ROME – When the Vatican opened its sealed archives from the pontificate of World War II of Pius XII in March, Brown University historian David I. Kertzer was one of the first in a series.
Like many other scholars, Drs. Kertzer has been eager to mine the papers of a pope – long under consideration for sanctuary – whose response to Nazism and the Holocaust has become the target of a heated debate.
Some have cast Pius XII as the pope who remained shamefully silent when the Nazis murdered Jews during the war. Others claim that Pius worked behind the scenes to encourage the Roman Catholic Church to save thousands of Jews and other victims from persecution.
Now documents are starting to drip from the archives, offering an early taste of what could emerge from the tens of thousands of papers scholars have clung to for decades to study. The pontificate of Pius XII extends from 1939 to 1958.
In an article published in The Atlantic on Thursday, Dr. Kertzer previously unpublished documents, including a memorandum advising Pius against a formal protest when the Gestapo on October 16, 1943 called for 1,000 of the Jews of Rome to be deported to the concentration camp. in Auschwitz.
Dr. Kertzer also found a trail of documents showing that Vatican clerical officials in France were right to resist converting two Jewish boys who were placed in the care of local Catholics and baptized when their parents became murdered in Auschwitz – despite French court ruling that the boys are given to their aunt.
The church’s opposition to the aunt’s years of trying to get the two boys back – Robert and Gérald Finaly – made headlines internationally, including on the front pages of The New York Times. The documents show that Pius was kept informed, even though French nuns and monks were arrested on charges of kidnapping the boys.
“Among historians, my piece I think will be quite explosive,” said Dr. Kertzer, whose book “The Pope and Mussolini” about Pius’ predecessor, Pius XI, won the Pulitzer Prize for biography in 2015.
Vatican officials, provided the article by Dr. Kertzer, did not respond to multiple requests for comment.
In 1965, Pope Paul VI ordered the release of some official wartime records after the war after Pius XII was excursed in Rolf Hochhuth’s 1963 play “The Deputy”, which attacked the pope for not publicly condemning Hitler, although he was aware of the Nazi crimes. Mr. Hochhuth died in May.
Four Jesuit scholars published 11 volumes of documents from the pontificate of Pius XII between 1965 and 1981. Critics have said those volumes were selective and insufficient.
Dr. Kertzer said a note and memorandum found from 1943, both translated and reprinted in the Atlantic article, were not included in the Vatican’s volume of 1943, which, however, contained a document referring to one of the newly discovered documents. ,
The denial gave weight to “suspicions that those four Jesuit scholars may have been reluctant to publish items that would be seen to cast the Pope, and the Vatican, in an unfavorable light,” said Drs. Kertzer in a Skype interview from his home in Harpswell. , Maine. “Honestly, this shows that is the case.”
But others who study church history say that the urge to find gems buried in newly opened archives can also result in a selective understanding of events.
Scholars have a duty to study the archives thoroughly, said Matteo Luigi Napolitano, a professor of history at the University of Molise, who has written several favorable books on Pius XII, including “The Pope Who Saved the Jews. All the truth about Pius XII from the Vatican Archives ”(co-author with Andrea Tornielli, the editorial director of the Vatican’s communication department).
“You can’t publish one creation after another just because you’ve been in the library for a few days,” said Dr. Napolitano, a member of the Pontifical Committee for Historical Sciences. ‘That’s not the way to work. It is not a historical method. ”
Dr. Kertzer only managed to work in the archives for a few days when the coronavirus caused the Vatican to close its doors, but he continued to investigate with a Rome-based church historian, Roberto Benedetti.
The documents include pages that Dr. Kertzer described it as “steep in anti-Semitic language.”
In one document regarding the 1943 summary, Rev. Pietro Tacchi Venturi, a close adviser, for Pius XII telling the Germans that there was no need to use force against the Jews of Italy, because Mussolini’s racial laws were “enough to contain the small Jewish minority” within the right limits, ‘wrote Father Tacchi Venturi. “One does not understand why and why there is a need to return to a question that the Mussolini government has already taken care of.”
Father Tacchi Venturi’s proposal was rejected by a memorandum written by Rev. Angelo Dell’Acqua, then an official at the State Secretariat who became the cardinal for Rome, persuading Pius XII not to file a formal protest. against the composition of the Nazis, but instead to speak privately with the German ambassador “advising him not to aggravate the already serious situation of the Jews.”
Cardinal Dell’Acqua was also involved in the much-publicized case of the Finalies.
The war had left many Jewish orphans in Catholic lands, and on at least two occasions, Jewish leaders had appealed to Pius XII for help in ensuring that they were returned to Jewish families. As one document published in 2004 shows, in some cases there had been church policy to resist.
The Final boys were secretly baptized, and the church in France had initially actively resisted attempts to give them back to surviving relatives because the church believed they should be raised in their new faith.
The new documentation quoted by Dr. Kertzer suggests that the Vatican was directly involved in efforts to hide the Finaly boys and prevent them from being given to their relatives, entirely seeking to keep their role secret.
The family finally survived, and the brothers were taken to Israel, where they still live. Dr. Kertzer suggests that the horrors of the Holocaust did little to soften the Vatican’s position.
The demand for full access to the archives intensified after Vatican Pius XII moved closer to a shrine in 2009, a decision protested by some Holocaust survivors. Speaking to journalists when he returned from his trip to Israel in 2014, Pope Francis said that Pius XII would not be blessed, the penultimate step to sanctuary, until a miracle could be attributed to him.
“The cause for Pius XII is open. However, there have been no miracles, and if there are no miracles, it is not yet possible to continue, ‘said Francis.
No miracle has been verified yet – and for the church to make him a saint, he officially needs two, although Francis deviates from the second miracle in the case of Pope John XXIII.
When Francis ordered the early opening of the sealed archive of Pius XII in 2019, he said, “The church is not afraid of history.”
At the time, Francis had said that the pontificate of Pius XII “had included moments of serious difficulties, of torture decisions, of human and Christian caution.”
The unsealed Pius XII archives (contained in three different Vatican archives) were opened on March 2, but closed by the March 5 pandemic until early June. They are now closed again due to the planned summer recess.
But articles and at least one book have already begun to appear, such as attention-grabbing revelations.
Pastor Hubert Wolf, a German scholar who was in the Vatican in March, gave an interview two months later that he had found documents that poorly reflected on Pius XII and the Vatican. When the Catholic and other media picked up on these reports, some academics, including Drs. Napolitano, him for too hasty publication.
Alberto Melloni, a church historian, said that the anti-Semitic tones that emerge from some of the documents of the time should come as no surprise.
“It is not for nothing that it took 20 years and five months for the end of the war for the church to produce ‘Nostra Aetate,'” Mr Melloni said, referring to a document produced by the Second Vatican Council under Pope Paul VI, who radically defined the church’s relationship with the Jews.
Dr. Benedetti, the historian of Rome who Dr. Kertzer assisted in his investigation, saying that even after the papers were sealed in March, scholars did not have full access to each document because some archives were still being digitized or inventoried.
While the State Secretariat’s archive is online, giving scholars sufficient access, in the apostolic archives scholars are limited to asking to see three documents in the morning and two in the afternoon. It can go slowly.
“The documentation is really huge, so I imagine there will be a lot of publications,” supported many different positions, said Dr. Benedetti, the director of an online historical journal.
