Pope Benedict XVI has taken the next steps in the beatification of Pope Pius XII, Benedict's predecessor during World War II. This puts Pius XII on the path to sainthood:
Pope Benedict on Saturday put his wartime predecessor Pope Pius XII, accused by Jews of turning a blind eye to the Holocaust, back on the road to Roman Catholic sainthood.
Jewish groups had asked the pope to freeze the process that could lead to eventual sainthood until more World War Two archives could be studied.
The pope approved a decree recognising Pius' "heroic virtues", meaning he will have the title "venerable". It puts Pius two steps away from eventual sainthood in the Church. First he must be beatified and then canonised.
By coincidence, last week I also saw the the film Constantine's Sword, a powerful documentary of James Carroll's book by the same title. Carroll was a Roman Catholic priest who became disenchanted with the Church during the Vietnam War and eventually left the priesthood. Constantine's Sword is an historical and also personal account of anti-Semitism, which Carroll feels is embedded in the history and teaching of the Catholic Church. Needless to say, both the book and the film have a different take on Pope Pius XII and his actions - or inactions - during the Nazi era.
I always felt there was something odd about the efforts of Pope John Paul II to beatify Pius XII. Was the Church engaging in a massive coverup? In the past, the Vatican has made the preposterous claim that Pius had "saved hundreds of thousands of Jewish lives". A recent symposium determined that Pius had, in fact, saved 80 Jews from the death camps. Given the enormous power of the papacy, is saving 80 lives sufficient for achieving sainthood?
The fact is, Pius' "secret efforts" on behalf of the Jews were so secret they went unnoticed by the Nazis. The Vatican was silent about the atrocities committed during Kristallnacht and its aftermath. Pius was obsessed with the spread of Russian Bolshevism and spoke out repeatedly against "atheistic communism" while remaining silent about National Socialism. Presumably Pius viewed Hitler - a born Catholic - as a lesser evil than Stalin. The one historical fact that speaks against the canonization of Pope Pius XII is his documented postwar effort to smuggle Nazi criminals and Croatian fascists out of Europe. Why does Benedict remain silent about this shameful episode in the Church's history?
Individual Catholics such as Cardinal August Graf von Galen, the Lion of Münster, spoke out bravely against Nazi atrocities. And elsewhere Benedict XVI has spoken movingly about the hundreds of priests who perished in the concentration camps, sharing the fate of the Jews. But the Catholic Church as an institution failed as an embodiment of Christian faith - just as the Protestant Church failed abysmally to stop the evil. I recommend Carroll's documentary and book by the same titel, and for an historical analysis of Christianity (both Protestant and Catholic) in the Third Reich I recommend Doris Bergen: Twisted Cross: The German Christian Movement in the Third Reich.