A retired priest of the Allentown, Pa. diocese has defended the record of Pope Plus XII in helping Jews during World War II. Father Rosario Schiarrone offered this defense in the Catholic Standard and Times, the newspaper of the Philadelphia Archdiocese.
The priest said he had been motivated to write by statements in a recent book by Father John Morlet, “Vatican Diplomacy and the Jews During the Holocaust,” that Pope Plus XII did not give enough help to Jews in that period. Schiarrone wrote he had first hand knowledge that “Pope Plus XII and the Vatican did give aid to hundreds of Jews with whom I personally had contact from late December, 1940 until the end of January 1941. He wrote that at that time he was returning to the United States and finishing studies for the priesthood in Rome.
Schiarrone stated that in December 1940, after the signing of an armistice between Italy and Vichy France, he went by train from Turin to Lisbon, “the second train since the armistice, from Turin to Lisbon. The Perio Travel Agency of Turin was in charge of the trip. The train was filled with refugees, 99 percent of them Jews.”
SAID JEWS PRAISED POPE, VATICAN
He wrote that in his compartment “there was a family of Jews — father, mother and three small children. They told me that they would be eternally grateful to the Pope and the Vatican for making it possible for them to leave war-torn Europe. The Pope was Plus XII.”
Schiarrone added that on the liner, Excambion, on which he sailed from Lisbon, 85 percent of the passengers were Jews and “from these, too, I heard much praise for the Vatican and the Pope without whom they said they would not have been on their way to America. Some had even been sheltered and fed in the Vatican while they were awaiting escape from Europe.”
The priest appealed in his letter to any passengers on that train and on that ship who might read his letter to “come forward in defense of the saintly Pope who was their friend in their hour of dire need.”
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The Archive of the Jewish Telegraphic Agency includes articles published from 1923 to 2008. Archive stories reflect the journalistic standards and practices of the time they were published.
