Vatican City - The Vatican on Thursday rejected requests to immediately open its secret archives on wartime Pope Pius XII, who critics say did not speak out enough to save Jews during Hitler's extermination campaign.
But a Jewish leader said Pope Benedict XVI told a Jewish group he would give "serious consideration" to their request to freeze the sainthood process for Pius XII until the archives on Pius' papacy were opened.
Rabbi David Rosen said the requests, as well as the pope's comments, came during a meeting Thursday between Benedict and the International Jewish Committee on Interreligious Consultations.
Vatican spokesman Rev. Federico Lombardi said the requests to see the wartime archives were "understandable," but added it would take another six or seven years to catalog those 16 million documents.
Later, when asked about Rosen's comments, Lombardi said Benedict's response was not a "public commitment."
"You shouldn't read this response for beyond what it is," Lombardi told The Associated Press. "It is a polite, serious response. He always takes seriously what he is told."
Currently, the archives can be consulted only up through the papacy of Pius XII's predecessor, Pius XI, which ended in early 1939, a few months before World War II began in Europe.
Pius XII was Pius XI's secretary of state, as Cardinal Eugenio Pacelli. Some scholars who have examined Vatican archive documents say Pacelli was an indecisive diplomat as Nazism and Fascism took hold in parts of Western Europe.
The Vatican says Benedict has been reflecting on documentation gathered by Church officials about Pius XII's virtues as part of the process toward possible beatification, the last formal step before possible sainthood.
"In order to come to judgment on Pope Pius, the archives need to be available on an open basis," Abraham Foxman, the director of the Anti-Defamation League, said in a telephone interview with The Associated Press in Jerusalem.
A Holocaust survivor saved by Catholic nuns, Foxman was acutely aware of the passage of time.
"Every year that the archives are kept closed, more survivors die," he said. "It would be a good gesture if they could open them up for the survivors."
Benedict, marking the 50th anniversary recently of Pius' death, has described him as a great pope who spared no effort to try to save Jews.
Earlier this month, Israeli president Shimon Peres urged the Vatican not to let a contentious reference to Pius XII stop Benedict from visiting the Holy Land. A caption accompanying a photograph at Jerusalem's Yad Vashem Holocaust memorial alleges the wartime pope did not act to save Jews from the Nazi genocide.
At Thursday's meeting, the pontiff also called for "sincere dialogue" and called Church condemnation of all forms of anti-Semitism a "significant milestone." In their speeches, neither Benedict nor Rosen mentioned the sainthood controversy.
Rosen said Jews were "profoundly grateful for all that the Holy See has said and done in recent times" to combat anti-Semitism and he expressed thanks for Christians who "saved many Jews" during the Holocaust.