Pope’s legacy: Changed the world, but not the Church

Vatican City -

Some conservative Catholics have longed to see Pope Pius XII named a saint of the Church. If the man who presided over the Church’s responses to World War II were canonized, so the hope goes, charges that Catholics had failed during the Holocaust or that Catholic anti-Semitism had helped prepare for it would be laid to rest once and for all.

In the late 1990s, rumors abounded that the Vatican was soon to beatify Pius XII, but in 1999 John Cornwell published “Hitler’s Pope,” a damning biography that detailed, among other lapses, the future pontiff’s early role as a Vatican diplomat doing business with and legitimizing the Nazi regime. The book caused a sensation, driving a stake through the pope’s reputation. Pius XII’s defenders dismissed Cornwell, but when new lists of people being promoted toward sainthood were published after that, Pius XII’s name was conspicuously and steadily absent. He isn’t mentioned much for sainthood anymore. Cornwell, a Catholic writer from Britain, may well have helped his church avoid the historic sacrilege of compounding its failures during the Holocaust with shameless denial by canonizing the man who embodied the shame of the war years.

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