Report: John Paul II covered Up sexual abuse of minors before becoming Pope

[afleitch]

Yeah, there's nothing really redeeming about Pius XII on that front.

Nearly every country and institution, religious and secular has tried to salvage or worse, rewrite their reputation from before and during the Holocaust. The Church is no exception, but it's clear it was up to individuals from laity to priests, bishops and bureaucrats motivated by their own interests, or their own personal faith to do what little they could in whatever situation they found themselves in. The Church and most apologists for it have over the past decade, pulled back from trying to claim those personal moments for the wider Church.

What compounds things is that Catholic protests against 'Aktion 4' were very real, both on the ground in Germany and had the ears of and support of, the Vatican. It was some of the most public demonstrations against the regime during it's existence.

But what was known about Aktion 4; the processing, removals, institutionalisation, the centres, what the public saw and heard was no different from the removal of Jews and other 'undesirables'. It often overlapped.

The inaction, by stark comparison of Church authorities, to me remains jarring because it demonstrates some element of 'choice'.

[Benjamin Frank]

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.

 

[Okay, maybe Mike Johnson is a competent parliamentarian.]

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.

I wasn't trying to dispute that, sorry. Yes, around the end of the war and especially after Western policy drifted from antifascism to anticommunism his approach got even worse. Montini/Paul VI starts coming off pretty badly around 1950 as well and doesn't really return to his initial relatively anti-pro-fascist stance until late in the decade.

[Torie]

Yeah, there's nothing really redeeming about Pius XII on that front.

Nearly every country and institution, religious and secular has tried to salvage or worse, rewrite their reputation from before and during the Holocaust. The Church is no exception, but it's clear it was up to individuals from laity to priests, bishops and bureaucrats motivated by their own interests, or their own personal faith to do what little they could in whatever situation they found themselves in. The Church and most apologists for it have over the past decade, pulled back from trying to claim those personal moments for the wider Church.

What compounds things is that Catholic protests against 'Aktion 4' were very real, both on the ground in Germany and had the ears of and support of, the Vatican. It was some of the most public demonstrations against the regime during it's existence.

But what was known about Aktion 4; the processing, removals, institutionalisation, the centres, what the public saw and heard was no different from the removal of Jews and other 'undesirables'. It often overlapped.

The inaction, by stark comparison of Church authorities, to me remains jarring because it demonstrates some element of 'choice'.

For those not of the cognescenti (including myself of course), who are clueless as to what the heck Aktion 4 refers to:

https://encyclopedia.ushmm.org/content/en/article/euthanasia-program

[Oswald Acted Alone, You Kook]

Who was the last Pope not to do that, Peter?

[Okay, maybe Mike Johnson is a competent parliamentarian.]

Incidentally, and to support something Frank was implying, JP2's sympathy for right-wing politics is, I think, related to his terrible approach to the abuse crisis. This isn't necessarily a direct causal relationship, but his political sympathies and his refusal to believe many types of abuse claims were both informed by his very old-school, very Neoplatonist conviction that correct moral behavior was downstream from correct beliefs about moral behavior, in other words that the personal morals of people who were sufficiently theologically orthodox could be trusted implicitly. Of course this is flagrantly, scandalously wrong--any Joe Massgoer can tell you that theological astuteness, moral virtue, and devotional intensity are all more or less autonomous features of someone's spiritual life--but it's how JP2 thought the world worked.

[Associate Justice PiT]

Incidentally, and to support something Frank was implying, JP2's sympathy for right-wing politics is, I think, related to his terrible approach to the abuse crisis. This isn't necessarily a direct causal relationship, but his political sympathies and his refusal to believe many types of abuse claims were both informed by his very old-school, very Neoplatonist conviction that correct moral behavior was downstream from correct beliefs about moral behavior, in other words that the personal morals of people who were sufficiently theologically orthodox could be trusted implicitly. Of course this is flagrantly, scandalously wrong--any Joe Massgoer can tell you that theological astuteness, moral virtue, and devotional intensity are all more or less autonomous features of someone's spiritual life--but it's how JP2 thought the world worked.

     Would that he had learned from the example of St. James the Ascetic, a good example of a "saint with a troubled life" that you alluded to. The Devil is crafty, and we are all vulnerable to his wiles. I wonder if this failing bears any relation to the scholastic conviction that theology is a matter of identifying and labeling every aspect of the spiritual world, and that it would be easier to understand that theologically gifted people can err if one did not approach it as a science. I could be wildly off-base though.

[jojoju1998]

Incidentally, and to support something Frank was implying, JP2's sympathy for right-wing politics is, I think, related to his terrible approach to the abuse crisis. This isn't necessarily a direct causal relationship, but his political sympathies and his refusal to believe many types of abuse claims were both informed by his very old-school, very Neoplatonist conviction that correct moral behavior was downstream from correct beliefs about moral behavior, in other words that the personal morals of people who were sufficiently theologically orthodox could be trusted implicitly. Of course this is flagrantly, scandalously wrong--any Joe Massgoer can tell you that theological astuteness, moral virtue, and devotional intensity are all more or less autonomous features of someone's spiritual life--but it's how JP2 thought the world worked.

Ironically, enough, Pope Benedict who was considered to be to the right of John Paul II, was the one who finally got the ball rolling on processing the sex abuse cases.

[Okay, maybe Mike Johnson is a competent parliamentarian.]

Incidentally, and to support something Frank was implying, JP2's sympathy for right-wing politics is, I think, related to his terrible approach to the abuse crisis. This isn't necessarily a direct causal relationship, but his political sympathies and his refusal to believe many types of abuse claims were both informed by his very old-school, very Neoplatonist conviction that correct moral behavior was downstream from correct beliefs about moral behavior, in other words that the personal morals of people who were sufficiently theologically orthodox could be trusted implicitly. Of course this is flagrantly, scandalously wrong--any Joe Massgoer can tell you that theological astuteness, moral virtue, and devotional intensity are all more or less autonomous features of someone's spiritual life--but it's how JP2 thought the world worked.

Ironically, enough, Pope Benedict who was considered to be to the right of John Paul II, was the one who finally got the ball rolling on processing the sex abuse cases.

To an extent. The Ratzinger CDF was definitely the relative good guy on the issue in the 90s when you compare it to the Sodano Secretariat of State. The latter was shockingly consistent in its anti-doing-anything stance (and Sodano's personal secretary from that period is now the President of the USCCB; sad!). It's not a left-right issue, it's just that the particular expression of JP2's conservative views was not conducive to acting appropriately on it.

[Oswald Acted Alone, You Kook]

I'm being serious: Who was the last Pope not to do that?

[Okay, maybe Mike Johnson is a competent parliamentarian.]

I'm being serious: Who was the last Pope not to do that?

It's impossible to know because the existence of a coverup only becomes obvious if it's, ultimately, unsuccessful. To my knowledge the last Pope who didn't make any (currently) publicly known decisions that made a case of sexual abuse harder to punish or resolve at any point in his career was John Paul I, but he was Pope for barely a month. Before him you have to go back to the early twentieth century.