"Hitler's Pope"?
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.
I am not sure if this is the same one?
"Siroki Brijeg, Bosnia-Herzegovina - Near the site of a World War II wartime massacre of Serb women and children by Croatian Nazis stands a Franciscan Monastery. It's just down the road from Medjugorje or "Miracle City" where the Virgin Mary is said to put in nightly appearances for the tens of thousands of Roman Catholic pilgrims who flock there each year. The Franciscan Monastery at Sirkoi Brijeg and its controversial contents are at the center of an international scandal involving the Franciscans, Croatian ultra nationalists and the Vatican Bank.
A lawsuit, Alperin v. Vatican Bank, filed in San Francisco Federal Court in November 1999 by Serb, Jewish, and Ukrainian Holocaust survivors against the Vatican Bank and Franciscans seeks return of Nazi loot stolen from wartime Yugoslavia. According to a 1998 US State Department report, the money known as the Ustasha Treasury, is thought to have been concealed in the Vatican and used in part to fund the escape of Nazi and Croatian war criminals to South America. The Franciscans acted as facilitators and middlemen in moving the contents of the Ustasha Treasury from Croatia to Austria, Italy and finally South America.
The Franciscans have denied their wartime ties to the Ustasha regime in Croatia, which slaughtered over 700,000 Serbs, Jews, and Gypsies and set the stage for today's ethnic battles in the Balkans. However, in Siroki Brijeg, plaintiffs' attorneys have obtained tangible proof of the Nazi Franciscan connection. Cameramen working for Phillip Kronzer, a staunch foe of Medjugorje and its Marian apparitions obtained entry to the Monastery and filmed a secret shrine honoring the Ustashe. A plaque dedicated to Franciscan monks who were Ustasha members was filmed along with a massive shrine lining the walls complete with photographs of Ustasha soldiers some in Nazi uniforms. The admonition, "Recognize us, We are yours" can clearly be discerned in the video footage. On a later visit to the monastery the shrine had been dismantled but the videotape preserved the evidence and has now been made available by the Kronzer Foundation."
Just as in World War II, Medjugorje in the 1990's was the site of brutal ethnic cleansing by Croat nationalists. Alperin plaintiffs have alleged that Medjugorje and its facilities are connected with the Ustasha Treasury and the monastery at Siroki Brijeg seems to provide hard evidence of the connection.
But dontcha love the story I put in bold? They have film for proof. LOL. From thelinkup, a site for survivors of sexual abuse by RC clergy.
On this site is a copy of a memo.
Reads "Pavelic's contacts are so high and his present position is so compromising that any extradition of subject would deal a staggering blow to the Roman Catholic Church."
There is no doubt in my mind that the vatican knew about Pavelic and approved. I guess they may as well go ahead and make him a saint.
You bet. Why, what the world really needs right now is an indpendent film producer out to show what hypocrites and frauds certain Catholics, and by extension all Catholics, and by extension from that all Christians, really are. After all, they're the same people who want to deny womyn freedom of reproductive choice, so they really deserve whatever they get, right?
And why stick to the mere facts (I mean the ones you can actually substantiate)? Go for rumor, innuendo, and outright lies. Might as well cook up the good old "secret Papist conspiracy to take over the world" one, while you're at it. After all, consider the remarkable success of "The Protocols of the Elders of Zion", still working wonders for its fans after all these years.
That's something like complaining that a British Ambassador to Washington during the Reagan Administration didn't do enough to keep Bill Clinton from being elected President.
Pacelli (if my memory serves me) wasn't Papal Nuncio when Hitler became chancellor. What sort of influence he might have had, as the diplomatic representative of a foreign power, on domestic German politics before that is at best conjectural.
The historical record demonstrates very clearly that the Nazis knew who Pacelli was, knew what he stood for, and hated him for it.
And, BTW, the Church did "explicitly condemn the Holocaust". Many times, beginning with Mit Brennender Sorge in 1937, before the Holocaust even took place. When von Ribbentrop visited Rome after the Nazis invaded Poland, Pius XII simply sat down at his desk, opened a large book, and began reciting, in German, the catalog of German atrocities against Polish Catholics, Jews, and others.
"Hitler's Pope"?
In fact, he's so "anti-Israel" that he caved in on every one of the Vatican's previous conditions for diplomatic recognition of Israel, granted it anyway, and then went to Jerusalem to grovel. I wonder what it would take for him to be "pro-Israel," short of conversion to Judaism and moving to a West Bank settlement. Oh, that's right: nothing.
And all these Jews would never DREAM that they're doing to Catholics exactly what anti-Semite propagandists did to their ancestors: lay the groundwork for persecution, disenfranchisement, and ultimately mass murder.
Yeah, buddy, it goes both ways. Probably 3 million Catholics died in the Nazi Holocaust, and another 15-20 million died behind the Iron curtain. Just keep laying the groundwork for bringing that glorious chapter of history to these shores. Just keep it up.
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