Yeh Eugenio Pacelli, this Pope who sold out the Catholics in Germany and Germany itself:
"After Hitler came to power in January 1933, he made the concordat negotiations with Pacelli a priority. The negotiations proceeded over six months with constant shuttle diplomacy between the Vatican and Berlin. Hitler spent more time on this treaty than on any other item of foreign diplomacy during his dictatorship.
"The Reich Concordat granted Pacelli the right to impose the new Code of Canon Law on Catholics in Germany and promised a number of measures favorable to Catholic education, including new schools. In exchange, Pacelli collaborated in the withdrawal of Catholics from political and social activity. The negotiations were conducted in secret by Pacelli, Kaas, and Hitler's deputy chancellor, Franz von Papen, over the heads of German bishops and the faithful. The Catholic Church in Germany had no say in setting the conditions.
"In the end, Hitler insisted that his signature on the concordat would depend on the Center Party's voting for the Enabling Act, the legislation that was to give him dictatorial powers. It was Kaas, chairman of the party but completely in thrall to Pacelli, who bullied the delegates into acceptance. Next, Hitler insisted on the "voluntary" disbanding of the Center Party, the last truly parliamentary force in Germany. Again, Pacelli was the prime mover in this tragic Catholic surrender. The fact that the party voluntarily disbanded itself, rather than go down fighting, had a profound psychological effect, depriving Germany of the last democratic focus of potential noncompliance and resistance: In the political vacuum created by its surrender, Catholics in the millions joined the Nazi Party, believing that it had the support of the Pope. The German bishops capitulated to Pacelli's policy of centralization, and German Catholic democrats found themselves politically leaderless.
"After the Reich Concordat was signed, Pacelli declared it an unparalleled triumph for the Holy See. In an article in L'Osservatore Romano, the Vatican-controlled newspaper, he announced that the treaty indicated the total recognition and acceptance of the church's law by the German state. But Hitler was the true victor and the Jews were the concordat's first victims. On July 14, 1933, after the initialing of the treaty, the Cabinet minutes record Hitler as saying that the concordat had created an atmosphere of confidence that would be "especially significant in the struggle against international Jewry." He was claiming that the Catholic Church had publicly given its blessing, at home and abroad, to the policies of National Socialism, including its anti-Semitic stand. At the same time, under the terms of the concordat, Catholic criticism of acts deemed political by the Nazis, could now be regarded as "foreign interference." The great German Catholic Church, at the insistence of Rome, fell silent. In the future all complaints against the Nazis would be channeled through Pacelli. There were some notable exceptions, for example the sermons preached in 1933 by Cardinal Michael von Faulhaber, the Archbishop of Munich, in which he denounced the Nazis for their rejection of the Old Testament as a Jewish text.
" The concordat immediately drew the German church into complicity with the Nazis. Even as Pacelli was granted special advantages in the concordat for German Catholic education, Hitler was trampling on the educational rights of Jews throughout the country. At the same time, Catholic priests were being drawn into Nazi collaboration with the attestation bureaucracy, which established Jewish ancestry. Pacelli, despite the immense centralized power he now wielded through the Code of Canon Law, said and did nothing. The attestation machinery would lead inexorably to the selection of millions destined for the death camps.
" As Nazi anti-Semitism mounted in Germany during the 1930's, Pacelli failed to complain, even on behalf of Jews who had become Catholics, acknowledging that the matter was a matter of German internal policy. Eventually, in January 1937, three German cardinals and two influential bishops arrived at the Vatican to plead for a vigorous protest over Nazi persecution of the Catholic Church, which had been deprived of all forms of activity beyond church services. Pius XI at last decided to issue an encyclical, a letter addressed to all the faithful of the world. Written under Pacelli's direction, it was called Mit Brennender Sorge (With Deep Anxiety), and it was a forthright statement of the plight of the church in Germany. But there was no explicit condemnation of anti-Semitism, even in relation to Jews who had converted to Catholicism. Worse still, the subtext against Nazism (National Socialism and Hitler were not mentioned by name) was blunted by the publication five days later of an even more condemnatory encyclical by Pius XI against Communism."[Hitler's Pope; Cornwell]
Kenneth Woodward, Newsweek's religious editor, found that some of the historians quoted (and acknowledged in his introduction) by Cornwell, quickly disavowed and refuted the fraudulent use to which he put their work. Historians Pier Blet and Antonio Spinosa disproved Cornwell's account of the Concordat, and Ronald J. Rychlak, Professor of Law at the University of Mississippi School of Law and the author of Hitler, The War and The Pope confirms that Cornwell wrote a comic-book approach to Church history, ignoring, above, all, contemporaty Jewish voices thanking Pope Pius XII for his unwavering support of the Jews.
The 1943-44 American Jewish Yearbook reported that Pope Pius XII "took an unequivocal stand against the oppression of Jews throughout Europe."
Dr. Rafael Cantoni, head of the Italian Jewish Assistance Committee said: "The Church and papacy have saved Jews as much and in as far as they could save Christians...Six million of my co-religionists have been murdered by the Nazis, but there could have been many more victims, had it not been for the efficacious intervention of Pius XII."
Shortly after World War II, Grand Rabbi Isaac Herzog of Jerusalem wrote: "I express my thanks as well as deep appreciation...of the invaluable help given by the Catholic Church to the Jewish people in its affliction."
