Was Pius XII Hitler’s Pope?

Why is Pius XII in the news?

Because the Vatican has been using the 50th anniversary of Pius's death to rebut decades-old claims that he failed to speak out against Hitler's extermination of the Jews. Pius's supporters hope to see his "heroic virtues" recognised - a crucial step on the road to sainthood. But although Pope Benedict says he is praying for Pius's beatification to "continue smoothly", he has called for more research before approving his "virtues".

What kind of man was Pius?

Born into a respectable family of Vatican lawyers, Eugenio Pacelli was elected Pope in 1939, months before war broke out, and stayed in office until his death in 1958. He won praise for reforming the liturgy and canon law, and for making the teaching of religion more relevant to daily life. Under his leadership, the Catholic Church acknowledged for the first time that evolution might accurately describe the biological origins of human life. The process of his beatification was opened in 1967, but has been repeatedly interrupted by controversy.

What is it that his detractors hold against him?

His behaviour towards the Nazis. In 1933, when still a cardinal, he helped negotiate the Reichskonkordat, a treaty between Hitler and the Vatican that many saw as legitimising the Nazis. During WWII, he remained officially neutral and did not speak out against Nazi atrocities. Asked by French Vichy Marshal Henri Pétain whether he'd object to anti-Jewish laws, Pius replied that the Church condemned racism but not every rule against the Jews. By the end of 1942, he'd heard ample evidence of the Holocaust, yet still rejected requests to make a formal protest even though many Catholic leaders did (often at the cost of their lives).

Was he accused of cowardice at the time?

In some quarters. For example, in 1941, Pius met Ante Pavelic, Croatia's Fascist leader, who had overseen the forced conversion to Catholicism of 200,000 Orthodox Serbs and the death of many thousands more. The "greatest moral coward of our age", is how a British Foreign Office memo described Pius after that meeting.

So how do Pius's supporters justify all this?

Far from being indifferent, they say, he loathed Hitler. The Nazis, Pius declared in 1935, "are possessed by the superstition of a race and blood cult". In 1937, he drafted an encyclical denouncing Nazism that was read from every Catholic pulpit in Germany. If he stayed silent in the War, say his defenders, that was to avoid stirring Hitler to yet greater crimes. (When Dutch Catholic clergy spoke out, deportation of Jews intensified.) It was the only way, in Pope Benedict's words, "to save the greatest number of Jews".

But did Pius take any positive steps to help?

Yes. In Rome, an estimated 7,000 Jews were sheltered in Vatican buildings while hundreds of thousands more were saved across Europe through hasty baptisms and the ready issue of false documents by the Catholic Church. In fact, until the 1960s, Pius was a hero for many Jews. Albert Einstein, Golda Meir and Chief Rabbi Isaac Herzog all thanked him for his action during the