Pope Pius XII's reputation has been rock bottom since his death 50 years ago this month over his failure to speak out strongly against the Holocaust during the Second World War.Now Pope Benedict XVI -- who is a German -- has, for the first time in public, defended Pius's blemished wartime record.
He claims that new evidence found in the Vatican's secret archives show that the former Pontiff "spared no effort" in trying to save Jews from extermination in Nazi Germany and Fascist Italy.
Benedict's remarks have been widely interpreted as a calculated move to pave the way for Pius's canonisation as a saint of the universal church.
The late John Paul II was intent on fast-tracking the Cause of Pius and the stage was set for this awesome step in May last year when the Vatican's Congregation for the Causes of Saints unanimously voted to recommend that Pius should be proclaimed Venerable.
Benedict now appears to be ready to accept this recommendation, even though scholarly debate is polarised on whether Pius merits canonisation.
Benedict cites previously unknown private interventions by Pius which saved the lives of 80 Jews. This in itself is unlikely to convince Jews to remove their description of Pius as "neutral" in his attitude towards the Nazi murder of Jews which is inscribed in the Holocaust Memorial Yad Vashem.
Even if new evidence proves that Pius did not speak out because of his fear of even worse anti-Semitic pogroms by the blood-lusty Nazis, a premature canonisation of this controversial figure could make truth its first casualty.
Irish schoolchildren growing up in the 1940s and 1950s were taught to believe that the tall, princely and mystical Pius XII was a saint and one of the greatest ever popes.
Yet, within weeks of his death on October 9, 1958, aged 82, his reputation went into eclipse with the election of a small, fat and jovial cardinal who took the name of Pope John XXIII and summoned a council of world bishops to reform a Church that still clung to a medievalist mindset.
Overnight, Pius was seen as embodying the high point of an authoritarian and monarchical papacy, wedded to court ritual, the promotion of the cult of the Virgin Mary, corrupt banking practices and obsessed with 'atheistic Communism'.
Fifty years on, the thwarting of Pope John XXIII's reforms and 'the Restoration' of papal authority by John Paul and Benedict have combined to present Pius for public veneration even though the writer John Cornwell has dubbed him "the Nazi Pope".
While Cornwell's description caused offence, he assembled weighty archival material to indict Pius of displaying a lack of moral courage in not condemning Nazism as evil. Cornwell argues that the most traumatic event in Pius's life happened in 1918 when as Eugenio Pacelli, the papal diplomat to Russia, he witnessed the Bolshevik Revolution, which pledged to annihilate religion.
It was fear of Communism that blinded Pacelli, promoted as nuncio to Berlin, to sign a Concordat with Adolf Hitler, which conferred respectability on the aspiring Führer and eased his path to such unprecedented destruction of Jews.
On the eve of war in 1939, Pacelli was elected Pope as Pius XII and pursued a policy to undermine centre parties led by Catholic laity in Germany and Italy who could have opposed Hitler and Mussolini. He also abandoned the Dutch bishops who had courageously spoken out on behalf of Jews against the Germans.
In contrast to his timidity with the Nazis, Pius showed more courage in 1948 when Italy flirted with Communism.
Outwardly independent of the Vatican, the committees took their instructions from the Pope. The chain of command stretched from the Vatican via the Turin-based leader of Italy's Catholic Right, Dr Luigi Gedda, to all 300 Italian dioceses and from there into every parish. Pius won. The Communists lost.
Inside the Catholic Church, Pius launched an inquisition against the leading Catholic theologians of the day, and stopped the worker-priest experiment in France.
Pius cultivated an image as "the Angelic Shepherd", but his personal secretary, the German Jesuit Fr Robert Leiber, concluded that under Pius "Rome was a Stalinist regime".
Fr Leiber was once asked if Pius was a saint. He replied candidly: "No, he is not a saint. He is a man of the Church."
If Benedict advances Pius's canonisation, he too will be seen as "a man of the Church", more concerned with the political prestige of the papacy than eternal truth.
+++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++
Disclaimer
No responsibility or liability shall attach itself to either myself or to the blogspot ‘Clerical Whispers’ for any or all of the articles placed here.
The placing of an article hereupon does not necessarily imply that I agree or accept the contents of the article as being necessarily factual in theology, dogma or otherwise.
Sotto Voce
(Source: II)