Posted on 05/12/2002 6:04:44 PM PDT by Lady In Blue
The year 1939 saw the elevation of a longtime papal diplomat,Cardinal Pacelli,to the throne of St.Peter.No candidate for the holy office was better prepared to deal with the inevitable crisis in Europe.He had been the chief negotiator of the concordats during the interwar years.He had seen Communist violence in postwar Bavaria-in a very personal way.Communists splashed his house with machine-gun fire in the hope of assassinating him. In another instance,he faced won Communist armed robbers with the words:"I have neither money nor food.For as you know,I have given all I had to the poor of the city....This is a house of peace,not a den of murderers!"
Though he had experienced Communists violence first-hand in Bavaria, it did not color his feelings about Germany.Communism he loathed,but Germany-her people,civilization,language,and literature-he loved.This combination did not,as his detractors claim,make him sympathetic to Hitler.Rather, he saw Hitler for what he was-a threat to German civilization.He first criticized the Nazis in 1921 in just these terms:
As Professor Ronald Rychlak points out,"Of the forty-four public speeches that Nuncio Pacelli made on German soil between 1917 and 1929,at least forty contained attacks on National Socialism or Hitler's doctrines."As pope,he took the name Pius X11(1939-1958),a signal to the Nazis,among others,that he intended to continue the policies of his predecessor,the man who had issued *Mit Brennender Sorge, a document that Cardinal Pacelli himselfhad drafted.[emphasis mine] It was Cardinal Pacelli,too,under Pope Pius X1's leadership,who had called on Catholic archbishops to lobby their governments to accept Jewish immigrants from Nazi tyranny.The Nazis certainly understood that the new pope was their enemy.Shortly after Pacelli's election in 1939, a secret Nazi security report noted,Pacelli has already made himself prominent by his attacks on National Socialism during his tenure as Cardinal Secretary of State....In adopting his name[Pius],will he not also resume the work of that man whose collaborator as Secretary of State he has been in recent years?"Indeed,Pius XI thought the Western democracies were not hard enough against Hitler, and couldn't be,because the true anti-Nazi and anti-Communists critizue came out of Catholic philosophy.
Pope Pius X11 made desperate overtures to achieve peace,declaring,"Nothing is lost by peace:everything may be lost by war."Surely even he, though a diplomat and prince of peace, must have known that it was impossible.He understood the Nazis and the Communists all too well.When the Hitler-Stalin pact was signed in August 1939,uniting the two most murderous reigmes in history,the pope must have felt very much like Guy Crouchback,the hero of Evelyn Waugh's The Sword of Honourtrilogy,when he hears the news:"The enemy at last was plain in view,huge and hateful,all disguise cast off.It was the Modern Age in arms."
For the next six years,he pope devoted himself,as Pope Benedict XV had in the First World War,to bringing relief to the suffering.But Pope Pius X11 had an additional mission. The Nazis openly persecuted the Jews in Germany and in every country into which they marched.Secretly,they were killing Jews by the millions.The pope-the commander in chief of the Swiss guards of Vatican City,surrounded by Fascist Italy,which,by 1940,was the ally of Nazi Germany-intended to bring as many Jews as he could to freedom.Thousands of Jews were housed,literally,in Church buildings in Rome-even after the Nazis occupied the city in 1943.But these were only a few of the hundreds of thousands of Jews that the Church saved from the Nazi executioners.In 1967,Israeli diplomat Pinchas Lapide estiated that Pope Pius X11 "was instrumental in saving at least 700,000 but probably as many as 860,000 Jews from certain death at Nazi hands."In other words,no institution,outside the Allied armies,did more during World War 11 to save Jewish livesfrom the Holocaust than the pope and the Catholic Church.To put those numbers in even clearer perspective,consider that the Nazis had within their grasp 8,300,000 Jews.Six million of these were killed,leaving only 2,300,000 survivors.If we take Lapide's lowest estimate of the Jewis lives that Pope Pius X11 was "instrumental"in saving-700,000-it amounts to 30 percent of the Jews who survived Hitler's "final solution."</>
