The leader of the Society of Jesus has authorized the opening of private documents that could reveal how Pope Pius XII helped to rescue European Jews from the Holocaust.Father Adolfo Nicolas, the superior general of the Jesuits, is allowing historians to examine, catalog and digitally record evidence collected by U.S. Jesuit Father Robert Graham, who until his death in 1997 was widely considered the Vatican's leading expert on the role of the wartime pontiff.
Father Graham's private collection comprises more than 25,000 pages of testimony and documents specifically dealing with the actions of the pope and the Vatican in confronting Nazism and helping the Jewish people during World War II.
The U.S.-based Pave the Way Foundation, working with the Jesuits in Rome, was granted exclusive access to the documents after Father Nicolas was approached by Jesuit Father Peter Gumpel, the relator, or chief investigator, of Pope Pius' sainthood cause.
Researchers intend to publicize the most significant discoveries by posting them on the Internet. They expect to begin their digitization work in the summer and complete it within a month.
One source familiar with the project said the collection included some "very promising" documents. However, the source said that once the documents are digitized they need to be studied and evaluated.
"How to match them up and certify and corroborate everything in there -- that's the important task ahead," the source said.
Gary Krupp, the Jewish president of the Pave the Way Foundation, which is committed to furthering peace by working to remove nontheological obstacles between religions, said in an April 18 interview that he was "very, very excited" about the project.
He said the Father Graham collection contained photocopies of documents sealed in the Vatican Secret Archives that would not otherwise be made public until 2013 at the earliest.
"These contain many of the original documents never before publicized which will now be publicized," Krupp said during a visit to London.
"The significance of it is that it's as though the Vatican archives have opened as of today," he added.
He said that one possible result of the project would be that resistance by some Jews to the possible beatification of Pope Pius would diminish as evidence of his efforts to save lives was made public, though the evidence would not influence the progress of the cause itself.
The digitization of the collection also would relieve pressure on Pope Benedict XVI to open the wartime archives to historians who were still undecided about the role of Pope Pius, Krupp said.
Pope Benedict has authorized the opening of the Vatican archives up to 1939, but it will take at least four more years before the wartime archives can be cataloged.
Father Graham emerged as one of the most prominent defenders of Pope Pius after 1964, when Pope Paul VI appointed the Jesuit to a commission to rebut allegations made by Rolf Hochhuth, a German, in his 1963 play, "The Deputy." Hochhuth alleged that the wartime pope was a self-interested coward who was silent and inactive during the Holocaust.
Father Graham joined three other Jesuit historians in scouring Vatican archives for evidence to show the truth about the pope's conduct.
The historians published a total of 12 volumes of evidence in the 16 years up to 1981 under the title "Acts and Documents of the Holy See Relating to the Second World War."
Although the volumes "decisively established the falsehood of Hochhuth's specific allegations," according to Irish historian Eamon Duffy, the claims continued to inspire further attacks on the reputation of Pope Pius, a man who had previously been credited by Israeli diplomat Pinchas Lapide with helping to save as many as 850,000 Jewish lives.
Father Gumpel told CNS in an April 20 telephone interview from Rome that Father Graham continued to study Pope Pius and write about him long after the work of the commission had come to an end.
When Father Graham fell ill in 1996 he left Rome to return to California, taking with him his vast personal archives.
Father Gumpel said that the collection was sent back to the Jesuits in Rome two years ago as a result of a misunderstanding.
He said he had written to the California province of the Society of Jesus requesting just two documents, but a chest containing the private archives of Father Graham was shipped to him instead, along with a bill for $1,800.
"There is an enormous mass of documents which are in total disorder," he said. "I can't tell you exactly what is in there. This will be found out in the summer."
He added: "I expect to find in this material some of his own manuscripts ... published or not published."
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