The pope’s tricky visit to the Holy Land

Israel’s Holocaust museum, Yad Vashem, is housed within an angular concrete corridor that leads visitors through appalling stories of persecution, suffering and death and out eventually to a calming view over the Jerusalem forests.

Halfway down the corridor in a room on the left are two black and white photographs of the wartime pope, Pius XII, with a few lines of text in English and Hebrew. It is one of hundreds of displays in the museum and easily overlooked, but it runs to the heart of Israel’s often troubled relationship with the Vatican.

Pope Benedict XVI is making an official visit to the Holy Land this week and attended Yad Vashem yesterday to lay a wreath, but he did not visit the museum or see the caption. The wording set off a diplomatic spat two years ago when the papal envoy to Jerusalem threatened to skip Israel’s Holocaust day service and it remains contentious, symbolic of the troubled history between the Catholic Church and the Jewish people.

For some, Pius XII was little more than “Hitler’s pope” and the caption at Yad Vashem is accusatory. It claims Pius “shelved” a letter against racism and anti-Semitism prepared by his predecessor and says that when the Vatican received news of the murder of Jews “the pope did not protest either verbally or in writing.”

In December 1942 he “abstained” from signing an allied declaration against the extermination of Jews, and when Jews were deported from Rome to Auschwitz “he did not intervene.”

“His silence and the absence of guidelines obliged churchmen throughout Europe to decide on their own how to react,” it says.

Israeli academics, including researchers at Yad Vashem itself, have pressed the Vatican to open its wartime archives and shed light on documents that might explain in more detail how the Catholic Church acted. Workshops and discussions on the Holocaust have been held between Yad Vashem staff and Catholic clergy.

Vatican officials have tried to smooth over the differences, although Pius remains on track for canonization. Monsignor Antonio Franco, the papal envoy who threatened to stay away from the Holocaust service two years ago, said this week that the Vatican was making a “huge effort” to accelerate the opening of the archives. Perhaps within four or five years they might be revealed, he said.

“It really demands a lot of work, a lot of investigation and things must be done in a very professional way,” he said.

Pope Benedict was not coming to Israel to quarrel, Franco said, but at 82 he was an elderly man with a busy schedule and a visit to the museum had “never been on the agenda.”

This despite the fact that in 2000 his more charismatic predecessor, John Paul II, spent several hours at Yad Vashem listening to Holocaust survivors.

Vatican officials have also been at pains to describe the papal tour as a pilgrimage, not a political visit. But in reality it holds much more significance. It will be only the third visit of a pope to the Holy Land and comes at a time when hope of a genuine peace between Israel and the Palestinians is ever more illusory.

More and more Christians are leaving the area, particularly the Palestinian territories, for several reasons, among them perceived persecution by Muslims and the suffocating and deadly effect of Israel’s four-decade occupation.

Only in 1993 did the Vatican sign an accord recognizing the state of Israel, but the “fundamental agreement” between the two sides, with its 15 articles about property rights and hugely valuable tax exemptions, has still not been implemented. Negotiations continue.