Hitler’s Pope, Nazi Crimes, and The New York Times

By Father Gordon J. MacRae

New evidence unmasks a myth that Pope Pius XII was “Hitler’s Pope:’ and a shocking failure of The New York Times to tell the world of the Holocaust.

These Stone Walls might seem a strange place to be reading this story, but in a way it might make sense. Too many Catholic writers today seem to fear The New York Times and the rest of the mainstream news media.

It’s a subtle fear that I laid out in “The Catholic Press Needs to Get Over Its Father Maciel Syndrome.” There are courageous exceptions, of course, and notable among them are Bill Donohue of The Catholic League and David F. Pierre of The Media Report. Both have repeatedly and forcefully called The New York Times to task for its distortions of news pertaining to the Catholic Church. Nowhere have these distortions been more evident than in the Catholic sex abuse scandal, a drama I have lived every day for the last 18 years. It’s also a drama that leads the late 20th Century litany of anti-Catholic agendas in the news. I gave several examples in a post entitled “Catholic Scandal and the News Media.”

Running a close second in that litany is the story of Pope Pius XII during the Holocaust. You have all read or heard the claims that Pope Pius XII was silent, at best, during the Holocaust, and at worst secured an accommodation with the Third Reich that saved the Catholic Church at the expense of the Jews. It’s not at all true, but the truth has had an uphill climb against the pervasive story, told again and again, that Pope Pius XII failed to confront Hitler during his systematic genocide of over six million European Jews and millions of others. You’ve heard the story of this supposed silence in a slanderous media sound bite that Pope Pius XII was “Hitler’s Pope.” Next to the “pedophile priest” propaganda, it is probably the most often used and abused modern anti-Catholic slur. But simply put, it is a lie.

Newly emerging evidence reveals that the entire story was the result of an organized propaganda effort sponsored by the Soviet KGB to discredit Pope Pius XII and the Catholic Church. It’s a shocking story, the stuff of Tom Clancy novels and wild conspiracy theories, but it’s also true, and I’ll unravel that truth in a few moments... (continued)

Read More at These Stone Walls

Link:

• Hitler’s Pope, Nazi Crimes, and The New York Times

On Loudmouthed Tough Guys in the Church

By Ann Barnhardt at Barnhardt.biz:

To open this post I wrote up this whole brilliant allegory about how sometimes you gotta be Paul Scofield, and sometimes you gotta be Ernest Borgnine, and if you put the two together you get Marty, but then I realized that all of three people reading this would have any idea who or what I was talking about, so I skipped it. But trust me, it was brilliant.

Here is Voris, clearly edified and energized by his new digs and new name, ChurchMilitant.tv, knocking it out of the park. I have pasted the key quotations he cites below, in case you want to copy and paste them into a file for future reference.

Since, in order that the deceits of the enemy may be avoided, it is necessary first of all that they be laid bare; since much is to be gained by denouncing these fallacies for the sake of the unwary, even though We prefer not to name these iniquities "as becometh saints," yet for the welfare of souls We cannot remain altogether silent. - Pope Pius XI

We’ve had enough of exhortations to be silent! Cry out with a hundred thousand tongues. I see that the world is rotten because of silence! -  St. Catherine of Siena

If people are scandalized at the Truth, it is better to allow the birth of scandal, than to abandon the Truth.  - Pope St. Gregory the Great

Let me add two more from the Church Fathers:

Everyone who can speak the Truth, yet speaks it not, will be judged by God. - St. Justin Martyr, died A.D. 165

Anyone who conceals the Truth for fear of some authority calls down the wrath of God upon himself, because he fears men more than God... Both are guilty: he who conceals the Truth and he who speaks falsehood, because the former does not wish to make the Truth known and the latter desires not to refute it. -  St. Augustine, died A.D. 430

I have heard a priest relate an anecdote regarding "prudence" that makes my flesh crawl. It goes something like this:

During World War II, the priests and bishops in Italy kept fairly quiet, and did not preach with fire and zeal against Mussolini or Hitler - their efforts against the Axis were more clandestine and underground. In the Netherlands (correction here: I originally said Denmark - I was wrong), by comparison, the priests and bishops were vociferous in their preaching against the Reich. As a result, nearly the entire Jewish population of the Netherlands was exterminated, while a far higher percentage of the Jews in Italy survived the war.

