180 Movie on Abortion Goes Viral, 500K Views in One Week

From LifeNews.com

By Steven Ertelt

The new pro-life movie 180 has become an overnight sensation as nearly half a million people have watched the 33-minute pro-life documentary in just one week since director and producer Ray Comfort released it to the public.

The film is changing public opinion on abortion 180 degrees in a matter of minutes as it shows Comfort asking pro-abortion students questions that change their views quickly. Titled to reflect the complete turnaround in the mindsets of all to whom the question is posed, the award-winning film shows eight “pro-choice” people, mostly college students, changing their stance to pro-life just moments after the question is asked in its entirety. It was Comfort’s hope that the documentary would go viral and it appears to have done so.

James Carroll Exploits Holocaust, Lies Again About Catholic Church

From NewsBusters
By Dave Pierre

Leave it to the web site The Daily Beast to publish a lie-filled attack on the Catholic Church the day before Christmas. The author of the hate-filled piece is James Carroll, one of the country's foremost haters of the Catholic Church. He is an anti-Catholic zealot. Period. (Is it any surprise that he also writes for the Boston Globe?)

Carroll's piece takes issue with Pope Benedict's decision earlier this week to declare World War II-era Pope Pius XII "venerable." In the Catholic Church, this declaration is a step toward sainthood.

In his article, entitled "The Pope's Big Holocaust Lie," Carroll repeats several falsehoods about the Catholic Church and the actions of Pope Pius XII during World War II and the Holocaust.

Among Carroll's lies:

1. "The case against Pius XII is well established: He knew early on of Hitler’s plan for the Final Solution of the 'Jewish problem,' and never raised his voice against it."

Wrong. Carroll's falsehood is flat-out debunked in many places (see my list below), including the book The Myth of Hitler's Pope by Rabbi David Dalin. Even before he was pontiff, Pius XII, as Cardinal Pacelli, branded the Nazis as "false prophets with the pride of Lucifer" (Dalin, p. 65).

Pius' "pro-Jewish" policies angered the Nazis so much that Hitler actually planned to kidnap and imprison the pontiff. Records from a July 1943 meeting reveal that Hitler openly discussed invading the Vatican. After the war, Nazi General Karl Otto Wolff testified that he had received orders to "occupy as soon as possible the Vatican and Vatican City." (Wolff talked Hitler out of the plan in December 1943.) (Dalin, p. 77)

Meanwhile, the memoirs of Adolf Eichmann detail that the Vatican "vigorously protested the arrest of Jews, requesting the interruption of such action" (Dalin, p. 84).

And in a December 25, 1941, editorial, the New York Times wrote,

The voice of Pius XII is a lonely voice in the silence and darkness enveloping Europe this Christmas... he is about the only ruler left on the Continent of Europe who dares to raise his voice at all... the Pope put himself squarely against Hitlerism... he left no doubt that the Nazi aims are also irreconcilable with his own conception of a Christian peace.

Additionally, a August 6, 1942, headline in the Times read, "Pope is Said to Plead for Jews Listed for Removal from France."

In his book, Three Popes and the Jews, Israeli diplomat and scholar Pinchas Lapide has asserted, "The Catholic Church under the pontificate of Pius XII was instrumental in saving lives of as many as 860,000 Jews from certain death at Nazi hands." Lapide adds that this "figure far exceeds those saved by all other Churches and rescue organizations combined."

Jewish historian and biographer Sir Martin Gilbert has documented that Pope Pius was one of the first to publicly condemn Nazi atrocities and speak out on behalf of Europe's Jews. Gilbert has also asserted, "Hundreds of thousands of Jews were saved by the Catholic Church, under the leadership and support of Pope Pius XII" (Dalin, pp. 13-14).

The truth is that Pius XII spoke out several times against the Nazi regime. Carroll is lying. (For more specific examples, see the sources I've listed below.)

2. "[I]n October 1943, more than a thousand Jews were rounded up in the Roman Ghetto at the foot of Vatican hill, within sight of the pope’s windows, and still [Pope Pius XII] did nothing. That is a fact. Those Jews died in Auschwitz."

The truth is that Pius took immediate and decisive action as soon as he heard of the roundup. According to the research from Rabbi Dalin, Pius personally protested to Germany's ambassador Ernst von Weizsacker and demanded that the Nazis stop the arrests. Pius himself gave sanctuary within the Vatican to hundreds of homeless Jews. He also asked that convents and churches throughout Italy shelter Jews.

