-
Latest Posts
-
Recent Comments
-
TCL Archive
- October 2023 (2)
- September 2023 (84)
- August 2023 (74)
- July 2023 (89)
- June 2023 (81)
- May 2023 (88)
- April 2023 (90)
- March 2023 (118)
- February 2023 (84)
- January 2023 (101)
- December 2022 (62)
- November 2022 (72)
- October 2022 (83)
- September 2022 (81)
- August 2022 (82)
- July 2022 (83)
- June 2022 (113)
- May 2022 (80)
- April 2022 (114)
- March 2022 (117)
- February 2022 (120)
- January 2022 (126)
- December 2021 (116)
- November 2021 (112)
- October 2021 (126)
- September 2021 (84)
- August 2021 (6)
-
Post Categories
- Art, music, letters
- Australian police state
- Climate hoax
- Culture
- Defence and national security
- Economics and the economy
- Education
- Elections
- Ethics and morality
- Fake conservatism
- Fake news
- Fake science
- Federal politics
- Foreign policy
- General
- History
- International
- Left-wing extremism
- Left-wing hypocrisy
- Legal affairs
- Media
- Politics
- Religion and faith
- Rule of law
- Science and technology
- Social media
- Sport
- State politics
- US politics
- War and peace
- War on Christianity
- Whatever
-
The calumny on this question directed at Pius XII and the Church is so nauseating.
Wonderful numbers saved but doesn’t change the reality that the Vatican also “saved”, probably, 100s of SS & Nazis to avoid arrest after 1945 by facilitating the South American/ Euro identity swap escape pipeline(s) …..!
For a long time I thought that Pius XII and the Church were indifferent to the suffering of Jews during World War II. Whilst I never believed that Pius and the Church actively supported or collaborated with the Nazis, I did however believe they turned a blind eye to the Holocaust. I was wrong. I no longer believe that to be the case.
I had an aunt who was saved from the Nazis by Catholic nuns outside Budapest. Her parents survived Auschwitz and they were able to retrieve her later. Across Catholic Europe, but particularly in Italy, thousands of Jews were saved by Catholics, and particularly by Catholic religious orders. Those individuals are the Righteous Among the Nations.
Not to mention the hundreds of priests killed by the national socialists.
This is all very well but the elephant in the room is thousands of years of persecution and Jew hatred with its roots in christian and particularly Catholic teaching. Without the ingrained Jew hating culture in Europe derived from christianity the atrocities of the last two millenia, the inquisitions and particularly the holocaust could not have happened. You can talk all you like about christian love, salvation and the occasional righteous gentile etc but we Jews know our history.
No, that isn’t a “reality.” The problem is conflating what a Catholic did with what “the Vatican” did. This is like saying American democracy ‘saved’ Nazis because the OSS was recruiting so many of them after the war – especially if they had technical skills – as were other countries. Oftentimes, of course, this conflation is wilful. The irony is that anti-Catholicism is very similar to ant-semitism in the post-war West.
There has been increased violence against Christians in Israel lately at the hands of the ultra-orthodox who resent their presence; the latter do not represent world Jewry.
A small number of senior prelates are thought to have facilitated the escape of some hard core Nazis – mostly on grounds of Christian clemency and/or in ignorance of what they may have done during the war. There were 6000 Jews being hidden by the Church in Rome alone and many more throughout Europe. Needless to say, many of the anti-semites of Europe were Catholics – just as many were protestants and atheists.
To get away after VE Day, Nazis needed Red Cross documentation before they went anywhere and the Red Cross provided it in hundreds of thousands of instances. That doesn’t make the Red Cross culpable either. Total chaos reigned at the time.
Speaking of movies, long before Schindler’s List there was The Scarlet and the Black (1983) – which told the true story of Monsignor Hugh O’Flaherty, aka the “Irish Pimpernel” (played by Gregory Peck). He was Pope Pius’s agent-at-large for rescuing Jews and countering the SS. He personally saved and sheltered several thousand. Unlike Oskar Schindler, O’Flaherty had a Gestapo price on his head.
The application to have O’Flaherty declared Righteous Among the Nations by Yad Vashem has been slow-going. My guess is his conversion and baptism of Herbert Kappler, head of the SS in Rome (the man who tried many times to kill him and a bona fide war criminal; played by Christopher Plummer in the film), isn’t helping.
But no man is beyond redemption – not even a former Nazi monster.
One of my favourite movies.
“allegedly”?
What an anaemic- even creepy- word to use for this headline.
Funnily enough, as soon as I saw this topic I thought of that movie, which I purchased last year.
The Scarlet and the Black, that is.
Thanks for your comment, omom.
I’ll have to disagree, respectfully.
Very pronounced, intellectually systematised and extremely violent anti-semitism pre-dates Christianity in Greco-Roman classical history – and it continued to be more virulent among pagans even in Christian antiquity.
That Christians themselves persecuted Jews subsequently is not disputed.
“but we Jews know our history.”
Omom, yes we do, but I also acknowledge the bravery of those individual Catholics, Protestants and Atheists who did jeopardise their lives and the lives of their families to hide Jews.
