Eugenio Pacelli and the Vatican’s Irish Plan to Save Baptized Jews (1938–1939)

The ‘Jews File’

In 2022, in connection with the recent opening of the archives of the papacy of Pius XII and in keeping with the Vatican’s attempts to counter criticisms of the pope’s silence during the Holocaust, the Secretariat of State office made publicly available on line what it labelled its ‘Serie Ebrei’ or ‘Jews File’. According to the Vatican announcement of the project, this was done specifically at the request of Pope Francis. ³ The Vatican document accompanying the release of the Jews File describes its contents as consisting of ‘petitions for assistance sent by Jews, baptized and unbaptized, from all over Europe to Pope Pius XII after the start of Nazi-fascist persecution’. ⁴ Ordered alphabetically by the name of the petitioner, the files are divided into 170 ‘volumes’, generally containing a dozen or more cases each. The cases typically pertain not to a single individual but to a family unit, and so the materials involve pleas for help on behalf of thousands of those being persecuted because the state they lived in regarded them as Jews. The files begin with cases from 1938 and, aside from a handful of 1944 cases, end with those from 1943.

The tens of thousands of pages in the Jews File offer a litany of tales of woe and heart-rending pleas for help. What I would like to take the opportunity here to focus on is the role Ireland played as Pope Pius XI and, in particular, his secretary of state, Cardinal Eugenio Pacelli, whom the pope had charged with spearheading these efforts, frantically sought ways of responding positively to the growing chorus of pleas coming into them as the government campaigns of persecution of Europe’s Jews were mounting.

While the Jews File includes pleas from all over Europe, the early pleas came in good part from Italy. There were many reasons for this. The launching of Mussolini’s anti-Jewish campaign in 1938 and the fact that the pope was viewed as the only alternative source of authority and power in Italy to the Fascist regime itself certainly played a major role. Many of these requests for aid came from those viewed as foreign Jews by Italy’s government who, in the wake of the September 1938 racial laws, were given only a few months to leave the country. Should they fail to do so, they faced either deportation to their country of origin – here typically Germany or Austria, now part of the Third Reich – or internment in one of the many concentration camps that the Italian Fascist government was hastily organising. Other pleas came from Italian citizens who, especially following the so-called ‘magna carta’ of the racial laws issued in mid-November 1938, found themselves without any source of income to support their families. ⁵

What becomes clear from a reading of the pleas that were coming in to the pope and the Vatican secretariat of state in the wake of Italy’s new racial laws is how much attention the man who took on responsibility for organising a response, Secretary of State Eugenio Pacelli, paid to the possibility that Ireland could offer assistance not found elsewhere in Europe. In March 1939, he would succeed Pius XI, ascending to the papacy as Pius XII.

As we will see, the Irish case reflects one of the key features of the Vatican’s ‘Jews File’, and that is the fact that the efforts to help those being persecuted focused not on those who remained Jewish but rather on those who were being persecuted as Jews even though they were Roman Catholic, that is, Jews who had been baptised or Catholics who had a Jewish parent and consequently were categorised by the state as members of the Jewish race.

The ‘Jews File’ was the source for the first book to appear following the opening of the Pius XII archives on the question of the Vatican’s response to the persecution of Europe’s Jews in these years. Written by Johann Ickx, the director of the archive housing those documents, its Italian edition titled Pius XII and the Jews, ⁶ the book was presented by its author as showing how heroically the Vatican worked to save the Jews of Europe. The book was heralded by those eager to portray Pope Pius XII as a great friend and protector of Europe’s Jews. In presenting the book, Ickx himself referred to the secretariat of state’s ‘Jews File’ as ‘Pacelli’s list’, thus likening the pope to the heroic figure of Oskar Schindler who risked his life to save hundreds of Jews in Germany. Ickx’s characterisation was subsequently featured in lengthy reviews of the book published in both the Vatican’s own daily newspaper and the newspaper of the Italian Church hierarchy. ‘Pius XII’s List’, was the headline in L’Osservatore romano, ‘Shoah: It is a List that Offers the Truth on Pius XII’ the headline in Avvenire. ⁷ Unsurprisingly, the arch-conservative Catholic organisation, the Society of St Pius X (SSPX), also took up the analogy, heralding the ‘Jews File’ as ‘Pacelli’s list’. ⁸

