O'Flaherty, Hugh Joseph (1898–1963), priest and Vatican official, was born 28 February 1898 in Lisrobin, Kishkeam, Co. Cork, the eldest in a family of three sons and one daughter of James Flaherty, an RIC constable in Tralee, Co. Kerry, and his wife Margaret Murphy of Lisrobin, who returned to her parents' home for the birth. Reared in Killarney, Co. Kerry, where his parents went into business, he received primary education at the Presentation Brothers' Monastery and secondary education at St Brendan's college, and held a junior teacher's post at the Monastery for three years from age 15. He attended the De La Salle Brothers' teachers' training college in Waterford city for two years on a King's scholarship (1916–18), but suffered a bout of pleurisy during final exams and failed to qualify. Despite being two years past the age limit, he was admitted in August 1918 to study for the African missions in Mungret college, Limerick city; distinguished more for his athletic skills than for academic ability, he was particularly accomplished at boxing and golf, and played handball and hurling. Adopted by the vicariate of Cape Town, South Africa (December 1921), he was sent to Rome to commence theological studies at the training college of the Sacred Congregation for the Propagation of the Faith; awarded a bachelorship in theology after just one year, he was ordained a priest on 20 December 1925. Instead of being posted to a parish in Cape Town, as he expected, he was made vice rector of the Propaganda College, the highest position achieved by an Irish churchman in Rome in many years, and especially notable in view of his youth. Over his first two years in the post he worked on triple doctorates in divinity, canon law, and philosophy, awarded in 1928. Assigned in 1934 to the Vatican diplomatic service (by which time he had been made a monsignor), he held successive appointments in Egypt, Haiti and Santo Domingo, and Czechoslovakia; while secretary to the apostolic nuncio to the two Caribbean republics, he was decorated by the government of Haiti for famine relief work, and that of Santo Domingo for helping to arbitrate a border dispute.
Recalled to Rome in 1938, O'Flaherty was appointed a scrittore (writer) in the Sacred Congregation of the Holy Office (latterly, the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith), the arm of the Roman curia empowered to arbitrate in matters of faith and morals. Despite his rough-edged demeanour, his skills at bridge and golf admitted him to the highest echelons of Roman society. During the second world war, after serving as secretary to the papal nuncio to allied prisoner-of-war (POW) camps in northern Italy (1941–2), O'Flaherty began to assist Jews, dissidents, deserting Italian soldiers, and others fleeing from the Italian fascist government. In time he organised and masterminded – at great personal risk, and without the knowledge or permission of his ecclesiastical superiors – a vast and intricate rescue network, which reached its peak after the Italian surrender and throughout the ensuing nine-month German occupation of Rome (September 1943–June 1944). In total some 4,000 escaped allied POWs and numerous other refugees were conveyed along O'Flaherty's undercover escape route. Hidden in some sixty locations – churches, monasteries, convents, homes of sympathisers, seminaries – the fugitives were disguised as monks, nuns, bus drivers, and labourers, and provided with food, clothing, money, and forged identity papers. On one occasion refugees were hidden beside Gestapo headquarters, on another in an Italian police barracks. Every evening O'Flaherty stood on the steps of St Peter's basilica in view of armed German soldiers across the piazza, thereby being available to arriving refugees, who would be smuggled into hiding. Coming under increasing suspicion and surveillance, he was threatened by Col. Herbert Kappler, the Gestapo commander in Rome, with immediate arrest should he step outside the forty-four-hectare enclave of the neutral Vatican city-state. Alerted by informants, O'Flaherty's network foiled a kidnapping-and-assassination attempt ordered by Kappler in March 1944: four burly Swiss Guards bundled two Gestapo agents, who were approaching O'Flaherty, out of St Peter's and down a lane where they were roundly beaten. After the liberation of Rome (4 June 1944) O'Flaherty assisted the families of Italian POWs seeking news of their relatives, and aided Germans and Italian fascists fearful of vengeance. Made a CBE and awarded the US medal of freedom with a silver palm, he was also decorated by the governments of Canada, Australia, and Italy. Claiming in later years to have been largely neutral between the wartime belligerents, he asserted his motivation as not having been political but an enactment of the Christian virtue of charity to any in distress. After the war he regularly visited Kappler in prison (where he was serving a life sentence for war crimes), and baptised him into the catholic church in 1959. O'Flaherty's wartime exploits were recorded in several books and numerous periodicals, and were the subject of a television film, The scarlet and the black (1983), starring Gregory Peck as O'Flaherty.
Promoted in 1946 to substitute notary in the Holy Office, O'Flaherty eventually became head notary, responsible for drafting in final form and signing all decisions of the congregation; he was the first Irishman to occupy the post. He was also a domestic prelate to the pope. Fluent in nine languages, he was a tall, powerfully built man, ebullient and self-effacing, with a lifelong passion for golf. After suffering a stroke in June 1960 he retired from the Holy Office and went to convalesce with his sister, Mrs Bridie Sheehan, in Caherciveen, Co. Kerry. On recovery he worked for two years in the advisory curia to the archbishop of Los Angeles (January 1961–January 1963), till worsening health necessitated his return to Ireland. Five months after suffering a second stroke, he died at his sister's home in Caherciveen on 30 October 1963, and was buried in the grounds of the Daniel O'Connell Memorial Church. Renowned as ‘the scarlet pimpernel of the Vatican' and latterly as ‘the Oscar Schindler of Killarney' for his wartime rescue work, he is commemorated in Killarney National Park by a plaque and a grove of trees of Italian origin. A flurry of media speculation in 2000 that O'Flaherty may have been spying for the Germans was based on a single SS document included in newly opened archives of the Amerian CIA stating that he had advised a ‘secure source’ of the likely landing sites of the impending allied invasion of Italy (stating locations that, in the event, were erroneous). The allegations were refuted by former British intelligence operatives who had known him, one of whom suggested that O'Flaherty may indeed have been participating in the intentional leaking of deceptive information organised by allied intelligence. O'Flaherty's nephew Hugh O'Flaherty (b. 1938) was a barrister and supreme court judge (1990–99).