In recent years,Pope Pius X11 has been accused of being "Hitler's pope"and of not having done nearly enough to protect the Jews of Europe.It might be noted,first of all,that Catholics themselves were targets of the Nazi extermination machine.At Auschwitz concentration camp alone three million Polish Catholics were systematically murdered-including thousands of priests,20 percent of Poland's entire clerical class(or "priest swine,"as the Nazis called them).It might be noted further that papal diplomacy and underground assistance were more effective at saving Jewish lives from the Nazis than they were at saving Catholic lives from the Communists in Soviet Russis.It was the Soviet Communists,in fact-no mean anti-Semites themselves-who began the "disinformation,"after the Second World War,that Pope Pius X11 had been a Nazi collaborator.The reason was simple:The pope was the leading religious anti-Communists crusader in the world.It is not surprising that atheistic Communists should hate the pope-it was as much a part of their ideology as anti-Semitism was a part of National Socialism.But as Rabbi David G.Dalin noted in his authoritative article "Pope Pius X11 and the Jews"in the Weekly Standard,this Communist big lie has been appropriated by "Lapsed or angryCatholic writers[and others?]as "simply the biggest club available for liberal Catholics to use against traditionalists." He continues:
If the accusations against Pius X11 are despicable,they are also ludicrous coming from liberals or secularists,who for hundreds of years pressed for the destruction of the Catholic Church as a temporal power-until it exists on a mere postage stamp of real estate-and the stripping of all conceiveable authority from the institution.It is,however,perhaps a backhanded compliment to the papcy and the Catholic Church that no one asks why the Free Church of Scotland,the United Methodist Church,the Southern Baptists,the Anglican Church, or any other of the other innumerable Protestant churches or the Eastern Orthodox churches did not do more to help the Jews.In such enormous world crises,there really is only one Christian voice and one Christian institution that matters;the rest-whatever great and heroic individual efforts are made-are so fractured,politically unimportant,or compromised as to be irrelevant.
The Nazis were sufficiently intent on silencing the alleged "Hitler's pope" that Hitler in 1943-the very year the Nazis occupied Rome-planned to seize the Vatican and kidnap Pius X11, which might have been tit-for-tat,as the pope had collaborated with aristocratic German officers plotting against Hitler.Another plan was developed for execution by SS cavalry units in 1944 to "massacre Pius X11 with the entire Vatican,"because of :the papal protest in favor of the Jews."These plans,obviously, did not come off.But if the Nazis decided that they could not risk kidnapping or killing the pope,they did send Catholic priests to the death camps for "treason"against the Nazis.Moreover,they punished Jews even more severely whenever the Church condemned Jewish deportations.The Church delivered such condemnations repeatedly in 1942,with regard to Dutch Jews and Jews being deported from Vichy France-to no positive effect.In sheer fact,the Church-and this shouldn't be surprising-mas most effective as a silent rescuer,by doingrather than merely talking.Our own age tends to prefer the latter,because it offers painless self-affirmation.But in World War 11,public condemnations were no more than a lit candle in a window-a symbolic gesture-and,unfortunately,an incitement to those who would kill.
I presume you mean the last quote. No, that's just as K-L wrote it.
I would blame the universities, first, since the young one were the first to be beguiled by the Fuehrer.
K-L was writing about election results -- mostly not the young, I imagine.
However, I would love to see the election results of 1936:-)?
The title of K-L chapter is "The Rise of the National Socialist Party." He didn't discuss later events.
Perhaps we need to look at the membership roles of the NSDAP for those constituencies. One wonders what happened to conservative party leaders to see how many the Nazis co-opted once they had chopped off the heads of the the tallest plants.
That would perhaps distort their true leanings -- fear has a tendency to do that.
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