Michael Tagliacozzo, "the foremost authority on the October 1943 Nazi roundup of Rome's Jews" and "a survivor of the raid himself, " said Pius' actions helped rescue 80 percent of Rome's Jews. Said Tagliacozzo,

"Pope Pacelli was the only one who intervened to impede the deportation of Jews on October 16, 1943, and he did very much to hide and save thousands of us." (Dalin, p. 83)

And in the June 21, 2009, edition of Carroll's own newspaper, the Boston Globe, Mordechay Lewy, Israel's ambassador to the Holy See, is quoted,

"It is wrong to look for any affinity between [Pius] and the Nazis. It is also wrong to say that he didn’t save Jews. Everybody who knows the history of those who were saved among Roman Jewry knows that they hid in the church."

James Carroll lies again.

Learn the truth:

• "Pope Pius XII and the Holocaust" (a catalog of research): The Catholic League
• "The Truth About Pope Pius XII," by Sister Margherita Marchione. Ph.D.
• "The Real Story of Pius XII and the Jews," by James Bogle
• "How Pius XII Protected Jews," by Jimmy Akin
• "Catholic Heroes of the Holocaust," by Elizabeth Altham
• "How to Manufacture a Legend: The Controversy over the Alleged Silence of Pope Pius XII in World War II," by Robert A. Graham, S.J.
• The New Anti-Catholicism: The Last Acceptable Prejudice by Philip Jenkins
• "The Charity of Pope Pius XII," by Eugenio Zolli (former Chief Rabbi of Rome)
• "The Record of Pius XII's Opposition to Hitler," CatholicCulture.org
• A Hand of Peace: Pope Pius XII and the Holocaust (DVD)
• Highly recommended: The Myth of Hitler's Pope: How Pope Pius XII Rescued Jews from the Nazis by David G. Dalin

In addition to falsely characterizing Catholic doctrine, Carroll additionally smears Pope Benedict by grossly misrepresenting the pontiff's 2006 address at Auschwitz.

The bottom line: Carroll is exploiting the Holocaust for his own angry agenda. And this fact has been noted before:

"The anti-papal polemics of ex-seminarians like Garry Wills and John Cornwell (author of Hitler's Pope), of ex-priests like James Carroll, and of other lapsed or angry liberal Catholics exploit the tragedy of the Jewish people during the Holocaust to foster their own political agenda of forcing changes on the Catholic Church today. This hijacking of the Holocaust must be repudiated." (Dalin, pp. 2-3)

There you have it.

Dave Pierre is the creator of TheMediaReport.com and a contributor to NewsBusters.

Conference Details Efforts by Pope Pius XII to Rescue Jews

One wonders if, in the whole history of the Church, there has been a Pope as unfairly maligned as Pope Pius XII. The heroic efforts of Pius XII to save Jews from the holocaust were praised by Golda Meir, Albert Einstein and the government of Israel, and yet the man who did more "than all the other world leaders and religious leaders combined" continues to be slandered. But "truth is the daughter of time" and the story is finally being told.

From Catholic World News

Jewish conference organizer: Pius ‘saved more Jews than all the other world leaders and religious leaders combined’

As a 3-day conference on Pope Pius XII and the Holocaust concludes in Rome, John Allen speaks with organizer Gary Krupp, who concludes that Pius XII "saved more Jews than all the other world leaders and religious leaders combined." Vatican Radio interviews the keeper of the archives of the late Father Robert Graham (1912-97), the Jesuit historian and defender of Pope Pius.

In a message to conference participants, Pope Benedict XVI called attention to the "vast quantity of documented material" showing the "organized assistance to the Jewish people" by "this noble Pope."

Source(s): these links will take you to other sites, in a new window.

• John Allen: American Jew comes to the defense of Pius XII (National Catholic Reporter)
• True legacy of Pope Pius XII (Vatican Radio)
• Papal message: Understanding the historical truth about Pius XII (VIS)
• Jewish leader says Pope Pius XII has been demonized falsely (Sept. 16 CWN News Brief)

Irena Sendler, 98; Member of Resistance Saved Lives of 2,500 Polish Jews

From the Los Angeles Times
By Elaine Woo

Fate may have led Irena Sendler to the moment almost 70 years ago when she began to risk her life for the children of strangers. But for this humble Polish Catholic social worker, who was barely 30 when one of history's most nightmarish chapters unfolded before her, the pivotal influence was something her parents had drummed into her.

"I was taught that if you see a person drowning," she said, "you must jump into the water to save them, whether you can swim or not."

Irena Sendler

When the Nazis occupying Poland began rounding up Jews in 1940 and sending them to the Warsaw ghetto, Sendler plunged in.

With daring and ingenuity, she saved the lives of more than 2,500 Jews, most of them children, a feat that went largely unrecognized until the last years of her life.

Sendler, 98, who died of pneumonia Monday in Warsaw, has been called the female Oskar Schindler, but she saved twice as many lives as the German industrialist, who sheltered 1,200 of his Jewish workers. Unlike Schindler, whose story received international attention in the 1993 movie "Schindler's List," Sendler and her heroic actions were almost lost to history until four Kansas schoolgirls wrote a play about her nine years ago.

