The Vatican's ambassador to Israel will attend a Holocaust memorial service at the Yad Vashem museum, reversing an earlier decision to boycott the event, officials said today.Vatican officials had said they would skip the Sunday event because of a caption at the Holocaust museum describing the wartime conduct of Pope Pius XII.
Officials from Yad Vashem, the Vatican's Embassy and the Israeli Foreign Ministry confirmed Sunday that the ambassador, Monsignor Antonio Franco, would attend.
The caption next to the picture of Pius reads, "even when reports about the murder of Jews reached the Vatican, the pope did not protest."
Pius "maintained his neutral position" with two exceptions, the caption says, criticizing "his silence and absence of guidelines."
The exceptions were appeals to the rulers of Hungary and Slovakia toward the end of the war.
The boycott had threatened to upset fragile relations between Israel and the Vatican.
The memorial service is traditionally attended by all foreign ambassadors to Israel or their representatives. Yad Vashem had said this would mark the first case in which a foreign emissary deliberately skipped the ceremony.
The disputed photo caption first appeared in 2005, when Yad Vashem opened its new museum. Shortly after, the previous Vatican ambassador asked that the caption be changed.
Yad Vashem has not done so, insisting its research on the pope's role was accurate.
Yad Vashem said it would be ready to re-examine Pius XII's conduct during the Holocaust if the Vatican opened its World War II-era archives to the museum's research staff and new material emerged.
Despite frequent requests from Holocaust researchers, the Vatican has denied access to major parts of its archives, including wartime papers.
The Vatican has struggled to defend its wartime pope, insisting Pius spearheaded discreet diplomacy that saved thousands of Jews.
Israel and the Vatican established diplomatic relations in 1994, after hundreds of years of painful relations between Catholicism and Judaism.
Separately, church officials announced new developments Thursday in the Vatican's case to make Pius a saint. A massive dossier on Pius' virtues - some six volumes of 3,000 pages - was handed over to a panel of bishops and cardinals earlier this month to study, they said.
In Rome, the Rev. Peter Gumpel, who is spearheading Pius' sainthood cause, said he hoped the panel would decide on Pius' case this year.
If the clerics approve the dossier, they will pass their recommendations on to Pope Benedict XVI, who could then sign a decree on Pius' virtues, the first major step toward possible beatification.
The Vatican would then have to confirm a miracle attributed to Pius' intercession for him to be beatified, and a second miracle for him to be canonized.
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