Lying for the gospel: Falsifying documents to save Jewish lives

Should violation of the law be praised? No! Is lying wrong? Yes!  Can a sacrament be invoked for a person who has no intention of converting, but only wants to use it for some convenient self-interest? Never! 

But can all the above be justified and commended if they are done at the service of the Gospel values? “Yes” can be the only answer.  For, “we must obey God rather than any human authority” (Acts 5:29).

It is such an event of a violation of law, deliberate lying, and false invocation of sacraments—an event that remained a holy secret for nearly 80 years—that came out in the open a couple of months ago, from the pages of Spanish-French history. 

When a wrong becomes right

During the Second World War, when France went under Nazi occupation, a little-known Spanish parish community of Claretian Missionaries in Paris issued forged baptismal and marriage certificates to 155 Jews over a period of five years, helping them pass off as Catholics to escape being identified as Jews, and thereby saving them from being deported to be gassed in the concentration camps. 

This falsification of documents to save human lives remained a well-kept secret until recently. None of the four Claretian missionaries involved—Father Gilberto Valtierra, Father Joaquín Aller, Emilio Martín and Father Ignacio Turrillas—had left any communication on their heroic act. Therefore, hardly anyone—neither their own congregation nor any historian nor the general public—had any idea of the act they had undertaken, putting their lives in the line of fire. 

The secret came tumbling down the hidden layers of history almost as an accident. The first glimpse of the truth happened in 2008, when a lady contacted Father Arturo Muiño, the then director of the mission, to thank the mission fathers for saving the lives of her parents during World War II. 

Nobody understood very well the background or the scope of the saving act she referred to. A couple of Claretians who had some vague knowledge about it, played it down and preferred that the story remained a secret. Yet, noble deeds have a way of revealing themselves! 

In 2018, Santiago López Rodríguez, a 26-year old professor of history at the University of Extremadura and who has been doing doctoral research into The Spanish Foreign Service during the Holocaust in occupied France (1940-1944), was surveying consulate archives and interviewing Holocaust survivors. 

While interviewing a son of a Jewish deportee, the latter mentioned that a Spanish church in Paris helped his parents flee the Nazi-occupied France by providing forged baptismal documents. 

With his curiosity piqued, López began hunting for more information. He located the still-existing mission parish that ministers to the Spanish catholics of Paris located at Rue de la Pompe, some 15-minutes’ walk from the Eiffel Tower. 

Together with the current superior at the mission, López scanned through the dust-filled and dog-eared baptismal registers of the 1940s and lo and behold, they came upon name after name of people with Jewish surnames, many of them emigrants from Greece and Turkey, who have been falsely baptised. They identified 155 forgeries, spanning five years (1940-1944) of Nazi occupancy of France. They sometimes included names of entire families as well as 22 marriage certifications. 

The news became sensational, and the August 9 Sunday Supplement of the Spanish newspaper, El País, carried a special and detailed coverage of what had been a long-held secret, and is now being proclaimed from the rooftops. 

Did they truly convert?

Due to the absence of any explanations or notes left by those “God’s forgers,” it is not clear if these persons were truly baptised or if the records were merely falsified for the sake of issuing them certificates. What is evident is that the very first falsified record is entered on the very day—3 October 1940—when the anti-Semitic Statute was signed into law in France, which led to the census of Jews and the infamous deportations to concentration camps. 

Having traced and spoken to descendants of several of the beneficiaries of the forged documents, López asserts that the forgery of documents was merely to assist them to deceive the Nazi officials and escape France. 

So, it was not an attempt to convert them to Christianity, but to save them from gas chambers and help them continue to be who they were! 

The majority of the beneficiaries were of Sephardi Jewish origin (of Iberian peninsula) and the missionaries changed their names to sound more Spanish, in order to make the documents more credible and evade any suspicion. 

Laying life on the line

One can only shudder at the thought as to what would have happened to the four missionaries had the Nazi officials discovered the forgery.  

The missionaries were working against the Nazis, confronting the French state and breaking Church law by forging sacramental documents. Had they been caught, it would have endangered not only their lives, but also Franco-Spanish diplomatic relations as these priests were Spanish nationals working in France. 

The Nazis would have retaliated against the Church as well. 

However, forging baptismal documents to save Jews was not a new idea, nor was the act of those four Claretians the only instance. Angelo Giuseppe Cardinal Roncalli (later Pope John XXIII) himself used his good offices to forge baptismal and other diplomatic certificates to save the lives of thousands of Jews during World War II. 

Those four missionaries were not without clandestine help from other sources. López discovered that the then Spanish consul general in Paris, Bernardo Rolland, was also secretly supportive of the move and had referred Jews to the priests. 

Father Arturo Pinacho, the current Claretian in charge of the mission’s archives, also found the letter from then-Archbishop Emmanuel Suhard of Paris, inquiring about the adult baptisms and urging the mission superior to pass on the necessary documentation to the diocese. 

Though nothing is known definitively about the stand of the archbishop on the forgery of baptismal documents, given that he was anti-Nazi, the communication was possibly an effort to give credence to the baptisms and to protect the missionaries.  

After the fall of the Nazis and end of the World War II, the missionaries could have made their “adventure” public; but they chose to keep it as a treasured secret. López managed to track down 20 descendants of the beneficiaries, and none of them was aware of the forgery. 

Evidently, the beneficiaries themselves kept the matter a secret. El País has published the names of all the beneficiaries as found in the register and invited the descendants, or anyone who knew about them to contact the newspaper.

Models for today

One can only read the story of these four ordinary missionaries who dared an unjust system and used their offices to help God’s people, with pride and gratitude. 

How well they had imbibed the message of the gospel that the Sabbath is made for human beings and not vice versa! 

That they had to defy earthly powers to do their bit to protect “the strangers, the widows, and the orphans” of Yahweh! 

Did they violate the rules of society and perhaps of the Church? Of course! But in so violating the letter of the law, they upheld the true spirit of the law. As Tony de Mello once observed, “love knows when to break the rules.” 

It was no coincidence that the story of these four Claretian missionaries came out in the same week when one of their own fiery missionary bishops, Pedro Casaldàliga, who fought tooth and nail for 52 long years against the land mafia and military regime in the Amazonian Brazil to protect the lives and rights of the indigenous people there, died. 

If Casaldàliga fought publicly to protect lives, his fellow Claretians in Paris fought secretly to do the same, both placing their lives in great risk in doing so. 

Pope Francis, in his latest encyclical Fratelli Tutti, highlights the dark clouds gathering over a closed world in which we live, where increasing numbers of people are being marginalised, victimised, and their rights violated, as “instances of a myopic, extremist, resentful and aggressive nationalism are on the rise” (FT § 11). 

If many people become refugees, many more live in their own lands as aliens devoid of fundamental human rights. Oppressive political regimes seem to be the order of the day in many countries fo the world. 

As fundamental human rights are repeatedly violated and universal human values go for a toss, the Church, more than ever, has a duty to stand up to unjust human-made laws and denounce them, to uphold the mandate of the gospel; to play the Good Samaritan in manifold ways. 

Can the Church turn a blind eye to the realities around and be self-protective, only concerned about preserving “her own” people and institutions? Or, should the Church put herself on the line and do the right thing in the eyes of God, even as it goes against the call of the state? 

The prophetic and courageous acts of those missionaries in Paris should help us discern the answer. For their story holds before us the mirror of the Gospel. 

This is an adapted version of the article originaly published in Truth of Life 11, no.19 (1 October 12020): 1,13.