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Title: | Yes, it is the Catholic Church?s business alone to beatify ? | |||
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| Name: | bat yam | | |||
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| Absolutely not my business! But it is my duty to accuse an accomplice to murder. And the Church?s outrage? Really? Following excerpt from: The silence of the shepherd by Adi Schwartz Haaretz, October 30, 2008, http://www.haaretz.com/hasen/spages/1030928.html In the second half of October 1943, several thousand of Rome`s Jews were arrested by the German SS and incarcerated in a detention camp. The road leading from the Jewish ghetto on the banks of the Tiber to the Collegio Militare ran by the edge of St. Peter`s Square. If Pope Pius XII had looked out the window of his residence, he would have seen the German trucks taking away the Jews, who would never return. But despite the entreaties of the Jewish community and of British and American diplomats, Pope Pius XII, who was also the bishop of Rome, refused to speak out. On October 19, when the freight train packed with Rome`s Jews passed through the city of Padua on its way north, the local bishop urged the Pope "to take urgent action." However, Pius XII remained mum. Three days later, 1,060 of Rome`s Jews were murdered in Auschwitz. Only 15 of the transport`s deportees survived the war. The SS was worried that the Pope - the supreme spiritual authority in the Italian capital and throughout the Catholic world - would try to prevent the deportation of the Jews. So relieved were the Germans after the operation that in its wake, the German ambassador to the Vatican, Ernst von Weizsaecker (the father of Richard von Weizsaecker, who would become Germany`s president in 1984), sent the following cable to Berlin: "The Pope, although under pressure from all sides, has not permitted himself to be pushed into a demonstrative censure of the deportation of the Jews of Rome. Although he must know that such an attitude will be used against him by our adversaries ... he has nonetheless done everything possible even in this delicate matter in order not to strain relations with the German government and German authorities in Rome ... it may be said that this matter, so unpleasant as it regards German-Vatican relations, has been liquidated." This episode, described in detail in John Cornwell`s 1999 book "Hitler`s Pope" (from which the translation of the cable and a quotation later in the article are taken), is only one example of what historians refer to as "the moral failure of Pope Pius XII" in the face of the Holocaust of European Jewry. The reports published in recent weeks about the Vatican`s intention to expedite the procedure for canonizing Pius XII have flabbergasted historians and sent shockwaves through the Jewish world. The fact is that, despite the considerable warming of relations between the Catholic Church and the Jewish people in the past 40 years, one significant stumbling block continues to weigh on those ties: the Church`s role in preparing the ground for the Holocaust and the subsequent behavior of its leader at the time, Pius XII?.. |
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