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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Instead of 152 paragraphs and 47 pages, what the progressives wanted is 11 words in one line.” Maybe this: “Synodality is to Fatherhood as Woodstock is to the Apostolic Succession”.
And, too, about now returning to what the International Theological Commission wrote about synodality in 2018, there’s this:
“…It is essential that, taken as a whole, the participants give a meaningful and balanced image of the local Church, reflecting different vocations, ministries, charisms, competencies, social status and geographical origin. The bishop, the successor of the apostles [!] and shepherd of his flock [!] who convokes and presides over the local Church synod, is called to exercise there the ministry of unity and leadership with the authority which belongs to him [!]” (n. 79).
Had Grech, Hollerich & Co. folded this foundation into their vademecum, rather than with bishops reduced “primarily as facilitators,” much ink need not have been spilled in the past few years, and today the progressives would be spared much cognitive dissonance.
So, still, yes to always better “listening” and being heard, but in a theologians’ food fight, less herding of the laity to be conned, scripted, and conscripted.
“So what were we discussing?” Indeed.
“What were we discussing?” And, what more, or less, COULD have been discussed?
Literally, just now, yours truly found a dated but possibly relevant article tucked in a book on my random and sparse shelf. On February 14, 2013, three days after Pope Benedict XVI announced his resignation and two weeks before the resignation took effect, and a full month before his successor was elected (March 13), he (Benedict) addressed the clergy in Rome, “without notes and from the heart.”
Writer Rev. Matthew L. Lamb recalled the purpose of the Council, reflected in the Documents, and then he quotes generously the conclusion of Benedict’s “electrifying” address:
“I would now would like to add another point: there was the Council of the fathers—the true Church—but there was also the Council of the media. It was almost a Council unto itself, and the world perceived the Council through these, through the media. Therefore the Council that immediately and efficiently arrived to the people was that of the media, not that of the fathers. And while the Council of the father was realized within the faith, and was a Council of the faith that seeks intellectus, that seeks to understand itself and seeks to understand the signs of God at that moment, that seeks to respond to the challenge of God at that moment and to find in the word of God the word for today and tomorrow, while the whole Council—as have said—was moving within the faith, as fides quaerens intellectum, the Council the journalists was not realized, naturally, within the faith, but within the categories of today’s media meaning outside of the faith, with a different hermeneutic. It was a political hermeneutic.
“For the media, the Council was a political struggle, a power struggle between different currents in the Church. It was obvious that the media were taking sides with that part which seemed to them to have the most in common with their world. These were those who were seeking the decentralization of the Church, power for the bishops and then, through the expression ‘people of God,’ the power of the people, of the laity. Ther was this threefold question: the power of the pope, then transferred to the power of the bishops and to the power of all, popular sovereignty.Naturally, for them this was the side to approve of, to promulgate, to favor.
“And so also for the liturgy: the liturgy was not of interest as an act of faith, but as a matter where understandable things are done, a matter of community activity, a profane matter. And we know that there was a tendency, that was also founded historically, to say: sacrality is a pagan thing, perhaps even in the Old Testament, but in the New all that matters is that Christ died outside: that is, outside of the gates, meaning in the profane world. A sacrality therefore to be brought to an end, profanity of worship as well: worship is not worship but an act of the whole, of common participation and thus also participation as activity.
“These translations, trivialization of the idea of the Council were virulent in the praxis of the application of liturgical reform; they were born in a vision of the Council outside of its proper key, that of faith. And thus also in the question of Scripture: Scripture is a book, historical, to be treated historically and nothing else, and so on. We know how this Council of the media was accessible to all. Therefore, this was the dominant, more efficient one, and has created so much calamity, so many problems, really so much misery: seminaries closed, convents closed, liturgy trivialized….And the true Council had difficulty in becoming concrete, in realizing itself; the virtual Council was stronger than the real Council.”
(Citation is from http://chiesa.espresso.republic.it/articolo/1350435?eng=y, but does not work. The above is quoted directly from Rev. Matthew L. Lamb, “Vatican II After Fifty Years: The Virtual Council versus the Real Council,” The Fellowship of Catholic Scholars Quarterly, Fall/Winter 2012 including early 2013).
Archbishop Marcel Lefebvre refused to sign the document on religious liberty and Guadiem et Spes; the council was corrupted from within, with the media council managed from inside the council chamber by Cardinal Villot, who supplied lots of scandal to his fellow freemason running the French Newspaper LaCroix. (Information published from an interview in Catholic Catechism of the Crisis in the Church by Abbe Matthias Gaudron). This all helped their French Grande Orient lodge forment the phallic revolution of May ’68.
