Reflections on the Vatican's 'Reflection on the Shoah.' - Roman Catholic document 'We Remember: A Reflection on the Shoah'

Cross Currents, Winter, 1998 by A. James Rudin

The summer of 1987 was a particularly difficult moment in Roman Catholic-Jewish relations throughout the world. In June of that year Pope John Paul II had a widely publicized and highly controversial meeting at the Vatican with Austrian President Kurt Waldheim. At the time the former Secretary-General of the United Nations was charged with participating in deadly crimes against innocent civilians, especially Jews, when he served as a German army officer in the Balkans during World War II.

In addition, the controversy surrounding the presence of a Carmelite convent at the Auschwitz death camp in Poland was at its most intense in 1987. The building chosen by the nuns a few years earlier was an original camp building used by the Germans during the Holocaust to store the lethal Zyklon B poison gas.

Many Jewish and Catholic leaders vigorously argued that the convent needed to be moved to a new location that was not part of the Auschwitz killing site. The issue of the convent was an international cause celebre that required the intervention of Vatican officials and, ultimately, the pope himself before the crisis could be satisfactorily resolved. The nuns now reside in a new convent that was built in the early 1990s, six hundred meters from the death camp.

Finally, during the summer of 1987, the pope was preparing for a lengthy visit to United States that included a long-planned September meeting in Miami with American Jewish leadership. The strong negative reaction to the Waldheim audience and the acrid Auschwitz convent crisis placed the Miami assembly in some jeopardy.

An emergency meeting between the pope and international Jewish leaders at Castel Gandolfo, the papal summer residence, was arranged by the Vatican to ease the tensions. When the meeting concluded on September 1, 1987, the Holy See announced that a formal document on the relation of the Catholic Church to the Shoah (the Hebrew word for Holocaust) would be developed and published soon. Pope John Paul II affirmed the importance of the proposed document. As a direct result of the fruitful Castel Gandolfo conversations, a successful Miami meeting took place a few days later.

Nearly eleven years passed, however, before the Vatican published the long-awaited document on March 16, 1998, as We Remember: A Reflection on the Shoah. During that period, both Christians and Jews eagerly anticipated the text, which was to be the church's formal attempt to confront directly the terrible years of 1933-45, when the persecution and then the mass murder of Jews was the policy of Germany's Nazi government.

When We Remember finally appeared, however, it raised more questions than it answered and created more problems than it solved. It remains a highly controversial document, drawing praise and criticism from both Christians and Jews.

The twelve-page statement is divided into five sections: "The Tragedy of the Shoah and the Duty of Remembrance," "What We Must Remember," "Relations Between Jews and Christians," "Nazi Anti-Semitism and the Shoah," and "Looking Together to a Common Future." A short but important letter from the pope to Edward Cardinal Cassidy introduces the document. Cardinal Cassidy is the president of the Pontifical Commission for Religious Relations with the Jews, and his Commission is the primary author of We Remember. The papal letter, although brief, embodies John Paul's personal endorsement of the document.

The letter clearly reveals the Polish-born Pontiff's acute personal sorrow in describing ". . . the sufferings of the Jewish people during the Second World War. The crime which has become known as the Shoah remains an indelible stain on the history of the century that is coming to a close." His words are an emphatic refutation of those who deny the reality of the Holocaust as well as those who minimize its horrors. His letter represents one of the positive features of the document. A century from now when all the survivors of the Holocaust are dead, these words of the pope from Poland, who was born in 1920 and witnessed first-hand the German occupation of his country in 1939, will remain, as will his declaration, in another context, that "this is the century of the Shoah."(*)

In his letter to Cardinal Cassidy, the pope calls for "a future in which the unspeakable iniquity of the Shoah will never again be possible." The pope's words are more powerful than the overly cautious committee-approved document that follows. Unlike the pope's words, We Remember is obviously the work of many authors and lacks a single compelling voice of conscience and contrition.

This call for remembrance is an integral part of the pope's teachings. His special emphasis on remembering the Shoah has been a hallmark of his pontificate. Since he became pope in 1978, John Paul II has consistently stressed the importance of building mutual respect and understanding between Catholics and Jews. His focus on the Shoah was reflected most notably in his 1991 address to Jewish leaders in Budapest. He also reiterated this theme at the 1994 Vatican concert that commemorated the Shoah. At the conclusion of his remarks at the concert, the pope publicly identified with the victims of Nazi German terror when he declared: "Do not forget us!"