Saints And Sinners

For some reason, there's a sudden push on to have Pope Pius XII made a saint. Was he so saintly as all that?

The folks at the Yad Vashem Holocaust Museum wouldn't agree. As far as they're concerned, His Holiness didn't open his mouth when the Nazis deported 1,000 Jews from Rome to Auschwitz.

The folks at the Vatican would say that His Holiness zipped his lip in an effort to not annoy the Nazis, who would only have done even worse to Italy's Jews. Rather like a triage system, to save those most likely to survive by letting the terminal cases go.

Sir D'Arcy Osborne, who worked closely with Father Hugh O'Flaherty to rescue escaped Allied POWs, wasn't overly impressed with the Pope's actions. Germany's ambassador to the Vatican may have pegged Pius XII's reasoning rather precisely, when he noted in a dispatch to Berlin that His Holiness hoped that the Nazis would hold the Eastern Front, to keep Communism from spreading out of Russia and infecting the West.

So what's a few Jews lost when Communism is rearing its ugly head? Why rock the Nazi boat if they can contain one evil while promulgating another that isn't so bad as all that when it comes to the survival of Catholicism?

For now, a picture of Pius XII hanging in the Holocaust museum bears an inscription that describes his inaction as a case of someone in authority failing to act. Pope Benedict won't visit Israel until the caption is removed, and the museum authorities won't remove the caption unless the Vatican can prove it wrong.

The issue has reached a stalemate, in which the Jews insist that beatification of the Pope would only harm relations between the religions, while the saint-makers are itching to grant special status to the Pope who kept the Vatican neutral during the Second World War.

Not a particularly holy bit of business, was it?