Who wrote Pope Benedict’s speeches for this trip? Why do his speeches to Muslims hit the spot and those to Jews seem to fall short? Does he have two teams of speechwriters, one more attuned to the audience than the other?

We don’t know the answers (yet) but a pattern suggesting that has certainly emerged. Look at what he had to say today in Bethlehem to Palestinians, Christian and Muslim:

• To Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas: “Mr President, the Holy See supports the right of your people to a sovereign Palestinian homeland in the land of your forefathers…”
• To Palestinian Catholics at Mass: “In a special way my heart goes out to the pilgrims from war-torn Gaza: I ask you to bring back to your families and your communities my warm embrace, and my sorrow for the loss, the hardship and the suffering you have had to endure.”
• At Aida refugee camp: “I know that many of your families are divided – through imprisonment of family members, or restrictions on freedom of movement – and many of you have experienced bereavement in the course of the hostilities. My heart goes out to all who suffer in this way.”
• On the Israeli-built wall: “In a world where more and more borders are being opened up – to trade, to travel, to movement of peoples, to cultural exchanges – it is tragic to see walls still being erected… How earnestly we pray for an end to the hostilities that have caused this wall to be built!”

(Photo: Pope Benedict speaks at Aida refugee camp in Bethlehem, 13 May 2009/Tony Gentile)

These comments stand in strong contrast to his speech at Yad Vashem, which was so abstract that his Jewish audience — and commentators in the media — were openly disappointed by it. They called it lukewarm, said he avoided speaking clearly about the Holocaust and said nothing about the fact he himself is German. He skirted the contentious issues that strain Catholic-Jewish relations, such as the possible beatification of the late Pope Pius XII or the recent lifting of the excommunication of an arch-conservative bishop who denies the Holocaust.

The latest gaffe came yesterday when his spokesman, Rev. Federico Lombardi, flatly denied to journalists that the German-born pope had ever been a member of the Hitler Youth (see our story). He was reacting to repeated mentions of this in the media and possibly a comment to that effect by the speaker of the Knesset Reuven Rivlin. But the pope, while he was Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger, said in a book over a decade ago that he had been enrolled in the Hitler Youth by force. Reporters who had the book back in their office bookcases quickly found the quotes on the internet. Within hours, Lombardi had to eat humble pie and admit the book was right after all.

Coming after the uproar over the case of the Holocaust-denying Bishop Richard Williamson, where Vatican communications were chaotic, one has to wonder why some speeches work and others don’t. Just imagine if Pope Benedict had added a line to his Yad Vashem speech saying there was no place in the Church’s ministry for Holocaust deniers. Or cut and pasted that line from his speech in Auschwitz in 2006: ” I come here today as a son of the German people.” It would have been so easy. It would have been so effective.

(Photo: Rev. Federico Lombardi, 12 March 2009/Alessia Pierdomenico)

Fr. Lombardi told us yesterday that Benedict had said all these things before and couldn’t be expected to repeat them all in every speech. To criticism that he didn’t mention the total number of Holocaust dead or the issue of anti-Semitism at Yad Vashem, he said the pope had spoken about them on his arrival at Tel Aviv airport — hardly comparable to the Holocaust memorial as a place for a solemn statement. And his reaffirmation of the Vatican’s support for a Palestinian homeland was also just a repetition of what had been said before. By these arguments, he could have skated over that issue today, but he didn’t. Today’s speeches had far more sense of the occasion and the location.

So we’re left with the question we started with. Who writes these speeches? It’s something we’ll have to follow up once the morning-to-evening coverage of this visit is over.

The uproar over traditionalist Bishop Richard Williamson and his denial of the Holocaust highlights an open secret here in Rome: Vatican departments don’t talk to each much, or at least as much as they should. The pope appears to have decided to lift the 1988 excommunication of four schismatic bishops of the SSPX (including Williamson) without the wide consultation that it may have merited. The Christian Unity department, which also oversees relations with Jews, was apparently kept out of the loop. The head of the office, Cardinal Walter Kasper, told The New York Times it was the pope’s decision. Kasper’s office and the Vatican press office, headed by Father Federico Lombardi, were clearly not prepared for the media onslaught that followed the discovery of Williamson’s views denying the Holocaust.

