Delay beatification, Jewish group asks

Vatican officials accepted without comment a letter from a global Jewish organization requesting that the beatification of a controversial cardinal be delayed until after a historical review.

Pope John Paul II was to beatify Cardinal Alojzije Stepinac Oct. 3 during a Mass at the Croatian national shrine. Declared a martyr for the faith by the pope in July, Stepinac is considered by some to have been a Nazi collaborator because he did not openly oppose a German-installed puppet regime in Croatia during World War II.

In a Sept. 25 letter addressed to Vatican spokesman Joaquin Navarro-Valls, the Simon Wiesenthal Center asked that the pope "postpone this beatification until after the completion of an exhaustive study of Stepinac's wartime record based on full access to Vatican archives."

The center said that the beatification plans were proceeding "despite public expressions of indignation" and asked that the beatification be postponed "in view of the bitter memories and current religious sensitivities in the structure of the ex-Yugoslavia, and also His Holiness' oft-repeated hope for reconciliation with the Jews."

Stepinac spoke in favor of the pro-Nazi Ustasha regime while he was archbishop of Zagreb in 1941, but the next year he denounced its genocidal policies. After the war, the communist government that came to power in Croatia, then an independent region of Yugoslavia, convicted Stepinac of collaborating with the Ustasha and sentenced him first to jail, then to house arrest in his hometown, Krasic, where he died in 1962.

The staff of the Vatican press office reported Sept. 28 that Navarro-Valls had received the center's letter, but would issue no official comment on it.

In another case of alleged church silence during the Holocaust, the new head of the Union of Italian Jewish Communities said Sept. 28 that he would not be insulted if the Catholic church beatified Pope Pius XII, but it would not change his opinion of the pope who led the church during World War II.

"Pius XII did not make his protest heard when the Roman Jews were carried away right under his nose" by Nazi occupation forces, said Amos Luzzatto.

Luzzatto, 70, said there was no way he or Pope Pius' supporters could know whether a papal pronouncement at the time would have made the situation worse for Italian Jews, as some have suggested. "I limit myself to the facts -- silence," he said.

"If they want to beatify him, fine. We have nothing to do with that. Evidently, in the exclusive judgment of the church, he had merits which make him deserving of much," the retired physician said. "This does not change my positive judgment of John Paul II nor my negative one of Pius XII."

Jesuit Fr. Peter Gumpel, who is working on Pope Pius' cause for beatification, said most of the research has been completed. Pope John Paul has not yet declared his predecessor "venerable," one of the early stages in the process leading to beatification.

COPYRIGHT 1998 National Catholic Reporter
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