Talk:Pope Pius XII/Archive 6

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Holocaust section

While I am all for not ignoring Pius's positive contributions to saving Jews, this section is entirely an apologetic, without any attempt to balance at all. Literally, the only critical sentence in the entire article is "Critics accuse him of remaining silent towards the Holocaust and other Nazi crimes," which the article then attempts to contradict. It uses some dubious sources, and ignores any other evidence. Just some of the problems:

• Pinchas Lapide To quote from Madigan: the now thoroughly discredited statement of Pinchas Lapide, who estimated that Pius "was instrumental in saving at least 700,000 but probably as many as 860,000 Jews from certain death at Nazi hands." Ultramontane Catholics have since 1967 been quick to seize upon these figures. Why, defenders of the wartime pontiff invariably inquire, would an Israeli and a Jew like Lapide have reason to exaggerate? In this and similar cases, the answer is transparently clear: political exigency. Lapide was in the 1960s an Israeli consul in Milan and was attempting, at the time he made his inflated estimates, to secure Vatican recognition for the state of Israel. Similar motives explain statements made in the immediate postwar period by Golda Meir and Moshe Sharett, foreign ministers of the new state of Israel. Had these statements been accurate within even an order of magnitude, Pius would perhaps deserve to be honored by Yad Vashem and celebrated by Rabbi Dalin as a righteous gentile. They were not. Whatever was thus gained diplomatically by these statements--in the short run, precious little--was purchased at the cost of considerable historical untruth. Kevin Madigan (Catholic Theological Union) in Christian Century
• Israel Zolli The statement that he converted because of how great Pius was is horrificly inaccurate. Zolli fled Rome when the Nazis came, and the tried to resume his position afterwards, and was rejected by the community, so he converted, making excuses. From the Encyclopedia Judaica: "Zoller (Zolli), Israel (1881-1956), rabbi and apostate. Born in Brody, Galicia, Zoller spent a great part of his life in Italy. He was chief rabbi of Trieste after World War I, professor of Hebrew at the University of Padua from 1927 to 1938, and, from 1939, chief rabbi of Rome. At the beginning of September 1943, when the Germans entered Rome, he abandoned the community and took refuge in the Vatican. At the end of the hostilities he reappeared to assume his position as rabbi, but was rejected by the community because of his unworthy behavior at the time of the greatest danger." This sentence should be removed.
• Praise in the 1940s. I am not sure why this is relevant, indeed, the Pope was one of the few people who actually knew about the Holocaust during that period, the newspapers were surely in no position to judge in the 1940s what the Pope was doing or not relative to the Holocaust.
• Sydney Zion aparently, this is where the statistic that "Pius saved more Jews than the allies combined" came from. Who is this guy-- a columnist? I have tried searching the archives of the Houston Chronicle, and have not found the article, it doesn't seem to show up on Nexis or on the Houston Chronicle site. Could someone point me to the source?
• Quotes section This is a bit over the top -- why only include quotes from Jews praising Pius? (Especially as many of them are rather dubious: the "Chief Rabbi of Israel" made his statement in 1944, long before the magnitude of the Holocaust was known to Jews outside Europe, and before there was an Israel, Golda Meir's quote is dealt with above, etc.) Again, a quotes section such as this has no place in an NPOV article, unless it is balanced by other quotes like that of Chief Rabbi Meir Lau and others, that express opposing views. Even then, however, I doubt the value of the section,
• Rabbi defends Pius XII This is another unabalanced section. There are also plenty of Rabbis who do not defend the actions of Pius, and plenty of other authors too, so why give so much weight to Dalin's arguments, without even mentioning that his POV is simply one of many? In fact, the article from Chrisitan Century above attempts to rebut may of Dalin's points. And, again, the dubious Israel Zolli material is invoked in this section.
• Balancing info The article is missing all of the balancing information that has actually claimed that Pius was passive in the face of the Holocaust. Many scholars believe this, take a look at the preliminary report of the International Catholic-Jewish Historical Commission (commissioned by the Vatican) which raised 47 questions about the situation. And this doesn't even begin to mention Carroll or any of the other more forceful writers on the subject. You need to at least discuss the arguments made by those who blame Pius, even if you are going to later dismiss them. As this is, it is nothing more than apologetics, anyone reading the article would not even know that there was a controversy.

