LONDON (CWNews.com) - Winston Churchill asked Pope Pius XII to publicly denounce the Nazi regime during World War II, according to a report in the Sunday Telegraph newspaper this week.
The Telegraph said it had found previously undiscovered documents that showed British officials asked a prominent Catholic, Lord Fitzalan, the uncle of the then Duke of Norfolk, to ask the Pope to denounce the Nazis in 1940. The newspaper said Winston Churchill asked Fitzalan to "persuade [the Vatican] to abandon its support for Adolf Hitler," echoing other attacks on Pope Pius XII, which interpret his relative silence as active support.
One letter to Lord Fitzalan from Lord Halifax, the former Foreign Secretary, contrasts the valuable contribution made by British Catholics to the war effort with the Pope's continued silence on the issue. Lord Halifax warned Lord Fitzalan that "the Pope's policy of appeasement was leaving Catholics outside Britain with the impression that a Europe dominated by Hitler was the Pope's preferred outcome to the war," The Telegraph said.
Catholic historians have noted that following public denunciation of Nazi atrocities in Holland, the German regime expanded its internment of Dutch to include many Catholics in addition to Jews. Pope Pius publicly spoke out against atrocities based on nationality and ethnic origin in his Christmas homilies in 1941 and 1942, and was credited by Israel with saving the lives of 400,000 Jews during the war.
Catholic World News Service - Daily News Briefs