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.”
[…]
Pope Francis attributes anti-LGBTQ attitudes to cultural backgrounds, and says bishops in particular need to undergo a process of change to recognize the dignity of everyone. Change?! God’s attitude does not change when He calls the LGBTQ life an “abomination” (Lev 18:22). LGBTQ sin and crime should be unrelated in today’s world; but giving it a dignity when God calls it an abomination!? Compromising thousands of years of God-given moral values is not on the side of God, but of men.
I think its a shame that the pope is so soft on homosexuality.
I used to and to some etent still do, love the catholic church and it’s church fathers immensely but this is very disheartening the church shouldn’t be changing with the times but staying firmly on the truth. I love all the ancient churches and I fear that this is a bad precedent that we might not get out of and it’s got me leaning towards eastern orthodoxy (no offence intended).
Homosexuality is unnatural, disgusting and immoral and should not be encouraged or taken lightly.
It is a psychological aberration and people with an inclination to it should be enhoined to chastity not.
I hope that I’m misunderstanding something or that popes words are being taken out of context by the media and magnifying what he said unjustly but if not I have to admit I’m very dissapointed.
edit didn’t mean to say “not” at the end of sentence preceded by chastity. pardon my error
Between yesterday and today Pope Francis rushed to intervene on the homosexualism questions, because, it appears to me, it matters to him that these should coincide with today’s Gospel, “This is fulfilled in your hearing.”
The positive “Homosexuality is not a crime”, is misleading. Homosexuality is an inherent evil like abortion and when acted upon it is crime. It is one of those evils that by nature can not be separated from moral content.
Something further is happening. The Pope is not a day philosopher, he is a shepherd of souls and of shepherds. It is not his role to parse moral content for positivism. Were he to do it can form ecclesial sin and ecclesiastic crime.
I am not trying to prosecute Pope Francis but what he says and does would fall short of integrated faith. Simultaneously he adds a cameo of Benedict XVI, his “dad” whom he “lost”; and stresses how joy is the hallmark of faith.
Sorry for pressing this but it seems to me they made this the Gospel for today combining it with so many other things being stressed to overshadow St. Paul.
https://www.catholicnewsagency.com/news/253456/pope-francis-unpacks-jesus-good-news-today-this-scripture-has-been-fulfilled
No, it is not a crime. Neither is it something to be emulated. I have known some gay men and they have been perfectly nice. However from a religious point of view this is a disorder. When the Pope continues to soft pedal this stuff he creates confusion and sends peoples beliefs down the wrong road. I am sure that many an adulterer is also “nice”. Some people behave as prostitutes. Maybe they just need the money. Yet even that does not make it ok. Jesus did not repeal the 10 Commandments, several of which deal with sex. His word to the woman taken in adultery was go and sin no more. It was NOT ” it’s ok”. Ditto people who find their kicks in other sexual manners. The answer is no. Period.
God cannot bless sin…
But He can also recognize (as per the face-value meaning of Amoris Laetitia and the Argentine Bishops’ Letter) that I might not be able to abstain from sin without falling into a greater sin? The human condition is what it is, but if straight couples in irregular unions can live more uxorio (because they are not subjectively culpable, as a step along the path to greater holiness, because there are positive aspects to their relationship, etc.) why can’t gay couples? One way or another, justice demands that the same standard be applied to both.
Pope Francis is correct that homosexual acts are a sin, not a crime. Why does he insist on appointing and surrounding himself with people who believe they are neither? The only reason I can imagine for why he seems to want an escape clause for straight couples but not for gay couples is that he emotes more than he thinks, and he has an easier time emotionally identifying with straight couples than gay couples. Emotion and charity (let alone truth in charity) are not the same thing.
Correction to Bergoglio: if you said “homosexuality is a sin” you are wrong. Homosexual acts are sins. But being burdened with a perverse and unnatural inclination toward one’s sex is NOT a sin. Acting on those inclinations IS a sin. Bergoglio needs to consult a good moral theologian. I think Cardinal Mueller is available.
It’s very confusing. Being attracted to others of the same sex is only a sin if acted upon. Or I suppose if dwelt upon unnecessarily.
It’s hard to know what the Pope was thinking. Maybe the translation was faulty?
What prompted the conversation in the first place?
There’s an old saying “Least said, soonest mended “…
The simple reading of scripture or the Catechism before bedtime does much to improve one’s moral theology.
I agree meiron.
Someone once said unconfessed sins, usually those of a sexual nature, are often a source of bad theology.
Exactly right. There is no such thing as a natural inclination for homosexuality. It is learned behavior arrived at through some level of moral compromise, although in some cases culpability might be minimal due to tragic abuse. Like the state of alcoholism is arrived at through episodes of willful glottony. Francis is not a man of wisdom, so we need not scratch our heads trying to sort through the confusion every time he embarrasses the Church that embarrasses him.
