Journal defends pope during WWII

VATICAN CITY - The Vatican's wartime pope, Pius XII, learned of the Nazi roundup of Jews in Rome only after it had occurred and tried to gain their release and prevent further arrests, a Catholic journal reported Thursday, citing newly unearthed World War II-era documents.

The article, in the Italian Jesuit journal Civilta Cattolica, challenges claims that Pius did little or nothing to protect Jews during the Holocaust.

The article in Civilta Cattolica, which has close ties to the Vatican, comes as the church digs into its archives to defend Pius as part of its efforts to beatify the wartime pope, a step toward declaring him a saint.

Pius XII, who became pontiff in 1939, was denounced as "Hitler's pope" in a 1999 bestseller by John Cornwell for not using his moral authority to aid the Jews, an allegation echoed by some Jewish groups and other authors.

The pope's defenders, however, say he used private diplomacy to help the Jews, knowing that a public denunciation of the Nazis would only anger Germany.

In its article, Civilta Cattolica does not address whether Pius did anything on behalf of Jews in the rest of Europe, dealing mostly with the mass arrest of Jews in Rome on Oct. 15-16, 1943.

Pius "did everything humanly possible" to save Rome's Jews from the Nazis, the article's author, the Rev. Giovanni Sale, said in an interview, citing previously unpublished documents from the magazine's archives.

The documents, Sale wrote, show that Pius learned of the roundup on the morning of Oct. 16, after the operation had ended. That day, the pope dispatched his nephew, Carlo Pacelli, to ask the rector of a German church in Rome to secure the release of 1,000 detained Jews.

The article reports on previously known efforts by churches, convents and other religious institutions to take in many of the remaining 8,000 Jews who had fled Rome's ghetto in the wake of the roundup. But based on apparently new documents, it says this was not the result of individual acts of spontaneous generosity by the institutions but rather the pope's own wishes.

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