Archbishop Marcel Lefebvre refused to sign the document on religious liberty and Guadiem et Spes; the council was corrupted from within, with the media council managed from inside the council chamber by Cardinal Villot, who supplied lots of scandal to his fellow freemason running the French Newspaper LaCroix. (Information published from an interview in Catholic Catechism of the Crisis in the Church by Abbe Matthias Gaudron). This all helped their French Grande Orient lodge forment the phallic revolution of May ’68. Cardinal Villot was a Luciferian Freemason.
Thanks for this prophetic contribution. What would it take to get those at the Vatican to read it let alone respond to it?
What will church history make of this? It will probably be condemned as a huge waste of time, resources and money and have nothing to show. It is an exercise in confusion that would make the Charge of the Light Brigade seem as a sensible military decision!
I wish they’d all just go home and resume their quiet lives of anonymity. They should return to worshipping God, frequenting the Sacraments (especially Confession), aspire to lives of holiness and proclaim the Gospel as Jesus exhorted all of us. As for Francis, since he is coming to a close of his pontificate, he needs to step back and take a fearless moral inventory of the impact his papacy has had on the Church and seek to restore unity to the Body which has been dreadfully fractured by actions he’s taken and things he’s spoken. This is best done by frequent meetings with a Spiritual Director – someone specifically chosen who won’t tell him what he wants to hear but, rather, what he needs to hear. In this last regard, I think the emeritus bishop of Tyler TX is well-suited for the role.
Mr. Beaulieu above – Thanks for the passage from Pope Benedict.
It about sums up my experience of the Church in the last 59 years.
Some of us do not have a forum to express ourselves. Synod on Synodality has been the Protestant approach and we have seem how their churches scrambled within 500 years. This will certainly break the church: Even when we were given questionnaire at the level of parish, I sensed there was unclear motive.This is not the Pope’s ideas, some evil power has cropped in which needs prayer. But God helps those who help themselves – you ask for help but you run, then God will help you run faster to defeat the enemy. We read what is happening in Vatican, but out hands are tied. Can some Cardinal or Bishop or someone able to see the Pope tell him that this path is evil and has already failed the Protestants.
“This is not the Pope’s ideas…”
The Synod on Synodality surely is his idea. How can you conclude otherwise, considering he called it, etc.?
Dr OJ, you suggest somone tell the Pope that this (synodal) path is evil and has already failed the Protestants.
May I suggest that is precisely why the Pope via Cardinal C6 Marx chose it? The objective is clear to anyone who has understood the Church Institution is occupied by anti-Catholic forces. (There is no other rational explanation for the terrible destruction 1962-1965 and then the fall out.)
Francis is the culmination of currents of dissent from Catholic orthodoxy that has characterized the whole post VII era. Except for some erroneous heterodox sentiments implied in various sentences, the documents of VII were orthodox but invited an unwarranted optimistic faith in the trajectory of contemporary history, which led to a great deal of junk theology and liturgical free-for-alls. Many clerics and prelates were captivated by bad theology, but few ever believed a distorted mind could ever rise to the top and raise havoc. Not only through his own foolishness, but in resurrecting dissidents of the past, Francis’ actions serve as a rebuke to the confident loyal Catholics who baselessly assumed the era of dissent died in the seventies. Human vanity never dies.
From what can be gathered from remarks here by theologian Myriam Wijlens and exchange between Raymond Arroyo and Robert Royal, Arroyo having access to some related documentation – the major impact on the Church will be governance. The implementation of permanent parish and or Diocesan councils.
What is of interest are regional councils with a larger share of independent authority. It appears to be a restructuring of Ecclesial governance more localized and horizontal rather than leading vertically to the Roman pontiff. Some theologians perceive a beneficial return to the early conciliar Church, although the early Church trended toward consolidation centered in the papacy. Especially when doctrinal issues on the nature of Christ came to fore.
From this writer’s perspective, after 2000 years of defining doctrine the purpose apparently is to implement a variegated approach to not simply regionally interpreting doctrine but inclusive of new rules or disbandment of doctrine. A restructure of a Church unified in name only. An ironic reproduction of the person whose Catholicism is limited to name. We might add, relevant to Peter Beaulieu’s quote of Benedict XVI upon resignation of the papacy, “These were those [the media and clergy] who were seeking the decentralization of the Church, power for the bishops and then, through the expression ‘people of God” the final success of Luther’s Reformation.
A major problem was created years ago when the local parishes started writing their own Mission Statements. The result was total CHAOS (compete disorder and confusion) and misguided Roles and Activities.