To the Editor:
Re “New Reasons to Doubt That Pope During ’40s Sought to Save Jews” (news article, Aug. 28):
I was a member of the International Catholic-Jewish Historical Commission comprising three Catholic and three Jewish international scholars to review the 11 volumes of archival Holocaust material published by the Vatican and to raise relevant questions that were not satisfactorily resolved by the available documentation.
We released a preliminary report in October 2000 posing 47 questions that have not been fully addressed by the Vatican.
You cite previously unpublished documents related to the Finaly brothers, which the historian David I. Kertzer published, that describe the church’s refusal to return them to their Jewish aunt after the war.
During the Holocaust the brothers were put in the care of local Catholics and secretly baptized after their parents were killed in Auschwitz. If they had not been baptized, it is not certain that the church would have protected them from the Nazis, and they would have been shipped to concentration camps. And after the war the church resisted returning them to their Jewish family, claiming that they were Catholic.
This incident demonstrates in microcosm the church’s deplorable attitude toward Jews during the Holocaust and why Pius XII should not be considered for sainthood.
Seymour D. Reich
New York
To the Editor:
Pope Pius XII was a complex figure, and David I. Kertzer’s preliminary findings reveal the already known less flattering facets of this controversial pontiff.
In 2014, the International Raoul Wallenberg Foundation, which I founded with Representative Tom Lantos, began its Houses of Life program with the aim of identifying and marking physical sites that gave shelter to victims of Nazism, especially children.
Since its inception, we founded more than 500 Houses of Life in Europe, mostly in Italy. A vast majority were Catholic churches and convents, a fact that suggests the Vatican’s involvement.
Thousands of Jewish children were saved in those Houses of Life. Many of them never returned to their families, and converted to Catholicism.
Hopefully, the unfettered access to the Vatican archives will shed light on this lifesaving campaign and its motivations. Did Pius XII give the order to shelter the Jewish children, or did he just turn a blind eye? Was he moved by Christian compassion, or did he want to convert Jewish children? All this remains to be seen.
Baruch Tenembaum
New York