Posted on 01/21/2005 8:54:47 AM PST by marshmallow
It is the pope's private archive: a thousand years of documents in eighty kilometers of shelves. In 2006, it will be opened up to 1939. Many papers relating to Pius XII's can already be read. An interview with the prefect of the archive
ROMA, January 18, 2005 – A stir has been created in Italy and other countries by a document dating from 1946, from the Vatican nunciature in Paris, headed at that time by Angelo Giuseppe Roncalli, the future John XXIII.
The document – anticipated in an incomplete and poorly interpreted version by historian Alberto Melloni in the December 28, 2004 edition of "Corriere della Sera," and then discovered and published in its entirety by Andrea Tornielli and Matteo Luigi Napolitano in the January 11 edition of "Il Giornale" – carries an instruction from the Vatican approved by Pius XII and transmitted by Roncalli to the French bishops. It warns the Church against returning the Jewish children it sheltered during the war to the Jewish institutions that in 1946 were working in Paris and throughout Europe to transfer these little ones to Palestine in view of the foundation of the new state of Israel. But "it would be another matter," the document clarifies, "if the parents were asking for their children."
The document provided the impetus for the umpteenth firestorm of accusations against Pius XII. Daniel Jonah Goldhagen, a professor at Harvard, accused him of "having given the order to take the [Jewish] children away from their parents," and called for an international jury to try and condemn him.
Other voices were raised in opposition to the beatification of Pius XII, which is now underway.
And others demanded of the Vatican the "courage" to make the "grand gesture" of opening its archives.
The prefect of the Vatican Secret Archives, Sergio Pagano, replied to the latter of these contentions in an exclusive interview with the newspaper of the Italian bishops' conference, "Avvenire," on January 14.
The interview in its entirety follows. It was conducted by Gian Maria Vian, a Church historian and tenured professor of patristic philology at the "La Sapienza" university in Rome.
Q: Have you heard about the latest requests for opening the Vatican archives? What do you think?
A: "I have read in the papers the latest invocations in a long litany that has lasted for decades: the Vatican must open its archives, the truth about Pius XII (as if there had never been any other popes) and his position in the last war must be known. The scholars; indeed, all of Europe – it has been written – have a great 'thirst' to understand this tragedy of the recent past, as if the pacification of the burning conscience of Europe's peoples, at least in terms of the second world war, can take place in an historiographical setting by virtue of the mere opening of the Vatican archives, while so small a place is reserved for Christianity – I do not say for the papacy – in the European constitution. This is a rather strange phenomenon. And I ask myself whether the continual request to open the archives of the Holy See is really motivated by genuine and tranquil historiographical considerations, or by other causes."
Q: But what about the openings themselves?
A: "There is the problem of preparing the archive material, as the most serious scholars know, which in our case is aggravated by the fact that, because of habit and the need for scientific consistency, in carrying out an opening this is not done, as elsewhere, according to periods determined by law, but for the whole pontificate. And in the case of Pius XI and Pius XII – some are already asking for the opening of the pontificates of John XXIII and Paul VI – we are looking at pontificates lasting almost twenty years. To prepare, inventory, number, and label such a great quantity of papers to make them available for consultation involves, as everyone understands, years of work and a significant amount of serious and qualified human effort. Also, the rule of checking documents before releasing them applies to the Vatican archives. The documents' position and classification are verified, the completeness or incompleteness of an envelope or series of writings is confirmed, and procedures are followed. As much as possible, the documentation is made available in its genuine and original nature and cohesion, partly to avoid the emergence of "whodunnits," disappearances, or mysterious withdrawals – mysterious, of course, only for someone who doesn't know how to do serious archive research – of which one reads occasionally.
Q: And all the pressure for openings?
A: "It isn't true that all the historians are pressing for ever more frequent openings of the archives. But some should nonetheless keep in mind what Jacques Freymond wrote in 1981: governments should evaluate the documents to be made available to historians, separating those which for various reasons will not be consultable, while pressing for rapid openings would risk undermining these delicate operations. And the reason for this was given by a great Italian archivist, Elio Lodolini: 'We are against overhasty releases, insofar as these provoke the willful destruction of documents, or their distortion. Where the most absolute and demanding guarantee of secrecy for a reasonable period of time is lacking, the papers' veracity and impartiality are diminished."
Q: Who determines the progressive release of the archive's documents?
A: "The Vatican Secret Archives are called that because they are the private archive of the pontiff. They belong and answer only to him. It follows that only the pope has command of the archives, establishing norms and regulations, and deciding also the progressive openings."
Q: In 1880, Leo XIII opened the archives to scholars. What did this accomplish?
