If he can provide convincing documentation that would be one thing. But considering the Pope’s power in much of Germany in those days it’s hard to justify his not speaking out, it seems to me.

Pius XII didn’t even speak out AFTER the war according to CRIF. There would be no excuse for that. The RCC needs to prove beyond doubt, the “secret” efforts made by Pius XII to protect Jews during WWII. This might show how much respect the RCC has for the victims of the Holocaust and the Jewish faith. If they “saint” Pius then that might answer the question.
Anyhow, do they really need yet ANOTHER person to pray to?

I can not imagine the Jewish people thinking that they have the right to interefere in the internal affairs of the Catholic church or those of any religion. Jews will not tolerate others’ meddling in their religion; how do they have the audacity to try to dictate to the Catholics those whom the Catholics should regard as having lived saintly lives? The very notion that rabbis from Israel would de facto forbid a sitting pope to throw his weight behind a candidate for canonization or beatification is absurd and surrealistic. It is like a pope forbidding Catolics to go on pilgrimage to Israel until the Jewish congregations confessed the sins of stealing land from the Palistinians and treating them like dogs. Let’s admit the double standard and end it for all time.

It could be, Joseph, that they think they might have a bit of a say since millions of Jews were killed by Hitler, and Pius probably could have helped by speaking out. RCC says that he did help…and I’m sure many regular Catholics did hide and protect Jews as best as they could, but Pius was the “leader” of this huge faith group, and there must be records of his help. If so, why doesn’t the RCC volunteer them?
And it doesn’t help that for years the RCC blamed Jews for “killing Christ.” I know that some pope or other “apologized” for that, but I’m sure the thought still runs about in the older hierarchy of the RCC.
If the RCC needs yet another person to pray to, I’d think they’d need to make sure she/he is “squeaky clean”. Not using your rank in a major church to speak out wasn’t taking advantage of that rank. All the RCC has to do is prove with documentation, what he did.

I presume a saint is considered to have led an exemplary life. PP XII, on the face of it, led anything but an exemplary life, given his position and the influence he could have brought to bear to prevent a monumental tragedy and which he did not.
If they have really convincing evidence he made appropriate efforts to prevent the Holocaust let them present it. (I cannot imagine they do, myself.) Otherwise I’d hope even they would have enough sense to bring this travesty to a stop.

If the “Vicar of Christ” couldn’t speaking out and save people that he had the power to save, then he is deservedly dust and forgotten.
But when you read the posts of people like Joseph, with deliberate lies and distortion, such as “The very notion that rabbis from Israel would de facto forbid a sitting pope to throw his weight behind a candidate for canonization or beatification is absurd and surrealistic.”, you know they don’t even care if Pius actively abandoned the Jews.
Yes, let’s admit the double standard and end it for all time. If they canonize Pius, let’s cut our ties with the Catholic church and perhaps examine our ties with some Catholic people as well.

Double standards cause problems all the time but the dominant ideology wins in every epoch of history. In a totalitarian system, the dominant ideology is too obvious. In a so called ‘free democracy’ it isn’t, therefore, some people can be fooled. However, when one looks at what groups are exempt from scrutiny, then it is easy to figure out who are the carriers of the prevaling ideology. No one has any right to interfere with the business of another organization. As it is now, govenrnments, different secular and religious organizations and people in general are – at least in the West – only allowed to talk about one holocaust; no one is encouraged to talk about the Ukranian or the Armenian holocausts. No one has demanded punishment for those, who were responsible for them. New York has no powerful Ukrainian and Armenian layers; that could be one reason. Perhaps, the best thing to do would be to re-write history; then the feudal lords would be pictured as benevolent rulers, Egypt and Rome and others wouldn’t have slaves drivers just fair bosses, who treated and paid their workers well, Christ would not be killed by the Jews but His death would be called suicide, the children in factories -during the industrial revolution – would be called visitors not workers, the masters of usury during the centuries would be called harmless magicians not exploiters, the wars of history would called friendly military execises between nations and, of course those, who could not make out of it alive, would die of cholera of typhus. Yes, there is only one way of sorting things out; when everyone and everything is measured against the same principles irrespective of whom or what they are. Then,the honourable ones would surely be separated from the pretenders.

Wisdom of hindsight is so easy. Pope Pius XII should publicly have denounced the immense crimes of the nazis against the Jews, some people say. And then what? Do they really think that this would have stopped these crimes from taking place? Isn’t it far more probable that it would have given the nazis a pretext to isolate the Papacy, or even invade the Vatican, virtually turning the Pope into a prisoner, if not murdering him. The Pope’s main responsibility was to navigate the international church that he presided through a global conflict that threatened its coherence. What he undisputedly did do under the circumstances is remarkable. It is, so to speak, the moral bonus of Christianity. I fail to appreciate the moral stance of people who, though not being catholic themselves, are outraged against the Pope for not representing them sufficiently. Perhaps the highly developed sense of personal guilt in Christian belief makes Christians easy targets for such accusations. One can only guess at the motives of the accusers, but I fail to perceive anything noble in them. Is it the confirmation of their moral superiority? The desire to humiliate? By the way, I am not a catholic

Fred, yes, hindsight is remarkable. But not saying anything publicly about what was happening during that time, as leader of a darn big Christian group was, IMO, poor. No, I don’t think it would have stopped the crimes, but it might have let folks know just where the RCC stood, as told by the Chief Honcho. As to whether speaking out by Pius would have resulted in doing him harm? Who knows? But at least the position of the RCC would have been publicly known. If indeed the Nazi’s harmed him for speaking out, then the RCC would have no doubt that he could be made a “saint”, for what that’s worth.

Dear Pagansister, most people just repeat what they are being told about Pius XII having been silent about the fate of the Jews. Its mostly echo’s of Rolf Hochhut’s notorious play in the sixties, a man who clearly had an axe to grind.
Just to mention one example: on 16 and 17 Juli 1942 the papal nuntius in Vichy France (of course following orders from the Vatican) openly protested the razzias against Jews, demanding these to be cancelled immediately. Radio Vatican repeated these demands. France’s Vichy government was aggravated about this. The archbishop of Toulouse, mgr. Saliège wrote a letter in protest that is being read from all pulpits in his diocese. Pius XII has that letter translated and it is read on two consecutive days on the Vatican Radio, followed by six daily broadcasts of comments. As a reaction Hitler’s minister of propaganda, Joseph Goebbels, had ten million pamphlets printed against ‘this pro-jewish pope’. According to Heydrich (Reichssicherheitshauptamt) Pius XII had become the ‘mouthpiece of Jewish war criminals’. In his Christmas sermon of the same year, Pius spoke of “hundreds of thousands who through no fault of their own, and solely because of their nation or race, have been condemned to death or progressive extinction”, not mentioning the Jews by name, but most people will have understood.
His was a balancing act in an extremely complex situation of which the outcome was far from clear. Most people thought in 1942 that Germany would rule Europe for many years to come.

Fred:
Duly noted.