I am going to speak from the heart and colorfully and aggressively but please believe that I mean you no offense. I have no idea of what you personally believe and certainly you are entitled to believe as you choose. So am I. I am simply using your post as a springboard to reply to it.
When Pope Pius XII died in 1958, Golda Meir was the Israeli Ambassador to the United Nations. She gave a very admiring eulogy to Pius XII on the floor of the UN General Assembly and was not herself motivated by religion in doing so since I believe she was an agnostic or an atheist. She did note that during the Holocaust, Pius XII's voice was raised in defense of the Jews and that he was the only head of state on the continent to do so, referencing his famous Christmas radio broadcast on the subject.
The Israelis deemed him "righteous among the Gentiles" which is high praise indeed and planted about 950,000 trees in his memory, one for each Jew, whom the Israeli government believed he had saved from the Nazis.
Francisco Franco, a Catholic, also set up an underground railroad through Spain to Spanish Morocco to facilitate the escape of Jews to go wherever they wished. He also allowed them to set up shop in Spanish Morocco to work for the escape of their fellow Jews.
Most of the Reichman/Gestetner family originally of Hungary and Germany respectively escaped Europe by the Spanish route, stayed in Spanish Morocco to use their fortune in resistance to the Nazis and, after the war, emigrated to Montreal where they established a major international construction firm, Olympia and York. Their company was destroyed financially by scheming among termites disloyal to Maggie Thatcher but influential with her cabinet ministers in a scandal known as Canary Wharf, and through no apparent fault of their own. They have been model citizens of Canada and they are utterly Orthodox Chassidic Jews.
As to the possibility of casting a pall on German Christmas celebrations, why? Not one Jew or Gypsy or Pole or "political" prisoner would have been saved by such politically correct showmanship. The celebration of the birth of Our Savior at Christmas and His Resurrection at Easter were a direct slap in the face to the Nazi pagans and murderers. So was the celebration of each and every Mass throughout the Nazi era.
For further details on the Church's response to Hitler, study the actions of Bishop August Galen of Munster, and Michael Cardinal von Faulhaber, Archbishop of Munich from 1917 through his death of natural causes in 1952 at the age of 83.
I will let the decidedly non-Catholic Encyclopedia Britannica article on Cardinal von Faulhaber be my source. In 1923, he helped significantly in thwarting Hitler's Munich Putsch. He resisted the Nazis ever thereafter. Additionally, he was "in their face" to the Nazis in publicly inviting Munich's major Jewish Temple to store their Torah Scrolls with him for their protection.
Cardinal von Faulhaber taunted Hitler regularly from the pulpit at his cathedral. The Nazis did not dare lay a glove on von Faulhaber who was known as "The Lion of Munich." You can also rest assured that von Faulhaber celebrated Christmas and Easter and daily Mass, Nazis or no Nazis.
What were the Nazis but a particularly vile and murderous pagan sect with grand racial pretensions and a very temporary phenomenon who slaughtered many millions of innocent Jews, Gypsies, Poles, political opponents and others in their fanatic attempt to purge non-"Aryans." They were rendered temporary by the rise of Western Civilization's determination to crush the Nazis. The Roman Catholic Church is not all of Western Civilization but it has certainly played a crucial role now for nearly 2,000 years. We often turn the spades of dirt over the graves of the enemies of the Western Civilization.
See also such Protestants as the Lutheran minister Dietrich von Bonhoeffer martyred near the end of the war by the Nazis lest he survive to instruct the world as to the evil that was Nazi rule. Also the ten Booms and others like them.
There is a magnificent Jewish Oxford History Professor Emeritus Sir Martin Gilbert who is now devoting the remainder of his life to documenting (in many 600 page volumes) those Europeans (many of them Catholic) in places like Ukraine, Poland, Lithuania and other nations who risked their own lives and their families' lives to save the lives of Jews being hunted by the Nazis. He regards such people as "righteous among the gentiles" and regards it as his duty as a Jew to see to it that they are identified for history and honored.
See also the memoirs of the Israeli diplomat Pinchas Lapide and of the British (Protestant) diplomat D'Arcy Osborne, both of whom know whereof they speak of Pius XII's heroism during the Nazi era.
Pius XII also is known to have written for his predecessor Pius XI a unique German language encyclical against the Nazis "Mit Brennender Sorge" (With Burning Anxiety) for publication in 1937 and read from each and every Catholic pulpit in Germany on Passion Sunday 3/10/37, catching Hitler and the Nazis by surprise.
The Nazis made the grave mistake of assuming themselves relevant (a thousand year Reich that lasted about 20 years until Der Fuehrer blew what passed for his brains out in a Berlin bunker rather than be captured and tried by Western Civilization). He was not the first and will not be the last to be so defeated. What is and always be the most relevant fact of human existence is the sacrifice of Jesus Christ, God and man, on the cross in atonement for the sins of each and every one of us and we need only accept that sacrifice and live accordingly.
If any reader somehow disagrees with the above-stated theology, for whatever reason, I am not writing to antagonize you and I recognize that your beliefs may differ from mine but I am not going to argue. I believe what I believe and the Roman Catholic Church believes. I won't change or deviate from that path nor do I expect anyone to deviate from theirs.
