At the time of Luther, that was actually pretty mild stuff. How about equal time for the Catholics?
The story about the Catholics is still being learned after researchers have unveiled in March 2020, approximately 16 million never-before-seen files. What is the conventional thinking was the Church took a position of neutrality as Pope Pius XII’s public silence and impartiality as 6 million Jews and millions of others were killed. “The Vatican dealt mainly with distribution of economic relief and by helping [mostly baptized Jews] emigrate to North or South America,” according to Giovanni Coco, Staff Archivist in the Vatican Apostolic Archives.
According to researcher Brown-Fleming, Hitler “wasn’t going to be controlled by anything a Pope said or did. He was going to go forward with his genocidal program.”
There was lots of contradictions with the Church. At the same time Catholic rescuers were helping Jews, some of those same people were also helping Nazis. The Church wanted to seem sympathetic to the Nazis during their occupation of Rome. They did not want to risk the destruction and theft by the Nazis of the Vatican and St. Peters. Brown-Fleming sees “a lot of fear” in the papers she’s read. It could be another decade before the 16 million files are studied in their entirety. “We have all these contradictions, and it’s going to take a long time to work through them,” says Brown-Fleming.