Good news to and from
'men of good will'
Translated from
online
ROME, Dec. 21 - Pope Benedict XVI is expected for his visit to the Great Synagogue of Rome on January 17, as scheduled, the Jewish community in Rome confirmed today.
Notwithstanding the Pope's promulgation Friday of the heroic virtues of Pope Pius XII, a move that many Jewish quarters have opposed bitterly.
"Of course he will come. We expect him," the sources said.
January 17 has been observed in the past twenty years by the Catholic Church In Italy [and some other countries in Western Europe] and the Jewish community as a day of dialog.
This year, it coincides with the Roman Jewish feast of Mo'ed di Piombo commemorating a miraculous rainfall that prevented the Jewish ghetto in Rome from burning up when an anti-Jewish mob set fire to its gates.
It will be Benedict XVI's first visit to the Rome synagogue, and his third to a synagogue, after Cologne in 2005 and New York City in 2008.
I've decided to post here the AP report on the Pop'e address today to the Roman Curia - typical of the other Anglophone reports in singling out from that entire dense speech only the reference to the Holocaust memorial - which was to be expected of them, in the light of the Pope's decision to proclaim thr heoric virtues of Pius XII.
But I'd like to note that the apparently general translation used in the reports of the adjective 'sconvolgente' - with which the Pope describes his visit to Yad Vashem - is 'upsetting' or 'disturbing', which are both translations of the word, yes, but the translation most appropriate among those available for the word 'sconvolgente' is 'overwhelming', which I believe is the sense of what the Pope meant. 'Upsetting' or 'disturbing' are rather limited, and even misleading, in this respect. (Just look at its effect as AP uses it in its headline below.) See my full translation of the Pope's address in the preceding post.
Pope says visit to
Holocaust memorial 'upsetting'
By ALESSANDRA RIZZO
VATICAN CITY, Dec. 21 (AP) - Pope Benedict XVI on Monday described a visit to Israel's Holocaust memorial as a disturbing encounter with hatred, days after his decision to move the controversial World War II-era pope closer to sainthood angered Jewish groups.
The German-born Benedict signed a decree Saturday on the virtues of Pope Pius XII, who has been criticized for not doing enough to stop the Holocaust. The decree means that Pius can be beatified - the first major step toward possible sainthood - once a miracle attributed to his intercession has been recognized.
The decision sparked further outrage among Jewish groups still incensed over his rehabilitation earlier this year of a Holocaust-denying bishop, Richard Williamson.
Nevertheless, a planned visit by Benedict to Rome's main synagogue, scheduled for Jan. 17, is still on, said Ester Mieli, spokeswoman for Rome chief Rabbi Riccardo Di Segni. She dismissed a report in a Rome newspaper that the visit was in doubt following the Pius decision.
Benedict, who was forced to join the Hitler Youth and deserted from the Nazi Army, has repeatedly spoken out against the horrors of Nazism and anti-Semitism, but his efforts to improve relations with Jews have not always been smooth.
On Monday, he recounted his May trip to the Holy Land in a speech at the Vatican.
"The visit to the Yad Vashem has meant an upsetting encounter with the cruelty of human fault, with the hatred of a blind ideology that, with no justification, sent millions of people to their deaths," he said.
Yad Vashem is "first of all a commemorative monument against hatred, a heartfelt call to purification and forgiveness, to love," he said.
Benedict's speech during his Yad Vashem visit drew criticism in Israel, with some faulting the Pope for failing to apologize for what they see as Catholic indifference during the Nazi genocide. Others noted that he failed to specifically mention the words "murder" or "Nazis."
Some Jews and historians have argued that Pius, who served as Pontiff from 1939-1958, should have done more to prevent the deaths of 6 million Jews by the Nazis and their collaborators. [
[But this argument is clearly fallacious in its entire premise! Can anyone cite any plausible reason to believe that if Pius XII had openly condemned the Nazis for what they were doing, not just to Jews but to Catholics and other persons they found 'useless' of 'harmful' to society - that it would have prevetned Hitler in any way from carrying out his programmed extermination of everyone the Nazis considered 'undesirable'?
