Catholics and Jews in World War II again...

Another ill-instructed fellow (hi, Keir!) purports to besmirch the name of good Catholics who risked their lives to save Jews in World War II.

He didn't bother to read the condemnation of Nazi beliefs that the Pope wrote in 1937 in his encyclical letter Mit Brennender Sorge addressed to the Church in Germany.

He didn't read the fruitless condemnation of Nazism that the Dutch Catholic bishops wrote that resulted in the deaths of many more Jews, including all Catholic convert Jews, as a direct result.

He hasn’t read of the decision of Pope Pius XII not to issue condemnations that would only lead to tens of thousands of more deaths but, instead, to organise Europe-wide clandestine operations to save Jewish lives which rescued 860,000 Jews.

He is so quick to condemn those who saved Jews rather than the British and US governments who did so very little to save Jewish lives.

He has not read what Jewish Diplomat, Pinchas a Lapide, wrote about the heroic work of Pope Pius XII in saving Jewish lives.

Pinchas a Lapide, Israeli diplomatic consul in Milan, Orthodox rabbi, and a lecturer at Bar Ilan University, testified in his book The Last Three Popes and the Jews that Pope Pius XII was responsible for saving 860,000 Jews in World War II, more than all other agencies put together.

He did not read about the sacrifices made by Pope Pius XII to obtain 35 kilos of gold to save innocent Roman Jews from execution by Colonel Herbert Kappeler and the SS.

He did not read how this caused the Chief Rabbi of Rome, Israel Zolli, to convert to Roman Catholicism, taking the Pope's own name, Eugenio, as his baptismal name.

He condemns a pope who was a prisoner in the Vatican and at the mercy of the Nazi occupiers of Rome and he does so from a position of total comfort and safety, free from danger, long after the war is over and without any experience of life under a totalitarian regime.

He - who doubtless never had to face such challenges – is so ungallant as to condemn those popes who did so much to save Jews at risk to their own lives.

The Venerable Pope Pius XII who, during World War II, was responsible for saving 860,000 Jewish lives

He is so ignorant of the very subject he claims to pontificate about that he is unaware that the Pope who condemned the war-time carpet bombing of civilians was not the Pope at the time but was an Apostolic diplomat saving Jewish lives.

He seems unaware that Angelo Roncalli – who would become Pope John XXIII – played a pivotal role in saving the lives of thousands of Jews while serving as the papal representative to Turkey during World War II.

He seems unaware that Roncalli, on the orders of Pope Pius XII, used diplomatic couriers, papal representatives and the Sisters of Our Lady of Zion to transport and issue baptismal certificates, immigration certificates and visas – many of them forged – to Hungarian Jews to save their lives.

He seems unaware that "Operation Baptism" proved so effective that when the Soviets captured Budapest in February 1945, as biographer Lawrence Elliott wrote, "some 100,000 Jews (200,000 in the whole of Hungary) had been spared".

Blessed Pope John XXIII who, when Apostolic Delegate in Turkey, rescued thousands of Jews in Hungary by issuing false baptismal certificates and passports

He overlooks the fact that Chaim Barlas, who worked closely with Roncalli as head of the Palestine Jewish Agency's Rescue Committee, wrote "Much blood and ink have been spilled in the Jewish tragedy of those years, but to the few heroic deeds which were performed to rescue Jews belong the activities of the apostolic delegate, Monsignor Roncalli, who worked indefatigably on their behalf".

He clearly does not know that the International Raoul Wallenberg Foundation asked the Holocaust Museum of Israel to designate Roncalli as "Righteous Among the Nations", an honour reserved for non-Jews who helped Jews during the Holocaust.

Raoul Wallenberg, the Swedish Diplomat who co-operated with the Papal Nuncio in Hungary to save thousands of Jews from death

He also seems unaware that Rabbi Simon Moguilevsky, Chief Rabbi of Buenos Aires, called Roncalli "a man truly created in the image of God".

He further seems unaware that successive Israeli governments praised and thanked Pope Pius XII for saving so many Jewish lives.

He even goes so far as to call the saving of 860,000 Jewish lives "inactions during the war", even though Pope Pius XII saved more Jewish lives during the Holocaust than all other agencies put together.

He thinks that "all the rules had been thrown out" in the war so that the Allies were allowed to commit war crimes but, in the same contradictory breath, he condemns those, like the popes, who, unlike the Allied bombing planners, were scrupulous in following "the rules" and in saving the innocent, especially the Jews.

He seems to think that the Blitz gave the Allies carte blanche to commit war crimes in response.

