Movie Review: AMEN (2002) AA

Very special movie about an EXTREMELY controversial Issue. It raises questions about the Catholic Church's failure to speak out against the Holocaust even though they knew exactly what was happening. I gave it an AA rating mainly because of the seriousness of the issues discussed.  The story, taken from actual events, is based on the 1963 play "The Deputy" by Rolf Hochhuth.

By the way, the British . . . Churchill, the Americans . . . Roosevelt, and US State Department plus the press, such as the NY Times . . . did very little to save the Jews in Europe from destruction by either military action or through the media. 
Edited From Promotional Material:
In the movie two systems are engaged in a monumental struggle: the Natzi killing machine versus an almost non-existent Vatican and Allied diplomacy effort to diminish the killing.

In the movie, two men are struggling from the inside: On one side, Kurt Gerstein, a real-life chemist and SS officer who supplies the death camps with zyklon B. He tirelessly denounces the genocide against the Jews and attempts to alert the Allies as well as the Pope, German people and their churches of their murderous policy. Kurt does this at his own risk, and at the risk his family's welfare and safety. 
 On the other side is Ricardo Fontana, a young Jesuit, a fictitious character who represents all the priests who were determined to struggle against Nazi savagery, many of them paying for their courage with their lives.  Countless priests, some known, others anonymous, were simply not content to live with the silence of their church's hierarchy regarding the Natzi killing machine.

What the film does best, is point out the moral deficiencies of both the church and the political leaders to do anything to halt the Holocaust. It shows with certainty that both Pius XII and the American's both knew the Holocaust was taking place.. The Pope feared the Communists more than he did Hitler's regime, and his prayers without actions seemed to make him out to be the ultimate religious hypocrite. The movie brings nothing new to the table about the Holocaust, but puts another nail down in the argument that the world could have acted but didn't because of indifference. It is sad to say that the reason so many died during the Holocaust is because as the film claims, there were so few who tried to do anything. The lessons are there for both the Church and America to learn something about themselves that still hasn't changed. The church is still in denial about its covering up of pedophile priests and America continues it's own form of empire building that conveniently ignores human rights whenever it wants to. 

From Wikipedia:
The Deputy,  is a controversial 1963 play by Rolf Hochhuth  which portrayed Pope Pius XII as having failed to take action or speak out against the Holocaust. It has been translated into more than twenty languages.The play's implicit censure of a venerable controversial  pope has led to numerous counterattacks, of which one of the latest is the 2007 allegation that Hochhuth was the dupe of a KGB disinformation campaign . The Encyclopedia Britannica  assesses the play as "a drama that presented a critical, unhistorical picture of Pius XII"^[ and Hochhuth's depiction of the pope having been indifferent to the Natzi genocide as "lacking credible substantiation".