Cui bono?

Who benefits, cui bono, from identifying Pius as a saint?

By JERUSALEM POST STAFF
Pope Pius XII (photo credit: courtesy)
Pope Pius XII
(photo credit: courtesy)
For having failed to speak out against the Nazis during World War II, the moniker "Hitler's Pope" has stuck to Eugenio Pacelli, later Pius XII. Yet every pope since he died, 50 years ago this month, has been a champion of his reputation and "sanctity." Factions within the Church are pushing hard to have Pacelli beatified, a process that would lead to canonization - retroactively acknowledging him as a saint. This momentum, however, has been temporarily halted, and the Vatican has asked those supporting and opposing the beatification to stop pressuring Pope Benedict XVI on the issue. JEWS CANNOT help but think of Pius as a fatally flawed figure who managed to safeguard the Church's political and worldly interests from the Nazis, but only at the steepest of moral costs. It was Pacelli, who as secretary of state in 1933, signed the Vatican Concordat with Germany. Hitler interpreted this treaty to mean that he had won the Church's approval "in the developing struggle against international Jewry." On January 17, 1941, with the war against the Jews well under way, Berlin's Bishop Konrad Preysing - whose moral compass remained intact - wrote Pacelli, by then Pius XII, asking "whether the Holy See couldn't do something… issue an appeal in favor of these unfortunate [Jewish] people?" No answer ever came. At the height of the killing, in a letter dated June 22, 1943, the pope's representative reportedly wrote to US president Franklin D. Roosevelt, warning against the creation of a Jewish state in Palestine. Even in October 1944, when the Jews of Rome were rounded up under his very window and sent to the gas chambers, the pope said nothing. WHO BENEFITS, cui bono, from identifying Pius as a saint? Perhaps those who want to quash the indictment, once and for all, that the Church's behavior during the Shoah was sinful. Perhaps it is simply Catholic traditionalists who want to honor Pius for strengthening the Church by having centralized ecclesiastical and political power within the Vatican at the expense of dioceses around the world. His defenders argue, not unreasonably, that even if the pope had openly condemned the Nazis for their atrocities, they would have carried on anyway. Far less convincingly, they say Pius feared the Germans would have retaliated against Jewish converts to Christianity; or even occupied the Vatican and expropriated its wealth. They say Pius was working "secretly" to help the Jews. One thing is clear: Pius feared Bolshevism - which he may have associated with Jewry - as a menace even greater than Hitlerism. Holocaust historian Saul Friedlander describes Pius as "distant, autocratic, and imbued with a sense of his own intellectual and spiritual superiority." His measured assessment of Pacelli: "There is no specific indication that the pope was anti-Semitic or that his decisions during the war stemmed, be it in part, from some particular hostility toward Jews." NO ONE benefits, however, from heightening enmity between Catholics and Jews. Peter Gumpel, a Jesuit priest and Pacelli-canonization activist, has been exacerbating tensions by demanding that Yad Vashem, the Holocaust Martyrs' and Heroes' Remembrance Authority in Jerusalem, "revise" its exhibit, which accurately depicts Pius's failure to rescue. Gumpel threatens that not doing so will keep Pope Benedict from visiting the Jewish state. But another Vatican spokesman, backtracking from Gumpel's hard line, says that the row with Yad Vashem will not be "the deciding factor" in any papal visit. We claim no standing in telling Catholics whom to honor as a saint. For us, however, and for many Catholics as well, the undeniable legacy of Eugenio Pacelli is moral failure - his deafening silence as millions of Jews were persecuted, brutalized and finally murdered on an industrial scale. If the Church wants historians to reevaluate pope Pius XII's wartime record, let it open the Vatican's archives to outside historians. Let us recall the words spoken by Pope John Paul II in his March 2000 visit to Yad Vashem: "We remember, but not...as an incentive to hatred." In recent days, President Shimon Peres extended an invitation to Pope Benedict to visit the Holy Land. We respectfully urge him to make the journey and to continue the work of improving Catholic-Jewish relations.