This is a sad story. Another example of mean spirited and obsessive RCC
behavior. BTW the 'Vatican's Holy Office' where the policy behind the
letter was said to have originated was known in earlier times as the
Roman Inquisition.
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Document Revives WWII-Era Vatican Debate
Fri Dec 31, 2:16 PM ET
By ANGELA DOLAND, Associated Press Writer
VATICAN CITY - A document that surfaced recently in church archives has
revived debate about a contentious post-World War II issue: the Vatican
(news - web sites)'s attempt to keep hold of some Jewish children who
were protected from the Nazis by Christian families.
The 1946 circular apparently instructed French church authorities that
Jewish children baptized as Roman Catholics, for safety or other
reasons, should remain within the church even if that meant not
returning them to their own families once the Nazi occupation ended.
The document, published in Italy's Corriere della Sera newspaper this
week, caused a stir for its tough, clear wording, though several
historians said it offered no major revelations on an issue that emerged
across Europe after the war.
One Jewish leader called the letter "horrible."
"It's a dry, bureaucratic document, which has no feeling for the
Holocaust, I'm sorry to say," Amos Luzzatto, president of the Union of
Italian Jewish Communities, told the Apcom news agency.
The one-page document, dated Oct. 23, 1946, advised French church
authorities on how to handle information requests from Jewish officials,
asking them not to put anything in writing.
"Children who have been baptized must not be entrusted to institutions
that cannot ensure their Christian education," says a copy of the
French-language letter obtained by The Associated Press.
One of the letter's most jarring lines says that children whose families
survived the Holocaust should be returned, "as long as they had not been
baptized." Those whose parents were killed "should not be abandoned by
the Church," even if they had not received the sacrament.
That stance on baptism predated the Holocaust by nearly a century in
1858, papal guards took a 6-year-old Jewish boy named Edgardo Mortara
from his family in Bologna, Italy, after hearing he had been secretly
baptized by a Catholic housemaid.
The 1946 letter shows how seriously the church still treated the
sacrament and how it was unable to grasp the implications of the Nazi
extermination of Jews, said Michael Marrus, a Holocaust historian at the
University of Toronto.
"What really rings true to me is the church's failure to understand the
Holocaust as a catastrophe that affected the Jewish people, as a people,
and that certain consequences had to be drawn from this," he said,
adding that the church was not alone on that front.
The document was discovered recently in Roman Catholic Church archives
outside Paris by a French historian and was passed on to the John XXIII
Foundation for Religious Studies, the Bologna research organization said.
One mystery is who exactly wrote it. The letter is datelined from Paris
and says it summarizes the views of the Vatican's Holy Office, the
precursor to the current Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith.
It also notes that the contents were approved by Pope Pius XII the
controversial figure accused by some Jewish groups of not doing enough
to prevent the Holocaust.
Rev. Peter Gumpel, a Jesuit investigator promoting Pius' cause for
sainthood, denied that the letter came from any Vatican source. He
suggested it might have been a brief, incomplete summary of church
position by religious officials in France.
"Certainly there was a discussion about these issues, and norms were
established in the Vatican, that is true. But they were far more
explicit and far clearer and far more benign," Gumpel said.
The vast majority of children entrusted to Catholic families or
institutions were never baptized, Gumpel said. Some were baptized with
their parents. And all of them, when they came of age, had the right to
choose their religion, he said.
Besides Pius, the letter also appears to have involved another major
Catholic figure of the last century the Vatican diplomat who became
John XXIII.
In 1946, Angelo Roncalli was the Vatican's ambassador, or nuncio, to
France, and the letter was addressed to his office. The much-loved
pontiff is credited with saving thousands of Jews with transit visas and
other assistance during the war, before he became pope.
Etienne Fouilloux, a French historian who is compiling Roncalli's
diaries, said he found no trace of the diplomat's reaction to Jewish
leaders inquiring about children.
Given Roncalli's record, Fouilloux said, "it would be a great discovery
if we knew what the nuncio had replied."
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http://news.yahoo.com/news?tmpl=story&u=/ap/20041231/ap_on_re_eu/vatican_
jewish_children_1
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John Hachmann aa #1782
Intelligent Design has as much to do with science as reality
television has to do with reality. - Barry Lynn on CNN 12/25/04
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