Pope Francis’ recent visit to Turkey coincided with the 70th anniversary of one of the most daring rescue operations of World War II, conceived by Angelo Giuseppe Roncalli, the Vatican’s ambassador to Turkey, who would become Pope John XXIII and would be canonized in 2014.

Roncalli’s “Operation Baptism” was as dangerous as it was simple: it entailed the issuance of false baptism certificates to hundreds of thousands of Hungarian Jews at the time when Adolf Eichmann was deporting 430,000 souls from Budapest. 

Roncalli worked with Rabbi Isaac Herzog, the chief rabbi of Jerusalem, and Ira Hirschmann, special envoy from the American Refugee Board, with the full support and participation of the Turkish authorities. They met in the church of St. Anthony of Padua in Istanbul to launch the operation in 1944.

“Roncalli listened intently as I outlined the desperate plight of Jews in Hungary,” Hirschmann later recalled. “Then he pulled his chair up closer and quietly asked, ‘Do you have any contact with people in Hungary who will co-operate?’”

Author Joseph D’Hippolito’s article Pope John XXIII and the Jews, published by the Raul Wallenberg Foundation, mentions that Roncalli had heard reports of Hungarian nuns distributing baptismal certificates to Jews, mostly children. Nazi authorities in Hungary regarded these documents as authentic proof of Aryan descent and permitted the bearers to leave Hungary. 

“Roncalli planned to reinforce and expand the operation – regardless of whether Jews were actually baptized. Hirschmann readily agreed,” D’Hippolito wrote.   

Roncalli used diplomatic couriers, papal representatives and the Sisters of Our Lady of Zion to transport and issue baptismal certificates, immigration certificates and visas – many of them forged – to Hungarian Jews. “Operation Baptism” exceeded the wildest expectations of all those involved in the rescue effort, and indeed, when the Russians liberated Budapest in 1945, it became apparent that more than 100,000 had been saved.

According to Roncalli’s biographer, Thomas Cahill, the future pope, was first alerted to the fate of the Jews in occupied Poland by a party of Jewish refugees he met in Istanbul on Sept. 5, 1940. He helped them on the way to the Holy Land, and from that time, stood ready to facilitate the escape of Jews in whatever way he could, with clothes, money, documents and a quiet sense of common humanity that never left him. Indeed, whatever was in the heart of the reining pope in 1940, Angelo Roncalli was in no doubt about what his conscience was telling him.

“We are dealing with one of the great mysteries in the history of humanity,” Roncalli wrote to a concerned nun in Bucharest. “Poor children of Israel. Daily I hear their groans around me. They are relatives and fellow countrymen of Jesus.” 

His accomplishments include the delivery of “immigration certificates” to Palestine through the Nunciature diplomatic courier, intervention before King Boris of Bulgaria in favour of Bulgarian Jews, helping Jewish refugees from Transnistria, using his influence to save Jews from deportation in Romania and Croatia, communicating with Nazi authorities in Greece about the fate of Jews in that country, rendering succour to Jewish refugees from France and Germany, co-ordinating rescue efforts with Raymond Courvoisier, Ankara director of the Red Cross, and using his moral authority with Hitler’s ambassador to Ankara, Franz von Papen. His efforts resulted in the clandestine saving of countless Jews throughout Europe.

When Pope John XXIII passed away in 1963, thousands whom he had saved, as well as Jews, Christians and Muslims with whom he had worked, paid him the silent tribute of their tears.

He was truly a saint in the age of demons.