[CTRL] Is The Vatican Hiding The Pius Papers?

[William Shannon]

http://www.theage.com.au/breaking/2001/07/24/FFXWK3AKIPC.html Jewish-Catholic panel researching Holocaust suspends work By Nicole Winfield Source: AAP| Published: Tuesday July 24, 9:06 AM VATICAN CITY, July 23 AP - A panel of Jewish and Catholic historians investigating the Vatican's role in the Holocaust today suspended its work, hampered by a lack of access to the Vatican's World War II-era archives. The historians, who were appointed by the Vatican and a Jewish group to examine Pope Pius XII's wartime actions, released a preliminary report in October. In it, they described a pope bent on fruitless diplomacy as reports of atrocities poured into the Vatican. The historians said at the time that questions still needed to be answered before they could issued a final report. They expressed hope that the Vatican would open up the archives of the Holy See's correspondences to fill in the gaps from 11 wartime volumes provided by the Vatican. The volumes, in many cases, left out the Vatican's responses to reports of atrocities, members said. Pius, who is being considered for beatification, is accused by many Jews of having failed to speak out against the Holocaust. In a letter to the group June 21, Cardinal Walter Kasper, who heads the Vatican's office for religious relations, offered to let the panel talk to the Vatican scholar on Pius, who is leading the cause for his beatification, and suggested archives elsewhere could help answer some of their questions. But he said the Vatican's archives dating after 1923 were not accessible for “technical reasons.” Boxes and boxes of documents after 1923 merely had not been catalogued and bound for release, said Eugene Fisher, a panel coordinator and top ecumenical official at the National Conference of Catholic Bishops in Washington. The Vatican, he said, only has two archivists cataloguing the documents, and has been releasing them slowly, by pontificate, as they become ready. “It's not a question of whether the documents will be released,” he said. “It's all a matter of time.” However, the Jewish coordinator of the group, Seymour Reich, chairman of the International Jewish Committee for Interreligious Consultations, said he wasn't hopeful that the documents would be made available. “We understand that Cardinal Kasper does not have the keys to the archives. That rests with the secretary of state,” Reich said. “But what's deeply disappointing to me and what is a let down is the failure on the part of the Vatican to furnish a positive reply to a team of scholars, one half of whom were appointed by them.” Vatican officials were not available for comment today. A Catholic member of the panel, Reverend Gerald Fogarty, said he doubted the Vatican was withholding incriminating information that might slow Pius' beatification. “I certainly think that the opening of the archives would clarify many positions, but ... I doubt there is a smoking gun,” said Fogarty, a professor of church history and theology at the University of Virginia. In their letter to Kasper, the five team members said that they couldn't put out a final report of historical credibility without access to the archival material. They acknowledged that they had agreed to the project without a Vatican pledge to open the archives, but said they had done so in the hopes that in the process of research the documents would become available.