation or race, have been condemned to death or progressive extinction."(15) The Pope never mentioned the Jews by name.

In a September 1940 broadcast, the Vatican called its policy "neutrality," but stated in the same broadcast that where morality was involved, no neutrality was possible.(18) This could only imply that mass murder was not a moral issue.

The Pope's indifference to the mistreatment of Jews was often clear. In 1941, for example, after being asked by French Marshal Henri Philippe Petain if the Vatican would object to anti-Jewish laws, Pius XII answered that the church condemned racism, but did not repudiate every rule against the Jews.(16) When Petain's French puppet government introduced "Jewish statutes," the Vichy ambassador to the Holy See informed Petain that the Vatican did not consider the legislation in conflict with Catholic teachings, as long as they were carried out with "charity" and "justice."(17)

Robert Wistrich notes that “by the end of 1942, the Vatican was among the best-informed institutions in Europe concerning the Holocaust. Except for the Germans or perhaps British intelligence, few people were more aware of the local details as well as the larger picture.”(17a)

The Pope Protests

The Pope did act behind the scenes on occasion. During the German occupation of Hungary in March 1944, he, along with the papal nuncio in Budapest, Angelo Rotta, advised the Hungarian government to be moderate in its plans concerning the treatment of the Jews. Pius XII protested against the deportation of Jews and, when his protests were not heeded, he cabled again and again.(23) The Pope's demands, combined with similar protests from the King of Sweden, the International Red Cross, Britain and the United States contributed to the decision by the Hungarian regent, Admiral Miklos Horthy, to cease deportations on July 8, 1944.(24)

In the later stages of the war, Pius XII appealed to several Latin American governments to accept “emergency passports” that several thousand Jews had succeeded in obtaining. Due to the efforts of the Pope and the U.S. State Department, 13 Latin American countries decided to honor these documents, despite threats from the Germans to deport the passport holders.(25)

The Church also answered a request to save 6,000 Jewish children in Bulgaria by helping to transfer them to Palestine. At the same time, however, Cardinal Maglione wrote to the apostolic delegate in Washington, A.G. Cicognani, saying this did not mean the Pope supported Zionism.(26) The church did often help baptized Jews, but was less enthusiastic about assisting Jews who did not abandon their faith.

The Politics Behind the Policy

Historians point out that any support the Pope did give the Jews came after 1942, once U.S. officials told him that the allies wanted total victory, and it became likely that they would get it. Furthering the notion that any intervention by Pius XII was based on practical advantage rather than moral inclination is the fact that in late 1942, Pius XII began to advise the German and Hungarian bishops that it would be to their ultimate political advantage to go on record as speaking out against the massacre of the Jews. (27)

One of the only cases in which the Pope gave early support to the allies was in May 1940. He received information about a German plan, Operation Yellow, to lay mines to deter British naval support of Holland. Pius XII gave his permission to send coded radio messages warning papal nuncios in Brussels and The Hague of the plot. The German radio monitoring services decoded the broadcast and went ahead with the plan.(28) This papal intervention is surprising due to the pope's persistent claim of neutrality, and his silence regarding almost all German atrocities.

In Hitler's Pope, John Cromwell argues that the pope’s behavior can be partly explained because Pacelli was an anti-Semite, however, Robert Wistrich argues he was anti-Jewish only in the traditional sense of believing that Jews killed Jesus. Meanwhile, defenders of the pope have pointed to statements by Israel's consul in Italy in the 1960s, Pinhas Lapide, and by Golda Meir praising the pope as evidence of his efforts to save Jews during the war, but Wistrich says their remarks were not backed by verifiable evidence of papal action. What is clear is that the pope could have done more. In fact, Catholic Poles were the most outspoken critics of his silence. Pius did not speak out effectively after Germany overran Poland and the restrained remarks that did come from the Vatican about the oppression of the Catholic Poles ceased after Germany protested. (28a)

Wistrich also notes that while there is some controversy about the pope’s assistance to the Jews, the Church's role in helping Nazi murderers escape, and seeking clemency for convicted Nazi criminals, is well-documented. It is less clear, however, how much the pope knew about this.

