wha?
I am with you about the pope, he should have done a lot more, but what do Juan and Evita Peron have to do with all this?
Knowing that they were giving refuge to former Nazis and that they were fascists who were crushing dissenters in their country he met with them, gave them communion and blessed rosaries, etc., and again did not denounce them in any way.
“Whatever you do unto the least you do unto me; whatever you neglected to do unto the least, you neglected to do unto me.” [Jesus Christ, who appointed Peter to be head of the church that 19 centuries later was under the stewardship of Pius XII who made a conscious decision not to do more against the Nazis.]
As for saving the lives of Catholics- how exactly? More Catholics died in Word War II than in any other war in history. More Protestants to for that matter, and of course more Jews. Had Hitler begun actively killing Catholics for no reason but their Catholicism, how many do you suppose he would have killed before the rest said “screw this” and regardless of their nationality or political affiliation linked shields against him? Arguably, fewer than were killed being faithful to the Nazi cause or fewer than the Catholics among the Allies who were killed.
Umm
They gave refuge to Nazis (I think Juan Peron was prolly a Nazi simpatizer) but didnt Truman also gave refuge to other (usefull) nazis?.
As for the crushing dissenters part, Peron was a democratically elected president, he certainly had a less than enlightened vision of freedom of the press but nothing much worse than for example Chavez or other leaders the Popes have received beofre or since then.
Wouldnt Franco be a better example?, he was very much closer to Hitler and the Catholic church supported him (while they attacked Peron for wanting to stop religious education in public schools)
By accounts, he expected to be siezed by the Nazis, and had taken steps to avoid being used as a Nazi puppet.
As was Hitler, by much the same free process, which included violence against/arrest of opposition leaders and officials.
Besides which, Truman didn’t claim to be the representative of Christ on Earth. There’s nothing mystical about the PotUS, it’s strictly a Caesarean office.
Then German troops occupied Rome.
He condemned totalitarianism. He condemned the occupation of Poland. He condemned the killing of civilians on the basis of race or ethnicity. He condemned anti-semitism. He sent official letters of sympathy to the leaders of Low Countries when they were occupied. He “clarified” the prohibition against helping Communists to say that there wasn’t a moral objection against allying with them against the Nazis. He helped the German resistance in the plot to overthrow Hitler. Meanwhile, he gave the orders to shelter Jews in the Vatican. He pressured the government of Brazil to issue visas to Jewish refugees. He protested to the German government about their treatment of Jews. He protested to Vichy France about their deportation of Jews. He protested to Slovakia about their deportation of Jews. He offered to loan the Chief Rabbi of Italy the ransom the Nazis demanded for the Jews of Rome. He ordered papal legates to hide Jews.
He probably could have done more against the Nazis, but he wasn’t just sitting on his hands there.
In face of the evil that was the Nazis, this statement makes no sense to me.
I don’t know much about this subject and make no claims about it, but I do think I can point out that it’s a mistake to focus only on the extent to which Catholics in Germany supported the Nazis vs. the Pope. Because there were people in other countries who abetted the Holocaust in one form or another, and some were undoubtedly Catholics, esp. in places like Poland.
Neither did Peron.
My point is that using Peron as a “Generic evil dictator” is wrong, since he was democratically elected, reelected, deposed by a coup, and then reelected again.
I think he lacked respect for the freedom of the press and had some serious lackings in other civil rights areas, he was, however NOT a dictator and I am not aware of serious violence/arrests of opposition leaders under his administration.
Except for, you know, the millions of Allied Forces who brought down the Nazis…
I read the OP and thought … “human shields for the Vatican infrastructure”. I suppose it worked. Some Jews were saved (how many compared to the 6 million lost?) and the Vatican itself made it through the war.
How many divisions does the Pope have? -Joseph Stalin
Perhaps he could have made clear that German Catholics who participated in the holocaust, regardless of age or indirectness, were in a state of excommunication.
Had he done so, perhaps we would not have had today’s debacle in Jerusalem.
Didn’t you understand anything that was said in that thread about excommunication?
It sounds to me like you’re talking more about God than the Pope.
Evil empire? Don’t you think that perhaps you are exagerating things. God knows that the Roman Empire wasn’t the most enlightened civilization in history but it did some services to humanity.
