Ben Shapiro’s Disgraceful Rehab of Hitler’s Pope Pius XII
There are names that live in history as lights of moral courage. And then there are names that live in infamy — not because of what men did, but because of what they did not do. Pope Pius XII, the wartime pontiff, is remembered not for heroism but for a silence that bordered on complicity. He is remembered by Jews, and by honest historians, as Hitler’s Pope. And he is remembered by history not as heroic voice against genocide but as a Nazi collaborator.
Which begs the astonishing question: why would an Orthodox Jew who claims to fight for his people force his media company to create a documentary rehabilitating an evil man whom even the Catholic Church refuses to canonize. Pope John Paul II died in 2005 and just nine years later, on April 27, 2014, he was made a Saint along with Pope John XXIII. Both men saved many Jewish lives, especially John XXIII as Papal nuncio in Istanbul who, as Cardinal Angelo Giuseppe Roncalli, used his position to provide false baptismal certificates and visas that enabled Jews to escape Nazi-occupied Europe. He forwarded lists of Jews in danger to the Vatican and to governments that could intervene. He is credited with intervening on behalf of Jews from Slovakia, Hungary, and Greece, and he helped secure ships for Jewish refugees traveling through Turkey to reach Palestine.
By contrast, Pope Pius XII was the first man on earth to sign a treaty with Hitler after he became Chancellor, making him the earliest of Nazi collaborators, which is why, though Pius died way back 1958, the Church has never and will never make him a Saint, treating Hitler’s Pope as a radioactive embarrassment.
Pius’s Reichskonkordat with Hitler, signed on July 20, 1933 between Nazi Germany and the Vatican, under Pope Pius XI (with then–Cardinal Eugenio Pacelli, the future Pope Pius XII, as chief negotiator), remains one of the most controversial agreements in modern Church history.
Has Ben Shapiro lost his mind? Who is paying him? Why is he disgracing his yarmulke, trampling on the memory of the six million, and engaging in Holocaust revisionism?
When Jewish Holocaust revisionists like Ben Shapiro seek to cleanse Pius’ reputation, and Catholic apologists try to transform silence into sanctity, we minimize the magnitude of the Holocaust just as who those who today falsely accuse Israel of genocide seek to do.
The Concordat That Empowered Hitler
Eugenio Pacelli, before he became Pope Pius XII, served as the Vatican’s Secretary of State. In that role, in 1933, he personally negotiated and signed the Reichskonkordat with Nazi Germany.
What did this treaty mean? On paper, it protected the rights of the Catholic Church in Hitler’s Reich. In reality, it gave Hitler the international legitimacy he craved. The day the Concordat was signed, Nazi propaganda trumpeted it as proof that the Catholic Church — the moral giant of Europe — had thrown its weight behind Hitler’s new regime.
Hitler himself gloated:
“The Reich Concordat shows the world that the Vatican has recognized the new regime. This treaty is to a large extent an unprecedented........
© The Times of Israel (Blogs)
