As a parishioner on the North Side of Chicago, I take no pleasure in criticizing the high priests of my church. But after reading the Vatican’s long-awaited, definitive pronouncement on the Holocaust, released this week, I cannot remain silent.
Issued by the Vatican Commission for Religious Relations with the Jews, the document is entitled, “We Remember: A Reflection on the Shoah.” It might better be called, “We Remember Selectively: A Deflection of Responsibility.”
Searching for some sign of institutional repentance, newspaper headlines report that the document regrets “errors and failures” during the Holocaust. Yes, but only errors by “sons and daughters of the church. The Vatican document does not expressly acknowledge error by the church itself–despite the German Catholic bishops’ acknowledgment in 1995 of the “co-responsibility” of the church.
Nor does the Vatican document suggest that the church ask forgiveness, as the French bishops did last year. It professes to be an “act of repentance”–but only insofar as the church is “linked” to the sins of her children. Has the parent no sins?
If memory is to heal, it should be open, unafraid and truthful. But this document is defensive and partisan. It does not even mention the relative failure of wartime Pope Pius XII to publicly speak out against the Holocaust or the resulting controversy. Instead it reports only that he was thanked by Jews for saving Jewish lives. To cite only his sins of omission would distort history, but why does the Vatican statement remember only his good deeds?
The document also labors to distinguish secular anti-Semitism from religious anti-Judaism. There is indeed a difference. Church doctrine has never embraced the Nazi theory of Aryan superiority and Semitic inferiority. Historically, church hostility to Jews focused on their religious rather than their racial identity.
Relying on this distinction, the document admonishes Christians merely for “long-standing sentiments of mistrust and hostility that we call anti-Judaism,” while blaming Nazi anti-Semitism, with “its roots outside of Christianity,” for the Holocaust.
That is a heavier burden than the distinction will bear. In practice, it was not always observed even by the church. In 1936, for instance, the German episcopate issued the following guidelines for religious instruction: “Race, soil, blood and people are precious natural values which God the Lord has created and the care of which he has entrusted to us Germans.”
If not even bishops faithfully adhered to the distinction between race and religion, how much difference did it make to Nazis? And to ordinary German Christians, not members of the Nazi party, many of whom actively participated in persecuting Jews?
Even if the distinction had been scrupulously observed, did not anti-Judaism fuel the fires of anti-Semitism? Historian Daniel Goldhagen argues that the historic hostility of the church toward the Jews–call it what you will–helped to condition Germans psychologically for the Holocaust. Did not anti-Judaism tend to dehumanize Jews? Was it not perceived as lending moral legitimacy to their persecution? Can a church which so long preached and practiced against the Jews really wash its hands of all responsibility for what finally happened?
These are serious questions–central questions–but they are apparently not to be seen in the Vatican’s mirror.
On specifics, the Vatican document reads more like a defense lawyer’s brief than a judicious self-evaluation. Congratulating German pastoral letters that condemned Nazism, it overlooks others described by Goldhagen as “replete with anti-Semitism.”
And it presents debatable interpretations without acknowledging them as such. It describes, for example, the 1933 Advent sermons of Cardinal Faulhaber as having “clearly expressed rejection of the Nazi anti-Semite propaganda.” Yet Goldhagen reports: “Although Faulhaber defended the Jewish religion and the Jews who lived prior to Jesus, he made it clear that those Jews were to be distinguished from the Jews who lived after Jesus . . . When, the following year, foreigners misrepresented his words by asserting that Faulhaber had championed German Jews, Faulhaber emphatically denied this.”
Some observers nonetheless find hope in the document’s clear condemnation of anti-Judaism and anti-Semitism. Thank God for that blessing. But moral reform is not enough. True repentance–and reconciliation with God and conscience–cannot be built on self-servingly selective memory. Christians continue to owe a more open and balanced assessment of the truth not only to Jews, but to themselves and to their faith.
