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The interwar period marked a pivotal phase in formalizing Catholic Church thinking and engagement on the arising refugee crisis. This wider conceptual work was notably shaped by French Catholics’ lived encounters starting in the 1920s. With post-WWI France as the world’s foremost immigration destination, the country took in scores of refugees, predominantly from the collapsed Russian and Armenian empires. The Church effectively treated this period as a laboratory, generating theological, social, and political contemplation on Catholics’ rapport with refugees alongside practical, unified efforts to receive them. The advent of Jewish refugees from 1933 deeply reinvigorated and complicated this thinking, pressing Catholics on their relationship to Judaism as well as refugees. Consequently, this article investigates Catholics’ positioning on Jewish refugees, portraying persistent patterns of activism and messaging from the 1920s while also highlighting the vanguard Catholic embrace of unqualified refugee backing before WWII.