Hier made his remarks as part of a wide-ranging address on the “State of World Jewry,” delivered May 13 at the 92nd Street Y in New York.
He called on the Vatican and Pope John Paul II to open wartime archives. Such a move, Hier said, “would prove conclusively that Pius XII knew all about the Final Solution.”
Hier asked “every person of conscience, Jew and non-Jew, to write to Pope John Paul II, asking him not to go forward with Pius’ nomination,” because “such an act would rewrite history.”
Catholic leaders interviewed by the Los Angeles Times sharply criticized Hier’s remarks, warning that they could lead to a worsening of already strained relations between Catholics and Jews.
Church spokesmen were particularly outraged by Hier’s charges, first reported in a book in 1983. The charges include ones that Pius, while serving as the papal nuncio in Munich, gave church money to Hitler to fight communism, and later, as pope, prayed for Nazi Germany’s victory after its attack on the Soviet Union.
Eugene Fisher, director of the U.S. Bishops’ Secretariat on Catholic-Jewish Relations, denounced such charges as “a selective reading of history” and “patently absurd.”
“This is a matter for many, many Catholics of reverence and it deserves, therefore, not hurtful rhetoric, but an approach of objective scholarship,” Fisher said. “One has to de-escalate a lot of this language.”
Some Jewish leaders also criticized Hier’s remarks.
Rabbi Jack Bemporad of New Jersey, a leading figure in Catholic-Jewish dialogue, told the Los Angeles Times that the “Catholic Church is not going to change its attitude through these kinds of attacks.”
Rabbi Harold Schulweis of Los Angeles, a strong voice in the Conservative movement, warned of a “general breakdown in Jewish-Catholic relations on the highest level.”
The controversy comes at a time when some Catholic leaders feel that the Jewish community has failed to acknowledge far-reaching changes in the church’s stance toward Jews.