The incredible courage and faith of French friar Father Marie-Benoît, Holocaust rescuer

Heather Tomlinson• January 27, 2025

Many ordinary, humble priests and religious worked hard to save the lives of endangered Jewish people in Nazi-occupied Europe, but this Capuchin friar’s courage, compassion and derring-do shines particularly brightly amid the terrible darkness of the Holocaust.

Despite later allegations that the Catholic Church did not do enough against the Nazi regime, there were many Catholic faithful who risked torture and even gave their lives to save others in Nazi controlled areas. Some would become well-known, such as ‘Vatican pimpernel’ Monsignor Hugh O’Flaherty, subject of a film made about his daring exploits in Rome, and champion cyclist Gino Bartali, who cycled around the Italian countryside secretly working for the resistance. 

Many senior clerics took action, too. For example, Monsignor Jules-Géraud Saliège, Archbishop of Toulouse from 1928 to 1956, was outspoken about the horrors he witnessed in a pastoral letter issued in 1942. 

This letter would inspire many others, including the unassuming Capuchin monk Father Pierre-Marie Benoît, whose story was brought to life by his collaborator Fernande Leboucher in her 1969 memoir (The Incredible Mission of Father Benoit, Fernande Leboucher trans. JF Bernard, 1970, William Kimber & Co). Mdme Leboucher ran a fashionable dressmaking business, but Nazi brutality intruded into her life when her Jewish husband, Ludvik, was detained in a local camp. 

At the time it was not clear what the inmates’ fate would be, but there were terrible rumours about deportations to hellish German camps. Distraught and desperate, Mdme Leboucher had heard that Fr Benoît was helping Jewish people in danger, and she sought him at his Capuchin monastery in Marseilles. Together they considered what practical action they could take, but he urged her to pray most of all. “You can be sure that, in one way of another, God will answer your prayers,”  the monk told Mdme Leboucher. “After all, his son was a Jew, too; and he, too, was persecuted during his lifetime. It is not hard to believe that God has a special feeling for the Jewish race.”

Mdme Leboucher was new to prayer, “perhaps I never really needed God before,” she wrote. After she began to pray, in a few days she discovered where her husband was held and visited him shortly afterwards. 

It may, however, seem as though her petitions were not answered because eventually her husband’s fate became that of the six million others. Yet, from the time he was detained, until the time of his deportation to Auschwitz, they worked together to rescue others in the camp, with the help of Fr Marie-Benoît. 

The friar sought homes where fleeing Jews could hide and arranged practical matters such as food – a feat not easily achieved in wartime. But the main means of rescue the Church could offer was to issue Jews with a certificate of baptism, which Fr Benoît arranged. He also sought ration cards and other means of identification with false names that signalled Christian rather than Jewish heritage. Eventually his monastery would have a printing press in the basement, producing the life-saving documents even faster, and it became a hub of resistance activity. 

Working with other local churches, religious and resistance, they sheltered Jews and sent them via various routes to safety in neutral countries, with numerous frightening brushes with the authorities along the way.

As well as these clandestine efforts, Mdme Leboucher designed fashionable hats that provided income for their work. It was to prove useful as a cover too: when she and a Jewish refugee were confronted by aggressive officials demanding they tell them of Fr Benoît’s activities, she found the strength to dismiss the claims and charmed them into discussing her hats and how pretty they would look on their girlfriends. Perhaps the fact that she had such an apparently superficial interest made her an unlikely suspect, and they escaped unharmed. 

Father Benoît had a diplomatic talent that enabled him to persuade certain regime officials to help Jews escape rather than obey orders to assist in their extermination.

Eventually, however, his remarkable ability to evade Nazi efforts to arrest him became untenable. The network of rescuers heard from multiple sources that the Gestapo was determined to find Fr Benoît, so his Capuchin superiors ordered him to a convent in Rome. “He had left Marseilles not a day too soon,” wrote Mdme Leboucher, “for the group heard later that only a short time after the trucks had pulled away from the convent, a Gestapo car had arrived. An officer… demanded that ‘the criminal Marie-Benoît’ be turned over to him.”

But the Nazis received this response from an old priest: “Alas! You will not find him here. He is gone, to Italy, to teach theology. These young priests today are never satisfied to remain in one place.”

The fleeing monk hid in France for several weeks before he could enter Rome in June 1943. There, Fr Benoît’s experience of underground activity, forging identity papers and diplomatic appeals to officials would be put to good use, and he seemed to arrive at exactly the right time. Italy under Mussolini had instituted unjust laws against the Jews, but until then, the country had not succumbed to the murderous anti-Semitism of its ally. When the Nazis took over in September 1943, Jewish lives were soon in great danger. 

Fr Benoît worked with a new network of religious as well as the Jewish aid organisation DELASEM, which he eventually would manage, under the name Father Maria Benedetto. He arranged letters of protection from the Swiss, Romanian, Hungarian, and Spanish authorities, which allowed “thousands of Jews, under assumed names, to circulate freely in Rome” according to Yad Vashem, the Holocaust memorial organisation. 

When the Gestapo raided Rome for Jews, Pope Pius XII issued an order for convents and monasteries to break enclosure, and platoons of nuns, monks and priests opened their doors to fleeing Jews and others hiding from the Nazis. Fr Benoît testified to Yad Vashem that the Pontiff personally gave him encouragement and financial support for his rescue efforts, according to Rabbi David G Dalin, in his robust defence of papal efforts to help the Jews ( The myth of ‘Hitler’s Pope’: How Pope Pius XII rescued Jews from the Nazis, Rabbi David G Dalin, 2005, republished 2023 Regnery History). This historian blames a liberal campaign of misinformation for later attempts to smear the pontiff’s role in WWII, with the aim of damaging “traditional religion”. 

Again Fr Benoît’s rescue work put him in great danger. Suspiciously officious people came to one door asking for the “priests who take care of the Jews,” but were fobbed off with offers of prayers and blessings. The Gestapo raided his monastery, but he had been tipped off and escaped via a side door, fleeing to a nearby convent at 2am to appeal to the mother superior. “The next morning, the community of nuns was startled by the appearance among them of Father Benoît – his beard carefully shaved, his hands modestly hidden in voluminous sleeves, his eyes demurely cast down – clad in the habit of the sisters of the Capuchin Order,” writes Mdme Leboucher. 

In all, 477 Roman Jews hid in the Vatican, while another 4,328 were sheltered in nearby convents and monasteries, according to Michael Tagliacozzo, an Italian Jew who was protected and eventually became a Holocaust scholar. Around 3,000 jewish people were given shelter in Castel Gandolfo, the summer residence of the Pope.

Following the war, US President Lyndon Johnson described Fr Benoît’s actions as “heroic and fabulous”. The frequently quoted estimate of Jewish lives saved by the friar is 4,000, and he was one of the earliest to be honoured with the title “Righteous Among the Nations” by Yad Vashem in 1966. “Many Jews owe their lives to Father Benoît and regard him as the man who saved them from the crematoria,” says the international Holocaust memorial organisation. “When Rome was liberated in June 1944, the Jewish community held an official synagogue ceremony in honour of Father Benoît and showered him with praise.”

He was known as “Father of the Jews”, a title, it is said, he particularly cherished, until he passed away at the great age of 94 in 1990. 

Heather Tomlinson is a freelance Christian writer. Find more of her work at https://heathertomlinson.substack.com/ or via X (twitter) @heathertomli