The Roman Catholic Church's humiliation over a Holocaust-denying bishop is raising new hope among Jewish groups and speculation among scholars that the Vatican now will put the brakes on declaring its controversial wartime pope a saint. The pending beatification of Pius XII - the last step before canonization or sainthood - has been the source of a decades-long conflict between Jews and the Vatican.
They disagree on what role he played during the Nazi genocide of Europe's Jewry.
The elevation of Pius to holiness and the statements of English-born Bishop Richard Williamson come together in that they not only anger Jews but deeply embarrass and upset many Catholics, saddling the Vatican with two inflammable problems.
Leaders of the influential U.S. Jewish community will meet today with Pope Benedict XVI to urge him to forcefully distance the church from Bishop Williamson and "all those who share his abhorrent views," Malcolm Hoenlein, executive vice-president of the Conference of Presidents of Major American Jewish Organizations, said in a telephone interview last night from Rome.
But Mr. Hoenlein said he also expects Pius's pending beatification to be raised in the 45-minute meeting.
"It will not be the major focus of the session, but we will talk about other issues" besides the Williamson affair. "We want to see things go back on a positive track."
The 68-year-old Bishop Williamson has publicly called the Holocaust a lie and said no Jews died in gas chambers during the Second World War.
Last month, Benedict - apparently oblivious to the bishop's long-standing beliefs - revoked a 20-year excommunication order against him and three other bishops who were members of a schismatic conservative sect, the Society of St. Pius X, that the Pope wanted to bring back into the mainstream church.
The ensuing uproar has been unprecedented in modern times, with world Jewish leaders threatening to cut off contact with the church's hierarchy, senior cardinals publicly criticizing the Vatican, and German Chancellor Angela Merkel calling the Pope on the carpet.
"What this has revealed is not only a certain clumsiness of papal administration but a very serious insularity," University of Toronto historian Michael Marrus, one of the world's leading scholars on Catholic-Jewish relations, said yesterday. "And I think if they take this lesson to heart, as they surely will, it can't be far from doing that to thinking very, very hard once again about the Pius XII file.
"When I look at the historical literature and also to some degree the popular writing in North America, the major writers who are very anti Pius XII are Catholics and not Jews."
Prof. Marrus said the proposed canonization of Pius XII has become a kind of vehicle for discussing both the papacy and the fate of the reforms of the 1960s Second Vatican Council - the same issues raised by controversy surrounding Bishop Williamson, who was a leading member of the Society of St. Pius X, a conservative organization founded by the late French Archbishop Marcel Lefebvre in opposition to the Vatican II reforms.
A powerful conservative lobby within the church has crystallized around Pius XII and is promoting his cause, Prof. Marrus said.
Yet why the wartime pope has become emblematic of ultra-conservative Catholics is not entirely clear.
As Prof. Marrus and other church scholars such as Frank Flinn, professor of religious studies at Washington University in St. Louis, Mo., point out, Pius XII had a decidedly liberal side to him in some of the liturgical and canon law reforms he introduced during his 1939-1958 papacy.
Vatican-watchers find that Benedict has sent out mixed signals about Pius.
He has said that, far from being indifferent to the plight of Jews during the war, Pius XII "spared no effort" to help them. But the priest in charge of the canonization dossier, Rev. Peter Gumpel, said recently the Pope has held back on approving a key document in the process "because he wants good relations with the Jews."
At the same time, the Vatican has told both Jews and Catholics to stop putting "pressure" on Benedict, and has denied the process is being delayed
"It's never going to be on a back burner," Prof. Flinn said. "The conservatives are in control [of the Vatican]."
Historian Kevin Spicer of Stonehill College in Massachusetts, who has written extensively about the Nazi-era church, has suggested the Pope might quietly be delaying the beatification process until the Vatican's cumbersome bureaucracy gets around to producing long-withheld archival wartime documents.
The wartime deeds of Pius XII
Differences over what Pope Pius XII did or did not do during the Second World War have haunted Catholic-Jewish relations for decades and conflict has resurfaced over whether Pius should be made a saint.
THE VATICAN SAYS ...
While Pius did not speak out forcefully against the Holocaust, he worked behind the scenes to help Jews, believing direct intervention would have worsened things by prompting Adolf Hitler's retaliation. The Vatican points to evidence that, in 1939 and 1940, he secretly supported a British-German plot to overthrow Hitler. He's said to have saved thousands of Jewish lives by ordering churches and convents in Italy to hide Jews. In response, he received praise from several prominent Jews after the war.
HIS CRITICS SAY...
The harsh light of history has shown the Pope's efforts were not so praiseworthy. His muted criticisms of the Nazis gave tacit papal acquiescence to the Holocaust, critics charge.
They point to the Vatican's silence even as the Nazis were rounding up Jews in Rome for transport to Auschwitz, saying he avoided drawing Nazi ire toward Catholics at the expense of Jewish lives.
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(Source: GMP)