October 22, 2023 - "Father Marie-Benoit"

Pierre Péteul was born on March 30, 1895.  He served in the French army during the First World War.  He was wounded at Verdun and received the distinction of five citations and the Croix de Guerre.  After the war he entered the Capuchin Franciscan Friars where he received the religious name Marie-Benoît.  He was sent to Rome where he earned a doctorate in theology.  In 1940, he returned to France where he was stationed at Marseilles.
 
At Marseilles he found thousands of refugees trying to escape the horrors of World War II. He determined that he would help them.  Father Marie-Benoît explained why he did so: “We Christians claim to be spiritual children of the patriarch Abraham.  This should be enough reason to exclude any kind of anti-Semitism whatsoever, anti-Semitism being an ideology which we Christians cannot in any way share and be part of.”  Father Marie-Benoît set up an operation to smuggle Jews successfully out of an increasingly hostile France.  His first headquarters was the Capuchin friary in Marseilles where he organized a massive forging operation to produce passports, baptismal certificates, and other documents that would enable refugees to cross the border into Spain and Switzerland.  This was often done in collaboration with Jewish organizations and the French resistance.
 
In November 1942, the Nazis occupied France’s Free Zone, which included Marseilles.  This closed off the possibility of helping Jews escape to Spain and Switzerland.  He turned his attention to those areas of France controlled by the Italians.  Traveling to Nice, he convinced the Italian officials to permit Jews to cross over to the Italian Zone.  He was also working on a plan for Jews to be transported to Northern Africa.  However, this was foiled when the Germans occupied Northern Italy and the Italian-occupied zone of France.
 
Father Marie-Benoît then briefly returned to France to carry out “the Spanish part of his plan.”  With the authority from the Spanish government to decide which Jews qualified as being of Spanish descent, he managed to save another 2,600 people.  There is no record of how many of them actually had Spanish blood.
 
At the urging of his friends who knew that the Gestapo aimed to capture him, Father Marie-Benoît disappeared and eventually turned up in Rome as Father Benedetti.  Once established in Rome, he was elected to the board of the Delegation for the Assistance of Jewish Emigrants (DELASEM), the central Jewish welfare organization in Italy of which he eventually became president.  After he became president, he transferred the headquarters of DELASEM to the International College of the Capuchins.  Once again, he established an operation to forge documents at the International College.  His office was raided several times by the Gestapo early in 1945.  Father Benedetti was persuaded to go into hiding when most of the rest of the officers of DELASEM were arrested, tortured, and executed.  Somehow, he managed to elude the Gestapo which was in hot pursuit of him and survive the war.
 
On December 1, 1966, Father Marie-Benoît was honored with the Medal of the Righteous among the Nations by the Holocaust Martyrs’ and Heroes’ Remembrance Authority in Jerusalem (Yad Vashem).  His name was also placed in their Hall of Names on that occasion for his courage and self-sacrifice in the saving of approximately 4,000 Jews.
 
Father Marie-Benoît died on February 5, 1990.  President Lyndon Johnson once praised him in a speech when he stated that Father Benoît’s actions should inspire the American people in the protection and preservation of rights of citizens, irrespective of race, color, or religion.
 
Until next week,
Fr. John