Denver Newsroom, Sep 9, 2020 / 04:00 am (CNA).- Scholars of Pope Pius XII have countered claims that the wartime pope and the Catholic Church hierarchy were complicit in a controversial post-war custody battle over two Jewish orphans who were baptized Christians in France, then hidden from their relatives.
Researcher William Doino Jr. told CNA a recent article on the topic in The Atlantic is “both flawed and misleading, because it misrepresents and cites out of context a small portion of the newly released archives to advance a one-sided view of Pius XII– and omits key documents and evidence which contradict the article’s main allegations.”
He responded to historian David I. Kertzer, writing in The Atlantic, who has claimed that the archives have now revealed “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,” Kertzer wrote Aug. 27.
Those claims have also drawn criticism from Matteo Luigi Napolitano, professor of history of international relations at Italy’s University of Molise said in L’Osservatore Romano Sept. 3.
“Things are obviously much more complex if we look at the Jewish sources,” he said. “The Rabbinate wanted to maintain dialogue with the Vatican, while other organizations would have gone to the clash, to be exploited on the media level.”
The archives on Pope Pius XII’s pontificate were opened in 2020 for only four days before being closed again due to coronavirus restrictions. Napolitano said scholars have only had about forty days’ worth of work on the new material.
Napolitano is thus critical of the claims of Kertzer regarding the wartime papacy of Pius XII and the Finaly brothers controversy.
In February 1944, agents of the Gestapo arrested a refugee Jewish Austrian couple, Fritz and Annie Finaly, in a French village. They were transported to Auschwitz and killed. Their children, three-year-old Robert and two-year-old Gerald, were taken in by a Catholic woman, Antoinette Brun, who ran a foundling home in Grenoble.
Brun began the legal process to adopt them in 1945, when she learned their parents had been killed. At the same time, the boys’ relatives sought to take custody of them. An aunt from New Zealand asked the boys be sent to her, but Brun resisted. In 1948, she baptized the boys, making them Catholic in the eyes of the Church.
A custody struggle ensued, with both religious and national elements, citing the father’s reported desire to have his sons brought up in France, the boys’ reported desire to stay with Brun, calls to have the boys brought up Christian, and calls to return the boys to their family.
When courts said the boys should be placed with their relatives, the boys were taken by friends of Brun and hidden near France’s border with Spain.
Brun, a Catholic nun who helped her, and several Catholic clergymen were arrested.
“Several arrests were made, and the Church got some bad press. Contrary to what the critics claimed, however, the Catholics involved were not acting on behalf of the institutional Church,” said Ronald Rychlak, a law professor at the University of Mississippi School of Law and an expert on the history of Pius XII and the Nazis in the Second World War, wrote in an essay he sent to CNA in late August.
“When she was asked by the press about her Catholicism, Brun said she ‘didn’t give a fig for the pope.’ Bishop Alexandre Calliot of Grenoble took to the radio airwaves to demand that anyone with information about the missing boys contact the authorities. One of the first to comply was a priest in Spain who reported on their whereabouts.”
Doino characterized Brun as “a renegade Catholic.”
“She and a small group of collaborators evaded Church officials at every turn, after they demanded she return the children to their Jewish relatives,” he told CNA.
Doino pointed to an article he co-authored with Rychlak for Inside the Vatican Magazine’s a January-February 2005 issue, which used primary source documents and first-hand testimonies to disprove a claim he helped refuse to return baptized Jewish children to their surviving family members after the Second World War.
He told a Polish Catholic woman to return a baptized child to its father, saying it “was her duty as a Catholic not only to give back the child, but do it with good will and in friendship,” said Doino, who recommended Peter Hellman’s 1980 book Avenue of the Righteous.
Rychlak said Pius XII approved an agreement negotiated between Cardinal Pierre-Marie Gerlier of Lyons and the chief rabbi of Paris: the children would go to their relatives in France, but would be allowed free choice of religion. The pope approved this despite some leading advisors who wanted to reject any agreement in which Catholic children would live in a Jewish home.
In Kertzer’s telling, a Vatican document from Catholic sources in Grenoble appeared to describe positively Brun’s refusal to return the children.
