The documents contain the names of 3,200 Jews whose lives Catholics protected during the occupation.

Rome's Jewish community organisation has verified the listed Jews' identities.

Researchers from the Pontifical Biblical Institute, Israel's Yad Vashem Holocaust Research Institute and Rome's Jewish community released the findings at an academic workshop on Thursday.

The documents have not yet been made public however.

It seems many Catholic institutions helped their Jewish neighbours.

The new documents provide names and addresses of dozens of Romans sheltered in Catholic institutions.

They list 4,300 people sheltered in the properties of 100 women's and 55 men's Catholic religious orders.

Of those, 3,600 are identified by name, with 3,200 identified as Jews.

"Of the latter, it is known where they were hidden and, in certain circumstances, where they lived before the persecution.

"The documentation thus significantly increases the information about the history of the rescue of Jews in the context of the Catholic institutions of Rome."

Were the sheltered Jews baptised?

Whether any of the Jews on the list were baptised is unclear.

Recently opened Vatican archives suggest the Vatican worked hardest to save Jews who had converted to Catholicism or had Catholic-Jewish parents.

Claudio Procaccia from Rome's Jewish community says the documentation doesn't provide any baptismal information.

But he says some people pretended to have Jewish last names in order to find shelter in Catholic convents, even if they weren't necessarily Jewish.

Jewish research

Procaccia notes the Roman Jewish community published its own research in 2013 about the fate of Jews during the Nazi occupation.

Over 1,000 of Rome's Jews were rounded up immediately after the Nazi occupation began and deported to Auschwitz.

Yad Vashem's International Institute for Holocaust Research says the new documentation poses new questions.

One is - why did an Italian Jesuit compile the list at the Pontifical Biblical Institute immediately after the liberation of Rome?

"There are many more questions we ask but, while the document lists thousands of Jews who found refuge in religious institutions, it lacks the names of those who were refused assistance ... during the Holocaust."

Source

• AP News
• Jewish Telegraphic Agency

For me, the most meaningful experience of my time in that city was the morning that we visited the campus of Humboldt University.

That was the location of the infamous book burnings by the Nazis in 1933.

We spent a few moments at the memorial for those burnt books, meditating silently on the meaning of intellectual repression, mindful of Heinrich Heine's eerily prescient warning in 1820: "Where they burn books, they will ultimately burn people as well."

We then moved on.

We strolled to the site of the Rosenstrasse protest.

That was where, in the winter of 1943, a group of non-Jewish women protested the arrests of their Jewish husbands. Their protests were successful; the men were released.

Then, close to that site, we encountered a sculpture — of a man sitting on a bench, blithely looking away, averting his gaze from what is going on around him.

These memories crashed into my soul this week, with the news that the Keller Independent School District school district in suburban Fort Worth, Texas, has ordered its librarians to remove a graphic novel adaptation of The Diary of Anne Frank from their shelves and digital libraries, along with the Bible and dozens of other books that were challenged by parents last year.

OK, I can understand removing the Bible.

• Sons sexually violating a father.
• A patriarch sells his wife into temporary sexual slavery in order to get a few camels; that same patriarch has sexual relations with the "help" in order to father a child.
• A man offering his daughters to an unruly mob for sexual abuse
• The aforementioned patriarch almost killed his own son.
• A man having sex with his daughter-in-law, thinking that it had been a prostitute (that would be Judah. our ancestor and namesake!).
• The attempted seduction of a Hebrew man…

That's just the book of Genesis!

And, to think: For the last forty-five years, I have been earning my living teaching this text — to children!

What could I have been thinking?!?

OK, that's the Bible.

But, Anne Frank? What could possibly have been the problem?

Ah.

The graphic novel makes explicit that which readers of the original diary might have missed — that Anne had lesbian fantasies and desires.

So, for those of you who happen to live in the Keller school district, here it is:

Thursday, January 6, 1944

But I had these feelings even before my period… I remember particularly one time when I spent the night at Jacque's.

