Researchers identify Jews aided by Catholics in Nazi era even as Pope Pius was silent
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In 2000, Pope John Paul II offered a sweeping apology for the mistreatment of Jews by Catholics.
PHOTO: AFP
ROME – A group of historians convened by a research institution of the Vatican announced on Thursday the discovery of documents naming thousands of Jews in Rome who received safe haven in Catholic convents and monasteries during the Nazi occupation of World War II.
Historians have long known that some Catholic institutions in Rome provided refuge to some Jews during the period, and the documents for the first time supplied some of their identities.
But experts say that although the discovery adds to scholarship of the period, it does not fundamentally change the historical understanding of the actions of the church and of Pius XII, the Pope at the time.
Nearly 2,000 Jews, about a sixth of Rome’s Jewish population, were deported from Rome and murdered during the Nazi occupation, from September 1943 to June 1944, while Pius remained publicly silent.
“Now we have specific names and numbers, so, from the historiographical point of view, it’s clearly a great satisfaction,” said Ms Liliana Picciotto who is a historian at the CDEC Foundation, a Jewish research institute in Milan. She was referring to the documents, which were in fact discovered 15 years ago but studied only recently.
“But it doesn’t change the historical judgment” of Pius, “which remains harsh”, she added.
Pope Paul VI in 1964 became the first Pope to visit Israel and in 1965 the church issued the Latin document Nostra Aetate or In Our Times, which deplored antisemitism and said Jews could not collectively be blamed for the death of Jesus.
Pope John Paul II, in 2000, offered a sweeping apology for the mistreatment of Jews by Catholics, though he did not specifically apologise for the role of the church leadership in the gravest crimes, including the Holocaust.
Pope Francis ordered the archives of Pius opened, in 2019, saying, “The church is not afraid of history.”
Initial evidence from those archives painted a picture of Pius as a Pope whose fear of communism, belief that the Axis powers would win the war and desire to protect the church’s interests, as well as avoid alienating millions of German and Nazi-sympathising Catholics, all motivated him to avoid confronting or offending Adolf Hitler. NYTIMES