[donh]

Your statement is illogical based on the truths you have already acknowledged. The RCC at the direction of Pius XII sought to save Jews. As proof, they were more successful at it than any other group or state in the world. Do you acknowledge that?

"Worked in concert" means worked altogether toward the same goal. When some high officials of the church are helping to load boxcars heading for Auschwitz, and some are busy collating and stapling documents to help the SS track down jews, And some are signing away the rights of the moderate catholic centrist party in germany to exist, it is pretty hard for you to believably claim that "they were all working in concert", now isn't it?

I have here frequently acknowledged that the catholic church helped save a fraction of the jews it worked hard for 1400 years to put at risk. And I now do so once again, secure in the knowledge that there will be no responsible reciprocal response from catholicism's defenders cruising on automatic.

[polemikos]

donh,

You need to study history a little better. You're just spouting unsupported claims of anti-Catholics.

RE: The Concordat
Eugenio Pacelli publicly and privately warned of the dangers of Nazism both before and after he became pope. He denounced the deportations and persecution of Europe’s Jews and was almost universally recognized, including by the Nazis themselves, as an unrelenting opponent of the National Socialist regime. Throughout the 1930s, Pacelli was widely lampooned in the Nazi press as Pius XI’s "Jew-loving" cardinal. It is obvius that Pius XII, far from being "silent," was a persistent critic of Hitler and the Nazi regime.

Critics of Pius XII have long used the Holy See’s 1933 Concordat with Germany to attack him, since Pacelli himself played a major role in negotiating it during the time he served as Pius XI’s Secretary of State. The critics claim that the Concordat silenced German Catholics who otherwise would have opposed Hitler and might have held him in check. But the Concordat was in fact a largely pragmatic and morally-defensible diplomatic measure to protect Catholics within Germany and to ensure the continuity and freedom of the German Catholic Church. The Germans had proposed the Concordat, and for the Vatican to have rejected it out of hand would have been prejudicial to the rights of Catholics in Germany. From the vantage point of German Jews, it was morally defensible as well, since it was signed in July 1933, well before Hitler had begun to enact any of his anti-Semitic legislation or decrees. The widely recognized start of the Holocaust, Kristallnacht, didn't occur until 5 years later in November 1938.

Also, the Concordat did not precipitate the collapse of Germany’s Catholic Center Party. The Center Party had been founded during the pontificate of Pius IX in the nineteenth century to defend Catholics against Bismarck’s campaign against them. The Pope had given it his blessing, and it had become increasingly influential in the decades that followed, serving as a vehicle for lay Catholic participation in German party politics and for the protection of Catholic political and religious interests in German public life. However, its influence had steadily declined during the last years of the Weimar Republic and, as Rychlak has shown, it was almost eliminated by the Nazis in March 1933. Then, on July 5, 1933, two weeks before the Concordat was signed, the party decided to dissolve itself voluntarily. It was thus not Pacelli and his negotiation of the Concordat that caused the party’s political decline and ultimate demise. On the contrary, as even so vociferous a critic as James Carroll has conceded, "even before the Concordat was formally signed, the Center Party had ceased to exist." Numerous respected historians — including the Germans Heinz Hurten, Ludwig Volk, and Konrad Repgen, and the American Stewart Stehlin — have marshaled considerable historical evidence in defense of the Concordat and of Pacelli’s role in negotiating it. Unfortunately, their work has gone largely uncited and undiscussed by most of the Pope’s most vociferous critics.

The Concordat issue doesn't support the claims of anti-Catholics. Any others?