Dimitri Cavalli writes in today's Palm Beach Post that the supposed Vatican memo ordering that Catholic families not return baptized Jewish children sheltered during the Holocaust is false:

Two Italian scholars, Matteo Luigi Napolitano and Andrea Tornielli, revealed that this memorandum [on Jewish children] was written by someone in the apostolic nunciature in Paris that was headed by Monsignor Angelo Roncalli, who would become Pope John XXIII. The memorandum was drafted in response to an official dispatch, dated Sept. 28, 1946, that Father Roncalli received from Monsignor Domenico Tardini, the Vatican's secretary of the Congregation of Extraordinary Ecclesiastical Affairs. When he was elected pope in 1958, John XXIII appointed Father Tardini the Vatican secretary of state.

An English translation of the complete text of Father Tardini's letter was published by John Allen in his column for the National Catholic Reporter (Jan. 14). A comparison of Father Tardini's letter and the memorandum reveals substantial differences in tone, language and content. Father Tardini clearly affirms that baptized Jewish children should be returned to their relatives who ask for them. For reasons that remain unclear, the individual who wrote the memorandum went far beyond what the Vatican specified.

Did the Catholic Church withhold or return [Jewish] children? In his book, Three Popes and the Jews (1967), the Jewish scholar Pinchas Lapide quotes Dr. [A. Leon] Kubowitzky [later Kubovy, the secretary-general of the World Jewish Congress], in 1964, as saying, "I can state now that I hardly know of a single case where Catholic institutions refused to return Jewish children."

In an interview published in the Israeli newspaper Ha'aretz (Jan. 20, 2005), Serge Klarsfeld, the French Holocaust survivor and Nazi hunter, also disputed the charge that the French church kept baptized Jewish children.

Pius XII himself personally intervened in several individual cases. For example, in his book, Avenue of the Righteous (1980), Peter Hellman writes that Leokadia Jaromirska, a Polish Catholic woman, was unwilling to return a Jewish girl she protected back to her father after the war. Ms. Jaromirska wrote to the pope, asking for his blessing to keep the child. "She was instructed by the pope to return the child to its father," Mr. Hellman reports. In fact, the pope told Ms. Jaromirska that it was her duty as a Catholic to return the girl to her father and to do so in goodwill and friendship.