Why has Pope Benedict chosen now to beatify Nazi-era pontiff?
By Robert Wistrich
Exactly ten years ago, on a cold winter morning in New York City, the Catholic-Jewish Historical Commission, established to investigate Pope Pius XII's response to the Holocaust, met for the first time to discuss its future work. I was the only Israeli historian among the six scholars (3 Catholics and 3 Jews) designated by the Vatican and leading Jewish organizations to study this hotly contested issue.
A little under two years later, the project was abandoned as a result of the Holy See's unwillingness to release materials from its own archives that could help clarify issues that our team of scholars raised in our provisional report.
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At issue was the silence of Pius XII during the Holocaust and his indirect complicity in the Nazi mass murder of Jews. These allegations, which first emerged around 1964, had prompted the Vatican to publish eleven volumes of its own documents (edited by four trusted Jesuit scholars), most of them appearing in the 1970s. It was these documents in Italian, German, French, Latin, and English that we were originally asked to review.
The million or so unpublished documents from the pontificate of Pius XII (1939?1958) according to the Vatican's most recent estimate, will only be available in about four year's time.
It is in this context that we need to see the recent decree onthe 'heroic virtues' of Pius XII, just signed by Pope Benedict XVI. Most Jews have interpreted this act as yet another signal that the Vatican is determined to beatify the controversial wartime pope - whom some even consider to have been anti-Semitic - regardless of what the historical evidence may indicate.
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My own provisional conclusion drawn from the study of thousands of documents is that the mass murder of Jews was fairly low on his list of priorities. Of course, much the same could be said of Roosevelt, Churchill, and Stalin, but they did not claim to be the 'Vicar of Christ' or to represent the Christian conscience.
Pius XII strikes me as a polished diplomat far more worried about the Allied bombing of Rome than about the thousand Roman Jews who were being deported by the Germans to their deaths in Auschwitz, virtually under the windows of the Holy See.
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So why has Benedict XVI chosen to take this step now? Why risk unnecessary damage to Catholic-Jewish relations? My own inclination is to think that the present pope regards Pius XII as a soulmate - both theologically and politically.
He shares with the wartime pontiff an authoritarian centralist world-view and a deep distrust of liberalism, modernity, and the ravages of moral relativism. He was 31 years old when Pius XII died in 1958, and already then regarded him as a venerated role model.
Moreover, the German-born Joseph Ratzinger (today Benedict XVI) certainly knew that Pius XII (an artistocratic Roman) was also a passionate Germanophile, surrounded by German aides during and after the war, fluent in the German language, and a great admirer of the German Catholic Church.
Not only that, but Ratzinger probably knows that Pius XII personally intervened after 1945 to commute the sentences of convicted German war criminals. This solicitude for Nazi criminals contrasts sharply with Pius XII ignoring all entreaties to make a public statement against anti-Semitism even after the full horrors of the death camps had been revealed in 1945.
In this context it is profoundly unsettling to think that the ultraconservative Benedict XVI and his entourage can identify so completely with Pius XII as a man of 'heroic virtue.'.......
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