Documents reveal the private discussions behind both Pope Pius XII’s silence about the Nazi deportation of Rome’s Jews in 1943 and the Vatican’s postwar support for the kidnapping of two Jewish boys whose parents had perished in the Holocaust.
by David I. Kertzer, THE ATLANTIC
In early 1953, the photograph of a prominent nun being arrested was splashed across the front pages of French newspapers. Over the next several weeks, other French clergy—monks and nuns—would also be arrested. The charge: kidnapping two young Jewish boys, Robert and Gérald Finaly, whose parents had perished in a Nazi death camp. The case sparked intense public controversy. Le Monde, typical of much of the French media, devoted 178 articles in the first half of the year to the story of the brothers—secretly baptized at the direction of the Catholic woman who had cared for them—and the desperate attempts by surviving relatives to get them back. It was a struggle that pitted France’s Jewish community, so recently devastated by the Holocaust, against the country’s Roman Catholic hierarchy, which insisted that the boys were now Catholic and must not be raised by Jews.
What was not known at the time—and what, in fact, could not be known until the opening, earlier this year, of the Vatican archives covering the papacy of Pius XII—is the central role that the Vatican and the pope himself played in the kidnapping drama. The Vatican helped direct efforts by local Church authorities to resist French court rulings and to keep the boys hidden, while at the same time carefully concealing the role that Rome was playing behind the scenes.
There is more. At the center of this drama was an official of the Vatican curia who, as we now know from other newly revealed documents, helped persuade Pope Pius XII not to speak out in protest after the Germans rounded up and deported Rome’s Jews in 1943—“the pope’s Jews,” as Jews in Rome had often been referred to. The silence of Pius XII during the Holocaust has long engendered bitter debates about the Roman Catholic Church and Jews. The memoranda, steeped in anti-Semitic language, involve discussions at the highest level about whether the pope should lodge a formal protest against the actions of Nazi authorities in Rome. Meanwhile, conservatives in the Church continue to push for the canonization of Pius XII as a saint.
David I. Kertzer: What the Vatican’s secret archives are about to reveal
The newly available Vatican documents, reported here for the first time, offer fresh insights into larger questions of how the Vatican thought about and reacted to the mass murder of Europe’s Jews, and into the Vatican’s mindset immediately after the war about the Holocaust, the Jewish people, and the Roman Catholic Church’s role and prerogatives as an institution.
I. A Secret Baptism
Fritz Finaly, a medical doctor, was 37 and his wife, Anni, was 28 when the Germans came for them. Having escaped from Austria following its annexation by Nazi Germany, in 1938, they had hoped to flee to South America, but like so many desperate Jews at the time they found it impossible to find passage there. Settling in 1939 in a small town just outside Grenoble, in southeastern France, they did their best to make a life for themselves, although Fritz’s ability to practice medicine was hampered by the anti-Semitic laws installed by Marshal Philippe Pétain’s collaborationist Vichy government following the German conquest of France in 1940. In 1941, Robert, the Finalys’ first child, was born, followed by Gérald 15 months later. Despite a mounting official campaign against the Jews in France, the Finalys had both boys circumcised, in accordance with Jewish law, eight days after birth.
In February 1944, aware of the intensifying Gestapo roundups of Jews in their area, the Finalys placed their two small boys in a nursery in a nearby town. They confided the boys’ whereabouts to their friend Marie Paupaert, asking her to look out for the children in the event of their own arrest. Four days later, the Germans took Anni and Fritz. The couple was transported to Auschwitz, never to be seen again.
Read: Why some Catholics defend the kidnapping of a Jewish boy
For many more months, Marguerite tried every avenue she could to retrieve her nephews. She sent pleas to the local mayor in France, to the French foreign minister, and to the Red Cross. At Marguerite’s urging, the bishop of Auckland sent a request through the archbishop of Westminster to the bishop of Grenoble, asking him to look into the matter. In his reply, in July 1948, the bishop explained that he had had a long talk with Brun, but she remained firm in her refusal to give up the children to their family. He made no offer of help himself, perhaps influenced by the fact that he had learned what no one in the family yet knew: Four months earlier, Brun had had the two boys baptized, meaning that under canon law they would now be considered by the Roman Catholic Church to be Catholics, and under longtime Church doctrine could not be returned to their Jewish relatives. When the family learned of the baptism, they turned for help to a Jewish family friend who lived in Grenoble, Moïse Keller. Frustrated by the difficulty of effectively fighting their cause from the other side of the world, the sisters in New Zealand decided it would be best if Fritz’s sister in Israel, Hedwig Rosner, took the lead.
Indeed, the antisemitism is a “blasphemy”, because the Jews are G-od’s elected sons and their Lord is G-od, the Creator of the Universe (and not “J”esus).
“The memoranda, steeped in anti-Semitic language…”
The irony of this, is that the hatred of the Jews – all Jews – could (and should) well be descibed as “blasphemy” considering that their lord Jesus was himself a Jew.