Andrea Cassulo

Andrea Cassulo (30 November 1869 – 9 January 1952) was an archbishop of the Roman Catholic Church and a representative of the Holy See in Egypt, Canada, Romania and Turkey from 1921 to 1952.

Biography He was born in Castelletto d'Orba in 1869 and ordained a priest in 1893 in Florence. In 1914, he was appointed bishop of Fabriano-Matelica. In 1921, he became the titular archbishop of Leontopolis in Augustamnica.

He was the apostolic delegate to Egypt from 1921 to 1927.

Efforts of behalf of Jews In 1944, the Chief Rabbi of Bucharest praised the work of Cassulo on behalf of Romania's Jews: "the generous assistance of the Holy See… was decisive and salutary. It is not easy for us to find the right words to express the warmth and consolation we experienced because of the concern of the supreme Pontiff, who offered a large sum to relieve the sufferings of deported Jews — sufferings which had been pointed out to him by you after your visit to Transnistria. The Jews of Romania will never forget these facts of historic importance."

According to Morely, as nuncio to Bucharest, Cassulo's "early efforts on behalf of Jews concerned almost exclusively those who had been baptized Catholic". He passed on to the Vatican in 1939, but did not pursue, a project to emigrate the 150,000 converted Jews of Romania to Spain.

Diplomatic protests In his study of the rescue of Jews during the Holocaust, Jewish historian Martin Gilbert wrote that, Cassulo "appealed directly to Marshall Antonescu to limit the deportations [of Jews to Nazi concentration camps] planned for the summer of 1942. His appeal was ignored; hundreds of thousands of Romanian Jews were transported to Transnistria."

Cassulo made three protests to Antonescu: on 20 November 1940, 2 December 1940 and 14 February 1941.

Jewish converts

Five days after the last of Cassulo's 1941 diplomatic protests, Antonescu informed the nuncio of his signing a decree allowing students of any ethnic origin to attend their own religious schools. Again, Cassulo protested that this violated the concordat, but the Romanian government replied that the decree did not because it would only affect the "civil status" of baptized Jews. Nationwide statistics on Jewish baptisms are unclear, but they certainly rose to the level that the Romanian government became concerned. Morley judges him sincere in his belief that it was "God's plan" that the Holocaust increase the number of converts.

Last years Cassulo was named Apostolic Nuncio to Turkey on 3 June 1947. He died on 9 January 1952