The Vatican sought to defend Pope Francis on Tuesday after he sparked fury in Ukraine by praising Russia’s imperial rulers — a history President Vladimir Putin has invoked to justify his ongoing war.
The Kremlin delighted in the controversy, which stemmed from comments the pontiff made to a group of young Russian Catholics urging them to see themselves as the heirs of a “great” empire.
“Don’t forget your heritage. You are the descendants of great Russia: the great Russia of saints, rulers, the great Russia of Peter I, Catherine II, that empire — educated, great culture and great humanity,” he told them in St. Petersburg by live video Friday.
To say the Catholic church and they pope supported Nazism is a bit of a stretch. The Nazi Party was anti religious in ideology. They were very brave protests from within the church and contrary to the current pope the did dismiss the regime and even the anti Jewish stance.
Did Pius XII do enough, seen the circumstances of what he knew and his power? Not at all. Even the Catholic network get used for protecting nazi wat criminals. So there’s enough the church managed to screw up.
But there was at least some verbal resistance, which was braver back then, as the pope actually lived in occupied territory.
They may not have actively supported the Nazis the whole time, but all in all I would count them as supporting, rather than opposing or being neutral. The main goal they worked for in Germany during the Third Reich was to legally secure their special institutional rights.
As any totalitarian thought system must see other such systems as competitors, National Socialism too saw Religions as a competittion and began working to supplant it as soon as it was entrenched enough in Germany. Before that though, Hitler took care to be especially friendly with the Catholic Church, even praising them as “the most important factor in sustaining our nations identity” in his Declaration on Governmenance in March of 1933. Even late in the war, Hitler always declared himself sent and guided by Divine Providence, without going into detail about which god or gods he was refering to.
Agreed. And he and his Church never got punished for that.
By the Catholic Church as a whole mainly from 1930 until the NSDAP was given power and Hitler showed himself to be friendly to the Catholic Church and again after the German Government failed to honor parts of the “Reichskonkordat” (a contract that assured the Curch many of its institutional rights and which richly compensated it for anything it did loose and which is still in force today) but evern then only in the form of one Encyclica by the Pope mostly denouncing the loss of adherence to Catholic/Christian Dogma in Germany and only in one part denouncing the Nazi Race Theory. Aside from that, there was only resistance by singular priests.
… from September 1943 until April 1945. At wich time and with their already overstreched ressources no “sane” German commander would have dared attacking the Pope directly and risking public uprisings in most European (occupied and unoccupied) countries.
Which is more than the current pope has done regarding the Ukrainian invasion, which was my general point.
This is underselling it a bit, there was quite a lot resistance from priests to the episcopal level (The Netherlands, Vichy France)
I don’t think our opinions differ too widely. My point is that the current pope could certainly do better, even compared to the low point set by Pius XII.