Statutory law often exists even with the understanding that it can not be enforced to protect society and to express meaningful values.
Separation between a homosexual orientation and homosexual acts is very important. Those with a homosexual attraction that are living a chaste life are not committing sin. This is often overlooked. This is because the LBGT movement, that dominates the news, is only infested in those
living an active homosexual life.
Pope Francis seems to be discriminating against sinners and criminals. By going so far out of his way to state that same sex attraction is not a sin or a crime and thus they deserve dignity and respect, gives the feeling that, if it were a sin and a crime, then they would not deserve dignity and respect. Does Pope Francis not believe that even the worst criminals and sinners deserve human respect and dignity as well?
I try to cut His Holiness some slack and make allowances for translation problems, but his statements in this instance seem confusing. Saying that homosexuality is not a crime but a sin is more than a little vague.
Being homosexual is no more sinful than being murderous or greedy or anything else. The belief that a sinful tendency or inclination is in and of itself sinful instead of a cross or trial to be borne is a modernist belief that shifts right and wrong from reason to faith, changing the basis of natural law where reason guided and illuminated by faith, not faith alone, is preeminent.
Whether someone is homosexual, greedy, murderous, or anything else, is a matter of subjective opinion or personal faith and cannot be sinful. Committing homosexual acts, theft, murder, or anything else is a matter of objective fact, determined by empirical evidence and logical consistency — reason — and may be sinful under the usual conditions. In human terms, we cannot judge anyone a sinner because of our opinion of them, only by their proven acts.
That is why in both civil and canon law the principle is that someone is innocent until proven guilty. To condemn someone without proof (real proof, not opinion, even popular opinion) is calumny, a mortal sin, and one “that cries to Heaven for vengeance” and for which reparation must be made.
As for homosexuality (or, probably more accurately, homosexual acts) not being a crime, that depends on a particular code of laws. If the law says it is a crime, it is a crime . . . just as robbing a bank, praying outside an abortion clinic, or helping a runaway slave are or have been crimes. A law that declares something a crime need not be just or moral, it need only be a law. Human positive law should be just and moral, but that doesn’t mean it is.
How much longer, Lord, on a papacy who ‘wants to mess things up’?
Where has Francis’s battle cry improved the Church in the last decade?
Brother I am with you. Every day I am calling to Jesus for help for the faithful so that we may not be put to the test of being forced to accept the Woke Agenda; To the Holy Spirit for patience; To the Saints for wisdom for the Church and to Our Lady of Sorrows for help to me bear this sense of doom. And thank God for this Magazine where I can express my fears and know that I am not alone in just trying to be a good Christian man. And thank you Pope Francis for braving these storms.
God loves us as we are is the premier loaded comment. Yes, let us be tender rather than criminalize, let us lovingly abet disorded sexual morality. Our issue, acknowledging sin and acknowledging the liceity to sin.
Recently reported in multiple sources the UK Catholic Herald, here the Daily Compass 1.9.2023, “if we see that there is no intention to repent, we must forgive all. We can never deny absolution, because we become a vehicle for an evil, unjust, and moralistic judgment” (Francis allegedly to Barcelona Spain seminarians Dec 10).
His Holiness believes compassion has no limits and eclipses judgment and repentance, the two standards a priest must employ in the confessional. Earlier I said ‘it’s clear this pontificate intends to reform the Church from a doctrinal to an all embracing pastoral body’. Perhaps saying it’s clear is not justified, that indications are is better. Although at this rate, with a plethora of like remarks, the Synod on Synodality and homosexual advocate Card Hollerich’s appointment as relator, must the judgment it’s clear be withheld until it becomes fact?
As quoted by CNA’s Courtney Mares the Catechism instructs that our mission, inclusive of the sacraments, is to assist those who have homosexual inclinations, attraction to transform their lives to the Christian image. Vatican policy is moving in a different, paradigmatic, one may correctly say opposite direction. We in order to remain faithful must acknowledge this and call it out. Yes, with due propriety.
I wonder if James Martin left his two audiences with Francis convinced and convicted that homosexuality is a sin. I don’t remember it unfolding in quite that way. Francis doublespeak, true to form.
Now I’m confused. Homosexuality is a sin? Those, including bishops, who resist the LGBetc. lobby do so out of their backward, unenlightened cultures?
Lord, help us.
Sins are crimes against God, against the Gospel Word of God, and against God’s people. Homosexual acts are horrendous sins against nature. The word ‘sod’ (dirt) derives or is associated with ‘sodomy.’ Neither are clean and one only is natural.
