Pius XII and Received Wisdom

3 Responses

1. There are many Catholics who acted with conspicuous bravery towards the Jews during the Holocaust. But it is also true that there was virulent Jew hatred rife and accepted in most of Catholic Europe where almost all of the death camps were located, and Pope Pius XII did little to stop it or to discipline clergy who preached it, like Cardinal Glemp in Poland or Cardinal Stepinac in Croatia, who was also an ally and apologist for the horrendous Nazi-allied Ustashe regime. And yes, I’m aware that it was Tito’s communist regime that convicted him of war crimes…but there’s plenty of independent evidence of his guilt.

   Those Catholics whom did not participate in Hitler’s war against the Jews at best simply looked the other way in large part because of these attitudes prevalent through out much of the Church. For instance, many Jewish children whom their parents were desperate to save were only sheltered by the Church on condition they be baptized as Catholics, and many of them were never told of their Jewish background after the war, which unfortunately puts the lie to the frequent excuse that it was just done to fool the Nazis.

   Former Secretary of State Madeline Albright is just one example. There were others whom were only found and reclaimed as Jews by the Jewish Agency and Rabbis working independently..after they were told by the Catholic orphanages, etc that ‘there are no Jewish children here.’

   I am not familiar with any directive from the Pope forbidding this behavior.

   I am by no means anti-Catholic. But I would ask Mr. Como this:

   Hitler could never have come to power in Germany without the support of the Catholic Center Party in passing the infamous Ermächtigungsgesetz (Enabling Act) . Pope Pius, as the former Papal Nuncio to Germany certainly could not have had any illusions of whom Hitler was, yet he approved this. Is this the act of a saint?

   Did Pope Pius XII at any time before, during or after the Holocaust excommunicate one Catholic whom participated in the Holocaust? Did he ever announce before it occurred or while some Catholic countries like Hungary still had not sen them to the death camps that he would do this in an effort to use his authority to prevent Catholics from participating in it? Did he dismiss any clergy whom supported it?

   If Pope Pius XII was such a saintly man, why won’t the Church allow scholars access to their WWII archives? The answer seems obvious.

   Your point about ‘received wisdom’ is a valid one. Trying to make Pius the XII a saint is an abysmally poor example.

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2. Honestly, Mr. Miller, you are behind the curve, by failing to make distinctions or taking context into account, by adducing adventitious criteria (e.g. excommunication), and by painting with a very broad brush. As I said, it was not my purpose to re-litigate the case: others have done that superbly, including the newest to the field, Riebling. Now, might Pius himself, when looking back, have thought to have made some different tactical moves? Well, how could he not? Only people like Obama and Trump don’t second guess themselves. But is 20/20 hindsight admissible in a charge of . . . of what? Villainy? Complicity? Insouciance? Remember, please, the subject is Pius, not cherry-picked groups of Catholics, especially since those groups were not sufficient to prevent Hitler from hating the Catholic church, along with its priests, nuns and believers, or from acting on that hatred.

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3. Behind the curve, Mr. Como?

   That’s a neat way of trying to push past the uncomfortable facts I presented, but it doesn’t wash. In fact, it’s intellectually dishonest.

   We aren’t discussing hindsight, but human decency and moral values and the last time I checked, they haven’t changed all that much.

   You’re the one who wants to see this man made a saint. As such if is perfectly proper and and even just to judge him by those standards.

   You know quite well that we are not talking about ‘a few Catholics’ but a significant number of them who either collaborated with Hitler during the Holocaust or were content to simply look the other way. Would they have done so if Pius had been more vociferous in denouncing what was going on, if he had used every tool at his disposal including the threat of excommunication and disciplining people like the clergy members I mentioned to try and stop it? Would Hitler had even have come to power if he had instructed the Catholic Center Party to vote against him in the Reichstag? Would more Jews have been saved, as they were in Denmark and Finland?

   We’ll never know,because Pius did nothing of the kind.

   I doubt that’s the kind of moral bankruptcy the founders of the Catholic Church had in mind when they started the practice of naming saints.

   There’s a very good reason why the Vatican refuses to release its Holocaust era archives to scholars, and I think both of us know why.

   As far as I’m concerned, if the Church wants to disgrace itself and lower the bar to make Pius a saint, they certainly can.

   But let’s not labor under the illusion that such an act isn’t going to send a message that no amount of sophistry or glibness is going to obscure.

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