"Um…Jacque…could we show each other our breasts?"

"Why?"

"As proof of our friendship."

"Absolutely not!"

If only she had known of my terrible desire to kiss her… I must admit, every time I see a female nude, I go into ecstasy. If only I had a girlfriend!

This is an accurate re-statement of Anne's entry in the "original" diary, dated January 5, 1944; it might have been expunged in some earlier versions. This, notwithstanding her simultaneous attraction to her annex-mate, Peter.

The censorious acts of this school district in Texas offend me.

They should offend all people who believe in intellectual freedom.

Let it not be lost on us: this happened days after the attempted assassination of Salman Rushdie, whose books also contain "forbidden" ideas.

The actions of the would-be assassin and those of the school district only differ in intensity. The would-be assassin and the members of that school board are fellow soldiers in the war against words and ideas.

This has been the right wing's playbook all along.

This has been their strategy.

They have started small and local offices — with library boards and school boards, contenting themselves with the stifling of young minds and their imaginations.

They might have been content to see Anne Frank as one of the great tragic, moral heroines of our time.

But, that she might have been a lesbian, or bi-sexual — this was far too much for them.

News flash folks: The Nazis also vigorously persecuted homosexuals.

As for me, as a rabbi and educator of teens, I can tell you this.

Several years ago, at a different synagogue, my confirmation class read that graphic adaptation of Anne Frank's diary. They came to that passage in the text, that revealed Anne's desires.

We spent a lot of time talking about that.

The students found that aspect of her life to be not salacious, but interesting.

It made her more human.

One girl included that aspect of our learning in her confirmation speech to the congregation.

For the past sixty years, Jewish educators (and not only Jewish educators) have "used" the story of Anne Frank as a window into the teaching of the Shoah.

For Jewish kids, the story of Anne Frank contributes to their sense of Jewish pride and solidarity.

For non-Jewish kids, it is a story of heroism. Years ago, I heard a Vietnamese refugee talk about how the story of Anne Frank had given her strength when her family was in dire straits, victimized by pirates in the China Sea.

Imagine, then, how the revelation of Anne's private desires might inspire and strengthen LGBTQ kids who are looking for role models. In fact, that has been the case, as this article will make clear.

Back to that statue in Berlin.

We can choose to sit on the metaphorical park bench. We can choose to look away,

But, the other choice is a much more powerful choice — and that is the choice of activism, of screaming in the face of those who would destroy the intellectual and spiritual lives of our young people — all in the name of some imagined purity.

Yes, I said scream.

If the combined forces of anti-intellectualism, small-mindedness, and intolerance want to continue their culture war, then let's have it.

I will be in the front lines on the other side.

Oh, and another thing.

I am so done with being polite about this.

• Jeffrey K. Salkin is the spiritual leader of Temple Solel in Hollywood, Fla., and the author of numerous books on Jewish spirituality and ethics.
• First published in RNS. Republished with permission.

In traditional Jewish culture, myth once served many functions. The rituals commemorating the myths provided the Jewish community with a powerful cohesiveness that persisted throughout the community's dispersal across continents. At the personal level, myths helped individuals to encounter, explain, and gain meaning from their experiences in the world. For children, myths functioned as a nurturing source for spiritual feeling.

The story of Passover is a particularly important myth for Jews. Lovingly sustained by the Jewish community for millennia, it carries sacred and enduring wisdom that is passed down each year from the elders of the family to the children.

Its accompanying ritual, the Passover seder, is one of the oldest surviving rituals in the Western world, dating back some 3,300 years. It is also the most widely observed ritual in Judaism. The lively, family-oriented evening revolves around the retelling of one of Judaism's most important mythical moments — the Jewish exodus from Egypt. Accompanied with song and good cheer, the seder evening contains both set and spontaneous elements, with riddles, games, and a series of symbolic culinary elements designed to transport the individual back to ancient times, so that they may momentarily suspend reality and experience life exiled in Egypt.

Myths reflect the essence of a group's religious feeling and core identity — and for Jews, the central mythical motif is that of exile.

