Posted on 07/06/2012 1:07:35 PM PDT by NYer
.- Israel's Yad Vashem Holocaust memorial has made changes to a controversial exhibit on Pope Pius XII, presenting a more balanced view of his actions toward the Nazis and their Jewish victims.
Pave the Way Foundation President Gary Krupp, a prominent Jewish defender of Pope Pius XII, said his inter-religious group was “very pleased” with Yad Vashem's change of position, which “should show the world that it is truly an institution based on facts and truth.”
“The black legend against Pope Pius XII is being bleached white by the stark light of truth,” Krupp told CNA on July 5. Further research, he said, will show that the Pope, born Eugenio Pacelli, “was indeed a great hero to the Jewish people during our darkest years of the Shoah.”
Yad Vashem's new wall panel on Pius XII and the Vatican “presents a more complex picture than previously presented,” the museum said in a July 1 announcement, citing “research that has been done in the recent years” on the wartime Pope.
The panel's revised text states that “reaction of Pius XII, Eugenio Pacelli, to the murder of the Jews during the Holocaust is a matter of controversy among scholars.” It acknowledges the Pope's condemnation of ethnic persecutions, as well as the Holy See's efforts to save Jews.
While the exhibit criticizes the Vatican for instances of silence and a “lack of clear guidance” during the Nazi era, it also acknowledges the perspective of those who say the Pope acted prudently under the circumstances.
“His defenders maintain that this neutrality prevented harsher measures against the Vatican and the Church's institutions throughout Europe, thus enabling a considerable number of secret rescue activities to take place at different levels of the Church,” Yad Vashem's revised exhibit reads.
“Moreover,” it states, “they point to cases in which the pontiff offered encouragement to activities in which Jews were rescued.”
Regarding the 1943 deportation of 1,000 Jews from Rome to Auschwitz, the new display says that the Pope “did not publicly protest.” The previous version of the panel made the accusation that the Pope “did not intervene.”
Yad Vashem's new exhibit also quotes the Pope's 1942 Christmas Eve radio address, in which he spoke out for “the hundreds of thousands of persons who, without any fault on their part, sometimes only because of their nationality or ethnic origin, have been consigned to death or to a slow decline.”
The new text suggests that the controversy over the Pope will continue “until all relevant material is available to scholars.”
Krupp said he believed full access to the Vatican archives would vindicate Pope Pius XII's true legacy as wartime hero. In the meantime, he urged scholars to study the 76,000 pages of documentation and study material made available by the Pave the Way Foundation.
The group's chairman Elliot Hershberg said in a July 3 statement that its research on Pope Pius XII, undertaken for the purpose of “setting the record straight,” has shown “that his work to mitigate the suffering of the Jews during World War II was monumental.”
“I’m certain that through our work and with the opening of the Vatican Archives, the controversy will be ended and Eugenio Pacelli will be recognized for his extraordinary efforts and for saving possibly hundreds of thousands of Jewish lives,” Hershberg said in response to Yad Vashem’s announcement.
Catholic ping!
The nazi pope thing came straight from Moscow.
It's a good first step, I suppose, but they have a long way to go before cleaning up their presentations of Soviet and East German communist propaganda.
While the exhibit criticizes the Vatican for instances of silence and a “lack of clear guidance” during the Nazi era, it also acknowledges the perspective of those who say the Pope acted prudently under the circumstances.
“His defenders maintain that this neutrality prevented harsher measures against the Vatican and the Church's institutions throughout Europe, thus enabling a considerable number of secret rescue activities to take place at different levels of the Church,” Yad Vashem's revised exhibit reads.
Ping for later
The above is also excerpted from the linked article. A reasonable person could conclude that the exclusion of this exculpatory crux of the article is intentional and even expected from someone who has maintained an unwarranted vendetta against the Church. The fact that the accusations against Pope Pius XII originated within the Kremlin for cold war propaganda purposes shed light on your presumed motives.
Do you think it possible that Alex is a Kremlin operative, closet communist, or just another useful idiot?
Peace be with you
Do you think it possible to ping me when talking about me?
FR thread from 2006: Hitler's Pope? (Book review of The Myth of Hitler's Pope)
The whole "Hitler's Pope" tale is a KGB disinformation operation. The highest ranking East bloc intelligence agent ever to defect to the West, Ion Mihi Pacepa, who himself participated in the operation, says so. Pacepa even reports the detail that Andropov regretted the operation to him after learning of Hitler's plans to arrest or kill Pius XII.
Put that together with the overwhelmingly favorable testimony of people who actually lived through the events in question -- like the chief rabbi of Rome, Angelo Roncalli (later Pope John XXIII), Golda Meir, Pinchas Lapide, etc. -- and it's clear that "Hitler's Pope" is a dirty slander.
Those are the facts of the matter. "Ping for later"? Which of those facts do you think will change ... "later"?
"If I have told you heavenly things and you do not believe, how can you believe if I tell you earthly things?"
Looks like it’s the third paragraph in the excerpt to me. Them KGB double-nought spies is real sneaky-like though, maybe they stuck it in while you weren’t looking.
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