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Pope Benedict XVI greets chief rabbi Riccardo Di Segni at Rome's main synagogue - Source: Reuters -
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An Italian Jewish leader told Pope Benedict that his wartime
predecessor Pius XII should have spoken out more forcefully against
the Holocaust to show solidarity with Jews being led to the "ovens
of Auschwitz".
The comments, from the president of Rome's Jewish community
Riccardo Pacifici, were made during the Pope's first visit to
Rome's synagogue and were some of the bluntest ever spoken by a
Jewish leader in public to a pope.
"The silence of Pius XII before the Shoah, still hurts because
something should have been done," Pacifici told the Pope, using the
Hebrew word for the Holocaust.
"Maybe it would not have stopped the death trains, but it would
have sent a signal, a word of extreme comfort, of human solidarity,
towards those brothers of ours transported to the ovens of
Auschwitz," he said.
The visit, Benedict's third trip to a Jewish temple since becoming
Pope in 2005, has deeply split Italy's Jewish community after he
took the decision last month to advance Pius XII on the path
towards sainthood.
Many Jews say Pius, who reigned from 1939 to 1958, did not do
enough to help Jews facing persecution by Nazi Germany.
In his speech to the Pope, Pacifici paid tribute to Italian
Catholics, priests and nuns during the war and said their efforts
made Pius' "silence" hurt even more.
The Vatican maintains that Pius was not silent during the war, but
chose to work behind the scenes, concerned that public intervention
would have worsened the situation for both Jews and Catholics in a
wartime Europe dominated by Hitler.
Hidden and discreet
The Pope, speaking after Pacifici, broadly stuck to this stance,
although he did denounce the Holocaust as the most extreme point on
the path of hatred and acknowledged that unfortunately, many
remained indifferent.
"The Apostolic See (the Vatican) itself provided assistance, often
in a hidden and discreet way," Benedict said, referring to the
wartime record of the Catholic Church during Pius' papacy.
Jews have asked that the Vatican wartime archives be opened for
study and Israeli Deputy Prime Minister Silvan Shalom repeated the
request to the pope privately at the synagogue.
"I asked the Pope to find a way to make it possible to open the
archives in the Vatican in order to give some details of the papacy
of Pius XII in order to ease tensions between the Jewish people and
Catholics," Shalom said at the synagogue.
Italian Holocaust survivors gave the Pope a letter saying "the
silence of someone who could have done something has marked our
lives ..."
The letter said: "We are here but we have never left
Auschwitz".
The visit comes 24 years after Pope John Paul became the first pope
in nearly 2,000 years to enter a synagogue and called Jews our
beloved elder brothers.
Benedict, a German who was drafted into the Hitler Youth and German
army as a teenager during World War II, has had a more difficult
relationship with the Jewish community.
Many are still seething at his decision last year to start the
rehabilitation process of traditionalist Bishop Richard Williamson,
who denied the extent of the Holocaust.
And some in the Jewish community, including at least one senior
rabbi and a Holocaust survivor, decided to boycott the Sunday
synagogue visit after Benedict approved a decree recognising Pius's
heroic virtues.
The two remaining steps to sainthood are beatification and
canonisation, which could take many years.
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