For Catholics the Pope is Christ Vicar on Earth. They also consider God to be omnipotent but they generally agree that an all intervining god would erase free will. We are here in this planet and in this life to live our lives to the fullest, even if it means almost exterminating an entire people.
Besides insulting someones beliefs is just not kosher. Don´t do it, it reflects badly on you.
Again, you are simplifying history. The papacy was trapped in Rome which is located in the middle of Italy and, at that time was a fascist regime. When Mussolin was overthrow, Nazi occupied all of northern Italy, including Rome.
Not till almost the end of the war, the front collapsed and the italian resistance was able to extract it’s revenge on Mussolini and his followers. Till that time, they were to busy evading german bullets.
Peron isn’t a personal saint of mine and neither is his wife. But don’t be so simplistic. World leader aren´t usually the best christians but the Pope has to deal with them all the same. Peron was something of a dictator but he was no worst than say… Bush Jr (who was also received by the Pope).
Yes Soviet timetable and the allied invasion of normandy were dictated by the necessity of saving as many jews as possible.
Give me a break.
Churchill, Truman and Stalin didn’t give a damm for the jews.
Absolutely. So did the Nazis (restoring the German economy mainly). The Roman Empire also slaughtered hundreds of thousands of Jews (in one year alone) and sold as many more into slavery, and they did likewise to others who opposed them, so evil is, at least with qualification, correct.
Christ would not have overtly condemned the Nazis? Are you saying this because He didn’t speak out against Rome? Because if so, it’s because Rome wasn’t evil (you said so yourself).
Not exclusively Catholic, but a helluva good (and convenient) excuse to whoever uses it.
WHAT?
So saying that Muslims who kill their sisters who have been raped to preserve family honor is impolite? Or that a Prophet who has a G.E.D. taking dozens of wives and many of them underage is effed up isn’t kosher? (Neither of these apply to Catholicism but I’m trying to establish if you feel this way about all religions or just some.)
And again and again and again, why would the Pope, of all people, fear an army when he knew his cause was just? Worst case scenario is he gets captured, tortured, and killed, which would not have been likely since to do so would have turned most of the Catholics in Germany and Italy against the Nazis but if it had then
1- Historically the Pope his in very good company (how many saints and martyrs are recognized now? How many have relics in the Vatican for that matter?)
2- He could be assured of eternity in Heaven
3- Another Pope would replace him so he hasn’t lost the church (even if the new Pope had to be coronated in America or England or Brazil it wouldn’t be the first time the Papacy had been exiled)
4- What greater sacrifice could he have made or greater gesture could he have made than to have died for his faith and in so doing thoroughly denounce the Nazis? (Again, Titus Brandsma did it, and so did other priests and many nuns throughout the Nazi regime- there was no shortage of Catholic clergy who were real heroes in that war and who paid with their lives.)
5- It cannot be known for certain how much he knew about the death camps, but it is known for certain that he knew about the concentration camps (they were no real secret) and that the truth about the death camps was known by many in the Resistance (including documents, photographs, and even filmed footage of mass killings) and whether he had seen the evidence or not it’s almost inconceivable that word had not gotten to him. As Christ’s vicar on Earth it was not his place to play espionage games any more that Christ worked with the zealots; it was his place to make known the will of God even if this meant his life; again and again and again there were other Catholic clergy, Protestant clergy, Catholic and Protestant non-clergy, agnostics and atheists and all manner of none-of-the-above who gave up their lives in the fight against Nazism.
So he saved thousands of Jews in the Vatican. Thousands out of millions and millions and millions. That was nice of him.
Hermann Göring saved at least hundreds if not thousands of Jews himself. Some he saved from the camps and provided exit papers to due to flat out bribery, some because they had befriended or helped him before the war, many because they were friends or associates of his second wife (an actress, German theater having a disproportionate number of Jews compared to the general population). Oscar Schindler, a man whose name few people knew until a generation after the war, working with only the resources of an enamel ware manufacturer in the eastern territories, saved hundreds of Jews, and his colleagues saved thousands more (this is referenced in the movie- he wasn’t the only factory owner who spent a fortune in protecting his Jewish slave workers, though he was probably the one who did the most).
The Pope, to quote Oscar Schindler from the end of the famous movie, could have done more. A lot more. It is my belief that Pius XII is unworthy of kissing the bottom of the sandals of Titus Brandsma and that his actions or inaction was based not on lack of knowledge but on fear of preserving his own life and his office and the property and authority of the church rather than human lives. These being my beliefs, it would be unkosher and disrespectful of you to challenge them.