(Photo: Bishop Richard Williamson, 28 Feb 2007/Jens Falk)

Pope Benedict’s lifting of the ban and Williamson’s comments about the Holocaust are unrelated as far as Church law is concerned. The excommunications lifted last Saturday were imposed because the four were ordained without Vatican permission. As Father Thomas Resse, senior fellow at the Woodstock Theological Center at Georgetown University, told me: “The Holocaust is a matter of history, not faith. Being a Holocaust denier is stupid but not against the faith. Being anti-Semitic, however, is a sin.” This is an important distinction, but not one the Vatican seems to be able to get across.

It was all very reminiscent of the pope’s Regensburg speech in 2006. Few in the Vatican knew it was coming. The Vatican was overwhelmed by the Muslim reaction and the media interest. This time, it is also not clear how many people in the Vatican even knew about Williamson’s history. Surely, those negotiating with the traditionalists for the lifting of the excommunications should  have known. If they didn’t, why didn’t they? If they did, why did they not tell Kasper’s department? The Holocaust is such a sensitive issue for Jews that this response could have been seen from miles away.

(Photo: Pope Benedict speaks at Regensburg University, 21 Sept 2006/KNA)

Even if the Vatican felt the rapprochement with the traditionalists was necessary, a clear and severe distancing from Williamson’s views issued simultaneously to the announcement of the lifting of the excommunications certainly would not have hurt.

It is still too early to gauge the public relations fallout within the Jewish community and in the Church itself. In all the years I have been covering Catholic-Jewish relations, this is the biggest blow-up I can recall — bigger than the Carmelite convent at Auschwitz, the Good Friday prayer,  the controversy over Pius XII or the late Pope John Paul receiving Arafat.  It will take a long time for this one to heal. Those involved in Catholic-Jewish dialogue say it will go on. It will.

In 2003, several Reuters correspondents — including myself — published a book entitled “Pope John Paul, Reaching Out Across Borders.” One contributor, Alan Elsner, is Jewish and lost relatives in the Belzec death camp in Poland in 1942. He concluded his chapter on Catholic relations with Jews with this paragraph:

“For the Jews, the central question to be put to Christians remains, in the words of Rabbi Michael Signer ‘Can we trust you, can we trust you now?’ For Pope John Paul, the answer was a resounding ‘yes’. It will be for his successor to provide an answer for the future.”

The role of Pope Pius XII during World War Two is a subject of endless dispute, part of which we’ve tracked on FaithWorld over the past year. This has gained in interest because of Vatican plans to put him on the path to sainthood, which may be held up now because of protests from Jewish groups. We’re all waiting for the secret archives of his papacy (1939-1958) to be opened to finally see what the documents say about his relations with Nazi Germany. While we’re waiting, one of the key questions that could be assessed on the basis of files already available is what Pius thought about dealing with the Nazis before he became pope. There is a long paper trail there, because Pius was the Vatican Secretary of State — effectively, the prime minister of the Vatican — from 1930 until his election as pope. But a lot of people argue for or against Pius without having read this material.

(Photo: Pope Pius XII/Vatican photo)

Gerard Fogarty S.J., a University of Virginia historian and Jesuit priest, has worked through much of this material and come up with a fascinating article in the U.S. Jesuit magazine America. He’s examined much of the paper trail the future pope left in the 1930s but many of the documents are in a language that the leading commentators on Pius don’t speak. We’re not talking about that dead language Latin, but Italian — a lively regional tongue in Europe that happens to be an international language within the world’s largest church, Roman Catholicism.

“This is one of the problems even now,” Fogarty recounted in an informative podcast for America. “Scholars come to me and ask, do you use a translator? No scholar is going to do that. You’ve got to learn the language yourself. So people have not looked at what was published.”

(Photo: Cover of America magazine, 15 Dec 2008 edition)

Fogarty has scoured archives in the United States, Britain, Italy, Germany, Spain, Ireland and Vatican City for all the information he can find about Cardinal Eugenio Pacelli — the future Pius XII — and the Nazis in the 1930s. He has also pushed the Vatican to publish documents from the Pius XII papacy in stages, so we can get the files from the war years soon, but come up against the reflexes of a bureaucracy that goes back two millennia. “Some people in the archives opening up just a segment because they want to open it pontificate by pontificate,” he said. Publishing the war documents once the archivists have sorted material until 1945 could give us this information earlier, “but they want to go up to 1958.”