Yet he speaks of the "security of one's home in 2009" and "the context of the time rather than that of generations later" when it is he who, from the safety and comfort of his armchair, claims to sit in judgement upon those who lived under totalitarianism and, whilst preposterously speaking of throwing out "the rules", claims to condemn those saviours of Jews for not risking their own lives even more than they already were.

He claims to find the condemnation of area bombing by popes and Catholics as “rather appalling”.

What shall we say of those who claim to find “rather appalling” the righteous rage of the just against the bombing of innocent civilians, the very same just souls who did more to save Jewish lives than all other agencies put together, particularly when the person finding this “rather appalling” cannot even be bothered, from the complacent comfort of his armchair, to find out the truth despite having every opportunity since he, unlike they, lives in peace, tranquillity and security rather than under a terrorist police state and the constant threat of a horrible death?

When one also takes into account the fact that the UK took very few Jewish refugees and the US took less than 20,000 throughout the whole period of the persecution of European Jewry in sharp contradistinction to the 860,000 Jews saved by the orders and plans of Pope Pius XII, our view of this person claiming to find the Pope and his Church “rather appalling”, whilst ignoring the truly appalling complacency of the Allied governments, is likely to be very dim indeed.

Rabbi Israel Zolli converted to Catholicism as a result of seeing what Pope Pius XII did for the Jews. He took the Pope's name of Eugenio as his baptismal name.

Nevertheless, this is yet further compounded by a deep ignorance which is apparently unaware that the government parties NSDAP and DNVP jointly won 52% of the vote in March 1933 compared to only 11% for the Centre Party so that it was not the Church that abandoned the Centre Party but rather the German people, contrary to the yet further muddled (or worse) view of those who try to blame the Church. After the 1933 election the Centre Party was powerless to stop the Nazis and was inevitably finished whatever the Church might have done. But it is not at all uncommon for the uninstructed to blame the powerless for the faults of the powerful.

In sharp contrast to the German Protestant Church which sold out to Nazism in the form of the Deutsche Christen which produced Hitler's Protestants and the Reich Bishop, Ludwig Muller, the Catholic Church continuously and consistently opposed the Nazi regime, saved more Jewish lives than all other agencies together and suffered direct persecution and the execution of Catholic laymen and priests whose memory some have little or no compunction but disgracefully to defame and besmirch.

Protestant Reich Bishop Ludwig Muller willingly and openly acted as Hitler's Bishop for the Third Reich in marked distinction to the Catholic Church which always opposed the Nazi regime

One hopes that this fellow will now be prepared to revise his view and will avoid making the same mistake twice.

He might even apologise for making such appallingly false accusations against the innocent and the heroic.

...

The Williamson Affair: what rational Jews say

I decided to wait until the furore had died down a bit before commenting on the Williamson affair and the lifting of the excommunications on the SSPX bishops.

I'm glad I did. What a lot of nonsense has been spewed forth by journals such as The Times of London and The Tablet.

Read these and marvel at the sheer asininity of the commentary:

http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/comment/leading_article/article5614137.ece

and this:

http://www.thetablet.co.uk/pdf/2767/bookmarks/#pagemode=bookmarks

The arrogance displayed in these 2 articles, particularly that of The Times is pretty laughable. Who is the leader writer at The Times to tell the Pope what excommunication in the Catholic Church means? What is his/her authority to determine issues of Roman canon law? What is his/her authority even to comment on them, given the chasm-like lack of knowledge he/she demonstrates? It is so silly as to be no more than risible.

It is as absurd as if the Pope were to excommunicate the Archbishop of Canterbury or the Chief Rabbi of Jerusalem - or, for that matter, the non-Catholic Editor of The Times.

Consider how much more asinine those 2 articles appear when compared with the following much more sober and balanced commentary by 2 Jewish writers.

I will let their comments stand on their own since they speak for themselves eloquently.

This from Rabbi Irwin Kula on the Washington Post/Newsweek website:

Rabbi Irwin Kula

Jewish Reaction to Pope Disproportionate
newsweek.washingtonpost.com
Jan. 30, 2009
Rabbi Irwin Kula

The official Jewish response to Pope Benedict XVI's recent decision to reach out to the St Pius X Society and to revoke the excommunication (though not yet determining the status) of four bishops says a great deal about the psycho-social state of American Jewish leadership or at least the leadership that claims to speak for American Jews.

