After what has been labelled as a significant address, discussion took place against the backdrop of the dicastery's annual plenary assembly.

The assembly focused on enhancing the liturgical formation for clergy and laity in line with the teachings of the Second Vatican Council and the Pope's recent reflections.

This year marks the 60th anniversary of the promulgation of Sacrosanctum Concilium, the Council's foundational document on the liturgy, which set the stage for sweeping reforms intended to make the Church's rituals more accessible and meaningful to the faithful worldwide.

Pope Francis used this occasion to reiterate that genuine reform of the Church is impossible without a reinvigoration of its liturgical life.

"Without liturgical reform, there is no reform of the Church" declared the Pope. He outlined a vision of a Church that engages actively with its people's spiritual and pastoral needs, bridges divisions among Christians and proclaims the Gospel with renewed vigour.

During the address, Francis spoke passionately about the importance of priests' fidelity and their relationship with the Church.

Keen to animate the Church's mission in the modern world, Francis urged the Dicastery for Divine Worship to proceed in close cooperation with other Vatican bodies, such as the Dicastery for Culture and Education.

In affirming the centrality of the liturgy to the life of the Church and as a way of encountering Christ, he says the Dicastery's focus is to ensure the liturgical life of the Church is vibrant and a unifying force for Catholics around the globe.

Liturgy and church life a single coherent unity

"At its most profound level, Sacrosanctum Concilium articulates a renewed understanding of the Church, where the liturgy of the church and the life of the baptised form a single coherent unity.

"Sacrosanctum Concilium was the first Constitution issued by the Council, not only because of the decades-long research that preceded it and the liturgical reforms of Pope St Pius X and Pope Pius XII but, most importantly, according to Pope Benedict XVI, because the liturgical life of the Church is central to the very existence of the Church.

"2,147 bishops at the Council overwhelmingly approved Sacrosanctum Concilium" Dr Joe Grayland told CathNews recently.

Source

• CNA
• CathNews

That is no surprise.

The Vatican had extensive contacts across Europe.

But such revelations about the tragic relationship between Catholics and Jews reminded me of an uncomfortable episode early in my time as editor of Commonweal.

Unpacking a few boxes of papers recently, I came across a copy of the May 2004 issue of Catholic Digest.

As you might suspect, that monthly magazine, founded in 1936 and folded in 2020, was modelled after Readers Digest.

For a period, it had a circulation in the millions.

The May 2004 issue featured articles titled "Fascinated by Mary?", "Miracle in a Bottle" on Lourdes, a historical note on "What Happens When a Pope Dies?", and some health items—"Stroke!" and "Skin

Cancer: Five Facts you Must Know." There were ads for Catholic religious orders and charities as well as one for investing in gold coins.

There was also an article titled "The Suspicious Catholic." It was a profile of me.

I had worked with the author of that profile for five years at a mid-size Connecticut daily newspaper.

We were friendly.

I had left the paper fourteen years before to join Commonweal.

When I became editor of Commonweal in 2003, he contacted me, said he had been doing freelance work for Catholic Digest, and asked if he could write about my appointment as editor.

I was somewhat hesitant since my old colleague was both an enterprising reporter and something of a provocateur.

He interviewed me over the phone, and his questions often seemed to focus on the fact that I was not married to a Catholic but to a Jew.

Since he was Jewish himself, someone who was also in a "mixed" marriage, I didn't think too much of that line of questioning at the time.

Perhaps I should have.

None of my three children were baptized or raised Catholic

Most of the article was unobjectionable, but it did touch on subjects that a certain kind of Catholic would find disturbing—especially the fact that none of my three children were baptized or raised Catholic.

As I explained to the author of the profile, my wife is the daughter of Holocaust survivors and she was uncomfortable baptizing our children after what her parents had been through in Germany and Poland during the war, where the Church did almost nothing to stop the persecution of the Jews.

