Scholars to study Vatican war archives

Christian Century, Dec 15, 1999

The Vatican and an international committee of Jewish leaders said November 23 that six Catholic and Jewish scholars have been chosen to study Vatican archive documents in an attempt to resolve the controversy over whether Pope Pius XII could have done more to avert the Holocaust. Cardinal Edward Cassidy, president of the Vatican Commission for Religious Relations with the Jews, and Seymour D. Reich, chairman of the International Jewish Committee on Interreligious Consultations (IJCIC), made the announcement.

The Vatican said the scholars will prepare a joint report on their "findings and conclusions" on one of the most contentious issues in Catholic-Jewish relations. It gave no indication of when the report would be issued. The Catholic scholars are Eva Fleischner, professor emeritus of Montclair (New Jersey) State University; Gerald P. Fogarty, a Jesuit and a University of Virginia religious studies professor; and F. John Morley, a Holocaust scholar at Seton Hall University in New Jersey. The Jewish scholars are Michael R. Marrus, history professor and dean of the School of Graduate Studies at the University of Toronto; Bernard Suchecky, research director at the Free University of Brussels; and Robert S. Wistrich, Jewish studies professor at the Hebrew University in Jerusalem.

An announcement said that Cassidy and Reich "expressed the hope that any questions and differences that may exist can be resolved through this joint review approach," which they called "unusual if not unprecedented." The appointments come at a time when the proposed beatification of Pius XII and the publication of the highly critical book Hitler's Pope, by John Cornwell, have focused renewed attention on the pope's wartime record. --RNS