Of
\nlate it’s been a tough time for those working to prevent genocide.
\nDarfur has been off the world’s radar screen for months. Then there’s
\nthe poor Armenians. It wasn’t enough that 1.5 million were murdered in
\na genocide perpetrated by the Ottomon Turks during the First World War.
\nTurns out that for the sake of appeasing Turkey and its increasingly
\nmilitant Islamist Prime Minister, Recep Tayyip Erdogan, President Obama
\nis prepared to rewrite history and deny there was ever a genocide in
\nthe first place. Breaking his campaign promise of January, 2008, where
\nhe said that he “stood with the Armenian American community in calling
\nfor Turkey’s acknowledgement of the Armenian Genocide” and that “as
\nPresident I will recognize the Armenian Genocide [which is] not an
\nallegation, a personal opinion, or a point of view, but rather a widely
\ndocumented fact supported by an overwhelming body of historical
\nevidence,” President Obama changed his tune last week. After the House
\nForeign Affairs Committee approved a resolution that declares the 1915
\nmass killings of Armenians in the Ottoman Empire as genocide, the Obama
\nAdministration urged the committee not to pass the measure. Secretary
\nof State Hillary Clinton has vowed to stop the resolution where it
\nstands for fear of angering Turkey.<\/p>\n
\n<\/p>\n
Then there was the curious
\nstory in the New York Times about Gary Krupp. A Jewish medical
\nmachinery salesman from Long Island who has no formal training in
\nhistory but who has emerged as “the Vatican’s most outspoken Jewish
\nally in a heated debate at the crux of tensions between Roman Catholic
\nand Jewish leaders and historians: whether Pope Pius XII, the pontiff
\nduring World War II, did as much as he could have to save Jews from the
\nHolocaust.” Having already been knighted by John Paul II for medical
\nservices to the Church, Krupp has now set up a foundation whose purpose
\nit is to whitewash the sins of the man know to the world as ‘Hitler’s
\nPope.’ The Times’ article quoted leading Vatican officials as saying
\nthat if not for Krupp it would be extremely difficult for the Church to
\nmove forward with its plans to declare Pius XII a saint.<\/p>\n
Now, it’s not difficult to understand why the Catholic Church would
\nseek a court Jew to help them clean up Pius. And it’s not particularly
\ndifficult to understand why a Jewish businessman, ignorant of history,
\nwould be willing to perform the role and take pictures with Pope
\nBenedict at Castel Gandolfo. What is perplexing is how the mighty
\nCatholic Church would have to fall back on a Long Island nobody to help
\nthem canonize a man who served as Pope for almost twenty years.<\/p>\n
Could it be desperation?<\/p>\n
Pius was, of course, the man who, as Cardinal Secretary of State,
\nbecame the first statesman, in 1933, to sign an agreement with the man
\nhe called “the illustrious Hitler,” sending him a letter expressing his
\nconfidence in his leadership. His concordat with Hitler forced the
\nCatholic Centre Party into dissolution, not only removing the last
\nobstacle to Hitler’s goal of absolute power in Germany but also
\ndestroying any further resistance by Germany’s Catholic bishops to the
\nNazis.<\/p>\n
He was the Pope who famously refused, amid unmistakable evidence of
\nthousands of Jews being shipped to slaughter in Nazi concentration
\ncamps, to ever speak out against the holocaust. This followed Pius’
\nsuccessful efforts to prevent the publication of an encyclical
\ncommissioned by his dying predecessor to condemn Nazi anti-Semitism.
\nThis is also the Pope who sent Hitler birthday greetings every single
\nyear and who refused to excommunicate Hitler or any other top Nazis who
\nwere on official Catholic rolls (to give this context, the singer
\nSinead O’Connor was excommunicated). He ignored the pleas of President
\nRoosevelt and Winston Churchill to denounce the Nazis. He later refused
\nto endorse a joint declaration by Britain, U.S and Russia condemning
\nmass murder of Europe’s Jews, claiming that he simply could not condemn
\n“particular” atrocities. The most he ever did was a single
\npronouncement during the war on the murder “of hundreds of thousands.”
\nBy then, of course, there were millions, and he did not mention Hitler,
\nNazi Germany, or the Jews in the statement. Most infamously, he was
\nsilent when the Germans rounded up Rome’s Jews in October 1944 for
\nslaughter. They were being processed for extermination in a military
\nschool a few hundred yards from his window in St. Peter’s. An Italian
\nprincess, Enza Pignatelli, forced her way into the Pope’s study and
\nwarned him about the imminent assault on the city’s Jewish citizens.
\n“You must act immediately,” she cried. “The Germans are arresting the
\nJews and taking them away. Only you can stop them.” The Pope assured
\nher, “I will do all I can.” He made no protest and nearly all were
\nlater gassed in Auschwitz. Curiously, amid the Pope’s inability to find
\nhis voice to condemn the extermination of European Jewry, when the
\nCatholic archbishop of Berlin issued a statement mourning Hitler’s
\ndeath, the Pope did not reprimand him.<\/p>\n
Author John Cornwell unearths letters from Pius’ early career in
\nGermany which reveals a stubborn, even distasteful disposition toward
\nJews. While Papal nuncio in Germany, Pius refused to perform favors for
\nthe Jewish community on the flimsiest of grounds and describes the
\nMunich chapter of the German Communist Party as being filthy and full
\nof Jews. Pius refers derisively to “a group of young women, of dubious
\nappearance, Jews like all the rest of them” and he describes Communist
\nleader Max Levien as a Jew, “pale, dirty, with drugged eyes, hoarse
\nvoice, vulgar, repulsive…” Perhaps this would explain why, in one of
\nthe greatest acts of mass-kidnapping in history, Pius, in 1946,
\ninstructed the French Church to refuse return of entire classes of
\nJewish children who were entrusted to the Church for safekeeping during
\nthe holocaust if they had already been baptized.<\/p>\n
Now, if, as the Church maintains, Pius is being falsely maligned by
\nhis critics as a pious fraud and moral coward who disgraced a great
\nworld religion, then why doesn’t the Vatican fix the error by simply
\nopening their archives on his pontificate that would reveal Pius’s
\ncorrespondence and actions during the War? It has thusfar released a
\nvery select and carefully scrubbed collection of wartime documents that
\nreveal next to nothing about the Church’s interactions with the Third
\nReich.<\/p>\n
There is a comical element to this debate, which would be more
\nhumorous if it weren’t so tragic. It involves Pius’ defenders arguing
\nthat Pius purposefully refrained from condemning the holocaust because
\nthe Jews would have fared even worse had the Pope spoken out.<\/p>\n
Worse than the holocaust? Now that’s funny.<\/p>\n