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

Shortly after the enactment in September 1938 of the first of Fascist Italy’s anti-Jewish ‘racial laws’, which mandated the expulsion from the country of all foreign Jews, desperate pleas for help began flooding into the Vatican. The pleas came overwhelmingly from Jews who had been baptised. Vatican secretary of state, Eugenio Pacelli, initially saw in Ireland the best possibility for a solution. Over the next months a thick correspondence developed between Pacelli and the nuncio in Dublin, Paschal Robinson. The nuncio in turn relied on Sir Joseph Glynn, president of Ireland’s St Vincent de Paul Society, to spearhead the resettlement effort. Not long after Pacelli became pope himself in March 1939, Vatican hopes for the Irish plan faded. Vatican ambitions for Ireland foundered on the lack of support among both the Church hierarchy and the general population for helping refugees regarded as Jews, notwithstanding their baptismal status.