'Hitler's Pope': Secret Files Of Pope Pius XII, Viewed As Nazi Sympathizer, Unsealed By Vatican
'Unsealing of Vatican archives will finally reveal truth about ‘Hitler’s pope.' Historians can now pore over secret files from the papacy of Pius XII, who has long faced accusations of being a Nazi sympathizer. The Guardian, March 1, 2020.
New light will be shed on one of the most controversial periods of Vatican history on Monday when the archives on Pope Pius XII – accused by critics of being a Nazi sympathiser – are unsealed. A year after Pope Francis announced the move, saying “the church isn’t afraid of history”, the documents from Pius XII’s papacy, which began in 1939 on the brink of the second world war and ended in 1958, will be opened, initially to a small number of scholars.
Critics of Pius XII have accused him of remaining silent during the Holocaust, never publicly condemning the persecution and genocide of Jews and others. His defenders say that he quietly encouraged convents and other Catholic institutions to hide thousands of Jews, and that public criticism of the Nazis would have risked the lives of priests and nuns. “The opening of the archives is decisive for the contemporary history of the church and the world,” said Cardinal José Tolentino Calaça de Mendonça, the Vatican’s archivist and librarian last week. Bishop Sergio Pagano, the prefect of the Vatican Apostolic Archive, said scholars would have to make a “historical judgment”. He added: “The good [that Pius did] was so great that it will dwarf the few shadows.” Evaluating the millions of pages in the archives would take several years, he said.
More than 150 people have applied to access the archives, although only 60 can be accommodated in the offices at one time. Among the first to view the documents will be representatives of the Jewish community in Rome, and scholars from Yad Vashem, Israel’s Holocaust museum, and the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum. David Kertzer, an American expert on the relationship between the Catholic church and fascism, who will begin examining the papers this week, said there were “signs of nervousness” at the Vatican about what would emerge from the archives. The Vatican archives would provide an “immense amount of fresh material from many millions of pages”, he told the Observer.
“On the big question, it’s clear: Pius XII never publicly criticised the Nazis for the mass murder they were committing of the Jews of Europe – and he knew from the very beginning that mass murder was taking place. Various clerics and others were pressing him to speak out, and he declined to do so. “Although there is a lot of testimony showing that the church did protect Jews in Rome, when more than 1,000 were rounded up on 16 October 1943 and held for two days adjacent to the Vatican [before deportation to the death camps], Pius decided not to publicly protest or even privately send a plea to Hitler not to send them to their deaths in Auschwitz. Hopefully, what we’ll find from these archives is why he did what he did, and what discussions were going on behind the walls of the Vatican.”...
Read More, https://www.theguardian.com/world/2020/mar/01/unsealing-vatican-archive-reveal-hitler-truth-pope-pius-xii
* The Ratlines, What Did The Vatican Know About Nazi Escape Routes? DW
https://www.dw.com/en/the-ratlines-what-did-the-vatican-know-about-nazi-escape-routes/a-52555068