Again, I am not saying that this article needs to be a screed against Pius, but, it needs to at least reflect a more balanced view, such as the one expressed by Madrigan "it is still fair to say that he was a cautious, passive diplomat, conditioned by his training in canon law and his career in foreign service to proceed with prudence and discretion. In other words, he was a bureaucrat at a time when the world, and especially the Jews of Europe, needed a prophet, or at least a priest more alert to demonic evil. That doesn't make him Hitler's pope. Nor a righteous gentile, either." I am going to mark this as POV until these issues are resolved. --Goodoldpolonius2 15:39, 11 November 2005 (UTC)

You suggest that the article is not balanced because it does not state as fact something that was invented by a socialist playwright? The Pius bashing that has grown since the 1960's play was not based in fact. After the war Jews and Chirsitians acknowledged Pius's actions as being good. Just because socialists and liberals want something to be true and books based on a lie are published does not mean that that is the truth or that all these ridiculous rumors should be incorporated into the article to make it balanced! Although Dan Rather and many many others wanted those fake Bush documents to be true, they were fake! No amount of propoganda are going to make these documents real but that is what people are trying to do to Pope Pius. Tell a lie often enough and some people are going to believe it. Dwain 16:41, 11 November 2005 (UTC)

No, I state that the article is not balanced because it does not include any mention AT ALL of criticism of Pius's actions, of which there are volumes, not just a play, including work by Catholic scholars like John Pawlikowski, O.S.M. of Catholic Theological Union in Chicago and Seton Hall professor and diocesan priest John Morley, and Kevin Madigan of Harvard Divinity School and Catholic Theological Union, in addition to the writings by Carroll and Willis, and many, many authors. It is also biased because it just includes positive quotes when there are at least as many negative quotes, and because it states controversal views as fact, without giving sources or context. Additionally, as I think I have tried to show above, some of the facts in the article are not correct. Again, I am not trying to vilify Pius, but any outside reader would not even know there was any controversy here, and there certainly was. Even staunch supporters of Pius would hopefully say that asking whether he did enough to help the Jews and what he knew when about the Holocaust are legitimate topics for discussion. These are issues the article does not raise, just as it does not even acknowledge there are critics. Perhaps you feel it is not valid, and that is fine, but these issues need to be acknowledged, not ignored. --Goodoldpolonius2 16:54, 11 November 2005 (UTC)

As an addendum. I don't want to get involved in a massive war over this issue, which I realize might be sensitive to some people. If the editorial community on this page really believes that the page is a good example of NPOV, and that my comments are unwarranted, then I will move on. So, in the words of the song: you gotta let me know, should I stay or should I go? --Goodoldpolonius2 17:11, 11 November 2005 (UTC)

It's not a question of who's right but on making sure that the relevant undisputed facts, disputed facts, analysis, opinion, and speculation get into the article in a readable form. The editing history of this article will show that some of the editors were unyielding in adding original research or refocusing the article from what the subject did to what the subject didn't do. G2, when Kevin Madigan calls Pinchas Lapide a liar because Lapide had an agenda, we've got to wonder what agenda Madigan has, and why Lapide's account wasn't challenged at the time it was made in the 1960's for its inaccuracy. patsw 23:25, 11 November 2005 (UTC)

Patsw, I realize that the article has been attacked in the past, and (as an editor who has worked on a number of controversal topics) I well know how frustrating it can be to try and keep an article sane and unbiased under these conditions. However, I do think this article has swung well over to the heavily POV side in an attempt to defend Pius from his overzealous attackers, and I am willing to bet that any group of reasonable people reading it would find it the same way. Please take a look at my points above, which I think are reasonable (the quotes section, etc.) Of course authors have agendas -- Madigan had one, Lapide had one, etc, but the usual way we deal with this on Wikipedia is listing sourced, authoritative views from both sides (of course, not original research). The current article does not even acknowledge any of the other side, it makes Lapide authoritative but does not mention the views of people like Madigan, who is far from a kook. The result is a page that feels overstuffed with defenses of Pius, without expalaining what, exactly, the other side has to say. --Goodoldpolonius2 23:35, 11 November 2005 (UTC)

The anti-Pius position is reflected in Further Reading with books by Susan Zuccotti and John Cornwell. As far as Kevin Madigan is concerned, it's my understanding he wrote only a magazine article including this quote:

The Vicar of Christ knew enough, but did not care enough, to speak more forcefully or to act more courageously than he did.

