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Liturgy Speech Analysis

Decent Essays

In 1933, a start of a tragic event identified as the Holocaust and also known as The Shoah occurred. The Holocaust is known to be an annihilation that changed history, in which Adolf Hitler and Nazi Germany killed about six million Jews. During the era of the Holocaust, German authorities also targeted other groups because of their supposed "racial inferiority" and not just the Jews alone.

Dietrich Bonhoeffer attempted to make sense of the ‘mystery of God’ during the Shoah by believing that ‘Being a Christian is less about cautiously avoiding sin than about courageously and actively doing God's will’ (Eric Metaxas, unknown). Bonhoeffer did not blame God for the incidents that took place in the Shoah but in fact he took a stand to what he believed …show more content…

Since this speech took place during the Holocaust, Pius XII had no choice but to share his words what he thought of this disaster that was taking place. However this speech about the extermination of society and racism was very vague towards his audience, thus lead to confusion towards the crowd; he however also addressed that Russia was a threat to Germany which triggered Hitler to start targeting the Catholics. Yet in 1965, a document called Nostra Aetate came out from the Catholic Church which focuses on the relationships between the Jews and Catholics but never did mention the Holocaust at all in the document. Later in 1998 the Vatican then, decided to apologize for its treatment towards the Jews in the Holocaust. Relating these two documented events that firstly went to super vague to very clear, states that the reason why Pius XII wanted his speech to be unclear towards his audience is so that the Nazis wouldn’t have targeted him, as he never showed arrogance towards the Jews and the Nazis; but lived in fear to see if he was targeted next. However the reason why the Vatican decided to publish a very clear document about their opinions in the later years, was because they knew this war was over so they decided to apologize to the Jews on how they mistreated them, this makes the Vatican’s look like cowards as the people in 1942 thought

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