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The Vatican's Holocaust Report
NEW YORK, March 18, 1998 (UPI) -- Following is an editorial excerpt from the New York Times:
The Vatican's Holocaust Report
At the direction of Pope John Paul II, the Vatican has labored for 11 years to address its behavior during the Holocaust. That study has now yielded a carefully crafted statement that goes further than the Roman Catholic Church has ever gone in reckoning honestly with its passivity during the Nazi era and its historic antipathy toward Jews. This breaking of new political and theological ground by the Vatican is important and welcome. Yet the document disappointingly stops well short of the unflinching acknowledgments of responsibility that Catholic bishops in France and other European countries have produced in recent years.
The gap was probably unavoidable, given the institutional interests and caution of the Vatican....
The church's attitude toward Jews began to change three and a half decades ago under Pope John XXIII. But John Paul II has made good relations with Jews a theme of his papacy. He has visited former concentration camps and meets with local Jewish leaders when he travels. He established diplomatic relations with Israel.
John Paul, however, has resisted a critical look at the Catholic response to the Holocaust and has defended the silence of Pope Pius XII during the Third Reich. The Vatican document echoes his views....
A full exploration of Pope Pius's conduct is needed. He did not encourage Catholics to defy Nazi orders. Church officials after the war helped Nazis escape to freedom. Pius's supporters argue that speaking out would have accomplished little and would have impeded Vatican efforts to save Jews. Critics contend that Pius's silence was a form of collaboration, inspired by anti-Communism and the church's anti-Jewish traditions.
It now falls to John Paul and his successors to take the next step toward full acceptance of the Vatican's failure to stand squarely against the evil that swept across Europe. With its repudiation of anti- Semitism, the new document provides a useful starting point.
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