I use the quote to show not that Madigan is a kook, but that he concluded something that could only be known by someone inside the mind of the Pope. Unfortunately for me, the entire article is not online.

Elsewhere [1] Madigan writes with total contempt of Pope Pius XII:

...Pius was passive during the Holocaust was not that he wasn't Christian enough; it was that he was too good a Christian, or, perhaps, too good a Gnostic. He was the kind of Catholic who could blithely finger his rosary, eyes gazing raptly toward the ethereal Blessed Mother, while the SS, who were all too real, were rounding up more than one thousand Roman Jews a few hundred yards away for deportation eastward. And he could do these things while still aspiring, and probably believing himself to be, "saintly," or at least not failing at his job. That was not, to put it mildly, the kind of saint required for the times. But that, sadly, was the kind of man that Catholic piety could easily produce in early twentieth century Europe.

Sadly, this is exactly the sort of point of view, speculative, and biased writing that we'd reject here. If Madigan accessed primary sources (as Zuchotti and the others did) or spoke to eyewitnesses or even made his arguments as a professional historian would, it is not evident from my review of what Google links to. patsw 02:19, 12 November 2005 (UTC)

Is there any criticism of the actions of Pius that you would consider to be non-biased? Madigan is critical, yes, but I am not sure contempuous is the right word, and even if it is, why is that not a valid view? In any case, I won't defend Madrigan overmuch, since I don't know a lot about him or his credentials, but there are a large number of critics of Pius that we could choose from. The point, again, is that the use of information in this article is highly selective: the use of non-historians (Syndney Zion?) for the positive arguments, while not giving any negative ones; the use of only positive quotes from Jewish figures, when many negative ones exist; the inaccurate Zolli story told twice; the whole section on Dahlin, but no more than a sentence on all the other critics combined, and so on. I don't intend to force through one rewrite or another, but I hope I am demonstrating why the article seems strongly POV.

My minimum suggestion would be to remove (or balance with opposing quotes) the "Jewish quotes" section, remove or qualify the Zolli story, add a paragraph or two describing the charges of Carroll and Willis and the others in some detail (with rebuttal from Dahlin, if you want), and remove the odd Syndney Zion quote (where is that from?). If you want, I can do more research later using JSTOR and the ProQuest archives, so we are not limited purely to Google, and can pull from some peer-reviewed history and religion journals as well. --Goodoldpolonius2 02:50, 12 November 2005 (UTC)

Having read Madigan I think saying his attitude "contemptuous" is an understatement. Surely there are more NPOV authors that this clearly OTT POV one. FearÉIREANN\^(caint) 02:52, 12 November 2005 (UTC)

Again, that's fine, we don't need to use Madigan, if the other editors find him offensive, I only found his article while researching, and you can feel free to use any author that you best feel represents Pius's critics instead. The point is that there are definitely a number of POV issues that we should address in this article -- please see my previous post for some of them. --Goodoldpolonius2 02:58, 12 November 2005 (UTC)

Incidentally, I was able to find a published source on the number of Jews saved by the Vatican, In a review of Pius XII and the Second World War: According to the Archives of the Vatican by Pierre Blet and Lawrence J. Johnson in The Journal of ReligionVol. 81, No. 1 (Jan., 2001), pp. 136-137, a book very sympathetic to Pius XII, it says, "Vatican diplomatic initiatives mitigated the sufferings of tens of thousands of Jews, and delayed the sad fates of thousands more." Also, in answer to earlier questions, there were questions about Pinchas Lapide's numbers at the time he published them, see "Nazis and Christians," Beate Ruhm von Oppen, World Politics, Vol. 21, No. 3. (Apr., 1969), pp. 392-424.(in which Lapide was described as a journalist, not a historian) Again, that doesn't mean we need to delete Lapide's comments, but we should qualify them. --Goodoldpolonius2 03:52, 12 November 2005 (UTC)

