Was Pius XII Hitler’s Pope?

Why is Pius XII in the news?

Because the Vatican has been using the 50th anniversary of Pius's death to rebut decades-old claims that he failed to speak out against Hitler's extermination of the Jews. Pius's supporters hope to see his "heroic virtues" recognised - a crucial step on the road to sainthood. But although Pope Benedict says he is praying for Pius's beatification to "continue smoothly", he has called for more research before approving his "virtues".

What kind of man was Pius?

Born into a respectable family of Vatican lawyers, Eugenio Pacelli was elected Pope in 1939, months before war broke out, and stayed in office until his death in 1958. He won praise for reforming the liturgy and canon law, and for making the teaching of religion more relevant to daily life. Under his leadership, the Catholic Church acknowledged for the first time that evolution might accurately describe the biological origins of human life. The process of his beatification was opened in 1967, but has been repeatedly interrupted by controversy.

What is it that his detractors hold against him?

His behaviour towards the Nazis. In 1933, when still a cardinal, he helped negotiate the Reichskonkordat, a treaty between Hitler and the Vatican that many saw as legitimising the Nazis. During WWII, he remained officially neutral and did not speak out against Nazi atrocities. Asked by French Vichy Marshal Henri Pétain whether he'd object to anti-Jewish laws, Pius replied that the Church condemned racism but not every rule against the Jews. By the end of 1942, he'd heard ample evidence of the Holocaust, yet still rejected requests to make a formal protest even though many Catholic leaders did (often at the cost of their lives).

Was he accused of cowardice at the time?

In some quarters. For example, in 1941, Pius met Ante Pavelic, Croatia's Fascist leader, who had overseen the forced conversion to Catholicism of 200,000 Orthodox Serbs and the death of many thousands more. The "greatest moral coward of our age", is how a British Foreign Office memo described Pius after that meeting.

So how do Pius's supporters justify all this?

Far from being indifferent, they say, he loathed Hitler. The Nazis, Pius declared in 1935, "are possessed by the superstition of a race and blood cult". In 1937, he drafted an encyclical denouncing Nazism that was read from every Catholic pulpit in Germany. If he stayed silent in the War, say his defenders, that was to avoid stirring Hitler to yet greater crimes. (When Dutch Catholic clergy spoke out, deportation of Jews intensified.) It was the only way, in Pope Benedict's words, "to save the greatest number of Jews".

But did Pius take any positive steps to help?

Yes. In Rome, an estimated 7,000 Jews were sheltered in Vatican buildings while hundreds of thousands more were saved across Europe through hasty baptisms and the ready issue of false documents by the Catholic Church. In fact, until the 1960s, Pius was a hero for many Jews. Albert Einstein, Golda Meir and Chief Rabbi Isaac Herzog all thanked him for his action during the Holocaust. In 1955, the Israeli Philharmonic Orchestra flew to Rome to give him a special concert. In Three Popes and the Jews (1967), Israeli historian Pinchas Lapide concluded that Pius "was instrumental in saving at least 700,000 Jews - probably as many as 860,000 - from certain death".

So what changed?

Pius's problems can be traced to 20 February 1963, and the first performance of The Deputy, an eight-hour play by Rolf Hochhuth, a left-wing German playwright, in which the Pope is depicted as a Nazi collaborator. The play was a hit and prompted a wave of revisionist history. In Israel, opinion changed to such an extent that the Yad Vashem Holocaust Museum included Pius among the "unjust". Earlier praise from Jewish leaders for Pius was interpreted as more diplomatic than sincere, an attempt to secure international recognition of the State of Israel. Pius's reputation took another battering in 1999, when John Cornwell, a Catholic writer, published a biography, Hitler's Pope, accusing Pius not just of complicity with Nazism but of being personally anti-Semitic and obsessed with increasing the power of the papacy.

And have the revisionists in turn been taken to task?

Yes. The US historian and rabbi, David Dalin, has detected numerous errors in Cornwell's book, while The Deputy, since translated into 20 languages, has been exposed as a Soviet attempt to discredit the Catholic Church. Last year, a Romanian defector, Lieutenant-General Ion Mihai Pacepa, revealed that the play had a KGB code name, 'Seat 12', and that he had overseen the forgery of more than 40 pages of Vatican documents to help Hochhuth write the play. "As KGB director Yuri Andropov, the unparalleled master of Soviet deception, used to tell me," Pacepa recalls, "people are more ready to believe smut than holiness."

Do the Vatican archives contain the decisive answer?

Hard to say as they remain sealed, officially, for 75 years. After The Deputy was performed, Pope Paul VI did authorise Jesuit scholars to inspect them and respond to Hochhuth's allegations; but the Vatican still refuses to open them to independent scholars, and although 11 volumes of documents relating to WWII were published between 1965 and 1981, they have been criticised for their omissions. In a letter to The Times last month, nine Jewish and Christian academics expressed their concern about the potential beatification of Pius because "more extensive study is still required". Without such work, which the Vatican says could take another six or seven years, no consensus is likely.

Saint or sinner?Saint: Oskar Schindler is credited with saving the lives of some 1,000 Jews, Pius of 700,000 at least - probably many more.
Sinner: "Why doesn't the Church go into battle against Nazism with the same energy it finds to fight Bolshevism and socialism?" asked German Jesuit Friedrich Muckermann in 1934. Why indeed?
Saint: The Nazis hated him. SS leader Reinhard Heydrich called him "a greater enemy of National Socialism than Churchill or Roosevelt". Hitler considered kidnapping him in 1943.
Sinner: If the Pope speaks, said Pius, "things would be worse". How?
Saint: He was thanked and respected by Jewish leaders at the time.
Sinner: Only after 1942, when it seemed the game was up for the Nazis, did Pius start offering the Jews support. ·