A day after defending Pius XII, the wartime pontiff accused of remaining silent over the Nazi Holocaust, Pope Benedict XVI has said that the memory of "Kristallnacht", the anti-Jewish Nazi riots which prefigured the Holocaust, still causes him "pain". Speaking on the 70th anniversary of the 1938 pogrom, or "Night of Broken Glass", when the windows of thousands of Jewish businesses and synagogues were smashed, the German-born Pope said "Still today I feel pain over what happened in those tragic events, whose memory must serve to ensure such horrors are never repeated and that we strive, on every level, against all forms of anti-Semitism and discrimination".
"I invite people to pray for the victims of that night and to join me in expressing profound solidarity with the Jewish world," the pontiff said during his Sunday Angelus address. Nearly 100 Jews were killed in the pogrom and 26,000 were sent to concentration camps.
The former Joseph Ratzinger was forced to join the Hitler Youth as a teenager. Jewish groups including Holocaust survivors are currently urging him to halt or suspend the process of beatifying Pius XII, the step before sainthood.
The Pope said that Kristallnacht "began the violent persecution that concluded with the Holocaust."
However on Saturday he defended Pius XII in a message to a Rome conference at which Cardinal Tarcisio Bertone, the Vatican Secretary of State, described claims that the wartime pontiff failed to help the victims of the Holocaust because of pro-German sympathies as "outrageous."
In remarks to the conference, marking the 50th anniversary of Pius XII's death and focusing on his thought and teaching, or magisterium, Benedict said that "in recent years, when Pius XII is spoken of, attention has been concentrated in an excessive way on only one problem, treated, for the most part, in a rather unilateral way".
This had "impeded an adequate approach to the figure of great historical-theological depth which Pope Pius XII was," Benedict said. Pius XII's teachings amounted to a "precious legacy" in the form of countless homilies, radio messages and encyclicals over twenty years.
Pope Benedict singled out the encyclicals Mystici Corporis on the nature of the Church and Miranda Prorsus on "modern communications and their influence on public opinion" as well as Pius XII's pronouncements on science, in which the pontiff had admired the "extraordinary progress made" but had also warned against the risks of "ignoring the moral consequences of scientific discoveries" such as the splitting of the atom.
The Pope said Pius XII had been a careful and realistic pontiff who weighed every word. He was "a man of uncommon intelligence" with a clear sense of justice, an unfailing memory and "a profound love for Christ and all Humanity".
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(Source: TTO)