Pope defends Pius XII’s World War II record
VATICAN CITY — Pope Benedict XVI gave World War II pontiff Pius XII a push toward possible sainthood Thursday and defended him from accusations that he did little to spare Jews from the Holocaust.
Benedict defended Pius as he celebrated Mass in St. Peter’s Basilica to mark the anniversary of the pontiff’s death in 1958.
The Vatican has been using the 50th anniversary of the death to mount an aggressive campaign to rebut decades-old accusations that Pius did not sufficiently wield his moral weight against Adolf Hitler’s regime to try to stop the extermination of 6 million Jews.
Vatican spokesman, the Rev. Federico Lombardi, told reporters that Benedict in his homily wanted to unite himself to the “widespread hope” of the faithful who want Pius to be beatified, the last formal step before sainthood.
Lombardi stressed that Benedict was not setting any timetable for beatification and that the pontiff wanted to reflect on a voluminous church dossier on Pius, before signing a decree approving his “virtues.”
Pius, an Italian, had been serving as Vatican secretary of state when he was elected pontiff in 1939, a few months before war broke out in Europe.
Benedict said Pius used behind- the-scenes diplomacy to try to help the Jews. He cited the radio message Pius delivered for Christmas 1942 as evidence of his determination to denounce the mass killings across much of Europe.
“In a voice breaking with emotion, he deplored the situation of ‘hundreds of thousands of persons, who, for no fault of their own, sometimes only because of their nationality or race, have been consigned to death or a slow decline,’ a clear reference to the deportation and extermination of the Jews,” Benedict said, quoting from the radio address.
Pius “often acted in a secret and silent way because, in the light of the concrete situations of that complex historical moment, he saw that this was the only way he could avoid the worst and save the largest possible number of Jews,” Benedict said.
Accusations that Pius did not do enough to save Jews have dogged his memory since German playwright Rolf Hochhuth’s work, “The Deputy,” first performed in Berlin in 1963, alleged that Pius failed to take action against the Holocaust.
Scholars and Jewish leaders also have criticized Pius, and the allegations have been explored in widely read books including John Cornwall’s “Hitler’s Pope.”
Benedict, 81, is a German who served in a Hitler Youth cadre while a young seminarian toward the end of the war.
In his homily, the pope did not take on specific critics, saying only that “unfortunately” the debate about Pius “has not always been the calmest.”
Benedict gave no hint when Pius might be beatified. The Rev. Peter Gumpel, a German Jesuit who has spearheaded the drive for the beatification, said the process could take years.
Earlier this week, Israeli Rabbi Shear-Yashuv Cohen, who became the first Jew to address bishops’ gatherings at the Vatican, pointedly omitted Pius when he spoke of the change in Catholic-Jewish relations.