A: "What Leo XIII did during the first months of 1881 (and announced in 1880) was certainly an act of political and scientific foresight; much has been written, and will be written, on this subject. Nevertheless, it must be remembered that this opening concerned only the records then present in the old archive of Paul V (1605-1621), that is, a limited number of 'catchalls' and 'miscellanies,' as valuable and important as these are. There were no updated research tools, only the indices of the 1600's – the great card catalogues and inventories would come later – so many were disappointed. From Leo XIII to today, the Vatican Secret Archives have grown by leaps and bounds, to at least fourteen times their original size. To give an example, initially there were the archives of only four nunciatures (three in old Italian states and one in Warsaw), while today we have more than 75. From about 5 linear kilometers of documentation in 1881, we have passed to more than 80 currently. This is without considering that the archive is not dead, but alive, because we periodically receive documents from curial bodies and the pontifical representatives around the world. Leaving aside the card catalogues and indices, the archive has increased in the last six years by more than 10,000 archive units. And each unit contains 500 pages on average: a total of 5 million sheets; that is, 10 million pages to look through and put in order."
Q: And the other popes?
A: "The successors of Leo XIII – who opened the Vatican archive up to 1815, the year of the congress of Vienna – followed his path. In 1924, Pius XI opened the documents up until 1846 (the year of Gregory XVI's death); Pius XII prepared the opening of Pius IX (1846-1878), carried out in 1966 under Paul VI. And John Paul II has surpassed all in opening the archive: in 1978, he opened the pontificate of Leo XIII (1878-1903) and in 1985, that of Pius X (1903-1914) and Benedict XV (1914-1922). And in the first months of 2006, the pontificate of Pius XI (1922-1939) will be opened."
Q: How do you see the Vatican Secret Archives in comparison with other archives?
A: "I would say they are at an excellent point, because according to various laws one proceeds by different periods of opening, according to the type of document. Generally, one begins from a minimum of 50 years, moving backward, up to a maximum of 100 years for the most delicate or reserved documents. Italy opens its archives relating to external or internal politics 50 years after their date, but those reserved relative to private or personal situations, or the documents from criminal trials, after 70 years. Within a year the Vatican archives will be open up to 1939. The next opening, that of the pontificate of Pius XII, will bring us to 1958. Limited personnel and the length of the work do not permit one to think Pius XII's documents will be opened soon. There is no fear that these documents, nor any of the others already open, will bring about historiographical reversals, exonerations, or condemnations (the historians do not expect this either). I add that, in order to make possible the opening of the pontificate of Pius XI within one year, a group of twenty archivists and collaborators has been working for about four years, and the Holy See has for this reason added eleven positions to the archive's staff. Once the pontificate of Pius XI has been opened, the next step will be to prepare that of Pius XII."
Q: Have there been partial openings for the pontificate of Pius XII?
A: "For several months, the records of the 'Vatican Information Office for prisoners of war,’ which included documents from 1939 to 1947, has been open. So it goes well beyond the limit of 1922. This is in fact a bank of records that is homogeneous and in a certain way disconnected from the others. Seven persons worked for three years to put in order the more than 2,500 boxes that contain the records, and to transfer the card catalogue (about 3 million entries) onto DVD. So these records have been open since May 2004, but up until today only ten researchers in all of Europe have taken advantage of it. Sometimes there is an impression that certain scholars, whose voices are perhaps amplified too much by the press, clamor for the opening of the Vatican archives almost as though to enter into a secret fortress by overcoming imaginary resistance; but when the door is open and the documents are available, those who seemed to be at the gates don't show up, or make almost a touristic visit. Also, for more than a year the archives of the nunciatures of Monaco and Berlin have been opened up to 1939; after some initial traffic from a modest number of researchers, just a few of the most serious and methodical have remained. Most of the curiosity seekers have dispersed. This is strange. It is as if, unable to provide confirmation for preformulated but undocumentable theories, the archives could be forgotten. John Cornwell, for example, who has judged Pius XII very harshly, has never set foot in the Vatican Secret Archives (if for nothing else than to study the period of nuncio Pacelli); I could say the same about Italian historians as well."
Q: Why does it take so much time to move forward to the opening of a pope's documents?
A: "To organize, verify, inventory, and number the papers. The Vatican archive, in fact, receives documents from the various dicasteries of the Roman curia, in the order and material organization they had originally. But in the archive, in view of the documents' release, a comparison must be made between the documentation – contained in envelopes, folders, bundles, volumes, and other bindings – and the related card catalogues or contextually compiled indices. Thus the material must be prepared, sometimes cleaned, and divided into manageable bundles; in this phase, verification is obtained that procedures are being followed and that the titles correspond with the records. The next phase is the collation, or organization into envelopes, of the papers, and this entails numbering them. All these operations, carried out for thousands and thousands of items, explains why the work goes on for years. To this it must be added that some archives of pontifical representatives, because of historical vicissitudes, arrive in complete disorder. This is the case, for example, of the representatives in countries occupied during wartime (Poland, Latvia, Lithuania, Estonia) or of those areas of central and eastern Europe which certainly did not have an easy life during the cold war: the pope's representatives were harried by the communist governments from one day to the next and forced to flee, carrying the papers from their archives heaped together as well as possible in their luggage (as in Bulgaria, Czechoslovakia, Yugoslavia, Romania, and other countries). All this material must be patiently reviewed, ordered, and inventoried. No scholar, in fact, could carry out studies on these documents without this preliminary work."
