The Vatican ambassador to Israel will not attend a Yom Hashoah ceremony at Yad Vashem because of the museum’s description of the wartime pope. Monsignor Antonio Franco said Thursday that his decision to boycott the Holocaust Remembrance Day ceremony on Sunday was due to a caption at the museum saying Pope Pius XII “recognized” the Nazi
regime and made no statement or action against the Holocaust. “I don’t intend to go to Yad Vashem if things remain the way they do,” Franco said, according to The Associated Press. Yad Vashem officials said this
would mark the first time a foreign emissary deliberately
skipped the memorial service, the AP reported. Foreign
ambassadors to Israel or their representatives attend the Yom Hashoah ceremony.”We are shocked and disappointed that the Vatican’s delegate to Israel
has chosen not to respect the memory of the Holocaust,” Yad Vashem spokeswoman Iris Rosenberg said.The Vatican, which is in the process of beatifying Pius XII, has insisted that he quietly helped Jews escape Nazi-occupied Rome. Critics say that Pius, sympathetic to Germany from his stint there in the 1930s, turned a blind eye to the genocide, and censure the Vatican for keeping sealed papers related to his pontificate.
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