Wartime pope a step closer to beatification

Pope Pius xii, the pope who presided over the Catholic Church during World War ii, came a step closer to beatification Saturday when Pope Benedict xvi signed a decree on his virtues. A decree was also signed for Pope John Paul ii.

Pius has been widely criticized for not doing enough to stop the Holocaust. For this reason, Jewish organizations and historians have led an effort over recent years to stop the beatification process. The Vatican initiative began with Pope John Paul ii, and Benedict has continued to pursue it. Beatification is the first major step toward sainthood.

Associated Press reports:

Some Jews and historians have argued Pius should have done more to prevent the deaths of 6 million Jews by the Nazis and their collaborators during World War ii. As a result, the German-born Benedict’s surprise decision to recognize Pius’s “heroic virtues” sparked immediate outcry from Jewish groups.The Anti-Defamation League and American Jewish Committee said the move was premature given the Vatican still hasn’t opened up to outside historians its secret archives from Pius’s 1939-1958 pontificate. The Vatican says the 16 million files won’t be ready until 2014 at the earliest. …Abraham Foxman, a Holocaust survivor and the Anti-Defamation League’s national director, said he was disappointed that the pope had taken the decision while the historical jury is still out on Pius’s record.”I can’t understand the rush, especially while there are still survivors who are alive who feel the issue very, very deeply and are being told the files need time to be processed. What’s the imperative?” Foxman told the Associated Press.The Israeli Foreign Ministry concurred, saying Pius’s actions are worthy of a “thorough historical examination. History will be the judge of this matter,” the ministry said in a statement.

That history contained in the Vatican archives has, however, already been at least partly exposed by Catholic historian John Cornwell, who was given access to the secret archives. Initially setting out to use the Vatican archives to exonerate Pius, Cornwell ended up being shocked at the condemnation of the pope revealed by the wartime documents. In his 1999 book Hitler’s Pope: The Secret History of Pius xii, Cornwell wrote:

I was convinced that if his full story were told, Pius xii’s pontificate would be vindicated. …I applied for access to crucial material in Rome, reassuring those who had charge of the appropriate archives that I was on the side of my subject. …By the middle of 1997, nearing the end of my research, I found myself in a state I can only describe as moral shock. The material I had gathered, taking the more extensive view of Pacelli’s [Pius xii’s] life, amounted not to an exoneration but to a wider indictment. Spanning Pacelli’s career from the beginning of the century, my research told the story of a bid for unprecedented papal power that by 1933 had drawn the Catholic Church into complicity with the darkest forces of the era. I found evidence, moreover, that from an early stage in his career Pacelli betrayed an undeniable antipathy toward the Jews ….

The AP story notes that Pius “didn’t issue scathing public indictments of Jewish deportations, and some historians say he cared more about bilateral relations with Nazi Germany regarding the rights of the Catholic Church there, than saving Jewish lives.”

While Vatican-Jewish relations in many respects appear to be healthy—with Benedict xvi visiting Israel earlier this year—they must be seen in this context: Pope Benedict pushing—in the face of ongoing strong Jewish resistance—for the sainthood of a fascist sympathizer who did nothing to help the Jews during the Holocaust.