The Vatican’s Role in the Finaly Children’s Kidnapping Case
Keywords:
forced baptism, Finaly brothers, Pope Pius XII, Vatican, Church-Jewish relations, FranceAbstract
No case more fully embodies the tensions between the Roman Catholic Church and Europe’s traumatized Jews in the wake of the Shoah than the battle over the return of the two French Jewish orphans of the Holocaust, Robert and Gérald Finaly. The French Catholic woman who took the boys in when, in 1944, their parents were deported to their death at Auschwitz, refused to honor the parents’ wishes and allow the boys’ aunt to reclaim them when requested in 1945. Spurning a series of subsequent French judicial orders to give the boys back to their family, an underground network of nuns and monks hid them, ultimately, in early 1953, concealing the children under false names in a monastery in Spain. The opening of the Vatican archives for the papacy of Pius XII in 2020 now permits, for the first time, a clear view of the intense involvement of the pope, the Vatican Secretariat of State, and the Holy Office in directing the French and Spanish Church response to the demand that the boys be given up to their Jewish family. The findings demonstrate the Holy See’s continued commitment under Pius XII to uphold longtime Church doctrine on the impermissibility of allowing baptized Jewish children, even if baptized against their family’s wishes, to be returned to their Jewish families.
Downloads
Published
How to Cite
Issue
Section
License
All content in SCJR, unless otherwise noted, is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution License. Under this license, authors retain copyright to their work and full publishing rights to their work, though mention of its original publication in SCJR would be appreciated. Users are free to copy, distribute, display, and perform the work; to make derivative works; and to make commercial use of the work, provided that attribution is given to the original author and that the license terms are made clear in any reuse or distribution.
Authors are required to agree to the following license terms:
License Agreement
I grant to Boston College the right to include and publish my submission in the online journal Studies in Christian-Jewish Relations. I will retain copyright ownership but hereby grant to Boston College the non-exclusive, world-wide, royalty-free right to use, copy, distribute, and display my submission in any format or medium for any educational, non-commercial purposes, including as part of the online journal. Boston College will apply the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License to all works published in Studies in Christian-Jewish Relations.
These rights include, without limitation, the right to maintain one or more copies of the submission in multiple formats for security, back-up, and preservation purposes, and to allow a third party to hold one or more copies solely for such purposes.
I represent and warrant that the submission is my original work, that I have the right to grant the permission in this agreement, and that, to the best of my knowledge, the submission will not infringe upon anyone’s intellectual property rights. I have obtained all necessary permissions to include in my submission any materials created or owned by third parties and any such third party material is clearly identified and acknowledged within the content of the submission.
If the submission is based upon work that has been sponsored or supported by an organization or agency other than Boston College, I certify that I have fulfilled any right of review or other obligations required by any contract or agreement with such agency or organization.
Boston College will clearly identify my name as the author or owner of the submission.
Nothing in this agreement shall be deemed to obligate Boston College to publish the submission.
