The Church and the Nazis....help please

[junostarlighter]

I attended a poor presentation on anti-Semitism and the Holocaust. I say poor because…

1.) It was presented by a student who hadn’t done his homework and instead wanted to push his own political agenda against FEMA.
2.) He claimed the Vatican did nothing to speak out against the Nazi party.
3.) He claims the Church did not excommunicate any major Nazi officials.
4.) He claims the Church helped Nazi officials and officers escape after WWII to other countries.

I am writing a response to him. I feel incredibly insulted because he invited the Catholic Student Union on campus, which I am president of, and said that he was going to mention about the Church saving Jews during the Holocaust. He did not do this. Instead, he made false accusations that the Church did nothing and the Nazi party and Mein Kempf was rooted in the teachings of Martin Luther. I was under the impression that Nazi ideology came from Paganism, not Martin Luther. Granted, Martin Luther was anti-Semitic and Hitler quoted Luther, I don’t think Luther’s teachings underlined Nazi thought. He not only invited Catholic Student Union to the talk, but he also invited the InterVarisity Christian Fellowship on the campus as well. I haven’t spoken to them directly, but I think the feeling of being cheated and deceived are mutual.

I ask you wonderful Catholics to give me some sources in which I can cite and quote in my response to the student who gave this poorly organized lecture. I am already searching the CA site and This Rock magazine for information. Any help to get the truth out on the Church would be an immense blessing.

~Mario

 

[junostarlighter]

So far, my response is as follows:

There were a couple of important details in regard to the Catholic Church and the Holocaust that I think would be of great help to you if you were to give this presentation again.

You mentioned that the Vatican did not speak out against the Nazi party. This struck me as odd as history clearly shows the opposite. Pope Pius XII was no friend of the Nazi party. His opposition to them began years before the War, before he was elected to the papacy, when he was still Cardinal Eugenio Pacelli, the Vatican Secretary of State.

On April 28, 1935, four years before the War even started, Pacelli gave a speech that aroused the attention of the world press. Speaking to an audience of 250,000 pilgrims in Lourdes, France, the future Pius XII stated that the Nazis “are in reality only miserable plagiarists who dress up old errors with new tinsel. It does not make any difference whether they flock to the banners of social revolution, whether they are guided by a false concept of the world and of life, or whether they are possessed by the superstition of a race and blood cult.” It was talks like this, in addition to private remarks and numerous notes of protest that Pacelli sent to Berlin in his capacity as Vatican Secretary of State, that earned him a reputation as an enemy of the Nazi party.

The Germans were likewise displeased with the reigning pontiff, Pius XI, who showed himself to be a unrelenting opponent of the new German “ideals.” He even wrote an entire encyclical, Mit Brennender Sorge (1937), to condemn them. When Pius XI died in 1939, the Nazis abhorred the prospect that Pacelli might be elected his successor.

Dr. Joseph Lichten, a Polish Jew who served as a diplomat and later an official of the Jewish Anti-Defamation League of B’nai B’rith, writes: "Pacelli had obviously established his position clearly, for the Fascist governments of both Italy and Germany spoke out vigorously against the possibility of his election to succeed Pius XI in March of 1939, though the cardinal secretary of state had served as papal nuncio in Germany from 1917 to 1929…The day after his election, the Berlin Morgenpost said: ‘The election of cardinal Pacelli is not accepted with favor in Germany because he was always opposed to Nazism and practically determined the policies of the Vatican under his predecessor.’ "

Former Israeli diplomat and now Orthodox Jewish Rabbi Pinchas Lapide states that Pius XI "had good reason to make Pacelli the architect of his anti-Nazi policy. Of the forty-four speeches which the Nuncio Pacelli had made on German soil between 1917 and 1929, at least forty contained attacks on Nazism or condemnations of Hitler’s doctrines… Pacelli, who never met the Führer, called it ‘neo-Paganism.’ "

A few weeks after Pacelli was elected pope, the German Reich’s Chief Security Service issued a then-secret report on the new Pope. Rabbi Lapide provides an excerpt:

“Pacelli has already made himself prominent by his attacks on National Socialism during his tenure as Cardinal Secretary of State, a fact which earned him the hearty approval of the Democratic States during the papal elections…How much Pacelli is celebrated as an ally of the Democracies is especially emphasized in the French Press.”

