Holocaust museum rewrites Pius

Published on 02/07/2012 00:00

Israel’s national Holocaust memorial has amended its account of Pope Pius XII’s actions during the Second World War, after the original text upset the Vatican by implying he did too little to try to rescue Jews from the Nazis.

Yad Vashem, the museum and memorial in Jerusalem, said yesterday its new display acknowledged that the pope’s defenders say his neutrality in the war gave church members more freedom and allowed them to carry out some secret rescue activities.

But it said the text mentioned that critics still saw Pius as guilty of a “moral failure”.

The panel now also quotes from the pope’s Christmas radio address in 1942 in which he refers to “hundreds of thousands of persons who, without any fault on their part, sometimes only because of their nationality or ethnic origin” were killed.