http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/tg/detail/-/0140296271/qid=1042138359/sr=8-1/ref=sr_8_1/104-1391187-1303963?v=glance&s=books&n=507846
The above link is to a book titled Hitler's Pope. I am posting this link as requested as I try very hard to not get involved in every thing. But Pius XII is to my mind as close to a war criminal as one can get and not be a Nazi. Pius XII had a long history as the Vatican's man in Germany, then Vatican Secretary of State, then Pope. The man was personally an anti-seminte and his role vis a vis the Nazis is extensively reviewed in this book. How did those cattle cars packed with Rome's Jews roll by the Vatican with no protest being lodged.... There was a long, long history of Pacelli and the Nazis long, long before Pacelli became pope and the concordat signed with the Nazis in 1933 was just one piece of the fruit of that. Of course I expect responses that good old Pope Pius was just a real nice guy and "quit picking on Pius" websites abound for those who do a net search. That does not obscure the truth, although those websites do a lot of skating around the truth. Most of them are "some catholics were persecuted by the Nazis and Pius was head of all catholics (and he was such a saintly man) so Pius was a victim of Nazis and was against Nazis." Very poor logic and historically wrong. This is not to discount at all the various individual Roman Catholics who helped rescue Jews and/or opposed Nazi-ism, at great personal cost, because of their faith. Those people should be honored. Pius should not be. (Side note: this is not to be read as an anti-catholic screed, the usual charge when one speaks of historical reality as opposed to pious sentimentality. You want Protestant neo-war criminals as an analogy, start with Bishop Ludwig Miller of the German Church, and a whole lot of, people that I am embarrassed about. Paul Althaus was a great Lutheran theologian who also was a neo-Nazi/Nazi and you all should have been there the days his book on ethics came up in my Ethics class iin seminary. To kill 6 million Jews, Hitler couldn't do it alone. There were many, many, many accomplices who made it all possible, and of all Christian faith communities; it should all make us all weep at the oven and at the cross for what we have done.) And as far as the Bible with "ethnic cleansing" portions, there are some cultic prescriptions in Judges and other (as Christians count them) historical books of the Prime Covenannt (aka Old [sic] Testamnent). They were very par for the times (10-14 centuries Before the Common Era, and Before the Common Era and Common Era are preferred terms for the Christo-centric and narrow BC and AD, BCE and CE long used by Biblical scholars). Even from obvious evidence, let alone the last 150 years of Biblical scholarship, these passages are cultic, ritual sayings and never happened, and the "historical" books are not read as history, they have a different purpose altogether and it would take forever to recount what the last 150 years of Biblical research tells us about those passages. As far as those passages apply to the the teachings of the Scriptures, they were never Torah, never teachings, and remind us always that people can too easily twist their faith into ways it should not go. If one wants to obsess about those ancient cultic passages, read the 8th century BCE prophets in particular Amos and Micah and see how God speaks in total opposition to such things. It is easy to pull any text out of the Bible with no referance to context (the process is called proof-texting) to make the Bible say anything anyone wants to make it say. Never take a particular minute piece and try and to make it the whole. Now I have said enough. (the Rev) Vince
