Margherita Marchione

In 2012, in light of better scholarship, Yad Vashem removed the negative evaluation of Pius XII. The memorial now highlights the pope's efforts to save Jews by secret rescue missions.

On August 19, 2011, it was revealed that the 90-year-old Marchione was treated surgically for intestinal cancer.

Yad Vashem's Righteous Gentiles Department had informed Marchione that the museum would consider changing the negative presentation of Pius' role during the Holocaust if at least two Jews (or their descendants) were to come forward with proof they were saved from the Nazis due to Pius' personal intervention. Marchione claimed she has interviewed scores of elderly Italian Jews who expressed gratitude to the Pope for the fact that they were hidden in Vatican institutions during that period. After Pope Benedict XVI's first major meeting with Jewish leaders in 2005, Rabbi David Rosen, director of interreligious affairs for the American Jewish Committee, told the Catholic News Service that "there would be very many [people] within the Jewish world who would see the beatification of Pius XII as an act of intentional insensitivity".

In the mid-1990s, she learned that her own order, the Religious Teachers Filippini, had sheltered 114 Jews from 1943 to 1944 at their convent in Rome. She then wrote a book, Yours Is a Precious Witness, which was published in 1997 by the Paulist Press. The book included extensive interviews with Italian Jews who expressed gratitude for having been hidden by convents and monasteries during the Nazi occupation of Rome. She continued to write more books on the same theme, including Pope Pius XII, Architect for Peace (2000) and Consensus and Controversy, Defending Pope Pius XII (2002).

The author of seven volumes on Mazzei, Marchione donated approximately 2,500 printed and published artifacts, works of art and decorative objects of Philip Mazzei to the Thomas Jefferson Foundation. Foundation librarian Jack Robertson stated, "The collection compiled by Sister Margherita includes not only facsimiles of all of Mazzei's correspondence, but relatively obscure publications on the role of Italians in American history." She launched an ultimately successful campaign to get the United States Postal Service (USPS) to designate a stamp to commemorate Mazzei in the form of a 40 cent airmail stamp in 1980 to commemorate Mazzei's 250th birthday.

Marchione's interest in Philip Mazzei began in 1974 bicentennial. Philip Mazzei, an 18th-century Florentine who moved to Virginia, fought in the American Revolution, and became a lifelong personal friend of Thomas Jefferson.

Sister Margherita Marchione (February 19, 1922 – May 20, 2021) was an American Roman Catholic sister, writer, teacher and apologeticist, who dedicated herself in her later years to the defense of Pope Pius XII.

Marchione was born in February 1922 in Little Ferry, New Jersey, one of eight children of Crescenzo and Felicia Marchione, immigrants from Campania, Italy. She attended St. Mary's School in nearby Hackensack, and in 1935 she joined the Religious Teachers Filippini. She became a nun in 1938 at the age of 16.