The Vatican Archive - NYTimes.com Re "Israel's Holocaust Museum Softens Its Criticism of Pope Pius XII" (news article, July 2): While it's commendable that after new research Yad Vashem, Israel's Holocaust museum, "changed the wording of an exhibit on Pope Pius XII's actions during World War II to soften its criticism of the pope," the controversy over what precisely those actions entailed still simmers. There is only one way to take the sharp edges off this debate, and that is for the Vatican to open its archives on Pope Pius XII and allow independent scholars access to them. Some years ago, the Vatican, responding to insistent demands from scholars and others, including a Catholic-Jewish historical commission on which I served, finally agreed to make these archives available to researchers. The Vatican has yet to do so. Serious questions about Pope Pius XII will persist until it does. The writer is professor emeritus of Holocaust studies at the University of Toronto.