Leave it to the web site The Daily Beast to publish a
lie-filled
attack on the Catholic Church the day before Christmas. The author of
the hate-filled piece is
James Carroll, one of the country's foremost
haters of the Catholic Church. He an anti-Catholic zealot.
Period. (Is it any surprise that he also writes for the Boston Globe?)
Carroll's piece takes issue with
Pope Benedict's decision earlier this week to declare World War
II-era Pope Pius XII "venerable." In the Catholic Church, this
declaration is a step toward sainthood.
In his article, entitled "The Pope's Big Holocaust Lie," Carroll
repeats several falsehoods about the Catholic Church and the actions of
Pope Pius XII during World War II and the Holocaust.
Among Carroll's lies:
1. "The case against Pius XII is well established:
He knew early on of Hitler’s plan for the Final Solution of the 'Jewish
problem,' and never raised his voice against it."
Wrong. Carroll's falsehood is flat-out debunked in many places
(see my list below), including the book
The Myth of Hitler's Pope
by Rabbi David Dalin. Even before he was pontiff, Pius XII, as
Cardinal Pacelli, branded the Nazis as "false prophets with the pride of
Lucifer" (Dalin, p. 65).
Pius' "pro-Jewish" policies angered the Nazis so much that Hitler
actually planned to kidnap and imprison the pontiff. Records from a July 1943
meeting reveal that Hitler openly discussed invading the Vatican. After
the war, Nazi General Karl Otto Wolff testified that he had received
orders to "occupy as soon as possible the Vatican and Vatican City."
(Wolff talked Hitler out of the plan in December 1943.) (Dalin, p. 77)
Meanwhile, the memoirs of Adolf Eichmann detail that the Vatican
"vigorously protested the arrest of Jews, requesting the interruption of
such action" (Dalin, p. 84).
And in a December 25, 1941, editorial, the New York Times wrote,
The voice of Pius XII is a lonely voice in the silence and
darkness enveloping Europe this Christmas... he is about the
only ruler left on the Continent of Europe who dares to raise his
voice at all... the Pope put himself squarely against Hitlerism...
he left no doubt that the Nazi aims are also irreconcilable with his
own conception of a Christian peace.
Additionally, a August 6, 1942, headline in the Times read, "Pope is Said to
Plead for Jews Listed for Removal from France."
In his book, Three Popes and the Jews, Israeli diplomat and scholar
Pinchas Lapide has asserted, "The Catholic Church under the
pontificate of Pius XII was instrumental in saving lives of as many as
860,000 Jews from certain death at Nazi hands." Lapide adds that this
"figure far exceeds those saved by all other Churches and rescue
organizations combined."
Jewish historian and biographer Sir Martin Gilbert has documented
that Pope Pius was one of the first to publicly condemn Nazi atrocities
and speak out on behalf of Europe's Jews. Gilbert has also asserted,
"Hundreds of thousands of Jews were saved by the Catholic Church, under
the leadership and support of Pope Pius XII" (Dalin, pp. 13-14).
The truth is that Pius XII spoke out several times against the Nazi
regime. Carroll is lying. (For more specific examples, see the sources
I've listed below.)
2. "[I]n October 1943, more than a thousand Jews
were rounded up in the Roman Ghetto at the foot of Vatican hill, within
sight of the pope’s windows, and still [Pope Pius XII] did nothing. That
is a fact. Those Jews died in Auschwitz."
The truth is that Pius took immediate and decisive action
as soon as he heard of the roundup. According to the research from Rabbi
Dalin, Pius personally protested to Germany's ambassador Ernst von
Weizsacker and demanded that the Nazis stop the arrests. Pius himself
gave sanctuary within the Vatican to hundreds of homeless Jews. He also
asked that convents and churches throughout Italy shelter Jews.
Michael Tagliacozzo, "the foremost survivor on the October 1943 Nazi
roundup of Rome's Jews" and "a survivor of the raid himself, " said
Pius' actions helped rescue 80 percent of Rome's Jews. Said Tagliacozzo,
"Pope Pacelli was the only one who intervened to impede the
deportation of Jews on October 16, 1943, and he did very much to
hide and save thousands of us." (Dalin, p. 83)
And in the June 21, 2009, edition of Carroll's own newspaper, the
Boston Globe,
Mordechay Lewy, Israel's ambassador to the Holy See, is quoted,
"It is wrong to look for any affinity between [Pius] and the Nazis.
It is also wrong to say that he didn’t save Jews. Everybody who knows
the history of those who were saved among Roman Jewry knows that they
hid in the church."
James Carroll lies again.
Learn the truth:
In addition to falsely characterizing Catholic doctrine, Carroll
additionally smears Pope Benedict by grossly misrepresenting the
pontiff's
2006 address at Auschwitz.
The bottom line: Carroll is exploiting the Holocaust for his own
angry agenda. And this fact has been noted before:
"The anti-papal polemics of ex-seminarians like Garry Wills
and John Cornwell (author of Hitler's Pope), of ex-priests like
James Carroll, and of other lapsed or angry liberal Catholics
exploit the tragedy of the Jewish people during the Holocaust to
foster their own political agenda of forcing changes on the
Catholic Church today. This hijacking of the Holocaust must be
repudiated." (Dalin, pp. 2-3)
There you have it.