The writer seeks to put the document that surfaced last year – an advisory document from the Vatican to the French Church which some spun as evidence of a determination of the Church to keep Jewish children to itself – in context, which is what historians are supposed to do:
For the Vatican, the appeals of the Jewish petitioners awakened some sympathy-belatedly, to be sure, in the case of Montini, who despite all that he had seen and heard in the preceding years, seems to have needed the forceful confrontation with Riegner to understand that there had even been a Holocaust. Jewish observers seem to have felt a real measure of good will at the highest level of the church. Yet as disclosed in Tardini’s memorandum, the Vatican had reservations about the custody claims of Jewish institutions, and notwithstanding desperate appeals from Jewish organizations, it held fast to a cautious, even grudging policy: each case should be examined on its own merits, and in the end the children could not be given to institutions “who have no right to them.” And of course, nothing was to be put in writing. No concessions were to be made on paper to a wounded people.
A full solution to the problem of Jewish children in Catholic hands was hampered by limitations that with hindsight are clear to be seen. None of the personalities involved was fully in command of the facts; nor was either side fully capable of reaching across a religious and cultural divide that had existed for centuries. As during the Holocaust itself, church officials were extremely reluctant to direct local Catholic institutions on matters having to do with Jews, and a broad appeal to local churches to assist Jewish aid workers looking for Jewish children was apparently out of the question. Such policy shortcomings point to an underlying limitation of sympathy. No church leader discussed here, not even Roncalli, was willing to step outside his traditionally prescribed sphere of authority to remind the faithful what had happened to the Jews and to assuage the continuing effects of that tragedy. Catholic authorities, knowing that many clerics and laypeople were unsympathetic to the Jewish case, were reluctant to challenge Catholics on their relationship with Jewish religious authority or the “Jewish people” on whose behalf Kubowitz, Riegner, Herzog, and other petitioners claimed to speak. As we have seen, the result was that all these petitioners, though treated courteously, left feeling that their appeals had not been fully or enthusiastically answered.
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