Pope Pius XII, the controversial wartime pontiff, may have saved thousands of Jews by secretly securing visas so they could escape Nazi Germany, a historian has claimed.
Pope Pius, who was labelled “Hitler’s Pope” because of his silence during the Holocaust, may have arranged the exodus of about 200,000 Jews from Germany just three weeks after Kristallnacht, when thousands of Jews were rounded up and sent to concentration camps.
The claim was made by Dr Michael Hesemann, a German historian carrying out research in the Vatican archives for the Pave the Way Foundation, a US-based inter-faith group.
He said that Cardinal Eugenio Pacelli – the future Pius XII – wrote to Catholic archbishops around the world to urge them to apply for visas for “non-Aryan Catholics” and Jewish converts to Christianity who wanted to leave Germany.
Elliot Hershberg, the chairman of the Pave the Way Foundation, said:“ We believe that many Jews who were successful in leaving
Europe may not have had any idea that their visas and travel documents were obtained through these Vatican efforts.
“Everything we have found thus far seems to indicate
the known negative perception of Pope Pius XII is wrong.”
Pius XII was criticised for failing to denounce explicitly the Holocaust, the Nazi regime or to excommunicate Hitler.
Dr Hesemann says that additional evidence suggests that the visas would have been given to ordinary Jews desperate to escape persecution.
“The fact that this letter speaks of 'converted Jews’ and 'non-Aryan’ Catholics indeed seems to be a cover,” said Dr Hesemann.
“You couldn’t be sure that Nazi agents wouldn’t learn about this initiative,” he said.
“Pacelli had to make sure they didn’t misuse it for their propaganda, that they could not claim that the Church is an ally of the Jews.”
The appeal from Cardinal Pacelli, then the Vatican’s Secretary of State, was dated Nov 30, 1938 – 20 days after Kristallnacht, the “night of broken glass”.
Cardinal Pacelli was able to ask for the visas because the 1933 concordat he signed with the Nazis specifically provided protection for Jews who converted to Christianity.
Dr Ed Kessler, the director of the Cambridge-based Woolf Institute of Abrahamic Faiths, said: “It is clear that Pius XII facilitated the saving of Roman Jews.”
In December, Pope Benedict XVI placed Pius one step closer to sainthood when he declared him “Venerable”, meaning that the Church believes he lived a life of “heroic virtue”.
Two miracles are needed to canonise him as a saint and the Vatican is investigating at least one apparently inexplicable healing.
Some Jewish groups want the process frozen until the Vatican is ready to open its secret wartime archives in 2014.
Sir Martin Gilbert, a British historian and the world’s leading expert on the Holocaust, has said that Pope Pius XII should be considered as a “Righteous Gentile” by Yad Vashem, the Israeli Holocaust remembrance authority.
Vatican City, Apr 9, 2010 / 10:29 am (CNA/EWTN News)
While resting up at Castel Gandolfo, the Holy Father will be taking the time to catch a film on Friday. The Pontiff will watch "Under the Roman Sky,” a movie about Hitler's treatment of the Jews in Rome and his attempt to kidnap Pope Pius XII.
As the Pope recovers from a taxing Holy Week schedule, during which he appeared for public celebrations nearly every day, he will have the opportunity to relax and take in the movie featuring the American actor James Cromwell as Pope Pius XII, who was the subject of a kidnap plot by Adolph Hitler.
The mini-series is set in the streets of Rome during the Nazi occupation. According to Italy's AGI News, the plot develops along the course of nine months, and features Jews being taken from the ghetto and a failed attempt by the Nazis to abduct the Pope.
The film, made by the Italian production company Lux Vide, also illustrates the Church's efforts to protect and save Jews during the war, the very subject that raised a considerable amount controversy after Pope Benedict declared Pius XII "Venerable" on Dec. 19, 2009.
Lux Vide has produced other biographical films on Popes John Paul II, Paul VI and John XXIII as well as many other saints and biblical figures.
The Holy Father will settle in for the viewing at 5:30 this afternoon in the Swiss Room of Castel Gandolfo.
The Holy Father expressed his sorrow over the death of Polish President Lech Kaczynski and those accompanying him on a flight to Russia on Saturday morning. Pope Benedict remembered all of those who died and implored "a special blessing to the people of Poland from God omnipotent."
According to CNN, President Kaczynski, his wife, top members of the Polish government, army and several Church authorities were on the plane that went down just seconds from landing at the airport of Smolensk, Russia. The aircraft apparently clipped some trees with a wing as it made its way through heavy fog. Reports vary on the number of people on the plane, but counts run from 89 to 132 people, none of whom survived.
The delegation was headed to the small village of Katyn, a few kilometers from Smolensk, in a landmark visit to observe the 70th anniversary of the execution of more than 20,000 Polish officers during World War II.
Pope Benedict XVI wrote in his telegram to the acting President of the Polish Parliament, Bronislaw Komorowski, that it was with "profound sorrow" that he learned of the deaths of those who were on their way to Katyn.
He remembered the president, the exiled ex-president of the Republic Ryszard Kaczorowski, Army chaplain and Bishop Tadeusz Plozki, Orthodox Archbishop Miron Chodakowski and Evangelical military pastor Adam Pilsch by name.
He entrusted all of the victims of the crash "to the goodness of merciful God" and prayed, "May He take them into his glory."
To the families of the dead and to all Poles he sent his "sincere condolences" and assured his them of spiritual closeness.
"In this difficult moment," he closed, "I implore for all the people of Poland a special blessing of God omnipotent."
The Myth of Hitler's Pope: How Pope Pius XII Rescued Jews From the Nazis by David G. Dalin (Regnery, 209 pages, $27.95)
AS A HISTORIAN OF THE HOLOCAUST, I frequently receive requests from Jewish educators, seeking support for grant applications for their Holocaust programs. Almost all these applications include a sentence about how the new program will inform students that the Pope, and the Vatican, "did nothing" during the Holocaust to help Jews.
The most recent such portrayal reached me while I was writing this review. It is part of a proposal to a major Jewish philanthropic organization, and contains the sentence: "Also discusses the role of the Vatican and the rabidly anti-Semitic Pope Pius XII, who were privy to information regarding the heinous crimes being committed against the Jews, and their indifferent response."
That the Pope and the Vatican were either silent bystanders, or even active collaborators in Hitler's diabolical plan -- and "rabidly anti-Semitic," as stated above -- has become something of a truism in Jewish educational circles, and a powerful, emotional assertion made by American-Jewish writers, lecturers, and educators.
David G. Dalin, professor of history and political science at Ave Maria University, Naples, Florida -- and an ordained rabbi -- demonstrates in his recent book, The Myth of Hitler's Pope, that this is a false and distorted portrayal. He also shows its long pedigree, starting more than 40 years ago, in 1963, with Rolf Hochhuth's play The Deputy. Although that play was fiction, it was widely regarded as based on fact in its strident assertion of the moral cowardice and silence of Eugenio Pacelli, who in 1939 became Pope as Pius XII.
Since Hochhuth's play, this theme has become commonplace. John Cornwell, a Roman Catholic, in his book Hitler's Pope (1999) blamed Pius XII not only for silence, but for active collaboration with the Nazi regime. Jewish writers have understandably been shocked by the reiterated assertion of papal refusal to help Jews at their time of greatest need. Daniel Goldhagen's book A Moral Reckoning: The Role of the Catholic Church in the Holocaust and Its Unfulfilled Duty of Repair (2002) portrays Pius XII as part of a wider Roman Catholic anti-Semitic tradition that permeated the Church's teachings and was integral -- in Goldhagen's words -- to the very "genesis of the Holocaust."
