This article analyses the Catholic humanitarian assistance provided to non-Catholic fascists after the Second World War. It does so by investigating the assistance provided by Vatican networks to leading Romanian Orthodox fascists displaced in Rome. Drawing from Pius XII's pontificate archives, the article explores an encounter between the rescuers and the rescued inspired by distinct political and religious ideologies. The investigation examines the material aspects of the rescue and the political and religious factors that determined its secrecy. It focuses on the terms and outcomes of the rescue, particularly on its ideological tensions and mobilization attempts. The analysis sheds light on the agendas shaping Catholic humanitarianism and the reception of postwar relief. The findings reveal that humanitarian motives and the Roman Catholic Church's mission for Eastern Christianity prompted the Catholic clergy to assist displaced Orthodox Christians, particularly those fearing repatriation. Furthermore, the article sheds light on the brief postwar ‘Catholic turn’ of the Orthodox fascists. While Catholic humanitarians rejected proposals for alliances intended to advance the fascists’ activities, anti-communism briefly emerged as the minimal common ground that allowed Orthodox fascists and Catholic clerics to bridge their religious divide. However, the fascists abandoned the dialogue once relief ended, underscoring their opportunism.

This article addresses historiographical ambiguities on Catholic humanitarianism, the Catholic search for the unity of Christians under the papacy, and the Vatican’s secretive assistance of war criminals after 1945. It does so by examining the humanitarian aid provided by the Roman Catholic Church since 1945 to Romanian Orthodox Bishop Visarion Puiu, a displaced war criminal associated with Romanian fascism. Based on unexplored Vatican and ecclesiastical archives, the article traces Catholic assistance provided to Puiu in postwar Italy, Switzerland, and France (1945–50). Its analysis reveals that while Puiu leveraged anti-communist sentiment and Christian unity under the papacy to secure aid, Catholic humanitarians, guided mainly by ideals of Christian charity, helped him overcome displacement and evade postwar justice, while still respecting his faith.

This chapter focuses on the memorials, held since the 1940s in Majadahonda, Spain, to honour Ion Moţa and Vasile Marin, two leading members of the Romanian Legionary movement who fell there while fighting for Franco in the Spanish Civil War. The memorials were established by the diplomacies of the Spanish and Romanian fascist dictatorships in 1941 and continued by legionaries resettled in Spain after 1945. The chapter contextualizes the memorials within Franco’s dictatorship and investigates the relationship between this and the legionaries. First, it shows that commemoration serves an important connecting function. The chapter reveals that, since the late 1940s, the memorials received support from Spanish fascists who had patronized the legionaries’ settlement in Spain. Second, the chapter discloses that political contexts and international relations influence heavily memory work. In the 1950s, once the regime promoted an anti-communist crusade, the memorials became part of the officially endorsed celebrations for Francoist war heroes. In the mid-1960s, when Spain sought to establish an economic partnership with communist Romania, the authorities treated the old legionaries unceremoniously, and the press muted the memorials and their anti-communism. Ultimately, the transnational and transgenerational “passing of the torch” enabling the continuity of the memorials is an unintended consequence of the legionaries’ networking with Spanish ideological peers, not an intended outcome.