Pius XII was no saint

Ten years ago, on a cold winter morning in New York City, the Catholic-Jewish Historical Commission, established to investigate Pope Pius XII’s response to the Holocaust, met for the first time to discuss its future work. I was the only Israeli historian among the six scholars (three Catholics and three Jews) designated by the Vatican and leading Jewish organizations to study this hotly contested issue.

A little under two years later, the project was abandoned as a result of the Holy See’s unwillingness to release materials from its own archives that could help clarify issues that our team of scholars raised in our provisional report. Already at that time, in the last years of Pope John Paul’s pontificate, there were moves afoot to place Pius XII on the fast track to sainthood, but they were probably slowed down by Israeli and Jewish protests and a desire by church authorities to prevent a serious rupture in Catholic-Jewish relations.

At issue was the silence of Pius XII during the Holocaust and his indirect complicity in the Nazi mass murder of Jews. These allegations, which first emerged around 1964, had prompted the Vatican to publish 11 volumes of its own documents (edited by four trusted Jesuit scholars), most of them appearing in the 1970s. It was these documents in Italian, German, French, Latin and English that we were originally asked to review. The million or so unpublished documents from the pontificate of Pius XII (1939–1958) according to the Vatican’s most recent estimate, will only be available in about four years’ time.

It is in this context that we need to see the recent decree on the “heroic virtues” of Pius XII, just signed by Pope Benedict XVI. Most Jews have interpreted this act as yet another signal that the Vatican is determined to beatify the controversial wartime pope — whom some even consider to have been anti-Semitic — regardless of what the historical evidence may indicate.

The sharp response of Jewish leaders to Benedict’s decree prompted the Vatican’s press office director, Father Federico Lombardi, S.J., to release a conciliatory note distinguishing between the historical judgment of Pius XII’s actions (still an open question) and the saintly Christian life he apparently led. In particular, Father Lombardi was concerned to disclaim any notion that this decree was “a hostile act towards the Jewish people,” or an obstacle to Catholic-Jewish dialogue.

Nevertheless, the decree on Pius XII still raises concern not only about the continuing drive to beatify the wartime pontiff but also about the present pope and the state of relations between the Catholic Church and the Jewish people.

Regarding Pius XII, I personally have never seen him either as “Hitler’s pope” (the theory of British historian John Cornwell — a “lapsed” Catholic), or as the “righteous gentile” evoked by Rabbi David Dalin. My own provisional conclusion drawn from the study of thousands of documents is that the mass murder of Jews was fairly low on his list of priorities. Of course, much the same could be said of Roosevelt, Churchill and Stalin, but they did not claim to be the “Vicar of Christ,” or to represent the Christian conscience.

Pius XII strikes me as a polished diplomat far more worried about the Allied bombing of Rome than about the thousand Roman Jews who were being deported by the Germans to their deaths in Auschwitz, virtually under the windows of the Holy See. True, other Roman Jews were discreetly given sanctuary in ecclesiastical establishments in and around Rome after October 1943, but it remains unclear if this was the result of a direct papal instruction.

In some instances we know that Pius XII did try to intervene against Nazi or racist anti-Semitic legislation, but in general this was almost always on behalf of baptized Jews since they were protected by the church as Catholics. Pius’s rare references to the mass murder of the Jews were invariably veiled and very abstract, as if he found it difficult to utter the word itself. Was it fear of further German reprisals? A latent anti-Semitism? Was it his visceral anti-Communism which also led him to hope for a Nazi victory in the East? Or perhaps the desire to spare German Catholics a conflict of conscience between their loyalty to Hitler, the fatherland, or their church? Whatever the reasons, this was hardly heroic conduct.

So why has Benedict XVI chosen to take this step now? Why risk unnecessary damage to Catholic-Jewish relations? My own inclination is to think that the present pope regards Pius XII as a soulmate — both theologically and politically. He shares with the wartime pontiff an authoritarian centralist world-view and a deep distrust of liberalism, modernity, and the ravages of moral relativism. He was 31 years old when Pius XII died in 1958, and already then regarded him as a venerated role model.

Moreover, the German-born Joseph Ratzinger (today Benedict XVI) certainly knew that Pius XII (an aristocratic Roman) was also a passionate Germanophile, surrounded by German aides during and after the war, fluent in the German language, and a great admirer of the German Catholic Church. Not only that, but Ratzinger probably also knows that Pius XII personally intervened after 1945 to commute the sentences of convicted German war criminals. This solicitude for Nazi criminals contrasts sharply with Pius XII ignoring all entreaties to make a public statement against anti-Semitism even after the full horrors of the death camps had been revealed in 1945.

In this context it is profoundly unsettling to think that the ultraconservative Benedict XVI and his entourage can identify so completely with Pius XII as a man of “heroic virtue.” The present pope, no doubt, deplores anti-Semitism, though his statements on the subject have been noticeably less robust than those of his predecessor, John Paul II.