Napolitano, however, said that Jewish sources show that the Bishop of Grenoble and the Archbishop of Lyons both worked with the judicial authority to track down the brothers after they were concealed in Spain.
Jewish sources reported that “the French clergy have already intervened with the Spanish clergy and that they are on the point of taking the children home.”
Napolitano said Vittorio Segre, press officer at the Israeli Embassy in Paris during the controversy, shows a “much more complex picture.”
In Segre’s account, the embassy officer said it is “logical to assume that there was support from the Vatican” for the agreement of Cardinal Gerlier through the former secretary of Charles de Gaulle, who was charged with tracking down the Finaly brothers.
According to Segre, there was “never a conflict between the Catholic Church and the Jewish community.” De Gaulle’s former secretary “worked in complete freedom, without encountering obstacles in the hierarchies.”
“There were difficulties, but they came from a much lower level,” said Segre.
While Kertzer’s essay claimed that relevant documents were now reported for the first time, Rychlak compared his work to a 2004 controversy in which the New York Times reported on a document from a French archive purporting to show Vatican authorization for church authorities not to return “hidden” Jewish children to their families if they had been baptized.
“To those of us who had studied the work of Pius XII, the directive immediately seemed suspicious, and for good reason,” Rychlak wrote. “The real directive, dated October 23, 1946, and authorized by Pope Pius XII, was quickly found in the Vatican archives. It was quite different from what had been reported in the news.”
“The directive told the rescuers to return these children, baptized or not, to blood-related relatives who came to get them,” Rychlak said. “Over and above that, if no relatives survived to reclaim the children, and if individuals or organizations unrelated to the children now wished to adopt them or transfer them to a new environment, each request was to be examined on a case-by-case basis, always with a sense of justice for the child, and with a sense of what their parents would have wanted for them.”
“This directive is perfectly in line with Judeo-Christian compassion and responsibility. It is also very probative of Pius XII’s mindset on these issues,” he said, saying this is far better evidence than internal memoranda.
Kertzer said other newly revealed documents justify repeated claims that Pius XII had been persuaded “not to speak out in protest after the Germans rounded up and deported Rome’s Jews in 1943.” He claimed memoranda was “steeped in anti-Semitic language.”
“The silence of Pius XII during the Holocaust has long engendered bitter debates about the Roman Catholic Church and Jews,” he said, repeating a claim long disputed by the Pope’s defenders.
For Kertzer, one piece of evidence is a December 1943 memo from Monsignor Angelo Dell’Acqua, an official in the Vatican’s Secretariat of State, about whether it was right to openly and officially protest mistreatment of Jews by Germans. Kertzer interpreted the memo as a sign of anti-Semitism and Church silence.
However, Napolitano said the note came just two months after the Oct. 16, 1943 Nazi raid on Rome’s Jewish ghetto, which resulted in over 1,000 Jews being deported to Auschwitz.
Vatican officials objected to that raid, but were also aware of the danger of reprisals from the Nazis. Napolitano cited the diary of Slovakian ambassador Karl Sidor, which said: “On the orders of the Holy Father, more than one hundred Jews and Italian officers are hidden in the Jesuit Generalate. Likewise, Jews with their entire families are hidden in every convent. The Holy Father provides for their nourishment. Money and food arrive from the Vatican. This is very important news. This is the way the Vatican is dealing with the Jews.”
Documents from the Pius XII papacy, Napolitano said, come in the context of Church efforts “not to compromise the network of aid that had been activated throughout Rome to ensure that Jews and wanted people of all kinds escaped arrest and deportation.”
“It does not seem that Kertzer takes this into account,” Napolitano wrote in L’Osservatore Romano.
He also faulted Kertzer’s depiction of Dell’Acqua as an anti-Semite, given that the priest was a close collaborator with Pope John XXIII, who would not have named him a bishop and apostolic nuncio to France “if he had the slightest suspicion of his anti-Semitic inclinations.” Similarly, Paul VI, another pioneer in Catholic-Jewish relations, would not have elevated Dell’Acqua to the cardinalate.
“These are logical discrepancies that Kertzer does not resolve,” said Napolitano. “But history, like nature, does not allow for leaps.”
