This papal visit is a good time to reprieve Pius XII

Simon Caldwell says that the wartime Pope was no Nazi sympathiser: on the contrary, he was a thorn in Hitler’s side and a protector of persecuted Jews

The Pope has done an impressive PR job this week, trying once and for all to scotch the suspicion that he and his Church are anti-Semitic. ‘Sadly, anti-Semitism continues to rear its ugly head in many parts of the world,’ he said as he visited the Yad Vashem Holocaust Memorial in Jerusalem. ‘This is totally unacceptable. Every effort must be made to combat anti-Semitism wherever it is found.’ President Peres and Prime Minister Netanyahu watched approvingly as Benedict XVI laid a wreath on a stone covering the ashes of people killed in the Holocaust. Operation ‘White Robe’, as Israeli security named the papal visit, was proving a success.

But if Catholics and Jews are to bury the hatchet for good (and, as the Pope says, religious types should really stick together in these secular times) there’s another ghost that must be laid to rest — that of Pope Pius XII, the wartime Pope, so often and so wrongly accused of being ‘Hitler’s Pope’.