Were Pope Pius XII's contemporary Jewish admirers somehow mistaken?
Or themselves secretly in league with Adolf Hitler?
Before you embarrass yourself further by quoting Cornwell, you should look into a number of other sources, such as Rabbi David G. Dalin's revealing book, The Myth of Hitler’s Pope.Here is a wealth of refutation, far too long to list, but much of it cited in the amazon.com page on Rabbi Dalin's book, and in the above links.
Rome is never introspective nor self-correcting. Rome is always...Rome.
So we have the clear writing of history which can be read and understood by anyone with any high school textbook in order to know "who" did "what" "when." The "why" is always a little more difficult to grasp, but with some effort, it all becomes clear.
We've come to expect that on this topic we will be trashed personally with vile denunciations by those cut-and-paste Catholic apologists who offer discredited quotes from anonymous sources; from NY Times guest editorials by Catholics rather than NY Times news stories (there's a BIG difference); from a few Jewish politicians who still covet the Vatican's recognition of Israel's right to even exist; and from a lucky and well-connected name or two that Pacelli managed to help get out of the country before they met the same deadly end that six million Jews eventually endured. An end that was clearly spelled out in Hiter's "Mein Kamp" a full eight years before the Concordat was signed and the fate of millions of Jews was sealed in death camps and ovens, as promised.
The defense of Pacelli's "benevolence" to Jews is similar to what Stanley Kubrick said about Steven Spielberg's movie, "Schindler's List," -- "Six million Jews died and he makes a movie about the 600 who lived."
No, Rome doesn't change. And so the history books are wrong. The Vatican's own research documents are wrong. Statistics are wrong. Our lying eyes are wrong.
And John Cornwell, a born, raised and practicing Roman Catholic, is wrong, and a "liar."
I would bet none of these apologists have read Cornwell's book. They may have read the hysterical, self-serving rebuttals. But none who reads Cornwell's book can come away confident in his church's actions before and during WWII. It was appeasement; it was complicity; it was tragically immoral. And it was intentional.
So we Protestants say to our RC FRiends, read the book for yourselves. At least read the short version in "Vanity Fair."
Not so coincidentally, this is what we also urge them to do with the Bible -- read it for yourselves.
One evening several years ago when I was having dinner with a group of students, the topic of the papacy was broached, and the discussion quickly boiled over. A young woman asserted that Eugenio Pacelli, Pope Pius XII, the Pope during World War II, had brought lasting shame on the Catholic Church by failing to denounce the Final Solution. A young man, a practicing Catholic, insisted that the case had never been proved. Raised as a Catholic during the papacy of Pius XII - his picture gazed down from the wall of every classroom during my childhood - I was only too familiar with the allegation. It started in 1963 with a play by a young German author named Rolf Hochhuth, Der Stellvertreter (The Deputy) which was staged on Broadway in 1964. It depicted Pacelli as a ruthless cynic, interested more in the Vatican's stockholdings than in the fate of the Jews. Most Catholics dismissed Hochhuth's thesis as implausible, but the play sparked a controversy which has raged to this day. Disturbed by the anger brought out in that dinner altercation, and convinced, as I had always been, of Pius XII's innocence, I decided to write a new defense of his reputation for a younger generation. I believed that Pacelli's evident holiness was proof of his good faith. How could such a saintly pope have betrayed the Jews? But was it possible to find a new and conclusive approach to the issue? The arguments had so far focused mainly on his wartime conduct; however, Pacelli's Vatican career had started 40 years earlier. It seemed to me that a proper investigation into Pacelli's record would require a more extensive chronicle than any attempted in the past. So I applied for access to archival material in the Vatican, reassuring those who had charge of crucial documents that I was on the side of my subject. Six years earlier, in a book entitled, "A Thief in the Night," I had defended the Vatican against charges that Pope John Paul I had been murdered by his own aides. Two key officials granted me access to secret material: depositions under oath gathered 30 years ago to support the process for Pacelli's canonization, and the archive of the Vatican Secretariat of State, the foreign office of the Holy See. I also drew on German sources relating to Pacelli's activities in Germany during the 1920s and 1930s, including his dealings with Adolf Hitler in 1933. For months on end I ransacked Pacelli's files, which dated back to 1912, in a windowless dungeon beneath the Borgia Tower in Vatican City. Later I sat for several weeks in a dusty office in the Jesuit headquarters, close to St. Peter's Square in Rome, mulling over a thousand pages of transcribed testimony given under oath by those who had known Pacelli well during his lifetime, including his critics. By the middle of 1997, I was in a state of moral shock. The material I had gathered amounted not to an exoneration but to an indictment more scandalous than Hochhuth's. The evidence was explosive. It showed for the first time that Pacelli was patently, and by the proof of his own words, anti-Jewish. It revealed that he had helped Hitler to power and at the same time undermined potential Catholic resistance in Germany. It showed that he had implicitly denied and trivialized the Holocaust, despite having reliable knowledge of its true extent. And, worse, that he was a hypocrite, for after the war he had retrospectively taken undue credit for speaking out boldly against the Nazi persecution of the Jews..." (Long-buried Vatican files reveal a new and shocking indictment of World War II's Pope Plus XII: that in pursuit of absolute power he helped Adolf Hitler destroy German Catholic political opposition, betrayed the Jews of Europe, and sealed a deeply cynical pact with a 20th-century devil.)...