Peron isn’t a personal saint of mine and neither is his wife. But don’t be so simplistic. World leader aren´t usually the best christians but the Pope has to deal with them all the same. Peron was something of a dictator but he was no worst than say… Bush Jr (who was also received by the Pope).
[/QUOTE]
WHAT?
It bore repeating.
I think you mean Albert Göring. At least, I hope you do! :eek:
I think it’s funny that people are complaining that Pius XII didn’t return to the church militant and reassert Catholic control over Europe during World War II.
Nope. The Reichsmarschall himself. He towed the line as far as open antisemitism but there’s absolutely no evidence he was anti-semitic before joining the Nazis and in fact quite to the contrary.
When he was in a Catholic boarding school he was asked to write an essay on the person he most admired and he chose his godfather and namesake, (Ritter) Hermann von Eppenstein, a self made wealthy businessman, medical doctor, and (through purchase) petty noble and… a Jew (at least by birth- he was in private an agnostic who converted to Catholicism late in life largely due to antiSemitism). When Göring was told that he could not choose a Jew for his subject he absolutely refused to back down, stating von Eppenstein was his hero and that was who he was going with; he was expelled. (There is speculation that von Eppenstein was more than just a family friend to the Görings incidentally; the rumor was he was having an affair with Frau Göring, whose husband [Hermann’s father] was very old and senile, and that Hermann’s younger brother was the spitting image of Baron von Eppenstein.)
Göring maintained a close relationship with von Eppenstein through the old man’s death. He even bequeathed Göring two of his castles (SchloßMauterndorf and Schloß Veldenstein) in his will (though he delayed the actual inheritance til the death of his young wife).
Later Göring had friendships with Jews, he had one as a partner when he was speculating in the wildly fluctuating currency market of the 1920s (even after meeting Hitler), his first wife, Carin (the Countess von Fock) had Jewish friends and relatives in her native Sweden and in Germany, and his second wife Emme was an actress whose friends included Jews, homosexuals, and others deemed undesirable by the Nazis. He later helped get exit papers for many of these people including von Eppenstein’s family [he had no legitimate children but he had nephews, nieces, cousins, etc.], some family servants, various Jewish friends of himself and of his wives, etc…
Göring actually started the concentration camps, though originally for political prisoners, and thus he had a lot of say in getting people out. Later they were removed from his control so he had less. In one heartbreaking story, a Christian friend of his wife begged the Görings to get her Jewish husband released, and Göring tried, but by then control had passed to the SS who weren’t inclined to be helpful to begin with and for this man, who was also a political prisoner, even bribery wouldn’t work, so he was completely unable; consequently the actress begged to be allowed to join her husband there. Göring tried to persuade her against it, perhaps he even told her about the actual goings on there (this was before the Final Solution but there were already executions and all manner of horrible abuse) but she would not be dissuaded, and he used his connections to get her into the concentration camp, where she died.
This is not meant to exonerate Göring at all incidentally. He was a horrible person all in all, a gauche and gross and crude and vain narcissistic disgusting drug addict with no self restraint and the worst qualities of both garish nouveau riche (which he was) and the debauched aristocracy (which he wanted to be). Most of the many Jews he helped escape from the Nazis he helped for profit. He made little if any secret of the fact that he could be bribed and German/Austrian/Bavarian Jews or their foreign relatives paid him everything from jewelry to art to houses to whole companies to get themselves and or their families out. (These included some relatives of the Rothschild family and some wealthy in-laws of Freud.) Still, it was his clout as well as his corruption (and probably to some degree his acknowledgment that even for Germans the degree of anti-Semitism was ridiculous) that saved them.
While Göring’s only child, Edda, was an innocent, I think it is great justice that in his final days the Reich Marshall, who was once among the richest men in Europe and practically all of it through extortion and his abuse of power, saw his wife and daughter dressed in rags and hungry when they visited him in prison, where he was not even allowed to touch them or put his hand to the glass separating them. I can think of no more karmic punishment for a man of such hubris and appetites.
Source for most of this is in several biographies I’ve read of him over the years, most important probably The Reichmarshall by Leonard Mosley (who knew Göring fairly well before the war).