Posted on 01/12/2005 5:35:52 PM PST by It's me
1946 Document on Jewish Children Tells a Different Story Undercuts Tale That Vatican Tried to Keep Them From Their Families
ROME, JAN. 12, 2005 (Zenit.org).- The latest in a series of accusations about Pope Pius XII's behavior vis-à-vis the Jews and Nazi persecution seems to have little basis in fact.
The latest round began Dec. 28 when an Italian newspaper published passages of an alleged 1946 Vatican document that supposedly aimed to keep baptized Jewish children from being returned to their families.
The text, as stated in Il Corriere della Sera by Alberto Melloni, director of the G. Dossetti Library of the John XXIII Foundation for Religious Sciences of Bologna, was "a disposition of the Holy Office," as the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith was formerly known. The document was said to be dated Oct. 20, 1946.
But after careful research, ZENIT discovered that the document, in fact, was not of the Holy Office and did not bear evidence of the reported date. Nor did it state what the article in Il Corriere said it did.
The document, whose original is in French, was written under the oversight of the then apostolic nuncio in Paris, Angelo Roncalli, the future Pope John XXIII.
It was meant to explain to the French clergy the instructions he had received from the Holy See, specifically, from the secretary of the Congregation for Extraordinary Ecclesiastical Affairs, Monsignor Domenico Tardini.
In his newspaper article, Alberto Melloni did not quote the archive from which the document came.
In fact, the document, in full, was published last Tuesday after being tracked down by Italian journalist Andrea Tornielli of the Milan newspaper Il Giornale.
Tornielli revealed that the original is kept in the Centre National des Archives de l'Église de France, archive of the secretariat of the French episcopate, position "7 CE 131."
ZENIT obtained by fax a copy of the original and verified that the text has the seal of the apostolic nunciature of France -- as opposed to what Il Corriere della Sera published, which attributed it to the Holy Office.
ZENIT also verified that the document is dated Oct. 23, 1946, three days later than that mentioned by Il Corriere, and that the terms of the Vatican proposal are very different from what the Italian newspaper had reported.
The original document contradicts Melloni's version. It states, in fact, that the children should be returned to their original Jewish families.
Regarding "Jewish institutions," which during those months were working in Paris and throughout Europe to transfer children to Palestine, the document states that each case must be examined individually.
ZENIT learned that the history of the document began in March 1946, when Isaac Herzog, the chief rabbi of Jerusalem, addressed a letter to Pope Pius XII in which the former wrote: "The Jewish people very much remember with profound gratitude the help given by the Holy See to the people that suffered during the Nazi persecution."
Profound thanks are given for the "thousands of children who were hidden in Catholic institutions," and the rabbi requests that these children be returned to the Jewish people.
Herzog emphasized how Pius XII "has worked to banish anti-Semitism in many countries" and concluded with an invocation: "God willing, may history remember that when everything was dark for our people, His Holiness lit a light of hope for them."
Pius XII took to heart the fate of these Jewish children and, in that same month of March, asked the Holy Office to study the case.
The Holy Office, after hearing from several consultors, prepared a document in response to the Pope's request.
In August 1946, some French bishops and, specifically, Coadjutor Archbishop Emile Guerry of Cambrai and Cardinal Pierre Gerlier of Lyon, asked nuncio Roncalli for pointers as to how to resolve the situation of Jewish children saved from Nazi persecution.
Angelo Roncalli gathered all this material and, at the end of September, sent a letter to the Vatican Secretariat of State requesting instructions.
Roncalli was answered by Monsignor Tardini, secretary of the Congregation for Extraordinary Ecclesiastical Affairs, not in the way quoted by the article in Il Corriere, but rather in the way mentioned above.
Journalist Andrea Tornielli told ZENIT that the Church in France resolved the problem in the vast majority of cases by returning the children, whose lives it saved, to their surviving families.
During the war, priests and religious received orders from the Holy See and bishops not to baptize these children. Baptism requires the consent of the person receiving the sacrament or of the parents, if the recipient does not have the use of reason. This is revealed in documents quoted by www.vaticanfiles.net. ZE05011220
My father and my uncles were all in the US military in WW2. My grandfather was a doughboy in WW1. I resent your comment and your apparent motives.
Armchair Quarterback Statement of the Week.
Why don't you envisualize yourself standing in line to get de-loused, naked, your family members standing naked at your side, without a weapon, and completely terror-stricken, knowing that you are minutes away from a gas chamber.
"Well, I think I'll find me a gun and get the hell outta here."
Its easy for you to say what should have been done after 60 years of hindsight.
My advice to you would be to shut up. You are really making an anti-semitic ass-fool of yourself to others on this board.
Well Really! How could someone say something so awful!
Google them.
I now realize why this person has said these wierd, off the wall things. He/she wants to take the light off the issue in the article.
Get people sidetracked.
It worked.
How about addressing the issue of the Vatican and the Jewish children after the war.