Early in 1940, Hitler made an attempt to prevent the new Pope from maintaining the anti-Nazi stance he had taken before his election. He sent his underling, Joachim von Ribbentrop, to try to dissuade Pius XII from following his predecessor’s policies. “Von Ribbentrop, granted a formal audience on March 11, 1940, went into a lengthy harangue on the invincibility of the Third Reich, the inevitability of a Nazi victory, and the futility of papal alignment with the enemies of the Führer. Pius XII heard von Ribbentrop out politely and impassively. Then he opened an enormous ledger on his desk and, in his perfect German, began to recite a catalogue of the persecutions inflicted by the Third Reich in Poland, listing the date, place, and precise details of each crime. The audience was terminated; the Pope’s position was clearly unshakable.”

If you guys can tell, I took this from the CA library tract on Pope Pius XII. I still have yet to address the other issues.

 

[Genesis315]

The chief Rabbi of Rome converted to Catholicism afterwards–I’m sure he didn’t do this because the Church was anti-semitic.

 

[corvidae]

I would show him the Encyclical
“With Burning Sorrow”

Encyclicals are typically written in Latin, this one was written in German, so its intent would be clear. It is a condemnation, and I believe it was written before the war, in other words, The Pope was condemning the Nazi’s before the rest of the world did.

I believe the Church did help several key Nazis escape, I have been told it was an exchange for several thousand Jewish lives. I would say that is worth it.

I would try showing this speaker the whole picture. Then again, it may not fit this person’s ideology, so they may simply ignore you.

A lone Raven

A lone Raven

 

[Church_Militant]

Links that will help you decimate this lie.

Pope Pius XII: “Just Among the Nations”

About This “Inaction” and “Silence”

My Post: “Someone lied to you about our Pope”

See if that helps. This is all just anti-Catholic propaganda.
You might even want to present a simiilar talk, with the truth.
Pax Domini sit semper vobiscum.

 

[Jaypeeto3]

Well, the stuff about Pius XII being proNazi is pure bunk.
But I wouldn’t be surprised if some of the German bishops were silent during the Nazi reign of Evil.
Look at how many of our OWN Bishops say NOTHING when Catholic (allegedly) politicians openly support abortion and gay marriage. Our bishops could boot these apostates from the Church, which they should, and set a righteous example, but do they? I have yet to see it happen…

 

[FCEGM]

I attended a poor presentation on anti-Semitism and the Holocaust. I say poor because…

1.) It was presented by a student who hadn’t done his homework and instead wanted to push his own political agenda against FEMA.
2.) He claimed the Vatican did nothing to speak out against the Nazi party.
3.) He claims the Church did not excommunicate any major Nazi officials.
4.) He claims the Church helped Nazi officials and officers escape after WWII to other countries.

I am writing a response to him. I feel incredibly insulted because he invited the Catholic Student Union on campus, which I am president of, and said that he was going to mention about the Church saving Jews during the Holocaust. He did not do this. Instead, he made false accusations that the Church did nothing and the Nazi party and Mein Kempf was rooted in the teachings of Martin Luther. I was under the impression that Nazi ideology came from Paganism, not Martin Luther. Granted, Martin Luther was anti-Semitic and Hitler quoted Luther, I don’t think Luther’s teachings underlined Nazi thought. He not only invited Catholic Student Union to the talk, but he also invited the InterVarisity Christian Fellowship on the campus as well. I haven’t spoken to them directly, but I think the feeling of being cheated and deceived are mutual.

I ask you wonderful Catholics to give me some sources in which I can cite and quote in my response to the student who gave this poorly organized lecture. I am already searching the CA site and This Rock magazine for information. Any help to get the truth out on the Church would be an immense blessing.

