Church To Atone For Silence During Nazi Era

For more than a half-century, the Roman Catholic Church has been grappling with its checkered record in France during World War II. When the Nazis and their Vichy allies began rounding up Jews, the French church largely kept silent.

On Tuesday, at the locale north of Paris where tens of thousands of French Jews were shipped off to their deaths, Catholic bishops will speak out - to atone for the silence of French church leaders during the 1940s.

The document to be read at the site of the infamous Drancy transit camp north of Paris has yet to be made public, but one participant in the ceremony, Olivier de Berranger, bishop of Saint-Denis, said last week that he and the other clerics will ask forgiveness “for the collective silence of the bishops of France during these terrible years.”

The unprecedented sign of contrition by the French Catholic leadership comes as the country is painfully reassessing the wartime period and the acts of the collaborationist Vichy regime.