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Yesterday, after decades of refusing to do so, the Vatican finally opened its archives to allow historians to examine documents from the papacy of Pius XII.

He has regularly been accused by his critics of turning a blind eye to the Holocaust. Others, though, have said Pope Pius worked behind the scenes to save Jewish people.

It will take many months, even years, before historians have trawled through all the documents and can assess the role of Pius XII at the time of the Nazis. What is discovered may finally confirm what went on in the Roman Catholic Church during the 1930s and 1940s.

But what is already known is that before he was pope, Eugenio Pacelli served as papal ambassador in Germany during the rise of Hitler. He returned to Rome and in 1937, helped his predecessor, Pius XI, write a highly critical encyclical, or teaching document, that condemned Nazism. It was written in German, not Latin, and distributed secretly by a network of motorcyclists to Catholic churches in Germany. It outraged Hitler. While plenty of Catholics in Germany failed to speak out against Nazism in the 1930s and 40s, others did, including those inspired by this document, and they paid with their lives.

One, Edith Stein, a convert from Judaism, who became a Catholic nun, died in Auschwitz in 1942. She had pleaded with the Vatican to act, writing that Nazi efforts to destroy Jewish blood were an abuse of the humanity of Christ, himself a Jew.

In the past 50 years there鈥檚 been a growing acknowledgement in the Catholic Church of Christ as a Jew, of the Church鈥檚 role in the persecution of Jews through the ages, and the profound debt that Christianity owes Judaism.

That debt is evident throughout the current season of Lent with readings from what Christians call the Old Testament and Jewish people the Torah 鈥� accounts not only of a yearning for God but of exile and suffering. Then there are the psalms, especially psalm 21 and its line 鈥淢y God, my God, why have you forsaken me鈥�. Jesus is said to have cried out the same from the cross. How many millions of others must have asked the same during the Holocaust?

This Lent, while the archives of Pius XII are being opened, would seem an appropriate moment to reflect on both a terrible past and the progress made in relations between Christians and Jews in the post-war era. But, as Pope John Paul II warned in his historic visit to Rome鈥檚 synagogue in 1986, this progress after centuries of misunderstanding is only the beginning of change in the Catholic Church. There is still a very long way to go.

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