 [ The Vatican ] still refuses to open all its files from the period — which seems to me to be a conclusive admission of guilt — but Katz has winkled various papers out of God 's business address on earth to add to the stash of new information he has uncovered in America in the archives of the Office of Strategic Services . From this we learn that , although Pius 's defenders still say that he paid a golden ransom in a vain effort to save Rome 's Jews from transportation to the death camps , the most he did was indicate a willingness to chip in if the Jews could not raise the sum demanded . He also shows that no individual Jews were spared , as is often claimed , after Pius personally intervened with the Nazis . Moreover , Katz reveals that those who did escape the Nazi round @-@ up and found sanctuary in church buildings in Rome did so in the face of explicit opposition from the Vatican . The real heroes and heroines were the priests and nuns who refused to bow to Pius 's officials and hand over the desperate people whom they were hiding . The main problem with writing about Pius 's wartime is that in effect , he did nothing . Facing the murders of six million people , he remained silent . As Jews were taken away from the ghetto that sat right alongside St Peter 's , he may have agonised , but he did not intervene . When he did raise his voice with the German occupiers , it was either to ensure that the Vatican City state would not be compromised — that is to say , he would be safe — or to emphasise his own neutrality in a conflict which , for many , became a battle between good and evil . His unrealistic hope was that the Catholic Church could emerge as the peacemaker across Europe . Instead , both the American and British leaderships , as Katz shows , regarded the papacy as tainted by its association with Nazism and irrelevant in the post @-@ 1945 reshaping of the continent . Both had urged Pius to speak up against the Holocaust and so drew their own conclusions about him . Far from being a saint , then , he was at best a fool , perhaps an anti @-@ Semite and probably a coward . 
