Madam, – Readers of The Irish Timesmay well recall a lengthy correspondence late last year concerning the wartime role of Pope Pius XII.
Rather fewer of your readers, however, will have seen the Jewish Chronicle of February 26th, in which Simon Caldwell writes about recently released documents from the Vatican archives which tend to vindicate those of your correspondents who took a more positive view of the pontiff’s actions in that period.
The documents in question have been put on the internet by Pave the Way, a largely Jewish organisation commissioned by Vad Yashem, the Holocaust remembrance authority, to investigate the subject of Pius XII and the Jewish people of Europe.
They include some which show that Pius XII asked religious houses and churches to shield Jews from the Gestapo; others relating to a request to the government of Brazil to receive 3,000 Jews; and a request to the government of the Dominican Republic to provide visas for 11,000 Jews.
Some of the papers relate to the Pope’s efforts to save the Jews of Rome in October 1943 (nearly 85 per cent were rescued before the occupying German forces could seize them).
Gary Krupp of “Pave the Way” said: “It is time to recognise Pius XII for what he really did rather than for what he did not say. . . From what I have seen this [Pius XII] is the greatest hero of World War II without question”. – Yours, etc,