Pope Knocked Down By Woman Before Christmas Mass
12/24/09-by Bridgette P. LaVictoire
A woman described as being possibly mentally ill knocked Pope Benedict down before Christmas Mass at St. Peter’s Basilica. The pontiff was not harmed, apparently, and did continue to celebrate Christmas Mass despite the assault. The woman jumped the barricades to tackle the Pope as he entered the Basilica. The Mass was held two hours earlier than traditional because his aids felt concerned that the late hour of the Mass could result in the pontiff becoming too tired. The woman also knocked down Cardinal Roger Etchegaray who was taken to hospital in order to be checked. He is not reported as being more than a little banged up. (Update: Cardinal Etchergaray’s hip was broken when he fell.)
It is doubtful that the Pope was in any real danger, and the woman was arrested.
Pope Benedict is closing out a year that has seen a variety of controversies embroiling the Church. His recent decision to beatify, a step in the direction of sainthood, Pope Pius XII. Jewish groups have especially been appalled at the move since Pope Pius did little to prevent the atrocities of the Holocaust. Additionally, the Murphy Report recently came out detailing sexual molestation within the Catholic Church in Ireland. The release of the report has caused the resignation of two bishops and three more are under threat to either retire or be removed.
Related articles by Zemanta
- Double Standard? Feds Seize Muslim Property… But is the Vatican Guilty too? (lezgetreal.com)
- Protesters Want To Know Why Bishop Tobin Is Unwilling To Aggressively Protect Children from Abuse (lezgetreal.com)
- VA and MD Govs Blast Catholic Church for Marriage Equality Threat (towleroad.com)
- Matthews Interview of Bishop Tobin Exposes Need To Keep Religion Out of Politics (lezgetreal.com)
- Mainers Protest Catholic Church Over Anti-Gay Marriage Vote (towleroad.com)
- End Church “Divorces” And Preserve Moral Authority In The Catholic Church (lezgetreal.com)
![Reblog this post [with Zemanta]](http://img.zemanta.com/reblog_c.png?x-id=f2b32e84-46e2-4f45-a737-8c585625ea8d)
Loading ...
Im not a huge fan of Catholicism, but Pope Pius was no nazi lover. He helped save thousands of Jews from Hitler. 75% of Italy’s Jews were saved, mostly in Catholic convents, churches and monestaries. Even at the Pope’s residence there were Jews hiding during the war. Far from being silent, when Pope Pius actually found out about the deportation of Rome’s Jews, he sent out an order to open up 155 Church buildings to hide all remaining Jews in Rome. The Nazis hated Pius, they banned the Catholic press, disrupted Catholic services and sent priests to the gas chamber. Almost 4,000 priests died in the gas chambers and death camps of nazi europe. They produced anti Pius political propaganda that called him a Jew lover. Pius worked silently to save Jews, getting them passports, safe passage to Spain and Turkey and Latin America. He did this because when the church spoke out aggressively in the Netherlands even former Jews, who were Christians, were targeted. It sent shockwaves through the church and though the Pope did condemn Nazi racism broadly he had to work behind the scenes. He was able to stop the euthanasia program for a few years and delayed the deportations in Hungary. 860,000 Jews were saved by Catholic institutions during the war. Even in Poland, where the Poles were also hated by the Germans and the penalty for helping a Jew was to be shot on the spot, many Jews were saved. Pius did what he could given the fact that he was in Nazi occupied Europe. He made an agreement with the Nazis early in the war to protect the Catholic population ( only 25% of Germany’s 1930s population) but the Nazis still persecuted the church and even had a plot to kidnap Pope Pius.
Throughout the Holocaust, Pius XII was consistently besieged with pleas for help on behalf of the Jews. Pleas that fell on the willfully deaf Papal ears of Pius XII
In the spring of 1940, the Chief Rabbi of Palestine, Isaac Herzog, asked the papal Secretary of State, Cardinal Luigi Maglione to intercede to keep Jews in Spain from being deported to Germany. He later made a similar request for Jews in Lithuania. Pius did nothing.
Within the Pope’s own church, Cardinal Theodor Innitzer of Vienna told Pius about Jewish deportations in 1941. In 1942, the Slovakian charge d’affaires, a position under the supervision of the Pope, reported to Rome that Slovakian Jews were being systematically deported and sent to death camps.
In October 1941, the Assistant Chief of the U.S. delegation to the Vatican, Harold Tittman, asked the Pope to condemn the atrocities. The response came that the Holy See wanted to remain “neutral,” and that condemning the atrocities would have a negative influence on Catholics in German-held lands.
But in the same year, after being asked by Catholic French Marshal Henri Philippe Petain if the Vatican would object to anti-Jewish laws, Pius XII answered that the church condemned racism, but did not repudiate every rule against the Jews. When Petain’s French puppet government introduced “Jewish statutes,” the Vichy ambassador to the Holy See informed Petain that the Vatican did not consider the legislation in conflict with Catholic teachings, as long as they were carried out with “charity” and “justice.”