~Mario

Mario, you’ve already received great help here, so I’ll just strongly urge you to get the latest issue of THIS ROCK magazine (if you haven’t already) since it contains an excellent article on just this subject.

 

[quasimodo]

Well, the stuff about Pius XII being proNazi is pure bunk.
But I wouldn’t be surprised if some of the German bishops were silent during the Nazi reign of Evil.
Look at how many of our OWN Bishops say NOTHING when Catholic (allegedly) politicians openly support abortion and gay marriage. Our bishops could boot these apostates from the Church, which they should, and set a righteous example, but do they? I have yet to see it happen…

On occasions when someone did speak up, the consequences were harsh and bloody. It is one thing to speak up and be stuck in a concentration camp for it. It is quite another when you speak up and someone else suffers for it. Damned if you do and damned if you don’t. How many divisions does the church have?

 

[William_Putnam]

I attended a poor presentation on anti-Semitism and the Holocaust. I say poor because…

1.) It was presented by a student who hadn’t done his homework and instead wanted to push his own political agenda against FEMA.
2.) He claimed the Vatican did nothing to speak out against the Nazi party.
3.) He claims the Church did not excommunicate any major Nazi officials.
4.) He claims the Church helped Nazi officials and officers escape after WWII to other countries.

I am writing a response to him. I feel incredibly insulted because he invited the Catholic Student Union on campus, which I am president of, and said that he was going to mention about the Church saving Jews during the Holocaust. He did not do this. Instead, he made false accusations that the Church did nothing and the Nazi party and Mein Kempf was rooted in the teachings of Martin Luther. I was under the impression that Nazi ideology came from Paganism, not Martin Luther. Granted, Martin Luther was anti-Semitic and Hitler quoted Luther, I don’t think Luther’s teachings underlined Nazi thought. He not only invited Catholic Student Union to the talk, but he also invited the InterVarisity Christian Fellowship on the campus as well. I haven’t spoken to them directly, but I think the feeling of being cheated and deceived are mutual.

I ask you wonderful Catholics to give me some sources in which I can cite and quote in my response to the student who gave this poorly organized lecture. I am already searching the CA site and This Rock magazine for information. Any help to get the truth out on the Church would be an immense blessing.

~Mario

Here is an excellant source for addressing this issue:

catholicleague.org/research/researchpapers.html#Holocaust

Most here will recognise this is within the Catholic League web site, one all should bookmark.

God bless,

PAX

Bill+†+

Pillar and Foundation of Truth, the Church. (1 Tim 3:15)

 

[Victorious]

Allow me to recommend The Myth of Hitler’s Pope, by Rabbi David Dalin. This book came out in August of 2005. Rabbi Dalin discusses the tradition, going back to the earliest centuries, of papal protection of the Jews. Then he discusses Pope Pius XII in particular, outlines his attitudes toward the Jews from his youth and through his career in the Church, and sets forth all the ways in which he acted to save Jews – including personally intervening in thousands of cases. His thesis is that it is only since the play The Deputy came out in the sixties that Pius XII has been villified as a Nazi fellow traveler, and, so far from being considered a collaborator, he should be officially declared a Righteous Gentile.

 

[VociMike]

Here is a summary article by Rabbi Dalin:

catholicleague.org/pius/dalinframe.htm

If Jewish leaders who lived the Holocaust declared him a “righteous gentile”, who are we to believe?

 

[CrossoverManiac]

Correct me if I’m wrong, but didn’t Pius dress up Jews as priests and nuns and smuggled out of Nazi terrority? That’s hardly the actions of a Nazi sympathizer.

 

[Gilbert_Keith]

Look for a recent article on the plot of Hitler to have Pius XII kidnapped. That should lay to rest any conspiracy theory that Pius was in bed with Hitler.

newsmax.com/archives/ic/2005/1/18/144428.shtml

Also, remember that Hitler, though raised a Catholic, **after becoming dictator **was an atheist and vowed the destruction of all Christian religions throughout Europe. This was revealed in his private conversations and disclosed by Herman Rauschning in The Voice of Destruction: Hitler Speaks (can’t remember the year of publication but it was either just before the war or shortly after).

