Word: pius
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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Read "Benedict's Pope: Should Pius XII Become a Saint...
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...
Therefore, in Benedict's view, the ultimate failure of Christian Europe to stop Hitler's slaughter doesn't seem to be a topic really worth pursuing. 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...
...movement founded by arch-traditionalist French Archbishop Marcel Lefebvre. A speech the Pope gave in May at Jerusalem's Holocaust memorial also left many Jews disappointed at its vagueness about the German role in events and the numbers of people murdered. The strongest language in response to the Pius announcement came from Benedict's native Germany, where Stephan Kramer, who heads the country's Central Jewish Council called it a "hijacking of historical facts concerning the Nazi era." He said that Benedict "rewrites history without having allowed a serious scientific discussion. That's what makes me furious...
There are still plans to open the relevant archives in 2014. But unless some shocking proof emerges that shows Pius didn't care about the Jews' fate, Benedict's declaring him venerable will stand as the Catholic Church's definitive absolution of historical guilt, of both Pius and the Church itself...