The Church's failure to loudly condemn the Nazis was something I had struggled with, but I was eventually convinced that Catholicism is not "inherently anti-Semitic." Vatican II, Nostra aetate, and Pope John Paul II were a great help in that regard.

As for the religious education of our children, I explained that "everyone always says example is the greatest teacher.

My Catholicism is the greatest example." (We'd see about that!)

When it came to my broader theological views, I described myself as being somewhat theologically conservative but open to change.

"People can disagree with the Church and still be faithful Catholics," I said.

I'm not sure if it was that last sentiment, the religious education of our children, the ambiguous title of the article, or just plain old anti-Semitism that set off Catholic Digest's readers, but the response was vehement and almost entirely negative.

Curiously, I ran into the publisher of Catholic Digest not long after "The Suspicious Catholic" was published.

He told me the magazine had never received so much hate mail about one article.

The fantasy that Pius XII could have stopped the Holocaust

Which brings me back to Pius XII, the Holocaust, and my in-laws.

I don't think there is any doubt that Pius XII and the Vatican knew about mass killings early on, just as the new revelations indicate.

Nor is it a secret that Pius's fear of Soviet Communism and his experience and justified fear of German Communists as a diplomat in Weimar Germany distorted his judgment.

Of course, he was not entirely wrong about the Soviets.

Stalin, like Hitler, was a genocidal monster.

Should Pius XII have publicly condemned the Nazi murders of Jews? Of course.

Would it have made a difference? I don't think so.

Would most German Catholics have abandoned the Nazis even if the pope told them to?

That is fantasy.

Like most Europeans, nationalism was the overriding faith of most German Catholics.

I once asked my father-in-law what, if anything, could have stopped Hitler and the Holocaust.

He had been deported from Germany to Poland along with thousands of other Jews in 1938.

He was imprisoned in a concentration camp and the Warsaw Ghetto. He and his wife hid out for six years, returning to Germany in the last year of the war, hoping to end up in a zone controlled by the Americans or the British rather than the Soviets.

They lucked out.

He dismissed notions that some papal statement or Allied "rescue plan" would have ended the slaughter.

There was only one thing that could end the Holocaust, he said, and that was the total military defeat of Germany.

I don't want to apologise for Pius's inaction, but neither do I want to minimize the complexity of his wartime situation or exaggerate his power to stop the Nazis.

Indeed, it is sobering to think of his choices in dealing with an unapologetically genocidal regime.

I was reminded of his predicament when Mitt Romney recently spoke about why his fellow Republican senators failed to vote to impeach Donald Trump.

They were fearful, scared by violent threats against them and their families if they convicted Trump.

The dangers facing Pius XII, and those he was in some sense responsible for, were of magnitudes greater than anything those senators feared.

Pius wielded no power beyond his example and powers of persuasion, while the likely consequences of any condemnation of Hitler were dire.

On the other hand, Republican senators had real power, and a vote to impeach Trump would have made an enormous, possibly democracy-saving difference. Or so thinks this suspicious Catholic.

• Paul Baumann is senior writer at Commonweal. He writes from the United States.
• Republished in La-Croix International. Republished with permission.

The documents contain the names of 3,200 Jews whose lives Catholics protected during the occupation.

Rome's Jewish community organisation has verified the listed Jews' identities.

Researchers from the Pontifical Biblical Institute, Israel's Yad Vashem Holocaust Research Institute and Rome's Jewish community released the findings at an academic workshop on Thursday.

The documents have not yet been made public however.

It seems many Catholic institutions helped their Jewish neighbours.

The new documents provide names and addresses of dozens of Romans sheltered in Catholic institutions.

They list 4,300 people sheltered in the properties of 100 women's and 55 men's Catholic religious orders.

Of those, 3,600 are identified by name, with 3,200 identified as Jews.

"Of the latter, it is known where they were hidden and, in certain circumstances, where they lived before the persecution.

"The documentation thus significantly increases the information about the history of the rescue of Jews in the context of the Catholic institutions of Rome."

