Sunday May 10th. 2009
"It is not easy for us to find the right words to express the warmth and
consolation we experienced because of the concern of the supreme pontiff,
who offered a large sum to relieve the sufferings of deported Jews ...
The Jews of Romania will never forget these facts of historic importance."
Chief Rabbi of Rome, Israel Zolli, who later converted to Catholicism
said:
"What the Vatican did will be indelibly and eternally engraved in our
hearts .... Priests and even high prelates did things that will forever
be an honour to Catholicism."
Further evidence has been revealed from the latest Vatican documents
that the Vatican drew up secret plans to appoint a new pope and relocate
the Curia to a safe country if Adolf Hitler went ahead with his threat to
kidnap the wartime pontiff.
Pope Pius XII informed leading bishops that his resignation would
become effective from the moment he was arrested by the Nazis. The
bishops would then be expected to flee to a safe country - probably
neutral Portugal- where they would re-establish the Vatican departments
and appoint his successor.
The revelations were confirmed last week by German Jesuit Fr Peter
Gumpel, the relator of the cause for sainthood of Pius XII. Fr Gumpel
has been granted privileged access to secret archive material, which will
be made public later, to help him with his research into the Pope's life,
and found the above documents among the files.
The documents are said to show that Pius was aware of a plan
formulated by Hitler on July 26 1943 to invade the Vatican and arrest
him and his senior cardinals.
On September 6, 1943 just days after Italy signed the September 3
armistice with the Allies - Pius told key aides that he believed his arrest
was imminent and that he would take the decision to resign at that point
so the Church could continue to govern itself in exile. Fr. Gumpel writes:
"Pius wouldn't leave voluntarily. He had been invited repeatedly to go
to Portugal or Spain or the United States but he felt he could not leave
his diocese under these severe and tragic circumstances ."
Pius's decision to resign once he became a captive would have been
unprecedented in the history of the modern Church
According to a leading Jewish and Catholic historians, the Nazi’s
particularly despised Pius X11 because he and shown himself to be
repeatedly and openly hostile to their ideology as Vatican Secretary of
State during the 1930s.
Joseph Goebbel’s diary shows that
Hitler was so furious at the election of
the “pro-Jewish” pope on March 2, 1939,
that he considered abrogating the 1933
concordat with the Vatican. Pius further
angered the Nazis with his Christmas
message of 1942 in which he denounced
“the unspeakable horror of the
hundreds of thousands who, solely
because of their nation or race, have
been condemned to death or
progressive extinction”
Adolf Eichmann's Reich Security Main Office,
the SS department responsible for the deportation
of the Jews, noted angrily that "in a manner never
known before, the Pope has repudiated the
National Socialist new European order ... and
makes himself the mouthpiece of Jewish war
criminals".
When Italy changed sides in autumn the
following year, German troops occupied Rome and
Hitler ordered the arrest of the Pope.
General Karl Otto Wolff, the SS chief in
Italy, was instructed to "occupy as soon as
possible the Vatican and Vatican City,
secure the archives and art treasures,
which have a unique value, and transfer
the Pope, together with the Curia, for
their protection, so that they cannot fall
into the hands of the Allies and exert a
political influence".
According to the American Jewish
historian Rabbi David Dalin, General Wolff.
talked Hitler out of the plan in December
1943 - at a time when 477 Jews were
secretly sheltering in the Vatican; 3,000 had
taken refuge in the Castel Gandolfo, the Pope's summer residence near
Rome, and a further 5,000 Jews were being hidden by nuns and priests
in the city's many religious houses.
Pope Benedict XVI has opened the Vatican archives up to 1939 but it
will take at least four more years before the wartime archives can be
opened because archivists must first file some 16 million documents
into thousands of folders and dossiers.
(The Catholic Herald, May 3, 2009, provided much of the
information for the above article)
.
Two important feast days
Next week, Thursday, May 21, we celebrate the Ascension of
Our Lord into heaven. His life’s work on this earth was
completed, and now he leaves the work of evangelising the
world to his Apostles and their successors:
“Go and teach all nations, baptising them in the name of the
Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Spirit. But they were
not to be alone.
Jesus promised he would send his Holy Spirit: “I will be with
you always, even until the end of time”.
And so we look forward to the great feast of Pentecost, the
coming of the Holy Spirit, which we celebrate on Sunday May
31st.