generalspeaking

Tuesday, October 08, 2013

He of Slender Courage

"I write in the book that the Vatican's relations with the Hitler government after 1933, which were effectively determined by Eugenio Pacelli, then secretary of state (and later Pius XII), bore heavily the imprint of his time as papal representative in two ways. First was his conviction that a politically unstable and socially divided Germany was dangerous insofar as it exposed German society to the threat of Bolshevism and this, in turn, was a threat to the rest of Europe. Second, Pacelli knew that a politically and socially volatile situation threatened the autonomy of the Church in Germany. Still, as Nazi radicalism grew more aggressive and violent, Pacelli's diplomatic missives started to have the feel of much fiddling."
Robert Ventresca, King's University College, London, Ontario: author, Soldier of Christ

So it seemed explicable that to avoid Bolshevism (Communism), Fascism was preferable to the Roman Catholic Church. Communism attempted to destroy religious devotion, and Fascism destroyed humanity, devaluing religion in the process.

The explanation that Pope PIus XII, whom both Pope Benedict and Pope John Paul set out to canonize was concerned at the potential of a threat to Europe when he decided not to publicly denounce the Third Reich for its monstrous assault on humanity, seems weak given that he became a witness to the moral debasement of the Holocaust where Europe was not only threatened and suffered, but European Jewry was abandoned and annihilated.

The latter hope was that Pope Francis would have included Pope Pius XII when the Vatican announced that John Paul II and John XXIII would be brought into the sainthood canon. Pope Francis appears to think that there is sufficient reason given the history of his Church during the Second World War, led by Pope Pius XII, to withhold that status from someone who might be considered unworthy of the honour.

Pope Pius feared placing Roman Catholics in the line of Nazi brutality should he exert the moral authority vested in him to explicitly bring the world's attention to the situation befalling the Jews of Europe. In his wisdom he chose the path of less resistance; non-confrontational diplomacy. Professor Ventresca set out on an initiative of his own, to search out the historical details through careful research to determine whether the ambivalence surrounding the avenue that Pius XII chose reflected a worthiness of sainthood.

In his newly-published book, Soldier of Christ, the pope and his diplomatic staff appeared reluctant to "take sides". They preferred to believe that Vatican impartiality might help engage toward a negotiation of the crisis building within Europe, with an aggressively militarized Germany. In the spring of 1939, high-ranking foreign diplomats urged Pius XII to state a firm moral argument, bypassing impartiality.

It seems the Pope was fixated on the threat posed by the volatile situation then brewing, to the autonomy of the Roman Catholic Church within Germany. Yet, where was his moral and spiritual conscience -- tucked away in a belfry beyond his reach perhaps -- when a Ukrainian bishop informed the Vatican that he knew as a fact that 200,000 Jews had already perished.

That knowledge appears to have solidified the neutrality policy, as though the Vatican and that Pope surrendered themselves to helplessness for fear of drawing attention to their own presumed existential fragility.

What the Pope preferred to do while preserving papal impartiality was to quietly authorize Catholic institutions to offer assistance to the growing numbers of Jews persecuted throughout Europe. While he was being pressed by his own Papal nuncios in Europe to condemn the Nazi attacks on oher countries, he decided against an unequivocal condemnation of war criminality. He did issue a telegram made public, warning those countries of imminent invasion, earning the wrath of Germany and Italy in so doing.

Pope Benedict XVI in 2998 acknowledged Pius XII's "heroic virtues". Those virtues referring strictly to the man's witness in word and deed to the Christian virtues. Despite that in word and deed those very virtues were deliberately set aside for fear of retribution falling upon the Roman Catholic Church should it condemn the barbaric slaughter of Jews, Gypsies, Homosexuals, the mentally and physically disabled, and political dissenters.