Dalin takes issue with these critics of Pius XII. Building on earlier documented defenses of Pius XII, including Ronald J. Rychlak's detailed study Hitler, the War, and the Pope (2000), he builds a powerful case for Pius XII, suggesting that the desire of Pope John Paul II to canonize Pius need not have been offensive -- or insensitive -- to Jews, as it was widely portrayed.
THE HISTORICAL RECORD is clear. There can be no minimizing the horrors of those manifestations of Christian anti-Semitism that were a curse in the story of Nazi-dominated Europe. The Polish villagers who murdered their neighbors in Jedwabne had been churchgoers all their lives. The Roman Catholic priests who, on many documented occasions, turned their flocks against the Jews throughout Eastern Europe were ordained in the rites of Rome. The Slovak leader, Father Jozef Tiso, who asked the Germans to deport his Jews to German-occupied Poland and to slave labor -- and death -- was an ordained priest.
But, as I myself pointed out in my book The Righteous: The Unsung Heroes of the Holocaust (2003), there was another side to this coin. In France, leaders of the Roman Catholic clergy were outspoken in their condemnation of the deportations. In Italy, churchmen across the whole spectrum of Roman Catholicism, including leading Jesuits, saved Jews from deportation.
Many hundreds of Polish priests and nuns are among more than 5,000 Catholic Poles who have been recognized by the state of Israel for their courage in saving Jews.
Where does this leave Pope Pius XII, the object of so much published hostility, and the main figure in Dalin's short but powerful book? Can Pius really merit the words of Israel's then Foreign Minister, Golda Meir (later Prime Minister of Israel), when she telegraphed to the Vatican on Pius's death in 1958: "When fearful martyrdom came to our people in the decade of Nazi terror, the voice of the Pope was raised for the victims. The life of our times was enriched by a voice speaking out on the great moral truths above the tumult of daily conflict. We mourn a great servant of peace."
Those who were in charge of that Nazi terror during the war years held this same view during the war itself. After Pius XII delivered his Christmas message in December 1942, the Reich Security Main Office, the German government department in Berlin responsible for the deportation of the Jews, informed its representatives, who were in charge of encouraging local leaders to permit their Jews to be deported: "In a manner never known before, the Pope has repudiated the National Socialist New European Order.... Here he is virtually accusing the German people of injustice to the Jews, and makes himself the mouthpiece of the Jewish war criminals."
This was stern condemnation by the Nazis of a man who is now condemned for the opposite failing. Yet nine months later, Pius XII was to upset the Nazis even more. After the German occupation of Rome and the northern part of Italy, when the SS determined to introduce the Final Solution in all areas of Italy under German military control, Pius and the Vatican took the lead in seeking to frustrate the deportation plan.
A MAIN OBJECT OF SS POLICY in Italy after the German occupation in 1943 was the deportation to Auschwitz of all Jews living in Rome. Margherita Marchione has told this story in Consensus and Controversy: Defending Pope Pius XII (2002). The roundup began without warning at eleven in the evening on October 15, 1943. Between then and one in the afternoon on October 16, one thousand of Rome's 6,000 Jews were arrested and taken to a deportation holding center, the Collegio Militare: their destination (although unknown at the time) was Auschwitz.
News of the start of the round-ups was brought personally to the Pope early on the morning of October 16 by an Italian Catholic princess, Enza Pignatelli Aragona Cortes, who had been alerted by a Jewish friend. Having received the princess early that morning, the Pope immediately instructed the Cardinal Secretary of State, Cardinal Maglione, to protest to the German ambassador to the Vatican, Ernst von Weizsacker (a former German Deputy Foreign Minister).
Maglione did so that morning, making it clear to the ambassador that the deportation of Jews was offensive to the Pope. In urging Weizsacker "to try to save these innocent people," Maglione added: "It is sad for the Holy Father, sad beyond imagination, that here in Rome, under the very eyes of the Common Father, that so many people should suffer only because they belong to a specific race."
Following Maglione's appeal, Weizsacker gave orders for a halt to the arrests. To protect those who were thus still in their homes from a possible German reversal of the halt to the deportations, the Pope gave instructions for the Vatican to be opened to Rome's Jews, and for the convents and monasteries of Rome to provide hiding places, or provide false identification papers.
As a result of this papal initiative, in Rome a larger percentage of the Jews were saved than in any other city then under German occupation. Of the 5,715 Roman Jews listed by the Germans for deportation, 4,715 were given shelter in more than 150 Catholic institutions in the city; of these, 477 were given sanctuary within the confines of the Vatican itself.
In reporting on the Maglione-Weizsacker meeting to London two weeks later, the British ambassador noted: "Vatican intervention thus seems to have been effective in saving numbers of these unfortunate people." Of the thousand deportees of October 16, only ten survived. The remaining four-fifths of Rome's Jews were alive at liberation.
A footnote to these events: fifty-one years after Weizsacker's decisive intervention, his son Richard was the first President of the Federal Republic of Germany to visit Israel, and there to express his shame at what Germany had done to the Jews in the Nazi era.
AS THE GERMANS began deporting Jews from other parts of northern Italy, the Pope opened his summer estate at Castel Gandolfo to take in several thousand (women had their babies in the Pope's apartment) and authorized monasteries throughout the German-occupied areas of Italy to do likewise. As a result, while the Germans managed to seize and deport a further 7,000 Italian Jews to their deaths, 35,000 survived the war -- one of the highest ratios of those rescued of any country.
There was to be a further decisive papal rescue action after the German occupation of Hungary in March 1944. Under the leadership of the Pope's senior representative in Budapest, the Papal Nuncio Angelo Rotta, the diplomats of eight neutral countries represented in the Hungarian capital -- including the Swedish ambassador and his staff, prominent among them Per Anger and Raoul Wallenberg -- organized a city-wide rescue scheme.
Under Rotta's energetic lead, an "International Ghetto" was established in the northern section of the city, in which more than 40 safe houses were established, marked by the Vatican emblem, and other national emblems. Into these safe houses -- a series of tall, modern apartment buildings -- 25,000 Jews found refuge, and survived. Elsewhere in Budapest, Roman Catholic institutions hid several thousand more Jews in their cellars and attics.
The influence and authority of Pius XII was wide-ranging. In the port of Fiume, the Italian police chief, Giovanni Palatucci -- the nephew of an Italian bishop, Giuseppe Palatucci -- together with his uncle, saved 5,000 Jews from deportation during the German occupation of the port. They did so by providing the Jews with false identity papers, enabling them to gain safety in the bishop's diocese in southern Italy. For helping the Jews of Fiume, Giovanni Palatucci was arrested by the SS and sent to Dachau, where he was executed.
Pius XII took a direct part in sending money to support the Jewish refugees from Fiume. He also sent considerable sums of money to other rescuers of Jews in Italy, and to the French Capuchin monk, Father Pierre-Marie Benoit, from whose monastery in Marseille several thousand French Jews were smuggled across the borders of neutral Spain and Switzerland.
AMONG THE LEADING Roman Catholic clergymen who helped save Jews was Archbishop Giovanni Montini, the future Pope Paul VI. When the government of Israel asked him, in 1955, to accept an award for his rescue work during the Holocaust, Montini replied: "All I did was my duty. And besides I only acted upon orders from the Holy Father."
When the deportation of 80,000 Jews from Slovakia to Auschwitz began in March 1942, Pius authorized formal written protests by both the Vatican secretary of state and the papal representative in the Slovak capital, Bratislava.
When a second round of deportations began in Slovakia the following spring, Pius wrote a letter of protest to the Slovak government. Dated April 7, 1943, it was outspoken and unambiguous. "The Holy See has always entertained the firm hope," Pius wrote, that the Slovak government "would never proceed with the forcible removal of persons belonging to the Jewish race. It is, therefore, with great pain that the Holy See has learned of the continued transfers of such a nature from the territory of the republic."
