In his four years as pope, Pius XII had never spoken out against Italy’s anti-Jewish racial laws. He had, though, frequently complained to the Fascist government that the laws were being unfairly applied to families who were, in the church’s eyes, Catholic. Jews who had been baptized should be exempt from the racial laws, the pope believed, as should baptized children of “mixed marriages.” The fall of Fascism now offered the prospect of bringing about the changes to the racial laws the pope had long sought. The newly opened Vatican archives reveal that Badoglio himself was sympathetic to a
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