On Easter Sunday, Pope Francis imparted the Easter blessing on thousands of faithful in St Peter’s Square. One day later, on April 21, the morning of Easter Monday, the 266th head of the Catholic Church died after suffering a stroke. Church historian Prof. Dr. Hubert Wolf has been researching the Catholic Church based on the documents kept in the Vatican archives for 40 years. The Vatican expert has closely followed the Argentinean’s twelve-year pontificate and draws mixed conclusions.
The theologian Lorena König will write her dissertation at the Cluster of Excellence on Romania’s special position, analyzing the processes that protected numerous Jews who converted to the Catholic faith from being deported to an extermination camp. The three-year position is funded by the Cluster of Excellence Religion and Politics at the University of Münster.
Yesterday, June 23, 2022, presumably the Vatican’s most explosive collection of sources was published online: the “Ebrei” series containing thousands of petitions addressed to Pope Pius XII by persecuted Jewish people was put online by the Historical Archives of the Secretariat of State, one of the most important archives of the Catholic Church – a sensation. In an interview, Hubert Wolf explains what this means for him and his team’s project “Asking the Pope for Help”, and why thus some of the most unbending principles of the Vatican’s archival policy were abandoned.
