Vatican faces anger over Pius XII archives
The church sought to convince public that the pope was on side of Jews, rabbi says.
ROME — The chief rabbi of Rome sharply criticized the Vatican on Tuesday for its handling of the longawaited opening of its archives on the controversial papacy of Pius XII, who kept silent during the slaughter of 6 million Jews in the Holocaust.
Rabbi Riccardo Di Segni said that rather than waiting for researchers to study the archives and reach their conclusions, the Vatican selectively published documents on its website in an effort to convince the public that Pius was on the side of the Jews.
“After saying that years of study would be needed, now the answers emerge on the first day like a rabbit from a magician’s hat,” he told the Italian news agency ANSA. “Please, let the historians get to work.”
At issue is whether Pius should be remembered for quietly hiding 4,000 Jews from the Nazis in convents and churches — knowing that denouncing Adolf Hitler would make their plight worse — or must be condemned for not speaking out as Jews were gassed in death camps.
The archives, which took 14 years to prepare and include 2 million documents, could help settle that question.
Pius was pope from 1939 until his death in 1958. A pope’s archives are usually kept sealed for 70 years after he dies, but Pope Francis sped up their publication, announcing, “The church isn’t afraid of history.”
As historians gathered in Rome over the weekend, ready to get in line Monday to view the archives for the first time, Vatican officials suggested the church had nothing to hide about Pius’ motives.
He “emerges as a great champion of humanity, a man deeply concerned about the fate of humankind during those terrible years, somebody who was very sensitive and concerned about those who were being persecuted, somebody who was also the object of the hatred of Nazis and fascism,” said Archbishop Paul Richard Gallagher, the Vatican’s secretary for relations with states.
On Monday, Vatican archivist Johan Ickx published screen shots of two documents and described a list found in the archives of 4,000 people, including baptized Italians of Jewish ancestry, but also some practicing Jews, who had asked the pope to be saved from Nazi roundups.
“The documents show the effort made to respond to the appeals for saving by the persecuted and needy whose lives were in danger,” Ickx wrote, adding the documents show how other states were reluctant to take in Jews.
That drew the ire of the rabbi.
“This sensationalism is highly suspicious, with files that are ready and easy conclusions laid out on a tray,” he said.
Historians have not treated Pius kindly. John Cornwell, the British author of the 1999 book “Hitler’s Pope,” believes Pius made it clear to Hitler he would not speak out against the Holocaust.
Before he become pope and took the name Pius XII, Eugenio Pacelli served as the Vatican’s ambassador to Germany from 1917 to 1929, witnessing the rise of Nazism
before he became secretary of state in Rome.
Among the historians gathered at the Vatican on Monday was David Kertzer, a professor of anthropology and Italian studies at Brown University, who said various archives from different Vatican departments would be ready for inspection.
“An important one is the Apostolic archive, which will have correspondence with the Vatican’s ambassador in Berlin, but also with the ambassador to the fascist government of Benito Mussolini in Italy,” he said.
Kertzer said that he was not looking to solve a mystery about Pius.
“If you want to know if this pope denounced the Nazis for killing most of the Jews in Europe, the answer is he didn’t, and there is nothing in the archive which will tell us different,” he said.
“But there is a lot we need to know about how decisions were made and who took them,” he added.
Kertzer gave as an example the Vatican’s lack of reaction to the Nazis’ rounding up of 1,000 Jews in Rome in October 1943 for transfer to the Auschwitz concentration camp.
“We know the pope was upset and we know he knew they would be killed,” he said. “He had his secretary of state summon the German ambassador and tell him he was unhappy.”
“We also already know that the ambassador replied that the order came from very high up, adding that the Vatican could lodge a complaint, even if it would displease people. The secretary of state effectively responded, ‘No, we’ll leave it to you.’ ”
“So we know what Pius did and didn’t do. I would like to know in this case what his close advisors were suggesting at the time,” he said.
Kertzer said he also wanted to know more about why Pius did not oppose the 1938 racial laws that were introduced by Mussolini and ejected Jews from public life. “I will be looking to see if people in the Vatican were urging him to take action, whether there was debate,” he said.
“The Nazi regime was persecuting the Catholic Church in Germany and in occupied countries,” he said. “Pius had no love for Hitler and saw his role as defending the church. Other issues were lamentable, but they weren’t his responsibility.”