A Bit of a Problem

The Vatican's ambassador to Israel has been called upon to make a hard moral choice: is the commemoration of a few million murders more important than the reputation of one religious politician who died of natural causes? The Yad Vashem, Israel's official Holocaust museum, notes that Pope Pius XII, on his election in 1939, "shelved a letter against racism and anti-semitism that his predecessor had prepared" and "did not protest either verbally or in writing" about reports of the murder of Jews. The text also notes that Pius decided not to sign a declaration by the Allies in 1942 which condemned the extermination of Jews, and that he did not intervene to keep Italian Jews from being deported to Auschwitz. The Vatican ambassador, Monsignor Antonio Franco, has taken exception to all this and has refused to attend the annual Holocaust memorial service in Jerusalem, calling this approach one "of dialogue and research and discussion". Pius' policy was "not really silence, it was a policy taken to avoid worsening the situation," the Monsignor said. A few million Jews and assorted other undesirables are one thing; a few million Jews, assorted other undesirables and one martyred Pope would clearly have been quite another. "When there were public statements and declarations there would be a huge number of people who were simply eliminated," the Monsignor observed. "Repression was the response to any kind of public position taken"; obviously it might have been a bit of a problem if, after 1939, Nazi Germany or Mussolini's Italy had started repressing or eliminating people.