The admittedly unnerving if not hurtful Holocaust denying views of one of those bishops, British born Richard Williamson, an obscure, irrelevant, cranky old man, offered on Swedish television, evoked the wrath of no less than the Anti-Defamation League, the American Jewish Committee, the B'nai B'rith International, the International Jewish Commission on Interreligious Consultations and the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum. "The decision undermines the strong relationship between Catholics and Jews", they protested. "We are stunned that the Vatican has ignored our concerns", they proclaimed.

This will have "serious implications for Catholic-Jewish relations" and there will be a "political cost for the Vatican" they threatened. And from Israel, the Chief Rabbinate in Israel, one of the most corrupt religious establishments in Western democracies, entered the fray calling into doubt the Pope's impending visit to Israel. All this hubbub and anxious lashing out about an internal Church matter regarding the sort of crabby, crotchety, trivial, unknown sort of jerk - the ratty uncle who embarrasses you every time he is in public -- who we all recognize exists in our communities.

As an eighth generation rabbi and someone who lost much family in the Holocaust, it could just be me, but this official Jewish response seems outrageously over the top. Do millions of American Jews sufficiently care that the Pope revoked the excommunication of this unheard-of bishop such that major Jewish organizations should devote so much energy and attention to this and turn it into a cause célèbre worthy of front page attention? And is this the way we speak to each other after decades of successful interfaith work on improving our relationship?

How is it that the view of some cranky bishop who has no power evokes calls of a crisis in Catholic - Jewish relations despite the revolutionary changes in Church teachings regarding Jews since Vatican II? Where is the "proportionality", where is the giving the benefit of the doubt - a central religious and spiritual imperative - in response to something that is admittedly upsetting but in the scheme of things is less than trivial especially given this Pope's historic visit to Auschwitz in which he unambiguously recognized the evil perpetrated upon Jews in the Holocaust and in his way "repented" for any contribution distorted Church teachings made to create the ground for such evil to erupt.

Something is off-kilter here. Is it possible that the leadership of Jewish defense agencies, people with the best of motivation who have historically done critical work in fighting anti-Semitism, have become so possessed by their roles as monitors of anti-Semitism, so haunted by unresolved fears, guilt, and even shame regarding the Holocaust, and perhaps so unconsciously driven by how these issues literally keep their institutions afloat, that they have become incapable of distinguishing between a bishop's ridiculous, loopy, discredited views about the Holocaust and a Church from the Pope down which has clearly and repeatedly recognized the evil done to Jews in the Holocaust and called for that evil to never be forgotten?

Perhaps, this called for a little understanding of what it must be like to actually run a 1.2 billion person spiritual community (one with which I disagree on many issues) and to be trying to create some sense of unity from right to left, from extreme liberalism to extreme traditionalism - sort of like the liberal Barack Obama inviting Rick Warren, despite his hurtful views on homosexuality, to give the invocation at the inauguration. How about cutting a Pope, who we know along with the previous Pope is probably amongst the most historically sensitive Popes to the issues of anti-Semitism, Holocaust, and the relationship to Judaism and Jews, a little slack given how he is trying to heal his own community. And is it possible that the Pope's desire/hope/need to reintegrate the Church (he has also reached out to Liberal theologian Hans Kung) may be of more importance both to the Church and actually to religion on this planet than whether we Jews are upset about the lifting of excommunication of one irrelevant bishop.

Would we Jews like to be judged by the crankiest, most outlandish, hurtful, and stupid thing any rabbi in the world said about Catholics or Christians? We Jews are no longer organized to excommunicate and a rabbi can't be defrocked the way the Church does with its clergy but surely there are individual rabbis who say things so abhorrent about the "other" that though we still call the person rabbi we would not want to be taken to task for doing so.

And isn't it possible that bringing Richard Williamson back inside the Church may actually influence him to see how wrong he is on this issue given how clear the Church is regarding the Holocaust and its commitment to Catholic -Jewish relations? After all the Pope himself said, "I hope my gesture is followed by the hoped-for commitment on their part to take the further steps necessary to realize full communion with the Church, thus witnessing true fidelity, and true recognition of the magisterium and the authority of the pope and of the Second Vatican Council."

There is no way to read this other than to conclude that to be fully reinstated in the Catholic Church, all those who have passed the first test must now clear the big hurdle: either accept what the Catholic Church teaches or remain on the sidelines. And what the Church teaches, among other things, is the necessity of respecting Jews.

Moreover, shouldn't the Jewish defense agency leadership, which to its credit is probably the most effective at its work of any ethnic and religious group in this country, try to understand the inner categories of the other, especially after decades of inter-faith and inter-group work? In this case, that there is a difference between heresy - an accusation from which the Pope is trying to heal part of his community- and stupidity. And what is the cost of not seeing the difference between heresy and stupidity?