Were the sheltered Jews baptised?

Whether any of the Jews on the list were baptised is unclear.

Recently opened Vatican archives suggest the Vatican worked hardest to save Jews who had converted to Catholicism or had Catholic-Jewish parents.

Claudio Procaccia from Rome's Jewish community says the documentation doesn't provide any baptismal information.

But he says some people pretended to have Jewish last names in order to find shelter in Catholic convents, even if they weren't necessarily Jewish.

Jewish research

Procaccia notes the Roman Jewish community published its own research in 2013 about the fate of Jews during the Nazi occupation.

Over 1,000 of Rome's Jews were rounded up immediately after the Nazi occupation began and deported to Auschwitz.

Yad Vashem's International Institute for Holocaust Research says the new documentation poses new questions.

One is - why did an Italian Jesuit compile the list at the Pontifical Biblical Institute immediately after the liberation of Rome?

"There are many more questions we ask but, while the document lists thousands of Jews who found refuge in religious institutions, it lacks the names of those who were refused assistance ... during the Holocaust."

Source

• AP News
• Jewish Telegraphic Agency

The documentation contains 2,700 files of requests for Vatican help from Jewish groups and families, many of them baptised Catholics, so not actually practising Jews anymore.

The files were held in the Secretariat of State's archives and contain requests for papal intervention to avoid Nazi deportation, to obtain liberation from concentration camps and help finding family members. Read more

Pope Pius XII defined the Assumption of the Virgin Mary formally as a dogma of the Catholic faith on Nov. 1, 1950.

This invoked papal infallibility to proclaim in his apostolic constitution "Munificentissimus Deus" that "the Immaculate Mother of God, the ever-Virgin Mary, having completed the course of her earthly life, was assumed body and soul into heavenly glory."

In doing so, the pope confirmed this belief about the Virgin Mary as the perennial teaching of the Church. This recognizes the longstanding traditions by which the Church has celebrated the Assumption throughout its history.

Read More

This will enable scholars to probe accusations that Pius turned a blind eye to the Holocaust.

They will find he helped Jews behind the scenes, Holy See officials say.

"I don't think you will find a smoking gun," Father Norbert Hofmann, the top Vatican official in charge of religious relations with Jews, says.

Jews have for many years been seeking transparency from the Vatican on its actions during the Holocaust.

Francis's order to open the archives will allow historians and other scholars to examine them during the next few years.

Some Jews have long accused Pius, whose pontificate spanned 1939 to 1958, of doing little to help those facing persecution by Nazi Germany.

They say he failed to speak out forcefully against the Holocaust, in which around six million Jews were killed.

The Vatican denies these accusations.

They say Pius worked quietly to save Jews and thereby not worsen the situation for many others at risk, including Catholics in parts of Nazi-occupied Europe.

David Kertzer, a Brown University professor who will be examining the archives, has written several books about the papacy and the Jews.

He said scholars were indebted to the Vatican for making the archives available - and that it is necessary to keep an open mind about what might be found in them..

"But clearly there's nervousness in the Vatican and among proponents of Pius XII, and the push to make him a saint, about what might come out of these archives," he told Reuters.

"Pius saw his job as protecting the institutional Church and everything else was secondary."

Pope Francis has said Pius has been treated with "some prejudice and exaggeration".

Source

• Reuters
• Image: History.com

Here it is: Opening the archives will not - indeed, by definition, cannot - settle the historical controversy about Pius XII and his alleged silence during the Holocaust.

That's because the debate is counter-factual, pivoting not on what Pius did or didn't do, but rather what he should have done.

• Should Pius XII have publicly denounced Hitler?
• Should he have threatened to excommunicate anyone involved in the mechanism of the Holocaust?
• Should he have pressured the Allies to liberate Nazi extermination camps earlier?
• Should he have offered himself in ransom for German prisoners in Rome after the 1943 occupation of the city, or come up with some other dramatic gesture to register disapproval?