Good luck.

 

[junostarlighter]

Thank-you everyone who has helped me out! If you find anything else, please post it up. I decided that before I submit a letter to the group that I should probably talk with the president of the group who put on the presentation (Jewish Student Union). If she had gripes with the person who presented as well, then I won’t have much of an uphill battle and I’ll be doing a better job at creating a bridge between the Catholic students on campus and the Jewish students. The presenter also made some far-fetched conspiracy theory comments in regard to FEMA. He more or less said that FEMA could create a dictatorship in the USA and could start another Holocaust…yeah, he’s crazy alright

 

[Church_Militant]

Links that will help you decimate this lie.

Pope Pius XII: “Just Among the Nations”

About This “Inaction” and “Silence”

My Post: “Someone lied to you about our Pope”

See if that helps. This is all just anti-Catholic propaganda.
Pax Domini sit semper vobiscum.

 

[Al_Masetti]

There was an article in the Catholic Advocate (Newark Archdiocese) page 8, February 21, 2007 by George Weigel.

Weigel stats that Hitler wasnted to kidnap Pius XII and then raises the campaign of defamation against Pius XII.

Weigel states that there is now confirmation that the KGB (Soviet intelligence service) was behind the campaign. "General Ion Mihai Pacepa, a former Romanian intelligence officer and the highest-ranking Soviet bloc spymaster ever to defect, in an artile posted on National Review Online on January 26 2007 … [stated] that the Soviets stung by the public relations bludgeoning they had taken because of the persecution of Catholics in Poland, Czechoslovakia, Hungary, and elsewhere decided to accelerate the anti-Catholic propaganda offensive theyhad launched toward the end of World War II by depicting the Church as a bulwark of Nazism. Pius XII was the primary target because, as the KGB liked to say:’ Dead men cannot defend themselves.’

"So the KGB concocted a scheme whereby its Romanian ally would penetrate the Vatican archives, using agents disguised as priests; certain Vatican officials, it seems took the bait.

"No documents incriminating Pius XII were found, but the plot now shifted. In 1963, a senior Soviet intelligence official tolkd his Romanian colleagues that the centerpiece of the anti-Catholic offensive would now be a play defaming Piux XII: ’ The Deputy’. It’s author, Rolf Hochhuth, was a former Hitler Youth turned communist fellow traveller. A lifelong communist produced the play. The results for The Deputy was the Pearl Harbor of the Pius War - vindicated KGB chairman Yuri Andropov’s conviction that the gullible find smut easier to believe than holiness.

“Don’t bet the mortgage money that this new evidence will appear in The New York Times anytime soon.”

{George Weigel is a senior fellow of the Ethics and Public Policy Center in Washington, D.C.}

 

[Al_Masetti]

A number of years ago, a fellow seminar participant made a rude remark to me about Pope Piux XII and when I did some homework and defended the Pope, I was accused of being “divisive” [their word.]

One fabulous source is “Three Popes and the Jews” by Pincus Lapide, a Jewish historian. He stated that during WWII, Pius XII rescued about 865,000 Jews.

Italy had about the best record of not killing Jews; something like 80% survived the war.

There was one book (sorry, I can’t recall the title or author) in which the author described how an Italian Army colonel was ordered to round up the local Jews. So, the colonel dressed in his best parade uniform, polished boots and sword and clanked down the center aisle of a local garment factory, looking neither left nor right, and marched up to the supervisor’s desk. Whereup he announced in a very loud voice that the next day he would round up and ship all the Jews to extermination camps.

Needless to say, the next day no one was there.

Can you imagine receiving an order like that colonel did with the political and military pressure. If you had been the colonel, how would you have reconciled your orders with your moral obligation without getting yourself murdered by the Nazi’s? When I read the story, I could feel the fear and the sweat pouring down my spine.

