On Friday, Pope Francis
is to become the third Roman Catholic pope to visit Auschwitz. John
Paul II was the first Polish pope in the church’s 2,000-year history.
Auschwitz is less than an hour from where he was born, and his 1979
visit was poignant. Every bit as dramatic was the 2006 visit by the German-born Benedict XVI who had at 14 been a member of the Hitler Youth.
But
Francis’ visit could be the most significant ever if he uses the
symbolic backdrop to break with the policies of six predecessors over 70
years and order the release of the Vatican’s sealed Holocaust-era archives.
The
debate over the church’s secret wartime files is not new. The Vatican
is the only country in Europe that refuses to open all of its World War II
archives to independent historians and researchers. The issue is more
than simply an academic debate over the appropriate rules for public
disclosure of historically significant documents. The church’s files are
thought to contain important information about the Holocaust in
Nazi-occupied Eastern Europe. The Vatican had eyes and ears in the
killing fields: tens of thousands of parish priests who sent letters and
reports to their bishops, who in turn forwarded them to the secretary
of state in Vatican City. One of the monsignors in charge of reviewing
those thousands of reports was Giovanni Battista Montini, later Pope Paul VI.
It
is little wonder that historians are eager to study the Vatican’s
Holocaust-era papers. The accounts by the parish priests may help answer
lingering questions of when and what the Vatican knew about the Nazi
murder machinery. The files are likely to shed light on whether the
wartime pope, Pius XII,
could have done more to try to stop the Holocaust. Also buried inside
the secret archives are the early records of the scandal-ridden Vatican
Bank, created during World War II. Those documents could resolve
conclusively how much business the Vatican did with the Third Reich, as
well as the extent of insurance company investments that yielded
enormous profits from life insurance policies of Jews sent to Auschwitz,
which I uncovered in my own reporting.
And
finally, the church’s secret files might resolve the debate over
whether several postwar refugee-smuggling networks that were run from
Rome separately by an Austrian bishop, a German priest and a Croatian
priest — and through which Nazi criminals escaped — were freelance
operations, or instead parts of a program that had the pope’s blessing.
The
church has since the 1960s released some wartime files, while refusing
unfettered access by historians. In the 1990s, the administration of
President Bill Clinton ordered federal agencies to release
relevant Holocaust files, and also spearheaded an effort that persuaded
several dozen other nations to do the same. The Vatican was an outlier.
The
2013 election of Pope Francis held out the promise for a change in the
church’s longstanding policy of secrecy. While still the archbishop of
Buenos Aires, he had been asked about the dispute over the Holocaust-era
files. The Vatican, he answered, “should open them and clarify
everything.” Many Vaticanologists thought he would use a 2014 visit to
Israel to free the files. But Francis did not say anything publicly
about the papers on that visit.
Francis last discussed the issue in a November 2014 interview with the Israeli newspaper Yediot Ahronot. The
pope asked: “Did Pius XII remain silent in the face of the
extermination of the Jews? Did he say all he should have said? We will
have to open the archives to know exactly what happened.” According to
Francis: “There is an agreement between the Vatican and Italy from 1929
that prevents us from opening the archives to researchers at this point
in time. But because of the time that has passed since World War II, I
see no problem with opening the archives the moment we sort out the
legal and bureaucratic matters.”
The 1929 agreement Francis cited is the Lateran Pacts
between the Vatican and Benito Mussolini’s Fascist Italy. It gave the
church full sovereignty over Vatican City. The agreement declared that
the pope was not only the equivalent of a secular monarch but also
endowed with divine rights. Instead of preventing the church from
releasing its archives, as Francis suggested, the agreement invests the
Vatican with inviolable powers to set its own policies independent of
any interference from Italy. All that is required to open the
long-sealed archives is a papal decree.
Jewish
advocacy groups, human rights organizations and concentration camp
survivors hope that Francis’ commitment to reform will trump the desire
of Vatican traditionalists to keep the documents buried forever. On the
very grounds where the Nazis murdered more than a million victims, most
of them Jews, Pope Francis can do much more than have a photo
opportunity and offer a generic condemnation of the depths of human
depravity. By freeing the Vatican’s Holocaust-era files he will pay a
singular and lasting tribute to the dead. NY Times
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