Angelo Rotta

On 16 October 1922, Pope Pius XI named him titular archbishop of Thebes and Apostolic Internuncio to Central America,[1] which then covered Costa Rica, El Salvador, Honduras, and Nicaragua.

[6] According to historian of the Holocaust Martin Gilbert, "With Arrow Cross members killing Jews in the streets of Budapest, Angelo Rotta, the senior Vatican representative in Budapest, took a lead in establishing an "International Ghetto", consisting of several dozen modern apartment buildings to which large numbers of Jews - eventually 25,000 - were brought and to which the Swiss, Swedish, Portuguese, and Spanish legations, as well as the Vatican, affixed their emblems.

[9] Rotta encouraged Hungarian church leaders to help their "Jewish brothers", and directed Fr Tibor Baranszky to go to the forced marches and distribute letters of immunity to as many Jews as he could.

[8] In 1944 - 1945 Rotta contributed greatly to the saving action of the Neutral Powers (Portugal, Spain, Sweden, Switzerland, the Vatican) and the International Red Cross Committee in Budapest (initiated by Carl Lutz, and led, among others, by Giorgio Perlasca, Friedrich Born, Raoul Wallenberg, Angel Sanz Briz).

[8] On 19 November 1944, the Vatican joined the four other neutral powers - Sweden, Spain, Portugal and Switzerland - in a further collective protest to the Hungarian Government calling for the suspension of deportations of the Jews.