Word: vaticans
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...Roman Catholic church can't find a politically correct Pius. Since the 1960s, it has synchronized the canonization process of liberal hero Pope John XXIII and conservative favorite Pius XII, but recently Pius' "cause" has stalled. The Vatican won't say why, but Jewish groups' critiques of the Holocaust-era Pope may have played a role...
Pope Pius XII sat through the Holocaust in the Vatican, either turning a blind eye or quietly resisting - depending on whom you believe. But for Pope John Paul II, then Karol Wojtyla of Wadowice, Poland, the Holocaust was a lived experience, as he made clear during an emotional address at Israel's Yad Vashem memorial on Thursday. And whatever his judgment on the acts and omissions of the Vatican at the time, there was no moral ambiguity about the response of the young Catholic seminarian who watched as the Jewish friends and neighbors with whom he'd grown...
...pontiff's moving expression of solidarity with the victims of the Holocaust, denunciation of anti-Semitism and call for mutual respect among Christians and Jews fell short of Israeli expectations of some form of apology for the Vatican's conduct during World War II, but that won't diminish the fact that - as Israeli prime minister Ehud Barak noted in his salutary response - John Paul II has done more in his 22-year papacy than centuries of predecessors to repair Rome's relationship with the Jews, whom the Church had until only too recently vilified as Christ-killers...
...even sometimes its own flock - are the exception rather than the norm in papal history. But a specific apology for the actions of a predecessor currently in the process of beatification (Pius XII) may have been beyond his reach, given the complex and contested process by which the Vatican makes decisions. The absence of an apology for Pius XII didn't in any way diminish the power in the spectacle of the bishop of Rome making a heartfelt expression of solidarity with the victims of the Holocaust, before being embraced by a weeping survivor he'd known since his boyhood...
...complexity, however, is the Pope's Mass at Nazareth's Basilica of the Annunciation. It is scheduled for March 25, the feast day marking the angelic announcement to a young Nazarene Jew that she would give birth to the Son of God. Last year the Israeli government appalled the Vatican by issuing a permit for a mosque to be built near the basilica. There was dark talk that the trip would be scuttled. It wasn't but another problem arose. The 25th is a Saturday, and 2,000 Jewish religious figures protested that attending Israeli policemen would be forced...