The Furor over Pius XII
FORUM The Furor over Pius XII "Mullahs of Islam should threaten to excommunicate Muslims who attempt, execute, or encourage suicide bombings. It is time to make clear that people executing such...
...So why should the Pope have been smarter than these men...
...FORUM The Furor over Pius XII "Mullahs of Islam should threaten to excommunicate Muslims who attempt, execute, or encourage suicide bombings...
...Pius "knowingly allowed hundreds of thousands of Jews to go to their deaths without a protest...
...That the Vatican could not verify U.S...
...intelligence simply means that it had no more, and probably much less actual "hard" information than Allied intelligence...
...Eugene J. Fisher, Associate Director Secretariat for Ecumenical and Interreligious Affairs, US Conference of Catholic Bishops Michael Phayer Responds 1) The Vatican decelerated [dissemination of] information about the Holocaust by withholding what it knew to be taking place from European bishops...
...4) The Vatican's assistance to fascist postwar emigres had a purpose—to fight communism in South America...
...It is time to make clear that people executing such atrocities are not martyrs destined for Paradise but murderers destined for Hell...
...In fact, the word "genocide," plunked so casually into 1942 by Phayer, did not even exist at the time...
...A Catholic Croatian priest and the rector of the German College in Rome did help their fellow countrymen escape Europe after the war...
...For example, J an Karski, a Roman Catholic member of the Polish underground resistance movement, was smuggled into a concentration camp, then taken by the Polish Government in exile to see both Churchill and Roosevelt...
...What had been attempted by the Nazis only began to dawn on the prosecutors themselves as the evidence was coming out...
...Fisher not heard of Otto Ohlendorf who was convicted of mass murder at Nuremberg...
...There is likewise no evidence that the German bishop, who was of course well known in the Vatican, was acting in any way on behalf of "the Vatican...
...This is an old and very false canard...
...Ransom money that the Nazis collected from the Jews, and which Pius offered to donate to meet the Nazi demands had pretty much everyone convinced this would not happen...
...Say again...
...They flat out could not get their heads around the enormity of what he was telling them...
...Goni and Sereny do make such allegations, but offer no real evidence.] The only evidence to support this is that an Argentine bishop, who did help a number of Germans, war criminals among them, to flee to Argentina, once met with the Pope during this period...
...It is significant that the pope did not show compassion toward the Jews, virtually imprisoned at his doorstep, before they were shipped off to Auschwitz...
...Does this mean we should blame Roosevelt personally...
...Contrary to Dr...
...The Vatican did not convey to other bishops the protests against the deportation of Jews by Bishop Stepinac in Croatia, French bishops in Vichy France, or Dutch bishops...
...That atrocity-perpetrators were conducted out of Italy by Bishop Hudal (who was Austrian, not German) and Father Dragonovic was well-known in the Vatican as it was everywhere in Rome...
...As far as I know, the Vatican did not have an active air force or vast codebreaking apparatus during the war...
...This activity must be seen in the broader context of Pius XII's attempts to have the sentences of convicted Nazi atrocity-perpetrators suspended or commuted to lesser penalties...
...Certainly, the Holy See's own records show that by the spring of 1943 the Vatican was aware of the on-going process of murder by gas...
...The Vatican's efforts in this regard became so blatant that Pope Pius's own envoy to postwar Germany, Bishop Muench, wrote to Monsignor Montini, Pius's trusted under-secretary of state, telling him that the Vatican must cease and desist...
...David Steinberg Alexandria, VA...
...The original indictments of the Nuremberg trials did not even single out the Jews among the victims of "war crimes...
...Was Phayer Fair...
...I have not dared to advise the Holy See to intervene [for the atrocity-perpetrators], especially if such intervention would eventually become public...
...Mullahs of Islam, for example, should threaten to excommunicate Muslims who attempt, execute, or encourage suicide bombings...
