Vatican To Throw Open Holocaust Archives

[Purveyor]

Pope Francis appears to have taken another bold decision in favour of inter-religious harmony and transparency in the affairs of the Roman Catholic Church. It has been reported that he has decided to throw open the Vatican’s archives on the Holocaust and the role played by Pope Pius XII during Hitler’s Third Reich when an estimated six million Jews were exterminated. Pope Pius has often been accused of not doing enough to save Jewish lives and it has been alleged that the Church helped Nazis like the Frenchman Paul Thouvier by sheltering him in cloistered monasteries.

However, the Vatican has still to confirm that Pope Francis has in fact decided to open the archives.

Jewish organisations have reacted positively to reports that the present Pope has decided to open the Vatican archives to examine the role of Pius XII before the process to canonise him as a saint is finalised. The proposed beatification of Pope Pius XII had aroused anger in the Jewish community, which claims that the wartime Pope did not speak up or do enough to prevent or minimise the extent of the Holocaust.

News that Pope Francis was contemplating opening the Vatican archives pertaining to this troubled period first appeared in The Sunday Times newspaper, which quoted Abraham Skorka, a Rabbi from the Pope’s native Argentina and a close friend of the Pontiff, as saying that Francis would keep his promise to examine the archives. The pope had expressed his position in a book he co-authored with the Rabbi before he was elected to head the Roman Catholic Church.

The Pope, who was known as Cardinal Bergoglio before his election, wrote in his 2010 book entitled On Heaven and Earth: “Opening the archives of the Shoah seems reasonable. Let them be opened up and let everything be cleared up. Let it be seen if they could have done something and until what point they could have helped. If they made a mistake in any aspect of this, we would have to say: ‘We have erred.’ We don’t have to be scared of this — the truth has to be the goal.”

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http://www.thehindu.com/news/international/world/vatican-to-throw-open-holocaust-archives/article5618022.ece

[840high]

1. Good.

[sakabatou]

2. It's been needed for a long time

[UTUSN]

3. This is a sore subject for me as I have posted in other threads

Because, lapsed as a Catholic but grown early into being a secular humanist Lib, I retain a bit of nostalgia for "the olde religion," as the first couple of generations after Henry VIII broke from the church referred to the longing for the gone church. And this man was the pope for my first eleven years, during which he was ingrained in me as the template of what a pope should be like. That is, during ages zero through eleven, I was being steeped in reverence not in the conflictions of history.

When this topic of Pius XII has come up I have also heard the defences that he did much for refugees in secret and certainly that he was at risk in the middle of all Hades.

As it is, today on CSPAN an author, perhaps the one being reviewed below, was paralleling this Pius XII argument with FDR as the one being accused (and defended). And he ended with this quote from FRANKFURTER that I am saving and will be repeating a lot.

As for opening the XII files, fine. I suspect that the current papal office holder might not be doing it if he didn't already know what's in them and if they didn't exonerate. And he's got his honeymoon popularity as a card to play.

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http://www.unc.edu/depts/diplomat/item/2013/0912/bk/book11_rockower_fdr.html

[font size=5]FDR and the Jews[/font]

[FONT style="BACKGROUND-COLOR: yellow"]“Fluctuations of historic judgment are the lot of great men, and Roosevelt will not escape it … But if history has its claim, so has the present. For it has been wisely said that if the judgment of the time must be corrected by that of posterity, it is no less true that the judgment of posterity must be corrected by that of the time.”
- Felix Frankfurter[/FONT]

FDR and the Jews by Richard Breitman and Allan J. Lichtman, Belknap Press, 2013

Review by Paul Rockower

Franklin Delano Roosevelt’s actions during World War II towards the slaughter of the Jews of Europe always posed an enigma. I speak as a lifelong Democrat and an American Jew—my family’s centenary in America was marked two years ago. I can still hear my grandmother speak so fondly of Roosevelt and how much they loved him, and yet so sadly at how he betrayed the Jewish people by not doing more to stop the Holocaust; I think such critiques are commonplace among many of that era. The charge that not a single Allied bombing was diverted to attack Auschwitz, or the train tracks leading to it, stood as a black mark on FDR’s otherwise extraordinary record.

In the prologue of FDR and the Jews, Professors Richard Breitman and Allan Lichtman also highlight the critics’ charge: “Conservative backers of modern-day Israel hold FDR out as an exemplar of indifference to Jewish peril and the horror of genocide.”

Breitman and Lichtman tack back to offer a rebuttal that encapsulates the argument of supporters of FDR, who argue that Roosevelt did “everything feasible to rescue European Jews and saved millions of potential victims by orchestrating the defeat of Nazi Germany in World War II.” ....

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