After reading what’s available now, Fogarty thinks Pius XII did the best he could given his understanding — from long diplomatic experience with Germany and advice given by, among others, members of the German resistance — that open protest against the Nazis was counterproductive.

“In retrospect, I wish he hadn’t been so diplomatic,” he said. “If you made me pope, which is not going to happen, i would think as an historian. He was a trained diplomat.”

Asked what he thought about Vatican efforts to beatify or canonise Pius XII, the historian said: “I don’t see evidence one way or another.”

Some of the most frequent accusations against Pius XII are that he was either pro-German or anti-Semitic? Can you say that after reading Fr. Fogarty’s article?

(Photo: Gerard Fogarty, S.J.)

The controversy over Pope Pius XII and the Holocaust just doesn’t seem to end. The latest twist came on Friday when our Vatican correspondent Philip Pullella got the scoop that Holocaust survivors and their descendants plan to lobby Pope Benedict to stop the process of making his wartime predecessor Pius XII a saint. They plan to submit their protests to papal nuncios (ambassadors) around the world, something apparently being done for the first time. The American Gathering of Jewish Holocaust Survivors and their Descendantsdecided this on Thursday in New York. Earlier that day in Rome, Pope Benedict’s deputy, Cardinal Tarcisio Bertone, said Jewish accusations were “outrageous” and no one could tell the Vatican whether Pius should be made a saint. But this does not seem to have prompted the decision.

Jewish groups would probably not have upped the ante like this if Pius’s supporters had not stepped up their campaign for his beatification in conjunction with the 50th anniversary of his death. For its part, the Vatican has blown hot and cold on the issue, with Pope Benedict praising Pius at one point and then saying later that he might freeze the beatification process.

Do you think the Vatican has mishandled this? What should it have done to avoid all this?

Pope Benedict told Jewish leaders on Thursday that he was seriously considering freezing the sainthood process of his Nazi-era predecessor Pius XII until Vatican archives from the war years can be opened. At a meeting with Jewish leaders, one urged the pontiff not to go ahead with the beatification of Pius until the files were open for study by historians. “The pope said ‘I am looking into it, I am considering it seriously’,” Rabbi David Rosen, head of the delegation. told reporters.

The Vatican said another six or seven years of preparatory work would be needed before the wartime archives could be opened. Read Phil Pullella’s full story here.

It seems prudent for Benedict to put this off for several years, if not decades. The Vatican has taken hundreds of years before making other people saints. Hurrying up the honours for Pius XII can only antagonise Jews, especially if he is beatified before all the archives are opened. The debate about his stand during the Holocaust can be pursued with less heat and more light once Pius and his papacy move out of living memory and his archives have been opened and studied.

I suspect there is nothing in those archives that shows Pius being markedly more courageous than we’ve seen up to now, although there might well be evidence of hitherto unknown examples of discreet help to Jews in certain cases. What might be more problematic for the Vatican would be documents that critics could interpret negatively, even if his supporters would read them in a positive light.

Do you think Benedict should freeze the sainthood process for Pius? Would that take some heat out of this debate and let cooler heads prevail later on?

The dispute over Pope Pius XII’s public silence about the Holocaust (background here) widened over the weekend. At the same time, Pope Benedict came in for criticism for his own silence, this time about organised crime in the Naples area during a visit to nearby Pompei . A local newspaper had (wrongly) reported he would publicly condemn the Camorra, as the local mafia is known. His spokesman insisted the visit to a Marian shrine (the purpose of the trip) was purely spiritual.

The Pius dispute heated up when Rev. Peter Gumpel, the German Jesuit who is the postulator for the late pope’s cause for sainthood, told the Italian news agency ANSA on Saturday that Benedict was delaying the beatification of Pius because it would harm relations with Jews. He also said Benedict could not visit Israel until a caption under a photograph of Pius at the Yad Vashem Holocaust memorial was changed. The caption said Pius “abstained from signing the Allied declaration condemning the extermination of the Jews”. The Vatican denies that charge and says Pius did all he could to save Jews.

