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.”
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Does Father Martin have any research data behind his comments about the number of chaste SSA clergy?
I’m guilty of making unqualified statements too but I’m not a priest nor a public figure being interviewed.
Father Martin’s statement is likely correct but he should acknowledge it’s his personal opinion unless he has additional information to back it up.
Perhaps the priest has heard the word, “No”?
To fully understand Martin’s role at the Synod, it is necessary to fully understand the MINDSET of Pope Francis…
Namely (as a mere bystander, I humbly propose), his proposition that instead of dynamically “handing on the deposit of faith,” this deposit itself, within the patience of time, is more of a polarizing space. A polarity within a dynamic tension (no longer deposit) with the different and more concrete pole of the particular. Almost as if the Incarnation of the Creed—two natures in one Person—is no longer the “concrete universal.”
But instead, only the universal in tension with the concrete… Situated morality becomes Situation Ethics, butt with orthodoxy not rejected, but still retained and reaffirmed, as an OPTION within the broader or ostensibly higher mix. This Francis proposition/mindset is favorably and well set forth by one of his tribe, Ivereigh, in this article posted in 2017 on CRUX: https://cruxnow.com/book-review/2017/11/new-book-looks-intellectual-history-francis-pope-polarity.
Regarding Fr. Martin, then, homosexual activity is the “third option” of a transcendent synthesis which does not replace, but which continues to include on the menu the more “rigid” and binary human sexuality (therefore, the new synthesis/ dispensation is not Hegelian). For the real Catholic Church, however, this particular “third option”—and others of its kind: a male alongside female priesthood, authentic alongside bigamous marriages, the “hierarchical communion” alongside redefined synodality, etc.–is really the THIRD RAIL.
Butt, Francis, long before becoming pope, was of the mind that the Church itself [!]—by its very nature (if there still is a “nature”)—is instead more like a “catalyst” (my word, but recalling his early chemistry background) of the Holy Spirit always on the move with the particular, as in “walking together.” Rather than, say, standing STEADFAST together! Evangelii Gaudium: “time is greater than space!” Can we not see, then, that Francis’s hypothesis probably brands even the Faith & Reason polarities(!) as “backwardist” stuff?
Where Francis would have us make “decisions” in the concrete, for example, the Catechism and Veritatis Splendor (VS) already clarify that–with a well-formed conscience (!)–each of us is personally(!) responsible for making concrete(!) moral “judgments” (VS, nn. 56, 95), particularly(!) with regard to moral absolutes (“Thou shalt not…”).
But, then, “who am I to ‘judge’”? Now meaning, let us “decide,” synodally! Now, with the laity recruited as a useful pawn in a theological parlor game—like a black star, Fernandez even absorbs the dubia as synodal!
Ivereigh (in the linked CRUX) then also reasons that Chesterton is also into the polarity thingy, with: “G.K. Chesterton once described a heresy as a good idea gone mad.” CHESTERTON, who said this of what’s truly mad:
“The madman is not the man who has lost his reason. The madman is the man who has lost everything except his reason [….] that his mind moves in a perfect but narrow circle. A small circle is quite as infinite as a large circle; but though quite infinite, it is not so large [that is] the insane explanation is quite as complete as the sane one, but it is not so large.” The small circle: the tautological and self-validating (!) Synod on Synodality. With Chesterton, are the lunatics in charge of the asylum?
Or instead, this: “The Catholic Church is the only thing that frees a man from the degrading slavery of being a child of his age.”
Every priest is human and has his own struggles. No doubt there are many priests who struggle with disordered sexual attractions, but any priest who identifies himself by these attractions, (e.g., “I am gay.”) is going to find it very difficult to live out his priesthood.
It is sad that Fr. Martin falls into the pop culture error of seeing a person through the lens of his or her disordered desires. Christ came to free us from all that.
Well said! If we love someone, we want union with God for them, not sin that can turn us away from God.
How does Fr. Martin know if someone else is chaste? He says many are. So does that mean more are not? Perhaps he knows priests who are not chaste? And to be sure, he knows many priests who have homosexual attractions. Why doesn’t he say if he is chaste? St. Paul had a lot to say in Sacred Scripture about chastity. And he used himself as an example. Perhaps Fr. Martin can preach from his own experience? Is all of this about his own experience?
Fr. Martin has no data. But there is sound data that shows that over 80% of sexual crimes in the Church against children are committed by men with boys. Obviously, legitimizing pererastry is next step on the agenda after “blessings” for same-sex unions. It’s just a matter of time, which is greater than space.
The problem for me is not that same sex attracted priests will be sexually active, it is the immature and childish behavior that they bring into the priesthood. I have witnessed this firsthand and lament the forced revision of the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual so many years ago.
It sounds as though homosexualists can find you guilty in conscience of whatever they decide to identify in you as disfavouring them as to be against faith even; while at the same time it is impossible for the faithful to point out their folly and faux that they themselves have declared integral in their identity.
It is anathema and upholding it is worse anathema.