As many of you know, two deacons from the Diocese of Rochester have been collaborating with the Holocaust Study Group on a Holocaust presentation. The name of this 14 week presentation is The 2,000 Year Road to the Holocaust. The Director of this group is listed as Morris Wortman. Morris Wortman is also known as an abortionist and a public defender of a woman’s “right to choose”. The Diocese of Rochester is listed on the group’s website as an official supporter of this program.
One aspect of this collaboration that bears further scrutiny is Deacons Driscoll’s and Sciolino’s portrayal of the Catholic Church. Further down below, you will find excerpts from Deacon Sciolino’s presentations that are taken from the study group’s website.
Lest I be accused of cherry-picking, I strongly encourage you to follow the links to Deacon Sciolino’s presentation and reflection, so that they may be read in their entirety. The links can be found following the excerpts.
The Holocaust was certainly one of the greatest tragedies of modern times. We should be fully supportive of any honest effort that is meant to uncover the events that led to this atrocity. My purpose in reviewing this material is to ensure that this particular project is indeed a fair and balanced representation of those events. I make no claim to be a historian, so I leave it up to you to discern the veracity of this portrayal of the Church and its actions regarding the Jewish people.
For those of you who are historians, I encourage you to contact Bishop Clark if the presentations by our deacons are slanted or inaccurate. It is his responsibility to regulate the activities of the priests and deacons in this diocese when they are acting in an official capacity. Also, the diocese is an official supporter of this program. If it is inaccurate or defamatory, the bishop should be made aware.
The following are selected excerpts from Deacon Sciolino’s presentations, as published on the project’s website:
While tens of thousands of Christians during the Holocaust acted humanely, even heroically, sadly many, many more did neither… For the most part church leaders, yes, including Pius XII, were silent and in some cases, complicit.
Jews ponder the Holocaust and rightly ask: Where was God? Christians must to do the same and, in addition, ask: Where was Church?
Despite numerous appeals, Pius refused to issue explicit denunciations of the murder of Jews or call upon the Nazis directly to stop the killing. He determinedly maintained the Vatican’s position of neutrality and declined to associate himself with Allied declarations against Nazi war crimes. The most the Pope would do was to encourage humanitarian aid by church subordinates, issue vague appeals against the oppression of unnamed racial and religious group, and try to ease the lot of Catholics of Jewish origin, caught up in Nazi persecution.
According to John Cornwell, Pacelli’s(Pius XII) role as “Hitler’s Pope” ensured that whatever Catholic resistance to Nazi fascism arose, would be isolated and impotent.
James Carrol, author of “Constantine’s Sword“, contends that Pius XII’s pact with Hitler was a “foundation stone of the Shoah.”
Abraham Foxman, national director of the Anti-Defamation League: For almost twenty centuries…the Church was the arch-enemy of the Jews, our most powerful and relentless oppressor and the world’s greatest force for the dissemination of anti-Semitic beliefs and the instigation of the acts of hatred. Many of the same people who operated the gas chambers worshiped in Christian churches on Sunday…The question of the complicity of the church in the murder of Jews is a living one. We must understand the truths of history.
Pius XII never excommunicated a single Nazi nor threatened to do so. He did, however, excommunicate some German Catholics who supported cremation as an alternative to burial.
Throughout this period the Church seldom opposed anti-Jewish persecution and rarely denounced governments for discriminatory practices…
“Silence gives consent”, Pope Boniface VIII
“All that is required for the triumph of evil is for good people to do nothing”, Edmund Burke
“The hottest places in hell are reserved to those who in a period of moral crisis maintain their neutrality.” Dante
One can only speculate how many more Christians might have acted heroically before or during the Holocaust if Pius, as the Vicar of Christ, had modeled ethical behavior fearlessly in the prophetic tradition.
Again, I urge you to read Deacon Sciolino’s entire presentations. They can be read at the following links: Christians and the Holocaust and Anti-Judaism Spawns Anti-Semitism, Session 4. There is also a personal reflection by Deacon Sciolino at this link.