Mussolini was a glorified pipsqueak with little actual power during the relevant period since the Germans, heir troops and the Gestapo surrounded the Vatican and occupied the rest of Rome. Musslini was nothing more than a local bully, a lickspittle for the Nazis, and a buffoon, hated by his own people who, after Pius XII refused him asylum, was murdered with his mistress in the streets of Rome, strung up by the ankles and his body desecrated. Pius did offer asylum to the mistress but she refused the offer and thus chose to be killed.
I write at this length not knowing the motives behind your post but always aware that there are those (not at all necessarily you) who take every opportunity to blacken the reputation which Eugenio Pacelli (Pius XII) had justly earned in his resistance to the Nazis.
The fairy tales began with publication of the play The Deputy (1962/)by Rolf Hochhuth who has been a member of Hitler Youth and became a communist after the war, devoting himself to a career of lies about Pius XII, who was then safely dead and unable to defend himself. Old Comrade Rolf was quite successful in his libels but it does not change the noble truth attested to by sober and knowledgeable direct witnesses most of them not Catholic.
Rome under the Nazis caused Pius XII to call from Ireland Monsignor Flaherty who spent the war taunting the Nazis by openly flaunting their every regulation to save Jews and advocate for them. See the film The Red and the Black starring Gregory Peck as the Monsignor. When the actually pagan Nazi commandant who ruled Rome for the Nazis was imprisoned after the war, Monsignor Flaherty converted him to Catholicism and baptized him in his prison cell.
Jesus Christ promised that His Church would be here until the very end of the earth. We bury our enemies of the caliber of Hitler, Mussolini, Lenin, Stalin and the rest.
The Islamonazis (whose predecessors like the "Grand Mufti" of Jerusalem were formally allied with Hitler) of our era like to have hissy fits calling Western Civilization's forces (such as they are) "crusaders" as a term of contempt. Perhaps it is time to arrange to make that charge true. Either the Muslims control and suppress their own nutcases or a United States with renewed resolve and an actual POTUS like Cruz or maybe Trump or even Rubio and no politically correct pretenses will control an suppress the Islamolooneytunes once and for all, splashily and memorably. Just one nuclear boomer submarine can spoil their entire history and we still have a lot more than one.
War or no war, when Christmas comes around in good times or in bad times, we will celebrate it and wish everyone a Merry Christmas. Likewise Easter when we will celebrate the Resurrection of Jesus Christ and His triumph over death whether the Muslims or anyone else like it or not. Our Savior was born into this world. Our Savior rose from the dead. We will celebrate and have parties and exchange gifts if we wish to do so, and decorate with lights and we will have Christmas trees and Easter Egg hunts for our children whether Mohammed El Kaboomski likes it or not.
There will be NO CALIPHATE and we will not accept Sharia Law. And we will celebrate that as well.
Francis stands on the shoulders of far greater men (and seems unworthy as their successor) like Pope St. Pius X, Pius XI, Pius XII, John Paul I, Pope St. John Paul II and even Pope St. John XXIII if you limit the analysis to his heroic work saving Bulgarian Jews from the Nazis as a Vatican diplomat to that country.
And his efforts were in addition to the heroic Bulgarian people, largely Eastern Orthodox, who laid down across the railroad tracks to prevent the cattle cars filled with Bulgarian Jews from moving the Jews to the death camps until the Nazis there simply gave up.
Francis stands on the shoulders of far greater men (and seems unworthy as their successor) like Pope St. Pius X, Pius XI, Pius XII, John Paul I, Pope St. John Paul II and even Pope St. John XXIII if you limit the analysis to his heroic work saving Bulgarian Jews from the Nazis as a Vatican diplomat to that country.
And his efforts were in addition to the heroic Bulgarian people, largely Eastern Orthodox, who laid down across the railroad tracks to prevent the cattle cars filled with Bulgarian Jews from moving the Jews to the death camps until the Nazis there simply gave up.
Thank you very much for the ping. Your little opus here was wonderful! Thank you for that. I am late to the Church (2000-01). I knew nothing of this really, regarding what you chronicled, and I’m grateful you made it so digestible here.
The Jesuits are also a chapter of Church history of orders, I have not studied. I see brows rise in all discussions where there name comes up.
As an example of a Jesuit, I have my first one, Pope Francis, and it’s a sad case for his own sake, and may be a dangerous example. How it is that he relates to his Jesuit Order and to his pontificate, I don’t fully understand.
I had just thought he was simply sub-par academically, broadly ignorant, occasionally silly, and prideful as we all are, and possibly senile. At worst, I wonder if he is possibly in cahoots with the Masons, athiests, and similarly a mule for Marxists, whom he seems to have placed at his hem line, all around him.
I don’t know quite what to do in the pseudo schism we live in, divided from the man but not the Church. I think we are all waiting for some kind of an *announcement* that heralds the Return of Christ, or the Illumination of the Soul, or the Three Days of Darkness, but vandalizing the Holy Mass and savaging the “praxis” of the Faith is not a sign of Peace. (sigh.)
Well written, as always.