The Irish Plan on Behalf of Converted Jews

The Irish story offers a good illustration of how misleading this characterisation of the Jews File, and by extension the Vatican efforts to come to the aid of Jews in these dramatic years, is. The Irish case reflects the actual nature of the Jews File in showing the Church’s focus on helping those the Holy See regarded as Catholics, not Jews. My examination of the Irish case discussed here is based in good part on two sources recently opened to researchers. One is the Jews File found in the Vatican Secretary of State Relations with the States archive, described above. The other is the archive of the Dublin nuncio, found in the Vatican Apostolic Archive (formerly known as the Vatican Secret Archive).

The first document in the Vatican’s Jews File written by secretary of state Cardinal Pacelli on the nascent Irish efforts is dated 8 November 1938. It comes in the form of a letter addressed to Cardinal Ildefonso Schuster, Archbishop of Milan. Pacelli wrote that he was enclosing a plea he had received from ‘a young Viennese woman of Jewish origin, but Catholic, resident in Milan’. If Schuster deemed it opportune, wrote Pacelli, he should let the woman know that ‘the particular conditions in which even the Catholic Jews are now finding themselves following the recent [Italian] Government measures are the object of lively interest on the part of the Holy See which has not failed to take the opportune steps, and that – as perhaps will already be known to Your Eminence – in these very days, according to information coming from the Nunciature of Ireland, the Catholics of that Nation are organizing a crusade of charity in favor of converted Jewish refugees’. ⁹

The Irish effort on behalf of converted Jews to which Cardinal Pacelli was referring was being organized through the efforts of the Irish branch of the Society of Saint Vincent de Paul, brokered on behalf of the Vatican by the nuncio in Dublin and the Society’s longtime president, Sir Joseph Glynn. The Society, founded in 1833 in Paris, was an international organisation of Catholic laity dedicated to bringing the poor back to Catholic practice through offering them material relief. Glynn had served as president of the Irish branch for over two decades. In 1944, Pius XII would honour Glynn for his work with appointment as Knight Commander of St Gregory. ¹⁰

A week after Cardinal Pacelli sent this letter, as the Magna Carta of Italy’s anti-Jewish campaign was being formally issued, ¹¹ he responded to three other pleas for help from victims of Italy’s new racial laws by invoking the prospect of an Irish solution. Again, he stressed the Vatican’s interest in helping Jews who had converted to Catholicism. On 11 November, Pacelli wrote to the rector of Rome’s House of the Catechumens, which had been established in the sixteenth century to convert Jews and Muslims. The rector had written on behalf of a family he had converted. ‘Many similar pleas’, Pacelli wrote in response, ‘have come into the Holy See, which has not failed to take opportune steps to mitigate the fate of the converted Jews. Meanwhile, I believe it opportune to inform you that – according to news coming into the Holy See, it seems that a Crusade of Charity is being organized among the Catholics of Ireland in favor of the refugees who are Jewish converts’. ¹²

That same day Cardinal Pacelli responded to a request coming from the mother superior of the Sisters of Zion in Rome with a similar message. The Holy See was doing all it could on behalf of ‘converted Jews’ in the aftermath of the announcement of Italy’s racial laws. As for the case she had recommended, wrote Pacelli, ‘it might perhaps be taken into benevolent consideration by the relevant Committee, which is being organized among the Catholics of Ireland in favor of the refugees who are Jewish converts. Should this Committee be interested in it, I will not fail to keep you informed’. ¹³ A week later Cardinal Pacelli offered a similar response to the Bishop of Trieste, Antonio Santin. The request involved a Hungarian national, a Jewish convert to Catholicism married to an Italian Catholic. He had been ordered out of Italy. After stating the interest that the Holy See was taking in the fate of Jews who had embraced Catholicism, he added, ‘If then the charity is realized in favor of the converted Jewish refugees that is being organized among the Irish Catholics, the pitiful case might perhaps be brought to its attention’. ¹⁴ In a letter Pacelli wrote in late November to the rector of Rome’s House of the Catechumens on another case, he was more specific: it was the Society of Saint Vincent de Paul that had proposed the creation of a new Committee to come to the aid of refugees who were Jewish converts to Catholicism. ¹⁵

