Posted on 10/08/2008 11:44:25 AM PDT by Alex Murphy
(ANSA) - Vatican City, October 8 - One of Italy's top journalists and historians on Wednesday defended controversial wartime pope Pius XII from the charge that he did not speak out against Hitler.
''Pius XII was a great pope, equal to the situation,'' Corriere della Sera editor and bestselling historian Paolo Mieli said. In an interview with Vatican daily Osservatore Romano on the eve of the 50th anniversary of the pope's death, Mieli said people had been seeking evidence that Pius was culpably silent about the Holocaust since the early 1960s.
''They've been looking for proof of his guilt since 1963 and nothing has come out,'' said Mieli, who is Jewish.
''It's as if we were to criticise Roosevelt for not saying clearer things about the Jews,'' said Mieli, who noted that a full awareness of the Holocaust only took hold decades after the war.
Mieli said there had been a ''prejudicial'' and ''specious'' attitude to Pius by Anglo-Saxon and Protestant historians.
''The widespread belief that Pius XII has actually been regarded as an accomplice of the Fuehrer is madness,'' he said.
He said a so-called 'black legend' about Pius had been fuelled by books like John Cornwell's 'Hitler's Pope' (1999) and Daniel Goldhagen's 'Hitler's Willing Accomplices (1996). Mieli rebutted a key accusation against Pius XII, that he had toned down an encyclical against anti-Semitism drafted by his predecessor Pius XI, and noted that several Jewish historians accepted that Pius acted to save Jews.
The interview with Mieli was accompanied by an editorial by Osservatore's editor Gian Maria Vian who repeated the Vatican's longstanding argument that Pius XII deliberately chose not to speak out for fear of making the Nazi persecution worse.
Instead, Vian said, Pius worked ''in a painful and aware silence aimed at increasing the efficacy of an unequivocal action of charity and rescue''.
The Catholic Church saved thousands of Jews during WWII but many Jews say they cannot forgive or forget Pius's silence.
They are opposed to the Vatican's moves to make Pius a saint.
Pope Benedict XVI will celebrate a mass in Pius's memory on Thursday ahead of a conference on his life and legacy.
The first Jew to address a Vatican synod, Rabbi Shear Cohen from Haifa, on Monday reiterated Jewish opposition to Pius being beatified - the step before sainthood.
''He should not be held up as a model because he did not raise his voice, even if he tried to help us secretly; the fact that he did not speak remains, perhaps because he was afraid...and we can't forget that''.
Cohen said he might not have come to the synod if he had known it would coincide with the celebrations for Pius.
"The voice of Pius XII is a lonely voice in the silence and darkness enveloping Europe this Christmas." NY Times 25 December 1941
"This Christmas more than ever he is a lonely voice crying out of the silence of a continent." NY Time 25 December 1942
Pius XII initially saw Hitler as another Napoleon, ie a self-proclaimed “Emperor” with whom he could negotiate to preserve the Church. When his initial assumptions proved wrong, he then shifted. He was NOT “Hitler’s Pope” as a certain ex-Catholic titled a diatribe a few years back.
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