ROME (CNS): A 1946 instruction, apparently approved by Pope Pius XII, said Jewish children who had been baptised to save them from the Nazis were to be entrusted only to families or institutions that would guarantee their continuing education in the faith.
The instruction was found recently in Catholic Church archives in France, and an Italian translation was published on December 28 by the Italian newspaper Corriere della Sera.
The translation accompanied an article by Alberto Melloni, a noted Church historian, whose Bologna, Italy-based Institute for Religious Sciences is in the process of publishing the diaries of Archbishop Angelo Roncalli, the Vatican ambassador to France after the war, who became Pope John XXIII.
The instruction was dated October 20, 1946, and ends with a statement that “this decision of the Congregation of the Holy Office [the predecessor of the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith] was approved by the Holy Father”, Pope Pius XII.
“As regards Jewish children who, during the German occupation, were entrusted to Catholic institutions and families and are now being reclaimed by Jewish institutions,” the note begins, “the children who were baptised cannot be entrusted to institutions unable to ensure their Christian education.
“If the children were entrusted [to the Church] by their parents and if the parents now reclaim them, they can be returned, as long as the children have not received baptism,” the document said.
Just three months before the Holy Office statement was written, Mr Melloni said, then-Archbishop Roncalli wrote a letter to the Chief Rabbi of Palestine, Rabbi Isaac Herzog, authorising him to use the archbishop’s name in the campaign to identify Jewish children sheltered by Catholics and to reunite them with family members or take them to Israel.
Jesuit Father Pierre Blet, a historian and expert on the Vatican during World War II, told the Italian Catholic newspaper Avvenire that the document was not anti-Jewish, but rather a defence of Church teaching in force at the time.
“On the basis of the canon law of that period, it was obligatory to provide a Catholic education to a person who had been baptised,” Fr Blet said.
While canon law also forbade people from baptising children against the will of the children’s parents, if someone was baptised according to the proper formula, they were considered Catholic, he added.
However, Fr Blet said, the Vatican’s reaffirmation of Church law did not mean the Vatican did not understand the massive confusion in Europe a’t the time, nor was it insensitive to Jewish feelings about children who had been hidden.
Fr Blet said the December 26 publication of the note was the work of forces “who do not want the beatification of Pius XII”.
