Nuggets from "Judgment Day: Islam, Israel, and the Nations" by Dave Hunt

There were, of course, some Catholics who did not fall under the condemnation [of persecuting Jews], but, in so doing, they endangered their own standing with the Church. Some Jews were rescued during World War II by individual Roman Catholics but not generally by the Church itself. The authors of “Shoah” point out: “Even when the church engaged in isolated rescue activities, the motive seems to have been to bring the rescued Jews into the bosom of Christianity [Catholicism]. Thousands of Jewish children were taken into monasteries, and after the war, many were not returned to their people and faith even after relatives pleaded for their release (Shoah, p. 161)….

A few popes (a very small minority) felt compassion and were at times even helpful to Jews: Gregory I, Alexander III, Gregory IX (though the founder of the Inquisition that would swallow up hundreds of thousands of Jews and non-Jews, far more of the latter), and Innocent IV. The vast majority of popes, however, persecuted the Jews – and that was the official stance of the Roman Catholic Church. Pope Urban II, who organized the First Crusade, promised instant entrance to heaven for those who died in that cause (hardly different from Islam’s promise of Paradise for jihad martyrs). On the way to the Holy Land, the Crusaders slaughtered Jews (more than one thousand in 1096, in the city of Worms alone), and when they took Jerusalem, they herded the Jews into the synagogue and set it ablaze. Urban II had told them to take that land – not to restore it to the Jews, to whom it belonged as the Bible so clearly declared, but to the Church as the new people of God.