Vatican City – The Vatican opened part of its secret archives Monday to let historians review millions of diplomatic letters, private correspondence and other church documents to gain insight into how the Holy See dealt with the growing persecution of Jews before World War II.
Researchers said it could take months or years to study the contents of some 30,000 bundles of documents from the 1922-39 papacy of Pius XI, a span when the rise of Nazism, fascism and Soviet-bloc communism gripped Europe.
The opening is part of the Vatican’s efforts to defend Pius’ successor, the wartime Pope Pius XII, against claims he did not do enough to save Jews from the Holocaust during the war.
The Vatican insists Pius XII, who earlier served as a church diplomat in Germany and later Vatican secretary of state under Pius XI, used discreet diplomacy that saved thousands of Jews.
Archives officials said at midday that some 50 researchers had shown credentials to gain admittance, although some of the scholars came to consult material on earlier papacies.
“There was a bit of chaos,” said Alessandro Visani, a researcher in contemporary history at Rome’s La Sapienza university who, like many others, was hoping for an initial idea of what was in the files.
“I wanted to look at something, but someone was already consulting it,” said Visani, whose research includes the attitudes of church hierarchy toward the 1938 anti-Jewish laws of Benito Mussolini, Italy’s fascist dictator.
He hopes the files will reveal the frank views that Roman Catholic prelates privately held about Mussolini’s racial laws affecting Italy’s tiny Jewish community.
One tantalizing question revolves around an encyclical that Pius XI commissioned to denounce racism and the violent nationalism of Germany. But he died before releasing it, and it has never been made public.
The encyclical was never published “in part because of his death and in part because it was judged to be inopportune politically,” Visani said.
The Rev. Giovanni Sale, an Italian historian at the Jesuit magazine Civilta Cattolica, which is close to the Vatican, expressed confidence the archives will yield evidence to “correct” suspicions of anti-Semitism surrounding Pius XII.
