I know it's not quite related and might be a bit of a cheap shot, but Pope Pius was a Nazi sympathizer, should the horrible way right wing Popes act be any surprise?
Not to take this further off topic too much, and not to make too much of any difference between Fascists and Nazis, but I asked my father, who was born in 1928, a couple questions:
1.Was Mussolini anti-semitic?
His girlfriend was Jewish.
2.Did Pope Pius only support Mussolini?
He was an anti semite who sympathized with Nazis.
Pius XI, to his credit, was always suspicious of Hitler and even broke with Mussolini late in his papacy. He was at the time of his death (seven months before WWII started) preparing an expressly antiracist encylical that his successor, Pius XII, the guy to whom you're referring, deep-sixed.
Defenders of Pius XII long pointed out that the Vatican and Church institutions in Italy and some other countries (not others, though) did shelter quite a few Jews during the Holocaust, and when Pope Francis opened the archives from his papacy a few years ago it was hoped that they would shed light on how much of a hand in that he had personally...and the answer was not much, that the rescue policies were all the handiwork of mid-level Vatican bureaucrats (including the future John XXIII and Paul VI) and Pius himself had to be relentlessly pressured to care one jot about what was happening to European Jewry.
I think you are understating the extent to which Pius collaborated with the Nazis, especially towards the end of World War II when the Vatican helped thousands of Nazis escape via the Ratlines.
