Word: sainthood
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...never fully erase that history. And indeed, when John Paul's successor, Benedict XVI, crosses the Tiber River on Sunday to visit that same synagogue, he will be dogged by a new dispute about the past: the controversy over the Vatican's decision last month to push for possible sainthood for World War II-era Pope Pius XII, whom some Jewish groups and scholars blame for not doing enough to try to halt the Holocaust. Because of this and other tensions in the five years of his papacy, Benedict may be met by slightly more tepid applause from his Jewish...
...Italy's leading rabbis, Giuseppe Laras, said he would boycott the service, citing a number of sore points with the Pope, most notably his decision to reactivate Pius XII's sainthood dossier, which Benedict himself had put on hold three years ago to await more historical study. "The Pope's visit to the Rome synagogue is a negative fact," Laras, head of the Italian Rabbinic Assembly, told the German-Jewish community newspaper Juedische Allgemeine Zeitung. "[The visit] won't bring anything worthwhile, but will only serve the most reactionary sectors of the Catholic Church...
...quietly worked to provide shelter for some Jews in Rome, and avoided public denunciations of Hitler's Final Solution because it would have prompted a Nazi backlash. After the German-born Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger rose to the chair of St. Peter, he initially decided to shelve Pius' candidacy for sainthood for further study and an examination of documents in the Vatican archive. With debate still heated about the historical facts - and with Benedict, a German of that era, in the papacy - many observers believed it might just be better for his successors to make the call on Pius' virtues...
Being a German of that era may, in fact, have been part of what drove Benedict to ultimately declare Pius venerable, and on the road to sainthood. What if the archives didn't resolve the issue for historians? What if the next Pope doesn't have the personal memories of Pacelli? Benedict may have felt he needed to act to ensure that the record showed that his Pope was a man of saintly virtues. In other discourses, notably one delivered on a 2006 trip to Auschwitz, Benedict has spoken about how Catholics and Germans of good faith - like himself - were...
...Whether Pius' sheltering some Roman families was the best result he could have achieved, or whether he should have better and more courageously used his diplomatic channels and bully pulpit is not a question the current Pope is driven to answer. Benedict's decision to move Pius' cause for sainthood forward is a declaration that the wartime Pope was a Catholic in good faith, a victim of the historical events that did not afford him the means to stop the bloodshed around him. In a way, that is just like the future German Pope himself. (See Pope Pius...