We all know that, as papal nuncio to Germany, the soon-to-be Pius XII concluded the famous Concordat with Nazi Germany. Pius XII, in his original letters to German bishops, frequently referred to Jews as ‘“the people who put Him on the Cross.’’
High Roman Catholic Clergy and Nazi officials: Hailmen
Back then, Alois Hudal was seen as the paragon of the “Nazi, Fascist Bishop’’ who, after World War 2, became politically embarrassing to the Vatican. Hudal was a Vatican-based informer to German intelligence under the Nazi regime and a docile cooperator of the SS intelligence chief Walter Rauff in charge of all Gestapo and SD operations throughout northwest Italy. After Germany’s defeat in World War II leading to the end of the Third Reich, Alois Hudal organized ratlines to help Nazi criminals, including Rauff, find safe haven in overseas countries.
But Alois Hudal was BY FAR not the only one of his kind. In FRANCE, the National Council of the Resistance and the provisional government of General de Gaulle demanded the resignation of four nazi bishops who had been seriously compromised: Florent du Bois de la Villerabel, archbishop of Aix-en-Provence, Henri Édouard Dutoit, bishop of Arras, Roger Beaussart, auxiliary archbishop of Paris, and last but not least: François-Louis AUVITY, bishop of Mende, who was certainly the worst of them all, and by far.
The French National Archives show us that François Auvity urged Catholics to support Pétain, Laval, the Milice and the Nazi military administration in occupied France. To top it off with ignominy, Auvity presented the denunciation to the GESTAPO of the Jews, the Resistance fighters and those who refused to work in Germany as a “Christian duty”… and forbade the priests of his diocese, and all other ecclesiastics, to administer the last rites to dying “Maquisards” (French Resistance fighters)!
François Auvity, the NAZI bishop from Germigny.
Because of his all-to-obvious complacency toward Hitler and his collaborationist attitude, François AUVITY was arrested on August 20, 1944, by a Maquis battalion in the Haute-Lozère on behalf of the French Forces of the Interior. But was he brought before a firing squad? Was he brought to trial before a general court-martial? Was he prosecuted in any way? Was he even branded a traitor and disgraced as the war criminal he was? Quite the opposite: he was comfortably rehoused at the expense of the French people until the storm would pass, and treated with the honour and courtesy due a honorable prelate! After he resigned his episcopal see on October 28, 1945, the Church reassigned him elsewhere — as usual with its criminals — and Auvity was promptly recycled as “bishop in partibus of Dionysiana”!
The French historian Annie Lacroix-Riz reminds us that François Auvity, the nazi bishop of Mende, died at the advanced age of ninety years, rich, fat and crowned with honours, in his quiet, large and beautiful country house in Germigny-l’Exempt, without ever being held accountable for his crimes against humanity. After Archbishop Lefebvre of Bourges had presided over Auvity’s funeral, his body was transported to the bishops’ vault in the cathedral basilica of Mende. And, today, complete forgetting started wiping clean his record and turning him from a perfect bastard into a saint, which I find extremely worrying. The only consolation: if there is a beyond, we can be sure that Auvity, the nazi bishop of Germigny, does not live on the top floor.
In the ‘Journal du Centre‘, one proudly displays Auvity’s pseudo-historical bullshit.
Remember Auvity and the people handed over to the Gestapo, and spread the word: NEVER FORGIVE, NEVER FORGET !
BIBLIOGRAPHY
Annie Lacroix-Riz, Les Elites françaises entre 1940 et 1944, 2016, p. 70.
Jacques-Augustin Bailly, La Libération confisquée: le Languedoc, 1944–1945, 1993, p. 291.
Philippe Valode, Le Livre noir de la Collaboration, 2013.