Here's a belated post that I am inserting for the record because I suppose it reflects the common secular view among Jews about the Holy Father and the Jews, and of course, about Pius XII.... To much of it, the kindest comment is "YADA, YADA, YADA', since it's the same irrational emotion-fuelled drivel and cavalier disregard for objective fact that we have been hearing for the past five years.
After Pius move, Pope Benedict
practices delicate Jewish dance
By Ruth Ellen Gruber
ROME, Dec. 31 (JTA) -- For at least the third time in his papacy, Pope Benedict's XVI is doing the Jewish dance that takes him one step back, one step forward.
The step back came when Benedict made a move in mid-December to bring Holocaust-era Pope Pius XII a bit closer to sainthood. The step forward will come in mid-January, when Benedict visits Rome's main synagogue -- a trip planned long before Benedict's move on Pius.
The question is what impact the visit will have on ruffled Catholic-Jewish relations.
"It is an important event, a milestone in the dialogue," Rome’s chief rabbi, Riccardo Di Segni, told Vatican Radio about the planned synagogue visit. "We have great expectations for what it can mean in terms of the general climate."
"If we stop at the things that divide us deeply, we won't get anywhere," he said. "The differences are important to move forward."
Benedict's visit -- set to take place Jan. 17, the Catholic Church's annual Day of Dialogue with Judaism -- will come a month after he recognized the religiously defined "heroic virtues" of both John Paul II and Pius XII, putting them one step away from beatification.
The Polish-born John Paul made fostering Catholic-Jewish relations a hallmark of his papacy. But critics have long accused Pius of having turned a blind eye to Jewish suffering during the Holocaust. The Vatican and other supporters say Pius acted behind the scenes to help Jews.
Gary Krupp, a Jew and the head of Pave the Way, a nonsectarian foundation that promotes interfaith dialogue, suggested in a recent Op-Ed in
The New York Post that criticism of Pius XII began in the 1960s as part of a Soviet smear campaign against the Catholic Church, which at the time was profoundly anti-Communist. The Anti-Defamation League responded with a call on the Pope to disregard Krupp's "flawed" evidence.
Scholars and Jewish organizations for years have called on the Vatican to fully open its secret archives in order to clarify the issue before Pius is moved any further toward sainthood.
[In the interest of fair reporting, the reporter should at least mention that the Vatican is working to do this and that it expects to be able to open the full Pius XII archives in five years.]
Benedict's decision to green-light Pius's advance drew widespread criticism from Jewish bodies. While many Jewish organizational leaders said it was up to the Vatican to decide whom to honor with sainthood, they renewed calls for the archives to be opened.
"As long as the archives of Pope Pius about the crucial period 1939 to 1945 remain closed, and until a consensus on his actions -- or inaction -- concerning the persecution of millions of Jews in the Holocaust is established, a beatification is inopportune and premature," the World Jewish Congress’ president, Ronald Lauder, said in a statement.
The Vatican responded with a conciliatory statement saying Benedict's move was in no way "a hostile act towards the Jewish people" and should not be considered "an obstacle on the path of dialogue between Judaism and the Catholic Church."
The uproar over Pius XII is not the first episode where the Vatican had to backpedal, clarify or explain a Pope Benedict decision that angered Jews.
In 2008, Jewish protests over the reinstatement of a Good Friday Latin prayer that appeared to call for the conversion of the Jews led the Vatican to change some of the prayer's wording. Still, Italian rabbis were so angry over the issue that they boycotted participation in last year's January 17 Day of Dialogue with Judaism.
One year ago, the Pope's lifting of a 1988 excommunication order against Richard Williamson, a renegade Bishop who turned out to be a Holocaust denier, sparked outrage among political figures and mainstream Catholics as well as Jews.
Williamson was one of four bishops rehabilitated as part of the Pope's effort to bring their ultra-conservative movement, the Society of St. Pius X, back within the mainstream Catholic fold.
The Vatican ordered Williamson to recant and admitted that the Pope had not been aware of his views --
despite a video of Williamson that was widely circulated on YouTube [only after the outcry!]
The Pope himself issued a strong message of support to a visiting delegation from the Conference of Presidents of Major American Jewish Organizations and announced to the group the plans for his May 2009 visit to Israel, his first to the Jewish state as Pontiff.
Analysts said Benedict's move on Pius is part of the Pope's effort to shore up conservative forces within the Church.
[A fallacious hypothesis which makes Benedict XVI no better than a secular politician looking to strengthen his base - especially if one considers that 'conservative' Catholics, among all Catholics, are those who need the least shoring up, since they are the firmest and most orthodox of the faithful.]
"The Pope apparently has chosen to balance his unquestionable commitment to the Catholic Church's good relations with world Judaism with his commitment to recuperating the religious right wing of Catholicism," said Lisa Palmieri Billig, the American Jewish Committee's liaison to the Vatican. "Obviously his path is strewn with warring obstacles."
Rabbi Gary Bretton-Granatoor, an expert in interfaith relations and the vice president of the World Union for Progressive Judaism, said, "The great struggle of this moment is shoring up the most traditional elements of his church as he fights the growing secularization and Islamification of the European stage, which is right before his eyes."
Bretton-Granatoor said that the visit to the synagogue in Rome is "far more telling about the state of Catholic-Jewish relations" than the move to elevate Pius.
His visit to the shul in two weeks will mark only the second time that a Pope has crossed the Tiber River from the Vatican to visit the synagogue in Rome. As Pope, Benedict has visited synagogues in his native Germany and in the United States, and he made the trip to Israel last May.
