Posted on 01/15/2005 2:12:47 PM PST by Embraer2004
Translated J.R. Orellana
So it reveals the Catholic newspaper Avvenire according to statements made by former Nazi General Karl Friedrich Otto Wolff, who says that he personally received orders from the Führer to kidnap the Pope
EFE El Universal online Roma, Italia Saturday 15 january 2005
13:24 Adolf Hitler had planned to kidnap Pope Pius XII 1944 due to his position against Nazism and his collaboration with the Jews, according to today's edition of the daily Avvenire, which is based on testimony from former Nazi General Karl Friedrich Otto Wolff.
According to the paper, Wolff's information is found in a written declaration in 1972 that pertains to the Nüremberg process and is among the documents filed in the beatification process of Pius XII. Avvenire claims that the former general received personal orders from Hitler to kidnap Pius XII on May 1944, when the General was to visit the Pontiff.
The audience occurred on 10 May 1944 and that is where the German General informed the Pope of Hitler's intentions.
As a proof of sincerity, the Pope asked Wolff to liberate two deathy-row inmates, which he did on 3 June 1944.
Once kidnapped, the plan was to transfer the Pontiff to the Liechtenstein Castle, in Württemberg, adds the newspaper, which also has collected documents which showed the Vatican's preoccupation with an imminent Nazi action against the Pope.
Some historians, such as Andrea Tornielli, author of "Piuso XII, The Pope of the Jews", have already pushed forward the theory that Hitler intended to deport the Pontiff in revenge of his presumptive help to the Jews and point out that it was Wolff's opposition to the Fuhrer that prevented such action.
In spite of his supposed collaboration to save the Jews, Pius XII , at the end of World War II, was severely criticized for his apparent passivity in the face of the Holocaust.
From Haaretz (Israeli newspaper) Friday, January 15, 2005, http://www.haaretzdaily.com/hasen/spages/527170.html
If this is a saint
By Daniel Jonah Goldhagen
Imagine that a person, at some risk to himself, saves an infant from a burning car in a rural area. The parents are dead. We would call him a hero.
But then he decides to keep the child and raise her in his god's way. The man does not inform the authorities. When the desperate child's relatives come looking for him, even knocking on his door, he denies any knowledge of the child's whereabouts. The man's initial good deed has become a crime. He is a kidnapper.
A document from the archives of the French Catholic Church has just been published that reveals Pope Pius XII to have been like this man when Jewish relatives - and parents - came frantically knocking, demanding their children. In 1946, the Vatican sent a document to the papal nuncio in France, Cardinal Angelo Roncalli, the future Pope John XXIII. He was a man of known compassion for Jews, who was working to reunite Jewish children who had been hidden in Catholic institutions during the Holocaust with their parents, relatives, and Jewish institutions. The document ordering Roncalli to hold onto the Jewish children: "Those children who have been baptized cannot be entrusted to institutions that are unable to ensure a Christian education."
The Pope's authoritative intent to deprive parents of their children is made unequivocal: "If the children have been entrusted [to the Church] by their parents, and if the parents now claim them back, they can be returned, provided the children themselves have not been baptized. It should be noted that this decision of the Congregation of the Holy Office has been approved by the Holy Father."
Since not returning baptized Jewish children was announced as a general papal policy, there is every reason to believe that the order applied and was transmitted across Europe. The relevant documents remain hidden in the archives of the Vatican (as does the Vatican's own copy of the one to Roncalli) and of other national churches.
During the Holocaust, unknown thousands of Jewish children gained refuge in Catholic monasteries, convents and schools - though as with Roncalli's actions not at the behest of this anti-Semitic Pope. They were saved locally by heroic priests and nuns, who also baptized an unknown number of the children under their care. It is well known that Jewish survivors or their relatives and heirs, in many, though not all, cases, had great difficulty retrieving their children. It was suspected that the Church had a policy of kidnapping these Jewish children for Jesus. A survivor of Auschwitz, persecuted because she was Jewish, was according to Pius XII not supposed to get her own child back because she was Jewish.
Now we have the smoking gun: this document. It proves the Pope's and the Church's policy was to kidnap Jewish children systematically. It exhibits Pius XII's unsurpassable callousness toward Jewish suffering. It imperiously victimized the Jews a second time by depriving of their own children these bodily and spiritually wounded survivors of the Nazi hell. The document cannot surprise anyone familiar with the anti-Semitic Church during this period, or with Pope Pius IX's infamous kidnapping of a 6-year-old Jewish child, Edgardo Mortara, in 1858, which led to revulsion throughout Europe and protests against the Church. But the document does remove what Pius XII has, until now, enjoyed: plausible deniability, which for 60 years he and the Church have sought to maintain for the many crimes against Jews during the Holocaust committed by Pius XII, bishops and priests.
Pope Pius XII, by not returning children to parents and relatives or their legal or spiritual guardians, made himself a criminal. So did all the bishops, priests and nuns who similarly helped kidnap Jewish children. No person is above the law. A religious leader or head of government who did this today would go to prison. (The Church's inquisitor, a priest, who kidnapped Edgardo on the orders of Pius IX was arrested and jailed by the Italian authorities.)
Many crimes, today and in the past, have been committed in the name of religion. Religious robes should not cloak a person from being called what he is; the recent sex abuse scandals involving priests have taught us this. They have also taught us that transparency is necessary for this most secretive of churches, which has habitually concealed its officials' crimes and misdeeds.
If the Church is the moral institution it claims to be, then it must take measures to redress its crimes. The Vatican should establish and fund a fully independent, blue-ribbon, international commission of outside historical, ecclesiastical and forensic experts, led by a person of great international stature, to determine how many Jewish children the Church kidnapped across Europe. The commission should be granted full access to all Church institutions, personnel and documents.
