After threatening to boycott the annual Holocaust Memorial Day state ceremony at Yad Vashem, the Vatican’s ambassador to Israel ended up attending the event earlier this week.Monsignor Antonio Franco originally said he would skip the event because Catholics were offended by an exhibited photograph of Pope Pius XII bearing the caption “Even when reports about the murder of Jews reached the Vatican, the pope did not protest.” The caption also notes that the pope declined to sign a 1942 Allied condemnation of the massacre of Jews.
While it’s not clear what prompted the monsignor’s change of mind, the episode should serve as a heads-up to those who have proclaimed a new era in Jewish-Catholic relations.
The photo caption first appeared in 2005, when Yad Vashem opened its new museum. The then-Vatican ambassador promptly asked that the caption be changed but Yad Vashem officials demurred, insisting that research on the pope’s role fully supported it.
The Vatican’s defensiveness about Pope Pius XII’s wartime role is not hard to understand – a process is now underway to declare him a saint, and the notion that he was insensitive – or worse – to the plight of the Jews would not be helpful to that effort, at least as a matter of public relations.
The Vatican has long resisted calls to open its extensive archives to researchers who could determine, once and for all, what Pope Pius XII really did or didn’t do during the Holocaust years.
It seems disingenuous in the extreme for the Vatican to object to the release of its files while complaining when institutions like Yad Vashem rely on what is available to them.
Surely logic dictates that if the Vatican had anything that would controvert the negative image of Pius XII, that material would have been released by now.
Further, for many years the Vatican has simply refused to release invaluable, and otherwise unavailable, manuscripts of Torah commentary from our early Torah sages that have come into its possession over the years – some as the result of the destruction of entire Jewish communities in the name of Christ.
What does this tell us about the level of esteem in which they hold a people defined by the Torah?
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