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| Pope Pius XII |
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| Fr. Peter Gumpel, S.J. |
The American diplomatic cables show a long and increasingly futile effort on behalf of the embassy to mediate between the Vatican archivists and outside historians, bedevilled by mutual mistrust. The story starts in 2001, when the first attempt to negotiate a solution had already broken down. Father Peter Gumpel, a German Jesuit priest and admirer of Pius XII, who was keeper of the archives, threatened to sue a journalist who suggested that he or his family had been Nazis, the cables show. "Gumpel also expressed concern about references in the media and in other comments to him as the 'German Jesuit'. Gumpel [said] his family had been victims of Nazi persecution and several had been killed by the Nazis. He himself had to flee Nazi Germany as a refugee, first to France and then later to Holland. He recalled that at one point a reporter had planned to print an assertion that Gumpel was a Nazi himself – something Gumpel said was libellous, and which he was more than willing to go to court to fight."
Link (here) to read the full UK Guardian story.
1 comment:
My experience has been that events are far more complex than we typically understand.
So we simplistically categorize a political or social event as "good" or "bad” because we don't appreciate this complexity.
An analogy might be a lesson with a test that you are taking with the option of re-taking. A complex event has elements of the test for some, elements of re-taking for others, elements of study for others, and elements of consequences for others. So, while God may have preferred that the test wasn't needed, and that many “innocents” weren’t caught in the lesson sequence, that is not really an option when you consider the cost of lessons unlearned.
This is yet another reason why the Church and Jesuits should be focused on teaching the values themselves, rather than getting involved in political or social events that they cannot understand.
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