Reply #41: I'm just guessing... [View All]

[onager]

...but Golda Meir's eulogy sounds like politics as usual. More than anybody, she knew that Pius XII did not raise his voice.

In fact, he made sure that the famous "hidden encyclical" of Pius XI never saw the light of day. Humanas Generis Unitas ("The Unity of the Human Race"), written in 1938, truly WAS an outspoken condemnation of racism in general and Nazi anti-Semitism in particular. Pius XII deep-sixed it and it didn't even come to light until years later.

Einstein's comment may have been a reference to individual Catholic churchmen, and some of them did show incredible courage in standing up to the Nazis.

One example was the Bishop Of Muenster, who denounced the T4 Program...better known as the "Euthanasia Program"...operating between 1939 and 1941. Its use of gas chambers prefigured the Holocaust, but the victims of the T4 program were Germans, including handicapped children.

As one German historian wrote in a collection of essays on the Nazis and the Vatican: "Those bishops who did publicly confront the state through their preaching and actions, such as Preysing and Clemens August von Galen, Bishop of Muenster, who spoke against the state's T-4 euthanasia program, were left to stand alone.

The papacy and their fellow bishops seemed robbed of the capacity to remain upright with them."