Marie-Benoît de Bourg d'Iré, 1895-1990

Résumé éditeur

A biography of Père Marie-Benoît (born Pierre Péteul in 1895), a Capuchin Franciscan friar who helped smuggle ca. 4,500 Jews to safety from southern France during the Shoah. Chs. 4-6 (pp. 131-274) deal with the period 1940-66: his rescue actions during World War II and his active role in Jewish-Christian dialogue after the war. Until 1940, he lived in the Capuchin monastery in Rome, but he returned to France and settled in Marseille in early 1940. Deeply committed to humanitarian values, he pledged himself to protecting Jewish refugees. He worked with the French underground and various religious institutions, procuring false papers and hiding places, and smuggling Jewish refugees to Spain and Switzerland. After the German occupation of southern France, Father Marie-Benoît began to organize the transfer of Jews to the Italian occupation zone. He met in Nice with Guido Lospinoso, the Italian commissioner for Jewish affairs, and persuaded him to refrain from action against the 30,000 Jews in Nice. In April 1943, he met with Pope Pius XII and presented a plan to transfer Jews from Nice to North Africa via Rome. The plan was foiled due to the German occupation of northern Italy and all of southern France. Father Marie-Benoît moved to Rome to escape from the Gestapo. He joined the board of DELASEM and later became its president. He procured asylum documents for Jews from the Swiss, Romanian, Hungarian, and Spanish embassies. After the war he focused on interfaith dialogue and a revision of the Church's "teaching of contempt". In 1966, he was recognized as a Righteous among the Nations by Yad Vashem.