But the Rome synagogue has particular significance. Rome is said to have the oldest continuous Jewish community in the Diaspora. The visit to the synagogue in 1986 by Benedict's predecessor, Pope John Paul II, was the first time any Pope had set foot in any shul since the time of St. Peter.
Bretton-Granatoor put some of Benedict's apparent gaffes down to differences in style and substance that set this Pope apart from his predecessor.
John Paul "was an actor and a pastor -- he understood that every gesture had meaning," Bretton-Granatoor said. Benedict, on the other hand, "was an academic and
was never a pastor-- he doesn't seem to get it in the same way as his predecessor."
[He was pastor for five years of Munich-Freising, one of the largest dioceses in Europe. And it's Jews like Bretton-Granatoor who don't get it about Benedict XVI - he's not playing to the media in any way, nor has he ever. Not that John Paul II was playing to the media either, because he made many good decisions that the media did not welcome, and perhaps did not do enough about the sexual offenses by priests that the media focused on in the last five years of his Pontificate.]
He added, "This Pope is vastly different from his predecessor. He is a German and, therefore, cannot speak about the Shoah in the way that [John Paul], a Pole, could."
[What rot! On the contrary, doesn't the fact that Benedict XVI happens to be German make his repugnance of the Nazis even more resonant? Besides, a crime against humanity is a crime against humanity regardless of nationality!
Here is the Krupp article referred to, which I am posting here for thematic continuity:
Friend to the Jews:
Pius XII's real record
By GARY L. KRUPP
December 28, 2009
A recent papal decree moved Pope Pius XII, among others, closer to sainthood -- returning to the forefront the controversy over his role in World War II and the Holocaust.
Growing up Jewish in Queens, I never dreamt I would be defending the man I once believed to be a Nazi sympathizer and an anti-Semite. But my work since 2002 with my wife, Meredith, and the Pave the Way Foundation has led me to this point
We founded Pave the Way to identify and eliminate nontheological obstacles between religions. Thus, despite our early prejudices, we decided to investigate the papacy of Pius XII (Eugenio Pacelli), one of today's greatest sources of hurt between Jews and Catholics.
After years of research in documentary evidence and eyewitness testimony, what we found shocked us. We found nothing but praise and positive news articles concerning Pius' actions from every Jewish, Israeli and political leader of the era who lived through the war.
A few articles in the postwar era suggested that he should have done more to confront the Nazis -- but it wasn't until 1963, in the wake of the fictitious play "The Deputy" (written five years after Pius died), that accusations began flowing that he had failed to act, that he was a cold-hearted Nazi sympathizer who couldn't care less about the Jewish people.
The evidence strongly suggests this was part of a KGB-directed and -financed bid to smear Pius, a Soviet disinformation campaign meant to discredit the Catholic Church, which at that time was profoundly anti-Communist.
In any case, the facts simply don't match what so many have come to believe about Pius.
It is unquestionable that Pius XII intervened to save countless Jews at a time most nations -- even FDR's America -- refused to accept these refugees. He issued false baptismal papers and obtained visas for them to emigrate as "Non Aryan Catholic-Jews." He smuggled Jews into the Americas and Asia. He ordered the lifting of cloister for men and women to enter monasteries, convents and churches to hide 7,000 Jews of Rome in a single day.
Among the 5,000 pages of documents that Pave the Way has located, there is abundant evidence that Pacelli was a lifelong friend of the Jews. Some highlights:
* In 1917, at the request of World Zionist Organization Director Nachum Sokolow, Nuncio Pacelli intervened with the Germans to protect the Jews of Palestine from extermination by the Ottoman Turks.
* In 1925, Pacelli arranged for Sokolow to meet with Pope Benedict XV to discuss a Jewish homeland in Palestine.
* In 1930, Pacelli supported the German bishops' orders excommunicating anyone who joined "the Hitler Party."
* In 1938, Pacelli intervened to defeat a Polish anti-koshering law.
* In 1939, A.W. Klieforth, the US consul general based in Cologne, Germany, wrote a confidential letter to Washington reporting on the "extremeness" of Pacelli's hatred of National Socialism and of Hitler.
* In 1947, at the United Nations, he encouraged the 17 Catholic countries out of the 33 in favor to vote for the partitioning of Palestine to create the State of Israel.
* A 1948 deposition by Gen. Karl Wolff, the SS commandant for Italy, revealed the Nazis' wartime plan to kidnap the pope, kill countless cardinals and seize the Vatican.
But the personal tales may be more compelling. Pacelli's childhood best friend was Guido Mendes, an Orthodox Jewish boy. He tells how Pacelli shared Shabbat meals with him. Mendes taught him Hebrew, and Pacelli helped him to emigrate to Palestine in 1938.
Pius XII's detractors prefer to criticize rather than simply look at the evidence. Two years ago, Pope Benedict XVI ordered the opening of the Vatican's archives up to 1939, containing much evidence of Eugenio Pacelli's activities leading up to his papacy.
According to the sign-in sheets, few of Pius' critics have bothered to come to the archives to view the material.
Pinchas Lapide, a Jewish historian, theologian and Israeli ambassador, stated that the actions and policies of Pius XII saved as many as 860,000 Jews.
Albert Einstein, Golda Meir, the chief rabbi of Palestine, the chief rabbi of Rome and the heads of every Jewish organization showered praise upon him during his lifetime.
Were all these witnesses who lived through the war misguided?
Gary L. Krupp is president of the Pave the Way Foundation, which has many of the documents noted here online at ptwf.org and which will soon publish a book with the main evidence in English, Hebrew, Spanish and French.
[Modificato da TERESA BENEDETTA 02/01/2010 12:17]