The Pius Wars - Round II

The reviewer of "Did Pius XII Help the Jews" responded to my comment:

Again, I hesitate to spend too much time on this unfortunate time in Catholic life. Why don't people write more about the great Catholics, famous and unknown, the priests who spend time helping the homeless, church members who help the poor and handicapped, nuns toiling in obscurity helping the aged with the only thanks that they are doing something that is good and honorable. Write about Catholic opposition to slavery and its horrors. But no you chose to again discuss Pius and the murder of Jews and others, women, children, the medical experimentation, torture, and stacking of dead bodies.


Agreed that Pope Pius provided substantial help to the Jews in Rome, which negates the argument that he wished to help Nazis. Had his legacy with others been equal, we can agree that we would be remembering his courage. Instead, his followers and other Christians help imprison, torture, and murder so many, in so many cruel ways, mwomen and children included. How about Poland. What help did he provide.

You quoted a passage Mit Brennender Sorge, which said in part:

"Whoever exalts race, or the people, or the State, or a particular form of State, or the depositories of power, or any other fundamental value of the human community - however necessary and honorable be their function in worldly things - whoever raises these notions above their standard value,...

Not much of a condemnation to me. "However necessary and honorable", the torture of defense persons, the murder of children, medical experiments, these are things that are "necessary and honorable." Why would the Nazis murderers honorable and why were the horrors necessary. Sadly Pius followers played a sad role in murder. This type of statements cannot be seen as a condemnation to deter.

Why not write. No German should murder children. No German should murder women. Do not kill civilians. Even if one accepts the German war machine, there are standards of morality that were freely violated.

My counter-response:

My point in writing what I did was to suggest to readers that there is a deeper historical context to understand Pius XII than was suggested by the two dimensional "if I had been there, I would have done it right" perspective of Bobby's review. For example, I questioned Bobby's claim that "Nazis and Christians saw no Inconsistency Between Christian Teachings, and Nazi teachings..." by quoting from Mit Brennender Sorge which showed taught the Catholic doctrine that "Whoever exalts race...and divinizes them to an idolatrous level, distorts and perverts an order of the world planned and created by God; he is far from the true faith in God and from the concept of life which that faith upholds. "


Since the Nazis "exalted race" and "divinized race to an idolatrous" level, the fair conclusion is that the future Pius XII - the author of Mit Brennendor Sorge - was teaching that Nazism was inconsistent with Catholicism, notwithstanding whatever broad brush Bobby and a conventional wisdom sadly ignorant of the actual history might choose to publish.

Bobby's response is to take exception to the phrase "However necessary and honorable" as if it applied to the barbaric practices that the Nazi regime practiced, as opposed to what the relevant sentence is talking about, to wit "any other fundamental value of the human community." It is a sad - but apparently too deep for a lot of people to understand - fact that human nature has the ability to take any fundamental value - freedom, democracy, equality - and turn it into an idol that distorts it into something that can dehumanize those who idolize it.

I asked whether Bobby was aware of the facts that I pointed too, but did not get an answer to that question. I suspect that the answer is "no" in that he seems not to understand that Mit Brennender Sorge was written in 1937, when Nazi anti-semitic legislation was just beginning to ramp up, when a good number of American political and business leaders, including John F. Kennedy's father, were still enamored of Hitler, and a full 18 months before Kristalnacht. But, as is typical for this kind of writing instead of praising Pius XI and the future Pius XII for being the lone voice of dissent in 1937's long litany of rampant anti-semitism, Bobby criticizes Pius for not saying quite enough.

Of course, for some people, there would always be something else that needed to be said. Thus, Bobby asks "Why not write. No German should murder children. No German should murder women. Do not kill civilians. Even if one accepts the German war machine, there are standards of morality that were freely violated." But this is tendentious. These things were said, repeatedly. Certainly, Bobby is not really suggesting that the Germans who killed women and children and committed atrocities were unaware of the moral implications of their actions. It is a signal fact that the Nazis developed their "impersonal" methods of mass killing because of the high incidence of nervous breakdowns among those who served on the death squads. Morality is apparently a hard thing to totally wipe out. So, one is permitted to ask, what were Germans supposed to learn from a restatement of the 10 Commandments that they didn't already know? Although if Bobby were to be fair, he would acknowledge that Pius XII sent many private protests against Nazi atrocities.

Likewise, Bobby is probably unaware of the Nazi response to Mit Brennender Sorge: "The reaction to the encyclical's publication was immediate. The German regime sent a formal protest to Rome; it was swiftly rejected by Cardinal Pacelli. An enraged Hitler and Goebbels gave orders to bring to trial dozens of clerics on charges of immorality and "slanders against the State." Gestapo and SS squads were dispatched to find which presses had produced the encyclical: 12 were confiscated and editors rounded up. In one parish, Essen in the diocese of Oldenburg, seven girls were arrested inside a church as they handed out copies after the Palm Sunday service. "

This was part of a steady barrage of Anti-Catholic persecution on the part of the Nazis. Such policy was not persecution was not unique in German history - Bismark had started the Kulturkampf for the same reason that Hitler suppressed Catholics - both realized that Catholics were a substantial minority in a largely Protestant state which had separatist tendencies. This last fact made Catholics dangerous and distinctly unNazi. Accordingly, among other things, the Nazis - like the Communists had done for their movement - prohibited church attending Catholics from being members of the Nazi Party. Anyone surprised by this really ought to read Eric Hoffer's "The True Believer" for the reasons why these totalitarian mass movements adopted such similar policies.

Bobby writes: "Agreed that Pope Pius provided substantial help to the Jews in Rome, which negates the argument that he wished to help Nazis. Had his legacy with others been equal, we can agree that we would be remembering his courage."

Note that Bobby seems to concede that Pius showed great personal courage in personally helping the Jewish community in Rome at his own risk. But he ignores the fact that it has long been conceded that the Catholic Church - at the orders of Pius XII - rescued and assisted more Jews during the Holocaust than any other organization, private or governmental, according to the study by Israeli diplomat Pinchas Lapide. It is therefore calumny to write "...you chose to again discuss Pius and the murder of Jews and others, women, children, the medical experimentation, torture, and stacking of dead bodies" as if Pius was proximately responsible for any of that.

Also notice that Bobby doesn't address any of the other historical points that I brought up.

If anyone is interested in getting a different perspective on Pius XII - something other than the Monday Morning Quarterbacking of those safely sitting in their living rooms long after the era of totalitarian nightmares have ended - I recommend Ronald Rychlak's "Hitler, the War and the Pope."