By Judith Harris • Catholic News Service • Posted September 4, 2014

ROME (CNS) — Seventy years ago Sept. 1, Nazi SS troops burst into the Certosa di Farneta, a Carthusian monastery in the central Italian region of Tuscany, and seized at gunpoint six monks and six lay brothers.

Accused of having given refuge to a hundred Jews, partisan fighters and anti-fascist Italian politicians, the 12 were taken away, shot and killed — two of them Sept. 7, the rest three days later. Along with them died 32 men who had been found in hiding inside the monastery.

This little-known World War II episode is the subject of a new book, “La Strage di Farneta” (“The Farneta Massacre”), by Luigi Accattoli, 70, a prominent Italian journalist specializing in the Vatican.

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During his research, he was able to interview the last surviving monk to have witnessed the arrests and two women in their 90s who had witnessed the executions.

In an interview with an online magazine, LoSchermo.it, Accattoli said historians knew little about the murders because of deliberate silence by the Carthusian order. Some of those hidden were Italian Communist Party members, and, during the early postwar years of ideological divide, some Carthusians feared the story would amount to an involuntary election plug for the party, which in that period regularly won 25 percent of the vote.

However, at the request of the Holy See in the year 2000, Certosa monks wrote an account of the incident, which was sent to the Commission of the New Martyrs, a body established by St. John Paul II to study 20th-century Catholics who had died for the faith. Accattoli was the first outsider to see that report, which he called a definitive reconstruction.

The Carthusians do not promote sainthood causes for their members, he said, “but there is nothing hindering (the dead monks’) martyrdom from being promoted by the bishops of Tuscany.”

What makes their story especially interesting, he added, is a paradox: “That such a closed world was thrown open to the persecuted in such a disinterested way.”