reply to post by orangeman dave
Well, this has turned personal very quickly.
Let's start with the 'defending the indefensible'. Feel free to go back through ATS threads and point out examples of where I have defended the
actions of pedophiles or the institutional practices that defended them. Feel free to go back and find examples of my defending the actions of the
Church during the Inquisitions. Feel free to go back and try to find examples of me defending the actions of any heinous individuals who claim to be
Catholics. Good luck.
The problem with your argument is that you're a one trick pony. You have no nuance and lack the ability to see subtlety or anything positive in
something that you dislike. And that now applies to your reaction to me. You imagine that I offer blanket approval and support for every action taken
by Catholics and the Church as that would be convenient. It makes it much easier to dismiss refutations to your simplistic argumentative.
While 80% of European Jews were killed during WWII, 80% of Italian Jews were saved. Coincidence?
From Rabbi David Dalin:
• Of the forty-four speeches Pacelli gave in Germany as papal nuncio between 1917 and 1929, forty denounced some aspect of the emerging Nazi
ideology.
• In March 1935, he wrote an open letter to the bishop of Cologne calling the Nazis "false prophets with the pride of Lucifer."
• That same year, he assailed ideologies "possessed by the superstition of race and blood" to an enormous crowd of pilgrims at Lourdes. At Notre
Dame in Paris two years later, he named Germany "that noble and powerful nation whom bad shepherds would lead astray into an ideology of race."
• The Nazis were "diabolical," he told friends privately. Hitler "is completely obsessed," he said to his long-time secretary, Sister Pascalina.
"All that is not of use to him, he destroys; . . . this man is capable of trampling on corpses." Meeting in 1935 with the heroic anti-Nazi Dietrich
von Hildebrand, he declared, "There can be no possible reconciliation" between Christianity and Nazi racism; they were like "fire and water."
• The year after Pacelli became secretary of state in 1930, Vatican Radio was established, essentially under his control. The Vatican newspaper
L'Osservatore Romano had an uneven record, though it would improve as Pacelli gradually took charge (extensively reporting Kristallnacht in 1938, for
example). But the radio station was always good—making such controversial broadcasts as the request that listeners pray for the persecuted Jews in
Germany after the 1935 Nuremberg Legislation.
• It was while Pacelli was his predecessor's chief adviser that Pius XI made the famous statement to a group of Belgian pilgrims in 1938 that
"anti-Semitism is inadmissible; spiritually we are all Semites." And it was Pacelli who drafted Pius XI's encyclical Mit brennender Sorge, "With
Burning Concern," a condemnation of Germany among the harshest ever issued by the Holy See. Indeed, throughout the 1930s, Pacelli was widely
lampooned in the Nazi press as Pius XI's "Jew-loving" cardinal, because of the more than fifty-five protests he sent the Germans as the Vatican
secretary of state.
To these must be added highlights of Pius XII's actions during the war:
• His first encyclical, Summi Pontificatus, rushed out in 1939 to beg for peace, was in part a declaration that the proper role of the papacy was to
plead to both warring sides rather than to blame one. But it very pointedly quoted St. Paul—“there is neither Gentile nor Jew”—using the word
"Jew" specifically in the context of rejecting racial ideology. The New York Times greeted the encyclical with a front-page headline on October 28,
1939: "Pope Condemns Dictators, Treaty Violators, Racism." Allied airplanes dropped thousands of copies on Germany in an effort to raise anti-Nazi
sentiment.
• In 1939 and 1940, Pius acted as a secret intermediary between the German plotters against Hitler and the British. He would similarly risk warning
the Allies about the impending German invasions of Holland, Belgium, and France.
• In March 1940, Pius granted an audience to Joachim von Ribbentrop, the German foreign minister and the only high-ranking Nazi to bother visiting
the Vatican. The Germans' understanding of Pius's position, at least, was clear: Ribbentrop chastised the pope for siding with the Allies. Whereupon
Pius began reading from a long list of German atrocities. "In the burning words he spoke to Herr Ribbentrop," the New York Times reported on March
14, Pius "came to the defense of Jews in Germany and Poland."
• When French bishops issued pastoral letters in 1942 attacking deportations, Pius sent his nuncio to protest to the Vichy government against "the
inhuman arrests and deportations of Jews from the French-occupied zone to Silesia and parts of Russia." Vatican Radio commented on the bishops'
letters six days in a row—at a time when listening to Vatican Radio was a crime in Germany and Poland for which some were put to death. ("Pope Is
Said to Plead for Jews Listed for Removal from France," the New York Times headline read on August 6, 1942. "Vichy Seizes Jews; Pope Pius Ignored,"
the Times reported three weeks later.) In retaliation, in the fall of 1942, Goebbels's office distributed ten million copies of a pamphlet naming
Pius XII as the "pro-Jewish pope" and explicitly citing his interventions in France.
• In the summer of 1944, after the liberation of Rome but before the war's end, Pius told a group of Roman Jews who had come to thank him for his
protection: "For centuries, Jews have been unjustly treated and despised. It is time they were treated with justice and humanity, God wills it and
the Church wills it. St. Paul tells us that the Jews are our brothers. They should also be welcomed as friends."
I could include much, much more but the post word count is almost up. It doesn't really matter though, as your insistence on seeing only black when
there is also white and gray says more about you than anything I could express.
Eric
