John Cornwell, a leading Church historian wonders whether the Vatican’s decision to open the sealed documents on Pius XII will settle a 60-year debate over whether he was ‘a saint or a sinner’

A leading Church historian wonders whether the Vatican’s decision to open the sealed documents on Pius XII will settle a 60-year debate over whether he was ‘a saint or a sinner’

The decision to open the sealed archive on Pius XII’s (Eugenio Pacelli) papacy (2 March 1939 to 9 October 1958) seems at first sight momentous. Ever since Rolf Hochhuth’s 1963 play, The Deputy, the reputation of the wartime pope has been a focus of heated dispute: now, at last, perhaps, the long-running quarrel – was Pius a saint or a sinner? – is to be settled.

Or is it? Hochhuth depicted Pacelli implausibly, most Catholics thought, as a ruthless cynic, more interested in the Vatican’s stock-holdings than in the fate of the Jews. The play was fiction. So, on the basis of the Scholastic tag – what is asserted without proof can be denied without proof – its account was dismissed by serious historians, and naturally out of hand by the Holy See. And yet, the allegations stung, especially those who saw Pius XII as a saintly icon of conservative Catholicism. A debate had been sparked that still smoulders, 60 years later. The central accusation is undeniable: that through the course of the war, even after he had been informed of the Final Solution policy in the summer of 1942, Pius neither condemned Hitler and the Nazis by name nor mentioned the victims – the Jews – by name.

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