SAY A PRAYER FOR FR. BLET
Fr. Blet and his book on Pius XII in the Second World War, based on the 11 volumes of documents from the Vatican Archives that he and three other Jesuit scholars put together on orders from Pope Paul VI in the 1960s.
It's been two days since Pierre Blet, SJ, died Sunday morning, and the only English news item I can find about his death comes from a Catholic blogger who lives in Rome. What are CNS and CNA doing? I will post the blog entry first because right now, I don't have time to translate the articles that came out in OR today.
Rev. Dr. Pierre Blet, S.J., 1918-2009
by J.P. Sonnen
Nov. 30, 2009
Sunday morning at 9 a.m. one of the very last Rome legends passed on to his reward at Rome's Hospital Santo Spirito.
Fr. Pierre Blet, S.J., famous Church historian, Rome professor and renowned Jesuit scholar (and great defender of the memory of the Servant of God Pius XII), passed away at the age of 91.
In him, the Company of Jesus loses one of its most heroic members: ever wise, observant, pious and loyal. May the Lord reward him with the prize of His chosen ones. Every day, Fr. Blet celebrated Holy Mass according to the Usus Antiquior of the Roman Missal.
October of 2008 I was in the lobby of the Gregoriana (Rome's Jesuit University) and took this pic[leftmost photo, above) of our beloved Fr. Blet. It was always a joy to see him at the Gregorian and to see him smile and wave. He was a brilliant man, shy and had an angelic smile. He would always smile back if you smiled at him. He was French and spoke some English.
Fr. Blet joined the Jesuits in the 1930s. In 1958 he graduated from the Sorbonne with his doctorate. In Rome he became professor of modern history at the Pontifical Gregorian Univeristy and for 17 years he taught diplomatic history at the Pontifical Academy of Ecclesiastics. In 1985 he was elected a corresponding member of the Institut de France.
Once, about 1998, when John Paul II was chatting with journalists on a flight he was asked about Pius XII and his answer was simple: "Read Blet."
Paul VI asked Fr. Blet along with some other scholars to defend the wartime record of Pius XII. After their research they published the
Actes et Documents du Saint-Siège relatifs à la seconde guerre mondiale (Città del Vaticano, 1965-1981).
In English. you can get
Pius XII and the Second World War According to the Archives of the Vatican, which contain Fr. Blet's conclusions drawn from the documents he compiled. The book was published in English by Paulist Press in 1999.
From Wikipedia about the WW-II documentation:
Actes et Documents du Saint Siège relatifs à la Seconde Guerre Mondiale (Acts and Documents of the Holy See related to the Second World War), often abbreviated Actes or ADSS, is an eleven-volume collection of documents from the Vatican historical archives, related to the papacy of Pope Pius XII during World War II.
The collection was compiled by four Jesuit priest-historians—Pierre Blet (France), Angelo Martini (Italy), Burkhart Schneider (Germany), and Robert A. Graham (United States) — authorized by Pope Paul VI in 1964, and published between 1965 and 1981.
The remainder of the documents from Pius XII's papacy may not be released for years; Bishop Sergio Pagano, the prefect of the Vatican Secret Archives said in June 2009 that it would take five or six more to organize the papers, after which the Pope can decide to make further documents available to researchers.
The completed catalog would include approximately 16 million documents from Pius XII's papacy (1939-1958) contained in approximately 700 boxes.