In late August 1942, after more than 200,000 Ukrainian Jews had been killed, Ukrainian Metropolitan Andrej Septyckyj wrote a long letter to the Pope, referring to the German government as a regime of terror and corruption, more diabolical than that of the Bolsheviks. The Pope replied by quoting verses from Psalms and advising Septyckyj to “bear adversity with serene patience.”
On September 18, 1942, Monsignor Giovanni Battista Montini, the future Pope Paul VI, wrote, “The massacres of the Jews reach frightening proportions and forms.” Yet, that same month when Myron Taylor, U.S. representative to the Vatican, warned the Pope that his silence was endangering his moral prestige, the Secretary of State responded on the Pope’s behalf that it was impossible to verify rumors about crimes committed against the Jews.
Wladislaw Raczkiewicz, president of the Polish government-in-exile, appealed to the Pope in January 1943 to publicly denounce Nazi violence. Bishop Preysing of Berlin did the same, at least twice. Pius refused.
Pius finally gave a reason for his consistent refusals to make a public statement in December 1942. The Allied governments issued a declaration, “German Policy of Extermination of the Jewish Race,” which stated that there would be retribution for the perpetrators of Jewish murders. When Tittman asked Secretary of State Maglione if the Pope could issue a similar proclamation, Maglione said the papacy was “unable to denounce publicly particular atrocities.” One reason for this position was that the staunchly anti-communist Pope felt he could not denounce the Nazis without including the Communists; therefore, Pius would only condemn general atrocities.
Pius’s indifference to the mistreatment of Jews is clear… Pius was no hero… and is hardly a saintly and sympathetic figure…. if he was anything, he was an enabler for the Holocaust through his steadfast silence and to say otherwise is to engage in revisionist history on par with that of the Holocaust denying president of Iran, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad.
One wonders what drove the woman to what they have termed insanity….. I guess my guess could be accurate
All I will say is I was in DC… so it was not me who body checked Nosratzitu… but does anyone know where I can send money for this womans legal defense fund?
To: Paula.. It sure takes a lot of bravery to stand up to Nazi Germany( on other side of the world?) and 65 years after it has been defeated. I mean you are truly a saint, putting your life on the line for all these jews when you know the punishment is death.. good for you.
As for the facts, we already know that Pius only made a few direct references to the Nazi genocide publicly but that hardly matters. He did what he ( and many jews he spoke to) thought was the right thing to do. Nazi Germany was hardly a Catholic stronghold, most Germans are secular or Protestant and Nazi racial ideology on religion contrasted sharply with that of the Church, which is a multicultural international organization.
Pius saved a lot of Jews despite the fact that he had no army and lived in Mussolini’s Italy not in safety in America. He was praised by the Jews of his time. How can you call him complicit in the holocaust when the president of Israel, Golda Meier called him a hero? The chief Rabbi of Rome became a Catholic AFTER the war.. Why would he convert if he knew that the Pope was complicit.?
It is very wrong to judge people who had good intentions and did the best they could in hindsight. There are so many factors to consider. For example, many jews wondered why the Allies never bombed Auschwitz during the war. Churchill called it the most evil place on earth when he found about it in 1943 and lengthy debates were had on what to do about it but decided that it would be hard to bomb it without harming many civilians. They decided the best thing to do was double down and destroy Nazi Germany, which they did. They even bombed part of Auschwitz accidently while bombing nazi factories. So one could say.. ” the Allies were complicit in the holocaust, they refused to act by bombing the death camps when asked by Jewish groups” or you could consider the factors and look at the context. The same is true with Pius. Pius could have made speech after speech ( in Obama style) condemning something, which at the time nobody knew the entire extent of and faced death for not him but many more people or he could have worked quietly underground to save Jews, which he did. But even that isnt totally true, because Pius did speak out against Nazi racial ideology and genocide.
Although Pope Pius XII took great pride in baptizing the former chief rabbi of Rome, the Catholic Church could hardly consider Rabbi Israel Zoller a pious convert. This is because Zoller’s apostasy to Catholicism had little to do with any spiritual conviction or theological satisfaction he found in the Roman Catholic Church. Rather, it was the result of his ostracism and banishment from his own flock after the Holocaust by the survivors of the Italian Jewish community, whom he abandoned during the war when he hid in the Vatican while fleeing the Nazis.
Now on the other hand Mussolini saved far more Jews then either Pius or Zoller did, because once the Holocaust was under way he and his fascists refused to deport Jews to the Nazi death camps, thus saving thousands of Jewish lives and that only changed after his overthrow and the occupation of Italy by the Nazis.
However, I don’t see anyone suggesting they make Mussolini a saint either.
No one is trying to make Churchill, Roosevelt or Stalin saints….