Gerald at the Cafeteria is Closed has a nice post on the need for the Beatification of Pope Pius XII.
My comment to his post:
Rome under Pius XII was occupied by Italian Fascist troops and after their surrender, by elite Nazi units until 1944.
The Pope had his Swiss Guards.
France and England and the United States with all their vast resources did nothing but negotiate with fascism until they were attacked. France folded in six weeks.
Why is it expected that the Pope with no army was to take on Hitler and Mussolini and leave millions of Catholics at risk.
Twentieth century history had already shown that thousands Catholics in Mexico and in Spain and Portugal had become victims of militant anti-Catholic governments. Hundreds of thousands of Armenian Christians had died at the hands of Islamic Turks.
One hundred or so Swiss Guards were to defend Catholicism? The Vatican could have been destroyed in an afternoon by a couple of artillery batallions.
The evidence is pretty clear that world-wide Pius XII and the Catholic Church quietly saved hundreds of thousands of Jews and other victims of Nazi hate and repression. To have openly encouraged resistance by German and Italian Catholics would have only generated more hate, repression, torture and deaths.
No comments:
Post a Comment