International Catholic-Jewish Historical Commission
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The International Catholic-Gewish Historical Commission was a body appointed by the Holy See's Commission for Religious Relations with the Jews in 1999. With three Jewish and three Catholic historians, the goal of the group was to study the way the Church reacted to the Holocaust. In October of 2000, the group issued a preliminary report raising a number of questions about existing data, in their introduction to their report, they stated:
Many scholars, from the 1960s to the present, have taken seriously the mandate for historical objectivity and have written balanced accounts (albeit in many cases still critical of the Holy See). Others appear to have simply assumed that a particular allegation, if deemed to be damaging to Pius XII's reputation, must therefore be true. Still others, reacting to the charges against the Pope, have developed apologetical defenses, some of which are highly polemical. As a result, there have developed over the years increasingly contentious portraits, both condemnatory and adulatory, of a man whose office, the papacy, is revered by many as a sacred institution.
In 2001, after failing to gain access to the Vatican archives after 1923, the group disbanded amid controversy.