Q: But how big are the Vatican Secret Archives?
A: "We have more than 80 linear kilometers of documentation – just recently provisions were made for measuring the individual shelves – which goes from the 11th century (documents before this are rare) until the extremely brief pontificate of John Paul I in 1978. In all, there are about 40,000 parchments, noteworthy documentation from the 12th-14th century, more consistent records from the 15th-18th century, and then the immense heap of documentation from the 19th and 20th centuries. The total is over two million items."
Q: Which documents are studied most today?
A: "With no offense to contemporary historians, the majority of the scholars who visit the archive are concerned with medieval and modern history. And this is verified by important series of publications from various European countries (Germany, France, Austria, Italy, Spain, Poland, Belgium, Switzerland, Portugal, Holland, Norway, Finland, Sweden, Ireland, Denmark, Croatia, Hungary, the Czech Republic, Slovakia, and others). These scholars also have the right to enjoy instruments adapted to their research, which makes it necessary that a certain number of officials work for years on medieval and modern documents. Consider that some diplomatic records from the 14th-16th centuries still do not have an inventory."
Q: How many scholars frequent the archive?
A: "From the 27 scholars admitted in 1882, immediately after the opening Leo XIII had wanted, the number grew to 400-500 scholars yearly in the period 1958-1967; in the last three decades of the 1900's this reached an average of 1300 scholars per year, with 40-50 daily visits and peaks of 60-80 during some months. The highest point came in 1999, when the number of researchers reached 1444."
Q: Is there privileged access?
A: "We must clarify this point again. I can attest in good conscience that since I have been prefect, that is, since 1997 – but this naturally held true even before – no privilege, regard, or favoritism has been reserved to any scholar, whether ecclesiastic or lay: all are subject to the same rules. No one can ever say he had any special permission from me (besides, this would have to come from the Secretariat of State). Only the postulators for the causes of saints, as is obvious, have permission to consult documents from the sealed period, having obtained permission from the Secretariat of State, and must maintain secrecy on the documents granted to them, both during the canonical process and after."
Q: What news will the opening of the pontificate of Pius XI bring?
A: "The entire pontificate of Pius XI (1922-1939) will be opened during the first months of 2006, and with it a vast field of historical inquiry. Among the ruins of the first world war and the threat of the second, pope Ratti had to witness the coming to power of four dictators (Mussolini, Hitler, Stalin, and Franco), the great crisis of 1929, the colonial wars, the wars of Mexico and Spain, the promulgation of terrible racial laws in Germany and Italy, and the harbingers of the second world war. Pius XI resolved the Roman question with the Lateran Pacts (1929), protected and expanded Catholic Action, celebrated the jubilee of 1925 and the extraordinary one of 1933-1934, designed a vast missionary project that reached all the way to China, turned his attention to the East (with special regard for Russia), looked at science from a new perspective, and established diplomatic relations between the Holy See and various countries of the world. All this, and much more, is reflected in the documents of his pontificate, which will be submitted openly to the scrutiny of scholars."
Q: And Pius XII?
A: "Already in 2002 it was officially communicated that after the opening of the pontificate of Pius XI work will begin to make available, as the first priority, the Vatican-German documentation sources relative to the pontificate of Pius XII (1939-1958), which were published in part at the behest of Pius VI in the 12 volumes (1965-1981) of the 'Actes et documents du Saint-Siège relatifs à la seconde guerre mondiale.' But as I said before, all of the records of the 'Vatican Information Office for prisoners of war,' which has documents from 1939 to 1947, are already open."
But, but,... I want it on the internet, and I want it NOW!!!
Ping
Critical insight, one never considered by the uninformed.
I haven't read this yet and I don't anything about the 'secret archives' but as far as I know Jesus never hid any part of His life.
Hmm. And I've always heard those years in Egypt referred to as just that, hidden. ;-)
Think of these like government documents (of any government). Every government has need to classify documents they produce in different categories, including "secret". Most companies keep personnel documents private, etc.
We're not talking Biblical parchments here.
10 And his disciples came and said to him: Why speakest thou to them in parables?
11 Who answered and said to them: Because to you it is given to know the mysteries of the kingdom of heaven: but to them it is not given.
12 For he that hath, to him shall be given, and he shall abound: but he that hath not, from him shall be taken away that also which he hath.
13 Therefore do I speak to them in parables: because seeing they see not, and hearing they hear not, neither do they understand.
I wonder if we'll ever be able to find out the truth as to why Anabale Bugnini was disgraced.
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