Quote:
Originally posted by Mojo_PeiPei
Here is a question. What could the Pope have done?
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One of the chief assets of the Catholic Church is its nearly 1 billion members. In 1933, this number was probably less, though how much less, I'm not sure. Even assuming (probably incorrectly) that the number of Catholics in 1933 was 500,000,000 - that's still a whole mess of Catholics, primarily concentrated in Europe and the Americas. All Pius XII had to do was to expose the Holocaust publicly, and appeal to Catholics to take action to stop it. Excommunicating Hitler, who identified himself as a Catholic until the day he took his own life, would have been a good step. Publicly placing his book on its Index of Prohibited Literature would have been a rather interesting step, too. These sorts of actions would have represented a total repudiation of Hitler and his Final Solution. They would also have been simple yet definitive steps - with a word, or a speech, or even a papal encyclical or bull or even a pastoral directive, aggressively and publicly positioning the church against this evil, instead of letting it pass without comment or rancor.
Who's to say if it would have had any concrete, material effect on the number of Jews Hitler killed? That's the sort of calculus of death I'm not interested in. But in non-calculable terms, having the Church stand firmly against one of the worst massacres in human history would have certainly been the right - and moral - thing to do.