Finally, there is a “silly book”, the biography of Pope Pius XII’s housekeeper. The title is “La Popessa”. The part I remember is her description of thousands of Jewish refugees being stacked up in the Vatican grounds, surrounded by German troops. She said that they had no money for food for the refugees, so Cardinal Spellman (Archbishop of New York) collected money from his friends in New York and using a diplomatic passport smuggled the cash into the Vatican. The housekeeper used the money to buy food.

The Vatican also started a forgery operation; they fabricated phoney Vatican State identification papers for the Jewish refugees … and the officious Germans bought it! The thousands of Jewish refugees were given the forged papers and sent out on the Vatican State Railway … to the local port and put on ships to freedom.

Two interesting points:

1. The chief forger was a man named Angelo Roncali… you might know him better as Pope John XXIII.
2. No one seems to know where all those thousands of refugees went; where did they end up??? It is a deep secret, even to this day, apparently.

I was at a meeting in 2001 and a retired fellow I met there said he was working on a book about that. Then 9/11 happened and the fellow “disappeared” … doing real work, I guess.

My guess is they ended up in Spain. Close enough to tolerate a sea trip. Israel was closed. South America was too far away. Interesting, isn’t it!!

 

[bones_IV]

A number of years ago, a fellow seminar participant made a rude remark to me about Pope Piux XII and when I did some homework and defended the Pope, I was accused of being “divisive” [their word.]

One fabulous source is “Three Popes and the Jews” by Pincus Lapide, a Jewish historian. He stated that during WWII, Pius XII rescued about 865,000 Jews.

Italy had about the best record of not killing Jews; something like 80% survived the war.

There was one book (sorry, I can’t recall the title or author) in which the author described how an Italian Army colonel was ordered to round up the local Jews. So, the colonel dressed in his best parade uniform, polished boots and sword and clanked down the center aisle of a local garment factory, looking neither left nor right, and marched up to the supervisor’s desk. Whereup he announced in a very loud voice that the next day he would round up and ship all the Jews to extermination camps.

Needless to say, the next day no one was there.

Can you imagine receiving an order like that colonel did with the political and military pressure. If you had been the colonel, how would you have reconciled your orders with your moral obligation without getting yourself murdered by the Nazi’s? When I read the story, I could feel the fear and the sweat pouring down my spine.

Finally, there is a “silly book”, the biography of Pope Pius XII’s housekeeper. The title is “La Popessa”. The part I remember is her description of thousands of Jewish refugees being stacked up in the Vatican grounds, surrounded by German troops. She said that they had no money for food for the refugees, so Cardinal Spellman (Archbishop of New York) collected money from his friends in New York and using a diplomatic passport smuggled the cash into the Vatican. The housekeeper used the money to buy food.

The Vatican also started a forgery operation; they fabricated phoney Vatican State identification papers for the Jewish refugees … and the officious Germans bought it! The thousands of Jewish refugees were given the forged papers and sent out on the Vatican State Railway … to the local port and put on ships to freedom.

Two interesting points:

1. The chief forger was a man named Angelo Roncali… you might know him better as Pope John XXIII.
2. No one seems to know where all those thousands of refugees went; where did they end up??? It is a deep secret, even to this day, apparently.

I was at a meeting in 2001 and a retired fellow I met there said he was working on a book about that. Then 9/11 happened and the fellow “disappeared” … doing real work, I guess.

My guess is they ended up in Spain. Close enough to tolerate a sea trip. Israel was closed. South America was too far away. Interesting, isn’t it!!

John XXIII encouraged the defamation of Pius XII? I don’t believe that.

 

[havemercy]

John XXIII encouraged the defamation of Pius XII? I don’t believe that.

No, he forged the papers for the Jews. “And the German’s bought it!”

I’m currently reading Assisi Underground, and it discusses some of this activity.

 

[bones_IV]

No, he forged the papers for the Jews. “And the German’s bought it!”

I’m currently reading Assisi Underground, and it discusses some of this activity.

Gotcha. My mistake. Please forgive me.