Yet another Jewish historian -- Anna Foa-- has reached a similar conclusion. She's an historian who's been combing through the Vatican "secret archives" with all of Pius XII's papers, which Pope Francis is due to release soon. The assumption has been that the papers would reveal malfeasance and that's why the Vatican kept them private, but now that they are organized and ready for public consumption, the opposite has proved true:
This is now being properly researched by historians like Dr Foa, who insists that, as a result, we can be sure that the “more recent image of the aid given to Jews by the Church arises not from pro-Catholic ideological positions, but above all from thorough research into the lives of Jews during the occupation, from the reconstruction of the stories of families or individuals. From field work, in short.”Drawing on reporting from Sandro Magister, the Catholic Herald notes:
as Anna Foa unambiguously makes clear, this research “erases (my emphasis) the image proposed in the 1960s of a Pope Pius XII indifferent to the fate of Jews or even an accomplice of the Nazis.”The piece reiterates the whole sorry episode of how grateful contemporaneous Jews were for Pius' help, the malicious lie and how it spread, how the lie hardened -- and then, bit by bit, how it is unraveling as Jewish historians disprove it. I was interested to read that even Yad Vashem has recently adjusted its account of Vatican neutrality during the war in a more pro-Vatican direction.
RTWT and follow the links.