Pope Francis to open World War II-era Vatican archives to scrutiny
The Vatican announced Monday that it would open up its secret archives on the World War II papacy of Pope Pius XII, whom some scholars have accused of keeping silent about the Holocaust.
Jewish organizations have long called for the Vatican’s archives from this period to be made accessible, saying Pope Pius turned a blind eye to the systematic persecution of Jews by Nazi Germany and fascist Italy. But Pius’ actions during this period are up for debate, and others say he worked behind the scenes to help Jews.
“The church is not afraid of history,” Pope Francis told members of the Vatican’s Secret Archives division. He said the period of Pius’s papacy from 1939 to 1958 would be opened to researchers on March 2, 2020.
“Pope Francis’s decision to make these materials now fully open and available for international scholarly research is enormously important to Catholic-Jewish relations,” Rabbi David Rosen, the American Jewish Committee’s director of interreligious affairs, said in a statement.
“It is particularly important that experts from the leading Holocaust memorial institutes in Israel and the U.S. objectively evaluate as best as possible the historical record of that most terrible of times, to acknowledge both the failures as well as the valiant efforts made during the period of the [Holocaust].”
At: https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/europe/pope-francis-to-open-world-war-ii-era-vatican-archives-to-scrutiny/2019/03/04/2908ff80-3e75-11e9-9361-301ffb5bd5e6_story.html
Pope Francis and his wartime predecessor, Pius XII.
Pius' relationship with the Nazi regime, with which he had been acquainted since his days as Apostolic Nuncio (ambassador) to Germany, has been the subject of much study and speculation since his death in 1958.
Some credit him with helping thousands of Jews and others at risk leave Germany and Italy during World War II; but others have accused him of authorizing lucrative "ratlines" for Nazis and Italian and Croatian Fascists, through Croatia, after the war.