Answers to those questions involve subjective judgments about what would have produced the best results in a complicated set of circumstances - whether fortune would have favored the bold, or discretion was the better part of valor - and, alas, there's no "smoking gun" in anyone's archives that will provide conclusive resolution one way or the other.

Moreover, the debate over Pius XII is also a moral one, and as anyone who's ever taken moral philosophy or basic logic knows, one cannot deduce an "ought" from an "is."

You can pile up all the historical facts you like, but in themselves they won't tell you what Pius or anyone else ought to have done.

By now, the basic data points about Pius XII and the Holocaust are wearily familiar to anyone who's followed the back-and-forth since 1963, when Rolf Hochhuth published his play "The Deputy" and thereby launched the accusation that the pontiff was complicit, at least through his silence, in the mass extermination of Jews.

Prior to that point, it's well-established that Pius XII enjoyed broad admiration for his leadership during the war years, including within the Jewish community. Continue reading

• Image: Soundcloud

Pius's role - helping or ignoring the plight of Jews during the holocaust - has been much debated.

On the one hand, he has often been criticised by Jews for his apparent silence during the holocaust. On the other, some Catholic leaders say Pius and other Catholic clergy helped European Jews.

They also argue that during the Nazi regime, broad action by the Church could have resulted in severe reprisals against Catholics.

Although the Vatican usually waits until a pontiff has been dead for 70 years before opening the archives, an exception has been made in this case, so the documentation can be seen while holocaust survivors are still alive. Pius died nearly 61 years ago in 1958.

Vatican archivists began preparing the documentation for consultation in 2006, at the orders of German-born Pope emeritus Benedict XVI.

Francis says he hopes opening the archives will allow "serious and objective historical research" to "evaluate, in the proper light and with appropriate criticism, the praiseworthy moments of the Pontiff..."

The archives will also produce information about "moments of serious difficulties, of tormented decisions," he says.

These moments may have seemed to some as "reticence" but were attempts to keep humanitarian initiatives alive.

The documents are expected to include various letters and messages between Pius and other Vatican officials and Catholic clergy throughout Europe.

Noting that opening the archives is "the right thing to do", International Director of Inter-religious Affairs for the American Jewish Committee (AJC), Rabbi David Rosen, says he hopes the documents will provide a clearer picture of Pius's actions.

The AJC has been raising the issue of opening the archives with the Vatican for the past 30 years, Rosen says.

Prefect of the Vatican Secret Archives Bishop Sergio Pagano also reportedly requested time to catalogue the large amount of documents before their release.

Holocaust historian and head of the Simon Wiesenthal Center in Israel, Dr Efraim Zuroff, say Pius never specifically denounced the Nazi persecution and the mass murder of European Jews. Nor did he ask Catholics to help save Jews from persecution.

Zuroff says "two cardinal questions" needed to be answered about Pius's papacy.

"The first is what information reached the Vatican regarding Holocaust crimes, and the second is when did that information reach Pius XII?"

He says the Vatican's papal nuncios who served as ambassadors were active in many countries where Jews were persecuted and murdered, and that he would have received "accurate information regarding the fate of the Jews… at a relatively early date, most probably before such news reached the Allies."

Source

• Times of Israel
• The Jerusalem Post
• CruxNow
• Image: The Times of Israel

However, the documents won't include material directly relating to Pius XII.

Pope Pius XII's attitude and behaviour towards the Holocaust has often been criticised. Read more

I came to this conclusion after studying about 2,000 pages, entitled "persecuzioni contra gli Armeni", in both the Archives of the Apostolic Delegation in Constantinople and the Secretary of State in the Vatican Secret Archives for an upcoming book[1], many of them for the first time.[2]

There is no doubt that Eugenio Pacelli (who became Pius XII in 1939) was extremely well informed about this dark chapter of World War I.[3]

From 1914 he was Secretary of the Department of Extraordinary Ecclesiastical Affairs of the Holy See's Secretariat of State. He became Undersecretary of State when Benedict XV named Cardinal Gasparri as Secretary of State.

