Guno צְבִי
We fight, We win
Friday, many will celebrate the 75th anniversary of Victory in Europe Day, which brought an end to the German Nazi war machine that oversaw the deaths of 70 million people during World War ii.
No doubt, in the lead-up to the celebration, individual stories of valor and heroism that contributed to the triumph of the Allies will be retold by the dwindling number of eyewitnesses.
But this year there is also another story being told; not one of sacrifice and courage, but of silence.
On March 2, around 60 historians and journalists braved a trip to coronavirus-laden Italy to make the most of unparalleled access to the Vatican Apostolic Archive, specifically, the wartime records of Pope Pius xii. In 2019, Pope Francis announced he would open the cache of historic documents to independent researchers to uncover the relationship between the Catholic Church and Nazi Germany. The critical question was how much did Pope Pius xii know about the Nazi atrocities against the Jews.
Originally called Eugenio Pacelli, Pius had been harried by claims of turning a blind eye to the Nazi genocide of the Jews. From his election to the papacy in 1939 to his death in 1958, he remained silent on the issue. In the late 1990s, devout Roman Catholic historian John Cornwell was given access to this same archive to find proof to counter claims that Pius aided and abetted the Third Reich.
Instead, he found the opposite. In the words of Cornwell, “Near the end of my research I found myself in a state I can only describe as moral shock. The material I had gathered, taking the more extensive view of Pacelli’s life, amounted not to an exoneration but to a wider indictment. Spanning Pacelli’s career from the beginning of the century, my research told the story of a bid for unprecedented papal power that, by 1933, had drawn the Catholic Church into complicity with the darkest forces of the era. I found evidence, moreover, that from an early stage in his career, Pacelli betrayed an undeniable antipathy toward the Jews, and that his diplomacy in Germany in the 1930s had resulted in the betrayal of Catholic political associations that might have challenged Hitler’s regime and thwarted the Final Solution.”
No wonder then, when the doors opened to the archive on March 2 this year, 60 of the 200 independent researchers cleared by the Vatican made their way to Italy, regardless of the coronavirus. Among the group was a German team from the University of Münster led by Herbert Wolf, a historian of the Catholic Church who had worked with other documents in the archive in the past. Unfortunately, only one week later, coronavirus’s spread in Italy led to the premature closure of the archive.
However, as international media learned this week, one week was enough for Wolf and his colleagues to find more evidence showing that the Vatican knew much more about Nazi atrocities against the Jews than it had revealed in the past, and far earlier.
https://www.thetrumpet.com/22326-the-vatican-knew-of-jewish-genocide-but-did-nothing
No doubt, in the lead-up to the celebration, individual stories of valor and heroism that contributed to the triumph of the Allies will be retold by the dwindling number of eyewitnesses.
But this year there is also another story being told; not one of sacrifice and courage, but of silence.
On March 2, around 60 historians and journalists braved a trip to coronavirus-laden Italy to make the most of unparalleled access to the Vatican Apostolic Archive, specifically, the wartime records of Pope Pius xii. In 2019, Pope Francis announced he would open the cache of historic documents to independent researchers to uncover the relationship between the Catholic Church and Nazi Germany. The critical question was how much did Pope Pius xii know about the Nazi atrocities against the Jews.
Originally called Eugenio Pacelli, Pius had been harried by claims of turning a blind eye to the Nazi genocide of the Jews. From his election to the papacy in 1939 to his death in 1958, he remained silent on the issue. In the late 1990s, devout Roman Catholic historian John Cornwell was given access to this same archive to find proof to counter claims that Pius aided and abetted the Third Reich.
Instead, he found the opposite. In the words of Cornwell, “Near the end of my research I found myself in a state I can only describe as moral shock. The material I had gathered, taking the more extensive view of Pacelli’s life, amounted not to an exoneration but to a wider indictment. Spanning Pacelli’s career from the beginning of the century, my research told the story of a bid for unprecedented papal power that, by 1933, had drawn the Catholic Church into complicity with the darkest forces of the era. I found evidence, moreover, that from an early stage in his career, Pacelli betrayed an undeniable antipathy toward the Jews, and that his diplomacy in Germany in the 1930s had resulted in the betrayal of Catholic political associations that might have challenged Hitler’s regime and thwarted the Final Solution.”
No wonder then, when the doors opened to the archive on March 2 this year, 60 of the 200 independent researchers cleared by the Vatican made their way to Italy, regardless of the coronavirus. Among the group was a German team from the University of Münster led by Herbert Wolf, a historian of the Catholic Church who had worked with other documents in the archive in the past. Unfortunately, only one week later, coronavirus’s spread in Italy led to the premature closure of the archive.
However, as international media learned this week, one week was enough for Wolf and his colleagues to find more evidence showing that the Vatican knew much more about Nazi atrocities against the Jews than it had revealed in the past, and far earlier.
https://www.thetrumpet.com/22326-the-vatican-knew-of-jewish-genocide-but-did-nothing