The Spurious Effort to Make Pope Pius XII a Villain – Public Discourse

The legacy of Pius XII, the pope at the helm of the Catholic Church during World War II, has been surrounded by controversy for decades. After the war, his leadership record became embroiled in debate: were his efforts to aid Holocaust victims sufficient? Or did he maintain holy silence about the wickedness perpetrated by the Nazis? The controversy first drew significant attention in the 1960s, when the Kremlin put its anti-Christian disinformation campaign into full gear, focusing on the recently deceased pope and supposedly cataloguing his failings during the Second World War.

To get to the truth, Pius XII s successor, Pope Paul VI, tasked four Jesuit priests with culling through Vatican archives to find documents focusing on the Holy See and the war. They put together an eleven-volume set of books, known as the Actes et Documents du Saint Siège relatifs à la Seconde Guerre Mondiale ( Actes et Documents ).

Unfortunately, that effort failed to quell the debate, so in 2020 the Vatican opened previously sealed archives containing about sixteen million pages of primary documents, in the hope of resolving unanswered questions. I obtained the credentials, permissions, and funding to work in Rome that summer of 2020, but Covid-19 closed the archives and delayed my research plans.

Brown University s David Kertzer s timing was better. He and his team got in early, for just a short time prior to the closing, and he returned as soon as it was possible after the reopening. This archival research eventually produced his new book, The Pope at War: The Secret History of Pius XII, Mussolini, and Hitler.

Unfortunately, Kertzer s book is agenda-driven and makes several factual errors. The author fails to take stock of recent scholarly contributions on Pius s record and ends up misrepresenting or entirely omitting key information.

via www.thepublicdiscourse.com

It must be fun to be an historian. Not very honest though.