It is wonderful to attend a parish whose Pastor has excellent intellectual firepower. Found this on the web one day:. My Pastors brief research piece on the NY Times view of Pius XII during WWII:
http://www-camlaw.rutgers.edu/pu...nal%
20Draft.pdf
It is in several other places, but that is the complete piece.
Crisis ran an article on the latest pope/Church-bashing book in regards to WWII in its January issue. Some of the points it makes are very specifically related to the book, but it sheds some much-needed light on the real actions of Pius XII and the Vatican during that time. Check it out:
http://www.crisismagazine.com/ja...03/
feature1.htm
pax
I have an Amazon list onDefending Pope Pius XII if you want to find good books on this topic.
Since Holoscan messed up the link:
http://www.amazon.com/exec/obido...6454185-
0277516
It is one of the weird twists of history that so many in both the Catholic and Jewish communities should survey the wreckage of WWII, a wreckage in Allied Leaders like Roosevelt and Churchill refused to bomb the rail lines to Auschwitz and in which Stalin did nothing as the Warsaw Ghetto was annihilated, and look past this to a man who had not a single gun to defend himself, and yet who was responsible for the rescue of more Jews than any other man in Europe--and condemn him as practically being the architect of the Holocaust.
Beautifully put.
A minor historical point that probably no one cares about...
There were two uprisings in Warsaw. The first is typically called the Ghetto Uprising. This was before the Jewish Ghetto in Warsaw was shut down, when the Jews still lived there. It was a mostly a Jewish event, but there were quite a few Polish Catholics that helped or fought alongside the Jews.
In 1944 came the Warsaw Uprising. The Poles fought with the idea that the allies would help in some way, having just landed a couple of months before in Normandy. That didn't happen. In fact, toward the end of the uprising, the Germans simply decided to destroy Warsaw entirely, and began a systematic, block-by-block torching of the city with flamethrowers. The bulk of the Red Army parked itself on the east side of the Vistula and watched for three months- fully capable of stopping the Germans any time they wanted. This was the rising that Stalin allowed to happen. By this time, the Jews were all gone.
Every August, on the anniversary of the start of the Warsaw Uprising, the Poles light tens of thousands of candles and set them in street corners throughout the old Jewish Ghetto and the medieval "Old Town". It's an eerie tribute to the courage with which they fought both the Nazis and the Commies, and to the 9 million Jewish and Catholic casualties who came from Poland.
Warsaw is an odd place even now as a result. Row after row of gray cinderblock communist style buildings. Dreary is a good way to describe it in many neighborhoods. Then, you turn a corner, and there's a 600 year old chapel, tiny and painted bright yellow, that somehow escaped the wrath of the both the Germans and the Russians.
I know it's a minor point, but it's a quiet morning and I don't have enough to occupy myself. 
Thank you Mark W., that was very touching.
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I think the "Hitler's Pope" gambit is pure garbage, and that polemicists like James Carroll and Cornwall (sp?) shouldn't be taken seriously. Most of these writers have an axe to grind about the church, so fomenting scandal about Pius is a way to undermine the current Pope and Catholic teaching.
At the same time, I think Pius XII was a rather strange man (based on Paul Johnson's book on John XXIII) and it seems clear that, although he wasn't silent by any means, he was subdued in his statements about the Holocaust. He spent a great deal of time in Germany before he was pope, and as much as he loathed Hitler, he could never quite dissociate the Nazi government from the people. He also seems to have been more pre-occupied with the preservation of Europe and the Church as an institution and this also contributed to the lateness of his actions on behalf of European Jews. Its clear though, based on Kevin Madigan's essay, for example, in Commentary (Oct. 2001), that he knew what the Germans were doing to the Jews as early as March, 1942.
Sure, I wish he had done more. But hindsight is 20/20 these days for the Church bashing mob.
Pius didn't do nothing.
And he wasn't silent.
My undergrad advisor was a Cambridge educated guy that could lecture on anything without notes. He called books like Hitler's Pope "Substandard Journalism". He refused to call them history.
America did bomb the rail lines (and railheads and railway yards), but the Germans were very clever about fixing them. It doesn't take any skill to fill a bomb crater, and it doesn't take hardly any skill to mend a rail. Bombing the rail lines only caused a few hours' delay, a day at most. Given the horribly inaccurate bombs of the day (it took a squadron of planes dropping hundreds of bombs to destroy a single target), it would have been impossible to destroy the rails altogether.
The Germans, as everyone knows, are organizational geniuses. Their wartime production kept humming along until the Allies started conquering Germany proper; a big part of their industrial prowess was dedicated to killing human beings. To say that we couldn't have stopped industrial processes such as tank production or oil refinement, but could have destroyed the killing process, is inaccurate.
In addition to Eric's post, bombing the actual death camps was entirely impractical. According to military historian James Kitchens, who had direct access to the USAF archives for his research, the camps were too far from the Allied lines and bomber bases to reach. When the bases in Italy were secured the B-24s would have had only enough fuel to make one pass over the targets, without any backup plan. Additionally, the bombing accuracy wasn't good enough to target the ovens and keep from hitting the barracks the prisoners were housed in. The result of such a raid would have been a major catastrophy for the Allied forces. The Nazis would have been able to hide the true nature of the camps targeted and the Allied would have lost too many planes.
The excellence of our military today has really spoiled us in terms of what we expect in a war.
Peace, all.
People today (for whatever reason) expected Pius XII to be a hero or martyr or both. He wasn't.
In reading a biography of Eleanor Roosevelt several years ago, I noted the rift with her husband over his decision to turn back the boat. Institutional anti-Semitism ran deep, even among Democrats of the day. The blame for the Holocaust can conceivably be spread very far, very thin, by using the current anti-Pius thinking. People under today's knee-jerk anti-anti-Semitism umbrella might do well to consider the whole perspective of history on this issue, then judge accordingly.
Appropos Pope Pius XII -- I just posted a picture of him with Grace Kelly and her husband Prince Ranier. Think of Grace Kelly as a Madonna/Princess Di-combo.
I don't think any American has any right to sneer at Pius XII--America turned away a ship of desperate Jewish refugees and sent them back...to their deaths. Only a few survived.
When Yad Vashem calls Pius XII a righteous gentile, they have a lot more credibility and authority than some communist playwright hack with an agenda and his intellectual midget minions.
Mark..those last two paragraphs say alot..it ought to be said over and over and over again!
Mark
PS..you should add the bit that the greatest share of the blame for the death camps was laid at the foot of the country which was completely overrun while the world looked the other way hoping to "stay out of it" and whoose occupants had guns to their heads throughout the war -- Poland. One in ten people in Poland were lost in the war. Thousands of Catholics who stood up against the Nazi's and their treatment of Jews were shot on the spot or sent to die. Meanwhile in the occupied terrorities of France where the French retained a certain autonomy, the folks at Vichy handed over the Jews of France. Only recently have they been called to task for this (1980's and 1990's).
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