Monsignor O'Flaherty hid Jews in monasteries and convents, at Castel Gandolfo, in his old college of the Propaganda Fide, in the German College and in his network of apartments. Every evening, he stood in the porch of St. Peter's, in plain view both of the German soldiers across the piazza and of the windows of the Pope's apartments. Escaped POWs and Jews would come to him there. He would smuggle them across the piazza and through the German Cemetary to the college. Sometimes he would disguise them in the robes of a monsignor or the uniform of a Swiss Guard.

"One Jew," Gallagher reports, "made his way to St. Peter's and, coming up to O'Flaherty at his usual post on the steps and drawing him deeper into the shadows, proceeded to unwind a solid gold chain that went twice around his waist. 'My wife and I expect to be arrested at any moment,' said the Jew. 'We have no way of escaping. When we are taken to Germany we shall die. But we have a small son; he is only seven and is too young to die in a Nazi gas chamber. Please take this chain and take the boy for us too. Each link of the chain will keep him alive for a month. Will you save him?'"

Monsignor O'Flaherty improved upon this plan: he accepted the chain, hid the boy and procured false papers for the parents. At the end of the war, he returned the boy and the chain.

Colonel Herbert Kappler, Rome's Gestapo chief, set several traps for Msgr. O'Flaherty. Once he escaped by a rolling-block charge through Gestapo men and in at the doors of St. Mary Major--extraterritorial property of the Church. Another time, he was at the palace of Prince Filippo Doria Pamphili, who provided funds for his operations. The SS surrounded the palace; Msgr. O'Flaherty escaped to the basement, then up a coal chute and away in the coal truck that had been making a delivery.

Finally Colonel Kappler complained to Berlin. Monsignor O'Flaherty received an invitation to a reception at the Hungarian Embassy, with an implicit safe-conduct. There Baron von Weiszacker, the German Ambassador, told him: "Nobody in Rome honors you more than I do for what you are doing. But it has gone too far for us all. Kappler is waiting in the hall, feeling rather frustrated.... I have told him that you will of course have safe-conduct back to the Vatican tonight. But...if you ever step outside Vatican territory again, on whatever pretext, you will be arrested at once.... Now will you please think about what I have said?"

O'Flaherty smiled down at von Weiszacker and replied: "Your Excellency is too considerate. I will certainly think about what you have said-- sometimes!"

Of 9,700 Roman Jews, 1,007 were shipped to Auschwitz. The rest were hidden, 5,000 of them by the official Church--3,000 in Castel Gandolfo, 200 or 400 (estimates vary) as "members" of the Palatine Guard and some 1,500 in monasteries, convents and colleges. The remaining 3,700 were hidden in private homes, including Msgr. O'Flaherty's network of apartments.

After the war, Colonel Kappler was sentenced to life in the Gaeta prison, between Rome and Naples. His only visitor was an Irish monsignor who came once a month. In 1959 Msgr. O'Flaherty baptized Herbert Kappler into the Catholic Church.

"Elsewhere in Italy," Pinchas Lapide says, "thanks in part to the lifting of the enclosure...at least 40,000 Italian Jews and others who had managed to flee to Italy were hidden and saved by humble priests, monks, farmers and laborers, dozens of whom lost their lives for sheltering them."

After the war O'Flarherty was named Notary of the Holy Office, the first Irishman to receive that honor. In 1960, he retired to Cahirciveen, County Kerry, where he died in 1963, and is buried in Cahersiveen.