Vatican spokesman Rev. Federico Lombardi denied the caption was holding up any papal visit to Israel. Without naming them, he also told both Gumpel and Pius’s critics to lay off Benedict. “In this situation, it is not opportune to exercise pressure on him from one side or the other,” he said.

The latest twist to this came on Monday when a photograph of Benedict emblazoned with a superimposed Nazi swastika appeared on an Israeli website run by self-proclaimed supporters of the governing Kadima party. It was later removed after a request from Kadima’s leader, Israel’s foreign minister and possibly soon its prime minister, Tzipi Livni. Before it was swapped for a picture of a smiling Benedict overlooking a crowd-filled St. Peter’s Square, a Kadima spokesman said: “Tzipi Livni strongly condemns this and we are working to remove this shameful picture.”

There is no link between the Pius story and Benedict’s non-condemnation of the Camorra, but several Italian papers like La Stampa, La Repubblica and Corriere della Sera played the issue prominently. This prompted Il Giornale’s Vatican correspondent Andrea Tornielli, a prominent Pius defender, to complain the press was now talking about “the ’silence’ of Papa Ratzinger.” “I think that Benedict should be free to make a Marian pilgrimage without being obliged to speak publicly about all the social scourges of the area that hosts him,” he wrote.

We’ve said here that the polemics were sure to continue because of two meetings at the Vatican in coming weeks. The New York Jewish weekly Forward has now added two more occasions for further sparks to fly:

The Jewish umbrella group in charge of official relations with the Holy See is planning to raise the issue during a meeting with Pope Benedict XVI later this month. The issue also is likely to be broached at a high-level biennial Jewish-Vatican meeting in mid-November in Budapest.

Abraham Foxman, the national chairman of the Anti-Defamation League, called on the body, the International Jewish Committee on Interreligious Consultations (IJCIC), to “take a strong stand” in insisting that the Vatican fulfil its promise to open its wartime archives to independent scholars.

Reasonable people can agree to disagree on lots of issues, but some are so polarising that even reasonable people will hunker down in opposing trenches whenever debate about them flares up. The long-standing Catholic-Jewish dispute over Pope Pius XII and his role during the Holocaust is one of those issues. The 50th anniversary of Eugenio Pacelli’s death on Oct. 9, 1958 has recently mobilised both his defenders and detractors. After several pro-Pius comments from the Vatican and its friends and a firm but polite rebuttal by an Israeli rabbi, the umbrella group of French Jewish organisations, CRIF, has issued a stinging denunciation of Pius and warning that beatifying him would strike a “severe blow” to Catholic-Jewish relations.

The statement (here in French) is clearly sharper than the latest call by the U.S.-based Anti-Defamation League (ADL) urging the Vatican to open its last wartime records to historians’ scrutiny before deciding to proceed with Pius’s beatification and eventual canonisation as a Roman Catholic saint. CRIF is the public spokesman for France’s 600,000-strong Jewish community, which is Europe’s largest. It regularly denounces anti-Semitism in France and upholds the memory of the Holocaust, but has not been as active as the ADL in engaging the Vatican in the debate over whether Pius did as much as he could have to save Jews during the Holocaust.

A quick look at the timetable of the latest dispute puts the CRIF statement in perspective. Shear-Yashuv Cohen, chief rabbi of Haifa in Israeli, became the first Jew to address a bishops’ synod in Rome on Oct. 6. Catholic-Jewish relations have improved markedly in recent decades and Cohen accepted the invitation in that spirit. But when in Rome he realised the meeting would also be commemorating Pius’s death, he told our Vatican correspondent Phil Pullella he might not have attended if he had known that. During his address, he told the bishops that Jews “cannot forgive and forget” that some major religious leaders during World War Two did not speak out against the Holocaust. He separately told reporters Pius “should not be seen as a model and he should not be beatified”.

