Nauseating...

It's been a long time since I have seen this much revisionist history being thrown around by the mainstream media... and it is making me physically ill more and more every day.

With the news that Benedict XVI was elevating Popes John Paul II and Pius XII to the status of "Venerable", the press is full of stories about the silence or outright cooperation that the Catholic Church was supposed to have practiced between 1940 and 1945 in regards to the Nazi Holocaust.

We'll pass on examining the record of John Paul II... I can't imagine there is anyone capable of reading this blog that doesn't realize the risks that Karol Wojtyla took to practice his faith and moral understanding during the Nazi occupation of Poland and the subsequent years of Communist repression... or his efforts as Pope to end that repression in all of Eastern Europe.

Pius XII, however, continues to be condemned as a man that did nothing to stop the killing of Jews and others by the millions across occupied Europe. On what basis do those that continue this falsehood use to perpetuate this lie? How is it that this sort of revisionism and outright falsification of fact is allowed to continue on an almost daily basis?

In 1958, at the death of Pius XII, Israeli Prime Minister Golda Meir (arguably the toughest PM Israel has ever had and dedicated to Nazi-hunting to her dying day) officially recognized Pius XII for as having been personally responsible for saving the lives of 7,800 Jews in Italy and Austria by issuing them Vatican passports signed in his own hand so they could "legally" immigrate to Allied and neutral nations (US, Great Britain, Ireland and Canada... all countries that were DENYING Jews immigrant status if they came from Germany, Italy or Spain). I'm having trouble imagining a more weighty acknowledgement of efforts made than that...

Pius received official recognition for his efforts of relief and humanitarianism towards the Jews from the Chief Rabbis of Jerusalem, Bucharest, Krakow (that from a man already inside Auschwitz!) and Rome. In fact, the Chief Rabbi of Rome was so touched by the efforts of Pius XII that he converted to Catholicism and took Pius' given name as his Christian name (Eugenio). Does anyone think THAT particular Jew questioned Pius XII in his ethical and moral standing, or in the position he took in regards to Jewish persecutions? Please...

In 1944, he convinced the Prince Regent of the Kingdom of Hungary (a member of the Axis and a personal acquaintance of Hitler's) Admiral Miklos Horthy, to NOT send 800,000 Hungarian Jews to the concentration camps in Germany and Poland as ordered by Hitler. Without Pius' intervention, does anyone wonder what would have happened to those 800,000 Hungarians... with nearly a year left in the war to go? Does THAT sound like complicity in the genocide of the Jews of Europe?

Pius XII did ask that regional bishops and archbishops refrain from public comment on the treatment of Jews AFTER the Archbishop of Utrecht (Belgium) made a public denouncement of Nazi policies regarding Jews that resulted in the immediate deportation and subsequent extermination of 7,900 Jews from Belgium, including the now famous (and Jewish) St. Edith Stein. I DO NOT see this as complicity, however... not when you are simply asking that public statements about policies that CANNOT BE CHANGED by those making the statements be held in check to protect innocent lives (like the 7,900 Belgians that died because of the political posturing one Archbishop chose to make). THAT constitutes criminal silence in the face of genocide? Really?

The most famous Jew of the age, Albert Einstein, said this about Pius and the Church during the war: "Only the Catholic Church protested against the Hitlerian onslaught on liberty. Up till then I had not been interested in the Church, but today I feel a great admiration for the Church, which alone has had the courage to struggle for spiritual truth and moral liberty." When he said this, Einstein was already an American, and had already given so much to the American and Allied war effort... but he DID NOT include FDR or Churchill in his quote, did he?

No, he did not.