In this position he had prime access to all information on the Armenian genocide and indeed we find his characteristic handwriting on several documents dealing with it.

Being responsible for several Papal relief initiatives during the War, he was well-informed about it. In several cases, the Apostolic Delegate in Constantinople, Msgr. Angelo Dolci, addressed Pacelli directly in his letters and reports to the Holy See.[4]

Later on, when Benedict XV appointed Pacelli as Nuncio to Bavaria, Pacelli was involved in a diplomatic intervention to prevent further massacres after the Russian retreat from northeastern Turkey following the Brest-Litovsk treaty.[5]

Indeed, all biographers of Pius XII agree that the wartime diplomacy of Pope Benedict XV served as a model for Pius XII's actions during World War II, when the "Pope of Peace"[6] served as his role model, especially in his stress on the Vatican's "impartiality".[7]

But what did Pius XII learn from his experience with the Armenian genocide? Continue reading

Sources

• MercatorNet
• Image: World War I in the Middle East

Ion Mihai Pacepa, who defected to the United States in 1978, previously claimed he was part of a KGB-led campaign of disinformation to discredit the wartime pontiff, centred on Rolf Hochhuth's 1968 play The Deputy.

Historians and Cold War-era diplomats initially doubted the story. One of them, Ronald Rychlak, an American law professor and specialist on Pius XII, decided to examine Pacepa's claim for himself.

Rychlak became so convinced of the veracity of Pacepa's story that he has now co-authored a book called Disinformation with the former spy.

"Bit by bit, all the pieces fell in place," Rychlak said. "The new picture answered many questions and made sense out of things that had previously been inexplicable."

Pacepa is now 84 and living in hiding. When Edward Pentin, the Rome correspondent of the National Catholic Register, tracked him down, he said there is "plenty of hard evidence proving that the portrayal of Pius XII as Hitler's Pope was born in Moscow".

Describing the KGB practice of "framing", he said it was a highly classified disinformation operation in which "mosaics made up of hundreds or even thousands of tiny pieces fitted together".

"Only a handful of master designers know how the final image will turn out," he said. "I was peripherally involved in changing the past of Pius XII, but at that time, even I did not know what the final image would look like."

Pacepa said the campaign against Pius XII actually began in 1945, when Stalin tried to portray him as a Nazi collaborator. That effort was rejected by the contemporary generation "that had lived through the real history and knew who Pope Pius XII really was".

"The Kremlin tried again in the 1960s, with the next generation, which had not lived through that history and did not know better. This time it worked," Pacepa said.

Source:

Zenit

Image: Cotidianul.ro

Officials at the Yad Vashem museum said the change was made on the recommendation of its International Institute for Holocaust Research, not as a result of Vatican pressure.

The previous text said Pius XII did not denounce racism and anti-Semitism during the Second World War, did not protest about what the Nazis were doing against the Jews, and did not intervene when they were deported from Rome.

The new text presents the Pope's role as something that has caused debate. It mentions, for example, that already in 1942 in the course of his Christmas radio message, Pius XII mentioned the "hundreds of thousands of persons who, without any fault of their own, at times only for reasons of nationality or race, are destined to death or to progressive deterioration".

The new text mentions that the Catholic Church carried out a considerable number of rescue activities to save Jews. It also recognises that Pius XII himself intervened to encourage the rescue activities and the safeguarding of the Jews.

Still, the new text includes criticism of the Vatican for not opening its archives to allow historians to research the actions of the Holy See at the time, noting that until researchers have access to "all relevant" materials the topic will "remain open to further inquiry".

Franciscan Father Pierbattista Pizzaballa, Custos of the Holy Land, said: "It is good news, even if Pius XII will not become suddenly a saint for them, but the situation will certainly be better. Now they present the Pontiff indicating that his work is still the object of great discussions."

Sources:

Catholic News Service

Zenit

Image: Popes and Papacy