The Vatican drew up secret plans to appoint a new pope and relocate the Curia to a safe country if Adolf Hitler went ahead with his threat to kidnap the wartime pontiff, according to secret archives.
Pope Pius XII informed leading bishops that his resignation would become effective from the moment he was arrested by the Nazis.
The bishops would then be expected to flee to a safe country—probably neutral Portugal—where they would re-establish the Vatican departments and appoint a new leader.
The revelations were confirmed last week by German Jesuit Fr Peter Gumpel, the relator of the cause for sainthood of Pius XII, after rumours of the existence of the documents began to circulate in Rome.
Fr Gumpel had been granted privileged access to secret archive material to help him with his research into the Pope’s life and found the documents among the files.
The documents, which remain secret, are said to show that Pius was aware of a plan formulated by Hitler on July 26 1943 to invade the Vatican and arrest him and his senior cardinals.
On September 6 1943—just days after Italy signed the September 3 armistice with the Allies—Pius told key aides that he believed his arrest was imminent and that he would take the decision to resign at that point so the Church could continue to govern itself in exile.
“It is certainly true and it is equally true that Pius said: ‘If they want to arrest me they will have to drag me from the Vatican’,” said Fr Gumpel.
The Pope, he said, was recorded as saying that “the person who would leave under these conditions would not be Pius XII but Eugenio Pacelli”, his name before he was elected leader of the Catholic Church.
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