7 The Return Of Baptized Jewish Children
While Pope Pius XII has been condemned for remaining largely silent on the Holocaust and politics of Word War II, under his leadership the Catholic Church did take steps to save several thousand Jews from the Nazis. Some Italian and Hungarian Jews were issued false baptism certificates and other documents identifying them as Catholics. In France, many Jewish children were baptized and placed in Catholic schools and orphanages, effectively hiding them from the Nazis.
The problem is what happened next. When the war ended, the Catholic Church in France issued a directive forbidding its representatives from returning Jewish children who had been baptized to their families. The document, which claimed to have been “approved by the Holy Father,” firmly stated that “children who have been baptized must not be entrusted to institutions that would not be in a position to guarantee their Christian upbringing.”
Many of the children concerned had lost their parents in the Holocaust, and some were deliberately never told of their Jewish background. The issue first came to public attention in France with the case of Robert and Gerald Finaly, who became the subject of a lengthy legal battle after their surviving Jewish relatives attempted to regain custody from the French Catholics who had baptized them. Other French Catholics apparently ignored the Church’s order and agreed to return the Jewish children in their care, including the future Pope John XXIII, who was the Vatican’s representative in Paris at the time. To this day it is not clear how many Jewish children the Church saved—or how many it gave back afterward.
6 Nazi Gold In The Vatican Bank
In 1947, a US Treasury agent named Emerson Bigelow apparently penned a highly classified report which alleged that the Catholic Church had smuggled Nazi gold through the Vatican bank. Although the report itself has been lost, a letter written by Bigelow explained that it contained information from a reliable source revealing that the Nazi’s puppet Utashe regime in Croatia had smuggled around 350 million Swiss francs in gold out of the country at the end of the war. According to Bigelow, perhaps 200 million francs of this was briefly held in the Vatican bank for safekeeping.
Bigelow’s letter also referenced information that the gold had subsequently been funneled through the “Vatican pipeline” to Spain and South America, where it was used to help Nazi and Utashe officials escape punishment for their crimes. The letter only came to light in 1997, after being declassified by the US government the year before. A spokesperson for the Vatican bank denied the claims, but the Catholic Church remains embroiled in lawsuits over its alleged laundering of Nazi gold.
In 2000, a class action lawsuit was brought by around 2,000 Holocaust survivors and relatives who sought restitution from the Vatican up to $200 million, using the Bigelow letter and other recently declassified documents to allege that the Vatican had improperly harbored gold stolen from Europe’s Jews. The suit has since stalled, with American courts split on whether the case can be tried in the US.
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