Popes

[Guest Incognito]

Why did Pious the XII punk out when he should have castigated Adolph Hitler for being a racist, genocidal butthead? Also, why did the church bend over and allow Mussolini to... um... exercise greater control over the Italian people and create a warlike police state? And WHEN are you going to explain the upside-down cross on the back of ol' John-Paul-George-N'-Ringo's Popeseat? And if the pope is the anointed of God, why the shooting/bulletproof glass on the popemobile? You'd think God if anyone would know how to keep his homies from gettin' capped. And the crusades? What the JESUS was that about, guys? COME ON. It's like you're NOT EVEN TRYING.

[Cam42]

Let's see....where to begin. How about here....

Eugenio Pacelli, who was to become Pope Pius XII in 1939, was Papal Nuncio in Germany during the Twenties. In 1930 he returned to Rome as the newly appointed Vatican Secretary of State under Pius XI. There he played an important role in negotiating, with the Hitler government, the 1933 Concordat between the Roman Catholic Church and Germany.

After the Nazis were defeated, Pius XII made an address to the College of Cardinals (2 June 1945) in which he condemned "applications of national socialist(i.e. Nazi) teachings, which even went so far as to use the most exquisite scientific methods to torture or eliminate people who were often innocent". However reading further into the speech it becomes clear that the Pope, like so many other people at the time, was thinking of the catastrophic scenes found in the German camps at the end of the war. The only specific victims mentioned were the Catholic priests who died at Dachau. There is nothing in the address about extermination of any racial, religious or national group. None of this is to imply that the Vatican under Pope Pius XII ignored the plight of the Jews. Its help to Italian Jews during the German occupation is well known. For example, several thousand Jews were given refuge in the Vatican after the Germans occupied Rome in 1943, and there were many other ways the Vatican helped Jews.

In November 1945 Jewish survivors of Nazi concentration camps, received by Pius XII, "thanked the pontiff for the generosity he had manifested during the terrible period of Nazi fascism." In March 1946 the Italian Jewish communities, meeting in Rome, "paid homage to the pope and expressed their deepest gratitude" to the Catholic Church for its help.

I think that this hardly is the action of one who "punked out."

As far as Mousolini is concerned, there really isn't so much to be said in relation to Pius XII as there would be to talk about Pius XI. Although it is Mousolini who negotiated the creation of the Vatican City State and ended the self-imposed exile.

What do you mean by the upside down cross? There is no upside down cross with regard to John Paul II. Unless you are looking at the Coat of Arms upside down.

Even Christ was killed. I would say that the reason that he is behind bulletproof glass is because he didn't want to get shot, again. And incidentally, God isn't necessarily going to get involved...there is a whole theology behind this....much too long to go into here.

What about the crusades? They were an attempt to save the Christian sites of the world. By today's standards they seem to be rather crude and barbaric, but then again we have had 10 or 11 centuries to refine our techniques of diplomacy.

Cam