Content area
Full Text
Keywords: Père Marie-BenoÎt, Joseph Bass, Marseille, Nice, Rome, Jewish rescue
Père Marie-BenoÎt, or Padre Maria Benedetto, as he was known in Italy, was a French Capuchin priest who helped rescue thousands of Jews in Marseille, Nice, and Rome during the Holocaust. His courage, ingenuity, and achievements were profoundly impressive, but his wartime activities were also unusual in another respect. Unlike other Catholic priests who became rescuers of Jews, Père Marie-BenoÎt almost always acted in collaboration with Jews who became close personal friends. In Marseille and Nice he learned rescue strategies from the Russian Jewish résistant Joseph Bass, and polished his public image through regular contact with the Italian Jewish diplomat and banker Angelo Donati. In Rome after July 1943, he applied his clandestine strategies and diplomatic skills in a leadership position, but again he always worked with Jewish friends, especially the Austrian Jewish lawyer Stefan Schwamm. After the liberation, Père Marie-BenoÎt remained in close contact with these three and other Jewish friends, and he worked diligently to enhance Jewish-Catholic reconciliation. Until the Second Vatican Council from 1962 to 1965, both the friendships and the reconciliation work were frowned upon by papal authorities and probably hurt his career as a Capuchin professor. But Père Marie-BenoÎt was an independent thinker, almost to the point of being a non-conformist, and he never abandoned principles that he believed to be right and just.
This essay will examine Père Marie-BenoÎt's Jewish rescue activities primarily as they developed in France between 1940 and 1943. It will discuss the origins of his concern for the Jewish people, the reasons for his friendship with Joseph Bass, the nature of their collaboration in rescue, and the factors that made the collaboration so successful. It will conclude by explaining what Père Marie-BenoÎt learned during his association with Bass, and how he applied that experience to his rescue work in Rome after July 1943.
The boy who would become Père Marie-BenoÎt was born in the small village of Le Bourg d'Iré, north of Angers, in 1895, and named Pierre Péteul. His father was a successful miller for a time, but he gave up his lease on a water mill when Pierre was still a child and moved his family to Angers. After that, the family...