Defiant Pope inflames Pius row on flight to Nigeria

By BRUCE JOHNSTON IN ROME THE POPE angered Jewish leaders by defending Pius XII at the weekend.
Aboard the papal jet bound for Nigeria, the Pontiff told reporters that his wartime predecessor had been "a great Pope."
The Pope said the Vatican had already "sufficiently answered" its critics, and referred to a reply published in the form of an article on March 19 by Fr Pierre Met, a leading World War H scholar.
The Jesuit priest is the last surviving member of a team of Church historians allowed to look into the Vatican's World War II archives to rebut the accusations against Pius. They studied the files between 1965 and 1981.
Writing in the latest issue of distinguished Jesuit journal Civil ta Cattolica, Fr Biet said it was "historically false" to claim that Pius XII was afraid to speak out over Hitler. He listed moves by the Vatican to help Jews, and rejected suggestions that Pius and Hitler conducted a secret correspondence.
He denied that the wartime archive office he runs had buried documents that would have proved Pius II's complicity with the Nazi regime, and said that if historians wanted to find compromising documents, they should search for them in the foreign ministry archives and vaults of counties such as Britain and France.
"The apparent silence concealed actions which were secretly carried out by nunciatures and episcopates to avoid, or at least to limit, the deportations, the violence and the persecutions," he writes.
"Public declarations would have done nothing but aggravate the fate of the victims and make their number increase."
The Church has previously claimed that Pius did not speak out against the Holocaust for fear of aggravating the safety of many Catholics.
Jewish leaders gathered this week in Vatican City for four days of meetings with Church officials that were dominated by the publication last week of a controversial document on the Vatican and the Holocaust.