by emad » Sat Aug 20, 2005 12:02 pm
August 20, 2005 <br><br>Relations strained on sainthood proposal<br>From Richard Owen in Rome<br> <br> <br> <br>THE Vatican’s relations with Israel and Jewish groups around the world have come under intense strain from a decision by Pope Benedict XVI’s predecessor to put the controversial wartime Pope Pius XII on the road to sainthood. <br><br> <br> <br>The dispute has brought into sharp relief accusations that Pius XII was “silent” in the face of the Holocaust and that the Vatican was at best ambiguous in its attitude to Nazism. <br><br>Father Peter Gumpel, the Vatican postulator charged with making the case for Pius XII’s beatification, vehemently denies that Pius XII, who before becoming Pope was the Vatican ambassador in Berlin and then Secretary of State, was anti-Semitic, let alone sympathetic to Hitler. <br><br>But in his book Hitler’s Pope: The Secret History of Pius XII, John Cornwell, a Roman Catholic author, accuses the former Pope of helping Hitler to gain power by agreeing in 1933 to the disbandment of a Catholic political party, thus reducing opposition to the Nazis. <br><br>In 1937 Pius XI issued an encyclical which condemned racism and persecution, but failed to mention Hitler or Nazism. The document was drafted by Cardinal Eugenio Pacelli, the Secretary of State, who became Pius XII two years later. Vatican historians argue that, as Pope, Pius XII preserved Vatican neutrality so it could serve as a “refuge for victims of the war”. <br><br>Jewish groups, such as the Simon Wiesenthal Center, claim that the Vatican helped Nazi war criminals to escape to South America. The Vatican denies this. Vatican historians argue that Pius XII helped thousands of Jews but did so without publicity for fear of provoking a backlash against Christians in Nazi-occupied Europe. <br><br>John Paul II is thought to have supported this view, describing Pius XII in 1998 as “a great Pope”. John Paul II also sought to mend fences with Israel and the Jewish community, issuing condemnations of anti-Semitsim and making a ground breaking trip to Israel in 2000, when he visited Yad Vashem, the Holocaust memorial in Jerusalem, and prayed at the Wailing Wall.<br> <br> <!--EZCODE AUTOLINK START--><a href="http://www.timesonline.co.uk/article/0,,3-1742369,00.html">www.timesonline.co.uk/art...69,00.html</a><!--EZCODE AUTOLINK END--><br><br>NOT surprised. The God's Banker murder trial opens in about six weeks' time. <br><br>PLENTY of strain everywhere, not just in the Vatican.<br><br>MOSTLY in the White House and in the Republican Home for Retired Old Bushies...............<br> <p></p><i></i>
