Saving Jewish Children, but at What Cost?
 By ELAINE SCIOLINO and JASON HOROWITZ
 New York Times
January 10, 2004

PARIS, Jan. 8 - In October 1946, just a year after the defeat of the Nazis, the Vatican weighed in on one of the most painful episodes of the postwar era: the refusal to allow Jewish children who had been sheltered by Catholics during the war to return to their own families and communities.

A newly disclosed directive on the this subject provides written confirmation of well-known church policy and practices at the time, particularly toward Jewish children who had been baptized, often to save them from perishing at the hands of the Nazis. Its tone is cold and impersonal, and it makes no mention of the horrors of the Holocaust.

Its disclosure has reopened a raw debate on the World War II role of the Catholic Church and of Pope Pius XII, a candidate for sainthood who has been excoriated by his critics as a heartless anti-Semite who maintained a public silence on the Nazi death camps and praised by his supporters as a savior of Jewish lives.

The one-page, typewritten directive, dated Oct. 23, 1946, was discovered in a French church archive outside Paris and made available to The New York Times on the condition that the source would not be disclosed. It is a list of instructions for French authorities on how to deal with demands from Jewish officials who want to reclaim Jewish children.

"Children who have been baptized must not be entrusted to institutions that would not be in a position to guarantee their Christian upbringing," the directive says.

It also contains an order not to allow Jewish children who had been baptized Catholic to go home to their own parents. "If the children have been turned over by their parents, and if the parents reclaim them now, providing that the children have not received baptism, they can be given back," it says.

Even Jewish orphans who had not been baptized Catholic were not to be turned over automatically to Jewish authorities. "For children who no longer have their parents, given the fact that the church has responsibility for them, it is not acceptable for them to be abandoned by the church or entrusted to any persons who have no rights over them, at least until they are in a position to choose themselves," the document says. "This, obviously, is for children who would not have been baptized."

The document, written in French and first disclosed last week by the Italian daily newspaper Corriere della Sera, is unsigned but says, "It should be noted that this decision taken by the Holy Congregation of the Holy Office has been approved by the Holy Father."

 The publication of the document is likely to embolden those who do not think Pius XII is worthy of becoming a saint. Some prominent Jews and historians have attacked the document for its insensitivity to the Holocaust.

 The Rev. Peter Gumpel, a Rome-based Jesuit priest and a leading proponent for the beatification of Pius XII, the first step toward sainthood, said he was convinced that the document did not come from the Vatican. He pointed out that it is not on official Vatican stationery, that it is not signed and that it is written in French, not Italian. "There is something fishy here," he said.

But Étienne Fouilloux, a French historian who is compiling Pope John XXIII's diaries during his years in France, said that the document had been discovered recently in church archives outside of Paris by a serious researcher and that it is genuine. John has been beatified, the last formal step toward sainthood.

At the time, Pope John XXIII was Monsignor Angelo Roncalli, Pope Pius XII'S representative to France. During the war, Monsignor Roncalli was credited with saving tens of thousands of Jews from Nazi persecution by using diplomatic couriers, papal representatives and nuns to issue and deliver baptismal certificates, immigration certificates and visas, many of them forged, to Jews. He also helped gain asylum for Jews in neutral countries.