Recent Developments

The International Catholic-Jewish Historical Commission (ICJHC), a group comprised of three Jewish and three Catholic scholars, was appointed in 1999 by the Holy See's Commission for Religious Relations with the Jews. In October of 2000, the group of scholars finished their review of the Vatican's archives, and submitted their preliminary findings to the Comission's then-President, Cardinal Edward I Cassidy. Their report, entitled "The Vatican and the Holocaust," laid to rest several of the conventional defenses of Pope Pius XII.

The often-espoused view that the Pontiff was unaware of the seriousness of the situation of European Jewry during the war was definitively found to be inaccurate. Numerous documents demonstrated that the Pope was well-informed about the full extent of the Nazi's anti-Semitic practices. A letter from Konrad von Preysing, Bishop of Berlin, that proved that the Pope was aware of the situation as early as January of 1941, particularly caught the attention of the commission. In that letter, Preysing confirms that "Your Holiness is certainly informed about the situation of the Jews in Germany and the neighboring countries. I wish to mention that I have been asked both from the Catholic and Protestant side if the Holy See could not do something on this subject...in favor of these unfortunates." The letter, which was a direct appeal to the Pope himself, without intermediaries, provoked no response. In 1942, an even more compelling eyewitness account of the mass-murder of Jews in Lwow was sent to the Pope by an archbishop; this, too, garnered no response.

The commission also revealed several documents that cast a negative light on the claim that the Vatican did all it could to facilitate emigration of the Jews out of Europe. Internal notes meant only for Vatican representatives revealed the opposition of Vatican officials to Jewish emigration from Europe to Palestine. "The Holy See has never approved of the project of making Palestine a Jewish home...[because] Palestine is by now holier for Catholics than for Jews." Some Catholic higher-ups violated this position of the Vatican by helping Jews to immigrate when they were able to; most did not.

Similarly, the attempts of Jews to escape from Europe to South America were sometimes thwarted by the Vatican. Vatican representatives in Bolivia and Chile wrote to the pontiff regarding the "invasive" and "cynically exploitative" character of the Jewish immigrants, who were already engaged in "dishonest dealings, violence, immorality, and even disrespect for religion." The commission concluded that these accounts probably biased Pius against aiding more Jews in immigrating away from Nazi Europe.

The claim that the Vatican needed to remain neutral in the war has also been refuted in recent months. In January of 2001, a document recently declassified by the U.S. National Archives was discovered by the World Jewish Congress. The document was a report in which Monsignor Giovanni Battista Montini, Pope Pius XII's secretary of state, detailed and denounced several abuses committed by the Soviet Army against German inhabitants of the Soviet Union. The report was widely viewed as demonstrating that the Vatican had no compunctions about speaking out against atrocities, even when doing so would violate neutrality.

The preliminary report released by the IJCHC also asked the Vatican for access to non-published archival documents to more fully investigate the Pope's role in the Holocaust. This request was refused by the Vatican, which allowed them access only to documents from before 1923. As a result, the Commission suspended its study in July 2001, without issuing a final report. Dr. Michael Marrus, one of the three Jewish panelists and a professor of history at the University of Toronto, expained that the commission "ran up against a brick wall.... It would have been really halpful to have had support from the Holy See on this issue."(29)

In 2004, news was disclosed of a diary kept by James McDonald, the League of Nations high commissioner for refugees coming from Germany. In 1933, McDonald raised the treatment of the Jews with then Cardinal Pacelli, who was the Vatican secretary of state. McDonald was specifically interested in helping a group of Jewish refugees in the Saar region, a territory claimed by France and Germany that was turned over to the Germans in 1935. The Pope's defenders cite his intercession on these Jews' behalf as evidence of his sympathy for Jews persecuted by the Nazis. According to McDonald, however, when he disccused the matter with Pacelli, “The response was noncommittal, but left me with the definite impression that no vigorous cooperation could be expected.”(30) Pacelli did intercede in January 1935 to help the Jews, but only after McDonald agreed that American Jews would use their influence in Washington to protect church properties that were being threatened by the Mexican government.(31)

In 2005, the Italian daily, Corriere della Sera, discovered a letter dated November 20, 1946, showing that Pope Pius XII ordered Jewish babies baptized by Catholics during the Holocaust not to be returned to their parents. Some scholars said the disclosure was not new and that the Pope's behavior was not remarkable. The more important story, according to Rabbi David Rosen, international director of interreligious affairs for the American Jewish Committee, was that one of the recipients of the letter, Angelo Roncalli, the papal representative in Paris, ignored the papal directive.(32)