Finally, when the Pope as well as key Vatican officials said within a day that Williamson's views are "absolutely indefensible" and that in the Pope's own words, the Church feels "full and indispensable solidarity with Jews against any Holocaust denial" where was a little humility in response? Wouldn't it have been interesting, yet alone ethically compelling, for those who initially lashed out to have acknowledged that perhaps they did overreact and that they do know that the Church and specifically this Pope are very sensitive to these issues. But that we ask the Pope and church hierarchy to please understand that, whether fully justified or not, we are still very very raw and very vulnerable regarding the Holocaust and so we are sorry if we did over react and we are deeply grateful for the Pope's unambiguous reiteration of that which we do know is his view and is contemporary Catholic teachings.

And this from the Jerusalem Post:

David Klinghoffer

The wages of whining
The Jerusalem Post
Jan. 29, 2009
David Klinghoffer

A point I try to impress on my children is one that the Jewish community would do well to consider. If you spend a day continually whining about trivia, by the end of the day, even if you've got something legitimate to complain about, mommy and daddy aren't going to be in a frame of mind to listen to you very seriously. This lesson can be difficult for a little kid to grasp.

The Anti-Defamation League has a hard time with it, too, otherwise the group wouldn't profess to be "stunned" that the Vatican had "ignored our concerns" and reversed the excommunication of four previously outlawed rebel bishops, leaders of the reactionary Society of St. Pius X. The Pius X organization opposes the reforms of Vatican II, including its olive branch to the Jews and Judaism. One of the bishops is a flagrant anti-Semite, Holocaust denier and conspiracy theorist.
Bishop Richard Williamson remains in hot water with the Catholic Church for having accepted ordination in 1988 in the first place, against the wishes of Pope John Paul II. Williamson still cannot minister officially as a bishop. Yet the title and at least some of the influence that goes with it are now his, unsullied by the sinister status associated with excommunication. The combination of malignant views and lofty office are why this case matters.

A priest friend in Rome whom I trust assures me there are sound technical reasons for Pope Benedict's act of mercy to Williamson and the other SSPX bishops: "Being a nut, even a pernicious one, is simply not a justification for maintaining an excommunication, which, from the Church's point of view, is the ultimate punishment. The guy could have been an unrepentant murderer and the excommunication - for the specific offense of illicit ordination - would have still been lifted. It is a technical thing, not a sign of personal approval or rehabilitation."

But as Jews know well from our own religious tradition, well acquainted with legal arcana, such technicalities usually carry the day only when unopposed by urgent real-world considerations.
Before Williamson's forgiveness was announced but after it was known to be a likely prospect, the ADL sought to dissuade Benedict from extending public mercy to a man who argues that The Protocols of the Elders of Zion are a gift that "God put into men's hands." Yet the Pope went ahead anyway, leaving ADL national director Abraham Foxman "stunned." When the news came out, my wife and I watched Williamson's video on YouTube in which he allows that maybe 200,000 or 300,000 Jews died in Nazi concentration camps, but not one in a gas chamber.

I was disturbed but not stunned.

No one should minimize the good that the ADL and other Jewish anti-defamation groups have accomplished in publicizing Muslim anti-Semitism. But they have also done great damage to Jewish-Christian relations by making a habit of attacking Catholics and Protestants, sometimes in hysterical terms, on matters about which Jews have no business complaining.

Thus for example the ADL and its allies remain publicly unapologetic, as far as I know, for their role in hyping the supposed anti-Semitic menace posed by Mel Gibson's film The Passion of the Christ. Before the film was released, the ADL harped on supposed parallels between Gibson's movie and medieval Passion plays. The latter led to pogroms, so the obvious implication was that the former could also.

Others went further. In an article in The New Republic - Jewish-owned and edited - a Jewish scholar, Paula Fredriksen, stated not as speculation but as a certainty that when the film appeared in countries like Poland, Spain, France and Russia, savagery would erupt: "When violence breaks out, Mel Gibson will have a much higher authority than professors and bishops to answer to."

Of course no such thing came to pass.

Meanwhile, Jewish groups continue to pillory the Christian churches for their alleged guilt in fomenting the Holocaust. That's despite the fact that Hitler himself clearly dismissed as ineffective any fancied strategy to try to whip up Germans with appeals to punish the Christ-killers. In Mein Kampf, an influential best-seller, he relied on the language of Darwinian biology to declare a race war against the Jews.

