Not Hitler’s Pope What history taught Pius XII about resisting tyrants. What makes this event so significant is that it constitutes the starting point for bitter accusations regarding the Catholic Church. Ever since the appearance of Rolf Hochhuth. But for the last half century, Hochhuth. That move triggered new rounds of recrimination about the Vatican. The wall text criticizing him for not speaking out against Nazi treatment of the Jews has been retitled from . Calling the Christmas address . But it was formulated and negotiated by his close aide, the papal secretary of state, Cardinal Eugenio Maria Giuseppi Pacelli, who would succeed him as Pope Pius XII. Regulating relations between the Vatican and various nations, concordats in no way amount to official endorsement of a regime. Nonetheless, popular opinion has typically treated them as such. In the aftermath of the Russian Revolution and of the breakup of the Austro- Hungarian Empire after World War I, the Vatican used concordats to safeguard the Church. Pius XI and Cardinal Pacelli devoted their energies to protecting the confessional status of the Catholic Church in education and guaranteeing the independence of organizations such as Catholic Youth. In Germany, no earlier concordat existed. Before German unification under Bismarck in 1. Vatican had negotiated treaties with several of the German states, including Bavaria and Prussia, yet no formal agreement with either Wilhelmine or Weimar Germany followed. Adolf Hitler was born on 20 April 1889 in Braunau am Inn, a town in Austria-Hungary (in present-day Austria), close to the border with the German Empire. He was one of six children born to Alois Hitler and Klara P Adolf Hitler chats with his flying aces from Luftwaffe after an awards ceremony (Eichenlaub and Schwertern) at Berghof Obersalzberg on April 1944. All these Luftwaffe officers aces received their Knight’s Cross of the Iron. Philologos Religious Online Books Philologos.org. THE RAINBOW SWASTIKA A REPORT TO THE JEWISH PEOPLE ABOUT NEW AGE ANTISEMITISM by Hannah Newman -- [email protected] 'Creation is not finished. The Munich Agreement was a settlement permitting Nazi Germany's annexation of portions of Czechoslovakia along the country's borders mainly inhabited by German speakers, for which a new territorial designation 'Sudetenland. Hannah Arendt’s 1963 report from the trial of Adolf Eichmann. Because of this lack and fears for the German Church after Hitler came to power in January 1. Pius XI and Cardinal Pacelli sought to normalize relations with Berlin. They worried that the Nazis might turn their secular ideology into a substitute religion that would displace Christianity and become the equivalent of a German national church. They also understood that many German Catholics viewed themselves as a persecuted minority ever since Bismarck. A deal with the new German state would demonstrate the patriotism of German Catholicism. Already by the mid- 1. Vatican recognized the blasphemous evil of Nazism: the worship of the state, the deification of Hitler, the atheistic secularism of the Nazi ideology. But Pius XI and Pacelli felt any condemnation of the movement would rebound against the Church. One option for dealing with Nazism was off- limits. According to Oxford University historian Diarmaid Mac. Culloch, the leading British scholar of the Protestant Reformation and Catholic Counter- Reformation, the use of a papal bull excommunicating a secular ruler was rejected because of the Church. In The Reformation: A History, Mac. Culloch argues that the 1. Queen Elizabeth I of England . As Mac. Culloch notes, . On the eve of World War II, Father John Oesterreicher, a Catholic convert of Jewish descent born in Moravia, and Karl Thieme, a German Catholic, implored the Vatican to release Catholic German soldiers from their oaths of loyalty to Hitler on the grounds that he was about to launch an unjust war. Writing in April 1. Journal of Modern History, Vol. LATE IN 1933, several months after the establishment of the National Socialist regime, a book appeared. By the time he had become Germany’s supreme leader Adolf Hitler was married, but Eva Braun would never take Geli’s place in his heart. On a table beside the body was a letter to a girlfriend, ending in the middle of the. Hitler in Argentina : Who Said that Adolf Hitler did not die in the F? CLICK HERE to learn the truth Where is the body? If Stalin would have had Hitler's body, it would have been on display in the Kremlin wall. Bibliography: endnotes : Introduction. This document is a supplement to The psychology and development of Adolph Hitler Schicklgruber. As with the main document, my interest is an analysis of Hitler’s state of mind. Osterreicher argued that Catholics are . And just what Pius XII feared took place in Holland in July 1. Without informing the Vatican, the cardinal of Utrecht issued a pastoral letter condemning the persecution of Dutch Jews. The Nazis responded by arresting all baptized Dutch Jews, including the philosopher- nun Edith Stein, and sent them to extermination camps. Fast- forward to a scene decades later and a continent away. In The Jesuit, the authorized biography of Bergoglio written by Argentinian journalist Sergio Rubin, Bergoglio revealed that he had hidden people on church property to evade the dragnet. He even once slipped his identity papers to a dissident who resembled him, thereby allowing the man to flee the country. But he never openly confronted, let alone condemned, a regime that was torturing, kidnapping, and murdering thousands of . If Pius XII had spoken out more forcefully, his statements might well have endangered Italian Jews in hiding who were secretly sheltered in the Vatican. Bergoglio harbored similar anxieties about Argentines on the run from the junta. In his groundbreaking study Britain and the Vatican during the Second World War, Owen Chadwick, dean of historians of Vatican- German relations during the Nazi era (and a non- Catholic), expressed the Papal strategy as follows: History is long, tyrants are short. They rise, and kill people and suppress monasteries, and close churches. But protest will change nothing; and soon the tyrants come to a bad end, and the Church shakes itself after the persecution . For we have faith, and know that our day will come. This view was not just the Vatican. In 1. 