Israel’s national Holocaust memorial has amended its account of Pope Pius XII’s actions during the second World War, after the original text upset the Vatican by implying he did too little to try to rescue Jews from the Nazis.
Yad Vashem in Jerusalem said its new display acknowledged that the pope’s defenders say his neutrality 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 quotes from the pope’s 1942 Christmas radio address in which he refers to “hundreds of thousands of persons who, without any fault on their part”, were killed. But it notes he did not name the Jews. – (Reuters)