In 2006, an Israeli scholar, Dina Porat, discovered correspondence between Haim Barlas, an emissary of the Jewish Agency sent to Europe to save Jews in the 1940s, and Giuseppe Roncalli, who later became Pope John XXIII. Roncalli expressed criticism of the Vatican’s silence during the war. In June 1944, Barlas sent Roncalli a copy of a report compiled by two Jews who escaped from Auschwitz documenting the mass murder at the camp. Roncalli forwarded the report to the Vatican, which had claimed it did not know about the report until October. Earlier, Roncalli had written to the president of Slovakia at the behest of Barlas asking him to stop the Nazi deportations of Jews.(33)

Conclusion

The Pope's reaction to the Holocaust was complex and inconsistent. At times, he tried to help the Jews and was successful. But these successes only highlight the amount of influence he might have had, if he not chosen to remain silent on so many other occasions. No one knows for sure the motives behind Pius XII's actions, or lack thereof, since the Vatican archives have only been fully opened to select researchers. Historians offer many reasons why Pope Pius XII was not a stronger public advocate for the Jews: A fear of Nazi reprisals, a feeling that public speech would have no effect and might harm the Jews, the idea that private intervention could accomplish more, the anxiety that acting against the German government could provoke a schism among German Catholics, the church's traditional role of being politically neutral and the fear of the growth of communism were the Nazis to be defeated.(34) Whatever his motivation, it is hard to escape the conclusion that the Pope, like so many others in positions of power and influence, could have done more to save the Jews.

The Atlantic: The Holocaust and the Catholic Church

It is appropriate that, as the Second Millennium of Christianity draws to a close"—this is John Paul II, in his 1994 apostolic letter Tertio Millennio Adveniente—"the Church should become more fully conscious of the sinfulness of her children," recalling all those times in history when they "indulged in ways of thinking and acting which were truly forms of counterwitness and scandal." The sinful "children" of the Church, spokesmen insist, can include its leaders, even bishops and popes. Yet when the long-awaited Vatican document examining the record of the Church in relation to the Holocaust, We Remember: A Reflection on the Shoah, was published last year, it singled out for special praise "the wisdom of Pope Pius XII's diplomacy." This seemed to be a direct rebuttal to an oft-raised criticism of the wartime Pope, whose "silence" in the face of the Jewish genocide had become for many an emblem of the Church's own "counterwitness and scandal." The Vatican pronouncement came as reports surfaced that the Congregation for the Causes of the Saints was preparing to advance the cause of Pius XII toward sainthood. At the end of the millennium Pope John Paul II, in the words of an observer writing in the periodical Inside the Vatican, "is preparing, not to denounce Pius, but to canonize him."

The process of canonization is secret, and there is no official word that Pius XII is about to be beatified, the penultimate step toward sainthood. But it seems to signal something that his positive prospects are being openly discussed—even by the Vatican official in charge of promoting his cause. If Pius XII were to be named a saint of the Roman Catholic Church, more than the restoration of his reputation would result. His policy of silence about Nazi atrocities would be justified. He would be credited with the secret rescue of Jews that was carried out by many individual Catholics across Europe. (We Remember honors Pius XII for what he "did personally or through his representatives to save hundreds of thousands of Jewish lives.") By extension, Hitler's hatred of Jews would be defined as rooted in "neo-pagan" atheism, not in Christianity. The Catholic Church, and the Vatican in particular, would be listed as among Hitler's mortal enemies, and exonerated from charges of at least passive collaboration in Nazi crimes. The Church's sinlessness would be confirmed. The papal absolutism of which Pius XII was the avatar, and which faltered under John XXIII and Paul VI, would be vindicated as John Paul II's lasting legacy. If Pius XII were to be named a saint, in other words, the Catholic Church could enter the new millennium with its timeless claim to moral transcendence intact.