It is not that he is offensive. I am a historian and expect certain academic standards when writing about history. He shows little. His accusatory, one-sided polemic style reminded me of the sort of people who burnt witches or worked for the Spanish Inquisition. Whether they worked for or against the Roman Catholic Church, or for or against any other institution, I just find those sort of people revolting. The world is not full of neat goods and bads, blacks and whites and people who write such histories or work for organisations that push such viewpoints I dislike intensely. It seems to me to make the tabloidisation of discourse.

From my reading Pius strikes me as a rather vain, self-centred man who was genuinely motivated (but who like so many churchmen managed to deny admitting to himself that he could make mistakes). He was all too typical of people of his era and class (self-opinionated, reactionary in politics, rascist) but to focus on him personally as though he was an exception to society at the time rather than reflective of it is unjust to him. (It is like personifying Bush as the devil incarnate when he is an all too accurate reflection of millions of Americans' attitude on things like world affairs or the environment.) Pius faced the ultimate nightmare. Yes he was like most of his contemporaries rascist and anti-semitic; few weren't. But even in their rascism and anti-semitism they still baulked at Nazim actions. However he faced a horrifying fear we don't face. We know the outcome of the war. He didn't. He headed a religion that he believed had a divine duty to survive. He didn't believe however that it could stop Hitler. How could little old ladies fingering their rosary beads in pews, clerics who taught in schools, and bishops in palaces stop fascists? He faced the ultimate no-win senario. Did he seek to prevent the slaughter of five million Jews and in doing so endanger as many Catholics or more? (I don't mean that though he would have thought that Catholic victims would have mattered more to him than Jewish ones. I mean that would he find that far from saving one group, would he simply be condemning another group to die as well as the group his actions had failed to save?) If he did so, might he be putting in danger the future of the church, something he believed he had an overriding duty to defend at all costs? If he failed in an intervention on behalf of the Jews, might his actions sentence to death millions of Christians as well, in the process destroying one thousand years of Christianity in the reich and undermining the churches from working on the ground against the Nazis? And also the Church was involved in resistence movements and in protecting Jews in practice on the ground. He was aware of that. The problem was: if he tried a high profile intervention against the Nazis, condemning the gas chambers, and if failed, might be inadvertently destroy those escape routes that were saving people, or destroy the resistence movements that for much of the war seemed like the only way to undermine the Nazis. In addition, the Nazis would have been easily able to undermine Pius's claims. After all if he said they were gassing Jews and they said they weren't, how could it be proved that they were? There were no satellites flying overhead to photograph the camps. There was no CNN or BBC television to secretly film pictures of what was going on. All the Nazis would have had to do was to jam Vatican Radio, arrest the Catholic Hierarchy and tell anyone who heard a broadcast that it wasn't Pius at all but a British actor broadcasting propaganda, and going by their past record they would have gotten away with it with a trusting populace. And it wasn't as if the Allies could do more: Britain could barely pay for its war effort. America was limited by distance. They could express their horror at such a 'revelation' but they could hardly hold 2 d-days, or create any more armies to attack. In fact the Pope coming out on the side of the Allies could have undermined, not strengthened the Soviets. Communists would have been appalled to find that they were on thee "side of the pope", while non-communist Russians had the traditional Russian Orthodox rivalry with Rome to wind them up.

It is all very well condemning Pius for not acting publicly, but it would have been a gamble. If it had failed and cost the lives of millions more, would we be saying "well done for trying"? I suspect people like Madigan would be the first to be writing "Pius's wrongheaded intervention cost the lives of millions of non-Jews in a backlash, led to an even tougher campaign against Jews and destroyed the Church's ability to smuggle people to safety. The resulting tightening of Nazi control destroyed the resistence and so lengthened the war by two years."

