PARIS -- Nazi collaborator Paul Touvier escaped arrest for four decades because he was protected by an unofficial but highly efficient network of French Catholic clergy, including former Vatican Secretary of State Cardinal Jean Villot, Pope Paul VI's chief adviser, a church- ordered study said Monday.
The report by eight church-appointed historians said that while the French Catholic Church was not involved as an institution in the effort to keep Touvier from coming to trial for his activities during World War II, dozens of priests, monks, nuns and a number of cardinals worked actively during a period of 40 years to hide Touvier from the authorities.
The report said the clergy acted outside official church channels to protect Touvier, who is charged with crimes against humanity for his role as head of the Nazi militia in Lyon between 1947 and 1949, by letting him hide in numerous monasteries.
Touvier, 76, was arrested in May 1989 at the Saint Francois Priory, a Benedictine monastery near Nice in southeast France. He was released last July 11 and is awaiting trial for his role in the assassination of seven Jewish hostages in June 1944.
Touvier's arrest at a Catholic institution immediately raised serious questions about the role of the church in protecting him and led Cardinal Decourtray to appoint an investigating panel in June 1989.
The report said Cardinal Villot, encouraged by his private secretary The Rev. Charles Duquaire, first tried to insure that Touvier benefitted from an amnesty and then worked successfully for a secret pardon from President Georges Pompidou.
'Whatever the mistakes of the past, I dare say that the actions, which took place more than a quarter century ago, and the exemplary conduct of Mr. Touvier during this long and tragic period of his existence ... justify in my view the greatest benevolence,' Villet wrote in a 1970 letter to Pompidou, according to the report.
In November 1971 Pompidou signed a decree allowing Touvier to again reside in France and canceling the confiscation of his property. In 1972 the news weekly L'Express revealed that the former head of the Lyon Nazi militia had in fact benefitted from a presidential pardon.
But in 1981 judicial authorities issued a new arrest warrant against Touvier on charges of 'crimes against humanity.' In September 1984 Touvier tried to confuse the police by publishing a notice of his death in a newspaper in Chambery, where he maintained a home.
In addition to Cardinal Villot and the Rev. Duquaire, the report names nine other top ranking church officials, including Lyon Archbishop Pierre-Marie Gerlier and Father Blaise Arminjon, the former Jesuit superior for the French Mediterranean region, as having actively protected Touvier.
'The subjectivity of conscience took precedence over the objectivity of the facts,' Rene Remond, who headed the eight historians on the commission, told reporters Monday in an effort to explain the attitude of those who protected Touvier.
Remond said the Rev. Duquaire, who died in 1987, was primarily responsible for hiding the former Nazi collaborator. 'He literally adopted Paul Touvier and his family,' Remond said. 'He put himself at his service, became his protector, his investigator, his strategist.'
The report insisted that the church as an institution was not involved in the efforts to protect Touvier, concluding that many of the individuals who helped him did so out of a mistaken conviction of Christian charity and pardon rather than because they agreed with his ideas.
Touvier, who was twice convicted of war crimes and sentenced to death in absencia by French courts in 1945 and 1947, was given shelter in Roman Catholic convents and monasteries for four decades.
Touvier currently faces charges for the Jan. 10, 1944 murder of Victor Basch and his wife Helen, the 80-year old head of the French League of Human Rights, and for the assassination of seven Jewish hostages on June 29, 1944.
