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 document's various internal contradictions and problems are sharply revealed in its central sections, which deal with historic relations between Jews and Christians and Nazi anti-Semitism and the Shoah. For example, while confessing that the ". . . history of relations between Jews and Christians is a tormented one," the document also states that the Jewish people "in their devotion to the Law, on occasion violently opposed the preachers of the Gospel and the first Christians." This observation is unfortunate and unnecessary for several reasons. It conjures up the old negative canard that has been at heart of much of Christian teaching about Jews and Judaism: The Jews of Jesus' time were wedded to static vindictive religious "Law" filled with zealotry and restrictions. In contrast, the "preachers of the Gospels," many of whom were themselves Jews, were filled with overflowing love and spiritual liberation from the Law's severe yoke.

By using the words "violently opposed," the Vatican text transmits the not-so-subtle message of a moral equivalency between historic, often deadly, Christian persecution and denigration of Jews and Judaism and the anti-Christian attitudes and behavior of some Jews. It is an equation that has no historic basis. Indeed, it was frequently the church, especially after the First Crusade in 1096, that was the primary source of religious violence. Pagans, Jews, and all other non-Christians were often the targets of officially sanctioned "violent" assaults carried out by Christians.

This harsh and false dichotomy has fostered anti-Jewish attitudes and behavior among many Christians for centuries. In fact, it is precisely this kind of negative teaching that the Roman Catholic Church since the conclusion of the Second Vatican Council in 1965 has been aggressively combating. It is unfortunate that this most important statement on Catholic-Jewish relations since the Council contains the discredited negative references to the Jewish "Law" and "violent" Jewish opposition to "preachers of the Gospel."

In the same section, the Vatican describes the rise of National Socialism (Nazism) in post-World War I Germany. This "extremist form of nationalism" promulgated a "pseudoscientific basis for a distinction between so-called Nordic-Aryan races and supposedly inferior races," especially the Jews. We Remember asserts that the "Church in Germany replied by condemning racism," listing some of the Catholic leaders, including both Pope Pius XI and Pope Pius XII, who spoke out in the 1930s against Nazi racial ideology.

However, the declaration of the German Catholic bishops issued in January 1995 clearly recognizes that such Catholic responses to Nazism in the 1930s were inadequate: "Today the fact is weighing heavily on our mind that individual initiatives [such as those noted in We Remember] to help persecuted Jews and that even the pogroms [Kristallnacht] of November 1938 were not followed by public and expressed protests; . . . [We have as Catholic bishops] the heavy burden of history. . . . [T]he 'Church which we proclaim as holy and which we all know as a mystery, is also a sinful church and in need of conversion.'" (This statement comes from the declaration issued by the German and Austrian bishops conferences in 1988 on the fiftieth anniversary of the November 1938 pogroms.)