Madam, - You are to be congratulated on publishing Dr Edward Kessell's succinct summary of this problem (Opinion Analysis, November 19th).
I hope that those who have taken the pro-Pius XII view will now at least acknowledge the complexity of this debate, and the fact that it has been a matter of bitter controversy for decades.
May I make two further points? Firstly, when Eugenio Pacelli - the same Pacelli who, as Vatican Secretary of State, had signed the Concordat with the Nazis in July, 1933 and then refused to rescind it - was elected pope in the spring of 1939, he suppressed an encyclical of his predecessor, Pius XI, Humani Generis Unitas, in which he Pius XI had for the first time explicitly condemned Nazism and the anti-Semitic persecution of the Jews. (How many Irish Catholics know this? Did Messrs Clear and Armstrong and Fr Grace know this when writing to you recently on this matter?) This document had been ready for publication, but could not be issued before Pius XI's demise.
Why did his successor do this? Was it because he was, essentially, more concerned with promoting the Vatican's interests than with anything else, as Dr Kessell has suggested? Secondly, given Pius XII's equivocal attitude in the years before he became Pope, and his vacillation after his election, was he trying, in an unsatisfactory way, after 1939 to close the stable from which the Nazi beast had bolted, a door he had himself helped to open? That, I believe, is the essence of the historical problem.
Meanwhile, there remains the present, political one. Why, but why, given the vehemence of this controversy, is the Vatican today proceeding with Pius XII's canonisation? What agenda does it have here? Is it, as John Cornwell and other writers believe, to further the concentration of Papal power in the Vatican, and the extinguishing of dissent in the Catholic Church - a distinguishing feature of Pius's whole career as a Vatican insider? Is that what is really going on here with the plainly fervent tone of his apologists today? - Yours, etc
PETER THOMPSON, Arklow, Co Wicklow.