 Israel Holocaust memorial amends text on Vatican |
JERUSALEM (Reuters) -- Israel's national Holocaust memorial
has amended its account of Pope Pius XII's actions during World
War Two, after the original text upset the Vatican by implying
he did too little to try to rescue Jews from the Nazis.
Yad Vashem, the museum and memorial in Jerusalem,
said on Sunday its new display acknowledged that the
pope's defenders say his neutrality in the war gave
church members more freedom and allowed them to
carry out some secret rescue activities.
But it said the text mentioned that critics still saw
Pius as guilty of doing too little, calling it a "moral failure".
The panel in the museum now also quotes from the pope's
Christmas radio address in 1942 in which he refers to
"hundreds of thousands of persons who, without any
fault on their part, sometimes only because of their
nationality or ethnic origin" were killed. But it notes
he did not explicitly name the Jews.
A Yad Vashem spokeswoman said the display was
amended due to new research findings and that it
now "better shows the complexity of the issue."
The original text at Yad Vashem was a terse chronicle
of the opportunities Pius missed to confront or speak
out against the Nazis and mentioned his role before
becoming pope in 1939 in the church reaching an
agreement with the German government. These
elements remain in the new text.
The history of the wartime pontiff has long been a
point of contention between Catholics and Jews.
Defenders of the pope have said he did everything
possible to help Jews, while critics have portrayed
him as being indifferent and even complicit in the
deaths of six million Jews across Europe.
Yad Vashem, which contains the largest archive of data
on the Holocaust, also urged the Vatican to open
itsarchives "so that a clearer understanding of the
events can be arrived at."
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