The lesson Sendler taught them was that "one person can make a difference," Megan Felt, one of the authors of the play, said Monday.

"Irena wasn't even 5 feet tall, but she walked into the Warsaw ghetto daily and faced certain death if she was caught. Her strength and courage showed us we can stand up for what we believe in, as well," said Felt, who is now 23 and helps raise funds for aging Holocaust rescuers.

Sendler was born Feb. 15, 1910, in Otwock, a small town southeast of Warsaw. She was an only child of parents who devoted much of their energies to helping workers.

She was especially influenced by her father, a doctor who defied anti-Semites by treating sick Jews during outbreaks of typhoid fever. He died of the disease when Sendler was 9.

She studied at Warsaw University and was a social worker in Warsaw when the German occupation of Poland began in 1939. In 1940, after the Nazis herded Jews into the ghetto and built a wall separating it from the rest of the city, disease, especially typhoid, ran rampant. Social workers were not allowed inside the ghetto, but Sendler, imagining "the horror of life behind the walls," obtained fake identification and passed herself off as a nurse, allowed to bring in food, clothes and medicine.

By 1942, when the deadly intentions of the Nazis had become clear, Sendler joined a Polish underground organization, Zegota. She recruited 10 close friends -- a group that would eventually grow to 25, all but one of them women -- and began rescuing Jewish children.

She and her friends smuggled the children out in boxes, suitcases, sacks and coffins, sedating babies to quiet their cries. Some were spirited away through a network of basements and secret passages. Operations were timed to the second. One of Sendler's children told of waiting by a gate in darkness as a German soldier patrolled nearby. When the soldier passed, the boy counted to 30, then made a mad dash to the middle of the street, where a manhole cover opened and he was taken down into the sewers and eventually to safety.

Decades later, Sendler was still haunted by the parents' pleas, particularly of those who ultimately could not bear to be apart from their children.

"The one question every parent asked me was 'Can you guarantee they will live?' We had to admit honestly that we could not, as we did not even know if we would succeed in leaving the ghetto that day. The only guarantee," she said, "was that the children would most likely die if they stayed."

Most of the children who left with Sendler's group were taken into Roman Catholic convents, orphanages and homes and given non-Jewish aliases. Sendler recorded their true names on thin rolls of paper in the hope that she could reunite them with their families later. She preserved the precious scraps in jars and buried them in a friend's garden.

In 1943, she was captured by the Nazis and tortured but refused to tell her captors who her co-conspirators were or where the bottles were buried. She also resisted in other ways. According to Felt, when Sendler worked in the prison laundry, she and her co-workers made holes in the German soldiers' underwear. When the officers discovered what they had done, they lined up all the women and shot every other one. It was just one of many close calls for Sendler.

During one particularly brutal torture session, her captors broke her feet and legs, and she passed out. When she awoke, a Gestapo officer told her he had accepted a bribe from her comrades in the resistance to help her escape. The officer added her name to a list of executed prisoners. Sendler went into hiding but continued her rescue efforts.

Felt said that Sendler had begun her rescue operation before she joined the organized resistance and helped a number of adults escape, including the man she later married. "We think she saved about 500 people before she joined Zegota," Felt said, which would mean that Sendler ultimately helped rescue about 3,000 Polish Jews.

When the war ended, Sendler unearthed the jars and began trying to return the children to their families. For the vast majority, there was no family left. Many of the children were adopted by Polish families; others were sent to Israel.

In 1965, she was recognized by Yad Vashem, Israel's Holocaust authority, as a Righteous Gentile, an honor given to non-Jews who risked their lives to save Jews during the Nazi reign.

Her status began to change in 2000, when Felt and her classmates learned that the woman who had inspired them was still alive. Through the sponsorship of a local Jewish organization, they traveled to Warsaw in 2001 to meet Sendler, who helped the students improve and expand the play. Called "Life in a Jar," it has been performed more than 250 times in the United States, Canada and Poland and generated media attention that cast a spotlight on the wizened, round-faced nonagenarian.

After each performance, Felt and the other cast members passed a jar for Sendler, raising enough money to move her into a Catholic nursing home with round-the-clock care. They and the teacher who assigned them the play project, Norman Conard, started the Life in a Jar Foundation, which has raised more than $70,000 to help pay for medical and other needs of Holocaust rescuers.

Last year, Sendler was honored by the Polish Senate and nominated for the Nobel Peace Prize, which brought dozens of reporters to her door. She told one of them she was wearying of the attention.

"Every child saved with my help is the justification of my existence on this Earth," she said, "and not a title to glory."

Sendler, who was the last living member of her group of rescuers, is survived by a daughter and a granddaughter.

For more information on Irena Sendler, or to contribute to the Life In a Jar Foundation, go to http://www.irenasendler.org/