Calls grow to canonise controversial Nazi-era pope
The Vatican's Congregation for the Causes of Saints, the agency that assesses a candidate's holiness, has just held its first meeting to examine Pius's cause and will hold another after the summer break, a spokeswoman said yesterday.
The campaign to canonise Pius horrifies his critics, who say his reign from 1939 to 1958 is tainted by what they regard as his failure to do enough to protect Europe's Jews from Nazi annihilation in the 1940s.
Undismayed, Roman Catholic cardinals, scholars and grassroots supporters have intensified their efforts to secure his recognition as one of the greatest leaders in the church's 2,000-year history.
In April, a special conference was convened at Rome's Pontifical Lateran University to hear evidence about Pius's virtues. There, Cardinal Fiorenzo Angelini, an 89-year-old prelate who personally knew the late pope, declared: "Pius must be declared a saint. Admiration isn't enough. People need to get moving."
The cause for Pius's beatification was opened in 1965 by Pope Paul VI, who balanced the move by simultaneously opening a cause for John XXIII, the pope who reigned from 1958 to 1963.
But whereas John was beatified in September 2000, supporters of Pius have waited in frustration while Catholic historians and theologians sift through mounds of documents and personal testimonies to build his case.
Not all relevant Vatican archives relating to Pius's strategy during the Holocaust have been released. When Benedict XVI, the pope elected 15 months ago, visited a synagogue last August in the German city of Cologne, he was asked by Abraham Lehrer, a Jewish community leader, to open the Vatican's second world war archives as "a further sign of historical conscience".
The main charges against Pius are that he did not speak out forcefully enough against Hitler's extermination of the Jews, and that his obsession with protecting the Catholic Church's interests trapped him in a fatal moral equidistance between Nazi Germany and the US-British-Soviet alliance.
Pius's supporters say public protests would only have increased Nazi persecution, and that he saved many Italian Jews from deportation and arranged other humanitarian initiatives.
The Vatican pleased scholars last month by agreeing to open all its archives from 1922 to 1939. In this period Eugenio Pacelli, the future Pius XII, served first as papal nuncio to Germany and later as the Vatican's secretary of state, or chief diplomat.
The files should shed extra light on Pacelli's opinions of Nazi Germany, by letting historians review his private discussions with Vatican officials as well as his personal annotations to sensitive Church documents of the time.
Father Peter Gumpel, the Jesuit relator, or official promoter, of Pius's cause, is certain the wealth of already available material justifies his beatification. "After reading more than 100,000 pages of the documents related to the process of beatification, I am more and more convinced that Pius XII was a saint," he said last year.
However, the final word will rest with Benedict, making the process distinctly political, with careful judgments required from the German-born pope about how Pius's beatification might affect the Vatican's relations with the world's Jews.
So far, Benedict has kept his cards close to his chest - although, at a closed-door session with Roman priests last March, the Vatican quoted him as saying Pius XII "really loved the German people" and was one of the century's great popes.