On the contrary, it is documented fact that after he praised Dutch bishops for speaking out in behalf of persecuted citizens, the Nazis responded by ordering the deportation of both Jews and Catholics (among them, Edith Stein) to the Nazi camps!
None of those good non-Jewish people whom Yad Vashem and the Jews honor as 'righteous among the people' for having helped the Jews during the war, shouted their good deeds to the rooftops at the time. No, tney did everything to be prudent in order that they could go on saving more people.
Pius XII as the Pope had a duty to Catholics as well as to Jews and any other persecuted people at the time to avoid making things worse for them by any public imprudence. That surely deserves more than just the proverbial benefit of the doubt.
It is the only reason he kept a public silence. And the reason prominent Jews including Albert Einstein and Golda Meir volunteered their praise for his good deeds soon after the war.
It is obviously wrong and immoral that Jews who have an obsessive hostility against Pius II should make it appear as if he, not Hitler or the Nazis, were largely to blame for the Holocaust, because that is what their senseless rhetoric amounts to.]
A caption of a photo of Pius at Yad Vashem's museum says he did not protest the Nazi genocide of Jews and maintained a largely "neutral position."
The Vatican insists Pius used quiet diplomacy to try to save Jews and didn't lash out at the Nazis for fear that such a public denunciation would only result in more deaths.
Jewish groups have argued that Benedict shouldn't have made any moves on Pius's beatification process until the now-closed Vatican archives of his pontificate are opened to outside researchers.
A Yad Vashem spokeswoman, Iris Rosenberg, said it was "regrettable" that the Vatican had acted before documents are made available.
The World Jewish Congress called any beatification of Pius "inopportune and premature" until consensus on his legacy is established, the World Jewish Congress said in a statement.
[And I doubt that there will ever be a positive consesnsus because they don't want to give it. Even if Jewish researchers find no smoking gun in the Vatican archives five years from now, the detractors will always find a new excuse for condemning Pius XII - if only because humans, especially sanctimonious ones, detest to be proven wrong!
All that said, I will not comment further on the preposterous statements attributed to Jewish representatives in this or any other report.]
"There are strong concerns about Pope Pius XII's political role during World War II which should not be ignored," said Ronald Lauder, the president of the group. He called on the Vatican to immediately open all archives on Pius era and show "more sensitivity on this matter."
The European Jewish Congress argued that some Catholics are also opposed to beatification and urged thePpontiff's advisers to persuade him to suspend the process.
"This is not just about Catholic-Jewish relations, but about the abuse of Holocaust memory and history," the group's president, Moseh Kantor, said in a statement.
The Vatican says its archives on the Pius era - about 16 million files - won't be opened to outside historians until 2014 at the earliest.
"It's not a matter of secrecy," Vatican spokesman the Rev. Federico Lombardi was quoted as saying in
Corriere della Sera. "Everything there is to know is already known*."
Actes et Documents du Saint-Siège relatifs à la seconde guerre mondiale (Acts and Documents of the Holy See relating to the Second World War) (Città del Vaticano, 1965-1981).
*
[Four Catholic historian priests, led by the recently deceased Fr. Pierre Blet, compiled the 12 volumes summarizing what they felt were the Archival documents relevant to Pius XII's wartime activities (with respect to the Jews and other persecuted persons), as ordered by Paul VI in the 1960s.
See post in the CHURCH&VATICAN thread on 12/1/09
benedettoxviforum.freeforumzone.leonardo.it/discussione.aspx?idd=8593...
They would not have perjured their immortal souls to 'cover up' for anyone in any way, not even for a Pope.
Why don't any Jewish objectors ever refer to that 12-volume work and choose to speak as though it does not exist? Because it disproves their biased hypothesis, that's why!
And why were these detractors so ready to buy into the Soviet-Hochhuth propaganda launched by The Deputy that started all this nonsense? (Andrea Tornielli says that before that, French intellectuals like Albert Camus and Francois Mauriac ahd started the blame-the-Pope campaign against Pius XII, but oddly, [D]their accusations did not gain the traction - either with teh Jews or the general public - that The Deputy immediately did, and were promptly subsumed in it[/D].]
