| | | Original name of the man who became Pope Pius XII.
Attended the coronation of George V in London in 1910. (Only picked that up thanks to a letter to The Times.)
Key need?
From Joseph Bottum in www.firstthings.com/ftissues/ft0404/articles/bottum.html
... what we really need now is a new biography of Pius XII during those years: a nonreactive account of his life and times, a book driven not by the reviewer’s instinct to answer charges but by the biographer’s impulse to tell an accurate story.
The article tells the story of how the story of Pacelli has developed in the US and tells it well. Not least, I thought, in summarizing the dangers for conservative Catholics in reading with approval the David Dalin article commissioned by Bottum for the Weekly Standard - and quickly made famous here on Why in 2001. Another interesting aspect is how another neocon journal, Commentary, felt the need to commission a left-wing author to attack the Dalin article in what would normally be considered almost a sister publication.
An important source of new research not mentioned by Bottum is The Real Odessa, which makes some grave charges about Pacelli and Montini's assistance to the post-War Nazi "rat run", which the second edition tries hard to substantiate. The Stray Fact of the audience Pacelli granted at a moment's notice to Schellenberg, mentioned only in passing in The Unlikely Death Of Heinrich Himmler, also remains powerful for me. But the best balance for me on Pius and the Catholic church generally is found in The Secret War Against The Jews. Not least because John Loftus and Mark Aarons have to guts to put their main focus on much more serious forms of collaboration, money making, power broking and deception. In this sombre context their comments on the Catholic contribution, both positive and negative, seem properly judicious. -- Richard Drake
Famous for his silence
Did Pacelli or anyone else read the letter of Edith Stein addressed to Pius XI in 1933?
The letter was long believed lost; Stein mentioned it in her autobiography of 1938, saying she didn't know what had become of it. In the letter she wrote, "Holy father ... for weeks we in Germany are spectators of evils which entail total contempt for justice and humanity ...
"For years the Nazi leaders have shown their hatred for the Jews. Now they have attained power and have armed their followers – including noted criminal elements – to harvest the fruit of the hatred they have sown."
Mentioning the Nazi boycott of Jewish traders, and the numerous suicides that followed, she wrote: "Is not this idolatry of the race and of state power stark heresy? Is not this war of extermination against Jewish blood an outrage against the sacred humanity of our Saviour, of the Holy Virgin and of the apostles?"
Clearly in great distress at the Church's apparent unconcern about Nazi atrocities, she went on, "We ... who see the actual situation in Germany believe it is harmful to the image of the Church worldwide if this silence is prolonged further."
Stein's letter received no answer, and it is not known for sure whether Pius XI even read it. What is known is that Sant'Uffizzio, the Vatican office that deals with heresy, planned a "sillabo" – a condemnation – "of the errors of Hitler and Lenin", in 1933 and 1934, but it never saw the light of day.
Did Pacelli see that reference to "silence"? Or did he read the letter from Friedrich Muckermann in 1934?
Atheistical Bolshevism, not Nazism, was the obsession of the Church. It took penetrating insight, back then, to grasp that Nazism was the worse evil. One man who did grasp it, a forgotten German Jesuit priest called Friedrich Muckermann, wrote a letter as prescient in its way as Stein's. It was directed to Cardinal Eugenio Pacelli, later Pope Pius XII, in 1934, and in it he described Nazism as "a real religion ... a religion that works with revolutionary dynamism and which works above all on subhuman instincts. What confronts us is a phenomenon of diabolical violence ... National Socialism and Neopaganism are identical.
"What is the problem with the Church?" Muckermann went on to ask. "Often it lacks courage ... Why does the Church not go into battle against Nazism with the same energy that it finds in confronting Bolshevism and socialism?" It is a question that continues to resonate down the decades. That lack of courage might help to explain the fierceness with which Pope John Paul II today excoriates the immorality of war mongers, and never ceases trying to build bridges to other religions.
Quotes from The Independent (here)
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