That pain was "aggravated further," the Pope wrote in this same letter, since it appeared "that the Slovak Government intends to proceed with the total removal of the Jewish residents of Slovakia, not even sparing women and children. The Holy See would fail in its Divine Mandate if it did not deplore these measures, which gravely damage man in his natural right, mainly for the reason that these people belong to a certain race."
Six times the Pope appealed to the Slovak leader -- the Catholic priest Father Tiso -- to halt the deportations. After the sixth appeal, on April 7, 1943, the remaining planned deportations were halted.
On April 8, 1943, the day after his final protest to Father Tiso, Pius XII instructed the Vatican's representative in the Bulgarian capital, Sofia, to take "all necessary steps" to support those Bulgarian Jews facing immediate deportation. From Istanbul, Cardinal Angelo Roncalli (later Pope John XXIII), a former Papal Nuncio in Bulgaria, and godfather to the king's sons, added his voice to that of Pius XII, urging the King of Bulgaria not to deport the Jews of his kingdom. Roncalli also signed transit visas for Palestine for several thousand Slovak Jewish refugees.
On learning of the plight of Jews in concentration camps in Romanian-occupied Transnistria, Angelo Roncalli contacted Pius XII, who interceded at once with the Romanian authorities, and authorized the dispatch of money to those in the camps. When, in 1957, the Israeli government sought to thank Cardinal Roncalli for his help, the Cardinal replied: "In all those painful matters I referred to the Holy See and afterwards I simply carried out the Pope's orders: first and foremost to save human lives."
Such is the historical record. It explains why Rabbi Dalin is so disturbed by the continuing assertions that Pius XII did nothing to help Jews, was an anti-Semite, and effectively acted as "Hitler's Pope."
AN IMPORTANT ASPECT OF THIS BOOK is the carefully constructed background to Pius XII's attitude to the Jews, going back to his early days as a young Vatican official. Indeed, from his schooldays, Eugenio Pacelli -- as he then was -- was friends with a Jewish student, Guido Mendes, later a distinguished Roman physician. As a result of this friendship, Pacelli was the first Pope to have shared a Sabbath dinner in his youth at a Jewish home. In 1915, then aged 39, he helped draft Pope Benedict XV's powerful papal denunciation of anti-Semitism in Poland, which insisted that the Christian law to love one another "must be observed and respected in the case of the children of Israel."
In 1919, as Papal Nuncio in Munich, Pacelli defended the Church against the ferocious onslaught of Communism, then -- as in Russia two years earlier -- spearheaded by individual Jews who had long since abandoned their religious faith. But anti-Communism did not make him pro-Nazi or anti-Semitic, as his critics claim. In May 1922, Pacelli warned the Jewish politician Walter Rathenau of an assassination plot by German anti-Semites. A month later, Rathenau was murdered. In November 1923, five days after Hitler's failed attempt to seize power in Munich, Pacelli wrote critically to the Vatican about the Nazi movement, and noted with approval the public defense of Munich's Jews by the city's Catholic archbishop.
In 1933, while serving as Cardinal Secretary of State -- the Vatican's Foreign Minister -- Pacelli negotiated the "Reich Concordat" with Hitler's Germany, determined to protect German Catholics from the anti-religious policies of the new regime. Dalin makes a convincing argument in favor of the Concordat as a protective measure, stressing that it was not a moral endorsement of Nazism. Indeed, from the outset of the anti-Jewish persecutions in Germany, Pacelli opposed them.
On April 4, 1933, three days after the one-day boycott of Jewish shops, Pacelli instructed the Papal Nuncio in Berlin to warn the regime against the persecution of German Jews, asking the nuncio to become actively involved on behalf of the Jews. Four months later he twice expressed to the British ambassador to the Vatican his "disgust and abhorrence" at the Nazi regime. The ambassador reported to the Foreign Office in London -- on August 19, 1933 -- that Pacelli "deplored the action of the German Government at home" including "their persecution of Jews."
In 1936 Pacelli visited the United States. One result of his mission, Dalin notes, was that, at President Roosevelt's personal request, he prevailed upon Father Charles Coughlin, the "radio priest," to end his anti-New Deal -- and also anti-Semitic -- broadcasts. While willing to meet Roosevelt, Pacelli never met Hitler. When, in a much-heralded gesture of friendship, Hitler visited Mussolini in Rome in 1938, Pacelli deliberately absented himself from the city, together with Pope Pius XI.
While Secretary of State, Pacelli made an astonishing 55 protests against Nazi policies, including, repeatedly, the "ideology of race." In 1938 Pacelli publicly endorsed and repeated the words of Pius XI, that "it is impossible for a Christian to take part in anti-Semitism. Anti-Semitism is inadmissible; spiritually we are all Semites."
So outspoken were Pacelli's criticisms that Hitler's regime lobbied against him, trying to prevent his becoming the successor to Pius XI. When he did become Pope, as Pius XII, in March 1939, Nazi Germany was the only government not to send a representative to his coronation.
IMMEDIATELY UPON BECOMING POPE, Pius XII responded to Mussolini's anti-Jewish legislation by appointing several Jewish scholars who had been dismissed from the university to positions inside the Vatican. Among them was the distinguished Jewish cartographer, Roberto Almagia, a professor at the University of Rome since 1915. On the day after his dismissal, Almagia was appointed director of the geography section of the Vatican library. While working there he completed an exceptional four-volume study of the Vatican's cartographic holdings.
Another dismissed Jewish scholar, Professor Giorgio Levi della Vida, a world authority on Islam, was also given a job in the Vatican library, cataloguing the Arabic manuscripts.
In his first encyclical as Pope, Pius XII specifically rejected Nazism and expressly mentioned the Jews, noting that in the Catholic Church there is "neither Gentile nor Jew, circumcision nor uncircumcision." The head of the Gestapo, Heinrich Mueller, commented that the encyclical was "directed exclusively against Germany." So outspoken was it that the Royal Air Force and the French air force dropped 88,000 copies of it over Germany.
One strong piece of evidence that Dalin produces against the concept of "Hitler's Pope" is the audience granted by Pius XII in March 1940 to the German Foreign Minister, Joachim von Ribbentrop, the only senior Nazi official to visit the Vatican during his papacy. After Ribbentrop rebuked the Pope for "siding" with the Allies, the Pope responded by reading from a long list of German atrocities and religious persecution against Christians and Jews, in Germany, and in Poland, which Germany had occupied six months earlier.
The New York Times, under the headline "JEWS' RIGHTS DEFENDED," wrote on March 14, 1940: "The Pontiff, in the burning words he spoke to Herr Ribbentrop about religious persecution, also came to the defense of the Jews in Germany and Poland."
DALIN DRAWS ATTNETION in this book to the man whom he regards as the missing personality in the story: Hajj Amin al-Husseini, the Mufti of Jerusalem, a position of influence in the Muslim world to which Hajj Amin had been appointed by the British in 1922. This senior Muslim prelate met Hitler several times during the war, called openly for the destruction of European Jewry, and intervened with Hitler to prevent rescue efforts.
Having been given an office in wartime Berlin, Hajj Amin mobilized political and military support for the Nazi regime. Traveling to German-occupied Yugoslavia, he helped raise a Muslim Waffen SS company, which turned its savage attentions against both Jews and Serbian Christians. In one of his many broadcasts from Germany to the Middle East, Hajj Amin said of the Jews: "They cannot mix with other nations but live, as parasites among the nations, suck out their blood, embezzle their property, corrupt their morals...." Hitler found the Mufti a useful tool.
In answer to Daniel Goldhagen's charge that the Roman Catholic Church remains a danger to the Jews today, Dalin writes: "It is radical Islam -- Hitler's overt ally in World War II -- not the Catholic Church, that threatens Jews today."
In his book Hitler's Pope, John Cornwell calls Pius XII the "most dangerous" cleric in modern history. Dalin feels that the Mufti is the one who deserves this title. As Dalin writes: "Hitler's mufti is truth. Hitler's pope is myth."
Professor Dalin's book is an essential contribution to our understanding of the reality of Pope Pius XII's support for Jews at their time of greatest danger. Hopefully, his account will replace the divisively harmful version of papal neglect, and even collaboration, that has held the field for far too long.
LONG BEACH, N.Y. — At home here on Long Island, he is Gary L. Krupp, medical equipment dealer, now retired after a career of ups and downs. He shares one car and a small house in a no-frills neighborhood with his wife, Meredith, and wryly describes himself as “an average schlemiel, just a Jewish kid from Queens.”
At the Vatican, he is known as Commendatore Gary Krupp, Knight Commander of the Pontifical Equestrian Order of St. Gregory the Great. For short, the Swiss Guard and cardinals address him as “Your Excellency.”
It is a compelling tale in itself: how Mr. Krupp became only the seventh Jewish papal knight in history, dubbed by Pope John Paul II in 2000 for persuading American manufacturers to donate $12 million worth of high-tech medical equipment to an Italian hospital.
But the more curious and complicated story is the transformation Mr. Krupp has undergone since. With no previous training or special interest in history, he has emerged as the Vatican’s most outspoken Jewish ally in a heated debate at the crux of tensions between Roman Catholic and Jewish leaders and historians: whether Pope Pius XII, the pontiff during World War II, did as much as he could have to save Jews from the Holocaust.
Mr. Krupp, 62, has raised enough money through the Pave the Way Foundation, a nonprofit organization he founded in 2002, to travel the globe, hire researchers to scour historic documents, sponsor a three-day symposium in Rome and publish four editions of a glossy, illustrated volume of evidence supporting his view that Pius XII spared no effort to save the lives of persecuted Jews.
He has pressed his case in a recent op-ed article for The New York Post, and in interviews with conservative Catholic television programs and Web sites, which have cited him as an expert on Pius.
And in a special audience at the papal summer residence in September 2008, Pope Benedict XVI thanked Mr. Krupp for bringing attention to “what Pius XII achieved for the Jews.”
Historians and religious leaders around the world have taken increasing notice of Mr. Krupp’s work — some with alarm, some with pleasure — because his advocacy has coincided with efforts within the Vatican to promote the canonization of Pius. Pope Benedict nudged that process forward in December by affirming Pius’s “heroic virtues” and pronouncing him “venerable,” a step on the path toward sainthood.
The controversy over Pius’s wartime conduct had stalled his elevation for so many years that Pope Benedict’s action shocked scholars on both sides of the debate. And while agreeing on little else, some in both camps credit Mr. Krupp for breaking the logjam.
“I wrote 10 books about Pius XII, but in all these years I never knew how to shake things up for the cause like this wonderful man, Mr. Krupp,” said Sister Margherita Marchione, a professor emerita at Fairleigh Dickinson University who is considered the foremost defender of Pius outside the Vatican.
Deborah Dwork, a professor of Holocaust history at Clark University, put it another way: “Pope Benedict would not have had the chutzpah to go forward with the veneration process if not for this P.R. work Gary Krupp does.”
In a dispute decades long, the church has maintained that Pius XII supported efforts throughout the war to hide Jews or help them escape, but worked behind the scenes to avoid retaliation from Nazi and Italian Fascist authorities.
Holocaust scholars, who consider Pius, with his worldwide network of diplomats and clergy, to be among the first world leaders to have grasped the scope of the Jewish persecution, have asked why he did not condemn it publicly. But most consider that and other questions unanswerable until the Vatican opens the complete archives of Pius’s papacy. Although a selection of those papers has been published, the Vatican has kept most off limits to outside researchers.
How Mr. Krupp happened onto this muddy battlefield is hard to explain, even for Mr. Krupp, a husky man who sometimes seems almost possessed, bounding up and down the stairs of his split-level house to retrieve copies of documents or books to make his points.
“Believe me, I never dreamed I would be defending a man who, when I was growing up, we believed he was a Nazi sympathizer,” he said.
Being knighted thrust Mr. Krupp into the ranks of some of the world’s richest and most prominent people, living and dead — Bob Hope and Rupert Murdoch included — who received the knighthood of St. Gregory the Great for serving the church in some way. Unlike the vast majority of them, however, Mr. Krupp said he saw his elevation as an opportunity to become a conduit between the Catholic Church and the world. In 2005, he brokered an agreement with the Vatican Library to lend a rare set of manuscripts by the medieval Jewish philosopher Maimonides to the Israel Museum. And gradually he decided he liked promoting interreligious understanding more than he liked selling medical equipment.
His Pave the Way Foundation became a full-time occupation in 2005, around the time a friend at the Vatican suggested that he might help clear up misunderstandings between Catholics and Jews about Pius. Mr. Krupp began collecting and underwriting research.
“Did you know Pius XII saved more than 860,000 Jews from the death camps? I mean, I never knew that before. It’s character assassination — a shanda — that so many Jews say he was an anti-Semite,” said Mr. Krupp, using a Yiddish word for disgrace.
Several historians said the 860,000 figure that Mr. Krupp cited appeared frequently in biographies of Pius XII, but had never been documented.
“Listen to me: Pius XII was the greatest hero of World War II,” Mr. Krupp said recently. “He saved more Jews than Roosevelt, Churchill and all the rest of them combined. We should not let him be an issue between Catholics and Jews.”
He added: “And I predict this: Historians are never going to solve this whole problem. There will always be questions.”
The word “hero” so often conjures up images of the brash and the bold. We may think of Audie Murphy’s WWII exploits, the Spartans at Thermopylae, or the doomed holdouts at the Alamo. But then there are the quiet heroes, people such as Oskar Schindler. Ever since Schindler’s List hit the silver screen in 1993, his clandestine efforts resulting in the rescue of almost 1,200 Jews from Nazi death camps have been well known.
Yet that dark time birthed another quiet hero, one who saved as many as 860,000 Jewish lives. Today, however, few know of his accomplishments, few sing his praises. And Steven Spielberg will undoubtedly never make a movie lauding him. On the contrary, this man is roundly maligned as a WWII villain who was at best indifferent to the plight of the people in the Nazis’ crosshairs. This man is Eugenio Pacelli. But he is better known as Pope Pius XII.
By the lights of the popular culture and the increasingly unpopular media, it is a “fact” that Pius was practically a Nazi collaborator. British journalist John Cornwell’s book Hitler’s Pope got a lot of press after its 1999 publication, and self-professed “anti-theist” Christopher Hitchens never misses a chance to highlight the papacy’s supposed WWII sins and silence. It has become atheist boilerplate, the barbarous vehicle through which barbarian historians sack modern-day Rome.
Beliefs Not Borne Out But the embrace of this impious Pius narrative extends far beyond activists and atheists, to people of good will. And one of them was a man named Gary L. Krupp. As a Jewish fellow raised in Queens, New York City, he had learned much about the Holocaust and knew who its main players were. He also knew who its monsters were — or, at least, he thought he did. He thus grew up “hating the name Pius XII,” as he put it. Yet he also had a certain passion: building bridges among people of faith by eliminating non-theological differences among religions. To this end he and his wife, Meredith, founded the Pave the Way Foundation (PTWF) in 2003. And, to this end — and despite his prejudices — the couple decided to investigate the story of Pope Pius XII.
After poring over literally thousands of documents during an exhaustive investigation, what the Krupps found was, to use Mr. Krupp’s characterization, nothing less than shocking. Far from being the callous Nazi sympathizer of many people’s nightmares (and some people’s fantasies), Pius was a hero who worked behind the scenes, quietly and diligently, saving lives and risking his own. Treating this matter just this past December in a New York Post piece entitled “Friend to the Jews: Pius XII’s real wartime record,” Krupp revealed some of what shocked him so, writing:
It is unquestionable that Pius XII intervened to save countless Jews at a time most nations — even FDR’s America — refused to accept these refugees.... He smuggled Jews into the Americas and Asia. He ordered the lifting of cloister for men and women to enter monasteries, convents and churches to hide 7,000 Jews of Rome in a single day.
Krupp provided a few more details in a Daily News piece entitled “Stop persecuting Pius — WWII pontiff is branded ‘Hitler’s Pope,’ but he did much to save the Jews,” revealing:
More evidence shows Pius secretly moved Jews out of Europe. We [at the PTWF] conducted dozens of video interviews, among them a witness account of a priest who revealed a secret “underground railroad,” directly ordered by the Pope, sending more than 10,000 Jews to the U.S. via the Dominican Republic. Many countries would not accept “Jews,” so they were given false baptismal papers to travel as Catholics.
Pius successfully stopped the deportation of tens of thousands of Hungarian Jews when he appealed to the Regent of Hungary. Similarly, he desperately tried to impact the deportation policies of many other countries to, in his words, “save this vibrant community.”
Yet, while Krupp is currently the most visible of the pope’s defenders, he is far from the first. Another is Rabbi David G. Dalin, Ph.D., a widely published scholar of American Judaism and author of the 2005 book The Myth of Hitler’s Pope. He provided a trove of information about Pius’ efforts in his piece “A Righteous Gentile: Pope Pius XII and the Jews.” And here is a small sampling:
Throughout World War II, he [Pius] spoke out on behalf of Europe’s Jews. When Pius learned of the Nazi atrocities in Poland, he urged the bishops of Europe to do all they could to save the Jews and other victims of Nazi persecution. On January 19, 1940, at the Pope’s instruction, Vatican radio and L’Osservatore Romano revealed to the world “the dreadful cruelties of uncivilized tyranny” that the Nazis were inflicting on Jewish and Catholic Poles.
... In June 1942, Pius spoke out against the mass deportation of Jews from Nazi-occupied France, further instructing his Papal Nuncio in Paris to protest to Marshal Henri Petain, Vichy France’s Chief of State, against “the inhuman arrests and deportations of Jews from the French occupied zone to Silesia and parts of Russia.”
The London Times of October 1, 1942, explicitly praises him for his condemnation of Nazism and his public support for the Jewish victims of Nazi terror. “A study of the words which Pope Pius XII has addressed since his accession,” noted the Times, “leaves no room for doubt. He condemns the worship of force and its concrete manifestations in the suppression of national liberties and in the persecution of the Jewish race.”
Pius XII’s Christmas addresses of 1941 and 1942, broadcast over Vatican radio to millions throughout the world, also help to refute the fallacious claim that Pope Pius was “silent.” Indeed, as The New York Times described Pius’ 1941 Christmas address in its editorial the following day, it specifically applauded the Pope, as a “lonely” voice of public protest against Hitler.... The Pope’s Christmas message of 1941, as reported by The New York Times and other newspapers, was understood at the time to be a clear condemnation of Nazi attacks on Europe’s Jews.
Hitler’s Nemesis In fact, not only was Pius not silent, he was passionately opposed to Hitler at a time when many other notables — such as former U.K. Prime Minister David Lloyd George, Joseph Kennedy, J. Paul Getty, future Nobel Prize winner Andre Gide, and writer Gertrude Stein — supported the German leader.
For example, a close collaborator of Pius’ named Sister Pascalina and other witnesses reported that, while still Cardinal Pacelli, he said of Hitler, “Everything he says and writes has the mark of his egocentrism; this man is capable of trampling on corpses.” Even more significant is a confidential letter sent to Washington by U.S. consul general A.W. Klieforth. Recording a 1937 conversation with Pacelli, he wrote (as rendered by World Over Live host Raymond Arroyo during a January 10, 2010 interview with Krupp), “His [Pius’] views, while they are well known, surprised me by their extremeness. He said that he opposed, unalterably, every compromise with National Socialism. He regarded Hitler not only as an untrustworthy scoundrel but as a fundamentally wicked person. He did not believe that Hitler was capable of moderation, and in spite of appearances would end up in the camp of left-wing Nazi extremists.”
The pope had also said, according to Krupp in the same interview, that it was better to lose young Catholics than to submit to Nazism.
Yet Pius’ charitable behavior toward Jews (which merely reflected his charity for all) greatly predated, and outlived, the Nazi menace. Pius’ closest friend growing up was a Jewish boy named Guido Mendes, and when Mendes’ life was later imperiled during WWII, Pius would intercede and rescue him (Mendes’ affection for his great friend was evident in an article he wrote the year of the pope’s death).
Additionally, to cite just a few more examples: As Nuncio Pacelli in 1917, he intervened with the Germans to prevent the Ottoman Turks from exterminating the Palestinian Jews; in 1930, he supported orders excommunicating anyone who joined Hitler’s party; he threw his weight behind the defeat of a Polish anti-koshering law in 1938; and at the United Nations in 1947, Pius encouraged Catholic nations to support the creation of the state of Israel.
Then, returning to the fruits of the pope’s wartime actions, I can add a somewhat personal note to this story. I had a Jewish relative who was a little girl in France during the Nazi occupation, and I had the opportunity to get to know her because she survived those harrowing days. And she only survived them because she was hidden and protected by Catholic priests.
Revisionist History Now, all this runs so contrary to the modern Pius narrative that some may wonder where it’s coming from. Is this a matter of revisionist history? It is — only, the revisionism occurred long ago.
If Pius was Hitler’s pope, he sure fooled Hitler. As to this, The Tablet of London reported that Nazi leader Joseph Goebbels distributed pamphlets referring to Pius as the “pro-Jewish Pope.” Then, after Pius’ 1942 Christmas message, Germany’s Reich Central Security Office issued a report stating, “The Pope has repudiated the National Socialist New European Order ... and makes himself the mouthpiece of the Jewish war criminals.”
And, writes Sister Margherita Marchione, Ph.D. in her piece “Three Jews and a Pope,” “The Nazi plan, reported in the July 5, 1998 issue of the Milan newspaper Il Giornale ... described Hilter’s [sic] plan to ‘massacre Pius XII with the entire Vatican,’ because of the ‘Papal protest in favor of the Jews.’”
And Pius must have fooled all the newspapers as well. Krupp points out that during the course of the PTWF’s research, they examined hundreds of WWII-era articles on Pius and found not one negative piece. Thus, ironically, while the New York Times has given much ink and credence to recent anti-Pius books, it is contradicting the findings of its own WWII-generation reporters.
Most significant, though, are the pronouncements and behavior of a veritable who’s who of WWII-era Jewish figures. For example, Golda Meir praised Pius, saying, “When fearful martyrdom came to our people in the dec-ade of Nazi terror, the voice of the Pope was raised for the victims.”
Albert Einstein was quoted in Time magazine in 1940 as stating, “Only the Church stood squarely across the path of Hitler’s campaign for suppressing the truth.”
Chief Rabbi Alexander Safran of Bucharest, Rumania, wrote in an April 7, 1944 statement, “In the most difficult hours which we Jews of Rumania have passed through, the generous assistance of the Holy See was decisive and salutary. It is not easy for us to find the right words to express the warmth and consolation we experience because of the concern of the Supreme Pontiff.”
These voices were joined by contemporaries such as Israeli Prime Minister Moshe Sharett, Israel’s first President Chaim Weizmann, Israeli Chief Rabbi Isaac Herzog, and Jewish historian Pinchas Lapide, just to name a handful. In fact, some prominent Jews actually suggested that a forest of 860,000 trees be planted on the hills of Judea in Pius’ honor.
