It is little wonder that historians are eager to study the Vatican’s Holocaust-era papers. The accounts by the parish priests may help answer lingering questions of when and what the Vatican knew about the Nazi murder machinery. The files are likely to shed light on whether the wartime pope, Pius XII, could have done more to try to stop the Holocaust. Also buried inside the secret archives are the early records of the scandal-ridden Vatican Bank, created during World War II. Those documents could resolve conclusively how much business the Vatican did with the Third Reich, as well as the extent of insurance company investments that yielded enormous profits from life insurance policies of Jews sent to Auschwitz, which I uncovered in my own reporting.

And finally, the church’s secret files might resolve the debate over whether several postwar refugee-smuggling networks that were run from Rome separately by an Austrian bishop, a German priest and a Croatian priest — and through which Nazi criminals escaped — were freelance operations, or instead parts of a program that had the pope’s blessing.

The church has since the 1960s released some wartime files, while refusing unfettered access by historians. In the 1990s, the administration of President Bill Clinton ordered federal agencies to release relevant Holocaust files, and also spearheaded an effort that persuaded several dozen other nations to do the same. The Vatican was an outlier.

The 2013 election of Pope Francis held out the promise for a change in the church’s longstanding policy of secrecy. While still the archbishop of Buenos Aires, he had been asked about the dispute over the Holocaust-era files. The Vatican, he answered, “should open them and clarify everything.” Many Vaticanologists thought he would use a 2014 visit to Israel to free the files. But Francis did not say anything publicly about the papers on that visit.

Francis last discussed the issue in a November 2014 interview with the Israeli newspaper Yediot Ahronot. The pope asked: “Did Pius XII remain silent in the face of the extermination of the Jews? Did he say all he should have said? We will have to open the archives to know exactly what happened.” According to Francis: “There is an agreement between the Vatican and Italy from 1929 that prevents us from opening the archives to researchers at this point in time. But because of the time that has passed since World War II, I see no problem with opening the archives the moment we sort out the legal and bureaucratic matters.”