[…]
Today, the Church rejects the death penalty in all cases because it “counters the inviolability and the dignity of the person” and denies guilty people the “hope of redemption and reconciliation with the community,” he said.
But is the above statement true? No.
“As a consequence, any use of lethal force that is not strictly necessary for (self-defense and preservation of life) can only be considered an illegal execution, a state crime.”
Wrong all these years? No.
From here on, I can only resist Bergoglio …his vile, treacherous traitorous, tone deaf, (and most of all) hypocritical regard he has towards China…his cronyism centered in homosexuality…his trivialization of marriage and the Eucharist…his rigged “synodal” Church…his disdain for Scripture and Tradition and the “pious faithful.”
Exactly right, Joseph. We have a Pope Frankenstein who is ripping the Church apart. If this is not heresy, what is when the clear and certain teaching of both the Old and New Testaments as uniformly followed by Tradition and every pope over 2,000 years are dismissed as ignorant rubbish?
Pope Francis won’t say ‘intrinsically evil.’
Both the Pope and John Finnis are trying desperately to reconcile the Church’s past on capital punishment.
And not succeeding..
“Prohibiting gay civil unions is an offense against human dignity!”
It needs to be said plainly: Jorge Mario Bergoglio is a heretic.
“Liberalism is a heresy.”
So for two thousand years the Catholic Church, the Bible, the Church Fathers, the Doctors of the Church, and 265 previous Popes were wrong by holding that the Death Penalty could be morally just in principle, but Pope Francis somehow right by coming to the opposite conclusion?
More likely the opposite is true.
Assuming that eternal life — in heaven or hell — awaits us after our brief sojourn on earth, anything that redounds to our salvation must be counted as more valuable than human life itself. Far from being inhumane, then, a death sentence is one of the greatest blessings we sinners can receive. By focusing the mind on the mortality that most of us ignore, it provides a compelling incentive for reconciliation. This applies even to those rare few who’ve been falsely convicted.
How many “victims” of capital punishment (not to mention terminal illness) might have been damned without the knowledge of their imminent demise? Do they share our mortal squeamishness in paradise? Not likely. They undoubtedly conclude, and rightly so, that we place too much emphasis on this life and too little on the next.
Laughable from commentators – the outrage over losing their moral satisfaction over killing people.
6 “Whoever causes one of these little ones* who believe in me to sin, it would be better for him to have a great millstone hung around his neck and to be drowned in the depths of the sea.
Some teachings are rooted in Scripture, and are also confirmed by the words of Christ, and also have been preserved in the Church by the Holy Spirit for two millennia. The teaching that the state has the authority to put criminals to death is one of those teachings. Human nature hasn’t changed. God hasn’t changed. That which the Holy Spirit has preserved in the Church for two millennia cannot be legitimately contradicted or reversed, not even by a pope, because that is tantamount to saying that the Holy Spirit made a mistake. And if the Holy Spirit makes mistakes, or Christ has not kept his promise that the Holy Spirit would remain with the Church forever and guide it into the truth, then the whole basis for Catholicism collapses.
The assertion that the death penalty is “inadmissible” contradicts two millennia of Church teaching, which was rooted in the Scriptures and had been confirmed by the words of Christ where He acknowledged Pilate’s authority to put people to death, saying that such authority had been given him “from above.”
There are translations that I prefer over Young’s Literal Translation which I used here, but I used the YLT because it gets the Greek word exousian right, translating it as “authority,” instead of as “power” as it often is in English translations of these verses. Anybody holding a hammer who can sneak up behind somebody else has the power to kill them. That isn’t the same as having the authority to kill them. Christ was obviously talking about Pilate’s authority, not his power, and acknowledges his God-given authority to put criminals to death by saying it was given him “from above.” He also makes clear that Pilate is sinfully abusing and misusing that authority as Pilate had already admitted that he found no fault in Jesus (John 19:4, Luke 23:4,15).
If Bergoglio wants to abolish truly unjust instances of the sinful misuse and abuse of the death penalty, he should start with the contemporary, militantly atheistic, radically secularized state pretending to have the authority to confer upon women the right to sentence their own unborn children to death, for any reason whatsoever, or for no reason at all. These blatantly criminal executions of innocent children have taken the lives of two billion children in the last 45 years of “legal” murder. That is more people than the entire human population of planet Earth at the beginning of the 20th century.
