Pope Benedict XVI on Thursday praised his controversial predecessor Pius XII while celebrating a commemorative mass on the 50th anniversary of the wartime pope's death.
Benedict told some 275 bishops, in Rome for a synod on the Bible, that Pius saved the ''largest possible number of Jews'' by acting in silence to ''avert the worst''.
He told the mass that Pius's action had been recognised after the war by Jewish leaders including Golda Meir.
Benedict said he was praying that Pius's progress towards sainthood would ''continue happily'' but said nothing to indicate when he would sign a decree on the ''heroic virtues'' of the WWII pope - an essential part of the process.
The Vatican's saint-making department unanimously voted in favour of recognising those virtues in May last year but Benedict has yet to sign the relevant decree.
The lag has been taken by some observers as indicating the pope believes more reflection on the case is needed.
Ahead of Thursday's mass, one of Italy's most authoritative historians, Paolo Mieli, called Pius ''a great pope (who was) equal to the situation'' he was faced with.
Mieli, who edits Italy's biggest newspaper Corriere della sera, said attempts to depict Pius as mute or supine in the face of the Nazis were ''mad''.
But many Jews have said they cannot forgive or forget Pius's silence on the Holocaust.
The first Jew to address a synod, Rabbi Meir of Haifa, said this week he might not have come to Rome if he had known Pius was to be celebrated too.
Pius was put on the road to sainthood in 1965 but progress has been slow because of the accusations that he remained silent in the face of the Nazi bid to exterminate Europe's Jews.
Polemics over the Italian pontiff's actions during the war years recur frequently. The main criticism, voiced most frequently in Jewish circles, is that he failed to raise his voice clearly against the Holocaust.
In his Christmas Eve homily in 1942, Pius condemned extermination ''by reason of nationality or race'' but did not use the words Nazi or Jew.
His defenders say that if he had been totally explicit, the Nazi reaction would have been to try to wipe out Jews even faster.
Although many of the attacks on Pius come from Jewish groups, he does have some defenders in the Jewish camp.
American rabbi David Dalin recalled recently that after the war Pius enjoyed a shining reputation among Holocaust survivors.
Tributes came from Albert Einstein, Golda Meir and Israel's chief rabbi, Isaac Herzog.
Criticism of Pius XII first began in 1963, when German playwright Rolf Hochhuth wrote a drama called The Deputy which indicted the pope for complicity in the Nazi genocide.
Since then charges that the Vatican was a bystander to the murder of six million Jews have regularly resurfaced.
In 1999 the writer John Cornwell caused a furore by claiming in his book Hitler's Pope that Pius XII had actually contributed to Hitler's rise and therefore to the Holocaust. It also said he was anti-Semitic.
The book was denounced by the Vatican as ''trash''.
A recent book claimed that Hitler, far from seeing Pius as a bystander, made plans to kidnap and possibly even to kill him.
