The pope who protected Jews and Hitler

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Okay so
I know it’s not true but I want to prove to my freind that it’s not true she showed me a pic of hitler shaking hands with the pope
 
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The Vatican is its own country, it also was a member of the league of nation’s and today the UN.

In order to prevent the pope from calling on the church to rally and fight Hitler he met the pope and played nice.

The pope in turn was interested in protecting the church from invasion and protect it’s members by appearing neutral.

Either way it’s a diplomatic meeting which you shake hands at or risk a war.
 
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I would also add that the United States, Great Britain, France, and virtually every other nation in the world had diplomatic relations with Germany when Hitler came to power and before World War II.

Does that mean that the U.S., U.K., France, and all the rest gave Hitler money to do what he did?
 
I heard somewhere that the photo was fake. I forget where, but I think it was a Catholic Answers article, and it listed reasons why it was fake.
 
That accusation was first made 20 years after WWII in a play by a former Hitler Youth member. The play is actually made so that the same actor plays the Pope and a Nazi apologist to steer the audience towards believing the accusation. The real facts are: When Hitler used the Enabling Act of 1933 to become dictator of Germany, then Cardinal Pacelli ordered the nuncio of Germany to “intervene with the government on behalf of the Jews and point out all the dangers involved in an anti-Semetic policy.” In 1936 he traveled to the US, where he praised Jewish contributions to the nation and denounced anti-Semitism. In 1938, he issued a letter to the world’s bishops asking them to appeal to their governments to grant visas to Jews trying to escape Nazi territory. In his autobiography, Ven. Fulton Sheen recalled a meeting with Cardinal Pacelli in Rome where “For over an hour [Cardinal Pacelli] spoke with considerable vehemence against Hitler and Nazism.” More in the next post.
 
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My understanding is that Pope Pius XII was interested in maintaining control over the priesthood in Germany at a time when the Nazis were coopting the state run church (reichskirche) and replacing priests and bishops with Nazi collaborators. In order to do so he declared neutrality but was offering help to refugees and Jews behind the scenes. I believe that Dietrich Bonhoeffer was using his ecumenical contacts with the Vatican and with the Anglican Church in England to pass messages from the German resistance to the allies. It seems to me the book Hitler’s Pope is a pretty dishonest portrayal of Pope Pius XII.
 
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Rosie11 said:
I know it’s not true
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And yet, you ask as if you do not know.
Rosie11 said:
but I want to prove to my freind that it’s not true
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It is up to your friend to prove that it is true.
Rosie11 said:
she showed me a pic of hitler shaking hands with the pope
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What picture? Source? Which Pope? What was the context?

The Pope did not travel to Germany during the war and Hitler did not travel to the Vatican, so… you put two and two together.

During the reign of Pope Pius XI, way before WWII the future Pope Pius XII was a diplomat in Germany on behalf of the Vatican, and Vatican Secretary of State.

And whatever the truth of a photo, it is not proof of monetary support.
 
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When Cardinal Pacelli was elected Pope, Germany’s reaction was not favorable. As a Berlin newspaper said, “The election of Cardinal Pacelli is not accepted with favor in Germany because he was always opposed to Nazism.” At the outbreak of WWII, now Pope Pius XII sent top secret orders to the nuncio in Poland to help in hiding Jews and to the nuncio in Turkey to “prepare thousands of baptismal certificates to give the Jews which will allow them passage through Turkey to the Holy Land.” He instructed his nuncios to work with the local bishops to help Jews escape persecution in a letter dated December 23, 1940. However, he kept his public actions on this as Pope as secret as possible. As he said in an address to his cardinals, “Every word we address to the competent authority on this subject, and all Our public utterances, have to be weighed and measured by Us in the interests of the victims themselves, lest, contrary to our intentions, We make their situation worse and harder to bear.” As can be seen, he was correct in this judgement. When the Dutch bishops publicly denounced Nazi mistreatment of Jews in 1942, the Nazis retaliated by increasing the number of Jewish deportations. In fact it was not the bishops in Nazi territory but the Jewish leaders themselves who recommended this course of action to him. More in the next post.
 
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The Pope at the time was attempting to insure the rights of Catholics in Germany under the new government. Since the Vatican is a country, he sought to keep informed about the goings-on in the occupied countries as well.
 
As far as intervention in specific cases goes, the Pope succeeded in replacing 500 Jews who were imprisoned in Rhodes to an improvised refugee camp in southern Italy. After Mussolini’s downfall and the German conquest of Italy, the Nazis rounded up 12,000 Jews in Rome for deportation to concentration camps. In reply, the Pope sent a message to Himmler threatening to publicly denounce the deportation unless it was stopped, which it was. When the Roman Jewish community was threatened with deportation unless they met a Nazi demand for gold, Pius offered to make up the difference if the Jews were short. He ordered the Italian Bishops to hide Jews monasteries and convents, and his many in his summer residence, the Castel Gandalfo. As far as the Jewish opinion of Pius XII goes, the chief rabbi of Rome, Israel Zolli, said that “no hero in all history was more heroic than Pope Pius and his readiness to defend the children of God,” became a Catholic, and took the Pope’s own birth name, Eugenio, at baptism. The Jewish historian Pinchas Lapide estimated that the Church under Pius XII rescued 860,000 Jews from the Nazis, which is about 37% of those who survived the war. Altogether, that certainly does not describe a coward Pope. I took almost all of that from The Real Story of Catholic History by Steve Weidenkopf, which provides plenty of citations, so if you need sources, I can provide them.
 
Shaking hands with Hitler means that the Pope gave him money?
How does your friend know that Hitler didn’t give the Pope money?

A silly accusation that shows their negative bias toward the pope and the church. There are people who, when they find out you’re Catholic, try to throw out nonsense to get a reaction. They are not interested in the truth. However, by them doing it, that’s good information for you to know where they stand. Use it to consider your strategy when discussing faith matters.
 
Unfortunately, there is too much speculation on the internet in forums generally. Not a way to learn anything.
 
From what I understand the Nazis would have preferred to just kill the Pope and get him out of the way. They couldn’t do it without arousing the ire of millions of Catholics, so they didn’t. Pope Pius XII was certainly not going to give money to a regime that wanted to kill him and destroy the Church.
 
A dramatic statement. Research shows the German government at the time had to deal with various groups, including the Catholic Church. Achieving propaganda goals meant not actually doing certain things. A contemporary photo shows a German soldier standing at attention outside the Vatican. The Pope spoke fluent German and had some pointed questions for a high-ranking official about some reports he was receiving.
 
Pope Pius XII maintained neutrality because Italy was allied with Germany, and if he did not, the Vatican liky would have been taken over.
 
Taken over by who? Benito Mussolini was the man in charge in Italy, not Hitler.
 
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