remember that time the fricking pope tried to kill hitler

Catholics made up a lot of resistance to Nazis and several clergy died in concentration camps:

Israeli historian Pinchas Lapide estimated that Catholic rescue of Jews amounted to somewhere between 700,000 and 860,000 people

One was St. Maximilian Kolbe

a Polish Catholic priest and Conventual Franciscan friar who volunteered to die in place of a man named Franciszek Gajowniczek in the German death camp of Auschwitz, located in German-occupied Poland during World War II.

Kolbe's life was strongly influenced in 1903, when he was 9, by a vision of the Virgin Mary. He later described this incident:

That night I asked the Mother of God what was to become of me. Then she came to me holding two crowns, one white, the other red. She asked me if I was willing to accept either of these crowns. The white one meant that I should persevere in purity and the red that I should become a martyr. I said that I would accept them both.

After the outbreak of World War II, Kolbe was one of the few friars who remained in the monastery, where he organized a temporary hospital.[7] After the town was captured by the Germans, they arrested him on 19 September 1939; he was later released on 8 December.[13][7] He refused to sign the Deutsche Volksliste, which would have given him rights similar to those of German citizens in exchange for recognizing his ethnic German ancestry.[28] Upon his release he continued work at his friary where he and other friars provided shelter to refugees from Greater Poland including 2,000 Jews whom he hid from German persecution in the Niepokalanów friary.

Kolbe received permission to continue publishing religious works, though significantly reduced in scope.[28] The monastery continued to act as a publishing house, issuing a number of publications considered anti-nazi

On 17 February 1941, the monastery was shut down by the German authorities. That day Kolbe and four others were arrested by the Gestapo and imprisoned in the Pawiak prison.[13] On 28 May, he was transferred to Auschwitz as prisoner 16670.

Continuing to act as a priest, Kolbe was subjected to violent harassment, including beatings and lashings. Once, he was smuggled to a prison hospital by friendly inmates.

At the end of July 1941, a prisoner escaped from the camp, prompting the deputy camp commander, SS-Hauptsturmführer Karl Fritzsch, to pick ten men to be starved to death in an underground bunker to deter further escape attempts. When one of the selected men, Franciszek Gajowniczek, cried out, "My wife! My children!" Kolbe volunteered to take his place

According to an eyewitness, who was an assistant janitor at that time, in his prison cell Kolbe led the prisoners in prayer. Each time the guards checked on him, he was standing or kneeling in the middle of the cell and looking calmly at those who entered. After they had been starved and deprived of water for two weeks, only Kolbe and three others remained alive.[31]

The guards wanted the bunker emptied, so they gave the four remaining prisoners lethal injections of carbolic acid. Kolbe is said to have raised his left arm and calmly waited for the deadly injection.[20] He died on 14 August 1941. He was cremated on 15 August, the feast day of the Assumption of Mary.

Kolbe's recognition as a Christian martyr generated some controversy within the Catholic Church.[37] While his self-sacrifice at Auschwitz was considered saintly and heroic, he was not killed out of odium fidei (hatred of the faith), but as the result of his act of Christian charity toward another man. Pope Paul VI recognized this distinction at Kolbe's beatification, naming him a Confessor and giving him the unofficial title "martyr of charity". Pope John Paul II, however, overruled the commission he had established (which agreed with the earlier assessment of heroic charity). John Paul II wanted to make the point that the Nazis' systematic hatred of whole categories of humanity was inherently also a hatred of religious (Christian) faith; he said that Kolbe's death equated to earlier examples of religious martyrdom.

During World War II, Kolbe's monastery at Niepokalanów sheltered Jewish refugees.[43] According to the testimony of a local, "When Jews came to me asking for a piece of bread, I asked Father Maximilian if I could give it to them in good conscience, and he answered me, 'Yes, it is necessary to do this because all men are our brothers.'"

!catholics