The Catholic Church and the Holocaust, 1930-1965

Christian Century, Oct 10, 2001 by Victoria Barnett

Carroll is an excellent writer and a creative and profound thinker. Despite the book's subtitle, however, this is not so much a history as a combination of memoir and spiritual autobiography, the work of a writer who is wrestling honestly with his faith and the legacy of his church. Carroll takes his faith, and the challenges to that faith, seriously.

Any attempt to paint on such a broad canvas inevitably raises questions of interpretation and emphasis. In particular, Carroll's focus on anti-Judaism minimizes the other factors that shaped the church's behavior throughout the centuries, including the period between 1933 and 1945. Anti-Judaism certainly played a crucial role, but the best explanation for the failure of both Catholic and Protestant churches under Nazism is multifaceted. As the moral center of culture and civilization, the Christian churches had become a powerful political and cultural force, one of the pillars of what German Lutherans called "throne and altar." This shaped how church leaders viewed their options and responsibilities between 1933 and 1945.

Carroll does address this, and one strong point of the book is his exploration of the church-state-culture relationship since Constantine's time. The emergence of an explicitly "Christian culture" had devastating consequences for non-Christians. The spread of anti-Judaism and anti-Semitism and the corresponding outbreaks of violence against Jews were linked to this understanding of culture. Nonetheless, there is no straight line from prejudice to behavior, or from Christian teachings to Nazism. And, there has been significant theological work in recent decades in response to the Shoah; a more detailed discussion of that would have been welcome.

Carroll concludes by listing a number of issues--the Catholic Church's attitude toward democracy, liberation theology, pluralism, etc.--that he would like to see on the agenda of a Vatican III. Though I agree with many of his opinions, I wonder whether making progress in these areas would create the kind of institution that would have responded differently to the Holocaust. This is the deeper assumption here. The task of rethinking Christian theological attitudes toward Judaism is important, as is an ongoing and open dialogue in which Christians really listen to Jews. But we will never know whether a theology more open to pluralism would have led to a different Vatican policy during the Holocaust. Altering patterns of institutional hierarchy and responding to genocide are two different things.

At one point Michael Phayer writes that the Vatican failed to offer leadership because "by temperament Pius did not know how to react to genocide." Who does? If nothing else, the history of the post-Holocaust era testifies eloquently to our helplessness in this regard. We may all wish that Pius XII had spoken out forcefully against the genocide and rallied Europe's Catholics behind him; but we simply don't know whether that would have stopped the Nazis. Several U.S. and European Protestant leaders, including the archbishop of Canterbury, did issue impassioned condemnations of the genocide and called for lifting the immigration restrictions against Jewish refugees. Yet they were unable to rally much support, either from members of their churches or from their governments.