Some notion of the emotional tenor of the pleas coming in to Cardinal Pacelli can be gleaned from a handwritten letter that Margarete Gerstel-Faerber wrote him from Genoa in late November. This too was a case that the cardinal would suggest might be referred to the Irish Committee:

I turn to You, Eminence, in my great desperation. I am a German Catholic and by March I must leave Italy, because I am of Jewish descent. I don’t know where to go, what to do! I am an orphan, without brothers or sisters. I live a very modest life. I give German language lessons at home. I am without means, I don’t have friends, I don’t have relatives. Where do I go, Eminence?. . .. What will become of me? Three months have passed [since the September racial law expelling foreign Jews from Italy], three months I have waited for salvation and a miracle. I have entrusted my destiny to the Lord and to the Madonna. I have brought so many, so many candles to Saint Anthony. But now I am afraid! Such a great fear. I am a woman, Eminence, a woman alone in the world. . ..You are such a great man, you have such a high position, I beg you with all my heart: Help me!. . ..It is You, Eminence, who are my only hope’. ¹⁶

That the Italian bishops and archbishops to whom these immigrants were appealing were themselves moved by their plight can be illustrated by a letter sent in mid-December by Cardinal Maurilio Fossati, archbishop of Turin, to Cardinal Pacelli on behalf of a thirty-four-year-old converted Hungarian Jewish refugee, Emerigo Hartstein. Hartstein had written directly to Pacelli in November and, following normal procedure, Pacelli had then written to Fossati to ask whether he would approve having Hartstein and his thirty-two-year-old wife, Paola, recommended to the Irish Committee. In replying to Pacelli, the archbishop informed him that the young couple had come to his office that morning and explained that Emerigo, born of two Jewish parents in Hungary, had, alone in his family, been baptised at age eighteen. He had then come to Italy to study chemistry at the University of Turin. After receiving his degree in 1931, he had gone to work in a chemical factory in Italy and married a Hungarian Catholic woman. Now, with the racial laws, he had been ordered to leave the country.

The archbishop offered his impression: ‘I confess that the two individuals, who are childless but who love each other very much, have deeply impressed me and moved me. Constantly weeping as they speak, they seem like two lost and hopeless souls, because they look to the future with terror. They are disposed to go to any part of the world, so that he can find work to support himself and his woman’. The only problem Fossati saw was that the couple had not celebrated a church wedding, having been married only civilly. He offered a final thought: ‘If it were possible to help them move to Ireland, it would be a good idea to first regularize their marriage, which would not prove difficult’. ¹⁷

The Nuncio

Cardinal Pacelli relied on his nuncio in Dublin, Monsignor Paschal Robinson, to broker the Irish plan. Robinson was rather unusual as a nuncio, being Irish himself. All the nuncios to the major countries at the time were Italian. The Holy See had appointed him as its first nuncio to the Irish Free State in 1929. Born in Dublin in 1870, his family had then emigrated to the United States. He entered the Franciscan order in 1890 and was ordained the following year. After serving in missions in the Middle East and Greece, he was appointed professor of medieval history at the Catholic University of Washington, D.C. in 1914. Following eleven years on the faculty there he began his Vatican diplomatic career, ultimately presenting his diplomatic credentials in Dublin in January 1930, taking up the position as nuncio, with ecclesiastical jurisdiction over the entire island of Ireland. ¹⁸