Justice demands that man worship God. The First Commandment comes first. Man justly owes allegiance first to God. As the supreme lawgiver and enforcer, God will in due course apply justice no matter what linguistic distinctions man applies to acts of injustice. Man may call sins by whatever names he chooses, but it prudently behooves man to seek God’s Word when man reasons about his own. Francis surely understands.
Scripture describes a homosexual act as a sin which cries, from the ground, for God’s vengeance.
Sins are crimes against God, against the Gospel Word of God, and against God’s people. Homosexual acts are horrendous sins against nature. The word ‘sod’ (dirt) derives or is associated with ‘sodomy.’ God destroyed Sodom once and surely may do so again.
Was not disappointed to find one or two commenters planting their flag on the side of people who like to stone gays to death, in order to prevent ‘moral confusion’ among the faithful.
Not satisfied with your usual slandering, you now resort to overt lies. Nicely played.
Dear Joe:
We are not to stone anyone. It has been stated that Jesus died for our sins, whatever those may be! Repentance starts the process. We are saying to God, Lord you are right and we seek your forgiveness. It is not hard to do. All men can ask for forgiveness. God not only saves us, He changes us, conforming us into His image. If a man wants salvation thru confession and forgiveness, all he needs to do is ask.
The other side of the coin is that a man is wedded to his sin and wants nothing to do with God. God offers the hand of friendship and it is up to the individual to accept it or reject it.
1 John 1:9 If we confess our sins, he is faithful and just to forgive us our sins and to cleanse us from all unrighteousness.
Psalm 32:5 I acknowledged my sin to you, and I did not cover my iniquity; I said, “I will confess my transgressions to the Lord,” and you forgave the iniquity of my sin. Selah
Proverbs 28:13 Whoever conceals his transgressions will not prosper, but he who confesses and forsakes them will obtain mercy.
Jeremiah 33:8 I will cleanse them from all the guilt of their sin against me, and I will forgive all the guilt of their sin and rebellion against me.
God bless you,
Brian
Sex between a man and a woman in a marriage is the only licit sex allowed by the Roman Catholic Church. If you have any questions, please re-read that statement.
The very word “crime” used to be associated with (mortal) sin. Of course, that was when civil law reflected Christendom. As the State moves further from God (objective truth and natural law), its legal codes become increasingly chaotically liberating with respect to human behavior. However, then reason in light of Faith must be concurrently suppressed and those who challenge unbridled conscience must be even oppressed. Thus we have such inane prosecutions as against Mark Houck and persons in the UK arrested for mental prayer.
“It is a human condition.”
It is NOT a human condition. It is a condition of a fallen-ness in humanity that is at the same time perverse. It’s presence is for UNDOING. You furthermore never address dignity in any person, or society, by saying “homosexuality is not a crime”.
In addition, propagating homosexuality is a crime, subversion of society; and defending it is a subversion of law. It is antithetical for the Pope to be doing such things and having the faithful vilified “neo-Pelagian” for it “in the name of the Church”.
Or “Jansenist”. The idea being professed is that truth may not be spoken or held to firmly at any time. It is patently false, the problem is that the error is being imposed and inverting the sequence and consequences multiplies corruption.
The Church separates herself from such things and she knows very well that truth itself is its own message in mercy and mercifulness. It names homosexuality for what it is and calls man out of any and all degradation and taint without exception.
If homosexuality is not acted on, why should we even know who is indeed homosexual?
This pope displays a little too much interest in the alphabet people for my personal comfort. One would think the vicar of Christ would have a slightly different itinerary but I’d like to set him down in the middle of the Castro District, in San Fransicko, during a Pride festival, and hear just what he has to say, upon exiting.
Between his stance on the WEF, the CCP, bunko vaccines, Latin Mass, and the gay lobby, I honestly have no interest in what he thinks, says, or does, at this point. I pray for protection from his intentions.
Up until the late 60’s sodomy was against the law in all states. That was changed and since then it has taken over society. If you follow the Popes train of thought, we should not have laws against pedophilia. It is a sin, but some people have a proclivity to it so maybe there should not be a law against it. Seriously? Shouldn’t laws reflect the commandments?
A two minded approach pleases no one.
James 4:8 Draw near to God, and he will draw near to you. Cleanse your hands, you sinners, and purify your hearts, you double-minded.
1 Timothy 3:2 Therefore an overseer must be above reproach, the husband of one wife, sober-minded, self-controlled, respectable, hospitable, able to teach,
2 Timothy 1:7 For God gave us a spirit not of fear but of power and love and self-control.
Romans 8:6 For to set the mind on the flesh is death, but to set the mind on the Spirit is life and peace.
James 1:8 He is a double-minded man, unstable in all his ways.