In the major biblical stories, exile is referenced through the metaphor of separation from a physical land — exile from the Garden of Eden, exile in Babylon, and exile in Egypt. The metaphor of the faithful wife exiled from her husband is another common expression of exile found in Jewish texts, including poems, prayers, and hymns.

To give but a few examples, In Song of Songs, a beloved young bride is consumed in search for her husband with whom she has been physically separated: "I sought him, but I could not find him; I called him, but he gave me no answer". Bound together in a mutually devoted relationship, yet physically apart, their love is dominated by a sense of yearning, "O daughters of Jerusalem, I adjure you; if you find my beloved; tell him I am sick with love". In a poem by Yehuda Halevi titled "The day the depths were turned to dry land", he writes: "Then return, marry her [Israel] a second time; Do not continue to divorce her; Cause the light of her sun to rise, that the; Shadows shall flee away". In dark times, when tragedy had befallen the Jews, we find the analogy of marriage reimagined in terms of widowhood, as in this poem by the medieval Rabbi Isaac ben Judah ibn Ghiyyat: "I am bound and troubled as one living in widowhood; I yearn intensely, O Lord, for the Day of Comfort". Continue reading

The Jewish community has asked that some of the donated money is used for interfaith activities to foster a greater connection between the Jewish and Muslim communities.

"Our faith has a shared Abrahamic tradition and Jews and Muslims have both suffered persecution and racism historically, and unfortunately still do today,'' says Stephen Goodman of the New Zealand Jewish Council.

"The Jewish community, both in New Zealand and overseas, wanted the victims of the mosque attacks to know that we see them, we empathise with them, and we support them.''

A great proportion of the money donated was raised by the Jewish Federation of Greater Pittsburgh in the United States of America, who lost 11 members of their community in a deadly synagogue shooting in October last year.

The New South Wales Jewish community also donated money, along with the American Jewish Committee and the New Zealand Jewish community.

The money has been pooled together to form the Abrahamic Fund.

It will be used mainly for counselling and support services, medical treatment, financial planning services, education and vocational training for the victims of the mosque shootings and their families.

"We extend our heartfelt condolences to the families of the victims of the Christchurch massacre and we extend our hand in friendship in calling for an end to racism, an end to anti-semitism, an end of Islamophobia, and an end to bigotry in all its forms,'' said visiting New South Wales Jewish Board of Deputies Chief Executive Vic Alhadeff.

Ibrar Sheikh, from the Federation of the Islamic Associations NZ (FIANZ), says the Muslim community is very grateful for the support shown by the global Jewish community.

Source

ccc.govt.nz

rnz.co.nz

Image: Screenshot: tvnz.co.nz

At the Chabad Center for Jewish Life in Arlington, Mass., where Rabbi Avi Bukiet and his family live about 20 minutes outside of Boston, firefighters were called to put out a shingle fire May 11.

Then they were called there again for another fire May 16.

Then, about an hour later that day, firefighters responded to a nearby fire at the Chabad Jewish Center in Needham, where Rabbi Mendy Krinsky lives with his family about 30 minutes outside of Boston. Read more

World ORT announced that it had shook hands on an extension to the pontiff's Scholas World Youth Encounter, which will allow a huge "youth encounter" to take place in Mexico City later this year. Read more

Members of the Islamic Ahlulbayt Foundation's Pakuranga mosque demonstrated in Aotea Square in support of the Lebanon group.

Chris Finlayson and Pakuranga MP Simeon Brown told mosque members of their concern at the support.

Mr Finlayson says Hezbollah has committed countless atrocities in the Middle East.

He says he made it clear to mosque leaders that their divisive attitude is not welcome in New Zealand.

Furthermore, New Zealand Police list the group as a terrorist organisation.

Finlayson says Hezbollah is extremist. He says the terrorist group causes misery and it's troubling to see open support for it in New Zealand.

Brown says the same mosque organised a visit and speech by an Iranian diplomat last year.

He says the speech was filled with hate.