Four days later, at the Oct. 9 commemorative Mass for Pius, Pope Benedict — who as a German must be particularly sensitive to the debate — staunchly defended his Italian predecessor. Pius “often acted in a secret and silent way precisely because, given the real situations of that complex moment in history, he realised that only in this manner could the worst be avoided and greatest number of Jews be saved,” Benedict said. He added that he hoped the beatification process could “proceed happily” (felicemente in the original Italian, successfully in the official English translation).

Even though he gave no date for any move on beatification, this was clearly a ringing papal endorsement for the plan. It’s no surprise, then, that CRIF upped the ante, saying that a beatification “would deal a severe blow to relations between the Catholic Church and the Jewish world”. Apart from criticising Pius’s caution during the war, it said he never issued a full public denunciation of the Holocaust after the war and called this shocking. “Jewish survivors of the Shoah will suffer a profound hurt if the silence of the magisterium in the face of the genocide of the Jews is presented as model behaviour,” it concluded.

A look at the Vatican agenda shows this dispute may not go away soon. The Vatican plans to open a photo exhibition on Pius next week and two pontifical universities in Rome, the Gregorian and the Lateran, will hold a joint conference on the pope and his teachings in early November. So there will be more fodder for debate.

For an institution that famously “thinks in centuries”, the Vatican seems to be pressing the issue by moving towards beatification before Pius and his papacy have slipped out of living memory. It seems to be saying that the Church and the Church alone will determine who is a saint. By doing so, it has painted itself into the “damned if you do, damned if you don’t” corner. As the U.S. religion writer David Gibson put it : “Giving Pius the green light to sainthood would compound the controversy; not doing so would be seen as a rank injustice by some Catholics.”

After reading an earlier FaithWorld post on Pius, a reader named Raffi Shahinian left a link to an interesting comment on his blog. Pius may well have done the best he felt he could do under the circumstances, he said. “But shouldn’t a saint be someone whose life and works are more indisputably Jesus-shaped? Shouldn’t a saint be someone who the whole Church, nay, the whole world, can look to and say, ‘Now that’s what I’m talking about!’ In other words, should the very debate disqualify Pius?

After all the books, conference, articles and disputes about Pius, is that it in a nutshell?

In the latest step in the discussion about Pope Pius XII and the Holocaust, Pope Benedict has issued a ringing defence of his wartime predecessor and said he hoped his beatification “can proceed happily.” To critics who say Pius should have spoken out publicly against the Nazi slaughter of European Jews, Benedict said Pius’s “secret and silent way” was the right approach.

“Given the real situations of that complex moment in history, he realized that only in this manner could the worst be avoided and greatest number of Jews be saved,” the German-born pontiff said at a mass commemorating the 50th anniversary of Pius’s death.

Read Phil Pullella’s full story from Vatican City here.

While this “full court press” (as John Allen of the National Cathoilc Reporter calls it) may encourage those supporting the beatification and disappoint those — including many Jewish critics — who want the process stopped, Benedict left out a crucial element both sides wanted to know more about. He made no mention of when the benediction should go ahead. An institution that is two millennia old can put off some decisions for a long time, in this case maybe long enough for World War Two to fade out of living memory. But Benedict is not one to take the easy way out, so the omission of any deadline does not mean the issue has been put off indefinitely.

In the meantime, others have joined the discussion. A U.S. Jewish group, the Anti-Defamation League, has renewed its call to open all Vatican archives on Pius. Sister Margherita Marchione, a noted Pius defender, has just presented her latest book about him in Rome.

The Sant’Egidio community, the Rome-based movement of “justice and peace” Catholic laypeople, will lead its annual silent march in memory of more than 1,000 Jews rounded up by the Nazis in Rome on October 16, 1943 and sent to Auschwitz. This round-up is part of the Pius XII controversy. Critics say the pope let it happen “under his very windows” while defenders say the deportations stopped within 24 hours because he complained to the Germans.

The Vatican daily L’Osservatore Romano has lost no time in rejecting the criticism of Pope Pius XII’s Holocaust record made by Shear-Yashuv Cohen, the Haifa Chief Rabbi who addressed a synod of bishops on Tuesday. Editor-in-chief Gian Maria Vian wrote a front-page editorial today saying charges that he turned a blind eye to the Nazi massacre of European Jews was a “black legend” not backed up by history.

