A Survey of Jewish Reaction to the Vatican Statement on the Holocaust

Cross Currents, Winter, 2000 by Kevin Madigan

The French said it better.

In March of 1998, the Vatican released a long-awaited statement on the Catholic Church and the Holocaust. In a preface to the document, entitled We Remember: A Reflection on the Shoah, Pope John Paul II expressed his hope that it would "help to heal the wounds of past misunderstandings and injustices." [1] Eighteen months after the publication of the document, it seems now possible to conclude that, however sincere the Vatican's intentions, the pope's hopes will almost certainly not be realized. Indeed, far from healing, the document has succeeded largely in reopening, if not actually deepening, old wounds. Not only did it divide the Catholic intellectual and journalistic communities, [2] more importantly it bewildered and frustrated many Jewish readers and bitterly disappointed others. It also called forth a literary response from Jewish intellectuals and organizations that, while especially vigorous in the immediate wake of the document's publication, had force and feeling to last more than a year. Since t he energy driving these responses appears to have subsided, [3] it seems possible now to undertake a comprehensive survey of Jewish reaction to We Remember and to attempt to account for its intensity and duration.

The French Bishops' Statement

One way to interpret the Vatican document and isolate what was distinctive and disappointing about it for so many is to compare it to prior ecclesiastical statements on the Holocaust and the Church. Probably none of the many documents issued by the various national episcopal conferences of the Church better allows us to appreciate by contrast the reaction to the Vatican document than the one issued in October of 1997 by France's Roman Catholic clergy. [4] The impact of this strongly worded and, it certainly seemed to both Catholic and Jewish auditors, strongly felt apology was magnified both by the place and time at which it was given, as well as by the identity of those present at the declaration.

The place was the grounds of Drancy, memorialized in a plaque there that calls it "the antechamber of death." In 1942 it began serving as the transit camp from which many of the seventy-six thousand Jews who would ultimately be deported from France boarded cattle cars destined for Auschwitz. Among the thousand Jews and Christians present at Drancy for the French Declaration of Repentance was Jean-Marie Lustiger. Lustiger is now a Catholic; he is, in fact, the Cardinal-Archbishop of Paris. Sixty years ago, however, he was a young Jewish boy menaced by the pro-Nazi government of France, which separated him from his mother. She, once detained, would pass through Drancy on her way to the gas chambers in Auschwitz.

The timing of the apology was also carefully planned in several ways. Aside from coinciding with the celebration of the Jewish New Year, its delivery came fifty-seven years after the passage of Marshall Petain's so-called "Jewish Laws," which not only banned Jews from the major professions and discriminated against Jews in a variety of other ways -- indeed, in some ways more harshly than the Nuremberg Laws had against the Jews of Germany -- but also facilitated census-taking by Vichy officials, which in turn made it easy for police to track down French Jews for detention and deportation. [5] Second, the apology virtually coincided with the trial of Maurice Papon, a former police supervisor from Bordeaux charged with signing the orders that led to the deportation of some seventeen hundred Jews, including hundreds of children. [6]

Thus, at the very moment the French government was trying the highest-ranking Vichy official ever accused of complicity in crimes against humanity, the French bishops were, in effect, delivering a verdict on self-imposed charges that ecclesiastical docility (their word) in the face of catastrophe had caused the church not just to be complicit in these crimes but, in so doing, to have violated divine laws and to have failed in its divinely ordained mission.

To these serious charges, the French bishops plead, with sober and quite unambiguous clarity, guilty. In fact, the French episcopal document is--especially for those accustomed to the genteel circumlocution of many Roman episcopal documents -- almost shockingly direct, self-critical and precise in responding to the question, exactly who in the church was guilty of moral dereliction? Throughout, the guilty parties are identified as "priests," "leaders," "church officials," "the hierarchy," and "the bishops of France." [7]

If the French bishops were blunt about the identity of the guilty ecclesiastical parties, they were no less direct on the issue of how their predecessors had failed. In their view, the French bishops generally failed -- they say sinned (36) -- above all by their silence (a word used many times in the document), especially in the immediate wake of the publication of the anti-Jewish laws. "Silence," the bishops confess, "was the rule" and words "in favor of the victims the exception" (35). If the bishops' preoccupation with institutional continuity in a time of insecurity was legitimate in itself, their "docility," "conformity," and "loyalism" caused them to ignore the biblical imperative to respect every human creature in the image of God (32). "Ecclesiastical interests, understood in an overly restrictive sense," the bishops say, "took priority over the demands of conscience" (33). The moral and political consequences of this silence were profound. Their predecessors' silence, the bishops declare, made them " acquiescent" in "flagrant violations of human rights" and left an open field for the spiral of death (33). Their predecessors failed to recognize that they had "considerable power and influence" (32) when the anti-Jewish laws were promulgated. Although there were "countless acts of courage later on," they should, they admit, have offered help immediately, when protest and protection were possible and necessary (32). Among other things, the impact of a public statement from them would have been amplified not only by their moral position in French society but "the silence of other institutions" (32). Indeed, the impact of a public statement, the bishops conclude, might have forestalled an irreparable catastrophe.