Finally, he says it included a denial of the Holocaust and called for Israel's destruction.

Finlayson says concerned constituents prompted his and Brown's visit.

The pair say that, in future, they hope the mosque will condemn groups that commit acts of terror in the name of their religion.

In addition, New Zealand Jews have welcomed Finlayson's stand.

Jewish Council concern

The NZ Jewish Council says New Zealand's Jewish community feels Hezbollah's threat - this despite New Zealand's remoteness.

The council says Hezbollah bombed a Jewish community centre in Buenos Aires, Argentina, in 1994.

It killed 85 people and injured hundreds more.

The council says it's shocked to see New Zealanders support anti-Jewish terrorists.

The Auckland demonstrators are from the same group that denied the Holocaust last year in a YouTube post.

Sources:

• Scoop
• One Community Chronicle
• NZ Police
• Image credit: Islamic Ahlul Bayt Foundation NZ

So says a manifesto denouncing "a new antisemitism marked by Islamist radicalisation."

The manifesto has been signed by over 300 French dignitaries and stars.

The manifesto was drafted by Philippe Val, a former editor at Charlie Hebdo, after a number of Jewish murders.

It says the "fight against this democratic failure … antisemitism" should become a national cause before it's too late. "Before France is no longer France."

The signatories condemn what they called a "quiet ethnic purging" which they say is driven by rising Islamist radicalism, particularly in working-class neighbourhoods.

They accuse the media of remaining silent on the matter.

"Why the silence?" asks the manifesto.

"It is because radical Islam is considered exclusively by some of the elite French parties as an expression of social revolt...

"… because the old antisemitism of the extreme Right is added to the antisemitism of the radical Left, which has found anti-Zionism as their alibi for transforming the executioners of Jews as victims in society."

The manifesto also says "In our recent history [since 2006] 11 Jews have been assassinated - and some tortured - by radical Islamists because they were Jewish."

The dead include three children and a teacher who were shot at a Jewish school in 2012 and four people shot at a Jewish supermarket in Paris in 2015.

A year ago a Jewish woman in her sixties was thrown out of the window of her Paris flat by a neighbour shouting, "Allahu Akbar" (God is great).

The most recent attack took place last month when an 85-year old Jewish woman was stabbed and set alight. The crime is being treated as antisemitic.

Thirty-thousand people marched in her memory.

France's President, Emmanuel Macron, says he is determined to fight antisemitism.

During the past 20 years, France's Jewish community has been leaving the country for Israel.

The manifesto says this is partly because of antisemitism in predominantly immigrant neighbourhoods.

Source

• Euronews
• Haaretz
• The Guardian
• Image: The Commentator

Traditionally, in the days leading up to Ash Wednesday, Catholic cities in Germany hold huge street celebrations. Parades and parties provide revellers with a last binge of drinking, dancing and singing before the 40 days of fasting in Lent. Read more

At the same time, President Trump announced plans to eventually relocate the US Embassy to the holy city.

Pope Francis responded to the change in US policy, saying he wants the "status quo" to remain.

He says he is "profoundly concerned" about recent developments concerning Jerusalem.

He declared the city a unique and sacred place for Christians, Jews and Muslims and that it has a "special vocation for peace."

He appealed "that everyone respects the status quo of the city," according to UN resolutions.

"I pray to the Lord that its identity is preserved and strengthened for the benefit of the Holy Land, the Middle East and the whole world ...

"... and that wisdom and prudence prevail to prevent new elements of tension from being added to a global context already convulsed by so many cruel conflicts," he said on Wednesday.

Others have expressed concern about Trump's decision.

The Middle East has strongly objected to the move.

Carefully worded rebukes have also flowed in from US allies.

The US position in 1947 held that Jerusalem was a corpus seperatum: an internationally controlled entity that belonged to neither Arab nor Jew.

Bit by bit this view has altered. Firstly it adopted a policy of "limited internationalisation", while still opposing both Arabs and Israelis claiming Jerusalem as their capital.