The pièce de résistance, however, would have to be Israel Zoller, Chief Rabbi of Rome from 1939 to 1945. After the war, he actually converted to Catholicism and adopted the name Eugenio Zolli — in honor of none other than Pope Pius XII.
Given this, what do you call it when many today stubbornly insist they know better than every prominent Jewish voice of Pius’s time? Well, Jewish folks have a word for it: chutzpah. To use another Yiddish term, though, how did all this narishkeit, or foolishness, surrounding Pius get started? Believe it or not, it began with one man, one day, and one play.
Pius’ reputation remained intact until about five years after his death. But then on February 20, 1963, The Deputy opened in Berlin. Written by leftist playwright Rolf Hochhuth, it depicted Pius as a self-serving man who failed to act or protest during the Holocaust, a man who subordinated the inklings of the Holy Spirit to the spirit of expediency. The play would ultimately be translated into more than 20 languages, and its narrative would metastasize even more aggressively. It illustrates the influence one man can have.
Persecuting a Pope Then again, if a story that broke in 2007 is to be believed, maybe it doesn’t. That year, the highest-ranking communist intelligence officer to ever defect to the West, Ion Mihai Pacepa, claimed that the attack on Pius was no accident — it was Soviet agitprop.
He revealed, wrote John Follain in the Sunday Times of London, “that he was involved in the operation code-named Seat12, a Kremlin scheme launched in 1960 to portray Pius XII ‘as a cold-hearted Nazi sympathiser.’ The result, according to Pacepa, was the 1963 play The Deputy, by Rolf Hochhuth.” Oh, I should add that the motto of this Cold War plot was “Dead men cannot defend themselves.” No, they can’t — but men with dead souls can attack very well.
While the hard-left Hochhuth certainly needed no encouragement to write such propaganda (except, perhaps, for some convenient misinformation “finding” him), should Pacepa’s story surprise anyone? After all, Pius and the church at the time were staunchly and explicitly anti-communist, and Catholic teaching specifically condemns communism.
In fact, so effective was the church’s opposition that Mikhail Gorbachev credited it as being instrumental in the fall of the Iron Curtain, saying in 1992, “What has happened in Eastern Europe in recent years would not have been possible without the presence of this Pope [John Paul II].”
The point is that the communists viewed the Catholic Church as a major (if not the main) impediment to their aims. Also remember that, as Soviet defector Yuri Bezmenov pointed out years ago, 85 percent of the KGB’s resources were devoted not to intrigue but to subversion, efforts at, as he put it, “demoralization.” That is, efforts such as the attack on Pius.
But as Bezmenov would also point out, most cultural havoc wreaked upon the West is done by Westerners to Westerners. Thus, however great (or minor) the communist influence over the character assassination of Pius, there is no doubt that it is covered with Western fingerprints. And why did so many glom on to The Deputy’s malicious lies?
Simple: The time was right. Secularist forces were on the march in the 1960s, hungry for any hammer suitable for bludgeoning traditionalist institutions. As University of Mississippi law professor and author of Righteous Gentiles: How Pope Pius XII and the Catholic Church Saved Half a Million Jews From the Nazis Richard Rychlak explained in a January 2006 Zenit interview:
Many of the critics [of Pius] share a view of the world that runs counter to the Catholic Church, and they have tried to advance their view and discredit the Church by denigrating Pope Pius XII.
Read through to the end of most of these [anti-Pius] books and you will find that the authors are critical not only of Pope Pius XII, but also the late Pope John Paul II, the positions expressed by Cardinal Ratzinger/Pope Benedict XVI, traditional Catholic doctrines of papal supremacy, the all-male priesthood and especially Catholic sexual teachings.
In fact, as Rychlak points out, the Catholic Church is being attacked for the same reason Christianity is always targeted: It advances the concept of Absolute Truth. For this reason, he writes, “it is their main target — not Pius or any other -individual.”
It’s Nothing Personal In reality, many of Pius’ critics couldn’t care less about the pope any more than they do about the truth concerning him. Rather, he is a vehicle. If they can discredit the church by impugning Pius, they will do that; and if they could discredit the church by lauding Pius, they would do that. Moreover, there is no question in my mind that the agenda-driven, secularist critics care not a whit about the Holocaust, either. It is also a vehicle.
And as an example, we need look no further than the impious playwright Rolf Hochhuth. To this day he is great friends with David Irving — the man who recently completed a prison sentence in Austria for Holocaust denial. In fact, Hochhuth was accused of anti-Semitism himself in 2005 when he defended Irving’s statement, “More women died on the back seat of Edward Kennedy’s car at Chappaquiddick than ever died in a gas chamber in Auschwitz,” by dismissing it as black humor.
Then there is an irony here: If you’re the church, you’re damned if you do and damned if you don’t. Moderns lament those medieval days when popes and prelates melded with princes and politics, but then turn about and say that the church didn’t do “enough” to stop the owners of arguably the most powerful military on Earth. But while nothing is ever enough to one bent on criticism, the days of a pope summoning Crusader armies to vanquish the barbarians du jour are long gone.
This brings us back to quiet heroism and Oskar Schindler. Krupp has pointed out that in Judaism “the highest form of charity is anonymous charity,” and he says that this is what Pius is “guilty” of. Yet anonymous help is sometimes driven by necessity as much as nobility. Sure, we often like our heroes spitting in the eye of 1,000 devils while dodging 1,000 bullets, but bravery that kills innocents is no virtue.
Many have observed that whenever the church spoke out, reprisals against Christians and Jews alike intensified. And this could only be observed because the church did speak out. This — and the fact that a dead savior saves no one — is the reason why, like Schindler, Pius had to work his miracles in secret.
Unlike Schindler, though, who is admired for using a pretense of friendship with Nazis to save 1,200 lives, Pius is condemned for using an occasional pretense of neutrality to save the better part of one million.
Yet, in trying to correct the record here, one encounters a very difficult stumbling block. It’s called the Big Lie technique. It was articulated by Adolf Hitler himself in Mein Kampf when he wrote, “It would never come into their [average people’s] heads to fabricate colossal untruths, and they would not believe that others could have the impudence to distort the truth so infamously.” Now, what does it say about Pius’ Machiavellian critics when, in order to paint him as a Nazi collaborator, they were willing to infamously distort the truth?
You can answer that yourself. As for the Big Lie that Pope Pius XII didn’t do enough, we should ask the big question: Who did more? One of Pius’ former enemies, Gary Krupp, knows. He put it this way, “Through our research of documented proof, we have discovered that secretly, he saved more Jews than all of the world’s religious and political leaders combined.”
That is a big truth. It’s big, it’s beautiful, and maybe it will even be, one day, known.
Silvio Berlusconi was reduced to tears when Benjamin Netanyahu paid tribute to the Italian prime minister's mother for saving a Jewish child from arrest and deportation.
Mr Berlusconi, who was visiting Jerusalem appeared to wipe away tears when the Israeli leader recalled how Rosa Berlusconi, who died in 2008 at the age of 97, saw a German policeman trying to arrest a Jewish girl on a train in Milan.
"The Italian woman, who was then eight months pregnant, stood between the policeman and the girl. And without a grain of fear, she confronted the German policeman and said to him: 'You can kill me, but look at the faces of the people on the train, I promise you they won't let you get out alive'," Mr Netanyahu said.
"With this firm statement, the Italian woman saved the Jewish girl and lit, if only for a moment, a ray of humanistic light and bravery in the great darkness that pervaded all of Europe.
"That brave woman was named Rosa, and one of her sons is named Silvio Berlusconi, today the prime minister of Italy."
