Pope Francis has announced an unprecedented revealing of the secret documents, The Telegraph reported on Tuesday. The secret archives of ‘Hiter’s Pope’ will be opened for public. Pope Pius XII’s secrets will be useful for both Jewish groups and historians who accuse the pontiff of failing to speak out against the Holocaust during World War Two.
Pope Pius XII is known as ‘Hitler’s pope’ among Catholics, that pontiff’s era was rather controversial but the opening of the secret documents of his ruling will be extremely useful for historians. Pope Francis is granting access to another layer of Roman Catholic history. The experts have for decades been calling on the Vatican to let scholars study the archives, in order to determine whether Pius XII failed to use his moral authority to oppose the massive murdering of Jews.
After harsh criticism of ‘sexual abuse’ summit, the pontiff decided to give the historians an opportunity to draw their own conclusion regarding Pope Pius’s position during Nazi times. Pope Francis declared that “the Church is not afraid of history” and announced the opening of the archive on March 2 next year to mark the 81st anniversary of the election of Pius XII in 1939.
The pontiff thanked archive historians for having worked, since 2006, to catalogue and organise the huge body of documentation relating to Pius’s papacy, from 1939 to his death in 1958. Mr Cornwell, the author of Hitler’s Pope, said he could not wait for the archives to be revealed.
“It should be really interesting. It might show that he did fantastic things to help the Jews. Or it might shed light on whether he had anything to do with the Nazi rat-run, when some Catholics helped Nazis escape to South America at the end of the war,” the historian said.