Nonetheless, Israel has sought to claim Jerusalem as its capital.

Following the six-day war in 1967, a new policy was adopted.

This held that neither Israelis nor Arabs could claim Jerusalem as their capital.

The Vatican has long sought an internationally guaranteed status for Jerusalem that safeguards its sacred character for Jews, Muslims and Christians.

Francis spoke by telephone on Tuesday with Palestinian leader Mahmoud Abbas, after President Donald Trump forewarned Abbas of his decision to recognise Jerusalem as Israel's capital.

The Vatican said the call with Francis was made at Abbas's initiative.

Source

• The Washington Post
• The Washington Post
• National Catholic Register
• La Croix
• Zenit
• JSTOR
• Image: Time Magazine

Image:

He has made the statement twice during the past fortnight: once on Saturday on during his in-flight press conference when he left Egypt.

He was first reported saying on 22 April when he was meeting with some migrants at the Basilica of St. Bartholomew in Rome.

He was speaking to them about his visit to a refugee camp on the Greek island of Lesbos last year.

He continued with the comparison, saying the camps are like the Nazi concentration camps because "migrants are penned in and prevented from leaving."

Both Jewish and German groups reacted in shock when his statement was reported.

The German response was to ask Francis if he's made a linguistic error.

The American Jewish Committee (AJC) said the Pope's comparison wasn't appropriate and he should find an alternative.

"The conditions in which migrants are currently living in some European countries may well be difficult, and deserve still greater international attention, but concentration camps they certainly are not," said AJC CEO David Harris.

"The Nazis and their allies erected and used concentration camps for slave labor and the extermination of millions of people during World War II. There is no comparison to the magnitude of that tragedy," he added.

Source

• The Washington Post
• The Times of Israel
• ArutzSheva
• Image: Anadolu Agency

New Zealand Jewish Council president Stephen Goodman said hate speech towards Jews was particularly prevalent on social media.

"A lot of anti-Semitism comes out of ignorance and thinking this is a fashionable thing to do," Goodman said. Continue reading

Cardinal Kurt Koch, who leads ecumenical relations for the Vatican, made the comments at an interfaith meeting in the United Kingdom, the Catholic Herald reported.

Cardinal Koch also said that Christians should not try and convert Jews and should view Judaism as a "mother".

"We have a mission to convert all non-Christian religions' people [except] Judaism," he said.

He reportedly added that this extended to jihadis responsible for persecuting Christians in the Middle East.

The cardinal said Christianity and Judaism shared a special relationship.

"It is very clear that we can speak about three Abrahamic religions, but we cannot deny that the view of Abraham in Jewish and the Christian tradition and the Islamic tradition is not the same," he said.

"In this sense we have only with Jewish people this unique relationship that we do not have with Islam."

On Monday, Pope Francis held a 25-minute meeting with Ahmad el-Tayeb, the grand imam of al-Azhar University in Cairo.

This was the first meeting between a Pontiff and the grand imam since the university suspended formal dialogue in 2011.

The university took exception to what it called Pope Benedict XVI's focus on Christian suffering in the Middle East when many Muslims were suffering too.

This was on top of Benedict's 2006 Regensburg speech which many saw as linking Islam with violence.

On Monday, Pope Francis sat to the side of his desk facing the grand imam rather than behind his desk as he customarily does when meeting with a visiting head of state.

Vatican spokesman, Fr Federico Lombardi, SJ, said the conversation between the two included a discussion about "the great significance of this new encounter within the scope of dialogue between the Catholic Church and Islam".

Sources

• Catholic Herald
• Express
• The Tablet
• Image: Catholic Herald

Msgr Hugh O'Flaherty disguised himself from Nazi secret police and set up safe houses in Rome between 1943 and 1944.

One of the safe houses was right next to the secret police's main headquarters in Rome.

A plaque in his honour was unveiled at the Teutonic (German College) at the Vatican on Sunday.

A commemorative Mass was celebrated at the German College.

