Pope John XXIII

Angelo Giuseppe Roncalli, the Vatican apostolic delegate to Turkey and Greece between 1935 and 1944 and later Pope John XXIII, was based at the apostolic delegation in Istanbul through the war. Istanbul was a neutral capital and a major listening post for both the Allies and the Germans. The papal delegation, with its diplomatic protection and its links to Catholic communities across the Balkans, central Europe and the Middle East, was well placed to assist Jewish refugees attempting to escape from German-occupied Europe. Roncalli used the position over nine years, and decisively from 1940 onwards, to assist what is estimated to be tens of thousands of Jewish refugees, principally Sephardic and Ashkenazi Jews from Bulgaria, Slovakia, Hungary, Romania and Greece, in a wide variety of ways: by issuing baptismal certificates that were not always closely examined for content, by providing immigration certificates for British Mandate Palestine through his contacts with the British and the Jewish Agency, by raising funds for the rescue of children and by interceding personally with the heads of state of the Catholic countries on the Balkans where he had pastoral standing.

The principal documented operations of the Roncalli rescue work fell in the period 1942, 1944. After the deportation of Slovak Jews to Auschwitz began in March 1942, Roncalli received pleas from the Jewish Agency representative in Istanbul, Chaim Barlas, for assistance in halting the deportations. Roncalli sent personal letters to the Slovak president Jozef Tiso, who was a Catholic priest, asking him to halt the deportations on the basis of Catholic moral teaching. The letters had some effect; the Slovak government suspended deportations from October 1942 to September 1944, although Tiso resumed them under German pressure after the Slovak National Uprising. Roncalli also intervened with King Boris III of Bulgaria in summer 1943 to discourage the planned deportation of Bulgarian Jews to the German extermination camps. Bulgaria’s Jews, around fifty thousand people, were not deported during the war.

The most documented direct rescue operation was Roncalli’s role in the rescue of around twenty four thousand Bulgarian and Hungarian Jewish children, conducted between summer 1943 and autumn 1944 through Istanbul to British Mandate Palestine. Roncalli used his diplomatic standing to arrange the necessary transit visas and to provide the children with baptismal certificates that, although they did not change the children’s actual religious identity, allowed them to pass the German and Hungarian checkpoints as Catholics. The certificates were issued in large numbers and were of the type that Jewish welfare organisations had specifically requested. The Bulgarian operation, organised by Chaim Barlas of the Jewish Agency and Joseph Schwartz of the Joint Distribution Committee, brought several thousand children through neutral Turkey to Palestine in late 1943 and 1944. Roncalli’s role was the diplomatic one of providing cover for the operation and, where necessary, of personally interceding with the Turkish authorities and with the various Balkan governments to allow the transit.

The Hungarian operation in 1944 was the larger and the more difficult. Following the German occupation of Hungary on 19 March 1944 and the deportation of around four hundred and forty thousand Hungarian provincial Jews to Auschwitz between mid May and early July 1944, Roncalli wrote personally to the Hungarian regent Miklós Horthy in early July 1944, jointly with the Vatican Secretary of State Cardinal Maglione and the King of Sweden, urging Horthy to halt the deportations on the basis of Christian moral teaching. The combined pressure produced Horthy’s order of 7 July 1944 halting the deportations. The pause held until October 1944 and saved the lives of approximately one hundred and ninety thousand Hungarian Jews who would otherwise have been deported. The operation is one of the major documented cases in which Vatican diplomatic intervention had a direct and quantifiable effect on the course of the German extermination programme.

Roncalli was elected pope on 28 October 1958, succeeding Pius XII, and took the regnal name John XXIII. His pontificate, between 1958 and his death in 1963, was the most consequential of the twentieth century in terms of the Catholic Church’s relationship with Judaism and with the modern world generally. He convened the Second Vatican Council in 1962. The Council’s declaration Nostra Aetate of 1965, drafted under his successor Paul VI but on Roncalli’s initiative, repudiated the long-standing Catholic teaching of Jewish collective guilt for the death of Christ and was the most important single act of Catholic reconciliation with the Jewish people in the history of the Church. Roncalli died of stomach cancer on 3 June 1963 at the Apostolic Palace at the age of eighty one.

Yad Vashem has not, on the present record, named John XXIII Righteous Among the Nations. The institution has reviewed the case and has acknowledged the breadth of his wartime work but has not, on procedural grounds, made the formal designation. The Israeli state and the Italian Jewish community have made repeated representations to Yad Vashem on the case. The matter is unresolved. The case is included in this section because the wartime work was on a scale comparable to the major individual rescuers, because the postwar opening of the Catholic Church to the Jewish people was Roncalli’s own work, and because the historical weight of the case is, on any honest reckoning, in the same category as the named Righteous.

John XXIII was canonised by Pope Francis on 27 April 2014. His tomb is in St Peter’s Basilica.

See also

Sources

  • Peter Hebblethwaite, John XXIII: Pope of the Council, Geoffrey Chapman, 1984
  • Andrea Riccardi, L’inverno più lungo: 1943, 44: Pio XII, gli ebrei e i nazisti a Roma, Laterza, 2008
  • Susan Zuccotti, Under His Very Windows: The Vatican and the Holocaust in Italy, Yale University Press, 2000
  • Chaim Barlas, Hatzala bi’yemei ha-Shoah, Hakibbutz Hameuchad, 1975
  • Andrea Tornielli, Pio XII: Eugenio Pacelli, un uomo sul trono di Pietro, Mondadori, 2007, on the Vatican’s wartime diplomacy
  • Vatican Apostolic Archive, papers of Angelo Roncalli, Istanbul delegation, 1935, 1944