in april 1938, vatican diplomat
Cardinal Eugenio Pacelli sent a
onfidential memorandum to Ameri-
an officials. In the note, he expressed
ntipathy toward the Nazi regime:
vidence of good faith” by the Nazis
as “completely lacking.... The pos-
bility of an agreement” with the
egime was “out of question.” One
ear later, Pacelli ascended to the
apacy, becoming Pope Pius XII. He
ever spoke of those feelings again.
It was this silence by Pius and the
Vatican during the Holocaust—in
which more than six million Jews
were killed across Europe—that led
historians to declare the pope a Nazi
ympathizer. As those communiques
rom the 1930s remained unknown
uring the Second World
War and for many years
fter, Pius was branded
Hitler’s Pope.”
Seventy-five years
ince the liberation of
Auschwitz in Poland,
more than 150 historians and research-
ers will access for the first time the
Vatican archives of Pius XII, a record
argely shielded by the Vatican for
nearly a century. Scholarship on Pius
and Italy’s complicity in the Holocaust,
were stifled without direct access to
the archives, and helped birth warring
legends about the wartime pontificate.
Ahead of the archives opening on
March 2, Cardinal José Tolentino
Calaça de Mendonça told reporters
that nationality, faith and ideology
would not preclude researchers
from requesting permission to use
the Vatican’s Apostolic Library. “The
Church has no reason to fear his-
tory,” he told reporters.In an interview with Reuters,
Father Norbert Hofmann, the top
Vatican official in charge of religious
relations with Jews, said, “I don’t
think you will find a smoking gun.”
For years the question of whether
Pius should be beatified—the final
step toward sainthood—hung in
the balance as church officials in the
United States and Rome were deterred
by negative images of the pope, stem-
ming in part from the success of
books such as Hitler’s Pope by John
Cornwell and Constantine’s Sword by
James Carroll. The books argued Pius
was complicit in Nazi crimes for his
silence throughout the war.
“We know that publicly, he was
silent, but privately, he may have
helped, for example, by
providing funding for
convents and monas-
teries that were hiding
Jews,” Aliza Luft, who
will be at the archivesthis summer researching a book
about the Catholic Church in France
during the Holocaust, told Newsweek.
“I think and hope the archives will
show how important moral authori-
ties are in dangerous times.”
Pius led the church during a
fraught period, from 1939 to 1958.
He held the post at a time when
anti-democratic leaders and policies
swept across Europe, similar to the
rise of alt-right and populist move-
ments today. The Roman Catholic
Church has said that Pius never inter-
vened when more than 1,000 Jews
were taken from Rome and sent to
their deaths, but that he did seques-
ter thousands of Jews in religious
institutions nationwide.
More than 8,000 Jews throughout
Italy eventually died in Nazi camps,
with 30,000 having lived in hiding
until Allied forces liberated them.
“We trust that the independent
scholarly review of these archivalBYKENNETH R. ROSEN
@kenneth_rosen“The much more important question is the
role played by the Church (and the Protestant
churches as well) in demonizing the Jews in
the decades leading up to the Holocaust.”COMPLICIT?Possible sainthood for
Pius XII (at right) blessing pilgrims
at the Vatican, has been stalled
by his image as “Hitler’s Pope.”co
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