Open the Vatican's WWII archives so that questions about the WW II papacy of Pius XII can be answered and Catholic/Jewish tension reduced, was Israeli Deputy Prime Minister Silvan Shalom's request to Pope Benedict on Sunday.
This shortly after the pope's visit to the main Jewish synagogue in Rome, Italy, where by way of welcome the president of Rome's Jewish community, Riccardo Pacifici, told him "the silence of Pius XII before the Shoah [Holocaust], still hurts because something should have been done.
"Maybe it would not have stopped the death trains, but it would have sent a signal, a word of extreme comfort, of human solidarity, towards those brothers of ours transported to the ovens of Auschwitz," Pacifici said.
The pope replied that the Vatican helped Jews and "provided assistance, often in a hidden and discreet way." He also asked forgiveness for the church's contribution to anti-Semitism and urged Jews and Christians “to come together to strengthen the bonds which unite us and to continue to travel together along the path of reconciliation and fraternity."
Israel's answer, then, is something like "Good. Prove it." And a review of Reuter's timeline of Vatican-Jewish relations shows how the rising Catholic/Jewish tension of the Joseph Ratzinger papacy led to Israel's request and provoked some (notably Rabbi Giuseppe Laras, president of Italy’s rabbinical assembly) to boycott the pope's visit to the Rome synagogue. They were aware that the pope had been unilaterally invited, but would not accept his "clarification" of the decision to recognize the "heroic virtues" of Pius XII.
Tension over the matter can also be seen in B'nai B'rith Europe's online petition opposing beatification of Pius XII.
The issue also provoked a request in 2005 by Jewish leaders to open the Vatican's WW II archives when Pope Benedict visited the Cologne synagogue.
One need not be Jewish to wonder why the archives would not be opened now when it is clear that there is not only no resolution like well-verified truth, but also no likely resolution to this matter but a public review of those archival materials.
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The Vatican has a clear policy regarding their Secret Archives: everything is kept under lock for 75 years after the events they cover. In general this would not be too much of a problem, but given the magnitude of the events during WWII, the controversy behind Pope Pius XII’s role, and the current effort to canonize him, I think it behooves the Vatican to open the archives for that period ASAP. Continuing to hide behind the explanation that it’s just too much material to index and prepare for researchers is just not credible when the period under question ended in 1945.
ReplyDeleteParadoxically, the play The Deputy triggered an accelerated issuing of quite a few documents, published as 11 volumes in the ‘60s. Quoting myself from "Six Million Crucifixions":
“Despite the documentation available, including the multiple volumes of Actes et Documents du Saint Siège relatifs à la Seconde Guerre Mondiale (French for “Acts and Documents of the Holy See related to the Second World War”), published between 1965 and 1981 precisely to counter critics of Pope Pius XII after the controversy created by Rolf Hochhuth’s The Deputy, the questions of what the Pope and the Church knew and especially what it did, remain contentious. It stands to reason that the Church would have released all documents clarifying this point among those documents released, but that might not be so. If the Secret Archives of the Vatican (the vast holdings of Vatican documents that remain inaccessible to outside researchers for many decades after the events covered) still contain documents exonerating or at least removing the cloud of doubt hovering over Pope Pius XII, it makes no sense the Vatican would have withheld them instead of releasing them together with the rest. It is therefore more likely that these documents do not exist. Unfortunately this issue will continue to be a matter of dispute until the Secret Archives of the Vatican covering this period are opened.”
Gabriel Wilensky
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Six Million Crucifixions:
How Christian Teachings About Jews Paved the Road to the Holocaust
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