Rescue of Jews by Catholics during the Holocaust

For example, in his 1942 Christmas radio address, he denounced the murder of "hundreds of thousands" of innocent people on the basis of "nationality or race," and he intervened by attempting to block Nazi deportations of Jews in various countries.

The Church played an important role in the defense of Jews in Belgium, France, and the Netherlands, encouraged by the public protests and statements of leaders such as Cardinal Jozef-Ernest van Roey, Archbishop Jules-Géraud Saliège, and Johannes de Jong.

[14] Though Faulhaber's words were cautiously framed as a discussion of historical Judaism, his sermons denounced the Nazi extremists who were calling for the Bible to be purged of the "Jewish" Old Testament as a grave threat to Christianity: in seeking to adhere to the central tenet of Nazism, "The anti-Semitic zealots..." wrote Hamerow, were undermining "the basis of Catholicism.

Unlike the Nazi euthanasia murder of invalids, which the church led protests against, the Final Solution liquidation of the Jews did not primarily take place on German soil, but rather in Polish territory.

[25] As the newly installed Nazi Government began to instigate its program of anti-antisemitism, Pope Pius XI, through Cardinal Pacelli, who was by then serving as Vatican Secretary of State, ordered the successor Papal Nuncio in Berlin, Cesare Orsenigo, to "look into whether and how it may be possible to become involved" in their aid.

[30] Mary Fulbrook wrote that when politics encroached on the church, Catholics were prepared to resist, but that the record was otherwise patchy and uneven, and that, with notable exceptions, "it seems that, for many Germans, adherence to the Christian faith proved compatible with at least passive acquiescence in, if not active support for, the Nazi dictatorship".

The neutral powers led a major rescue effort and Pius' representative, Angelo Rotta took the lead in establishing an "international Ghetto", around which the Swiss, Swedish, Portuguese, Spanish and Vatican legations affixed their emblems, providing shelter for some 25,000 Jews.

Pius' diplomatic representatives lobbied on behalf of Jews across Europe, including in Nazi allied Vichy France, Hungary, Romania, Bulgaria, Croatia and Slovakia, Germany itself and elsewhere.

Martin Gilbert wrote that when negotiations began for the deportation of Jews from the Italian zone, General Roatta flatly refused, leading Hitler's envoy, Siegfried Kasche, to report some of Mussolini's subordinates "apparently been influenced" by opposition in the Vatican to German anti-Semitism.

[80] Gilbert wrote, "In the Croatian capital of Zagreb, as a result of intervention by [Marcone] on behalf of Jewish partners in mixed marriages, a thousand Croat Jews survived the war".

[89][90] Later in 1942, amid Vatican protests as news of the fate of the deportees filtered back, and the German advance into Russia was halted, Slovakia became the first of Hitler's puppet states to shut down the deportations.

"[25] Mark Mazower wrote that "When the Vatican protested, the government responded with defiance: 'There is no foreign intervention which would stop us on the road to the liberation of Slovakia from Jewry', insisted President Tiso".

[89] Burzio begged Tiso directly to at least spare Catholic Jews from transportation and delivered an admonition from the Pope: "the injustice wrought by his government is harmful to the prestige of his country and enemies will exploit it to discredit clergy and the Church the world over.

"[72] Following the Nazi occupation of Italy, when news of the 15 October 1943 round-up of Roman Jews reached the Pope, he instructed Cardinal Maglione to protest to the German Ambassador to "save these innocent people".

Angelo Rotta, Papal Nuncio from 1930, actively protested Hungary's mistreatment of the Jews, and helped persuade Pope Pius XII to lobby the Hungarian leader Admiral Horthy to stop their deportation.

[105] 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.

[110] Upon the death of Pius XII in 1958, the Israeli Foreign Minister Golda Meir said: "When fearful martyrdom came to our people in the decade of Nazi terror, the voice of the Pope was raised for the victims.

"[118] This sentiment was echoed by Konrad Adenauer, the Catholic mayor of Cologne, who said in a private letter after the war when he had become chancellor of Germany, "I believe that if all the bishops had together made public statements from the pulpits on a particular day, they could have prevented a great deal.

… Let us pray to God and for the intercession of Mary … that he may lend his strength to the people of Israel, so severely tried in anguish and persecutionThe protest angered the Nazi authorities and deportations of Jews only increased - including Catholic converts.

[127] Marie-Rose Gineste transported a pastoral letter from Bishop Théas of Montauban by bicycle to forty parishes, denouncing the uprooting of men and women "treated as wild animals", and the French Resistance smuggled the text to London, where it was broadcast to France by the BBC, reaching tens of thousands of homes.

[129] In the spring of 1942, following a meeting with Pius XII in Rome, Archbishop Aloysius Stepinac of Zagreb declared publicly that it was "forbidden to exterminate Gypsies and Jews because they are said to belong to an inferior race".

[130] When Schutzstaffel chief Heinrich Himmler visited Zagreb in 1943, indicating the impending roundup of remaining Jews, Stepinac wrote Pavelic that if this occurred, he would protest for "the Catholic Church is not afraid of any secular power, whatever it may be, when it has to protect basic human values".

On June 26, 1944, confirmation of the mass murder at Auschwitz spurred the neutral powers in Budapest - including the Vatican - into action, seeking to thwart Nazi efforts to exterminate the Jews by issuing protective visas.

[151] Rotta also 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.

[149] When AK Home Army Intelligence discovered the true fate of transports leaving the Jewish Ghetto, the Council to Aid Jews - Rada Pomocy Żydom (codename Zegota) was established in late 1942.

[180] Wladyslaw Bartoszewski (aka "Teofil"), a co-founder of Zegota, had worked with the Catholic underground movement, the Front for the Rebirth of Poland, and was arrested in a 1940 Nazi purge of the intelligentsia and sent to Auschwitz.

In 1988, Lubac returned to writing about the era in Résistance chrétienne à l'antisémitisme, souvenirs 1940-1944 (Christian Resistance to Antisemitism: Memories from 1940-1944)[191] Mothers Superior of many convents provided safe haven to French Jews.

[193] The Carmelite friar Lucien Bunel (Jacques de Jesus) was sent to the Mauthausen Death Camp for sheltering three Jewish boys at his school (dramatized in the 1987 film Au revoir les enfants, made by Louis Malle, one of his former pupils).

[203] She and two British women, Mother Riccarda Beauchamp Hambrough and Sister Katherine Flanagan, have been beatified for reviving the Swedish Bridgettine Order of nuns and hiding scores of Jewish families in their convent during Rome's period of occupation under the Nazis.

[205] When the Nazis began rounding up Jews, Monsignor Nicolini, Bishop of Assisi, ordered Father Aldo Brunacci to lead a rescue operation, arranging sheltering places in 26 monasteries and convents and providing false papers for transit.