Psychologists may have a lot to say about this desperate need to displace the responsibility for the Holocaust and for their emotional devastation by it, onto a living institution - the Church - and the man who represented it at the time, because Hitler and the Nazis are no longer around to be dumped on!
They don't dare dump it on present-day Germans [except on one German, the present Pope] nor on the British and the Americans (for the much more relevant silence of Churchill and Roosevelt about the Jews) because there is no political or practical gain in doing that.
But blaming Pius XII - and excoriating his Church for venerating him - is a very convenient way of expressing the lingering anti-Christian bias among many Jews, that is just as bad as Christian anti-Semitism was in the past. Only the Jews can freely indulge in it today in the sanctimonious guise of denouncing 'offenses agianst the Holocaust'!]
Hannah Arendt, writing about the Eichmannn trial and the entire Nazi 'Final Solution' directed against the Jews, used the phrase 'the banality of evil' to say that evil can be and is perpetrated by ordinary persons claiming simply to the following orders.
Pius XII's detractors are not evil, but malicious and malevolent, for their own reasons, and one should perhaps speak, in their case, of the dreadful and insupportable sanctimony of malice, or the malice of sanctimony - it works both ways.
Before the announcement from the Rome synagogueee, some major Italian newspapers had articles warning the Pope's visit to the synagogue was at risk. The 12/21/09 paper edition of Corriere della Sera also had this brief interview with Cardinal Kasper.
'Emotional polemics now but
good sense will prevail'
by GIACOMO GALEAZZI
Translated from
Dec. 21, 2009
VATICAN CITY - "It would be an absurdity if Benedict XVI's visit to the Synagogue of Rome were to be cancelled. Negative reactions [to the decree on Pius XII's heroic virtues] were to be expected, but good sense will previal," said Cardinal Walter Kasper, president of teh Pontifical Commission for relations with Judaism, defending the Pope's decision.
Would it not have been better to wait until the archives are opened?
Beatification is a process distinct from historical research, and only the Pope can decide on it. He can allow a process to go forward, he can slow it down, he can postpone it.
But Benedict XVI chose to give the go-ahead because all the elements are in favor of Pius XII's cause, who, on the disputed issue, did everything possible to save Italian Jews during World War II.
During the Nazi persecution, the condemnation in
L'Osservatore Romano was a daily matter. But a public attack by Pius XII himself on the Third Reich would have brought more harm to the Jews, as demonstrated by the appeal of the Dutch bishops
[which led to a mass deportation to the Nazi camps of Dutch Jews as well as Catholics, including Edith Stein].
Serious historical studies continue to contradict those who want to feed the negative view about Pius XII. Papa Pacelli opened the doors of convents and parish houses to persecuted Italians.
Why are the Jews protesting?
These are emotional outbursts, but for some time now, I have found less opposition to a Blessed Pacelli. In a Europe that was subjugated by totalitarianism, he led the Church with prudence and an equilibrium acknowledged by everyone [except his detractors!].
Golda Meir praised Pius XII, whom the
New York Times had called during the war 'the only voice in favor of the Jews".
Benedict XVI has weighed every aspect of this controversy, and in the end, he made a good decision with the courage to restore the truth in this debate and to rid it of half a century of falsehoods.
Do you think that the Jews will close their doors to him?
No. Honesty, scrupulousness and clarity will be appreciated. The visit to the Synagogue will take place and it will produce results in terms of mutual familiarity as did the visit of papa Wojtyla in 1986. Meeting each other face to face will help dispel incomprehension.
Pius XII's beatification process has followed all the prescribed rules and it is an internal matter for the Church.
Before Benedict XVI's trip to the Holy Land, there were fears of attacks against him over this issue. There were none. So, even this visit to the Synagogue will be a success. Dialog is not an option - it is an inner obligation.
[Modificato da TERESA BENEDETTA 22/12/2009 17:17]