Mobilized Christians usually belonged to interfaith networks, which brought different Christian denominations as well as Jewish organizations into contact with each other. 

Spontaneous or organized, individual or collective, aid took many forms, from forging papers and baptismal certificates to sheltering Jews in private homes, convents and religious schools and helping them escape camps and flee across borders. 

Clergy and faithful who helped and rescued Jaws risked arrest, internment and deportation.

Between the summer and winter of 1942, several sources informed the Allies and neutral countries of the Nazi plan to exterminate the Jews of Europe and about the methods they were using to achieve that goal. 

Faced with the allied governments’ reluctance, some religious leaders publicly spoke out against an unprecedented crime. The strongest and swiftest reactions came from international ecumenical networks (mostly Protestant) in Switzerland, the United States and the United Kingdom. 

Attempts at interreligious responses undertaken at the beginning of 1943 resulted in a joint Jewish-Christian declaration, but they remained incomplete, notably because of the absence of the Vatican. 

The Vatican, a microstate with limited sovereignty and no army, was often powerless to affect the course of events but did have other levers of influence: charity, public opinion and transnational religious networks. 

The Holy See’s reactions to the Holocaust reflected a shifting balance between humanitarian aid and cautious diplomacy.. For the Vatican, the Jews were war victims like any others and outside its ecclesiastical jurisdiction-unless they were baptized. 

Other factors also explain the Holy See’s hesitancy: fears of retaliation against the Church, anti-Communism, the desire to maintain diplomatic ties with Germany and persistent anti-Jewish prejudice.