Canadian Jewish Congress urges full Vatican Archives disclosure to clarify Pope Pius XII's wartime record

Toronto - On the basis of strong relations and mutual respect between the Canadian Jewish community and the Roman Catholic Church, Canadian Jewish Congress (CJC) president Mark J. Freiman has issued the following statement on Pope Benedict XVI's recent step to confirm the "holy virtues" of Pope Pius XII:

It is not up to us to determine for the Catholic Church who is worthy of sainthood. We do, however, feel warranted to observe that the process of beatification should not be surrounded by a cloud of controversy. We also believe that Jewish sensibilities about Pope Pius XII's actions during the Shoah should be considered in the process of determining his future status. In this regard, CJC has long expressed concerns both about what is currently known regarding the war-time conduct of Pius XII in not speaking out regarding the horrors of the Nazi genocide and about the continuing inaccessibility of the Vatican's secret World War II Archives that might shed more light on these matters. We hope our ongoing concerns about Pius's silence during the Holocaust will not be met with ongoing silence by Vatican authorities today . We reiterate our request for the secret Archives to be fully opened so that historians may have unfettered access to the documentary record of Pius's actions. In the absence of the full historical record we believe it is reasonable to raise objections to any potential acceleration of the beatification of Pope Pius XII.