Actually, the The New York Times is a good source on this. There are books that defend Pope Pius XII that use these quotes.
But these are quotes of The New York Times during World War II.
But obtain a copy of the movie The Scarlet and the Black, and you will have a much clearer picture of what happened.
In World War II, Jewish people had the HIGHEST SURVIVAL RATE in Italy.
If no one has fire arms, self defense is all theoretical, anyway.
I think that there are a number of reasons for this. First off, I think that there was a belief that people are basicly good, and that the terrible things that the Jews and other "undesirables" were suffering would end in time. They wanted to believe that they were being "relocated." There was also the belief, especially in Germany, that these Jews were first and formost, good Germans! The "Reform Judaism" movement began there, and one of the things that Reform Jews are known for is assimilation with the local people. I'm not saying that this is a bad thing. What I mean is that they want to "blend in," as opposed to "standing out," as the Orthodox sects tend to do.
It was only when they realized that they were going to die that SOME Jews fought back. Either through partisan groups, the Warsaw Ghetto uprising, or the revolt at the Treblinka concentration camp.
But most, as I believe would be the case with most people, didn't fight back.
Mark
I don't know if I can really blame them any more. Look at history. Whenever Israel wins a war, world sentiment turns against her. Remember in 1973, when Israel was attacked, and they beat back the Egyptians and Syrians, capturing a huge number of Egyptian troops, and pressing into Egypt, across the Suez canal, and Israeli tanks were less than 50 miles from Damascus, Syria. It was only then that the UN stepped in to "stop the war." Israel didn't want to stop, but was pressured by the US, since the USSR threatened to get directly involved if Israel didn't stop.
Israel is afraid to use the sort of force needed to put an end to the nonsense that's going on there because of the way the rest of the world would react.
Mark
You are so very, very wrong. Stalin and Churchill were very nearly BOTH defeated by Hitler. Hitler did some dumb things in the invasion of the Soviet Union that hurt the Germans. The Germans were very, very close Moscow when the winter begin.
As for Great Britian, after Dunkirk, England could have been invaded -- it would have been quite costly to the Germans. But at that point, the Germans were not fighting the Soviet Union.
Even after the United States entered the war, it was pretty bleak for a while. And that was with the US sending 80% against Germany, and 20% against Japan -- and Japan was the country that bombed Pearl Harbor.
France also fought back in the war -- and what did it get them? They were out very quickly once Germany invaded.
Finally, one has to highly commend the Polish military for their bravery when fighting both Germany and Soviet Union in September 1939.
But somehow horse calvary against tanks, planes, and modern artillery is not effective, and the Polish had serious losses.
So maybe the Jews should have tried to run the Germans out of bullets by bare handed charges at machine guns.
I like Jews and I love Israel but I won't deny their big loyalty problems of the past.
Huh? Let me see if I've got this straight. You condemn Jews for not fighting against their government (which was rounding them up and sending them off to be "relocated"), then you say that they've got loyalty problems?
Just out of curiosity, according to you, should the Japanese who were sent to the internment camps in the US in WWII have fought against the US government?
Mark
<< "Fighting back" is a bit tricky if, after escaping from the Nazis, you can only look forward to being lynched by the local peasants. >>
Sure.
As was very well demonstrated in the Warsaw Ghetto -- and ever since in the Nation of Israel.
Makes much more sense to sit on your arse and wait for the "Democrats" [Whose eventually 70+ years-long ownership, operation and control of the US feral gummint's levers and institutions of power was by then well established] to save you.
You should praise the normal Israeli loving Jews even more, while seeing the other Jews for what they are.
I hate to tell you pal, it's not just the "Majority" of the Jews. In case you didn't know, there were over 12 million people killed in the camps. About 1/2 were Jews.
The simple fact is that when crunch time comes the vast majority of people will do NOTHING. History is ripe with that. Did the majority of Cambodians fight back against the Khmer Rouge? Or the South Vietnamese against the North Vietnamese? What about the Iraqi people against the Sunni minority? Try looking at history. It's not just the Jews that didn't fight back.
Mark
Good points - I was also thinking that many Jews were identifying themselves as Germans first, and didn't imagine that the government would exterminate them for that reason.
And people have a tendency to want to think the best of a situation - rose colored glasses, and all that. "No! It couln't possibly be *that* bad!"
As in "there couldn't possibly be another bad terrorist attack".
History says otherwise.
The Law on Firearms and Ammunition was introduced to Germany in 1928 under the Weimar regime to disarm the private paramilitary/political groups forming after WWI.
Hitler came to power (peacefully by ballot) in 1933. In 1938, using his emergency power granted earlier by the Reichstag, Hitler extended the law for the duration of the "emergency".
The Nazis didn't need the law, they already had absolute power by 1938 and no party could challenge them. It was just convenient for them to keep it to hold a "legal" club over any citizen that might step out of line.
Their Loyalty problems to each other, not their nation.
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