As for Jew hatred, it was never the sole preserve of Christian Europe. Whilst it didn’t reach genocidal proportions, it was and it remains endemic across the Arab Muslim world, a hatred prescribed by Islam from its earliest days, stemming directly from Islam’s birth when Arabian Jews refused to acknowledge Muhammad as a prophet. This refusal caused animosity on the party of Muhammad, with the climax being at the battle of Khaybar, when Muhammad and his army fought an Arabian Jewish army. Muhammad defeated and captured the Jews, enslaved the women and then beheaded every male over 12 years old. Historians believe the number of dead Jewish males was over 700. Even today, on Fridays, in mosques across the Middle East and now alas across Europe and Australia, you will hear exhortations from imams and mullahs to remember Khaybar and fight the Jews, the rallying cry being “Khaybar, Khaybar o Jews, the army of Muhammad is coming”. It is, of course, a call for slaughter and sexual slavery, as what happened fifteen hundred years ago. I should also add that Jews under Islam were routinely expelled, persecuted and the subject of blood libels and pogroms beginning at Islam’s inception. Jews in Palestine were routinely murdered and expelled, particularly in Jerusalem, Hebron and Safed, there was a succession of vicious murderous pogroms in Hebron and Safed, the last one being in 1929 in Hebron when over 13o Jews were murdered by Arabs. So, there were kind caliphs, just like there were kind Christian kings and princes. But there were also cruel caliphs and cruel Christian kings and princes. However there were plenty of popes in history that produced “bulls” calling for Jewish communities in Catholic Europe to be protected. One bull “forbade Christians (with the threat of excommunication) from forcing Jews to convert, from harming them, from taking their property, from disturbing the celebration of their festivals, and from interfering with their cemeteries”.
I believe the Catholic Church has atoned for its Jew hatred, as it should have, however I am yet to see and hear any atonement from Islam. Even today, I read the newspaper and apparently Mahmoud Abbas, the Palestinian leader, has said that Ashkenazi Jews aren’t Semites…so, he’s basically saying that we Jews have no right to the land of Eretz Israel.
I think I will end with the words of Pope John XXIII….
We are conscious today that many many centuries of blindness have cloaked our eyes so that we can no longer either see the beauty of Thy Chosen People nor recognize in their faces the features of our privileged brethren. We realize that the mark of Cain stands upon our foreheads. Across the centuries our brother Abel has lain in the blood which we drew or shed the tears we caused by forgetting Thy Love. Forgive us for the curse we falsely attached to their name as Jews. Forgive us for crucifying Thee a second time in their flesh. For we knew not what we did.
Shabbat shalom Omom.
As a boy I was taught that Catholics always opposed and fought the Nazis, in the occupied territories and in Germany itself. I later discovered this was not quite true, and a bit nuanced. Certainly many individuals, both cleric and lay did oppose and even die struggling against the Nazis. But things were different, say in Poland, than in Italy, don’t even mention Croatia. The Italians were generally more supportive of the Jews than elsewhere in Europe.
The struggle against the Nazis and help for the Jews tended to be clandestine, it was necessary to stay out of the notice of the Nazi authorities. This was true of the Catholic institutions, even the greatest of those institutions, the Papacy. But the hesitant and patchy nature of the struggle against the Nazis has always been kind of embarrassing to the Church, there was just not enough of it to make any difference.
I think if the Pope had shown more courage and directly challenged the Nazis, and appealed to all Catholics and in particular to Catholics in the Wehrmacht (nominally about one third perhaps) to reject the murders of Jews and civilians, it would have greatly ameliorated the situation. Many, many military Catholics and their families would have been executed and subjected to atrocities, many priests and even the Pope would have been murdered. But what better way for a Catholic to die? Plenty of Saints and holy acts to inspire the youngsters. Lutherans would have stood with the Catholics sooner or later. The Wehrmacht would have tied itself in knots, but the solidarity of brothers in arms would have protected most military Catholics, the Wehrmacht would have had to face the moral issues implicit in obeying orders.
It would have given Catholicism and Christianity in general great moral strength, the kind of strength needed now in the face of this post modern satanism faced in the “Collective west”.
The Catholic Church, the Pope in particular, did not do enough.
“The Italians were generally more supportive of the Jews than elsewhere in Europe.”
True, I think Italians are the least anti-Semitic people in Europe.
I don’t think that the Catholic Church ever had hatred for the Jews.
Jesus was a Jew.
I think the real question is why the hatred towards Jews? (Serious question)
The above discussion is about the symptoms but not the cause.
That might be to begin considerations in relation to a presupposition.
But on another aspect and in other ways – hate and states designated as hate are popular at the moment as pathological states to be killed-off. Hate speech, hate insignia, hate prayers.
Which suggests that hate is not really the problem. It’s not the same as ill-will. Nor is hate the problem when it simulates virtue to enact evil – in which case hate in response to simulated virtue is not the problem but the revelation.
Perhaps hate is something to be understood as a capacity for the heart to be tested any which way.
Franx – hate is one of the symptoms, not the cause
Perhaps hate is something to be understood as a capacity for the heart to be tested any which way.
Yes, but why the Jews for thousands of years? There have been plenty of massacres (hate) of all different races / tribes but none have been on-going for thousands of years.
A 3 time winner of the Italian Giro and the 1938 Tour De France, Gino Bartali, saved hundreds of Italian Jews by transporting forged documents in his handlebars between Catholic monasteries and clergy who were sheltering and assisting with escape plans. He also hid an entire Jewish family in his cellar.
Most admirably he did not allow his acts of extreme bravery to be down until after his death at 85.
As mentioned above, the Italians fought hard in secret to protect their Jewish neighbours.
down = known. I simply cannot remember to check what stupidity autocorrupt has inflicted upon my written meanderings. Where is AI when it could actually be useful?
It was AI that caused the misspelling in the first place!