...This does not include knowledge of the new gas chamber-crematorium complexes that were being built in the spring of 1943 at Auschwitz-Birkenau...
...There is no evidence, however, that the Pope had any idea what he was doing...
...That Pope Pius knew is undeniable...
...The Pope's Secret Weapon Michael Phayer's article on Pope Pius XII neglects citing what surely would have been the biggest step the Pope could and should have taken: Since Adolf Hitler was a baptized a Catholic, Pope Pius XII should have threatened to excommunicate him if those horrendous crimes against humanity, indeed against the teaching of the Church, were not promptly terminated...
...Michael Phayer ("The Silent Pope: Pius XII" April 2004) has a habit of phrasing things in a surpassingly odd manner, e.g.: "The [Vatican] policy to conceal information about genocide...
...Fisher's assertion, authors Sereny and Goni, who have written about the so-called "rat-line" (of murderers escaping to South America) have excellent sources...
...There's no evidence whatsoever of such a policy...
...I prefer to date it a year later...
...The former did what he did as a paid agent of the American government though, including helping Claus Barbie...
...The Vatican did not convey to European bishops its own opposition to the Nazi collaborator Father Tiso, the president of Slovakia...
...Knowingly" thus suggests a vastly greater prophetic ability to popes than Catholic tradition calls for...
...Neither, for that matter, could Justice Felix Frankfurter...
...Knowingly" is a loaded and highly misleading term...
...Well before the roundup, the pope knew that the Jews were going to be seized but failed to warn them...
...It had to be invented after World War U, so outrageously incredible was the idea to any sane person of the time...
...Pius established a program for assisting Nazi atrocity perpetrators to escape justice by fleeing to South America...
...All religious leaders should threaten excommunication against members of their faiths who commit horrendous crimes against humanity...
...Some authors say the Vatican knew as early as late 1941...
...Pope Pius XH's failure to use one of the most powerful instruments at his command against what arguably was the most egregious evil of this time seriously diminishes whatever merit exists for his beatification...
...But then I've never been one for fervid conspiracy theories, whether directed at "the Jews" or "the Vatican...
...The Vatican made no effort to cut off the "rat-Une" because it coincided with Vatican Cold War policies...
...Although the effectiveness of threatened excommunication cannot be assessed, the Pope's declaration of his readiness to carry it out (and actually going through with it if the threat proved ineffective) might well have sent a crucial message to Europe and the world...
...witness his 1942 Christmas address, his allocution regarding the imperiled Jews of northern Italy, his message to the Horthy government of Hungary (in which he joined with President Roosevelt and others) to stop the deportations of Jews...
...2) Dr...
...As a Catholic, I find it shameful that the Vatican newspaper Civilta Catholica was allowed to print grisly slander about the Jews even as they were being mercilessly shot by killing squads...
...Fisher seems to think that even at the war's end, the Vatican did not know about the Holocaust...
...The great historian, Michael Marrus, a member of our group of Catholic and Jewish historians, which Phayer kindly mentions, is very clear on the difference between having a lot of disparate facts, some verifiable and some not, and actually comprehending what is going on, especially something of the magnitude of the Shoah...
...Has Dr...
...That some of the fascists were atrocity perpetrators was accepted in the balance...
...It's rime to make clear that these people are not martyrs destined for Paradise but murderers destined for Hell...
...I do agree with Phayer, however, that the move to canonization of Pius should be put on hold until after the rest of Vatican archives come out (which will happen as soon as they can be physically catalogued), so that conspiracy-mongers like Phayer can't accuse the Vatican of hiding things...
...3) The evidence that Pope Pius knew of the October, 1943 razzia in Rome is circumstantial but compelling...
...The Allies, after all, had broken the German code and had planes flying over Auschwitz...
...It is also significant that he said nothing afterwards...
...Again, there is no evidence of this...
...Has he not heard of the many Germans convicted of atrocities at the army trials...
Vol. 29 • August 2004 • No. 4
