THE VATICAN & ITS DEMONS… 2/2
The 2nd version with the same title.
By 1937, 4 years after signing the Concordat, Pope Pius 11th had been highly disillusioned by Hitler and his totalitarian regime. On March 31, 1937, he had written and informally circulated a speech throughout the German churches entitled, “With Burning Concern”. It was a challenge to Nazism, but still not a direct condemnation. He died in February 1939.
Pope Pius 12th took office in March 1939, 3months before WW2 was officially declared. The year 1942 was a milestone during the Great War. Hitler invaded Poland; he was secretly at the peak of his ethnic cleansing which he kept Top Secret. Although the new Pope was reliable and well-informed, he chose to follow in the footsteps of his predecessor in absolute silence.
The World Jewish Congress provided him with a highly indexed report of the exterminations with all the statistical data. The Polish government in exile estimated that the extermination of Polish Jews consisting of the elderly, women, and children only, had surpassed one million by 1942. They both urged him to condemn Hitler publicly, aware of his moral influence and authority as the defender of humanity.
Eventually, in July 1942, a group of pastoral bishops got together and publicly condemned Nazism and its horrors. They initiated Baptisms and certificates without necessarily converting Jews, just to save them from deportations to the death camps. On the whole, the majority of European Catholics were frustrated by the Vatican’s silence and took matters into their own hands to voluntarily risk their lives and hide as many Jews as possible. The clergy in the monasteries did not wait for any permission from the Vatican to hide over 4,000 Jews, choosing conscience over authority. The lay Catholics spontaneously harbored Jews, and sometimes entire families, to save them from the Nazi onslaught. But this did not deter the Nazis who were relentless in their obsession and pursuit. They now traced whichever ‘converted’ Jew they suspected and found, dispatching them to the death camps.
Finally, on December 17, 1942, a joint worldwide condemnation was made by Churchill, Stalin, and Roosevelt. It is important to note here that Edith Stein had warned the Vatican 9 years earlier through the massive segregation that was taking place. Within this period, she was eventually sent to a concentration camp where she faced the same death.
In the western part of Rome, was the Jewish ghetto. From the 15th to the 16th of October 1943, along the Via del Portico d’Ottavia, 1,259 Jews were picked up by the Nazis and dispatched to Auschwitz. Amongst them were 200 innocent children. Although the Pope had earlier gone into the streets of San Lorenzo, a Catholic neighborhood, to sympathize with the victims of Allied bombardment, in this case, he did not budge from the Vatican.
Since the Vatican persistently and openly condemned Communism, its silence over Nazism transmitted a silent sympathy for it. In October 1943, on the cover of the well-circulated magazine “Signal”, there suddenly appeared a familiar face in a German Waffen SS uniform with the notorious eagle and swastika. It was French Bishop Mayal de Lupe, a clergy obsessed with an inherent resentment for Bolshevism, and sympathetic to the Hitlerite regime. Operation Barbarossa was the invasion of Russia by 4 million German soldiers. Mayal de Lupe decided to leave for the frontline along with hundreds of French youths. He obtained the surprising approval of his superior in Paris, Cardinal Suhard, who was a close friend of Marechal Petain. Monsignor Sebilia at the Vatican, who was close to Pius 12th, further endorsed this decision by sending his blessings. But at 70 years of age, the bishop was merely appointed as a military chaplain and spent 3 years on the Eastern Front. He settled in Germany hiding in a secluded monastery. The Allies found him at the end of the War, arrested him, and put him on trial for enemy intelligence. He was imprisoned for 4 years.
In 1944, Pius 12th’s Secretary of State died and the Pope occupied his position in the interim.
In 1948, as life slowly returned to normal, approximately 20 million displaced were homeless, aiming hopelessly and helplessly around the major cities of Europe in solemn droves. Monsignor Aloise Hudal headed one of the Assistant Pontificate Commissions created at the end of the war to welcome these refugees with the headquarters at Santa Maria dell Amina, House №20, Via della Pace, Piazza Cairall 117.
In May 1948, Franz Paul Stangl head of euthanasia killings in Austria and Treblinka extermination camp, clandestinely made the 1,000 km trip overland to Rome to meet the Monsignor, on reference. He obtained an official Pontifical application letter dated August 17, 1948, to the Red Cross, in the name of Paul Stangl. He protests that his first name was not indicated, in typical arrogant impunity. The crafty Monsignor advises him to accept it since he is wanted for war crimes. Stangl immediately fled to Syria and from there to Brazil, where he was eventually arrested 20 years later.
Adolf Eichman, Joseph Mengele, and Klaus Barbie all followed the same path through the Vatican network to obtain Red Cross documents and flee their trials in Europe. This network was eventually traced to a ring of 22 bishops headed by Monsignor Hudal in person. In 1947, this Report by Vincent La Vista of the US Secret Service was addressed to the Secretary of State of the Vatican, the position being occupied by none other than the Pope himself. Did he do anything about it? In 1952, 5 years later, Hudal resigned.
When his final Will was read after his death in 1958, the Pope’s final regrets were implicitly mentioned and addressed to His Creator in a solemn prayer of ambiguous repentance. Too little, too late for a catastrophe that swept across Europe and Asia, and claimed approximately 50 million lives between 2 butchers: Hitler and Stalin in a monstrous attempt to eliminate Jews, but also eliminating millions of Catholic Poles as well. As though Divine Providence linked the fate of both Faiths together, or was it in atonement for the Vatican’s silence?
This unholy alliance implicated 2 Popes in authority, who chose to remain silent through contempt of intent, no one knows. But it does not end there for the Vatican. In future articles, I shall reveal the flagrant weakness of each subsequent Pope since then — also through silence over major issues.
I still wonder why the Allies never ‘invited’ Pope Pius 12th as the Secretary of State to the Nuremberg Trials. After all, silence is complicity, and complicity in crime is a crime in itself. Unless proven otherwise.
Prior to the Great War, the Church’s fear was Communism, which remains so to this day. But why fear Nazism through the war, confronted with all the facts, and a transnational condemnation? Fear and doubt are pillars of evil. There was no doubt. Why the fear, then when the Vicars of Christ have the authority to uphold and exemplify the highest standards of morality?
Sammy RNAJ — sammy.rnaj.writer@gmail.com — WhatsApp +96170499352.