I'd hate to be in his shoes and have to take a gamble that might save five million lives or might cost ten million Jews and Christians alike? Hindsight is great to have, which is why I am highly sceptical of those people who make allegations with the benefit of it. People like Madigan don't live in a society where anti-semitism was prevalent as it was then. They don't live in a world where you don't know who will live and die, and like all commentators they can live by commenting without ever living with the responsibility for their actions. For their theories can never be disproven. They don't live in a world where one well meaning but wrong word could put the lives of millions on the line, and endanger an organisation you have devoted every moment of your life to protect and preserve. Pius couldn't even be sure that he would survive the war. He made plans to cover what to do if he was put in a concentration camp or assassinated. (Remember the King of Italy's daughter died in a prison camp. If even the Italian Royal Family were under threat from fascists, what of ordinary people if Pius's intervention backfired?) The only question is, within the limits of what he could do, did he do all he could, not did he do all that theoretically could be done if he tried a massive gamble. The more I read the less convinced I am by those who create a simple black and white version of Pius's options. He was in a no-win situation. He decided like any trained diplomat to play it cautious, don't try a likely-fail-gamble that could make things even worse but instead try to mitigate the excesses of Nazism and save lives practically, a gamble in itself but one which if it went wrong could have less damaging repercussions than a more dramatic and potentially more foolhardy gamble that might have stopped the Final Solution but which probably would simply have lengthened the queues at the gas chambers, as Christians joined Jews and gay people in the evil Nazi slaughter of the innocents. FearÉIREANN\^(caint) 04:14, 12 November 2005 (UTC)

Answer Goodoldpolonius/Historical representation on Wikipedia/Pius XII

I am supposedly a poor representative of NPOV on the talk pages but I do not accept that I have ever removed the bias on articles but rather attempted to add this very balance you conceive . However attackable I have become , this does not diminuish the historical questioning concerning Pacelli's involvement with the nascent Third Reich. I say that your clarifications regarding this facile 'jewish' apologia is vital to restore some sanity to Wikipedia , and that therefore you should definitely be praised for your ability to weed through the same. I for one have never been concerned with Pius Holocaust history , whatever it is or isn't . I am concerned at the skewed representation about the earlier era 1925-1933 ( which in my mind expands today to at least Papen's Nuremburg Trial reference to a 1936 "high authority" backing further synthesis with Nazism . Further I would say that it is your duty to continue your attempts at balancing any such articles which skew, or lack, or de-couple what history we do know . It sounds as though you suspect Hitler's Pope to be a conspiracy theory , so I attest that the phrase Avro Manhattan used by 1949 was Nazi Pope . I consider the Papen reference to 1936 at Reichskonkordat talk to in fact merit our fuller consideration of exactly this concept as anything but a conspiracy theory . I am open minded as to how, where and who could fulfill the necessary facts. I mean that angry attempts to emasculate the question left by history because a small section here or there seems more relevant to a separate article , and thus off-topic may necessitate a serious concerted move to open a catch all article . McClenon tried to do this and was jumped on for his trouble(not by me)- as really I just thought it too abstrusely named .

You are right that this is a touchy subject, and I claim it is an artificially dual subject . The reality of the Holocaust was engendered by several hundred years of German philosophy as I began to incorporate from R.DO'Butler's The Roots of National Socialism, 1941 (the Herder article ) . Just as vatican apologia concentrates on the wartime era and supposed goodnes you have qualified , and evades earlier Pacelli questions/ accusations thus, so I believe that there is too much focus on Hitler as a sole aberrant monster of anti-semitism . As Butler proves conclusively the evolution of this and the totality of the Nazism , from an evolution of thought . It is a design to diminuish and deflect , and today we will not be serving ourselves well if we allow such to carry sway .

