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The Vatican Secret Archive and Pius XII

(Jerusalem Center for Public Affairs) Julian Schvindlerman - On March 4, 2019, Pope Francis announced that within a year the Vatican would open the secret files related to Pope Pius XII (Eugenio Pacelli) during World War II. In March 1998, the Vatican published a document defending the policy of Pius XII between 1939-1945, claiming he had saved hundreds of thousands of Jewish lives. In 1999, the Holy See set up a commission composed of six renowned academics (three Jews and three Catholics) to determine the truth about its role during World War II. But the Vatican archives were accessible only until 1923, and the historians suspended their work. In the Holocaust Museum in Israel, an exhibit titled "Pope Pius XII and the Holocaust" says: "Pius XII's reaction to the murder of the Jews during the Holocaust is a matter of controversy....Even when reports about the murder of Jews reached the Vatican, the Pope did not protest either verbally or in writing." "In December 1942, he abstained from signing the Allied declaration condemning the extermination of the Jews. When Jews were deported from Rome to Auschwitz, the Pope did not intervene." The writer, a columnist for Infobae (Argentina) and Libertad Digital (Spain), lectures on world politics at the University of Palermo in Buenos Aires.
2019-03-29 00:00:00
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