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Warren Stupidity

(48,181 posts)
Sat Sep 19, 2015, 04:01 PM Sep 2015

Open the Vatican’s Holocaust-era archives


Pope Francis begins his much-anticipated visit to the United States this week with popularity ratings that are the envy of every U.S. politician. He also arrives with a well-deserved reputation as a reformer. During his more than two years as pope, he has supercharged a wide-ranging overhaul of the scandal-plagued Institute for the Works of Religion, or the Vatican Bank. Since its World War II creation, the bank had often served as an offshore haven for tax evaders and money launderers and frustrated six of Francis’s predecessors. Little wonder that public figures of all faiths are clamoring to share the spotlight with this pope. From a meeting with the president to an unprecedented address to a joint session of Congress, plenty of politicians hope to bask in the “Francis effect.”

Francis’s visit will be a missed opportunity, however, if America’s leaders and many presidential aspirants don’t push to resolve a long-standing impasse between the United States and the Vatican over the church’s steadfast refusal to open all its Holocaust-era archives.

Those sealed records may help settle debate about whether the wartime pope, Pius XII, could have done more to prevent the Holocaust. They could also resolve questions about the extent to which the Vatican did business with the Third Reich, particularly whether it invested in German and Italian insurance companies that earned outsize profits by escheating the life insurance policies of Jews sent to the death camps.


https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/open-the-vaticans-holocaust-era-archives/2015/09/17/f5c4ae5c-5a1c-11e5-8e9e-dce8a2a2a679_story.html
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Open the Vatican’s Holocaust-era archives (Original Post) Warren Stupidity Sep 2015 OP
Old News Cartoonist Sep 2015 #1
I remember when that pope died and was replaced by John. Even then his fascist era record was Warren Stupidity Sep 2015 #2
Really - Push to open its archives packman Sep 2015 #3
Understanding the Vatican During the Nazi Period struggle4progress Sep 2015 #4

Cartoonist

(7,297 posts)
1. Old News
Sat Sep 19, 2015, 04:10 PM
Sep 2015

We have jihadists at work right now. What difference does it make what the Church did last century?

That's the meme some posters are trying to fob off here today.

 

Warren Stupidity

(48,181 posts)
2. I remember when that pope died and was replaced by John. Even then his fascist era record was
Sat Sep 19, 2015, 04:14 PM
Sep 2015

a scandal. It was partly because of the disrepute of the Vatican at that time that an actual radical like John got into office.

 

packman

(16,296 posts)
3. Really - Push to open its archives
Sat Sep 19, 2015, 06:51 PM
Sep 2015

When we can't even open to the public those missing pages from the "official" 9/11 report. Let's make this a I'll show you mine if you show me yours visit.

struggle4progress

(118,032 posts)
4. Understanding the Vatican During the Nazi Period
Sun Sep 20, 2015, 12:00 AM
Sep 2015

by Michael Marrus

... Our understanding of Church policy now extends considerably beyond Hochuth's accusations and related charges of pro-German and antisemitic pressures at the Vatican. It is true that Pacelli had served many years as Papal Nuncio in Germany and feared mightily during the war that the defeat of the Nazis would lead to the triumph of Bolshevism in Europe. But Vatican documents do not indicate a guarded pro-Nazism or a supreme priority of opposition to the Soviet Union. Nor do they reveal a particular indifference to the fate of Jews, let alone hostility toward them. Rather, the Vatican's communications, along with other evidence, suggest a resolute commitment to its traditional policy of reserve and conciliation. The goal was to limit the global conflict where possible and above all to protect the influence and standing of the Church as an independent voice. Continually apprehensive of schisms within the Church, Pius strove to maintain the allegiance of Catholics in Germany, in Poland, and elsewhere. Fearful too of threats from the outside, the Pope dared not confront the Nazis or the Italian Fascists directly. Notably, the papacy maintained its reserve not only against Jewish appeals but in the face of others as well. The Holy See turned a deaf ear to anguished calls from Polish bishops to denounce the Nazis' atrocities in Poland; issued no explicit call to stop the so-called euthanasia campaign in the Reich; deeply offended many by receiving the Croatian dictator Ante Pavelic, whose men butchered an estimated 700,000 Orthodox Serbs; and refused to denounce Italian aggression against Greece. Beyond this, there is a widespread sense that, however misguided politically, Pius himself felt increasingly isolated, threatened, and verging on despair. With an exaggerated faith in the efficacy of his mediative diplomacy, Pius clung to the wreckage of his pre-war policy – "a kind of anxiously preserved virginity in the midst of torn souls and bodies," as one sympathetic observer puts it.

Individual churchmen of course reacted otherwise, and there is a long list of Catholic clergy who saw their Christian duty as requiring intervention on behalf of persecuted Jews. Often the deportation convoys galvanized priests to action. In some cases, as with the intervention of the apostolic delegate Giuseppe Burzio in Catholic Slovakia, such appeals may well have made a difference. In Bucharest, Nuncio Andreia Cassulo pleaded with the Rumanian government for humane treatment for the Jews and actually visited Jewish deportees in Transnistira. In Budapest Nuncio Angelo Rotta intervened repeatedly with Admiral Horthy on behalf of Hungarian Jews and may have helped secure papal intervention in the summer of 1944. Angelo Roncalli, the apostolic delegate in Turkey and the future Pope John XXIII, was among the most sensitive to the Jewish tragedy and most vigorous in rescue efforts despite his reflection, at the time, of traditional Catholic attitudes toward Jews. Elsewhere, on the other hand, church leaders replicated the posture of the Vatican itself – or even deferred with greater or lesser sympathy to those directing the machinery of destruction. Outstanding in this respect was the timid and pro-Fascist Cesare Orsenigo, the Nuncio in Berlin, who appeared wedded to the views of the German government. The Pope did not dictate policy on such matters to his subordinates and allowed them to go their own way. His timidity in this respect may be one of the most important charges against him ...


https://www.jewishvirtuallibrary.org/jsource/Holocaust/Marrus.html

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