Exhibition "To the grace of God",
the Churches and the Shoah

In 1944, in Combat, Albert Camus calls upon Pope Pius XII and the religious leaders to face the horrors of the Second World War. How was the Nazi regime able to implement the murder of Jews in the heart of Christian Europe, under the eyes of the clergy, the faithful? Why did some protest, act, when others remained silent? Did the churches constitute a force for negotiation, spiritual resistance and mutual aid?  For eighty years, these questions have continued to question the European consciousness.

Beyond the controversies, this exhibition presents to the general public a current state of research on these debates, as close as possible to recent discoveries related to the opening of the Vatican archives. The commemoration of the roundups of summer 1942 offers an opportunity to establish what the positions were, in the face of the Shoah, of the Christian Churches – Catholic, Protestant and Orthodox –between silence and protest, diplomacy, resistance and mutual aid, placing them in a longer context, of the tradition of Christian anti-Judaism in recent memory.

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