Pius not so Pious?

The Vatican wants Yad Vashem's controversial caption switched.

photo by Gali Tibbon/AFP/Getty Images

Does Pope Pius XII deserve sainthood or did he turn his back on the Jews in World War II?

This historical question has turned into a contemporary debate, and a fairly heated one, between the Vatican and Israeli authorities. The current pontiff, Pope Benedict XVI, would like to visit Israel, but within the Vatican there are priests pushing for Pope Pius XII's beatification –-a first step towards sainthood--who are saying that Benedict shouldn't travel to the holy land until Yad Vashem, the Holocaust Memorial Museum in Jerusalem, fixes a caption on the wartime pontiff's photo.

It's worth reproducing the caption in full: “In December 1942, (Pope Pius XII) abstained from signing the Allied declaration condemning the extermination of Jews. When Jews were deported from Rome to Auschwitz, the pope did not intervene.

“The pope maintained his neutral position throughout the war, with the exception of appeals to the rulers of Hungary and Slovakia towards its end. His silence and the absence of guidelines obliged churchmen throughout Europe to decide on their own how to react.”

Pius XII's chief defender in the Vatican, Father Peter Gumpel, says that the caption was “an obvious falsification of history" and wants it changed. Otherwise, he says, a visit to Israel by Pope Benedict would be “a scandal for Catholics”.

The Vatican's cautious spin-meisters issued a statement saying that the controversial photo caption isn't the sole reason why Benedict hasn't taken up the Israeli invitation. The current pope would also like some breakthrough in the Israeli-Palestinian peace process before he flies to Jerusalem. That could take years, or centuries, at the rate things are going.

In the meantime, it's doubtful that Yad Vashem will remove the offending caption. As a Foreign Ministry official commented: “Israeli is not involved in the rewriting of history.”

So what's the truth about Pius XII's ties with Hilter and Mussolini? Some scholars say that the pope wanted Hitler to defeat the godless communists in Russia and therefore was slow in denouncing the deportation of Jews to death camps. It's also true that in the early years of the war, when Britain and the exiled governments of countries under Nazi occupation pleaded with him to speak out against the extermination of the Jews, he didn't. (Yet as a Cardinal, he was on record denouncing the Nazi's anti-Semitism as un-Christian.) But when Mussolini ordered the deportation of Roman Jews, Pius hid hundreds of Jews in the Vatican and allowed Catholic monasteries and convents to give sanctuary to thousands more.

It wasn't until later in the war, in March 1944, that Pius urged the Hungarians to stop deporting Jews to death camps. He also used his pull with Catholic governments in Latin America to issue escaping Jews with emergency passports.

But the real story of Pius's role –-was he a defender of the Jews or a passive spectator to the Holocaust?-- won't be known until the Vatican opens its World War II archives. And for now, the Vatican refuses to do so.

By Tim McGirk/Jerusalem