“He confronted the wartime tragedy like no leader of his time did. Even when faced with the monstrous persecution of the Jews [he worked] in a suffered silence which is understandable and whose aim was an efficient endeavor of charity and undeniable help,” Vian wrote in the editorial “In memoria di Pio XII” (In Memory Of Pius XII).

Vian said Pius had been unfairly accused of being insensitive to the Holocaust and even pro-Nazi. He has also been unfairly contrasted with his successor, the popular Pope John XXIII. The Church had the duty, he said, to uphold the memory of Pius XII and his service to it. Read the whole news story here.

Vian’s defence of the wartime pope came after a biographer of Pius, Vatican expert Andrea Tornielli, rapped Cohen for his “totally inappropriate” comments. Is all this a drumroll for an announcement by Pope Benedict during the mass in Pius’s memory on Thursday?

UPDATE: Rabbi Brad Hirschfield at Beliefnet is calling this mass Benedict’s “Yom Kippur Mass” because it comes just before the Jewish holy day. He also gives it an interesting  and positive theological interpretation based on Yom Kippur — “On a day which celebrates that we can stand before God and get a second chance, no matter what we have done, Catholics and Jews have the opportunity to engage in a more honest dialogue than ever before …”

A leading Italian biographer of Pope Pius XII has sharply criticised Rabbi Shear-Yashuv Cohen for recalling the controversy about the pope’s role in the Holocaust during an unprecedented address to a synod of Roman Catholic bishops at the Vatican. Andrea Tornielli, the Vatican correspondent of the newspaper Il Giornale who has written four books defending the wartime pope, said no cardinal could have ever spoken that way at a major Jewish forum in Jerusalem.

Cohen, the chief rabbi of Haifa in Israel, was the first Jew to address such a synod. In unscripted remarks, he told the bishops that Jews “cannot forget the sad and painful fact of how many, including great religious leaders, didn’t raise their voice in the effort to save our brethren but chose to keep silent and helped secretly.” Defenders of Pius, who was pope from 1939 to 1958, say he did he did his utmost to help Jews during the Holocaust; Pope Benedict repeated this recently in his first public statement on his predecessor. But his critics fault Pius for not publicly challenging the Nazis by denouncing the Holocaust.

Tornielli focused special attention on Cohen’s statement in a Reuters interview prior to his synod speech. The 80-year old rabbi told our Vatican correspondent Phil Pullella that he might not have attended the synod if he had known in advance that Pius would be honoured there. The synod will mark the 50th anniversary of his death in 1958 with a special mass on Thursday at which Benedict may announce that Pius will soon be beatified. Tornielli wrote on his blog Sacri Palazzi (Sacred Palaces):

“Apart from the fact that the date of Pius XII’s death is not exactly a secret of the Mossad and can be found in all encyclopedias, and apart from the fact that the 50th anniversary represents an important milestone, I find it totally inappropriate that a Jewish leader invited to speak Catholic bishops uses the occasion to embarrass the Pope, and on the basis of black legends to boot. I leave to your imagination what would have happened if a cardinal of the Roman curia had been invited to speak at a major Jewish religious forum in Jerusalem and then, on his way out, had made statements of a similar tenor to journalists. Let me simply remind Rabbi Cohen of the words spoken by a distinguished colleague, the Grand Rabbi of Jerusalem Isaac Herzog, in 1944: ‘The people of Israel will never forget what His Holiness and his illustrious delegates, inspired by the eternal principles of religion which are the foundations of genuine civilization, are doing for our unfortunate brothers and sisters at the most tragic hour in our history. (This is) living proof of Divine Providence in this world.’ After the death of Pope Pacelli, the same Herzog declared: “The death of Pius XII is a great loss for the entire free world. Catholics are not the only ones to regret his death.”

The Pius controversy doesn’t split neatly along Catholic-Jewish lines. Only last month, the mixed Jewish-Catholic group Pave The Way from the United States visited Pope Benedict and held a conference in Rome giving a positive assessment of the pope’s record. And an American Catholic priest, Kevin Spicer, has just published a critical study entitled Hitler’s Priests.

The issue of the Catholic Church and the Third Reich is not going away anytime soon.