generalspeaking

"Hitler's Pope"

He has been declared "Venerable". He is venerated. By a distinct and very respected institution whose influence in this world is huge. As a moral institution, although feeling rather feeble of late, the Roman Catholic Church through the Vatican and the current Pope, Benedict XVI, still holds great powers of persuasion. The faithful, the deep down and deeply-invested faithful will always be persuaded. Their faith is an impressively vital portion of their lives.

Pope Benedict is determined, like Pope John-Paul before him, to see Pope Pius XVII made a saint. He is held to have lived an exemplary life, one of "heroic virtue". Among the faithful, and within the Vatican, there is no dissent, only full agreement. That one of their own, a previous-reigning pope, one who officiated at a most difficult time in modern history, be cited for his guidance to the afflicted, and raised to sainthood.

A British historian, acknowledged as the world's leading expert on the Holocaust has lauded Pope Pius XII, claiming him to be in line to be virtuously proclaimed a "Righteous Gentile", to take his place among the Judaic-blessed at Yad Vashem, the Israeli Holocaust memorial authority. There are many non-Jews who have been acknowledged to have risked their lives to aid fellow human beings during this dreadful time of mass lunacy. Pope Pius XII is not among them.

And perhaps never. There are others, Jewish groups, who remain unconvinced that this powerful religious figure whose mere word could effect wide changes in the way that the world perceived itself, merits this laudatory acclamation. They do not agree with those who defend this pope's inaction in the public sphere to make an attempt to halt the annihilation of European Jews. Claiming that by covert action he did save hundreds of thousands of lives.

Jewish children taken into Catholic institutions for concealment and safety. And conversion. Converted Jews, Jews who absorbed themselves into Catholicism were honoured members of the Catholic flock, and to them Pope Pius XII and his cohorts extended the hand of safe passage. If it is even remotely factual that this pope took strenuous, secretive steps to ensure the institution of which he had charge did save hundreds of thousands of Jews condemned to death, then what?

Six million Jews were annihilated. The death camps absorbed political dissenters, homosexuals, gypsies, the mentally and physically infirm, and Europe's Jews. Some lonely and stalwart Lutheran ministers protested and they too became camp inmates. Pope Pius might have extended himself and his office to protesting, loudly and clearly, what he knew was occurring. His faint heart instead sought to work quietly, stealthily.

Where displeasure with the overt acts of Catholics in criticizing their church might merit them excommunication, such a dire act of divine admonition seemed never to have been considered for Adolf Hitler.

Labels: Anti-Semitism, Holocaust, Social-Cultural Deviations

posted by Pieface @ Wednesday, July 07, 2010