Shock as Vatican boycotts Holocaust remembrance
Pastor Dale Morgan
Shock as Vatican boycotts Holocaust remembrance*
· Shock as envoy rejects invite to Jerusalem service
· Row grows over reference to pope's wartime role
Rory McCarthy in Jerusalem
Saturday April 14, 2007
The Guardian
The Vatican ambassador to Israel has sparked a row after refusing to
attend tomorrow's annual Holocaust memorial service in Jerusalem in
protest at a description of the wartime role of Pope Pius XII.
Monsignor Antonio Franco, who arrived in Jerusalem last year, has called
on Israel's official Holocaust museum, Yad Vashem, to change a picture
caption that criticises the pontiff for failing to condemn the
deportation and mass killing of Jews under the Nazis. Earlier this month
he turned down a formal invitation to Sunday's torch-lighting
remembrance ceremony.
The museum said it was "shocked" at Msgr Franco's decision and called on
the Vatican to open its archives for examination of the troubled history
of Pius XII.
The dispute revolves around a paragraph-long caption of Pius XII
installed when the newly designed museum was opened in 2005. A letter of
complaint was also sent by the previous Vatican ambassador a year ago.
The text notes that Pius XII's reaction to the Holocaust is
controversial and states: "When he was elected pope in 1939, he shelved
a letter against racism and anti-semitism that his predecessor had
prepared. Even when reports about the murder of Jews reached the Vatican
the Pope did not protest either verbally or in writing." The description
also says Pius XII chose not to sign a December 1942 Allied declaration
condemning the extermination of Jews and did not intervene when Jews
were deported from Rome to Auschwitz.
Pius XII has long been regarded as one of the most controversial popes.
In the past critics have dismissed him as "Hitler's pope" for failing to
speak out against the Holocaust and suggested his silence was aimed at
averting a communist takeover in Europe. Others, though, have argued he
was trying to defend a Catholic minority in Germany from the Nazis and
should be fast-tracked for canonisation.
Msgr Franco, an Italian who has been a Vatican diplomat for 35 years,
accepted there was debate and disagreement about the part played by the
pope during the second world war but he opposed the wording of the text
at Yad Vashem. "I consider this picture in that place and the caption
that accompanies it unfair and something that disturbs my feelings and
the feelings of Catholics all over the world. It does not correspond to
the truth," he told the Guardian yesterday.
"My approach is not polemic," he said. "It is an approach of dialogue
and research and discussion and to see if perhaps it could be presented
in another way."
Msgr Franco, 70, defended Pius XII's silence over the Holocaust. "It was
not really silence, it was a policy taken to avoid worsening the
situation," he said. "When there were public statements and declarations
there would be a huge number of people who were simply eliminated.
Repression was the response to any kind of public position taken."
Yad Vashem stood by its text, although it said yesterday it was
"prepared to continue examining the issue". It also called on the
Vatican to open up its archives of documents relating to Pius XII.
"Yad Vashem is shocked by, and regrets, that the Vatican's delegate to
Israel has chosen not to respect the memory of the Holocaust and not to
participate in the official ceremony in which the state of Israel and
the Jewish people join in memory of the victims," Iris Rosenberg, a
spokeswoman for the museum, said in a statement.
"The Holocaust history museum presents the historical truth on Pope Pius
XII as is known to scholars today. It is unacceptable to use diplomatic
pressure when dealing with historical research."
Relations between Israel and the Vatican have been fraught for years.
Full diplomatic ties were only established in 1993 and there have been
continuing disagreements over the taxing of church property in and
around Jerusalem.
Last month Israeli government officials postponed at the last minute a
trip to the Vatican for what would have been the first fully attended
meeting of a joint commission on church-state issues for five years.
Backstory
Pius XII was pope from 1939 until his death in 1958 and perhaps the most
controversial leader of the Catholic church in its modern history. A
caption in a display at the Yad Vashem Museum in Jerusalem, criticises
the pope's failure to condemn the killings of Jews under the Nazis.
Although he has been criticised as 'Hitler's pope' some defenders of
Pius XII are lobbying for him to be made a saint. The row over the
church's role in the second world war has soured relations between the
Vatican and Israel. Four months after inauguration Benedict XVI visited
a synagogue in Cologne, condemned the Holocaust and called for better
relations.