The first trace of the correspondence between the Vatican and Monsignor Robinson on the Irish efforts on behalf of converted Jews comes in the form of a 7 December 1938 letter to Robinson from Domenico Tardini, Pacelli’s deputy secretary for relations with the states. The case involved a Jew who had fled to Italy from Germany and then, two years before Tardini’s letter, was baptised in Sicily. ‘Enclosed’, wrote Tardini, ‘is the note regarding Hans Wolfgang Heydemann, German, a Jew by race but converted to Catholicism, who, being hit by the recent measures taken by the Italian government in defence of the race, is constrained to leave Italy by next March 12. May it please Your Excellency to signal and heartily recommend this pitiful case worthy of our benevolent consideration to Signor Glynn, President of the Society of Saint Vincent de Paul of Ireland’. ¹⁹

Four days later, on 11 December 1938, Cardinal Pacelli wrote to Robinson, making clear that the pope himself was following the Irish plan with interest. Responding to the activities of Glynn ‘in favor of the converted Jewish refugees’, reported Pacelli, ‘The Holy Father, to Whom I took care to report it, learned with particular satisfaction the news that everything has been arranged for a hundred people of German nationality and he heartily renews His Apostolic Blessing to Your Excellency, to the aforementioned Mr. Glynn, and to all his collaborators in this good, rewarding, and comforting work’. ²⁰ Three days later, Pacelli wrote the nuncio on another case, explaining that the young woman ‘German by nationality, a converted Jew, is forced to leave Italy following the recent measures of the Italian Government in the matter of the defense of the race’. ²¹ In yet another letter to the Dublin nuncio in December, Cardinal Pacelli sent a request on behalf of two other ‘converted Jews’, both Hungarian medical doctors, who had been given a deadline of 12 March 1939 to leave Italy. He concluded, ‘I beg Your Most Reverend Excellency to kindly report them to the Committee that is interested in the converted Jewish refugees’. ²²

Cardinal Pacelli would bring several other cases to the attention of Robinson over the course of the following month, making similar requests. He made clear that Pius XI, now ill, weakened, and in the last weeks of his life, continued to follow the Irish plan with interest. Responding to news that Glynn was running into financial difficulties in support of the plan, Pacelli wrote on 10 January: ‘The Holy Father, to Whom I have taken care to immediately report on the matter, aware of the serious difficulties, especially financial difficulties, which you point out are a major obstacle. . .and also moved by a sense of deep compassion for so many unfortunate people, would not be averse to studying a way to come to their aid’. The pope requested that the nuncio look into whether there might be funds donated in Ireland that year through Peter’s Pence that might be unspent, adding, ‘In the case of the affirmative, the August Pontiff. . .reserves the right to decide if and in what amount said Peter’s Pence can be destined to help the poor refugees’. ²³

On 25 January 1939, Robinson sent a letter to Pacelli reporting on his progress to date. He was responding to a request from Pacelli that he refer to the Irish Committee the case of Gertrude Baumgarten, a German refugee in Rome. The rector of Rome’s House of Catechumens had written in mid-November 1938 on Gertrude’s behalf, having recently baptised her there. Robinson reported that, to date, he had, on Pacelli’s request, recommended seven cases, most involving family groups, to what he simply referred to as the ‘Irish Catholic Committee’. As he explained, it was that committee that brought the cases to Seán Lemass, the Minister for Industry and Commerce, the Irish government cabinet member whose approval was necessary ‘to obtain the necessary authorizations’ for their immigration. ²⁴

The Minister, reported Monsignor Robinson, ‘showed himself well disposed to favor them insofar as possible, but believed it his duty to immediately note the impossibility of admitting doctors, given that, each year, 40% of the young Irish doctors are constrained to search for work abroad given the lack of work in the fatherland’. In fact, three of these cases had involved physicians, who, along with other professionals, were especially frequent among the Jews seeking baptism in Italy. As for the other four cases, the nuncio explained to Cardinal Pacelli, ‘the Minister said that they could be taken into consideration separately, but that no one could obtain work in Ireland insofar as the same work could be done equally well by an Irish person’. ²⁵

