Will Pope Pius’ archives shed light on his silence during the Shoah?
Pope Pius XII Image by Wikimedia Commons
By PJ Grisar February 28, 2020
Pope Pius XII Image by Wikimedia Commons
Over a 75 years after Nazis conducted mass deportations of Roman Jews to Auschwitz, we may finally learn why Pope Pius XII, heralded by some as a man who quietly saved Jewish lives and dubbed “Hitler’s Pope” by others, did not speak up on their behalf.
On March 2 Pius XII’s archives will be made open to a select group of scholars for the first time. The moment has been a year in the making; Pope Francis first announced plans for the opening last March. The materials the researchers find among Pius’ papers could lend the first clear insights into why the pope, who assumed his post in 1939 and died in 1958, did not act during the Nazi deportations of 1,800 Roman Jews, nearly all of whom died in Auschwitz. (Around 10,000 more Roman Jews survived World War II in hiding.)
“The pope knew what was going on and obviously was not happy,” David Kertzer, a Brown University historian and Pulitzer-winning author who will be allowed in the archives, told CBC radio’s Carol Off. “But he had to decide whether to take any dramatic action to try to prevent the Jews deportation to Auschwitz and their death. And he decided not, in fact, to intervene.”
“What we don’t know,” Kertzer added, “is what kind of discussions might have taken place behind the scenes that led the pope to make that decision.”
While many Catholics, including Pope Francis, have credited Pius as being a defender of the Jews, Kertzer called that characterization “unfortunate,” noting that “most of Europe’s Jews were murdered under his watch.”
One reason for the silence might be that Pius was concerned with protecting Catholics, who were persecuted by Germans both in the Reich and the lands they occupied.
No matter what Kertzer finds in the archives, he believes that the controversy surrounding Pius’ silence is “somewhat misplaced.” “[T]he larger issue about the responsibility of Christian churches has more to do with the decades leading up to the Holocaust — of vilification of the Jews,” he said.
PJ Grisar is the Forward’s culture fellow. He can be reached at [email protected].
A message from our CEO & publisher Rachel Fishman Feddersen
I hope you appreciated this article. Before you move on, I wanted to ask you to support the Forward’s award-winning journalism during our High Holiday Monthly Donor Drive.
If you’ve turned to the Forward in the past 12 months to better understand the world around you, we hope you will support us with a gift now. Your support has a direct impact, giving us the resources we need to report from Israel and around the U.S., across college campuses, and wherever there is news of importance to American Jews.
Make a monthly or one-time gift and support Jewish journalism throughout 5785. The first six months of your monthly gift will be matched for twice the investment in independent Jewish journalism.
— Rachel Fishman Feddersen, Publisher and CEO
