Even before Cardinals met in the Sistine Chapel yet to elect the new pope the family-owned Gammarelli tailor shop that has dressed popes for two centuries was ready.

With Pope Benedict XVI’s sudden resignation, his successor faces a difficult task with a Church seen by many as outdated, and a papal bureaucracy deeply flawed, writes TP O’Mahony

It is 50 years since Vatican II, a surprise attempt to radically overhaul the Catholic Church. But its potential has been squandered, writes TP O’Mahony

ISRAEL’S ambassador to the Vatican on yesterday backed off on his praise of Pope Pius XII, the WWII-era pope blamed by some Jews and historians for having failed to speak out enough against the Holocaust.

IT was a rare display of human connection from a Pontiff so often dismissed as distant and dogmatically out of date.

POPE Benedict XVI again defended his predecessor Pius XII against Jewish critics yesterday, telling the audience at a Rome synagogue that the Vatican worked quietly to save Jews from the Nazis during World War II.

POPE Benedict has moved two of his predecessors, Pius XII and John XXIII, closer to sainthood.

THE Vatican defended the Pope from a growing chorus of Israeli critics who accused the German-born Benedict XVI of failing to express enough remorse for the Holocaust – a controversy that threatened to eclipse a papal pilgrimage aimed at building bridges between faiths.

POPE Benedict XVI pledged yesterday to remember the six million Jews killed in the Holocaust, seeking to repair strains with Jews over one of the most sensitive issues at the start of a visit to Israel and the Palestinian territories.

Pope Benedict XVI pledged today to remember the millions of Jews killed in the Holocaust.

The Pope gave Second World War pontiff Pius XII a push toward possible sainthood today and defended his memory from accusations he did little to spare Jews from the Holocaust.

CON HAYES (Letters, November 26) should realise that the Catholic Church does not consider the Genesis account to be a work of science. Rather it considers it to be a work of mythic history, ie, it depicts real, historical events in the language of myth.

IT would be nice if all intellectual differences could be resolved by fiat.

IN his letter headlined ‘The Godless delusion, flights of fancy and pointless questions’ (October 22), Oliver Broderick makes a dismissive reference to Hitler and the myth of his Catholicism.

CON HAYES (Letters, October 22) claims that only ‘liberal Catholics and liberal Protestants’ would support Darwin’s evolutionary theories.

DICK KEANE (Letters, June 26) says the Pope’s views on homosexuality are “intrinsically immoral” and “objectively disordered”.

IN the past week we had posthumous pronouncements from both Judge Seán O’Leary and the late US President Gerald Ford.

THE defence of Pius XII by Fr Con McGillicuddy (Irish Examiner letters, October 12) ignores the contrast in the Pope’s behaviour as between Hitler and Stalin.

HOW utterly naive is TP O’Mahony in joining writers (some of them vehemently anti-Catholic) in attacking Pope Pius XII for not condemning the Nazis for their oppression of the Jewish people (Irish Examiner, September 12).

Pope Benedict XVI praised the the Second World War-era Pope, Pius XII, as a great pontiff but stopped short of endorsing his case for beatification, according to a transcript released today by the Vatican.

THE clergy have been taking a bit of pasting in recent days, but the World War One armistice commemorations yesterday reminded me of an extraordinary 1971 interview with a priest.

CATHOLICS were not encouraged to read the bible in this country, apparently because the hierarchy could not trust them to interpret it properly. It was symptomatic of a rather cavalier attitude towards education.

THE key to any man’s essence is the recurring phrase they use throughout life to spell out their central preoccupations. The phrase that surfaced again and again throughout the late Pope’s reign was ‘culture of death’.

Pope John Paul sets out on Thursday on number 100, a five day tour of Croatia, a Roman Catholic stronghold in the Balkans.

The Vatican has set February 15 as the release date for archives documenting its relations with Germany leading up to the Second World War – part of its promised release intended to counter criticism of the papacy during the Holocaust.

The Vatican will be unable to meet its promised New Year’s Day target for the release of documents on the Holy See’s relations with Germany in the years leading up to Second World War, saying it is overwhelmed by the huge mass of material.

Almost 3.5 million files on Second World War prisoners will be made public by the Vatican in January as part of a promised release of documents intended to counter criticism of the papacy during the Holocaust.