Posted on 02/15/2003 5:47:40 PM PST by MadIvan
Vatican papers offering the first direct evidence that Pope Pius XII tried to help Jews during the Second World War have been discovered by an Italian expert.
The documents undermine critics' claims that Pius - condemned by critics as "Hitler's Pope" - put the interests of Rome first and did not protest about the fate of Jews during the Holocaust.
A letter, signed by the Pope in October 1940 and sent to Giuseppe Palatucci, Bishop of Campagna in southern Italy, instructed him to give money "in aid to interned Jews", to whom Pius also referred in an earlier letter as "suffering for reasons of race".
The bishop was already involved in assisting Jews through his nephew, Giovanni Palatucci, the police chief in Fiume, in north-eastern Italy. Palatucci had distributed false identity papers to 5,000 Croatian Jews, enabling them to leave local internment camps for relative safety in his uncle's southern Italian diocese, an operation that would later lead to the police chief's death in Dachau.
A second letter to Bishop Palatucci in November 1940 contained a cheque for 10,000 lira that was to be used for the "support of Jews interned in your diocese".
Supporters believe that the letters will help to repair the reputation of a man whom the present Pope, John Paul II, is seeking to make a saint but who has been accused of being anti-semitic, culturally Germanophile, rabidly anti-communist and conspicuously silent about the fate of Europe's Jews.
"They appear to give compelling proof that will testify to Pius's attitude towards the Jews," said William Doino, an authority on Pius XII.
"Given the dangers then existing and the reluctance of the Church to put such matters in writing, these letters are remarkable. They establish beyond question that Pius XII took a direct, personal interest in helping Jews [and] did so very early on in the war.
"Numerous authors have maintained that there is no credible written evidence that Pius XII himself ever gave direct orders to assist persecuted Jews. Now, we have that evidence."
Mr Doino believes that other new documents to be released by the Vatican to scholars this weekend will shed light on one of the most controversial figures in the Catholic Church's history.
They cover between 1922 and 1939, when the then Eugenio Pacelli was nuncio to Weimar Germany and later papal secretary of state when Hitler came to power.
Controversy has long dogged Pacelli, the principal architect of the 1933 concordat between Germany and the Vatican which ring-fenced Catholic schooling and public worship in a climate that was hostile to "political Catholicism".
While Britain, France and Italy had already established relations with Germany, the concordat is widely viewed as having conferred "respectability" on the Nazis.
The alleged silence of Pius, who became Pope a few months before the outbreak of hostilities in 1939, would later become a stick with which to beat the Catholic Church over its wartime record.
While more than 80 per cent of Italy's Jewish population was rescued, critics of the Church have claimed that individual Italian Catholics acted spontaneously, without aid from Pius XII.
Defenders of Pius XII say he detested the Nazis, signed the concordat to protect German Catholics and put German conservatives who were plotting to kill Hitler in touch with the British, who failed to take much interest in them.
"Croatia's prime minister has angrily condemned the use of Nazi slogans and salutes at a reception in the capital, Zagreb, for the national handball team.
Prime Minister Ivica Racan warned such behaviour "could not be tolerated in Croatia". Fascist salutes are unacceptable... and shame us in the eyes of Europe
Dozens of people in the crowd gave the salute - allegedly after nationalist folk singer Marko Perkovic Thompson shouted a slogan used by Croatian Nazis in World War II.
Last month, Croatian skier Ivica Kostelic had to apologise for remarks interpreted by some as pro-Nazi."
Amen. I have also read Cornwell's "book". When you add to the fact that it is full of lies and distortions (and the very first one is the cover photo on the book, which was taken of then-Cardinal Pacelli in Germany, but well before Hitler came to power) the fact that Cornwell himself is a failed seminarian who has written a number of books viciously attacking the Church, then you see where the hatred is coming from.
I too have friends who swallow the anti-Catholic propaganda hook, line, and sinker. They at least have an excuse of sorts, because they are children of Holocaust survivors. I can see how looking around for people to blame would be their natural reaction, but in this case they're blaming a man who did all he could with the limited power of the Church ("How many divisions does the pope have?") to save as many as he could. In his position, he had to work quietly behind the scenes, because public pronouncements simply attracted the attention of the Nazis. When the Dutch bishops condemned the Nazis, they were brutally silenced, and the Nazis stepped up their extermination of Dutch Jews.
Abandoning his people during the greatest danger he had hidden in the Vatican like the coward and traitor that he was.
Now that's just delightful. On one hand you criticize the Catholic Church for being Nazi collaborators, but in cases where Catholics actually did something and offered refuge to Jews, you have the nerve to call those Jews "cowards and traitors." Your bigotry is transparent.
As for Edith Stein, why do you imagine anyone in the Jewish community actually cares? Do you think she was the first Jew to have converted?
The Catholic Church doesn't seek the advice of Jews, Muslims, Hindus, or anyone else, during the canonization process. The fact that Edith Stein was a convert played a prominent role in her canonization -- the fact that she was originally Jewish did not. Her recognition is for her life of dedication and devotion as a Carmelite sister.
You might want to do some research and see what kind of confusion existed even among Jews in the years leading up to the Holocaust. American Jews who petitioned Roosevelt to help the Jews in Germany in the 1930s were chastised by prominent German Jews who could not imagine that the Third Reich was anything more than a short-lived pipe dream.
Nationalists attack NGO activists over Croatian Nazi monument
DATELINE: Zagreb
Around 200 nationalists Monday confronted representatives of non-governmental organisations in the central town of Slunj who wanted to protest against a monument erected to a Croatian World War Two Nazi commander, HINA news agency reported.
