Hitler's Pope Myth Started as Atheist Propaganda

Former Romanian intelligence leader says Pius XII victim of Soviet smear campaign

From CatholicCulture.org 

17 August 2012

Ion Mihai Pacepa, a former Romanian intelligence leader who defected to the United States, has coauthored a forthcoming book with Ronald Rychlak on the Soviet Union’s framing of Pope Pius XII as “Hitler’s pope.” James Woolsey, the former CIA director, has written the book’s introduction.

“The Kremlin’s attempt to frame Pius XII as Hitler’s Pope was rejected by that contemporary generation that had lived through the real history and knew who Pope Pius XII really was,” Pacepa said in an interview. “The Kremlin tried again in the 1960s, with the next generation, which had not lived through that history and did not know better. This time it worked.”

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Additional information:

Operation Seat 12  (Wikipedia)

Ion Mihai Pacepa  (Wikipedia)

Hitler, Nazis and the Catholic Church

Some memorable quotes by Jews during and after World War II regarding the Nazis and the Catholic Church

Only the Church stood squarely across the path of Hitler's campaign for suppressing truth. I had never any special interest in the Church before, but now I feel a great affection and admiration because the Church alone has had the courage and persistence to stand for intellectual truth and moral freedom.

Albert Einstein. Quoted in Time Magazine, December 23, 1940.

We share in the grief of humanity [at the death of Pius XII]…. When fearful martyrdom came to our people in the decade of Nazi terror, the voice of the pope was raised for the victims. The life of our times was enriched by a voice speaking out on the great moral truths above the tumult of daily conflict. We mourn a great servant of peace.

Golda Meir (Former Israeli Prime Minister)

No keener rebuke has come to Nazism than from Pope Pius XI and his successor, Pope Pius XII.

Rabbi Louis Finkelstein, chancellor, Jewish Theological Seminary of America

In the most difficult hours of which we Jews of Romania have passed through, the generous assistance of the Holy See…was decisive and salutary. It is not easy for us to find the right words to express the warmth and consolation we experienced because of the concern of the supreme pontiff, who offered a large sum to relieve the sufferings of deported Jews…. The Jews of Romania will never forget these facts of historic importance.

Rabbi Alexander Safran, chief rabbi of Romania

The people of Israel will never forget what His Holiness and his illustrious delegates, inspired by the eternal principles of religion, which form the very foundation of true civilization, are doing for our unfortunate brothers and sisters in the most tragic hour of our history, which is living proof of Divine Providence in this world.

Rabbi Isaac Herzog, chief rabbi of Israel

I told [Pope Pius XII] that my first duty was to thank him, and through him the Catholic Church, on behalf of the Jewish public for all they had done in the various countries to rescue Jews…. We are deeply grateful to the Catholic Church.

Moshe Sharett (who later became Israel’s first foreign minister and second prime minister)

Some memorable quotes from the New York Times (1935 - 1944) regarding the animosity felt between the Catholic Church and the Nazis.

• "NAZIS WARNED IN LOURDES": reporting the protest in 1935 of then Cardinal Pacelli (later Pope Pius XII) against "superstitions of race and blood." When Pacelli was elected Pope on March 2, 1939, the Times reported "nearly general applause around the world," except in Germany.

• "POPE CONDEMNS DICTATORS, TREATY VIOLATORS, RACISM": three-column front-page headline reporting the Pope’s first encyclical, October 28, 1939.

• "VATICAN DENOUNCES ATROCITIES IN POLAND; GERMANS CALLED EVEN WORSE THAN RUSSIANS" (January 23, 1940).

• "JEWS’ RIGHTS DEFENDED": reporting the Pope’s "burning words to [Nazi Foreign Minister] Ribbentrop in defense of the Jews in Germany and Poland" (March 14, 1940).

• "Pius XII is a lonely voice in the silence and darkness enveloping Europe this Christmas. . . . The Pope put himself squarely against Nazism" (December 25, 1941).

• "The papacy is throwing the whole weight of its publicizing facilities into an exposé" of Nazi atrocities. (through Vatican radio): January 24, 1942.

• "POPE IS SAID TO PLEAD FOR JEWS LISTED FOR REMOVAL FROM FRANCE" (August 6, 1942). And on August 27: "VICHY SEIZES JEWS; POPE PIUS IGNORED."

• "This Christmas [1942] more than ever [the Pope] is a lonely voice crying out of the silence of a continent": editorial on the Pope’s reference to "the hundreds of thousands who, . . . solely because of their nation or race, have been condemned to death or progressive extinction."

• On August 21, 1944, Pulitzer Prize laureate Anne O’Hare McCormick wrote in the Times that the Pope had given "first priority" to saving Jews.

• "Under the Pope’s direction the Holy See did an exemplary job of sheltering and championing the victims of the Nazi-Fascist regime. . . . None [in Rome] doubts that the general feeling of the Roman Curia was anti-Fascist and very strongly anti-Nazi": Times reporter Herbert L. Matthews, October 15, 1944.

Did Pope Pius XII Help the Jews? Yes of course.

'Hitler's Pope' saved thousands of Jewish lives - Telegraph

By Simon Caldwell - 06 Jul 2010

Pope Pius, who was labelled “Hitler’s Pope” because of his silence during the Holocaust, may have arranged the exodus of about 200,000 Jews from Germany just three weeks after Kristallnacht, when thousands of Jews were rounded up and sent to concentration camps.