This argument is specious. It sounds good on the surface, but it is terribly flawed. The Dutch clergy did the right thing - they were the truly PRUDENT actors. They did what was right in those circumstances, which is to preach the Truth without hesitation, and with as much zeal and fire as they could muster. The failing in prudence was on the part of the other clergy in Europe. Had the clergy of the entire Church stood tall and railed without ceasing against Hitler, Mussolini, and the rest of the players, had they made clear that ANY cooperation with these governments was a mortal sin, and thus laetae sententiae excommunication, which means automatic by virtue of committing the sinful action itself, and not requiring any official juridical action of a bishop; if they had told the people of Europe that it was either friendship with Christ, which meant the total rejection of the Reich and the Fascist Italian regime, or eternal hellfire, perhaps a war which killed 70 million human beings could have been avoided, or drastically reduced in scale. Comparing survival rates of Jews in one country versus another makes the terrible assumption that the situation in Europe could not have been any better, and could ONLY have been worse. Considering that 70 million people were killed in World War II, it is lunacy to argue that "it couldn't possibly have been any better."

This is why I am doing what I am doing now with regards to Obama. I have, for my entire life, marveled at the people of Germany, in particular. Why didn't anyone say anything? Why didn't anyone do anything? If you had the chance and ability to rhetorically destroy Adolf Hitler in the early 1930s, if you had the capacity to reveal Hitler's insanity, homosexuality and unspeakable fetishes and perversions, and also the lies of National Socialism, wouldn't you do it? Wouldn't you do everything you could to rhetorically destroy Adolf Hitler? Wouldn't you expose his depraved homosexuality in order to utterly discredit him in the eyes of the German people so that they would never come to regard him as some sort of savior in the first place? Wouldn't you try to derail the train before it caused a war that killed tens of millions of human beings?
If not, WHY NOT?

How is NOT speaking the truth in any way prudent, much less charitable?

Expect God's wrath all you who fear MEN more than you fear God, and thus willfully conceal and stifle the Truth through silence and passivity. And don't you dare call it prudence.

Links:

• On Loudmouthed Tough Guys in the Church 
• ChurchMilitant.tv

Hitler learns that Gomez will succeed Mahony as Archbishop of Los Angeles

Hitler Rails Against Pope Benedict XVI

From Devin Rose via Mark Shea

Hitler's top secret stealth bomber

Posted on June 26, 2009, 1:32 PM | Brian Saint-Paul

(Inside Catholic) Surprising to most, the U.S. military's space-age B-2 Spirit was not the world's first stealth bomber. That honor belongs to the Horton 2-29, an experimental jet created by Nazi Germany at the tail end of World War II. However, because it was never in wide use during the conflict, the 2-29's stealth capabilities were never given much of a test. That is, until now.

Researchers hired by National Geographic studied the last remaining 2-29 in existence -- locked away in a U.S. government hangar -- and built a replica. They then tested the plane's resistance to the kinds of radar active during the Second World War.

Radar tests on the replica show that the plane's radical, smooth design would indeed have given it a significant advantage against radar, according to Tom Dobrenz, a Northrop Grumman expert in stealth, or "low observable," technology, who led the Horten replica project.

In short: The Horten 2-29 looks to have been the world's first stealth fighter.

Here's a brief video of the researchers at work. Fascinating stuff. We can marvel at the genius of the German design, while being grateful that it came too late to help the Nazis.

• Link to Original
• Explore the Aircraft