I have been waiting a long time to see someone rationally question the state of this history here (all the articles) and this your contribution appears to un-veil a new possible rationality . I beg you to involve yourself as much as you will , in the hope that this rationality will not shy from the harder questions and necessities . But apart from that which you have positioned here, I am not hopeful and am used to a wilderness and constant attack (maybe even from you?) . Excuse the length- a particular cause for attack .PS , I have to tell you that this is an information war . Do not expect other than wounds from those with interests-now. Do you seriously imagine it isn't and that there are no interests , but just a bloggy little community at stake here ? EffK 22:28, 11 November 2005 (UTC)

And, as you all know there is relevant exposition available concerning the theological direction and attitude that Pacelli brought to his in-action. All of it interesting and worthy of representation .EffK 07:53, 12 November 2005 (UTC)

Catholic Information

Goodoldpolonius may like to read the present pope's article as it is at this time and witness the elision between the "Crime" of revealing child sex abuse ( which is automatic excommunication (!) ) into the penalties for the commission of such crime .The presentation attempts to eliminate the former extra-ordinary "crime" by uninterruptedly continuing into the beneficial penalties upon the actual offences /crimes . I point this out in a state of shock that users there have allowed this , in reference to what Str1977 stipulates as the "havoc" which I create, as well as to illustrate my judgement that this is indeed an information war . I find that those who blame the messenger , reveal their positions , and I dispute that such presentation of information derives from innocent error on Wikipedia . There is indeed a creation of havoc , which stems from the very same interesting posture of Pius XII towards bolstering the Church as institution of faith over it centreing on the reality of the flock as church . This is what leads to all the denial, and denial is one outstanding result of Pacelli's life work . I repeat the last p[ost I made , which is that it is this vatican direction towards the saving of the Institution which in great part explains the Pius XII embodiment , the which should be fully treated , unlike the pauce reference at the articles opening . Certainly there can be no understanding of Pius without treatment of this which stands to the theological side of his life, to this which is characterised as his piety . I did begin it once, writing as if I shared such understanding with his devoted followers( it is interesting this piety aspect, and strong, and I will admit that an expalnation of it would be hard to put without sounding rather influenced by such distant concepts) .EffK 09:31, 12 November 2005 (UTC)

Apart from the fact that reporting a crime to the judicial authorities does not lead to automatic excommunication (the difficult problem of the confessional secret left aside), I just want to state what my "havoc" comment meant. Quite apart from the gravity, the factual accuracy and the NPOV-ness of your posts, the havoc is that your edits and talk page posts are difficult to understand. Hence, dicussions with you are far from easy and your edits disrupt the articles they are inserted in. I'm sorry about that and try (as on Pius XI) to include your information in a non-disruptive way (meaning proper wording, interpuctuation, grammar etc.), if the edit is accurate and NPOV. PS. Child abuse has really nothing to do with Pius XII. Goodday, Str1977 14:03, 15 November 2005 (UTC)

Removed statement by Pius XI

I removed the following section, since I couldn't see a reason to have it included in section Pius XII#World War II:

On September 6, 1938, in a statement published worldwide (except for censorship in fascist countries like Germany and Italy, Pius XI said:

Mark well that in the Catholic Mass, Abraham is our Patriarch and forefather. Anti-Semitism is incompatible with the lofty thought which that fact expresses. It is a movement with which we Christians can have nothing to do. No, no, I say to you it is impossible for a Christian to take part in anti-Semitism. It is inadmissible. Through Christ and in Christ we are the spiritual progeny of Abraham. Spiritually, we are all Semites.

Gugganij 08:42, 15 November 2005 (UTC)

You are right. Utterances by one Pope are not necessarily relevant to an article on his predecessor. Str1977 13:55, 15 November 2005 (UTC)

I would have cut that part in the reorg I just did, but I misread it as Pius XII and did not look at the dates. Thanks for catching it. I hope my other changes were acceptable. --Goodoldpolonius2 13:57, 15 November 2005 (UTC)

Controversial times 6

I know that Pope Pius XII is considered controversial, but does it need to be mentioned six times in the article?

And since the subject of the article is the Pope, who was the last non-controversial pope?