Take a look at this photograph of a beautiful child at 18 weeks after conception, which appeared on the cover of an April, 1965 edition of LIFE Magazine:
Beautiful Child
Hundreds of millions of beautiful children as far along or farther along than the child shown in that photograph have been brutally murdered — unjustly sentenced to death. That is what is inadmissible. (All abortion is inadmissible, but there is no excuse — not even for the worldly — to tolerate the mass murder of what are clearly innocent children. My two-year-old grandson, upon seeing that photograph, exclaimed “Baby!”)
John Paul II, in Evangelium Vitae, called this “murder” and insisted we had an obligation to defy civil authorities. Bergoglio objects to the death penalty for dangerous murderers, and has yet to call for the world-wide abolition of the death penalty being unjustly applied to innocent children.
It is time to revisit the claims that Bergoglio’s election to the papacy was not valid. A genuine Pope is protected by the Holy Spirit from officially teaching error.
I know certain people think the book by Professors Feser and Bessette volume provides proof of an unchanging Catholic tradition on the death penalty. Some of the examples in this book are not that convincing when you study them carefully. For example, Pope Innocent I’s 405 Letter to the Bishop of Toulouse not only supports the right to carry out the death penalty but also torture (PL 20, 499). Pope St. Nicholas I, however, in his letter to the Bulgarians in 866 says that “neither divine nor human law” allows such torture (Denz.-H, 648). This shows that what Innocent I expressed in his 405 letter about torture and the death penalty was hardly definitive. It’s also important to note that, after being asked whether it’s permissible for people after baptism to administer torture (tormenta) or a capital sentence (capitalem … sententiam), Innocent I says: “About these matters we read nothing definitive from the forefathers” (De his nihil legimus a majoribus definitum; PL 20, 499). This one simple sentence completely refutes Feser and Bessette’s claim that there was a definitive magisterial tradition upholding the legitimacy of the death penalty in the early Patristic Age. Pope Innocent I explicitly states that he reads “nothing definitive” from the forefathers on this matter. The fact that Pope Nicholas I in 866 rejects the legitimacy of torture likewise proves that Innocent I’s 405 letter to the Bishop of Toulouse cannot be considered a definitive magisterial judgment. Pope St. Nicholas also tells the Bulgarians: “….without hesitation and in every possible circumstance, save the life of the body and soul of each individual. You should save from death not only the innocent but also criminals, because Christ has saved you from the death of the soul” (Epistula 97, cap. 25). Since the lives of criminals on death row can be saved, executing them would be as inadmissible for Pope St. Nicholas I (r. 858–867) as for Pope Francis.
Feser and Bessette also appeal to the “profession of faith” prescribed for a group of Waldensians by Innocent III in 1208 and amended in 1210 (Denz.-H 790-797). Innocent III’s profession states that the death penalty can be carried out by the secular power under certain conditions “without mortal sin.” This is hardly a hardly an enthusiastic endorsement of the death penalty. It’s simply a judgment on the subjective culpability of the one who carries out the sentence for the secular power. If this judgment were definitive, then nothing in the 1210 profession of faith could change. This same profession, though, also requires Catholics to oppose “manifest heretics… even unto death … as adversaries of Christ and the Church” (Denz.-H 796). This requirement, though, was not reaffirmed by Vatican II, which looks upon Non-Catholic Christians—who are in material heresy on many points of dogma—as “separated brethren” (Decree on Ecumenism, 3). Sometimes only with the passage of time can we know which teachings are definitive and which are open to development. The Magisterium is the authority to decide this, not private scholars like Professors Feser and Bessette.
Not even the Magisterium has the authority to contradict that which the Holy Spirit has preserved in the Church for twenty centuries, and the truth of which was confirmed by the words of Christ recorded in the Gospels (See my post above.) Furthermore, the legitimacy of the death penalty in principle was clearly taught by St. Paul, and how Paul’s teaching was understood in the Early Church is made clear by St. Irenaeus (died 155 A.D.), who explains how the death penalty protects human dignity, and why God granted the state such authority, and assures us of God’s punishment of unjust civil authorities: