Archaeology in the News

[Del]

https://www.breitbart.com/middle-east/2 ... years-ago/

Sure beats all the Native children's bodies that they failed to find at the mission schools in Canada.

[Biff]

https://www.breitbart.com/middle-east/2 ... years-ago/

Sure beats all the Native children's bodies that they failed to find at the mission schools in Canada.

Right?

[Wosbald]

+JMJ+

Source: Crux
Link: cruxnow DOT com/vatican/2023/09/anti-fascist-graffiti-discovered-in-vaticans-apostolic-palace

Anti-fascist graffiti discovered in Vatican’s Apostolic Palace

〰〰〰〰〰〰〰〰〰〰〰〰〰〰〰〰〰〰〰〰〰〰〰〰〰

ROME — On the anniversary of events that triggered the German occupation of Rome in 1943, the Vatican has announced the discovery of a previously undetected piece of anti-fascist graffiti in the Apostolic Palace, in the offices of the Secretariat of State.

The small handwritten graffiti, hidden among a set of decorative leaves on a window frieze in a waiting room of the Secretariat of State, reads Morte Mussolini, or “death to Mussolini,” a reference to Italy’s fascist leader during the Second World War.

The graffiti had gone unnoticed until recently, when it was discovered during routine maintenance. It was scrawled onto the window jamb in a room that was originally the apartment of Cardinal Bernardo Dovizi da Bibbiena, a close advisor to Pope Leo X during the 16th century.

Later, it was converted into one of the waiting rooms used by visitors to the Secretariat of State, the Vatican’s most important department for both external diplomacy and also internal governance. The decorations on the floor upon which the offices are located, known in Italian as the Terza Loggia, are conventionally attributed to the Renaissance artist Raphael.

The discovery of the graffiti was announced on Sept. 8, which is the anniversary of an armistice declared after Mussolini had been deposed in the summer of 1943, which led directly to a German invasion and occupation of much of Italy, including the city of Rome.

[…]

Although it’s unknown who etched the graffiti onto the wall of the waiting room, the Vatican News coverage highlighted that in the period 1943–46, restoration work was carried out on the Terza Loggi to remove coatings of lime that had built up over the centuries.

One of the firms involved in the project was a company called “A.Valci Decorations and Paintings,” which, in January 1944, filed a letter with the office of technical services at the Vatican attesting that one of its employees was an Italian named Mario Bianchi, accompanied by a photo ID.

According to archives at Yad Vashem, the international center for Holocaust research, “Mario Bianchi” was a pseudonym for Ulisse Finzi, an Italian Jew from the city of Milan, and the husband of Matilde Bassani, a leader in the Italian resistance movement. Prior to the adoption of the Italian racial laws in 1938, Finzi and his father had owned a fur shop in Milan with a branch in Rome.

During the period of the occupation Finzi adopted a false name and took a job working with the Valci company, suggesting it’s possible he may have been involved in the project in the Apostolic Palace and thus could have been the author of the anonymous graffiti.

[Wosbald]

+JMJ+

Source: Crux
Link: cruxnow DOT com/vatican/2023/09/letter-nazi-dagger-rekindle-debates-over-wartime-role-of-pope-pius-xii

Letter, Nazi dagger rekindle debates over wartime role of Pope Pius XII

〰〰〰〰〰〰〰〰〰〰〰〰〰〰〰〰〰〰〰〰〰〰〰〰〰

ROME —Two new discoveries regarding Pope Pius XII are rekindling debate over the role of the wartime pontiff, including a letter suggesting he had earlier knowledge of the Holocaust than previously believed and a Nazi dagger presented to the pontiff by a repentant SS officer.

Both items were published in a Sunday insert of Corriere della Sera, Italy’s paper of record, after have been discovered by a researcher in the Vatican archives and made public with the encouragement of Vatican officials.

The yellowed letter, dated Dec. 14, 1942, was written by an anti-Nazi German Jesuit named Father Lothar König and addressed to the personal secretary of Pope Pius XII, another German cleric named Father Robert Leiber.

In the letter, König reports that an estimated 6,000 Jews and Poles were being killed every day at the Belzec concentration camp in what was then German-occupied Poland, today western Ukraine. König refers to the operation of “blast furnaces” at the camp, and also makes a passing mention of the Auschwitz and Dachau camps, referring to another report which, for the moment, has not been found.

The letter makes its more difficult to sustain, as some apologists for Pius XII have in the past, that the wartime pontiff did not explicitly and publicly condemn the Holocaust because he had only scattered and conflicting reports about the extent of the Nazi genocide.

The letter is part of a new trove of documents now available to researchers after Pope Francis decided in March 2000 to open all the archives from Pius XII’s reign, which ran from 1939 to 1958. Researcher Giovanni Coco, an official of the Vatican archives who discovered the letter, emphasized the importance of these materials.

[…]

In the same interview, Coco also revealed the existence of a dagger with the Nazi swastika which had been discovered in Pius XII’s private apartment after his death by his successor, Pope John XXIII. According to Coco, the new pope asked for an explanation of the dagger from then-Archbishop Angelo Dell’Acqua, who at the time was the substitute in the Secretariat of State, effectively the pope’s chief of staff.

Dell’Acqua in turn asked Sister Pascalina Lehnert, a German member of the Sisters of the Holy Cross who acted as Pius XII’s housekeeper and advisor from the period when the future pope was the Vatican’s ambassador in Bavaria in 1917 until his death. During the war years, Lehnert coordinated efforts to shelter Jews in church facilities on behalf of Pius XII.

Coco said that Lehnert explained that the dagger had been brought to a papal audience by an SS officer, who had planned to use it to attack the pontiff. Instead, Lehnert said, the SS officer had a change of heart and presented the dagger to the pope as a sign of repentance.

An image of the dagger was reproduced in the Corriere della Sera insert.

[…]

The 1942 letter is part of a broader set of papers from Pius XII’s papacy set to be published by the Vatican archives today. It will also likely be discussed at an Oct. 9–11 international conference at Rome’s Jesuit-run Gregorian University titled, “The new documents from the pontificate of Pous XII and their significance for Jewish-Christian relations.”

[Wosbald]

+JMJ+

Source: Crux
Link: cruxnow DOT com/vatican/2023/10/rome-summit-hears-both-defense-nuance-on-pius-xiis-legacy-on-the-holocaust

Rome summit hears both defense, nuance on Pius XII’s legacy on the Holocaust

〰〰〰〰〰〰〰〰〰〰〰〰〰〰〰〰〰〰〰〰〰〰〰〰〰

ROME — At a historic conference on newly opened Vatican archives related to Pope Pius XII, the Holy See’s top diplomat defended the late pontiff’s record on helping Jews while historians offered a more nuanced view, and Rome’s Chief Rabbi cautioned against morally defending anti-Jewish prejudice.

Speaking to conference attendees Oct. 9, Italian Cardinal Pietro Parolin condemned what he said are “cases of scientific dishonesty which become ‘historical manipulation’ when documents are negligently or deliberately concealed.”

To this end, he pointed to an official response of Pius XI’s Secretary of State, Italian Cardinal Pietro Gasparri, to the New York American Jewish Committee in 1916 and to Ashkenazi Jews in Jerusalem in 1919.

These documents, Parolin said, stated that “the Jews are our brethren” and “the Jewish people should be considered brethren as any other people of the world,” and were written with the aid of then-Monsignor Eugenio Pacelli, the future Pope Pius XII.

The texts, Parolin said, “portray a very different picture of the future Pope Pacelli from what is ‘generally known,’” suggesting the documents marked “a significant milestone in Catholic-Jewish relations” and assured Jews that he was someone they could turn to during the Nazi persecution of the Second World War.

“Thanks to the recent opening of the archives, it has become more evident that Pope Pius XII followed both the path of diplomacy and that of undercover resistance. This strategic decision wasn’t an apathetic inaction, but one that was extremely risky for everyone involved,” he said.

Parolin spoke at an Oct. 9–11 conference held at Rome’s Jesuit-run Gregorian University devoted to the papacy of Pius XII, whose actions regarding the Jewish community during the Holocaust have long been a source of debate among historians and research scholars.

[…]

This week’s conference, titled, “New Documents from the Pontificate of Pope Pius XII and their Meaning for Jewish–Christian Relations: A Dialogue between Historians and Theologians,” features presentations from historians offering the findings of their initial research over the past three years.

The conference has drawn widespread interest due to the unprecedented high-level Catholic and Jewish organizers and sponsors, including the Holy See itself, Israel’s Yad Vashem Holocaust research institute, the US Holocaust Memorial Museum, and the US and Israeli embassies to the Holy See and Italy’s Jewish community.

In addition to Parolin, Monday’s opening session was attended by Israeli Ambassador to the Holy See Raphael Schutz and the Chief Rabbi of Rome, Riccardo Di Segni.

Despite Parolin’s firm defense of Pius XII, historians in attendance, including Vatican archivists, painted a slightly more nuanced picture, referencing newly found documents they said helped explain Pius XII’s fears in regards to speaking out coupled with the Vatican’s tradition of diplomatic neutrality, but which also revealed anti-Jewish prejudices within the Holy See which, the scholars said, helped inform Pius XII’s decisions.

Giovanni Coco, an official of the Vatican Apostolic Archives who recently uncovered evidence that Pius XII knew that Jews were being sent to death camps in 1942, said there’s “divided memory” on the legacy of Pius XII. To this end, he quoted a speech of the pontiff during a consistory of June 2, 1945, in which he said, “no one could accuse the church of not having denounced the true face of National Socialism in a timely way.”

However, he also noted that Cardinal Raffaello Carlo Rossi in 1944 had written in a letter, “If we had condemned Nazism in time, maybe we would not find ourselves in the situation we are in today.”

Coco also described internal division over the way in which Jews were viewed within the church during the Pius XII era, noting that even after the war, “in the Roman Curia anti-Jewish prejudice was diffuse.”

Most of the documents containing anti-Jewish sentiments quoted by researchers Monday involved Italian Cardinal Angelo Dell’Acqua, who served as an official within the Vatican’s Secretariat of State during the reign of Pius XII, and who in 1968 was named Vicar General of Rome.

David Kertzer, a Brown University anthropologist, cited several occasions in which Dall’Acqua advised Pius XII against a public condemnation of the killing of Jews in Europe or issuing a formal complaint with German authorities over the roundup of Italian Jews during the German occupation in 1943.

Kertzer said that even in the Vatican, a distinction was made between “Aryan Jews,” who were of mixed heritage, and “non-Aryan” Jews.

To this end, he cited a letter from Dall’Acqua on Nazi roundup of Jews in Trieste in which Dall’Acqua said, “an official intervention of the Holy See might confirm the Nazi leaders in the false idea” that the Vatican supported “the destruction of the German people.”

Pius XII’s reaction to the deportation of Italian Jews, Kertzer said, “can only be understood through his desire, in the months of occupation, to maintain amicable relations with the occupying forces,” not because he was in favor of killing Jews, which Pius XII “personally deplored,” but to avoid a further complication of the situation.

[…]

Di Segni noted that while decades have passed since the Holocaust, the memory is still alive and elicits strong emotions, and he called this legacy “an open wound in the survivors and passed on to their descendants, in particular to those who live in this city.”

He noted that this month marks exactly 80 years since October 1943, when a train deporting Italian Jews arrived in Auschwitz and 800 people were sent to the gas chamber.

While much has changed in Jewish–Catholic relations, especially since the Second Vatican Council, Di Segni cautioned that “the Church was full of anti-Judaism rooted over the centuries,” and that Jewish suffering was “theologically justified” on grounds that “Jews had to pay for their primordial crime.”

“If we keep this context in mind, many things that would be inexplicable today find their place,” he said, saying, “an explanation of the dynamics is one thing, the moral justification is another.”

As historical research unfolds, Di Segni said, it’s important for Jews that “our painful feelings and memories are respected, and not offended by the sentences of other courts, acquittal and apologetic at all costs.”

[Del]

+JMJ+

Source: Crux
Link: cruxnow DOT com/vatican/2023/10/rome-summit-hears-both-defense-nuance-on-pius-xiis-legacy-on-the-holocaust

Rome summit hears both defense, nuance on Pius XII’s legacy on the Holocaust

Due to long and persistent anti-Catholic sentiment -- especially in America and other English-speaking nations -- it is easy for lies to take root and difficult to dispel them. Professional liars (such as the KGB) were quick to exploit this.

Here is a news story about this persistent myth that Pope Pius XII wasn't helpful enough to save Jews from the Holocaust:

Venerable Pope Pius XII: Righteous Among Nations

Excerpt:

The primary security agency of the Soviet Union — the KGB — developed a plan to undermine the Church’s role as the moral authority of Western Europe and to create a rift between Jews and Catholics worldwide

Their chosen tactic was to assault the character of Pius XII. A 1945 attempt by the Soviet Union to tarnish the Pope’s reputation was unsuccessful because there were too many living witnesses to the truth.

Later, after the Pope’s death, a different plan was devised and by 1963, that plan took fruition in the release of the fictitious play, “The Deputy.”

“The Deputy,” written by Rolf Hochhuth and produced and financed by the KGB, depicted Pius XII as a callous, anti-Semite who collaborated with Adolph Hitler and encouraged the Holocaust.

Though a work of fiction, the play became the source of many wrongful accusations against the Pope and created quite a stir —similar to that created by Dan Brown’s novel, The Da Vinci Code, in recent years.

Several books would follow, some even borrowing “facts” from “The Deputy,” that would continue the legacy of falsehood that still plagues the papacy of Pope Pius XII today.

The book, Hitler’s Pope, written by Catholic author John Cornwell, has been particularly damning. It is often quoted as proof in support of the charges against Pius XII.

However, the book was so riddled with errors that professor of history, Rabbi David G. Dalin, wrote a rebuttal titled, The Myth of Hitler’s Pope: How Pope Pius XII Rescued Jews from the Nazis.

When challenged by this and other evidence refuting his book, Cornwell retracted his position on some counts, admitting for example, that Pius was not anti-Semitic nor a Nazi collaborator.

He still insisted, however, that the Pope’s efforts were insufficient.

In some respects, the KGB’s plan to damage the Church’s reputation and create division between the Catholic Church and the Jewish community was successful.

...

Historical research has shown that Pope Pius XII was responsible for saving hundreds of thousands of Jewish lives during the Holocaust.

Survivor testimonies claim he did more than any other world leader to save Jewish people who were targeted by Hitler.

The time for Pope Pius XII to be honored as “Righteous Among Nations” is long overdue.

We, as Catholics, should be educating ourselves, defending the truth and leading the effort to right this great, historical wrong.