92. 5 the Soviet foreign minister, Georgy Chicherin, a friend of the future pope since Pacelli. If Rome did not exist, we would be able to deal with all the various branches of Christianity. They would capitulate before us. Without Rome, religion would die. They believed that the time to deal with Hitler was when the Third Reich was not yet firmly established: just as Mussolini had needed the endorsement of the Church in Italy to secure his position, so they believed would Hitler in Germany, which was still nominally led by President Paul von Hindenberg. This was a serious misreading of the German situation and an equally serious misjudgment of Hitler. The Vatican. Cardinal Pacelli had shared this view ever since his stint as Germany. Pacelli believed German and Italian fascism could function as an effective bulwark against Marxism- Leninism. Most European democracies harbored similar views about the choice between fascism and communism. Hitler ingeniously exploited this belief leading up to World War II: the appeasement policies of various European governments owed much to a perception of Hitler. The bombshell announcement of the Nazi- Soviet Pact in August 1. A lapsed Catholic who regarded all branches of Christianity as degenerate offspring of Judaism, Hitler nonetheless saw a treaty with the Vatican as a title to moral legitimacy and as a diplomatic coup, an act of recognition by the most influential nonpolitical institution in the world. So in the spring of 1. Privately, he crafted his plan for eliminating all domestic enemies, whereby neutralizing the Catholic Church in Germany would represent a valuable opening move. The Holy See realized that the Third Reich was an aggressive, power- mad regime. Cardinal Pacelli told Ivone Kirkpatrick, British charge d. Kirkpatrick informed the British Foreign Office that Pacelli . Within two weeks of official meetings, the agreement was finalized. In theory it granted much that the Vatican sought: guaranteed independence of the Catholic schools, firm protection for the Catholic press, financial support for Catholic clergy, and state recognition of the rights of special Church institutions such as the Catholic Youth organizations. By early 1. 93. 4, the freedom of the Catholic press was infringed, Catholic schools were closed, and in the next two years the Catholic Youth organizations were absorbed into the Hitler Youth movement. Protests from German bishops and the Vatican alike were ignored by the Nazi government. In light of these treaty violations, Pacelli determined that he had grounds to act. In 1. 93. 7, after consultations with the German bishops, Pacelli drafted a sharply worded papal encyclical. Putting aside his preferred diplomatic approach, he affirmed that he now had no illusions about the Nazis, who were . He spoke fluent German, and the encyclical was published in German. Quite clearly, it was designed to send a message, and the Nazis took it as an insult. Mit Brenneder Sorge was drawn up in Rome, smuggled into Germany by couriers to avoid confiscation, and issued in March 1. Palm Sunday. It was read from every Catholic pulpit in Germany. The encyclical represented the most blistering indictment of Nazism by any government or major institution before World War II. While the encyclical specifically skewered Nazi Germany for breaking the concordat, the document also attacked the Nazi doctrines of racism and paganism. Pacelli used strong language, with Hitler himself charged with . Hitler suppressed the Catholic press, confiscated all copies of the encyclical, and forbade German newspapers to print or report it. The German ambassador to the Vatican, Diego Von Bergen, lodged a formal protest against what he called an unacceptable interference in German domestic affairs. Speaking for the Pope, Cardinal Pacelli dismissed the protest and reaffirmed every accusation leveled in Mit Brennender Sorge. Relations between the Vatican and the Reich deteriorated, as the Vatican watched with dismay the dramatic events of 1. Anschluss with Austria in March, the Munich agreement to carve the Sudetenland from Czechoslovakia in October, and the terror of Kristallnacht in November, when the Nazis unleashed the fury of the mob against the Jewish community in Germany. With war on the horizon, Cardinal Pacelli and Pius XI vainly issued a series of diplomatic protests. After the Munich pact, the Vatican announced, . Yet it is only fair to ask: who spoke louder at the time? In the mid- 1. 93. European powers counseled caution in the hope that Hitler would prove himself a moderate statesman. Even when the regime showed its true face to the world in 1. After the Munich pact, Western statesmen voiced support for appeasement; President Roosevelt sent Prime Minister Chamberlain a simple congratulation for the agreement: . Even the otherwise perspicacious Winston Churchill admired Hitler. The press organs on the left, particularly the Marxist left, condemned the Third Reich unequivocally. In the U. S., liberal Catholic magazines such as America and Commonweal also criticized Hitler during the early and mid- 1. Vatican. Nonetheless, to hold the Vatican and Pius XII guilty of inaction regarding Nazism, when they did speak out after 1. One may contend that a clear condemnation of National Socialism was part of the church.
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