Unsealing of Vatican archives will finally reveal truth about ‘Hitler’s pope’ (The Guardian) 

New light will be shed on one of the most controversial periods of Vatican history on Monday when the archives on Pope Pius XII – accused by critics of being a Nazi sympathiser – are unsealed.

A year after Pope Francis announced the move, saying “the church isn’t afraid of history”, the documents from Pius XII’s papacy, which began in 1939 on the brink of the second world war and ended in 1958, will be opened, initially to a small number of scholars.

Critics of Pius XII have accused him of remaining silent during the Holocaust, never publicly condemning the persecution and genocide of Jews and others. His defenders say that he quietly encouraged convents and other Catholic institutions to hide thousands of Jews, and that public criticism of the Nazis would have risked the lives of priests and nuns.    

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