Activists of the NGOs tried to protest against the monument to Jure Francetic, commander of the Ustashe, the forces of the Nazi puppet state that ruled Croatia during the war, but the nationalists prevented them from doing so by organising a counter-protest.
The NGO activists, who came from the capital Zagreb, wanted the monument to be removed. President Stipe Mesic last year condemned local authorities for erecting such a monument.
Special police units had to intervene and protect NGO activists, otherwise they would have been beaten by angry nationalists, the report said.
Francetic, killed in 1943, was commander of the so-called "Black Legion" Ustashe battalion, responsible for numerous war crimes against Croatian Jews, Serbs and Roma during the war.
I once met a fascinating Jewish man who had fled from the Soviet Union during the Cold War (in fact, he was a friend of a prominent Soviet chess grandmaster who had fled at the same time). He told me that Russian Jews used the term "Great Catastrophe" instead of "Holocaust" to describe the events of the 1930s and 1940s in Eastern Europe.
What was most interesting was the reason why this was the case -- I won't go into details, but if anyone but a Jew had said this he would be roundly condemned as an anti-Semite.
Few states guard the secrecy of their archives more closely than the Vatican. But as the United States and other nations continue declassifying their World War II documents, more and more details of the behavior and attitude of the Vatican's wartime leader, Pope Pius XII, have come to light.
Now it appears that during some of the most crucial moments of the war, the Vatican believed that Nazi Germany would probably defeat the Allies. In a recently rediscovered coded cable sent to the State Department on June 29, 1942, Harold Tittmann, the U.S. envoy to the Holy See, reports that "a highly placed Vatican official has intimated to me for the first time . . . that he did not (repeat not) believe that the Allies were in a position to win the war in Europe." Tittmann goes on to say that he is especially concerned because the official in question "is in close touch constantly with the pope himself and has always professed to me his enthusiasm for the Allied cause." Tittmann and other Allied envoys feared that given this view, Pope Pius XII would push for a compromise Allied peace "settlement" and "that the pope's peacemaking ambitions might be exploited for their own ends by the Axis powers." Washington, Tittmann wrote, "should make every effort to disabuse him of any notion he might have that the Allies might agree to anything short of complete defeat of Hitler."
This latest insight into the Vatican view of Nazi power--combined with Pope Pius's obsessive fear of Soviet communism--lends new understanding to the wartime pope's refusal to unequivocally condemn the Nazi slaughter of the Jews. It also adds a new dimension to the controversy over the extent of the Vatican's participation in the postwar "rat-line," the odious underground railroad that smuggled "anti-Communist" Nazi war criminals and sympathizers from Europe to Latin America--together with major parts of loot plundered from Jews and other victims of Nazism.
A soon-to-be-released Argentine government report confirms the Holy See's hand in seeking Latin American visas for fleeing Nazis. According to newly declassified Argentine government archives, many such asylum requests were made directly to the Argentine ambassador by the Vatican Secretariat of State's Giovanni Montini. The report also says that Cardinal Eugene Tisserant appealed to Buenos Aires for visas for Vichy regime collaborators fleeing liberated France.
Booty. The Vatican especially interceded on behalf of Croatia's Ustasha Nazis, including Anton Pavelic, the Ustasha "fuhrer" who played a major role in the extermination of tens of thousands of Serbs, Jews, and Gypsies. The new Argentine government report, the result of three years of intense research, confirms that senior Vatican "personalities" pressed for the postwar "escape to Argentina of Pavelic, together with a relatively important retinue of followers and looted assets." Included in those assets: almost $ 50 million in jewelry as well as gold coins and ingots, much of it plundered from Yugoslav Jews, and part of as much as $ 250 million in Ustasha booty believed stashed for "safekeeping" in the Vatican treasury at the end of the war.
"According to the Zagreb Jewish community (report dated March 1998), two Catholic churches (in Zagreb and Split) continue to be used to propagate Pavelic's ideology and his Ustasa movement. 'It has become common practice to hold services for Pavelic when followers of his political ideas get together.'
The government of President Tudjman continues to support the rehabilitation of the war-time pro-Nazi Independent State of Croatia and its leadership. Thus, for example, anti-fascist monuments around the country are being demolished and the names of the fascist murderers wiped clean. At the end of 1997 the Croatian parliament changed its name to 'Parliament of the Croatian State', a name that was used only during the existence of the Independent State of Croatia.
On 4 October 1998, during a visit to Croatia, the Pope beatified Zagreb's Second World War archbishop, Alojzije Stepinac. Archbishop Stepinac is revered by Croatians as an anti-Communist martyr but reviled by others as a fascist collaborator. The beatification took place despite protests from the Serbian government and a demand by the Simon Wiesenthal Center that it be postponed 'until after the completion of an exhaustive study of Stepinac's war-time record'. Croatian Jewish groups dissociated themselves from the protest.
In May 1997 newspapers carried reports stating that in Karlovac, a town near Zagreb, unknown perpetrators had desecrated Jewish graveyards and defaced gravestones with Ustasa and Nazi symbols.
In the autumn of 1997 daubings of swastikas were found on a plate commemorating the Zagreb synagogue which was destroyed in 1942.
The most controversial issue in Croatia in 1997 was the publication of a Croatian translation of The Protocols of the Elders of Zion. The publication was particularly damaging in so far as the preface contained no warning about the book's historical inaccuracy and antisemitic contents. Owing to considerable publicity in the media, according to the Zagreb Jewish community, the book remained on the bestseller lists for several months
In 1997 the newspaper Narod, edited by the Catholic priest Ante Bakovic, published a number of articles depicting Jews as conspirators who control international industry, media and banking."
I guess it really depends on whose ox is being gored.
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