HITLER DIDN’T HAVE A POPE – BUT HE DID
HAVE A MUFTI
Long before the child-abuse scandal, liberals were abusing the Catholic Church by portraying Pope Pius XII as a Nazi stooge. Based on a steady drumbeat of propaganda, starting with the 1963 play “The Deputy,” some suspected that the wartime pope was wearing an SS uniform under his pontifical robes.
In the past, the most vigorous defenders of the pontiff, who died in 1958, were orthodox Catholic writers. Now comes David Dalin – scholar, professor of history and political science and a Conservative rabbi – with a most welcome work: “The Myth of Hitler’s Pope: How Pope Pius XII Rescued Jews From The Nazis.”
Starting in the autumn of 1943, Pius ordered Italian churches and convents to hide Jews.
• In Rome alone, 155 monasteries and convents sheltered more than 5,000.
• Roughly 3,000 Jews found refuge in Castel Gandolfo, the pontiff’s summer residence.
• Hundreds of Jews were housed within the walls of the Vatican.
• Monsignor John Patrick Carroll-Abbing, a rescuer, founder of Italy’s Boy’s Town and a close confident of Pius XII, testified in his memoirs that all of this was done at the direction of a pope who’s now derided as a closet anti-Semite. Dalin writes: “He (Carroll-Abbing) stressed that the idea that he and others like him acted in spite of the pope’s silence ‘is a blatant lie! I spoke to Pope Pius XII many times during the war, in person, face to face, and he
told me not once but many times to assist the Jews. … I can
personally testify that the pope gave me direct face-to-face verbal orders to rescue Jews.’”
• The eminent historian Martin Gilbert (author of “The Holocaust: A History of The Jews of Europe During The Second World War”)) agrees. In a 1998 interview, Gilbert observed, “Hundreds of thousands of Jews (were saved) by the Catholic Church, under the leadership and with the support of Pope Pius XII.”
As Rabbi Dalin points out, at a time when Allied leaders cared little about the death camps (with the honorable exception of Churchill), the Catholic Church rescued more Jews than any other institution in Europe.
As Dalin notes, it takes a particular callousness to distort the history of the Holocaust to score political points. In effect, the Catholic left is using the deaths of six million Jews to advance a theological agenda.
How else explain this relentless assault on Pius XII, when little has been written about the role of Hajj Amin al-Husseini, then the Grand Mufti of Jerusalem, in aiding and abetting the Holocaust?
A precursor to al-Qaeda and Hamas, al-Husseini devoted his life and considerable polemical skills to fomenting the most rabid Jew hatred.
Dalin (who devotes a chapter in his book to Islamic anti-Semitism) reports that al-Husseini took up residence in Berlin early in the war, as an honored guest of Hitler. The mufti made propaganda broadcasts to the Arab world calling for the extermination of Jews (“Kill the Jews, wherever you find them. This pleases God, history andreligion,”alHusseini implored in one radio address) and recruited a Waffen SS
company among Bosnian Muslims.
After the war, Dieter Wisliceny (one of Eichmann’s lieutenants) testified that the mufti even visited Auschwitz, and urged guards in charge of the gas chambers to “work more diligently.”
Regrettably, this monster escaped prosecution as a war criminal (a case of Allied pandering to the Arabs). In the late 1940s, he met a young Yasser Arafat in Cairo, and the torch was passed to the next generation of Jihadist anti-Semites. (Arafat called the mufti, “our hero al-Husseini.”) Dalin sees a direct connection between al-Husseini’s
murderous ideology and today’s Islamic anti-Semitism and terrorism.
Why has the mufti received so little notice from the liberal historians and commentators who are so quick to condemn the wartime pope? Perhaps because, while it’s fashionable in elitist circles to bash the Catholic Church, criticism of Islam is considered in bad taste. Since Muslims are often
anti-Western, the left is willing to bend over backwards to keep from offending them.
http://www.donfeder.com/articles/0509DalinBook.pdf
One of the things that influenced the negative treatment of both Pope Pius XII and General Francisco Franco (who also sheltered Jews, admitted them to Spain and had Spanish embassies all over the world offering them refuge) was the fact that the two were also anti-Communist and anti-Stalin.
The US, particularly under Roosevelt, with his Communist-filled administration, was utterly charmed by “Uncle Joe” and completely ignored and even covered up the horrible misdeeds of the Communists (who also treated Jews badly). It was considered bad form and disloyal to even mention these things.
After the war, both Franco and Pope Pius XII were the focus of hatred from the Democrats and the US (left-leaning) media because of their anti-Communism, and scurrilous and completely false things were said about both of them.
It's clear that the left is doing this because of the move to make Pius a Saint. They also want to denigrate anything having to do with the Catholic Church, because they see the Church as their main enemy for changing the world to suit themselves.
...AND A REICHBISHOP!
Ludwig Müller was installed by Hitler to the cabinet level position as Reichbishop and head of the Protestant Reich Church, (Deutsche Evangelische Kirche). The Reichkirche, as it was known, was formed by the Nazi party in 1936 to merge the 28 regional churches into a unified state church that espoused a single doctrine compatible with National Socialism. Fully compliant, on December 22, 1941, the German Evangelical Church called for all Protestant churches to withhold baptism to non-Aryans and bar them from all spheres of Protestant church life.