ROME (AFP)---The Vatican published an article Tuesday defending the Nazi-era pope Pius XII, as a prominent rabbi who made a landmark address to Catholic bishops added his voice to Jewish opposition to his beatification.
"We oppose the beatification of Pius XII. We cannot forget his silence on the Holocaust," Shear-Yashuv Cohen, the chief rabbi of Haifa, said in comments published Tuesday in the daily La Stampa.
"He should not be seen as a model and he should not be beatified because he did not raise his voice against the Holocaust. He didn't speak because he was afraid or for other personal reasons," the rabbi said.
Cohen, who became the first Jew to address a synod of Catholic bishops on Monday, said his presence sent a "signal of hope" after a history of "blood and tears" between Christians and Jews.
But in an article published in the Osservatore Romano, an official daily Vatican publication, one of the Vatican's most senior cardinals defended Pius XII's wartime record.
Vatican Secretary of State Tarcisio Bertone said Pius XII had been "neither silent nor anti-semitic, but he has been prudent," he wrote.
If the then pope "had intervened publicly, he would have endangered the lives of thousands of Jews who, at his request, were hidden in the 155 convents and monasteries in the city of Rome alone," he added.
Cardinal Bertone's remarks come from the preface to a book on Pius XII due to be published, which the Osservatore Romano chose to publish Tuesday.
The cardinal argued that it was "profoundly unjust" to attack Pius XII over his wartime position, "forgetting not only the historical context but also his immense charity work" for Jews.
The process of beatifying Pius XII, which was launched in 1967 and is approaching completion, would place him one step away from sainthood. It has sparked bitter debate and tension between Catholics and Jews.
Opponents, including the Simon Wiesenthal Centre, accuse Pius, who headed the Roman Catholic Church from 1939 to 1958, of having remained silent during the Holocaust that killed an estimated six million Jews.
Supporters, including the US-based Pave the Way foundation that organised a symposium on the issue last month, claim the pope worked intensively to save Jews and has been the victim of a slander campaign.
Last year, Pope Benedict XVI created a special commission to study the question of his beatification.