Rabbi Eric Yoffie, president of the liberal Union for Reform Judaism, America's largest Jewish denomination, has called conservative Christians "zealots" and "bigots." Harshly attacking opposition to gay marriage, Yoffie remarked: "We cannot forget that when Hitler came to power in 1933, one of the first things he did was ban gay organizations." And so on and on. By now, as far as anti-defamation activism is concerned, our community has squandered much of its credibility. Therefore when a real issue of concern arises, as in the Williamson affair, we have little on which to draw. Under circumstances like these, some Christians will listen politely but then turn away, citing technicalities.

The writer is a senior fellow at the Discovery Institute in Seattle and the author of Why the Jews Rejected Jesus: The Turning Point in Western History and other books.

~~~~"~~~~

The Pope will undoubtedly treat the hysterical reaction of some Catholics - even bishops - with the same degree of mild regret and paternal solicitude as is his habitual manner.

The rest of us might just remember that the very same Catholics who are now berating the Pope and even calling for his resignation include many who spewed forth vitriol and venomous hatred against traditionalists for the alleged reason that...wait for it...yes, you've guessed it..."they were disloyal to the Pope"!.

Yes, really!

Come back ye Pharisees and whited sepulchres! Your time is not yet up, apparently.

Some people still think that Catholics have always blamed present-day Jews for crucifying Christ.

That is nonsense and never has been our theology. All sinners are to blame for he Crucifixion and bad Catholics are more to blame than bad Jews.

And we do not hesitate to blame those amongst our own bishops whose disloyalty to the Church often crucifies Christ far more obviously and openly than any other religious group or leader does.

...

Defiance: it's powerful...

This is a still from the new film Defiance recently out and starring Daniel Craig as a Jewish partisan leader in Nazi-occupied Belarus.

The Bielski family were farmers in Nowogrodek, Belarus. After Operation Barbarossa, the German invasion of the Soviet Union, Nowogrodek became a Jewish ghetto, as the Nazis took over.

The three Bielski brothers, Tuvia, Alexander Zisel "Zus", and Asael, managed to flee to the nearby forest after their parents and other family members were killed in the ghetto in December 1941. Together with 13 neighbours from the ghetto, they formed the nucleus of a an independent fighting force.

The group's commander was the older brother, Tuvia Bielski (1906–1987), a Polish Army veteran. He recruited over a thousand to join the group in the Naliboki Forest.

They lived in underground dugouts but built a kitchen, a mill, a bakery, a bathhouse, a medical clinic for sick and wounded and a quarantine hut for those who suffered from infectious diseases such as typhus. Herds of cows supplied milk. They ran small factories and even made weapons. The camp's many children went to dugout school. The camp even had its own jail and a court of law.

Religion even flourished in the camp and many of the group were Hasids or fully Orthodox Jews. These authentic Jews believe the Old Testament fully. They are identifiable today by their dress - ringlets, beards, long coats, shawls, broad-brimmed hats and so on.

Today many of them are even anti-Zionist because they believe that there can be no State of Israel until the Moshiach (the Messiah) comes.

Catholics believe the same, the only difference being that we believe the Moshiach ("the anointed") has already come and His name is Y'shua (Jesus or Joshua) meaning "Saviour" and the current "Kingdom of Israel" is the Church. Catholics are the spiritual Jews.

Jews call this "replacement theology" and disparage it but that is only to be expected and - from their point of view - quite right and proper. If they did not think so then they would cease being Jews and become Catholics. So we ought not be unduly offended by the disparagement.

The past record of the Holy See should be our guide. The popes of the past - even at periods of persecution of Jews - have always taken the Jews under their special protection. No historian dare gainsay this truth because he or she will never find any evidence to the contrary, however much they may find evidence against bad Christian kings. The Jews was never expelled from the City of Rome - ever.

No-one - Catholic or non-Catholic - can have anything but the greatest anger and indignation at the disgraceful attempt to destroy defenceless men, women and children as this film again reminds happened even in once-civilised Europe. The twin evils of Nazism and Stalinism combined to make of the 20th century the bloodiest, dirtiest and most destructive of centruies in the history of mankind. How could man behave so unless he were first possessed of a legion of devils? What an appalling legacy it has left us!

The activities of the Bielski partisans were aimed at the Nazis and collaborators in the area. They also undertook sabotage. The Nazis sent out whole formations to track them down but they fled safely to a more remote part of the forest, still offering protection to the non-combatants among their band.

The real Bielski partisans

