Research project "Asking the Pope for Help“

Church historian Hubert Wolf and team working on Jewish petitions to the Pope – Digital edition for the general public – Cluster of Excellence research on Romania and Brazil

Thousands of Jewish people wrote letters to the Catholic Church during the Second World War asking for help to escape from Germany. In the research project “Asking the Pope for Help”, church historian Hubert Wolf and his team at the University of Münster are working on the thousands of petitions held in the Vatican archives, systematizing and preparing these letters as a digital edition for the general public. The Cluster of Excellence “Religion and Politics” is involved in the large-scale project with research on Romania and Brazil.

The petitions come from both baptized and non-baptized people of Jewish origin from numerous European countries. However, the sacrament of baptism did not offer protection from persecution during the Shoah – except in Romania. Drawing on hitherto unknown Vatican sources, the theologian Lorena König will write her dissertation at the Cluster of Excellence on Romania’s special position, analyzing the processes that protected numerous Jews who converted to the Catholic faith from being deported to an extermination camp.

König already wrote in her master’s thesis on the baptism of Romanian Jews during the Shoah, showing that the same racial laws prevailed in Romania as in many other countries occupied by the National Socialists, but that Andrea Cassulo, the local papal nuncio, used clever arguments to place baptized Jews under the protection of the Catholic Church. Besides files on this issue, the newly available files of the Vatican Apostolic Archive also contain numerous petitions from Jews to the nuncio, correspondence with state and church authorities, and some reports from the nunciature to the Vatican.

In the current research project, König will first catalogue the relevant petitions, and investigate what then happened to their authors in order to explore the room for manoeuvre available to the nuncio, as well as the networks that he had. These letters will also be published in the online edition of the project “Asking the Pope for Help”. The project will also reveal any distinctions that were made in Romania or in the Vatican itself between baptized and non-baptized people of Jewish origin. In addition, it will explore hitherto unknown material on the fundamental debate that flared up in the Holy Office, the supreme religious authority, regarding the requirement that Jews undergo a one-year period of preparation before baptism.

Another sub-project funded by the Cluster of Excellence “Religion and Politics” is examining the opportunities and limits of 3,000 visas that Brazil began providing to the Holy See in 1940 for baptized Jews to enter the country. Since the post designated to work on the sub-project has not yet been filled, the project team will continue the sub-project for the time being.

About the project “Asking the Pope for Help”

Around 15,000 Jewish people from all over Europe asked Pope Pius XII and the Vatican for help during the Nazi period. Their letters describe atrocities, persecution, and fear of death. In the research project “Asking the Pope for Help”, church historian Prof. Dr. Hubert Wolf and his team from the University of Münster are cataloguing these letters of petition held in the Vatican archives, and preparing an annotated digital edition for the general public. (aph/exc/vvm)