I think I share many Catholics frustrations how Pope Pius the XII is basically slandered as to his handling of the Jews during World War II. The fact that a man that saved so many lives is made out to be "Hitler's Pope" is sad. However it is the world we live in. It is ironic this week that the Israeli Govt , has forbidden access, to the Vatican a considerable amount of of the secret archives on the Pontiff.
'Pave the Way' on Pius XII:
He saved more Jews than anyone else in history
Translated from the Italian service of Vatican Radio
"Pius XII saved more Jews than anyone else in history," says Gary Krupp, an American Jew who is the president of the Pave the Way Foundation. He was at the Vatican Wednesday, and met with Pope Benedict XVI briefly after the General Audience, in the company of some Holocaust survivors.
Krupp told the Holy Father about the Symposium to be sponsored by Pave the Way in Rome this September on the 50th anniversary of the death of Pius XII. The intention is to reaffirm the documented facts about what the wartime Pope did in behalf of the Jews during the Second World War, to counteract the black myth that had grown about him, starting in the 1960s.
Krupp was interviewed by Susan Hodges.
KRUPP: Our Foundation has been going around the world to seek out and interview eyewitnesses, people who met Pius XII personally. They have given us wonderful accounts, and they are all accessible on our website Many accounts show how wrong the myth is. I have asked officials of the Yad Vashem Holocaust Museum in Israel if they had ever heard any of this testimony - and they claim no they had not heard any of it at all - not about Hitler's plan to abduct Pius XII, eliminate the Roman Curia and 'conquer' the Vatican, that General Karl Wolff as given explicit orders to this effect. Well, we have a Jewish journalist who has written a book about this, and he will be one of our speakers at the Symposium.
So you are optimistic that this Symposium will banish every shadow cast on the Pope for this...
Far more than optimistic. I am very sure it will be so. We have assembled a group of intellectually brilliant Jews. We need to be impartial, because only then can one judge properly. We have put together a systematic genesis of pertinent events, since Eugenio Pacelli (Pius XII) was a boy. He grew up with a Jewish boy, Guido Mendes, as his best friend. He ate kosher meals with him. When he was the Apostolic Nuncio in Germany, he intervened in behalf of many Jews who had been arrested under the anti-Jewish laws. An anti-Semite would not have bothered. And there are all the things he did as Pope - all this will be recounted at the Symposium, there will be a great deal of documented information presented, and one can only arrive at one conclusion: that this man, Pius XII, had saved more Jews than anyone else has done before or since.
But the problem is that all that activity was behind the scenes...
All behind the scenes and in silence. And not just because he wanted to avoid raising suspicions or because he knew that Hitler had given orders to try and abduct him. What he was afraid of was negative consequences, as when he sympathized publicly with the Archbishop of Utrecht on behalf of Dutch Jews. The Nazis responded very clearly: "This intervention by the Roman Church will not save a single life. It will only make us intensify our arrests. Up to this point, we have not been arresting Jews who converted to Roman Catholicism. Now we will target them first." It was around that time, for instance, that Edith Stein was arrested and sent to concentration camp. the Postulator of Pius XII's cause of beatification, the Jesuit Fr. Peter Gumpel, who will be in the Symposium, was in Holland at the time and can testify to what he saw and heard. =================================================================== There's more on Krupp and what he does to promote inter-religious dialog on www.faithindialogue.org/update/story.cfm?chnl=20&storyid=84
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