Several attempts by Soviet partisan commanders to absorb Bielski fighters into their units were resisted, so that the Jewish partisan group retained its integrity and remained under Tuvia Bielski's command. This allowed him to continue to protect Jewish lives whilst fighting.

In the summer of 1944, when the Soviet counter-offensive began in Belarus and the Germans withdrew, the Bielski partisans, numbering 1,230 men, women and children, emerged from the forest and marched into Nowogrodek.

Asael Bielski served in the Soviet Red Army but was killed at Königsberg in 1945.

Tuvia Bielski returned to Poland, then emigrated to Palestine in 1945 but he and his brother eventually settled in the United States.

Some of the acts of vengeance they undertook, and shown in the film are plainly immoral but they come to regret them and the effect of the whole is one of the triumph of courage and dignity over evil.

It is a powerful story - as is the film - of defiance, courage, horrifying, bloody murders and eventual escape from a most hellish episode in human history.

...

Pope Pius XII: saviour of the Jews in Europe during World War II

It has been open season on the Servant of God, Pope Pius XII, ever since the Hochhuth play entitled The Deputy (Der Stellvetreter).

However, in recent times it has got much worse since renegade Catholic and purveyor of falsehood, John Cornwall, published his book attacking the late Pope.

On the cover of this book, Cornwell does not hesitate to place a photograph of Pius XII exiting a building being saluted by guards in German coal-scuttle helmets. Impression? - that they are Nazis... except for one hidden fact: the photo was taken in 1929 during the Weimar Republic before the Nazis came to power!

Happily, however, Cornwall's dishonest book has spawned over 25 new books rebutting his falsehoods severally, seriatim and in detail.

Let us, however, not take our cue from the mendacious Mr Cornwall.

Let us hear what the Jews themselves said of Pope Pius XII.

Dr. Joseph Nathan wrote: "Above all, we acknowledge the Supreme Pontiff and the religious men and women who, executing the directives of the Holy Father, recognized the persecuted of their brothers and, with great abnegation, hastened to help them, disregarding the terrible dangers to which they were exposed".

At Pope Pius XII’s death in 1958, Golda Meir sent an eloquent message: "We share in the grief of humanity. 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".

Golda Meir, Israeli Prime Minister praised Pope Pius XII and mourned his death

During and after the war, many well-known Jews — Albert Einstein, Moshe Sharett, Rabbi Isaac Herzog, and innumerable others — publicly expressed their gratitude to Pius.

In his 1967 book The Last Three Popes and the Jews, the Israeli diplomat Pinchas Lapide (who served as Israeli consul in Milan and interviewed Italian Holocaust survivors) declared Pius XII "was instrumental in saving at least 700,000, but probably as many as 860,000 Jews from certain death at Nazi hands".

In response to the new attacks on Pius XII, several Jewish scholars have spoken out recently. Sir Martin Gilbert told an interviewer that Pius XII deserves not blame but thanks.

Sir Martin Gilbert, historian and scholar said Pope Pius XII deserves thanks not blame

Michael Tagliacozzo, the leading authority on Roman Jews during the Holocaust, added, "I have a folder on my table in Israel entitled 'Calumnies Against Pius XII.' . . . Without him, many of our own would not be alive".

Richard Breitman (the only historian authorized to study U.S. espionage files from World War II) noted that secret documents prove the extent to which "Hitler distrusted the Holy See because it hid Jews".

Despite allegations to the contrary, the best historical evidence now confirms both that Pius XII was not silent and that almost no one at the time thought him so.

Any fair and thorough reading of the evidence demonstrates that Pius XII was a persistent critic of Nazism.

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 a "nation whom bad shepherds would lead astray into an ideology of race".

Holocaust survivors such as Marcus Melchior, the chief rabbi of Denmark, argued that "if the pope had spoken out, Hitler would probably have massacred many more than six million Jews".

Chief Rabbi Marcus Melchior of Denmark, Holocaust survivor, said that if Pope Pius XII had spoken out more Jews would have perished

Robert M W Kempner called upon his experience at the Nuremberg trials to say (in a letter to the editor after Commentary published an excerpt from Guenter Lewy in 1964): "Every propaganda move of the Catholic Church against Hitler's Reich would have been not only 'provoking suicide,' . . . but would have hastened the execution of still more Jews and priests".

The Dutch bishops' pastoral letter condemning "the unmerciful and unjust treatment meted out to Jews" was read in Holland's Catholic churches in July 1942. The well-intentioned letter — which declared that it was inspired by Pius XII — backfired.

Lapide wrote: "The saddest and most thought-provoking conclusion is that whilst the Catholic clergy in Holland protested more loudly, expressly, and frequently against Jewish persecutions than the religious hierarchy of any other Nazi-occupied country, more Jews — some 110,000 or 79 percent of the total — were deported from Holland to death camps".

Bishop Jean Bernard of Luxembourg, an inmate of Dachau from 1941 to 1942, notified the Vatican that "whenever protests were made, treatment of prisoners worsened immediately".

Late in 1942, Archbishop Sapieha of Cracow and two other Polish bishops, having experienced the Nazis' savage reprisals, begged Pius XII not to publish his letters about conditions in Poland.

Albert Einstein paid tribute to Pope Pius XII for saving so many Jewish lives

As early as December 1940, in an article in Time magazine, Albert Einstein paid tribute to Pius XII: "Only the Church 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 a great affection and admiration because the Church alone has had the courage and persistence to stand for intellectual truth and moral freedom. I am forced thus to confess that what I once despised, I now praise unreservedly".

In 1943, Chaim Weizmann, who would become Israel's first president, wrote that "the Holy See is lending its powerful help wherever it can, to mitigate the fate of my persecuted co-religionists".

Chaim Weizmann, first President of Israel wrote that the Holy See was helping to rescue Jews

Moshe Sharett, Israel's second prime minister, met with Pius XII in the closing days of the war and "told him 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".

Moshe Sharett, Israel's second Prime Minister, said it was his "first duty" to thank Pope Pius XII

Rabbi Isaac Herzog, Chief Rabbi of Israel, sent a message in February 1944 declaring "The people of Israel will never forget what His Holiness and his illustrious delegates, inspired by the eternal principles of religion, which form the very 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".

Chief Rabbi Isaac Herzog of Ireland and then, later, of Israel, wrote that the people of Israel will never forget what Pope Pius XII was doing to help Jews

In September 1945, Leon Kubowitzky, secretary general of the World Jewish Congress, personally thanked the pope for his interventions, 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 1955, when Italy celebrated the tenth anniversary of its liberation, the Union of Italian Jewish Communities proclaimed 17 April a "Day of Gratitude" for the pope's wartime assistance.

On 26 May 1955, the Israeli Philharmonic Orchestra flew to Rome to give a special performance in the Vatican of Beethoven's Seventh Symphony — an expression of the State of Israel's enduring gratitude to the pope for help given the Jewish people during the Holocaust.

Pius XII was one of the few world leaders outside Jewry itself who was quick to recognize the danger of Nazism. Lapide’s book The Last Three Popes and the Jews demonstrates convincingly the consistent and active protection provided to Jews in Europe by the papacy.

Rev Jean Charles-Roux, now a Rosininian priest living in Rome and whose father was French Ambassador to the Holy See in the 30’s, lived with his family in Rome during the fateful pre-war period. He recalls that the Pope told his father as early as 1935 that the new regime in Germany was "diabolical".

The Ambassador frequently warned his government but the general reaction in France was chiefly that it was good to see the back of the Prussian militarist and that it was no bad thing that an Austrian-Czech house painter was now Chancellor.

The reaction in the USA and Britain was scarcely different at that time; and even later when they must have begun to know about the camps. The U.S. government accepted a total of 10,000 – 15,000 Jewish refugees throughout the war. — a scandalously small number.

Britain was little better and before the war the government had been full of "appeasers", the Duke of Windsor visited Hitler and Lloyd George, astonishingly, even went so far as to call him "the greatest living German".

Former British Prime Minister, David Lloyd-George, then Lord Lloyd-George, with Hitler, called the Nazi leader "the greatest living German". So much for the supposedly great Welsh "Liberal" leader - but no-one has yet spoken of "Hitler's Welsh Liberal".

In August 1943 Pius XII received a plea from the World Jewish Congress to try to persuade the Italian authorities to remove 20,000 Jewish refugees from internment camps in Northern Italy.

"Our terror-stricken brethren look to Your Holiness as the only hope for saving them from persecution and death" they wrote.

In September 1943, A L Easterman on behalf of the WJC reported to the Apostolic Delegate in London (there was no Nuncio since the British government always refused to recognize the diplomatic rights of the Holy See—a hangover from our anti-Catholic past). He reported that the efforts of the Holy See on behalf of the Jews had been successful and wrote, "I feel sure that the efforts of your Grace, and of the Holy See have brought about this fortunate result, and I should like to express to the Holy See and yourself the warmest thanks of the World Jewish Congress".

In November, 1943 Chief Rabbi Isaac Herzog wrote to Cardinal Roncalli, the future Pope John XXIII, then Apostolic Delegate for Turkey and Greece, saying: "I take this opportunity to express to your Eminence my sincere thanks as well as my deep appreciation of your very kindly attitude to Israel and of the invaluable help given by the Catholic Church to the Jewish people in its affliction. Would you please convey these sentiments which come from Sion, to His Holiness the Pope [Pius XII] along with the assurances that the people of Israel know how to value his assistance and his attitude".

The American Jewish Welfare Board wrote to Pius XII in July 1944 to express its appreciation for the protection given to the Jews during the German occupation of Italy.

At the end of the war, the World Jewish Congress expressed its gratitude to the Pope and gave 20 million Lire to Vatican charities.

Another Israeli diplomat in Italy claimed 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".

Chief Rabbi of Rome, Israel Zolli, converted to Roman Catholicism and took the baptismal name of "Eugenio", the Christian name of Pope Pius XII, in admiration of his help for the Jews.

As a matter of simple historical fact, Rabbi Israel Zolli, the Chief Rabbi of Rome, was received into the Catholic Church in 1945 after the war was over. He was baptized entirely of his own free will and asked Pius XII, with whom he had worked closely in the saving of Jewish lives, to be his godfather. Dr. Zolli chose the name Eugenio as his baptismal name precisely because it was Pius XII’s own Christian name.

These facts are rarely mentioned by commentators, yet they are clearly vital to any assessment of the reputation of Pius XII.

Instead a mendacious campaign has been maintained against the good name of that pope, largely centring around the accusation that he kept silent during the war about the plight of the Jews and refused to mention them by name. It is now implied by some that this was so because he was racist and an anti-Semite.

Those who make such claims often have a dark past of their own to conceal. One such was Rolf Hochhuth, the first to begin the hate campaign. What few know is that Hochhuth was, himself, a former member of the Hitler Youth.

Rolf Hochhuth, former Hitler Youth member, who worked out his guilt by defaming Pope Pius XII

Oskar Schindler, a Roman Catholic, is regarded as a "righteous gentile" by many Jews for saving the lives of some 1,200 Jews in his factories. Why then is Pope Pius XII so unjustly criticized, despite saving over 800,000 Jewish lives?

Pope Pius XII saved some 800,000 Jewish lives during the Holocaust, more than all the other agencies and individuals put together - yet some dishonestly call him "Hitler's Pope". It is a low calumny against a great man.

Eugenio Pacelli, the Servant of God, Pope Pius XII, RIP

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Franklin Roosevelt and Kristallnacht

When the National Socialist government of Germany was exterminating Jews and seeking to eliminate European Jewry, the rest of the civilized world did very little.

When Ambassador Charles-Roux, France's representative at the Holy See, had learned from Pope Pius XII what the Nazis were really like, he tried to warn his own government of the danger from Hitler and his thugs. They would not listen. What had the French to fear from an Austrian-born house-painter?

The British and American governments were no better, despite the warnings of Sir Winston Churchill and his friends.

Since the seizure of power by Hitler, the murderous intentions of the Third Reich were well-known to Western governments, even if the people were still unaware. Eye-witness accounts were reported in Western newspapers like The New York Times e.g. the account from a boy released from Oranienburg concentration camp was published on 6 October 1933. Reports were given in the British House of Commons, too.

Nevertheless, the US government did not boycott the Berlin Olympic Games of 1936 despite the fact that the grossly anti-Semitic Nuremberg Laws had been passed by then.

A month after assuming office, Hitler was already making sarcastic references to the US refusal to allow Jewish refugees into the USA (New York Times, 6 April 1933).

The New York Times tells Americans about Kristallnacht

Just 5 days after Kristallnacht, when Jewish shops were burned and looted and synagogues burned down, and 25,000 Jews were taken to concentration camps, Franklin Roosevelt was asked at a White House press conference if he would recommend a relaxation of US immigration restrictions so that Jewish refugees could be allowed in.

He replied - and let his words live in infamy! - as follows:

"That is not in contemplation. We have the quota system."

Yes, there it is!

The darling of the American Left himself!

Refusing to help the persecuted and oppressed Jews to escape certain death and torture under the Nazis.

What an appalling disgrace!

Jews being led away to concentration camps from the Warsaw Ghetto after Kristallnacht

And Roosevelt did not stop there in his refusal to help suffering mankind.

Under the influence of his wife, Eleanor, he also refused to help those in Soviet Russia and Eastern Europe who were being savagely persecuted by the Communists, too.

Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn being searched in a Soviet Gulag.
Roosevelt, under the influence of his wife, Eleanor, never condemned them as they imprisoned and murdered millions upon millions

It is frankly amazing that there are still Americans who consider this man to have been a "great" President of the USA.

I beg to differ.

...