Vatican opens secret archive
2006-09-18 22:23
Vatican City - The Vatican on Monday allowed access for the first time to millions of diplomatic letters, private correspondence and other documents in its secret archives spanning the 1922-1939 papacy of Pius XI.
These could provide insight into the degree to which the Holy See was concerned by the growing persecution of Jews in Europe.
For years, the Vatican has struggled to defend Pius's successor - the wartime Pope Pius XII, who had also served as Pius XI's secretary of state - against claims he did not do enough to save Jews from the Holocaust.
Researchers said it could take months or years to study the contents of about 30 000 bundles of documentation from a period when fascism, Nazism, Communism and nationalism clashed across the European continent.
'Bit of chaos'
Archives officials said that by late morning 50 researchers had shown their credentials to gain admittance, although some of the scholars were interested in consulting material on earlier papacies.
"There was a bit of chaos" at the archives, said Alessandro Visani, a researcher in the contemporary history at Rome's Sapienza University who, like many others, was hoping for an initial idea of what was in the files.
"I wanted to look at something, but someone was already consulting it," said Visani, whose research includes the attitudes of church hierarchy toward the 1938 anti-Jewish laws of Italian fascist dictator Benito Mussolini.
Files 'very rich'
The material in the files "is very rich", the Italian news agency Apcom quoted another Sapienza researcher, Emma Fattorini, as saying as she left the archives.
One tantalising question revolves around an encyclical Pius XI commissioned to denounce racism and the violent nationalism of Germany.
But he died before releasing it and it has never been made public.
It was never published "in part because of his death and in part because it was judged to be inopportune politically", said Visani.
Visani said he was hoping the files would yield insight into the frank views prelates privately held about Mussolini's racial laws against Italy's tiny Jewish community.
- AP