Pope Benedict XVI defended Pope Pius XII last week against critics who say the Vatican turned a blind eye to the Holocaust.(Reuters/Tony Gentile)
Pope Benedict xvi defended his World War ii-era predecessor last Thursday against critics who say the Vatican turned a blind eye to the Holocaust. Moreover, Benedict praised Pope Pius xii for being “courageous” in trying to save Jews.
“Wherever possible he spared no effort in intervening in their favor either directly or through instructions given to other individuals or to institutions of the Catholic Church,” Benedict said.
During the mid-1990s, author John Cornwell also set out to defend Pius’s reputation, believing if the full story were told, his “pontificate would be vindicated.” Accordingly, Cornwell applied for and was granted exclusive access to the Vatican’s archives. He concluded his research in 1997 in a state of what he called “moral shock.” The material he gathered about Pius, from the Vatican’s own library, “amounted not to an exoneration but to a wider indictment,” he wrote in his 1999 book, Hitler’s Pope.
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