Irish postal service honors Monsignor Hugh O’Flaherty with stamp for saving 6,500 Jews in WWII Rome as Vatican’s daring “Pimpernel.”
Newsroom (30/10/2025, Gaudium Press ) An Post (Irish Post)unveiled a commemorative €1.40 postage stamp Tuesday marking the centenary of the priestly ordination of Monsignor Hugh O’Flaherty, the Irish cleric whose clandestine network sheltered an estimated 6,500 Jews and Allied fugitives in Nazi-occupied Rome.
The stamp commemorating the hundredth anniversary of his ordination to priesthood, celebrates the work of Monsignor Hugh O’Flaherty with a design featuring a drawing of O’Flaherty himself, juxtaposed with a flock of birds.
Born in Lisnaboy, County Cork, on 28 February 1898, O’Flaherty was ordained in Rome on 20 December 1925. After diplomatic postings in Egypt, Haiti, the Dominican Republic, and Czechoslovakia, he returned to the Eternal City in 1934 as a monsignor in the Holy Office, the Vatican’s doctrinal tribunal.
Rome fell under direct German occupation on 10 September 1943, three days after Italy’s armistice with the Allies. Within weeks, SS Colonel Herbert Kappler initiated the deportation of the city’s 8,000 Jews. O’Flaherty, then 45, responded by transforming the Vatican into a sanctuary.
Working without explicit sanction from his superiors—though Pope Pius XII was later briefed—he recruited a coalition of clergy, diplomats, and Roman aristocrats. Monasteries and convents across Lazio concealed families; Vatican extraterritorial properties housed hundreds; Castel Gandolfo, the papal summer palace, sheltered up to 3,000 at a time. Forged papers forged documents, ration cards, and safe-conduct passes were produced in basement scriptoria.
Each dusk, O’Flaherty stationed himself on the broad marble steps of St. Peter’s Basilica, just inside the white-painted demarcation line. German patrols on the piazza below could only watch as refugees—Jews, downed Allied airmen, Italian deserters—approached the Irish priest, received instructions, and vanished into the labyrinth of Vatican corridors.
Kappler placed a 5,000-lire bounty on O’Flaherty’s head and authorised abduction or assassination. The monsignor countered with disguise: a street sweeper’s smock, a nun’s habit, a Wehrmacht corporal’s greatcoat. On one occasion, a Gestapo squad infiltrated St. Peter’s only to be disarmed by four Swiss Guards and a dozen Yugoslav refugees who, according to Vatican archives, “escorted the intruders to the border with appropriate persuasion.”
The operation ended on 4 June 1944 when Allied troops entered Rome. O’Flaherty’s final ledger, preserved in the Irish College archives, lists 6,532 individuals delivered to safety.
Postwar, Kappler was tried for the Ardeatine Massacre—335 civilians executed in reprisal for a partisan attack—and sentenced to life in 1948. From 1951, O’Flaherty was his sole visitor at Gaeta military prison, travelling monthly by train. In 1959, he baptised the former SS officer, who died in Catholic custody in 1978.
O’Flaherty returned to Ireland in 1960, dying in Cahersiveen, County Kerry, on 30 October 1963. He received the CBE from Britain and the U.S. Medal of Freedom, but refused Israel’s offer of the Righteous Among the Nations title, insisting, “I only did what any priest would do.”
The 1983 CBS film The Scarlet and the Black, directed by Jerry London, immortalised the duel between Gregory Peck’s O’Flaherty and Christopher Plummer’s Kappler. The Dictionary of Irish Biography notes the priest’s “rough-edged Cork humour and scratch-golfer’s entrée to Roman high society” as unlikely assets in wartime espionage.
First-day covers, postmarked Killarney—the town where O’Flaherty caddied as a boy—are available at An Post’s GPO Philatelic Bureau.
The stamp was unveiled in a ceremony in Dublin’s General Post Office, attended by Minister Patrick O’Donovan, Mgr Hugh’s niece Pearl Dineen, and the extended O’Flaherty family, Grandnephews, Grandnieces and their families.
- Raju Hasmukh with files from CNA
(The Scarlet and the Black is one of this authors favourite movies in a list topped by A man for all seasons )
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