The Death of Pius XI

In early February, only days before Pius XI’s death (10 February 1939), when Cardinal Pacelli, as chamberlain, would be otherwise occupied, the cardinal responded to Robinson with a long letter regarding the Irish Catholic Committee and its potential life-saving role given the current crisis facing the converted Jews in Italy. ‘I learned with regret that one cannot nourish any hopes, not even in a temporary stay in Ireland, for the few doctors that the Holy See has signaled to that Committee of aid for converted Jewish refugees. This is all the more to be regretted in light of the fact that these poor unfortunates, if they do not succeed in obtaining a delay, must necessarily abandon Italian territory by next March 12, without knowing where to find even temporary refuge’. Given this situation, wrote Pacelli, ‘it would be desirable for that Government not to make difficulty for their temporary residence there’. He closed with a special request for obtaining a temporary Irish visa for a female doctor, a Hungarian Jew who had come in 1925 to Italy to study medicine and who had then converted in 1932. Like many in her position, she was hoping to get a visa for the United States, but the queue for a residence visa involved a wait of potentially four or five years. She had the particular advantage, wrote Pacelli, of having in the U.S. ‘very rich relatives of Jewish descent disposed to offer all those guarantees required by law’. ²⁶

By this time the frail and ill pope was confined to bed and Pacelli was practically the only one, other than Pius XI’s doctors, allowed to visit him. Yet among the topics the pope was eager to be kept apprised of was the progress being made with the Irish plan. On 8 February, less than 48 hours before the pope’s death, Pacelli again reported to the Irish nuncio on the pope’s interest:

The Holy Father, to Whom I have taken care to immediately report on the matter, in order to alleviate the suffering of these refugees in need of urgent aid, authorizes Your Excellency to pay to the said Committee the bank check for 1034 pounds sterling, which you have recently received from His Eminence Cardinal MacRory, Archbishop of Armagh, as Peter’s Pence of his Archdiocese for the year 1938. His Holiness thus intends to help this work of human and Christian charity, while also being pleased with what the Committee in question intends to do for the Catholic children who are now in England with Protestants. With regard to the interest of converted Jewish refugees, Your Excellency will recommend that the aforementioned Committee take care of those cases, not many in fact, which have been or will be recommended by this Secretariat of State. ²⁷

In his three-page typed reply on 16 February, addressed to Pacelli six days after Pius XI’s death, Robinson offered more detail on what he referred to as the ‘Irish Catholic Committee interested in the Catholic refugees’. Following Pacelli’s instructions, he wrote, he had transferred to Sir Joseph Glynn, President of the Society of Saint Vincent de Paul, the sum of 1034 pounds, which Cardinal MacRory, Primate of Ireland, had collected for the year 1938 as Peter’s Pence for his archdiocese. He was attaching a letter from Glynn expressing the profound gratitude of the Society of Saint Vincent for such a generous offer ‘that the Holy Father, of sainted and venerable memory, wished to make in order to ease the suffering of the Catholic refugees in need of urgent help’. ²⁸ The gesture, one of Pius XI’s last acts, had, wrote the nuncio, made ‘a profound impression in Ireland, and will not fail to stimulate the Catholics to contribute more generously than they have to date to support this work of human and Christian charity’.

Monsignor Robinson then proceeded to give an update on what the Catholic Committee had accomplished in response to Pacelli’s requests. The Committee was actively lobbying the Irish government to obtain visas on behalf of five of these cases, including that of Gertrude Baumgarten and her parents. He noted: ‘For each visa the Committee must deposit the sum of 250 pounds as a guarantee that the refugees in question do not subsequently become a burden on the Government’. ²⁹