Mr Berlusconi, 73, was on a visit to Israel's parliament and listened to a translation of the speech, which was in Hebrew.
He wiped his hand across his eye and nodded in appreciation as Mr Netanyahu and Israeli MPs applauded.
"I am moved and thank the prime minister for recalling an episode involving my mother, who in that moment expressed the feelings of all Italian women," he said.
In true Italian style, Mr Berlusconi idolised his mother and devoted a chapter to her in a biography of his life that he sent to every Italian household while campaigning for re-election in 2001.
Italy's Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi (L) toasts with Israel's President Shimon Peres during a lunch on Berlusconi's behalf at the president's residence in Jerusalem February 3, 2010. Berlusconi, visiting Israel's parliament on Wednesday, appeared to wipe away a tear when Netanyahu recalled how the Italian leader's mother helped a Jewish girl during World War Two. (Daylife-Reuters)
VATICAN CITY, 27 JAN 2010 (VIS) - At the end of today's general audience, the Pope recalled how "sixty-five years ago, on 27 January 1945, the gates of the Nazi concentration campo near the Polish city of Oswiecim, better known by its German name of Auschwitz, were opened and the few survivors freed.
"That event, and the testimony of those who survived, revealed to the world the horror of the crimes of unprecedented cruelty committed in the extermination camps created by Nazi Germany", he added.
"Today we celebrate 'Holocaust Remembrance Day', to recall all the victims of those crimes, and especially the planned annihilation of the Jews, and to honour those who, at the risk of their own lives, protected the persecuted and sought to oppose the murderous insanity. Deeply moved, our thoughts go to the countless victims of that blind racial and religious hatred, who suffered deportation, imprisonment and death in those abhorrent and inhuman places.
"May the memory of those events", he concluded, "and in particular the drama of the Shoah which struck the Jewish people, arouse ever greater respect for the dignity of each person, so that all mankind may feel itself to be one large family. May omnipotent God illuminate hearts and minds, that such tragedies never happen again".
Remarks regarding St. Francis of Assisi can be found here.
Video of January 25th, Monday mass for Christian Unity & Vespers of St. Paul's Conversion:
The Pope visited Viterbo's Palace of the Popes, where after 33 months of vacancy the Cardinals entered conclave to elect a successor to the See of Peter.
Read more about the election of Pope St. Linus here.
VITERBO, Italy, SEPT. 6, 2009 (Zenit.org).- Here is a translation of Benedict XVI's homily at a Mass he celebrated while on a pastoral visit to Viterbo.
Dear Brothers and Sisters!
The setting in which we celebrate the Holy Mass today is truly unusual and suggestive: we find ourselves in the valley in view of the ancient city gate of Viterbo called "FAUL;" the letters stand for Fanum, Arbanum, Vetulonia and Longula. On the one side there stands the imposing palace, at one time a residence of the Popes, which in the 13th century -- as your bishop observed -- saw five conclaves; we are surrounded by buildings and spaces, witnesses of many events of the past, and today the fabric of the life of your city and province.
In this context, which recalls centuries of civil and religious history, your whole diocesan community is gathered, at least in spirit, with the Successor of Peter to be confirmed by him in fidelity to Christ and his Gospel.
To all of you, dear Brothers and Sisters, I offer my grateful thoughts with affection for the warm welcome you reserved for me. First, I greet your pastor, Bishop Lorenzo Chiarinelli, whom I thank for the words of welcome. I greet the other bishops, especially those from Lazio with the Cardinal Vicar of Rome, the dear diocesan priests, deacons, seminarians, religious, the young people and children, and I extend my remembrance to all the members of the diocese, whom, in the recent past, I saw gathered in Viterbo together with the Abbey of San Martino al Monte Cimino, and the dioceses of Acquapendente, Bagnoregio, Montefiascone and Tuscania. This new configuration is now artistically sculpted in the bronze doors of the cathedral that, as I began my visit in Piazza San Lorenzo, I was able to bless and admire.
With deference I turn to the civil and military authorities, to the representatives of parliament, the government, the region and province, and in a special way to the mayor, who acted as the bearer of the cordial sentiments of people of Viterbo. I thank the security forces and greet the numerous members of the military who are present in this city, along with those who are engaged in missions of peace in the world.
I greet and thank the volunteers and those who helped to make my visit possible. I reserve a very special greeting for the older people and those who live by themselves, the sick, those in prison and those who were not able to take part in this meeting of ours of prayer and friendship.
Dear Brothers and Sisters, every liturgical assembly is the space of the presence of God. Gathered together for the Holy Eucharist, the disciples of the Lord proclaim that he is risen, that he is alive and the giver of life, and they bear witness that his presence is grace, is a task, is joy.
Let us open our hearts to his word and welcome the gift of his presence! In the first reading the prophet Isaiah (35:4-7) encourages "those whose hearts are frightened" and announces this stupendous novelty, that experience confirms: when the Lord is present, the eyes of the blind are reopened, ears of the deaf hear, the lame "leap" like a stag. Everything is reborn and everything revives because wholesome waters spring up in the desert.
The "desert," in its symbolic language, can evoke the dramatic events, difficult situations and solitude that often mark life; the most profound desert is the human heart, when it loses the ability to hear, to speak, to communicate with God and with others. One then becomes blind because he is incapable of seeing reality; he closes his ears to not hear the cry of those who implore his help; his heart is hardened in indifference and egotism. But now -- the prophet announces -- all is destined to change; into the "arid land" of this closed heart a new divine blood will flow. And when the Lord comes, he will say to "the frightened of heart" of every age, "Courage, fear not!" (35:4).
The Gospel episode narrated by Mark in which Jesus heals a deaf mute in pagan territory (7:31-37) connects well here. First he encounters and cares for him with the language of deeds, more immediate than that of words; and then with an expression in Aramaic he says to him: "Ephphatha," that is, "Be open," giving that man hearing and speech. Full of wonder, the crowd exclaims: "He has done all things well!" (7:37).
We can see in this "sign" Jesus' ardent desire to conquer in man the solitude and incommunicability created by egotism, to give a face to a "new humanity," a humanity that listens and a humanity of the word, of dialogue, of communication, of communion with God.
A "good" humanity, as all of God's creation is good; a humanity without discrimination, without exclusions -- as the Apostle James admonishes in his Letter (2:1-5) -- so that the world truly be a "place of genuine brotherhood" ("Gaudium et Spes," 37) for all, in the opening of the common Father who created us and made us his sons and daughters.
Dear Church of Viterbo, may the Christ whom we see in the Gospel open the ears and loosen the tongue of a deaf mute person, reveal your heart and always give you the joy to listen to his Word, the courage to announce his Gospel, the ability to speak with God and thus to speak with your brothers and sisters, and finally, may he give you the courage of the discovery of his face and his beauty!
But, so that this might happen -- St. Bonaventure of Bagnoregio recalls (I will be traveling to Bagnoregio this afternoon) -- the mind must "go beyond everything through contemplation and go beyond not only the world of the senses, but also beyond itself" ("Itinerarium mentis in Deum" VII,1). This is the itinerary of salvation, illumined by the light of the Word of God and nourished by the sacraments that are common to all Christians.
I would like to take up some spiritual and pastoral points about this road that you too, beloved Church of this land, are called to travel. Education in the faith -- as search, as Christian initiation, as life in Christ -- is a priority that is very close to the heart of your bishop. It is the "becoming Christian" that consists in that "learning Christ" that St. Paul expresses with the formula: "It is no longer I who live but Christ who lives in me" (Galatians 2:20).
The parishes, families and various groups are involved in this experience. Catechists and all educators are called to commit themselves; the schools are also called to make their contribution, from the primary schools to the University of Tuscia, which is growing in importance and prestige, and, in particular, the Catholic school, with the Istituto Filosofico-Teologico "San Pietro."
