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

There were countless Christian acts of hatred aimed at Jews, some of which were copied by the Nazis, including the imposition on them of the yellow Star of David, the creation of ghettoes, and the assertion that Jews are eternally condemned by God because of their alleged faithlesshess in rejecting Jesus as the Messiah. Happily, these ugly teachings were repudiated by the church in 1965 at the Second Vatican Council, but these desperately needed reforms came twenty years after the end of the Holocaust.

The statement also discounts the vast number of Christian anti-Jewish texts, prohibitions, laws, and acts of discrimination that took one scholar, Heinz Schreckenberg, twenty-three hundred pages to list. Pawlikowski notes that Schreckenberg's work, "The Jew in Christian Art," graphically illustrates how deeply "anti-Semitism permeated Catholic catechesis and preaching and the popular culture it created."

Because Nazi anti-Semitism was racial, it refused to recognize the legitimacy of Jewish conversions to Christianity. Traditional Christian anti-Semitism, in contrast, sought to persecute Jews, but it always held out the possibility of baptism as a means of "escaping" Judaism. Even conversion did not always prevent virulent Christian hatred as the converted Jews in Spain learned during the Inquisition in the fifteenth century. Pawlikowski sees the clear linkage: "We Remember leaves the distinct impression that there is no inherent connection between Nazi ideology and classical anti-Semitism. This is basically inaccurate."

The distinction between anti-Judaism and anti-Semitism has also been vigorously criticized by Jewish leaders. Martin S. Kaplan, the American Jewish Committee's Interreligious Affairs Commission Chair has written: "The Vatican statement thus articulates a vast new problem, seeking to disconnect a thousand years of anti-Jewish behavior and persecution from the Final Solution of the Holocaust, as if a split personality allowed Christians to be anti-Jewish, but once their behavior crossed a certain line in the Holocaust, then they were reflecting their pagan roots."

Following World War II and the Shoah, the French Jewish scholar, Jules Isaac, coined the term "the teaching of contempt" to describe the systemic pattern of transmitting anti-Semitic teachings to generations of Christians. "The Declaration on the Relationship of the Church to Non-Christian Religions," Nostra Aetate, proclaimed on October 28, 1965, at the Second Vatican Council in Rome, emphatically "deplored . . . all hatred, persecutions and displays of anti-Semitism directed against the Jews at any time and from any source." Sadly, We Remember fails to acknowledge the well-established and well-documented connection between the tragic Christian record of anti-Judaism "down the centuries" and the creation of the cultural and political climate in twentieth-century Europe that made the Shoah possible.

In this section of the document, many important questions are raised but not fully examined. For example: "But it may be asked whether the Nazi persecution of the Jews was not made easier by the anti-Jewish prejudices imbedded in some Christian minds and hearts. Did anti-Jewish sentiment among Christians make them less sensitive, or even indifferent, to the persecutions launched against the Jews by National Socialism . . .?"