At Yad Vashem last summer he expressed no personal regret as a German for the unspeakable horrors of the Shoah, even though he had once been a member of the Hitler Youth. True, he had little choice in the matter. However, he was disturbingly vague about the truly monstrous German role in the Holocaust. Earlier in 2009, Benedict also showed remarkably poor judgment (to put it charitably) in reinstating an unrepentant Holocaust-denying British bishop into the mainstream Catholic Church, an action he only retracted after worldwide Jewish and Catholic protests.

These mistakes appear to follow a pattern and may even indicate a regression from the real progress in Catholic-Jewish relations under Benedict’s predecessor. One can only hope they are not irreversible since the stakes are high and no sane person can be interested in undermining the bridges across the abyss that have been so painstakingly constructed.

Robert S. Wistrich is director of The Vidal Sassoon International Center for the Study of Anti-Semitism at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem and the author of A Lethal Obsession: Anti-Semitism from Antiquity to the Global Jihad (Random House, January 2010).

“UFO Aficionado is somehow mean-spirited.”

What’s the matter? You don’t have the conviction to state what it is? Your own convictions?

“To: word_warrior_bob
Probably temporary insanity that I reply at all . . . however . . .
##################################################
THIS IS MY DISTILLATION OF 10’S OF THOUSANDS OF PUZZLE PIECES. I don’t per se, myself, accept this as proven fact . . . just the most likely summary given all I’ve studied.
###############
So the Ruling Elite are DEALING with 9-12 Fallen Angel Races, how do they “deal with” 9-12 different races? How do they communicate?
QX: Some are as human looking as you or I and communicate similarly though also reportedly much ‘telepathically.’ One of the military’s greatest fears is that such critters have already taken on positions of power in the human structures/orgs/governments.
There’s also purportedly a power to clone folks and download personality, memories etc. of the person cloned though with the clone still quite controlled by the . . . controllers . . . slipping that person back into the role of the cloned person. Who knows.
Have all these races learned languages of the Earth?
QX: The more human types have purporetdly learned unreal numbers of earth languages. Though functionally, they don’t have to learn that many to deal with the power brokers. And, given super advanced learning technologies and ‘brain/knowledge downloads,’ learning a language is purportedly not the challenge for them it is for us.
There’s also reports of the governmnet KNOWING there’s coming a time when there’ll be NO electronic communications and ALL military communications will be by ‘ET’ facilitated ‘telepathy’ [i.e. spirit world communications, imho]
Military personnel with certain DNA facilitating such communications are sought out and trained in super secret projects with very complex computer programs. Interestingly, the traffic they were trained to transmit sounded more or less exactly like the Secret and TS radio communications I dealt with as a Radioman in the Navy.
Are they posing as human?
QX: Evidently many do. Scares the _______ out of military and government leaders . . . There’s reportedly a kind of gate to go through like screening for metal at the airport to get to deeper parts of the Pentegon . . . only its scanning brains for any non human patterns to keep them out of those sections.
Or do they retain their Alien Appearance and deal with the Globalists in ET form in private?
QX: Hard to say. That bunch of puzzle pieces gets really wierd fast. . . . everything from OThuga offering a daughter . . . to every elite having to bugger toddler boys for initiation rites to ‘Draco’s and other such reptilian ‘species’ being invovled in such goings on.
I’m not eager to read a lot of that so I don’t. I’m just kind of peripherally aware that here’s a bunch of data there that I don’t know what to do with and had rather not do anything with it.
The War under Dulce near Los Alamos purportedly involved Dracos . . . with vats down deep . . . a slurry . . . for food . . . with human body parts . . .
So there are 9-12 Fallen Angel Races that the Ruling Elite have to deal with.
QX: That is the most consistent ball park figure I’ve seen for over 30 years from probably more than 2 dozen different sources.
The 9-12 Fallen Angel Races who the Ruling Elite have to deal with also play Good Cop/Bad Cop with the Ruling Elite, so we don’t know whether they are Good Angels or Bad Angels? Could they all be Bad Angels or Good Angels? Or is it a mixture?
QUIX: NO. I HAVE NO DOUBT.
THEY ARE ALL BAD. GOD’S ANGEL ARMIES DON’T BEGIN TO BEHAVE AS THESE CRITTERS DO. THEY ARE ALL WORKING TO SET UP SATAN’S GLOBAL GOVERNMENT.
= BAD, BAD, BAD.
#####################################
I’ve been candid with you. If you trash me again, it will likely be the last time I’ll tolerate relating to you in any way, shape or form.

478 posted on Friday, October 23, 2009 7:47:55 PM by Quix (POL Ldrs quotes fm1900 2 presnt: http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/religion/2130557/posts?page=81#81)
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