Msgr O'Flaherty became known as the "Scarlet Pimpernel of the Vatican".

By using fake IDs, disguises and operating a communications network inside and outside the Vatican, he was able to outfox Nazi efforts to capture him.

The priest was able to give refuge to 6500 Jewish refugees and Allied POWs, hiding them in houses, convents and monasteries across Rome and even inside the Vatican itself.

Ironically, much of his clandestine operation was conducted from within the Vatican's German College, where Mgr O'Flaherty lived for 22 years.

Speaking at the unveiling of the plaque, Ireland ambassador Emma Madigan said the priest's compassion was not bounded by lines of nationality or religious community.

Quoting Pope Francis, she said there are people who "do not grow accustomed to evil. Who defeat it with good".

She thanked Msgr O'Flaherty, who died in 1963, on behalf of all those he saved.

"There are occasions when quite ordinary people find themselves in very dark times. When people whose great passions are golf and Kerry football, find themselves, in Joyce's phrase, in the midst of history that has become ‘a nightmare from which we are trying to awake'," the ambassador said.

"Directed and sustained by his faith, he gave up the comfort and security he had, to try and lead as many people as possible out of that nightmare."

"Happily for so many people, Mgr O'Flaherty united that faith and that compassion with apparently bottomless courage and resourcefulness. Some would put that down to his Kerry roots!"

Sources

• Premier.org.uk
• Catholic Ireland
• Image: Irish Central

Marking 50 years of Catholic-Jewish dialogue since Vatican II, the Pontifical Council for Religious Relations with Jews has published "The Gifts and Calling of God are Irrevocable".

The document states that Catholics are called to witness to their faith in Jesus before all people, including Jews.

But Christianity and Judaism are intertwined and God never annulled his covenant with the Jewish people, stated the document.

"The Church is therefore obliged to view evangelisation to Jews, who believe in the one God, in a different manner from that to people of other religions and world views," it said.

"In concrete terms this means that the Catholic Church neither conducts nor supports any specific institutional mission work directed towards Jews."

The document explicitly states that it is not a "doctrinal teaching of the Catholic Church", but a reflection.

Dr David Kessler, director of the Woolf Institute for the study of inter-religious relations in Cambridge, said it was the first time a repudiation of active conversion of Jews had been so clearly stated in a Vatican document.

How God will save the Jews if they do not explicitly believe in Christ is "an unfathomable divine mystery", the document states.

The new document states "there can only be one single covenant history of God with humanity".

At the same time, however, the document says God's covenant with humanity developed over time: it was first forged with Abraham, then the law was given to Moses, then new promises were given to Noah.

"Each of these covenants incorporates the previous covenant and interprets it in a new way," the document states

"That is also true for the New Covenant, which for Christians is the final eternal covenant and, therefore, the definitive interpretation of what was promised by the prophets."

Sources

• The Guardian
• The Tablet
• Image: UptoJerusalem.com

The prayer reads: "Let us also pray for the Jews: that our God and Lord may illuminate their hearts, that they acknowledge Jesus Christ is the Saviour of all men."

The prayer was revised by Benedict XVI in 2008 after he permitted wider celebration of the Mass in the older form with his apostolic letter Summorum Pontificum.

Previously the prayer had included references to the "blindness" of Jewish people and their "immersion in darkness".

But the prayer remains different from the Novus Ordo version introduced after the Second Vatican Council.

This reads: "Let us pray for the Jewish people, the first to hear the word of God, that they may continue to grow in the love of his name and in faithfulness to his covenant."

Archbishop Kevin McDonald, chairman of the England and Wales bishops' Committee for Catholic-Jewish Relations, said the difference had caused "great confusion and upset in the Jewish community".

He said: "The 1970 prayer which is now used throughout the Church is basically a prayer that the Jewish people would continue to grow in the love of God's name and in faithfulness of his Covenant, a Covenant which - as St John Paul II made clear in 1980 - has not been revoked."

"By contrast the prayer produced in 2008 for use in the extraordinary form of the liturgy reverted to being a prayer for the conversion of Jews to Christianity."

