Relations strained on JP2 sainthood proposal

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August 20, 2005

Relations strained on sainthood proposal
From Richard Owen in Rome



THE Vatican’s relations with Israel and Jewish groups around the world have come under intense strain from a decision by Pope Benedict XVI’s predecessor to put the controversial wartime Pope Pius XII on the road to sainthood.

The dispute has brought into sharp relief accusations that Pius XII was “silent” in the face of the Holocaust and that the Vatican was at best ambiguous in its attitude to Nazism.

Father Peter Gumpel, the Vatican postulator charged with making the case for Pius XII’s beatification, vehemently denies that Pius XII, who before becoming Pope was the Vatican ambassador in Berlin and then Secretary of State, was anti-Semitic, let alone sympathetic to Hitler.

But in his book Hitler’s Pope: The Secret History of Pius XII, John Cornwell, a Roman Catholic author, accuses the former Pope of helping Hitler to gain power by agreeing in 1933 to the disbandment of a Catholic political party, thus reducing opposition to the Nazis.

http://www.timesonline.co.uk/article/0,,3-1742369,00.html