Vatican not impressed with threat to sue over access to archives

Published: 2005-01-28

VATICAN CITY (CNS) -- A Jewish group's recent threat to sue for access to church archives left Vatican officials unimpressed. "It doesn't make much sense, if you know how archives function. We certainly aren't going to be intimidated," said one church expert. Rabbi Shmuel Herzfeld, vice president of the Coalition for Jewish Concerns, said in Washington Jan. 27 that his group would take legal action unless the Vatican Secret Archives were opened within a week. The group believes the material could identify Jewish children baptized as Catholics during World War II. There are a couple of reasons why such demands for documents are not taken very seriously at the Vatican. For one thing, delayed opening of archival materials -- typically from 50 to 100 years -- is a practice adopted by states all over the world, for technical reasons and to protect archives from contemporary political pressures. Second, the Vatican has made extraordinary efforts to open some document sections in advance in recent years -- only to find that very few scholars bother to examine the material.

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