Pope at time of Holocaust moves closer to sainthood

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.

Pope Benedict XVI claimed that Pius acted silently to save as many Jews as possible and expressed hope that efforts aimed at beatification, the last formal step before sainthood, would proceed smoothly.

He celebrated mass in St Peter’s Basilica to mark the 50th anniversary of the death of Pius, who became pontiff in 1939, a few months before war broke out.

Some writers and Jewish leaders have accused Pius of not doing enough to try to stop the Holocaust, in which six million Jews died.

The Vatican has steadfastly defended Pius, contending he used behind-the-scenes diplomacy to try to help the Jews. It says he was cautious about public denunciations of Adolf Hitler’s treatment of them for fear of worsening their plight.

“How can we forget the Christmas radio message of December 1942?” the Pope asked in his homily.

“With a voice broken with emotion, he deplored the situation of ’hundreds of thousands of persons, who, for no fault of their own, only for reason of nationality or ethnic roots, were destined for death or for steady deterioration,’ with clear reference to the deportation and extermination carried out against Jews,” he said quoting from Pius’ 1942 radio speech.

Pius “often acted secretly and silently because, in the light of the concrete realities of that complex historical moment, he saw that this was the only way to avoid the worst and save the largest possible number of Jews.”

Among those who mourned his death on October 9, 1958, the Pope said, was the Israeli foreign minister at the time, Golda Meir, who praised him for working on behalf of the war’s victims.

Church officials have begun efforts that could lead to Pius’ beatification, but they say that would be years away.

Some historians, who studied documents in the Vatican’s secret archives, have described Pius as being sometimes indecisive in diplomacy when he was Cardinal Eugenio Pacelli, the Vatican secretary of state, in the years leading up to the war.

The secret archives section dealing with the years of Pius’ papacy has not yet been opened to historians.

The Vatican is using the 50th anniversary of Pius’ death to draw attention to the accomplishments of a man it has described as a great pontiff.