Throughout the Wikipedia, I think the "controversial" labeling appearing in nearly all the biographical articles I read is overused. patsw 01:50, 16 November 2005 (UTC)

I missed that. Did you say he was controversial? The edit summary wasn't very clear. :-p User talk:Jtdirl 01:59, 16 November 2005 (UTC)

While not a fan of the word when unwarranted, here is how it is used in the article:

• His leadership of the Church during the period of World War II is the subject of continued controversy
• The signing of the actual Reichskonkordat has always been controversial, having given important international acceptance to Hitler's regime
• Pius XII's role during World War II has been a source of controversy
• This trend was started in large part by Rolf Hochhuth's 1963 controversial fictional drama Der Stellvertreter.
• In an attempt to address some of this controversy, in 1999 the Vatican appointed the International Catholic-Jewish Historical Commission (ICJHC), a group comprised of three Jewish and three Catholic scholars to investigate the role of the Church during the Holocaust.
• More recently, additional controversy has been raised by a 2005 discovery by an Italian newspaper of a directive approved by the Pope in 1946 that baptized Jewish children should not be returned to their parents.
• Despite the controversy, there is no doubt that many Jews were bravely saved by the Catholic Church during World War II.

I actually think these are pretty acceptable and restrained usages. An alternate approach would be to say "subject to criticism," which is more, not less harsh. Which wordings would you change? --Goodoldpolonius2 02:15, 16 November 2005 (UTC)

On the other hand, the articles on Hitler and Stalin present their subjects as non-controversial and not subject to criticism. If six appearances of controversial in this article are not objectionable on accuracy or stylistic overkill grounds, why not go for a dozen appearances? patsw 03:24, 16 November 2005 (UTC)

• Huh? Hitler's not controversial; he's almost universally reviled. Stalin still has a few apologists and even a few followers, but he's not particularly controversial. Do you somehow read "controversial" as pejorative? --Jpgordon 03:37, 16 November 2005 (UTC)

I second jpgordon's comment on this, the Hitler analogy doesn't really work, and "controversal" is not an attack, it is a statement that controversy exists. Can you please look again at the six uses of controversal in the article that I listed above (one use was used to describe a fictional drama and two were used to signify "the debate over the actions of Pius XII in the Holocaust") and suggest what alternative language would you use? The best way to resolve this is with concrete suggestions, rather than general issues. Let me know what you think is best. --Goodoldpolonius2 03:47, 16 November 2005 (UTC)

I must agree with Jpgordon and Polonius. Tough "controversial" is sometimes used in order to disqualify someone it is not in itself pejorative. So far its original meaning has not been corrputed (as in the case of "criticism" or "critics") - so far I don't see that it is overused that much. And Hitler and Stalin are good examples for non-controversial people (except maybe controversies about some Hitler "side issues" (or trivia) - you can see plenty of that on Talk: Adolf Hitler. Str1977 10:29, 16 November 2005 (UTC)

Removed sentance on "document on baptism of Jewish babies

The document released by Corriere della Sera did not, in fact, come from the Vatican, nor did it say that Jewish babies should be re-baptized. The story was misreported and then picked up by other news sources, who later dropped it. For more info, see: [2]. {{unsigned|67.32.150.213|16:01, November 19, 2005

Wikipedia

So, considering the concert of revert and support...what is this but a Catholic cabal subverting a free encyclopedia ? EffK 19:00, 26 November 2005 (UTC)

• I'm utterly shocked. I thought there was a Jewish cabal subverting a free encyclopedia. --jpgordon∇∆∇∆ 19:29, 26 November 2005 (UTC)

Utopia has strange colours. And there's a user specialist in them too. I recognise white colour so far. EffK 19:43, 26 November 2005 (UTC)

Huhh? Robert McClenon 19:51, 26 November 2005 (UTC)

The claim that Pope Pius ordered that Jewish children not be returned to their families

This claim is bogus. The order was not verified as authentic. Even if authentic, it is not issued by the Vatican by anonymously by the nunciature. Debunked here [3], and discussed here as a media bias item [4] and no Jewish children have been identified as unreturned as an effect of this so-called order. This comment refers to an edit of 14 November [5] which has already been removed from the article patsw 03:11, 27 November 2005 (UTC)

OOH! Do I see the word " Bias " ? EffK 09:40, 10 December 2005 (UTC)

Bias or not! The claim was found out to be bogus. Str1977 18:48, 11 December 2005 (UTC)

Yep, it should be (and stay) removed. Thanks for the facts. --Goodoldpolonius2 03:49, 13 December 2005 (UTC)