In this context the arrival of the first serious and complete biography of Eugenio Pacelli, Pius XII, could not be more timely. Its author, John Cornwell, a contributor to Britain's distinguished Catholic publication The Tablet, embarked on the project, as he says in the preface, "convinced that if his full story were told, Pius XII's pontificate, and the Catholic Church, would be vindicated." Cornwell, it seems, is a conventional Roman Catholic with an instinctive wish to defend the Church from accusations of malfeasance and worse regarding the twentieth-century fate of the Jews. As such, he says, he gained access to heretofore unavailable sources within the Vatican—documents from the Secretariat of State and, especially, sworn depositions gathered decades ago in the early stages of Pius XII's promotion to sainthood. "By the middle of 1997, nearing the end of my research," he writes, "I found myself in a state I can only describe as moral shock. The material I had gathered, taking the more extensive view of Pacelli's life, amounted not to an exoneration but to a wider indictment."

That indictment is made explicit in the title Cornwell has given his book: Hitler's Pope. His criticism, rooted in a painstaking examination of Pacelli's record as the Vatican's point man in dealing with the rise of Hitler in the 1930s and of his maneuvering as Pius XII during the war years, is a devastating refutation of the claim that this Pope's diplomacy can in any way be characterized as wisdom. Instead of a portrait of a man worthy of sainthood, Cornwell lays out the story of a narcissistic, power-hungry manipulator who was prepared to lie, to appease, and to collaborate in order to accomplish his ecclesiastical purpose—which was not to save lives or even to protect the Catholic Church but, more narrowly, to protect and advance the power of the papacy. Pacelli's personal history, his character, and his obsession with Vatican prerogatives combined at the crucial hour to make him "the ideal Pope for Hitler's unspeakable plan," Cornwell writes. "He was Hitler's pawn. He was Hitler's Pope."

The young priest Eugenio Pacelli was trained not as a theologian but as a canon lawyer. He was ordained in 1899 and appointed to the Vatican bureaucracy in 1901, during the pontificate of Leo XIII, who is remembered as a social liberal (his 1891 encyclical Rerum novarum was read as an endorsement of the labor movement) but who ruled the Church as a rigid authoritarian. To Leo XIII the Church was "a perfect society," and the Vatican was to be the living embodiment of that perfection. In his vision, the papacy would not only exert spiritual sovereignty over the religious lives of Catholics but also control Church activities in every nation—from the licensing of schools to the appointment of bishops. Such a vision required nation-states to relate to the Church through the Vatican rather than through local institutions.

Leo died in 1903, and was succeeded by Pius X, whom no one would mistake for a liberal. Famous for his condemnation of "modernism," Pius X continued the program of centralizing Church authority in an absolutist papacy. Two strategies served him well in this. One was the Oath Against Modernism, which every candidate for ordination in the world was thenceforth required to swear (it was still in force when I was ordained, in the late 1960s), and the other was a new Code of Canon Law, which would give the Pope unprecedented power over every aspect of Church life. Pacelli was one of two Vatican priests who spent more than a decade developing the code, which was finally promulgated in 1917. As Cornwell points out, Canon 218 defines the Pope's authority as "the supreme and most complete jurisdiction throughout the Church, both in matters of faith and morals and in those that affect discipline and Church government throughout the world."

In Europe, where the structures of Church and State were traditionally intermingled, with much overlap of political and religious authority (those schools, the appointment of those bishops), the implementation of this new Code of Canon Law required the cooperation of governments, which led to Pacelli's next assignment. The task of negotiating treaties—concordats—that recognized the freshly claimed prerogatives of the papacy fell to him. His first success, concluded in 1914, before the code was formally published, was in Serbia, where he negotiated a concordat that served the Pope's purposes but undercut the Catholic hierarchy in Austria. "The treaty implied the abrogation," Cornwell explains, "of the ancient protectorate rights of the Austro-Hungarian Empire over the Catholic enclave in Serbian territory." This change in Church-State relations effectively supported Serbia's political effort to move away from Austrian dominance. The concordat was signed on June 24, 1914. Four days later Archduke Franz Ferdinand, of Austria, was assassinated by an independence-minded Serb in Sarajevo. Cornwell comments,

Salon: The pope and the Jews

Some in the Vatican want to make Pius XII a saint. If they succeed, "the Church will have sealed its second millennium with a lie"

But the story is unending. Soon we will see the architect of the Reichskonkordat, another Pope Pius ( the Xll), made a saint. His canonization is in process. As with Benedict, Jews were just not high on his agenda; theo-politics was more important. In the 1933 Concordat he negotiated with Hitler while he was Vatican secretary of state, Pius agreed the Catholic Church would stay out of German politics in return for preserving, indeed expanding, church privileges and authority. The Concordat revoked the church’s ban on Catholics joining the Nazi Party and the Vatican pledged that German bishops would obey and honor the German state. Guenter Lewy’s seminal work “The Catholic Church and Nazi Germany” asserted that “there is general agreement that the Concordat increased substantially the prestige of Hitler’s regime around the world.”