Pope John Paul II, who in many ways has worked hard to improve the Church's bearing toward Jews, should publicly instruct all European Catholic Churches to cooperate fully with the investigators and unearth what happened in their parishes. Most of the records are probably easily accessible. The Church is an institution that records and preserves one thing above all else faithfully: baptisms. Upon identification, all Jewish victims or their survivors should be located by the Church and notified. The commission should also publish detailed historical reports of its findings.
If Switzerland can do this with its Bergier Commission for the theft of Jewish assets during the war (publishing 26 volumes), and if Australia can do this for the children its government stole from Aborigines during the same period, then the Catholic Church can do this for its theft of Jewish children. The Vatican should finally stop the decades-long stalling about fully opening its and its national churches' archives during the Holocaust to scholars and journalists.
The Church should stop pretending that its sole transgression was not having done more to save Jews, and that its sole act of public penitence is to issue wan apologies. Surely this document is not the only incriminating one in the Church's vast secret archives. Moreover, isn't it now indisputably clear that the Church should stop its henchmen from attacking Jews and others who have rightly called for the Church to finally be open and truthful about its past and recent crimes?
The Church should finally cease all efforts to canonize Pius XII. He oversaw a Church that spread vicious anti-Semitism while the Jews were being slaughtered, that used its genealogical records to help the Nazi regime determine whom to persecute as a Jew, that legitimized and participated in the deportation of the Jews of Slovakia to Auschwitz. And that officially continued for more than a decade after the Holocaust to teach that all Jews for all time are guilty as Christ-killers.
Pius XII, commanding his subordinates to steal children from their parents, made himself one of the most rampant kidnappers or would-be kidnappers of modern times - not to mention a person bereft of fundamental human empathy for broken Jewish parents in search, after years of suffering, for their children.
Primo Levi's original title for "Survival in Auschwitz," his famous memoir and commentary on the character of humanity was "If This is a Man." How can we not ask: If this is a saint, then what kind of Church is this?
Daniel Jonah Goldhagen, author of "A Moral Reckoning: The Role of the Catholic Church in the Holocaust and Its Unfulfilled Duty of Repair" and "Hitler's Willing Executioners: Ordinary Germans and the Holocaust," is completing a book on genocide in our time.
Even that's debateable. He's using the tactic of "change the subject" once he's cornered with facts.
he was a "spy" from Democratic Underground
he was a "spy" from Democratic Underground
I have read this before, but thanks.
He may not be a DUer, just a garden-variety protestant who's been taught to hate Catholics.
My parents are Episcopalian (their bishop is a lot more conservative than our former bishop, so they're hanging in there) but my mom was raised old-fashioned Calvinist Presbyterian, and she's having a pretty hard time with our having converted to Catholicism. She just automatically believes everything bad she hears about the Catholics, I'm sure it's because all she heard when she was a kid was other bad things (not the same bad things - it just changes all the time. When she was a kid it was mostly World Domination and Taking Over the U.S. Government).
Goldhagen was one of those who "took the bait".
Zenit, the international news agency that covers the Vatican, learned that the origins of the document extend to a letter written in 1946 by Isaac Herzog, chief rabbi of Jerusalem, to Pius XII. In it, Herzog thanked the pope for helping Jews during the Holocaust and for sheltering ‘thousands of children who were hidden in Catholic institutions.’ He then requested that these children be returned to their original families. Which, as we now know, is what happened.(Excerpt) Read more at catholicleague.org“In short, what the critics of Pius XII are suffering from is a heady dose of Rathergate: they willingly took the bait and now look rather foolish.”
That's certainly understandable. There was a time in my life I was against the Catholic church for a variety of reasons. A Catholic friend of mine, who also happens to be a local priest of three small churches, explained alot of things to me, because I grilled him on a number of topics and he honorably answered them all.
HAH, yeah, I see you posted the text of that page above my link. LOL
When I was in high school in Atlanta back in the 60s, some of my classmates were whispering about the monks out at Holy Cross Monastery in Conyers GA . . . "They never take their robes off - and if one gets dirty, they just put another one on over the top."
It occurred to me (and I said) that if that were true, all the monks would look like the Michelin Man . . .
. . . but we were always kinda "High Church" . . .
Your statement is perfectly true.
"Light in the loafers" as it were.
Please enlighten me and give me absolute proof of your claim.
So now the Catholics steal children from their parents? Interesting. Isn't that what the Jews were accused of for centuries?
In actual fact if you were to go to Manhattan today you could meet many people who are alive today because they spent their childhood in convents. I have two friends who were saved by the sisters. One lost his parents, the other was reunited after the war with his. They were not kept from relatives after the war.
I do not understand why an Israeli newspaper would perpetuate such falsehoods about a man who saved so many Jews, Gypsies and disabled persons.
"I do not understand why an Israeli newspaper would perpetuate such falsehoods about a man who saved so many Jews, Gypsies and disabled persons."
Why not? Everyone else does. It's perfectly acceptable to slander Pius or any other churchgoing Catholic all over the MSM. But God forbid someone remotely allude to the wealth of any person who happens to be Jewish, or comment even obliquely about the stupidity or laziness of any person who happens to be a minority...unless of course the person referred to happens to be conservative.
In that case, the gloves are off, and the Aunt Jemima/Shylock slurs roll right out.
PSSST: Hitler killed just as many Catholics as he did Jews. We just don't bitch about it as much. What with what our Saviour went through for us and all...
I still don't think this news will shut the Catholic bashers up. The article confirms what I knew all along...
Um, I was being sarcastic.
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