The nuncio attached to his letter to Pacelli a two-paged typed letter that Glynn had sent him in mid-February on the stationery of the Society of St Vincent de Paul, Council of Ireland. He wrote, Glynn began, to express the gratitude of the Society for ‘the sum of L 1034 forwarded by His Eminence Cardinal Pacelli as a gift from His Holiness the late Pope Pius 11th, for the fund which is being used by the Society to aid Catholic Austrian and German Refugees in this country’. He went on to assure Pacelli ‘that this money will be used solely for Catholic Refugees and for Catholic Refugee children whom we hope to take into this country for their education’. Glyn reported that they ‘were taking steps to get visas for the Baumgarten family’ and acting on the other requested cases as well. But the limits on their action appeared great indeed: ‘The money available will allow of admitting one more adult case. We are not in a position to promise immediate admission, since negotiations with the Government are now in progress which we hope will result in the grant of additional visas’. Glynn’s letter made clear that for the requests involving physicians seeking refuge, what the Irish Committee – he refers in his letter to the ‘Refugee Committee’ – had in mind was not settling them in Ireland, but providing only temporary stays: ‘If Your Excellency would send to me the names and addresses of the Doctors whom His Eminence Cardinal Pacelli is anxious to have sent to Ireland for a short period pending arrangements being made for their emigration to other countries, I shall take the matter up with the Department of External Affairs’. ³⁰

The New Pope and the Collapse of the Irish Plan

Within days of his ascendancy to the papacy in early March, Pope Pacelli appointed Cardinal Luigi Maglione to replace him as secretary of state. In one of his first acts, Maglione wrote to the nuncio in Dublin to ask that the Irish Committee help a man recommended by the bishop of Trieste, who had described him as ‘a young Viennese man, Catholic but of a mother of Jewish origin and therefore subject to the German racial laws’. Having fled from Vienna to his aunt’s home in Trieste, he was ‘unable to return to his homeland without facing serious moral risks’ and sought refuge abroad. The bishop had enclosed a letter on the stationery of Catholic Action of Vienna certifying to the Catholic credentials of the man and his family. Cardinal Maglione, on 11 March 1939, in one of the first letters he wrote as secretary of state [Pius XI had appointed him to that role on the previous day], called on the Dublin nuncio ‘to urgently signal the pitiful case to the Committee interested in the converted Jewish refugees’. Maglione attached a copy of the bishop of Trieste’s letter and, in responding, Monsignor Robinson wrote that he had ‘immediately recommended’ the case to the ‘Committee for the converted Jewish refugees’. ³¹

Indeed, as the new secretary of state, who would before his death in 1944 handle the great bulk of the 2,700 cases found in the Vatican’s ‘Jews file’, began to deal with these pleas, Ireland remained central to his thinking as he considered his options. Only four days after this first request of the Dublin nuncio, Maglione wrote him again asking for help with another case. It was similar to the first in involving an Austrian Catholic in Italy whose mother was considered of Jewish race. In his 15 March letter to Robinson, Maglione asked for help getting him a visa for Ireland, as he otherwise risked being sent back to the Third Reich which would, he wrote, undoubtedly send him to a concentration camp. The nuncio sent his reply four days later, reporting that he had immediately recommended the refugee to the Irish committee.

Yet the new Vatican secretariat of state was quickly becoming impatient with the slow pace of action on the part of the Irish committee as is clear from a letter that deputy secretary of state Tardini wrote to the Irish nuncio in late March. He asked that Robinson ‘inform me. . .how much has been done to date by the . . ..Committee in favor of those persons, in truth not many, who have been recommended by this Secretariat of State, because they find themselves in the necessity of having to leave Italian territory as soon as possible and are anxious to know if they can rely on the help and assistance of the Irish Committee’. ³²

Robinson responded with a pair of reports back to Rome which reflect his own frustration with the lack of progress. In mid-April he offered a bleak outline of the situation: ‘The work done by the Committee in favor of the converted Jewish refugees recommended by the Holy See has had to date, as is clear, a very disappointing outcome. Indeed, the Committee itself has been rather disappointed in the hopes it had when it began its charitable work’. While part of its problems had resulted from difficulty in communicating with some of the individuals who had been recommended by the Vatican, there was another more fundamental problem: ‘above all in the unfavorable way in which this initiative was greeted in Ireland by various associations and by the people in general who, full of prejudices against the Jews, not only deny the material contribution on which the Committee counted on a great deal, but do not understand how one can look for employment in Ireland for foreigners while there are so many unemployed Irish and indeed so much poverty of many Irish families’. ³³

