http://www.cwnews.com/news/viewstory.cfm?recnum=34440In an renewed attempt to block the long expected beatification of pope Pius XII - the "Pastor Angelicus" of Rome and the Church who saved almost
a million Jews during WWII - Alberto Melloni, a well known "progressivist" Catholic Italian intellectual accused the holy pontiff of having ordered the withholding of forcibly baptized children hidden by the Vatican Jew families wanted back after the end of the war.
The charge wasn't new, and was debunked a million times even by Jews who seem more active in defending Eugenio Pacelli than catholics lately.
I thought it was over after 15 days of media "deja vu" here in Italy but now Hell's Bible (aka NYTimes) relaunched the campaign. Btw, the Italian Bishops conference performed an impressive crackdown on the subject virtually sinking the liberal fleet. I am impressed. I wish they did so more often.
The misrepresented document at the origin of the charge shows nothing else than what any diligent and prudent person on earth would have done: do not give children ot self proclaimed "organizations" clainìming a right to "take care" of children whose families had entrusted the Church of their protection.
If the children where orphans, and no parent or direct relative would search for tehm or it had been impossible to find them again after years of Nazi terror, then the Church would raise them as baptized catholics, if baptized. But of course, liberal catholics, now with the help of the NYT, could resist the temptation to smear the Church.
Quote:
"This document is indicative of a mind-set at the Vatican that dealt with problems in a legal framework without worrying that there were human beings involved," Mr. Fouilloux said. "It shows that the massacre of Jews was not seen by the Holy See as something of importance."
http://www.nytimes.com/2005/01/09/inter ... an.html?th Quote:
The document underscores the sanctity with which the Vatican treated the sacrament of baptism at the time - no matter how or why it was administered.
ANd now a gem of the ignorance of church's law and history plus blatant lie:
Quote:
The church's stance that a baptized child is irrevocably Christian was established nearly a century before the Holocaust, when, in 1858, papal guards took Edgardo Mortara, 6, from his family in Bologna when word spread that he had been clandestinely baptized by a Catholic maid. It was relaxed only in the 1960's.
The Mortara case was part of the mud slinging against Blessed Pius IX. I can't linger on this side story now but sufice it to say that Mortara became a Catholic priest and died as a saint. When asked if he wanted to go back to his family he loved dearly he chose to stay and become a catholic priest.
There is even a loudicrous attempt to mark a difference on the issue between Piux XII and then France's Nuncio Angelo Roncalli, futrure John XXIII. Both Melloni and now the NYT fail to mention bishop Roncalli' stance on the evangelization of jews, that was far less "cautious" than Pacelli's.
There's so much documentation on the holiness and the efforts of Pius XII that there's no need to examinate them now. But since there won't be lack of "catholics" joining the smear campaign against one of the greatest Popes of all times, it is useful to re-read a 2001 article by Rabbi David Dalin, Ph.D, who managed to grasp one neglected aspect of the controversy:
Quote:
Curiously, nearly everyone pressing this line today — from the ex-seminarians John Cornwell and Garry Wills to the ex-priest James Carroll — is a lapsed or angry Catholic. For Jewish leaders of a previous generation, the campaign against Pius XII would have been a source of shock. During and after the war, many well-known Jews — Albert Einstein, Golda Meir, Moshe Sharett, Rabbi Isaac Herzog, and innumerable others — publicly expressed their gratitude to Pius. In his 1967 book Three Popes and the Jews, the diplomat Pinchas Lapide (who served as Israeli consul in Milan and interviewed Italian Holocaust survivors) declared Pius XII "was instrumental in saving at least 700,000, but probably as many as 860,000 Jews from certain death at Nazi hands."
Quote:
Almost none of the recent books about Pius XII and the Holocaust is actually about Pius XII and the Holocaust.
Their real topic proves to be an intra-Catholic argument about the direction of the Church today, with the Holocaust simply the biggest club available for liberal Catholics to use against traditionalists. A theological debate about the future of the papacy is obviously something in which non-Catholics should not involve themselves too deeply. But Jews, whatever their feelings about the Catholic Church, have a duty to reject any attempt to usurp the Holocaust and use it for partisan purposes in such a debate — particularly when the attempt disparages the testimony of Holocaust survivors and spreads to inappropriate figures the condemnation that belongs to Hitler and the Nazis.
http://catholiceducation.org/articles/p ... h0024.html God Bless Rabbi Dalin and the beloved people of Israel.
On the light of Rabbi Dalin's insightful observations about the dispute on the papacy it is very interesting to read some literature on the subject by those groups who have been praying for a new conclave and a new concil in hte last 25 years:
Goodbye, King Pope. The Progressivists' Plan at the Conclave. They will loose.
And guess what? The author of one of the books cited in the article I link to is....Alberto Melloni, ladies and gentleman, the "discoverer" of the document that triggered the storm of mud that must have been certainly useful to the confidence in the Church and therefore the eternal destiny of so many souls...
Quote:
But the judgment of its authors on the Church after John Paul II is not dissimilar. Of the program set out in the memo, pope Karol Wojtyla has not realized a single point.
A confirmation of this critical judgment on the pontificate of John Paul II can be found in another book published recently in Italy: "Mother Church, Church Stepmother," written by Church historian Alberto Melloni, who has also been for years one of the pillars of the Dossetttian "workshop" of Bologna, together with Alberigo and the prior of the monastery of Bose, Enzo Bianchi.
One of the central theses of Melloni's book is that "on the agenda of the Church of tomorrow, there is still much that remains from that of 1978," and that the reform projects assigned by Cardinal Carlo Maria Martini to a future Vatican Council III, which he called for in a famous speech in 1999, "could have been pronounced with the same conviction in the 'de eligendo pontifice' oration of the conclaves of 1978."
The reforms Cardinal Martini called for concern married priests, women's ordination, lay participation in the ministry, sexual morality, communion for remarried divorced persons, the sacrament of penance, and ecumenism. But at the root of all this was a proposal for more collegial Church governance.
NOTA BENE: it is not my intention to imply or bring about the idea that card. Martini is a heretic or a liberal fanatic, no disrespect intended here. It is Melloni who uses Cardinal's name. The quote was intended to show what these guys have in mind and how we should consider their charges against the giants of our history. It's the papacy the hate.
_________________
Fabrizio
Party like it's 1773
No one can be at the same time a good Catholic and a true socialist (Pius XI)
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At least the vatican doesn't give in to our fast changing opinions on faith and morals, and that's what we need. To call the Vatican "fast" however, seems to me a bit of a stretch.
