Hitler's pope was no saint | Jerusalem Post

"Pope Benedict XVI's appearance at Rome's Great Synagogue on Sunday did nothing to quell the controversy over plans to confer sainthood on Pius XII, the wartime pontiff who has been called Hitler's pope. In fact, he may have made matters worse when just two days earlier he took a further step in the process by declaring Pius's 'heroic virtues.'

One prominent Italian rabbi and a number of Holocaust survivors boycotted the pope's visit in protest the beatification of Pius. Riccardo Pacifici, the president of Rome's Jewish community, did attend and declared, 'The silence of Pius XII before the Shoah still hurts because something should have been done.'

To this day, the Vatican has produced no hard evidence that Pius uttered a word or lifted a finger to help when, on October 16, 1943, the Germans rounded up 1,021 Roman Jews and held them for two days just across the Tiber from the Vatican before sending them to Auschwitz; only 17 returned after the war.

'The cries of the victims were met by Pius with silence,' said Elan Steinberg, vice president of the American Gathering of Holocaust Survivors and Their Descendants.

Benedict told his audience on Sunday that the Church had aided Jews in a 'hidden and discreet way' during the Holocaust, but he offered no specifics about Pius's own involvement.

IF THERE is evidence it lies buried deep in the Vatican vaults. For a decade the Church has been promising to open its wartime records to scholars 'soon,' but the latest word is it will be at least another five years. When some prewar archives were opened to a handpicked Catholic scholar, John Cornwell, to write a Vatican-sanctioned biography of Pius, he was shocked by what he found" ...more