It was in his subsequent report to deputy secretary of state Tardini a couple of weeks later that the nuncio reported the bad news. The Irish Committee, which Cardinal Pacelli had been so hopeful about, could be relied on no more. After all the hopes that Pacelli had placed in it, it had in the end helped few people. The Committee, wrote Robinson, reported that the 1034 pounds that Pope Pius XI had sent them to help the Catholic refugees had been used as follows: 200 pounds had been spent for the maintenance of Richard Marx, ‘a Jewish convert refugee’ from Germany who had come to Italy to study medicine. Marx had written directly to Pacelli in late January 1939 and Pacelli had then recommended the case to the Irish Committee. ³⁴ The remaining 834 pounds, reported Robinson, were dedicated to bringing to Ireland and supporting ‘10 children who belong to Jewish converted families and who find themselves in England in the hands of Protestants’.

The nuncio came to a conclusion that would, in essence, bring an end to the frenetic back and forth correspondence between the Vatican secretariat of state and the nuncio in Ireland: ‘The Committee also let me know that it can therefore not interest itself in other people. It took this decision following the fact that the Most Excellent Irish Bishops, in their most recent meeting of April 11, decided unanimously not to collect funds in their Dioceses for the immigration of converted Jews’. ³⁵

Perhaps not unrelatedly, on that same day that the bishops of Ireland took their decision, Ireland’s Minister for Justice, Patrick Ruttledge, offered his own view of the wisdom of coming to the aid of persecuted Jews: ‘There has never been in this country any feeling against Jews on the scale which has shown itself in some other countries but there are anti-Jewish groups in the country which would be only too glad to get an excuse to start an anti-Jewish campaign and those groups could get no better slogan than that the native Irish worker was being ousted by cheap imported labour’. ³⁶

Ireland and Brazil

As it happened, at the time that Pacelli, now Pope Pius XII, learned that his hopes for Ireland in helping the Vatican provide aid for converted Jews were to be disappointed, he was actively negotiating for a much more ambitious plan that would entirely displace Ireland. Prompted initially by Cardinal Michael von Faulhauber, the archbishop of Munich, the Vatican had entered into discussions with Brazilian authorities to offer refuge to converted Jews escaping the Third Reich. In June 1939, President Getúlio Vargas authorized the granting of 3,000 visas to Brazil to Jewish converts to Catholicism who were fleeing Third Reich persecution, casting the decision as an homage to the new pope. The visas were to come on recommendation of either the Vatican secretariat of state or Vatican-designated Catholic Church organisations in the Third Reich. Unlike the Irish case, all were to involve visas for permanent immigration rather than simply short-term transit visas. ³⁷

With those few Jewish converts who had succeeded in being taken in through the auspices of Glynn’s Committee under pressure from the Irish government to leave, with nowhere to go, Robinson ultimately saw the Brazilian program as a potential solution. In September 1940 he wrote to Cardinal Maglione:

On the request of the Irish Committee for Refugees permit me to send Your Most Reverend Eminence the list attached here of Non-Aryan Catholic Refugees who find themselves at present in Ireland and who would like to emigrate to Brazil as soon as possible, taking advantage of the facilities offered by the Brazilian government. The persons included in this list have been under the protection of the above-named Committee for over a year and have all been heartily recommended by their Clergy. ³⁸

Informed by Maglione that to move forward he would need to have the exact date of baptism of each of the converted Jews in question, Robinson responded in late October by providing the requested baptismal information. ³⁹ The secretary of state then sent the proposed list to the Brazilian embassy to the Holy See, as he had done for hundreds of other converted Jews he had recommended over the past months. The cardinal reported back with mixed news to the Irish nuncio three days before Christmas: He had recommended all those requested by the Irish committee to the Brazilian embassy, but ‘I am very sorry to have to communicate that not all the people indicated will be able to obtain the visa’. The embassy had informed them that ‘following precise instructions that have been received, it cannot grant the visa in cases of Jews who had converted after 1934, even if they are members of mixed families [i.e., involving married couples one of whom came from a Catholic family]’. ⁴⁰

As the pope and his secretariat of state geared up to handle what would become a huge avalanche of appeals for help from those being persecuted as Jews over the next few years, Ireland would play virtually no role.