Vatikanas ir nacių okupacija Lietuvoje: informacijos, interakcijos, reakcijos

ENBased on the documents from the Vatican archives, which were opened to scholars a few years ago, and reflecting on the period of the pontificate of Pope Pius XII, the article asks: was the communication between the Holy See and the Lithuanian ecclesiastical circles during the period of the Nazi occupation effective? What information about the extermination of the Jews in Lithuania reached the Vatican and what reactions did it provoke there? Why was the Holy See not always satisfied with the pastoral activity of the Lithuanian bishops and their attitude under the Nazi occupation? The analysis of archival documents confirmed that neither side managed to restore the more or less normal chain of ecclesiastical communication between Lithuania and Rome that had been broken in spring of 1941. Information about the situation in Lithuania during the Nazi occupation reached the Vatican irregularly, usually with considerable delays, often from anonymous sources of uncertain origin, and there was no way of verifying them. However, even in these scraps of information coming from Lithuania, the catastrophe that had befallen the Jews here and its overall extent were by no means glossed over. On the other hand, unlike in other parts of Europe, the Holy See was completely powerless to do anything to help the specific individuals who were in mortal peril. Their tragic stories rarely fed into the stream of pleas for help from elsewhere in Europe, and in this case the Nazis succeeded to some extent in blocking one of the channels of the earliest testimonies. As a result, the Vatican seemed to be aware that something terrible was happening in the East, but that knowledge, at least in the case of Lithuania, was not filled with the stories of specific people, and knowledge without them is always less impactful emotionally.Of course, the data based on the authority of the bishops would have had the greatest impact, but all that came out of Lithuania were fake letters from the bishops on the subject, which could not be accepted for granted. The available material suggests that the Holy See was very much out of touch with the bishops and the ecclesiastical matters of the country to reasonably evaluate their ongoing activities. The previous experience of dealing with them did not provide a basis for one hundred per cent confidence in their ability to behave appropriately under the conditions of destructive war and severe oppression. Some reports reaching Rome during the Second World War did not dispel such fears but only reinforced them. On the other hand, the realisation that these were only scraps, which do not give a complete picture, and a certain amount of empathy for the bishops who found themselves in an unenviable situation, made to the Holy See refrain itself from a harsher criticism of their actions.