"We implore you to ensure that such a historical investigation takes place before proceeding with the (sainthood) cause of Pope Pius XII," the scholars told the pope." "They said that Pius had become in essence, a de facto "symbol of Christian-anti-Judaism and anti-Semitism" (Reuters article)
This is the same liberal nonsense that has been going on in the Church for years now. We have "Catholics" more worried about offending those outside the Church, than getting those outside the Church to convert to the true faith. I wonder if these "scholars" remember Pope Pius XII being hailed as a hero by the Jewish people after the war? There has been adequate research done on the Holy Father, and he is clearly a saint who tried to do everything he could to save Jews from the Nazis. I am sure the Pope will not be persuaded to abandon the cause of such a great saint as Pope Pius XII due to a few "scholars" opinions.
3 comments:
Well, if everyone could agree on one point is that there are different opinions about what Pope Pius XII did or did not do during the war. However, the important point is that his public record is known and not open to dispute, and shows him to have been silent. Many defenders of the pope want to believe he did great things, but historical analysis is not based on wishful thinking. I also wish he had done much more than what I think he did. The issue is that if the pope did indeed do a lot of “behind the scenes” work to save the Jews, and I am not saying he didn’t (although I suspect he did not), then it makes sense for the Church to make that information public.
Perhaps the Church feels that the combination of time and new “facts on the ground” set by the canonization of the pope will whitewash his role and that of the Church during WWII. After all, it has worked in the past many times when the Church canonized many people whose record was atrocious, yet today we call them Saint This or Saint That and that makes them automatically good people. Pope Pius XII may have been a profoundly wonderful human being whose religious work may indeed warrant raising him to the sainthood. However, a pope is more than a religious figure. A pope is a head of state, and the head of a giant church, and Pope Pius had the misfortune to reign over it during the darkest period in history. Maybe he did indeed work tirelessly in defense of the Jews as his apologetics claim, and maybe his “heroic virtues” would warrant calling him a saint. However, his public record is well known and the available evidence seems to point in the opposite direction. As far as is publicly known, Pope Pius failed to speak loud and clear on behalf of the Jews, failed to prevent the German Catholic Church from providing the Nazis with baptismal records that allowed them to identify Jews, failed to instruct Catholics to stop murdering Jews, failed to officially instruct the clergy everywhere to give shelter to Jews, and failed to excommunicate any Catholics including Hitler, Goebbels, and many others in the Nazi hierarchy, let alone the actual Catholic perpetrators whose souls were cleansed by field priests as the soldiers, policemen or SS came back to the barracks with blood stains in their uniforms from the hundreds of Jews they murdered at point blank range that day.
The Vatican Secret Archives for the WWII period need to be opened. This is ultimately also for the Church's benefit, even if it does show, as I think it will, that the Church as such did very little to help the hounded Jews. After all, it was the Church itself that published eleven volumes of documents forty years ago precisely to counter allegations that Pope Pius XII did not do as much as he should have. It’s safe to assume the Church would have shown its best, most compelling documentation showing Pope Pius helping Jews if it had it, and it would have been totally counterproductive to have left clear evidence of this help out of those eleven volumes. I think one can logically assume the documentation simply does not exist.
Gabriel Wilensky
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How Christian Teachings About Jews Paved the Road to the Holocaust
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Well it seems that the Jewish people after the war, who saw what he actually did to save them, thought differently than you. One would have to wonder why the Jewish people whom he saved, gave him awards, and why the Jewish Rabbi at the time the war ended, converted to Catholicism? Maybe, just maybe you are the one buying into a revised ant-Catholic history that will do anything to tear down the character of a very holy Pope. I would just love to see a live debate concerning this issue of Pope Pius XII. I think your arguments would be utterly destroyed.
Also, just because you are a software engineer does not make you a historical scholar. I would just love to go through the bibliography of your book and see who your sources are. Normally I would delete people trying to sell things on my website. But I will leave this up so that people can investigate your book for themselves and hopefully refute it.
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