- VATICAN CITY (Reuters)
- The Vatican, eager to counter charges that wartime Pope Pius XII turned
a blind eye to the Holocaust, is about to open secret archives on its relations
with pre-war Germany.
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- The files, which will be open to scholars from Saturday,
include documents from 1922 to 1939 when Eugenio Pacelli, the man who would
become Pius XII, was Vatican ambassador to Berlin and then the Holy See's
secretary of state.
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- Church officials hope the release will put to rest the
view that Pius had developed an anti-Semitic and pro-German attitude even
before he was elected in 1939 and that this affected his decisions while
he was pope.
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- "There are historians who say Pius XII was too diplomatic,
that he didn't intervene on behalf of the Jews," Rev. Sergio Pagano,
the director of the archives, told Reuters.
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- "Many others recognize that Pius did everything
that was possible to avoid a bigger disaster... This is a judgment that
will be made, thanks also to these new documents."
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- Pope John Paul has called Pius "a great pope"
and the Vatican decided to open the archives in the hope that it would
deal with "unjust and thankless speculation" against him.
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- Many have accused Pius of inaction during the Holocaust,
in which the Nazis killed six million Jews, and his harshest critics say
his silence made him an accomplice.
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- "The overwhelming body of scholarly evidence...shows
that Pius XII was perhaps the best informed leader on what was really happening
in Europe at that time," Rabbi Marvin Hier, the dean of the Simon
Wiesenthal Center, wrote about the pontiff.
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- "Yet not once did the pope lift his voice in unequivocal
terms to protest the deportations and murder of the Jews."
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- His supporters say Pius did not speak out more forcefully
against Hitler for fear Catholics living in Nazi-occupied territories would
face reprisals.
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- "We will never know what would have happened if
he had shouted out, but he was a diplomat not a prophet," said Father
Pierre Blet, author of "Pius XII and the Second World War: According
to the Archives of the Vatican."
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- Blet, the Vatican's chief World War II scholar, said
the documents should reveal Pacelli's attempts to avoid war.
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- The Jesuit journal Civilita Cattolica, a Vatican-sanctioned
periodical, also supported Pius, saying the archives reveal the pope secretly
met a resistance leader.
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- The Vatican hopes the material will make it easier to
beatify Pius at some point, putting him on the road to sainthood. Jews
strongly oppose the beatification of Pius.
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- The archives contain thousands of documents on relations
between the Holy See and pre-war Germany, but many files from 1931-1944
were destroyed during World War II when the ambassador's residence in Berlin
was bombed.
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- That includes 1933 when Pacelli signed a controversial
concordat with Germany. Hitler said the treaty showed the Vatican was recognizing
his Nationalist Socialist state, while Pacelli said it showed Hitler would
respect Church laws.
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- "It would be interesting to be inside his head when
he signed the concordat, but it looks like the Vatican is preparing for
gaps in that period," said John Cornwell, author of "Hitler's
Pope: The Secret History of Pius XII."
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- In a bid to find the truth about Pius, Catholic and Jewish
scholars set up a joint study group in 1999, but talks broke down in acrimony
after the Jewish side said the Vatican had not given them access to the
documents they needed.
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- No date has been set to release key wartime archives
from Pius's papacy, which ran from 1939 to 1958.
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- "I think years are needed to prepare all of the
documentation and we haven't even started," Pagano said.
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