He said the English and Welsh bishops had "added their voice" to that of the German bishops, who had already asked for the prayer to be amended.

Archbishop McDonald said: "Such a change would be important both for giving clarity and consistency to Catholic teaching and for helping to progress Catholic-Jewish dialogue."

Joseph Shaw, president of the Latin Mass Society, said the request for a change is surprising as the extraordinary form version reflects the theology and imagery of 2 Corinthians 3:13-16.

Sources

• Catholic Herald
• Summorum Pontificum
• Image: St Patrick Parish

Guest speakers included Jewish born American Roy Schoeman whose parents survived the Holocaust.

Initially, Holocaust survivor Inge Auerbacher was to speak this year, but due to an unforeseen event she couldn't' make it.

Auckland residents Bob and Freda Narev accepted the invitation to replace Inge, and shared their survivor stories.

Mrs Narev shared her experience hiding on a farm for three years, "living as a Catholic." Eventually, her sister brought her to New Zealand to begin a new life.

Convention organiser John Porteous says: "Our Christian tradition grew out of Judaism, Jesus was a Jew. So was his Mother. The connection is enormously important to us.

"But we don't have such a strong Jewish theme this year just because of the state the world is in. Our faith is outside of time, in that regard," says Porteous.

In 2013, Pope Frances commemorated Kristallnacht at a mass in front of thousands of people in St. Peter's Square on Sunday, describing the Jewish people as the "big brothers" of his Roman Catholic flock.

The convention was held at Glendowie's Sacred Heart College Auditorium in Auckland. Continue reading

"Shades of Truth" is the account of a fictional present-day American journalist and critic of Pius who changes his mind after carrying out research.

Some Jews have accused Pope Pius of failing to use his position to bring attention to Hitler's attempted extermination of the Jews.

The Vatican has said Pius worked actively behind the scenes to save thousands of Jews.

He did not speak out more forcefully for fear his words could have led to more deaths of both Jews and Christians at the hands of the Nazis.

"Shades of Truth", based on the work of Jewish historian Pinchas Lapide, credits Pius XII with saving the lives of 800,000 Jews.

The filmmakers argue that Pius XII was "the most misunderstood figure of the 20th century".

Director Liana Marabini said "Pinchas Lapide is absolutely credible, because he was Jewish, he lived during war and knew Pius XII well".

But Vatican newspaper L'Osservatore Romano said the film was naive, lacking credibility and a "frankly clumsy attempt" at defending the wartime pontiff.

Italian Catholic magazine Famiglia Cristiana said the film would damage Pius's reputation.

This is because it was overly apologetic and not sufficiently based on historical documents that defend him.

Pagine Ebraiche, the online paper of Rome's Jewish community, called the film "a blundering soap opera of dubious quality, filled with stereotypes".

This paper particularly criticised a scene in which the journalist dreams he sees Pius wearing a yellow star of David on his white cassock, like the emblem the Nazis forced Jews to wear.

Marcello Pezzetti, director of the Museum of the Shoah Foundation in Rome, said the film presented a "false interpretation of history".

"Shades of Truth" will be released internationally next month.

Its director hopes to be able to show it in the Cannes Film Festival.

Last year, Pope Francis said the cause for beatification of Pius XII had stalled because no miracle attributable to his intervention had been found.

Sources

• The Guardian
• Catholic World News
• The Local
• Catholic Herald
• Image: The Guardian

Former Bishop John Gray shocked visiting Jews in Christchurch last month when he told them the Holocaust "should have taught you a lesson".

Gray, who was head of the Maori Anglican diocese in the South Island, also attacked Muslim speakers.

He asked what they were doing about the "slaughter of innocent people" by Muslims "under the banner of ISIS and al Qaeda".

The Anglican Church apologised and Gray was demoted from his role as vicar general to Maori Anglican Diocese in Aotearoa.

He initially retained his title of bishop.

Now he has lost that title, a much more serious demotion.

Continue reading