The Vatican Will Unseal Records About Holocaust-Era Pope Pius XII. Here's What We Already Know About His Controversial Legacy

On the other hand, those who say Pius XII privately helped save Jews in other ways hope the new batch of unsealed documents will contain more evidence of this kind, especially anything that could bolster his case for sainthood.“The church is not afraid of history,” Pope Francis said on Monday, while acknowledging that Pope Pius XII’s legacy includes “moments of grave difficulties, tormented decisions of human and Christian prudence, that to some could appear as reticence.” Before he became Pius XII, the Pope in question was Eugenio Pacelli, son of a Vatican lawyer. Taylor, Franklin Roosevelt’s personal representative to the Vatican, gave the Holy See evidence of the anti-Jewish campaign, and the U.S. Minister to Switzerland warned the Vatican that failure to condemn these atrocities “is undermining faith both in the church and in the Holy Father himself.” Baron Ernst von Weizsaecker, who claimed that he tried to protect the Pope from Hitler’s wrath while serving as German envoy to the Holy See, cabled his Foreign Ministry superiors: “The Pope has not allowed himself to be forced into any demonstrative utterances against the deportation of the Jews.”[German Jesuit Robert Leiber, Pius XII’s secretary,] admits that Pius “found it difficult” to speak out clearly against the murders, but adds, “This was providential. “If anything,” TIME reported, the books, specifically a volume on the Vatican’s efforts to help Jews in eastern Europe, only “heightened the debate rather than resolved it.”In the 1999 book Hitler’s Pope, British journalist John Cornwell argued that Pope Pius XII’s career as a diplomat helps explain why he didn’t openly condemn the Nazi persecution of Jews. Pope Francis has said that Pope Pius XII has to be evaluated in the context of the time in which he was serving, when it was arguably “better for him not to speak so that more Jews would not be killed.” Kertzer says that’s “the main narrative for his defenders,” but that the flip side is that a massive number of European Jews were already being killed, and by people who were theoretically Christian.