Jews have certainly benefited from the Catholic sanctuary movements of the 20th century, which makes this standoff all the more ironic.

From the Holocaust Heroes website:

When the Vichy regime took over in June 1940, many Catholic prelates embraced the new administration because its Premier, Marshal Petain, spoke in theological terms of repentance and expiation of sin. And they were quiet as a church mouse when Vichy issued its anti-Jewish decrees four months later.

But their indifference took a dramatic turn in the summer of 1942, when Jules-Gerard Saliege, archbishop of Toulouse, lashed out at Vichy's anti-Jewish measures. In his now famous pastoral letter, the archbishop said: "There is a Christian morality, there is a human morality that imposes duties and recognizes rights. . . Why does the right of sanctuary no longer exist in our churches? . . . The Jews are real men and women. . . They are our brothers, like so many others."

The letter galvanized the faithful and helped to influence and shape public opinion and action. Sheltering refugees and children in monasteries and convents became a church industry. Besides feeding and clothing the Jews, the church institutions became clandestine factories turning out identification documents, certificates of birth, baptism and marriage to show "Aryan" lineage, ration books and even driver's licenses.

One of the highly-organized rescue networks was operated by Father Marie-Benoit, a Capuchin monk in Marseille, who coordinated the refugee activity with frontier smugglers, guides and rescue groups, and is credited with saving thousands of Jewish children.

In the mountain town of Ville-la-Grand near the Swiss border, the fathers of Ecole St. Francois, a Catholic seminary, shepherded hundreds of refugees safely around German guards and into Switzerland. One of the teachers, Father Louis Favre, would place the refugee children in his classroom and disguise them as pupils, with the adults posing as visiting parents. But Father Favre was arrested by the Gestapo, tortured and shot in July 1944.

The widespread rescue activity by Catholic institutions drew this strong accusation from Jacques Marcy, a pro-Nazi journalist: "Every Catholic family shelters a Jew. . . Priests help them across the Swiss frontier. . . Jewish children have been concealed in Catholic schools; the civilian Catholic officials receive intelligence of a scheduled deportation of Jews, advise a great number of refugee Jews about, and the result is that about 50 percent of the undesirables escape."

Paulette Fink, originally from Paris and an active member of the French underground that saved Jewish refugees from Poland, Hungary and Romania, recalled the reception and aid of the Frenchmen: "We were passing the children from one to the other, a chain with many links – priests and nuns, monasteries and convents, Catholic schools, some on farms to work as farmhands with no pay. The Catholics were fabulous, the Protestants too."

The experience of Denise Caraco provides keen insight into the workings and psychology of rescue operations. The daughter of Jewish parents from Marseille, the university student joined Eclaireurs Israelites de France (Jewish Boy Scouts of France). Her task was to search the surrounding countryside and find families willing to take and hide a refugee child. At first, she placed the children with French Jewish families. "But," she explained, "not all French Jewish families wanted to be bothered. Far from it."

She later met Father Marie Benoit and Pastor Jean S. Lemaire, both of whom provided Jewish rescuers with personal letters of introduction that facilitated movement from one hiding place to another. She also worked with scores of assistants, both Jewish and non-Jewish who supplied and delivered food to the sheltered refugees.

Summing up her first-hand experience in the field, Caraco offered a penetrating analysis of rescue work:

"No matter how effective Jewish rescue organizations were in helping people escape the camps, in finding hiding places, in supplying food and false papers and visiting people in hiding, and in obtaining funds, especially from the American Jewish Joint Distribution Committee in the United States, they could never (italics are hers) have worked without the help from thousands of non-Jews. Where else could we have hidden our people?"