If He Were Alive, He'd Probably Forgive The Slander, Too

http://www.wideawakes.org

It’s one of the greatest lies of the last century. As it goes, Pope Pius XII was a silent partner in the Holocaust. He took no steps to help the Jews who were being slaughtered by the Nazi genocide.

It’s a nice fairytale, if you’re a psychotic leftist hater of the Church. As an added bonus, since most folks of that type are already living in fantasy land, all the absurdity seems perfectly normal. Yes, I know you people think it’s normal. I’m using my Energon Brain Decoder as we speak to read your thoughts. You obviously need to add another layer of aluminum to your hat.

Let me explain…no there’s too much. Let me sum up.

Rolf Hochhuth wrote a play in the ’60s called THE DEPUTY. In it, he portrays the Pope as a person who did nothing to stop the genocide around him.

That’s it. That’s the whole thing, the genesis of an outpouring of bile against a good and decent man. A play. The 1960’s version of “I saw it on the Lifetime Channel". That’s what they came up with.

There’s a really great website that lists the facts that shreds this piece of toilet paper of a charge against Pius XII. That’s a pretty good thing too, since I really don’t feel like listing all the rebuttals. I’ll just list a few here.

Golda Meir gave a stirring eulogy of Pope Pius XII, thanking him for his work in saving thousands of Jews during the war before the UN in 1958. Yeah, Golda Meir. She then went and planted a tree in Israel in his honor. But you know, what would Golda Meir know about anything? She’s not an important world figure, like Rolf Holchhurth.

The Chief Rabbi of Rome converts to Catholicism /after/ the war. His reason? He was so impressed by Pope Pius XII’s efforts to protect the Jews during the war. Then again, what would he know? He was only the head of the Jewish community in Rome during the war. It’s not like he wrote a play or anything.

Pope Pius XII used Vatican money to ransom the lives of many Jews. He directed his staff to set up numerous hideouts throughout Rome for Jews. There have been estimates of up to twenty thousand Jews being hidden inside the Vatican at one point or another. The Pope’s personal summer retreat, Castel Gandolfo, was even used to hide Jews. Unfortunately for posterity, not one wrote a play during this time.

While still a Cardinal, Pius XII wrote MIT BRENNENDER SORGE for Pope Pius XI. The encyclical specifically attacked Nazi ideology. Written in 1937 and smuggled into the country to be read in German churches, Allied bombers dropped copies of the encyclical into Germany to demoralize Catholic German soldiers. Sadly, it lacked in sufficient character development to be made into a play. Let’s read a little excerpt together, shall we?


4. If, then, the tree of peace, which we planted on German soil with the purest intention, has not brought forth the fruit, which in the interest of your people, We had fondly hoped, no one in the world who has eyes to see and ears to hear will be able to lay the blame on the Church and on her Head. The experiences of these last years have fixed responsibilities and laid bare intrigues, which from the outset only aimed at a war of extermination. In the furrows, where We tried to sow the seed of a sincere peace, other men—the “enemy” of Holy Scripture—oversowed the cockle of distrust, unrest, hatred, defamation, of a determined hostility overt or veiled, fed from many sources and wielding many tools, against Christ and His Church. They, and they alone with their accomplices, silent or vociferous, are today responsible, should the storm of religious war, instead of the rainbow of peace, blacken the German skies.

7. Take care, Venerable Brethren, that above all, faith in God, the first and irreplaceable foundation of all religion, be preserved in Germany pure and unstained. The believer in God is not he who utters the name in his speech, but he for whom this sacred word stands for a true and worthy concept of the Divinity. Whoever identifies, by pantheistic confusion, God and the universe, by either lowering God to the dimensions of the world, or raising the world to the dimensions of God, is not a believer in God. Whoever follows that so-called pre-Christian Germanic conception of substituting a dark and impersonal destiny for the personal God, denies thereby the Wisdom and Providence of God who “Reacheth from end to end mightily, and ordereth all things sweetly” (Wisdom VIII. 1). Neither is he a believer in God.

8. Whoever exalts race, or the people, or the State, or a particular form of State, or the depositories of power, or any other fundamental value of the human community—however necessary and honorable be their function in worldly things—whoever raises these notions above their standard value and divinizes them to an idolatrous level, distorts and perverts an order of the world planned and created by God; he is far from the true faith in God and from the concept of life which that faith upholds.


Uhh, Hitler tried to /kidnap/ the Pope. Obviously, he was concerned Pius would write a play.

Finally, a few years ago a “historian” by the name of John Cornwell wrote a book “exposing” Pius XII’s complicity in the Holocaust. We all remember “Hitler’s Pope", along with all the TV news specials, all the talking heads sadly shaking their heads in righteous shame at the Catholic Church. Case closed, right?

Sure, except for one little detail. The author of the book admitted he got it all wrong.

He got it so wrong, he couldn’t have been more wrong if he just went out and made up probate records. The fact of the matter is, the only people that did more in World War II than Pius XII to subvert the Nazis were the prisoners of Stalag 13. The only difference, of course, is Hogan’s Heroes is a fiction, a fantasy. Then again, that will fit in well with the worldview of those who believed what they did about Pope Pius XII.

For your penance, say 5 Hail Mary’s, 4 Our Father’s, and donate to St. Jude’s Hospital. And while the Church really doesn’t practice self-flagellation much anymore, please feel free to throw yourselves a good beating.