Sunday Times, 9 January
Did the Pope 'steal' Holocaust children?
Daniel Goldhagen
A 1946 Vatican letter was an attempt to stop the return of children to their Jewish families
Imagine that a person, at some risk to himself, saves an infant from a burning car in a rural area. The parents are dead. We would call him a hero.
But then he decides to keep the child and raise her in his god’s way. The man does not inform the authorities. When the desperate child’s relatives come looking for her, even knocking on his door, he denies any knowledge of the child’s whereabouts. The man’s initial good deed has become a crime. He is a kidnapper.
A document from the archives of the French Roman Catholic Church has just been published that reveals Pope Pius XII to have been like this man when Jewish relatives came frantically knocking, demanding their children. In October 1946 a letter containing papal instructions was sent to the papal nuncio in France, Cardinal Angelo Roncalli, the future Pope John XXIII.
He was a man of known compassion for Jews, who was working to reunite Jewish children hidden in Catholic institutions during the Holocaust with parents, relatives and Jewish institutions. The letter ordered Roncalli to desist and to hold on to the Jewish children: “Those children who have been baptised cannot be entrusted to institutions that are unable to ensure a Christian education.”
Pius XII’s intent to deprive Jewish parents of their children was unequivocal: “If the children have been entrusted (to the church) by their parents, and if the parents now claim them back, they can be returned, provided the children themselves have not been baptised. It should be noted that this decision of the Congregation of the Holy Office has been approved by the Holy Father.”
More:
http://www.timesonline.co.uk/newspaper/0,,176-1431072,00.html