The Nazi authorities occupied Rome from September 10, 1943 to June 4, 1944. During this dark period, 2,000 Jews – among them children and adolescents – were deported and never returned.
Researchers from the Pontifical Biblical Institute of the Vatican and those from the Yad Vashem Holocaust research institute have just made their most recent results public, during a university workshop organized on September 7, 2023 in the Eternal City.
It appears that 4,300 people were taken care of by around a hundred religious congregations present in Rome, among them 3,600 were clearly identified by their last name, and 3,200 were Jewish names.
“Of the latter, we know where they were hidden and, in certain circumstances, where they lived before the persecution. The documentation thus significantly increases information on the history of the rescue of the Jews in the context of the Catholic institutions of Rome,” said the joint statement from the Biblical Institute and Yad Vashem.
Of course, the names of those rescued are not accessible to the general public in order to protect their privacy as well as that of their descendants.
The results allow, once again, putting an end to the dark legend of the Pope whose guilty silences were deemed to cast an indelible stain on the pre-conciliar Church, sick with an anti-Semitism that Vatican II dissipated with a wave of a magic wand.
It has been a few years since the historical truth appeared irrefutabl. In 2020, the historian Johan Ickx presented his book The Office: The Jews of Pius XII in the columns of Figaro Magazine and noted “the reality of constant aid from the Vatican to Jews throughout Europe, individuals or families, via the action of a desk officer of the Secretariat of State, to whom this daily mission had been specifically entrusted: Bishop Angelo Dell’Acqua.”
But despite this, Pope Pacelli still bears the brunt of regular defamation campaigns 65 years after his death. “This clearly shows how we continue to ‘create’ history about Pius XII. It’s been the same technique for 50 years: delegitimizing to the general public the people around Pius XII to indirectly project an accusatory shadow on the Pope,” underlined Johan Ickx.
New research has identified the names of 3,200 Jews who were hidden in Catholic convents in Rome during World War II. It is additional proof of the effectiveness of the “discreet diplomacy” to save as many lives as possible led by Pope Pius XII during the German occupation of Rome.