The Place of Refuge

St. Augustine wrote The City of God in response to the pagan Romans who had taken refuge in the churches, which the barbarians spared in the sack of Rome, but who then blamed the Church for the abandonment of the city's old divinities.

The revisionist attempt to class Pope Pius XII as a collaborator or at least as someone who was too silent during WWII on the Nazi persecution of the Jews is a very similar smear. A member of my parish was in the army that entered Rome after driving out the German army; on being shown around one of the city's churches, he was told that he was the first to have seen the relics & historical features of the church in several years, because on Pope Pius' orders, the churches had been turned into refuges for Rome's Jewish population & all Italian Jews who could be accommodated. -- On Hitler's ascent to power, then-Cardinal Pacelli had rebuked an Italian aristocrat who said "At least he's against the communists." "Don't talk such nonsense," the future pope replied, "the Nazis are infinitely worse." The Church in Germany was viewed as a foreign & race-mixing power, and all means were used first to bind, then to harass and silence the Church in Germany; in the three years in which Hitler held sway in Europe, the heaviest blows fell on Polish Catholics. Pope John Paul II's spiritual understanding of human suffering & evil & the need for grace & mercy was formed against the backdrop of what he experienced & shared as a young man; and the father of the current pope would move continually during the Third Reich in order to keep his sons away from the satanic monstrosity which gripped Germany during those years.

Throughout the 19th century, and well into the 20th, the non-Catholic parties, all the anti-clerical parties, had aimed at getting the Church out of political affairs; and the same people who condemn the Church now for interfering are those who blame the Church for not stopping the Nazis or for facilitating their rise or collaboration. Pope Pius X, the first pope of the 20th century, did all that he could to try to avert the first World War; and his successor, Benedict XV, elected at the start of that war, tried to recall Europe from the holocaust of that time. Both Paul VI and John Paul II, despite the calls of militants to confront communist powers politically, both followed a path away from conflagration & to living Christ wholly, even under the circumstances in the Soviet bloc and elsewhere, to avoid plunging humanity into yet another war.

Catholics are often foolish & purblind & wayward & stubborn & dim, whether lay or clerical; but the body & mind endure & surpass the quality of its members, because it is THE body that the Holy Spirit animates & gives a divine endurance & direction, so that Christ crucified & risen always be the center, so that the cross "be not emptied" of its power. What is not The Church, capital C, is built from its members, and has only what natural qualities they have: were the Catholic Church built from its members, rather than being Christ's body on earth, it would, having suffered the many losses & defeats over the ages, have fallen long ago. It's she who shapes us & places Christ in us, and then makes more of us than we can possibly be on our own. She takes us in that we may be taken out of ourselves, and remade in Christ: any other way is building on the sand of the self. Because we are not the stuff, the substance of the sanctuary, we find sanctuary & life there.