How is this Pope different from all other Popes? For one thing, Pope Benedict XVI has been an outspoken critic for the plight of Christian minorities suffering in Islamic countries. Most recently, in his visit to the Jordanian capital of Amman, Pope Benedict made it a special point to speak out about the shabby way Iraqi Christians have been treated by their host country. Fearlessly, Pope Benedict is continuing his ideological battle against religious extremism that he in his 2006 speech at Regensberg where he quoted a Byzantine emperor from the Middle Ages criticizing Islam for seeking to spread its message by the sword. Although the Pope apologized to the Muslim community, he delicately made an apology only for the hurt his statement caused, but not for the substance of his remarks.[1]

During his visit at the King Hussein Mosque in Amman on Saturday, once more Pope Benedict alluded to the 2006 speech. When he said, “It is the ideological manipulation of religion, sometimes for political ends, that is the real catalyst for tension and division, and at times even violence in society,” Benedict was reinforcing—if cryptically—his basic criticism of radical Islamic extremism.

Obviously Pope Benedict realizes that Israel is the only country that can ensure that the Christian holy sites in Jerusalem remain protected under her care. The relationship between Jews and Christians is, according to the Pope, spiritually profound and intimate. In one of his speeches Pope Benedict spoke about “the inseparable bond between the Church and the Jewish people …. From the beginning, the Church in these lands has commemorated in her liturgy the great figures of the patriarchs and prophets, as a sign of her profound appreciation of the unity of the two Testaments. May our encounter today inspire in us a renewed love for the canon of sacred Scripture and a desire to overcome all obstacles to the reconciliation of Christians and Jews in mutual respect and cooperation in the service of that peace to which the word of God calls us!”

A Jewish interest in protecting the holy sites of Jerusalem is not merely a matter of Jewish concern; it is also of Christian interests. In saying this, the pope made clear that he views the preservation of Jewish holy sites in Jerusalem as essential for Christian heritage. For the record, the Islamic Wakf (religious leadership of Jerusalem) which desires to be the sole custodian of Jerusalem’s holy sites in the event of its partition, has already gone to great lengths to systematically destroy the ruins of the Temple Mount and the Jewish and Christian heritage of the holy basin through archeological theft, illegal building and digging.

The government of Israel needs to rethink its attitude about Pope Pius XII; this is an important matter especially since the Vatican wishes to canonize Pope Pius XII. Until now, there has been a lingering controversy about Pope Pius’s alleged support for the Nazis; Israeli scholars need to revisit and examine this matter with their Catholic counterparts.

Most of Pius’s critics have traditionally been associated with critics from the political and religious Left. In one recent study, a new revelation was introduced in January 2007 by Lt.-Gen. Ion Mihai Pacepa, the former head of the Romanian KGB. Pacepa writes that the allegations against Pius XII were really the brainchild of the KGB. In an article published in National Review, Pacepa recalls, “In my other life, when I was at the center of Moscow’s foreign-intelligence wars, I myself was caught up in a deliberate Kremlin effort to smear the Vatican, by portraying Pope Pius XII as a coldhearted Nazi sympathizer.”[2]

Pacepa’s background is impeccable. After he defected to the US in 1978, he became the highest ranking Soviet-bloc defector, claimed that in the late 1950s the KGB began perceiving the Catholic Church as the primary threat to its control over Eastern Bloc countries. Consequently, in 1960 the KGB decided to wage a campaign to destroy its moral authority. Since Pius had died two years earlier, the decision was made to castigate him as a Nazi collaborator. Already dead, he was in no position to defend himself before his accusers. To perpetrate the fiction that the Pope was a stooge of Hitler, Pacepa alleged that the 1964 play The Deputy, which opened the floodgates of criticism against Pius, was written by the KGB and that its presumed author, Rolf Hochhuth, was a communist fellow traveler. He claimed that the basis for the play was documents that Romanian KGB agents disguised as Catholic priests had purloined from the Vatican archives. Those documents, he alleged, were then doctored at KGB headquarters in Moscow.

Former CIA director James Woolsey has vouched for Pacepa’s personal credibility. Pacepa’s memoir Red Horizons formed the basis for the indictment and conviction of Romanian dictator Nicolae Ceausescu, who was executed in 1989. Vindicating the memory of a man who saved 850,000 Jews would go a long way to ensuring that the Vatican and Jerusalem remain the best of allies because of the mutual historical bond both faith communities forged together during the darkest period of Jewish history.