An unexpected find of the German scientists in Vatican provides one more reason for awarding the title of the Righteous Among the Nations to Andrey Sheptytsky.
Just before the coronavirus outbreak, the Vatican opened the archives of Pope Pius XII, who was the leader of the Catholic Church during World War II. Among the papers of Pius XII a letter from the head of the Ukraine’s Greek Catholic Church of that time, Metropolitan Andrey Sheptytsky, was found. Sheptytsky informs the Pope in it about 200 thousand Jews massacred in Ukraine under the “outright diabolical” German occupation.
The author risked his life writing such a letter in 1942. An unexpected find of the German scientists from the University of Münster provides one more reason for awarding the title of the Righteous Among the Nations to Andrey Sheptytsky.
At the end of January, Yad Vashem: World Holocaust Center, Jerusalem agreed to reconsider the case of recognizing Metropolitan Andrey Sheptytsky as the Righteous Among the Nations, if it received yet unknown documents and evidence, illuminating his activities in the period of the German occupation in a new light.
Such a document is available now and, possibly, others will appear as soon as the Vatican archives are open again.