And some still wonder why the Catholic Church gets criticized. The last acceptable prejudice, they claim, is anti-Catholicism. Are these people serious? The Vatican has been getting away with anti-Semitism for centuries. Isn’t it time we all said, “Enough”?

Many are apparently still not willing to say "enough" while continuing to rationalize and defend the indefensible.

Yeah, wow, Christians are human too. Imagine that.

The light bulb has to want to change. Making the same sins over and over again in hopes they will all be forgiven is disingenuous at best. It is also what Lightspectra and others continue to claim are the acts of those who aren't really Christians.

 

[Borachio]

Ah. The light bulb might want to change, yet not have the will to do so. (I assert my right to talk obliquely.)

 

[LightSpectra]

Quote bombing me with two articles. One of whom is written by a lunatic (former president of "Catholics for Free Choice", an organization well-documented to lie and misquote at its leisure). The other one ends by saying that Pius XII's position on the matter was "inconsistent and complex", which is true though he personally risked his life by sheltering thousands of Jews in the Vatican, had a document read in every German Catholic Church at Sunday Mass in 1937 explicitly condemning antisemitism and Nazism, and played a huge part in preventing hundreds of thousands of Hungarian Jews by being deported to concentration camps by train. Still, I can admit he could've done more. Though so could practically anybody with power in World War II. He's a hero.

"Inconsistent and complex", by the way, was not the final conclusion reached by Rabbi David G. Dalin, author of The Myth of Hitler's Pope (2005), a response to John Cornwell's Hitler's Pope (1999), who lately publicly recanted the thesis of his book.

You continue the lie that the Catholic Church did nothing to stop antisemitism until the 1960s, ignoring yet again all of the citations I've given you. Still not one acknowledgement of Mit brennender Sorge.

Do you still hold that the Catholic Church caused the Holocaust per post #89? Because now your argument focused on the Church during the war rather than before the war.

The light bulb has to want to change. Making the same sins over and over again in hopes they will all be forgiven is disingenuous at best. It is also what Lightspectra and others continue to claim are the acts of those who aren't really Christians.

I've claimed many times that evil men can be legitimate Christians (except Hitler, who as established at various points in this thread, was certainly not a Christian). I've also condemned the evil actions of many Christians before.

Unfortunately, you can't decide what you're actually arguing and refuse to even accept that counter-arguments exist. So this conversation is pretty dead weight, you're either going to continue to cry "strawman!" despite the overwhelming evidence that you do not even acknowledge that counter-points have been made and deny something you've said even as it's quoted before your eyes; or you're going to quote bomb more articles and bold parts that you like while ignoring other parts and drawing different conclusions from the authors themselves.

 

[Formaldehyde]

You continue the lie that the Catholic Church did nothing to stop antisemitism until the 1960s, ignoring yet again all of the citations I've given you. Still not one acknowledgement of Mit brennender Sorge.

"You continue to lie" by falsely claiming that I think "the Catholic Church did nothing to stop antisemitism until the 1960s". It is even directly refuted with quotes I even bolded in my last post.

But based on all the other quite similar straw men you continue to post in this thread, it isn't surprising in the least.

 

[LightSpectra]

That wasn't a direct quote. It was a paraphrase. One I think was justified because you still have not used the words Mit brennender Sorge once in any of your posts.

Still, I will acknowledge that "nothing" was the wrong word if you say it's not your argument.

Now, will you acknowledge that your claim that I was "character assassinating" you was wrong, since you did indeed say in post #89 that the Catholic Church caused the Holocaust? Will you acknowledge that the Pope and the Catholic Church did many, many things to repudiate the Nazis and antisemitism before and during the Holocaust, perhaps not 100% within their power but a substantial amount to the point where no many could call himself faithful to the Church were he a Nazi? Will you also stop strawmanning me under the false pretense that I claim somebody is not a Christian if he does something evil?