There are models that are always relevant, authentic pioneers in education in the faith from which to draw inspiration. I gladly mention, among others, St. Rosa Venerini (1656-1728) -- who I had the joy to canonize three years ago -- a true forerunner of girls' schools in Italy, during the Enlightenment; St. Lucia Filippini (1672-1732) who, with the help of Venerable Cardinal Marco Antonio Barbarigo (1640-1706), founded the worthy "Maestre Pie."
One could still happily draw from these spiritual sources to confront, with lucidity and coherence, the current inescapable and pressing "educational emergency," a great challenge for every Christian community and for society as a whole, which is precisely a process of "Ephphatha," of opening the ears, loosening the tongue and opening the eyes.
Along with education, the testimony of the faith. "Faith," St. Paul writes, "works through charity" (Galatians 5:6). The charitable work of the Church takes on a face in this perspective: her initiatives, her works are signs of faith in and love of God, who is Love -- as I amply noted in the encyclicals "Deus Caritas Est" and "Caritas in Veritate."
This is where voluntary service flourishes and must always increase, whether at the personal level or the organized level. In charity this voluntary service has its propulsive and educative organism. The young St. Rose (1233-1251), co-patroness of the diocese, whose feast is celebrated during this time, is a radiant example of faith and generosity toward the poor.
How can one not also recall that from her monastery St. Giacinta Marescotti (1585-1640) promoted Eucharistic adoration in the city and gave life to institutions and initiatives to benefit prisoners and the marginalized? Nor can we forget the Franciscan witness of the Capuchin St. Crispino (1668-1759), who continues to inspire worthy aid groups. It is significant that in this climate of evangelical fervor many houses of consecrated life were born, for both men and women, and in particular cloistered monasteries, which constitute a visible reminder of the primacy of God in our existence and show us that prayer is the first form of charity.
Emblematic in this regard is the example of the Trappist nun Blessed Gabriella Sagheddu (1914-1939): in the monastery of Vitorchiano, where she is entombed, spiritual ecumenism continues to be proposed, nourished by the incessant prayer, strongly solicited by the Second Vatican Council (cf. "Unitatis Redintegratio," no. 8). I would also like to mention another citizen of Viterbo, Blessed Domenico Bàrberi (1792-1849), the Passionist priest who, in 1845, welcomed John Henry Newman -- who later became a cardinal -- into the Catholic Church. Newman was a high profile intellectual and a man of luminous spirituality.
Finally I would like to touch on a third point, a pastoral one: attention to the signs of God. As Jesus did with the deaf mute person, God continues to reveal his plan to us through "events and words." Listening to his word and discerning his signs must be the work of every Christian community. The most immediate of God's signs is certainly care for one's neighbor, according to what Jesus said: "Everything that you did for these least of my brothers you did for me" (Matthew 25:40).
Furthermore, as the Second Vatican Council affirms: the Christian is called to "stand before the world as a witness to the resurrection and life of the Lord Jesus and a sign of the living God" ("Lumen Gentium," no. 38). The priest, whom Christ has chosen entirely for himself, must first of all be this. During this Year for Priests, pray with greater intensity for priests, for seminarians and for vocations, that they be faithful to this vocation of theirs! He must be the sign of the living God, as every consecrated person and all the baptized must likewise be.
Faithful laypeople, young people, families, do not be afraid to live and bear witness to the faith in the various spheres of society, in the multiple situations of human existence! Viterbo also has a prestigious figures in this respect. On this occasion it is a duty and a joy to remember the young Mario Fani of Viterbo, founder of the "Circolo Santa Rosa" ("Circle of St. Rose"), who then, along with Giovanni Acquaderni, of Bologna, started the Catholic Action movement in Italy.
The seasons succeed each other, social contexts change, but the vocation of Christians to live the Gospel in solidarity with the human family does not change or go out of fashion with the passing of time. This is social commitment, this is the service proper to political action, this is integral human development.
Dear brothers and sisters! When the heart is frightened in the desert of life, do not be afraid, give yourselves to Christ, the firstborn of the new humanity: a family of brothers built up in freedom and justice, in the truth and charity of the sons of God.
Saints who are dear to you are part of this family: Lorenzo, Valentino, Ilario, Rosa, Lucia, Bonaventure and many others. Our common Mother is Mary, whom you venerate with the title of Madonna della Quercia (Madonna of the Oak) as patroness of the whole diocese in its new configuration. May they guard you always in unity and nourish in each of you the desire to proclaim, with words and deeds, the presence and love of Christ!
Pope Benedict XVI prays in front of the mummified body of St. Rose inside the St. Rose shrine after celebrating a mass during his visit in Viterbo on September 6, 2009. (Daylife-Getty Images)
Pope Benedict XVI arrives in procession to the Faul valley to celebrate an ope-air mass during his visit at Viterbo, central Italy, Sunday, Sept. 6, 2009. (Daylife-AP Photo)
(CNA).- At the conclusion of Sunday’s Papal Mass in Viterbo, Italy, Pope Benedict XVI spoke on the theme chosen for his pastoral visit: “Confirm your brothers.” These are the words, he recalled, that Jesus said to St. Peter at the Last Supper, entrusting Peter and his successors with the task of being “Pastor of all his Church.”
Pope Benedict explained that throughout the ages, the Viterbo diocese has been a sign of affection and communion with the Successor of Peter. “I was able to take notice,” he shared, “while visiting the Palace of the Popes and especially, the hall of the ‘Conclave.’”
Benedict XVI added that the area was the birthplace of St. Leo the Great, “who rendered a great service to truth in charity, by way of an assiduous exercise of the word, as testified by St. Leo’s Sermons and by his Letters.”
Viterbo has a history of being the home of the Roman Pontiffs for the second half of the thirteenth century, as five popes were elected and four were buried in the city. In addition, 50 popes have visited there, most recently, the Servant of God John Paul II, 25 years ago.
Pope Benedict explained that he wants to stress the spiritual value of these numbers. “Viterbo,” he said, “is rightly called ‘City of Popes,’ and this constitutes for you, her residents, a reason to live and to testify to the Christian faith, the same faith for which the holy martyrs Valentine and Hilary, whose relics are contained in the cathedral and the first of a long line of saints, martyrs and blessed from your land.”
Returning to the theme of his visit, the Pope reflected on how the exhortation to confirm his brothers is an invitation of the Lord that is “today directed to me with particular intensity.”
“Pray, dear brothers and sisters, so that I might always complete with fidelity and love the mission of Pastor of all Christ’s sheep. For my part, I assure constant prayer for your diocese so that the diverse expressions, a symbolic representation of which I was able to admire on the new doors of the cathedral, tend to fuller unity and fraternal communion, indispensible conditions for offering the world an effective evangelical testimony.”
After the Angelus prayer, Pope Benedict XVI extended greetings to the participants of the International Congress “Man and Religions,” which is taking place in Krakow, Poland, with the theme, “Faiths and culture in dialogue.”
The Pontiff said: “Representatives of various religions, invited by the Archdiocese of Krakow and the St. Egidio Community, are gathered to reflect and pray in favor of peace, 50 years after the start of the Second World War.
"We cannot forget the dramatic facts which initiated one of the most terrible conflicts of history, causing millions of deaths and much suffering for the beloved Polish people, a conflict which witnessed the tragedy of the Holocaust and the extermination of other innocents. The memory of these events moves us to pray for the victims and for those who still bear wounds on the body and in their heart. May it serve as an example for all to not repeat such barbarity and to intensify efforts to construct in our time, still marked by conflict, a lasting peace, transmitting to new generations a culture and lifestyle of love, solidarity and respect for others.”
Pius XII's pro-Jewish WW2 efforts:
