Posted on 01/02/2007 3:22:19 AM PST by Aussie Dasher
JERUSALEM -- Newly discovered records document the role of Monsignor Angelo Roncalli, a Vatican diplomat in Istanbul during World War II who later became Pope John XXIII, in helping rescue thousands of Hungarian Jews from the Holocaust.
They also lend weight to arguments that Pope Pius XII, who was pontiff during the war, failed to do all he could to prevent the systematic massacre of millions of Jews.
The memoirs, documents and letters stashed away in the private collection of a Jewish associate of Monsignor Roncalli describe frequent late-night meetings in the Vatican compound in the heart of Istanbul.
There, the two men composed urgent messages to the Holy See and obtained false papers to enable Jews to escape the reach of the Nazis and their allies.
Examined recently by Tel Aviv University professor Dina Porat, an internationally respected authority on the Holocaust, the documents attest to a unique relationship that had consequences of historic importance.
Monsignor Roncalli was serving as papal nuncio in Istanbul, essentially the Vatican's ambassador. He went on to become one of the most beloved popes and, by convening the Second Vatican Council in 1962, opened the Catholic Church to a wave of modernization that included a revised liturgy and major efforts to unite with other Christian denominations.
(Excerpt) Read more at washtimes.com ...
Pius XII saved 860,000 Jews during the war. The article writer should consult Yad Vashem.
Here we go again, some ungrateful Jews attacking the man that personally saved over 800,000 of their brethren from perishing during WWII. I don't know why these people even bother with this nonsense anymore. The documentation that Pius XII exerted his influence to save a great many Jews during WWII is extremely well documented. Don't they know yet that you just can't bury the Truth?
To be fair - the offensive paragraph on Pius looks to have originated with the article writer.
Couls SOMEONE explain how a Catholic POPE in ITALY is resposible to save JEWS in Germany when Jews in America couldn't save their own?? I have NEVER gotten this argument.
Is that true? Do you have a link?
I caught a part of a story on CSPAN a while back. It was about a German lawyer who worked for their Foreign Ministry. He was fired when the Nazis came to power, but when they conquered so much of Europe in 1939-40 they were is need of men with diplomatic experience to help with administration, so he was hired.
One job he was given was to investigate reports that the Dutch were dummying up papers to "prove" that Jews were not Jews. He looked into it, and found it was true. He then produced a report that admitted the process was going on, but justified it by using the Nazi's own propaganda. He claimed that Dutch Jewish women were very promiscuous, and had a generations long habit of seducing Aryan men and bearing their illegitimate children.
The Nazis classified you as Jew or non-Jew racially, so if it turned out that your father and both grandfathers were not the Jewish men on the birth certificate, but Aryans, you were entitled to be classified as 1/4 (or less) Jewish. Not a good category to be in for sure, but a lot safer than simply being a Jew.
The report was duly submitted, which put the Nazis in charge of Holland in a fix. Because the lawyer had used their propaganda against them, no one in the Nazi hierarchy could condemn the report as false, without casting himself as a champion of the chastity of Jewish women. They weren't prepared to do that, and that people who had their papers "fixed" lived.
It was not nearly enough, but it reminds me of the old story about a beach after a storm, that is covered with starfish. The water has receded leaving the starfish to die under the sun. An old man was seen walking along the beach, tossing starfish back into the water. Someone asked him "There are miles of beach and millions of starfish, why bother? What difference does it make if you put a few back into the water?" The old man said "It matters to the ones I do put back."
"By July 7, 1944, they were stopped," Mrs. Porat said."
It sounds like Pope Pius did do something. It is noted in the article and seems to have been effective.
So many people think that popes and presidents have unlimited means and powers, they are supposed to be supermen. Who knows why Pope Pius didn't answer this man's letters personally, yet they assume that he "failed to do all he could" without citing further evidence. That sentence just seems like a prejudice of the original writer. In fact, it is a very badly written article which gives very little evidence of beyond the screaming indictment of Pope Pius XII.
Like the sentence;
There, the two men composed urgent messages to the Holy See and obtained false papers to enable Jews to escape the reach of the Nazis and their allies
Where did they get the false papers? Through the Vatican or did they procure them on their own? Or did the Vatican actually send them help but it wasn't publicly documented. There would have to be a lot more evidence to prove that the Vatican failed to help.
For anyone interested in the truth, there is a book The Pius Wars, published in 2004 or 2005 which includes an exhaustive 180-page annotated bibliography of this controversy by Bill Doino and about eleven chapters by various authors, Catholic and Jewish and otherwise who have risen to the defense of Pius XII before a generation who do not remember him and his work.
The controversy did not exist at the time of Pius XII's death in 1958. Pius XII was well aware of Angelo Roncalli's (the future John XXIII) efforts on behalf of Jews including the manufacture of passports and baptismal certificates and the establishment of a cooperating underground railroad that sent Jews in safety from Europe to North Africa through Spain.
The controversy began with the early 1960s publication of a play The Deputy by one Rolf Hochhuth attacking Pius XII's character and portraying him as a cold-blooded anti-Semite in league with the Third Reich. Somehow, these slanders had not been the view of those familiar with the facts and the historians and objective observers and Israeli political leaders (many of whom were atheists or agnostics as secular liberals).
As a conservative Roman Catholic, I would let the reputation of Pope Pius XII (who will, despite his enemies' efforts, become Pope Saint Pius XII just as Pope Blessed John XXIII will be canonized as Pope St. John XXIII) ride on such sources as Albert Einstein who effusively thanked Pius XII for his efforts against the Holocaust, Golda Meir who eulogized Pius XII in her capacity as Israel's UN Ambassador, Israeli diplomat Pinchas Lapide who wrote an entire book on the subject as a contemporary observer of Pius XII work to save Jews and Benjamin Gilbert, a noted Jewish historian and biographer and Oxford professor who has written repeatedly and in scholarly depth on the subject.
What were Hochhuth's credentials to examine in an effort to discredit the WWII resistance of Pope Pius XII to the Nazis and to the Holocaust? Hochhuth's father was a WWII SS officer loyal to Hitler and the Third Reich. Hochhuth was, during the Third Reich, a member of Hitler Youth. After the war, he became a Marxist and in that capacity was an enemy of all things Catholic. Those who perpetuate Hochhuth's myths include a substantial number of leftist Kumbaya pseudoCatholics like Garry Wills who want to neuter the moral authority of the Roman Catholic Church and its Teaching Magisterium on matters of personal and familial morality, water down the liturgies (including the Novus Ordo Mass) and practices of the Church which carry out the mission of the Church.
What Pius XII's enemies within want is Unitarianism/Universalism practiced within formerly "Catholic" parishes and some of them find even that too restrictive of their desire to follow the heresy of the week or agnosticism or atheism with tax deductions and without Vatican interference and call it "Catholicism." By and large they want a Catholic Church relentlessly advancing the social and economic and foreign policy of the barking moonbat left and stripped of anything actually Catholic. What would they not do to see a Pope Howard Dean???? Are you broad enough and open-minded enough or are you one of those narrow-minded moralist bigots who resist (all genuflect, now) CHANGE????
Finally, the New York Times, hardly a house organ of Roman Catholicism or of Western Civilization for that matter, editorialized in 1942, after a stinging anti-Nazi Christmas radio broadcast by Pope Pius XII that the lights had gone out all over the continent of Europe until only one candle remained and that candle was Pius XII's Vatican resisting Nazism.
If Pius is to be judged guilty for not doing enough to prevent the killing of innocent Jews, how can they escape being charged as guilty for not doing enough to prevent the slaughter of the innocent unborn, many of whom are Jews.
Zowie.
Perhaps we should all focus on what we ourselves can change TODAY. What can we do in our own sphere of influence to make the world a better place TODAY?
There's also a bit of controversy about the writings mentioned in the thread-head post. Some folks question whether Roncalli was writing for 'more than one' audience--meaning that he could have known that his letters were being reviewed by Nazi censors prior to dispatch to Rome.
Since when do the Moonies have an interest in the Church?
Anyone who saw the very ending of "Schindler's List" can attest to that.
It is really rather simple. Pope Pius-bashing is the latest fad among antiCatholic bigots. The fact that the slander had been decisively discredited by Jewish and other researchers matters not at all to those who hate.
Marking
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