Given that the Catholic Church's role in the Holocaust consisted mainly in saving many many thousands of Jews and pissing off Hitler, I'm curious to know what you might mean by this.
Given that the Catholic Church's role in the Holocaust consisted mainly in saving many many thousands of Jews and pissing off Hitler, I'm curious to know what you might mean by this.
Did Hitler invent the forced ghettoization of jews? No, it was invented by canon law. Did Hitler invent the idea of jewish armbands? No, it was invented by Canon law. The catholic church provided the SS with church marriage and birth records to aid in their hunt for jews in the european population. They only balked when the SS requested information on jewish converts to christianity--pretty proud of that, are they, you think? Pope Pius the Silent is credited by his apologists with every jew ever saved by any christian, however, as to what Pius himself was ever actually observed doing to save jews through the official offices of the church, well, that's a little sparse, to be charitable. The catholic church provided the SS with priests to provide them with mass absolution for mass murder.
Shall I go on?
The catholic church provided priests to supervise the loading of jews into cattle cars in Slovokia. The catholic church's vatican state provided Hitler with his first accord with a foreign power, where other states were reluctant to lend such legitimacy to Hitler's government, and which, incidently, was a compact to shut the hell up about the jews, in return for support, including monitary support, of the catholic church in Germany.
I can go on for quite some time, if that's not sufficient. And I can show you anti-jewish SS posters on the subject that echo 1400 years of official catholic sentiment about jews. And the reason I can do so, is that Germany was ready for the Jewish solution well before Hitler, who was a Catholic, and who voiced anti-jewish catholic rhetoric conspicuously in his speeches to an audience primed to hear it.
Thanks to the churches 50 years of mealymouthed avoidance of this uncontested history, it doesn't surprise me that you, like most people, sport such a sanitized version of history. Hitler had plans to bugger the Church despite having signed the concords with Pius the Silent but as for the Church having "pissed off Hitler". It did no such thing, to any significantly useful extent, (except, interestingly enough, for opposition to the eugenics genocide plan, late in the war, which was halted due to church opposition. Think of that--the church could stop the lame and the old from being gassed, but was curiously toothless to defend jews) until xmas of, um, 41, I think, after the damage to the jews was pretty much done and the allies were closing in. And Pius the Silent thought he had better grease some bacon, before he had to eat it raw.
Pius the Silent ex-communicated every communist shortly after WWII. In the space below you can list the number of high ranking SS officials he ex-communicated. It won't be as large as the number the Church spirited out of Germany to avoid prosecution.