The claim was made by Dr Michael Hesemann, a German historian carrying out research in the Vatican archives for the Pave the Way Foundation, a US-based inter-faith group.

He said that Cardinal Eugenio Pacelli – the future Pius XII – wrote to Catholic archbishops around the world to urge them to apply for visas for “non-Aryan Catholics” and Jewish converts to Christianity who wanted to leave Germany.

Continue reading ‘Hitler's Pope’ saved thousands of Jewish lives – Telegraph

___________________________

The term ‘Hitler’s Pope’ comes from John Cornwell’s anti-Pope Pius XII book ‘Hitler’s Pope’ published in 1999. At the time certain media outlets (ABC) heavily promoted the book. Since then much of Cornwell’s book has been debunked. Ken Woodward, writing in Newsweek, stated that Hitler's Pope has "errors of fact and ignorance of context [that] appear on almost every page.

On a positive note, Cornwell has now changed his position on Pope Pius XII. In his book The Pontiff in Winter (2004), p. 193, Cornwell says:

“ I would now argue, in the light of the debates and evidence following 'Hitler's Pope', that Pius XII had so little scope of action that it is impossible to judge the motives for his silence during the war, while Rome was under the heel of Mussolini and later occupied by the Germans.”

However it has been asked that given Cornwell has changed his position on Pope Pius XII why has he not withdrawn his book, or at least altered its hateful title?

Of course there’s plenty of money to be made in promoting lies and hate against the Catholic Church just ask Richard Dawkins and Christopher Hitchens.

Image courtesy of Ambrosius007

Holocaust Denial, Lifting of Excommunication, and the Media gets it Wrong Again.

From Pave the Way -

On the commemoration of the 50th anniversary of the Second Vatican Council Pope Benedict XVI used this occasion to lift the ban of excommunication, which was generated when  Archbishop Lefebvre ordained four Bishops in direct violation to a papal order not to do so issued by Pope John Paul II. It was this act of defiance against the Papal order that generated the excommunication. After the announcement of the lifting of the ban was made on January 21, 2009  a video interview of one of the Bishops, Richard Williamson, surfaced where he quite plainly denied the holocaust impact on the Jewish people and stated that not one Jew perished in any gas chamber. This Holocaust denial set off a firestorm of protests and negative remarks, which created a temporary rift in Jewish Catholic relations.

Unlike  many of the interreligious organizations Pave the Way Foundation did not issue a protest or a press release of condemnation but instead set out to find out the truth of this action.

Continue reading at Pave the Way Foundation

The Righteous Gentile – Pope Pius XII

Thanks to Gerard Charles Wilson.

Is the Black Legend at last dissolving?

Many Catholics, clerical and lay, have worked tirelessly for years to defeat the Black Legend. The Black Legend is the story that Pope Pius XII, regarded as a living saint in the 1950s, did little or nothing to save the Jews from Nazi murder. The legend grew from The Deputy a play by a German author in 1963 and thereafter propagated enthusiastically through the decades in all manner of books, newspaper and magazine articles and television programs. One of the most reprehensible books that developed the Pius XII anti-Semite and Nazi complicity theme was Hitler's Pope, by a self-proclaimed Catholic, John Cornwell.

Despite the work done to clear Pius XII's name, it seemed to many of us that little headway was being made to defeat what we knew to be the greatest calumny of the twentieth century. We knew that not only was Pius XII innocent of the charges, but that he was the very opposite both in deed and belief. Anti-Semitism and Nazism were abhorrent to him, and he did all that was in his power to save as many Jews from Hitler's extermination plans as he could.

But there has been a change, a change so great that it now looks like the Black Legend is dissolving. If it is, it is happening in no small part due to the efforts of an American Jew, Gary Krupp, of the Path the Way Foundation (http://www.ptwf.org/index.htm).

In a number of interviews and written pieces, Gary Krupp says that he 'grew up hating Pius XII, believing him to be an anti-Semite and a Nazi collaborator.' Through a 'providential' set of circumstances, related in an article in Galus Australis (Jewish Knight defends Pope XII), he became exposed to documents and oral histories that told a very different story. He said, 'my eyes were opened to a reality that was literally shocking. My emotions went from shock to anger. We discovered that we have been deceived by those whom we trusted for historical accuracy – that is, the scholars and historians.'

It was the beginning of a tenacious and feverish search for supporting evidence and documentation. In the four years since, he has uncovered literally thousands of documents demonstrating the calumny of the Black Legend, for which there is increasing evidence that the Soviet KGB was its originator.

I want to sincerely thank and pay tribute to Gary Krupp and the Pave the Way Foundation for the work they have done and are doing in undoing a terrible injustice. Immediately below are links to an interview with Gary Krupp and an eye-opening power point display which I strongly urge the reader to follow.

Gary Krupp interview on EWTN on the research of Pope Pius XII

Is Pope Pius XII a Righteous Gentile or Hitler's Pope? Watch this 56 minute narrated Power Point then you decide

More at GerardCharlesWilson.com

Pius XII image courtesy of Wikimedia Commons.

Galus Australis » Jewish Knight Defends Pius XII

There are perhaps three million Jews who are alive today because of Pius XII's secret but direct intervention, writes Gary Krupp, a Jewish Papal Knight.
Continue reading at Galus Australis