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

Cross Currents, Winter, 2000 by Kevin Madigan

The document also distinguishes, with a sharpness Jewish commentators almost unanimously found objectionable, between the anti-Judaism of which many Christians have historically been guilty and modern anti-Semitism. The latter, it argues, is a nineteenth-century development more sociological and political than religious in origin. Indeed, it owes its genesis in part to "a false and exacerbated nationalism" (50) and to theories which "denied the unity of the human race" (50) and were used in Nazi Germany to distinguish between the so-called Nordic-Aryan races and other supposedly inferior ones. Nazi anti-Semitism, refusing to acknowledge as it did any transcendent reality as the source of life and the criterion of moral good, was "the work of a thoroughly modern neopagan regime. "Its anti-Semitism had its roots outside of Christianity" (50; emphasis mine), the document proclaimed. Indeed, in pursuing its aims, it did not hesitate to oppose the church and persecute her members also.

Nonetheless, the document does ask if the Nazi persecution wasn't "made easier by the anti-Jewish prejudices imbedded in some Christian minds and hearts" (52), rendering Christians "less sensitive, or even indifferent" (52) to persecutions launched by the Nazis. "Did Christians give every possible assistance to those being persecuted, and in particular to the persecuted Jews?" (52) To the bewilderment of some, the document states that "many people" were "altogether unaware of the 'final solution"' (52) -- a statement whose inclusion in the document can now be questioned on historical as well as diplomatic grounds. Still, it goes on, if "many" individuals gave every possible assistance even to the point of placing their own lives in danger, the behavior of the rest "was not that which might have been expected from Christ's followers" (53). Passing from the individual to the collective level, the document is particularly critical of "the governments of some Western countries of Christian tradition" (52) which hesitated to open their borders to persecuted Jews, even though the "leaders of those nations were aware of the hardships and dangers to which Jews living in the Greater Reich were exposed" (52). The church therefore deeply regrets "the errors and failures of those sons and daughters of the church" (53). This, the document says, is to be understood as an act of teshuvczh (54).

At the same time, the document insists that those individuals and institutions that heroically resisted Nazism must not be forgotten. In one sentence that actually has not elicited much comment, the document observed of the German church's response to Nazism, that "it replied by condemning racism" (50)--surely one of the cruder and even erroneous statements in the document. It singles out Cardinals Bertram of Breslau and Faulhaber of Munich, as well as regional episcopal conferences, for criticism of Nazi anti-Semitic propaganda and celebrates Bernard Lichtenberg's public prayer for Jews in the wake of Kristallnacht. Similarly, it acknowledges Pius XI's encyclical Mit brennender Sorge, [13] read in German churches in 1937, and quotes his famous assertion, delivered to Belgian pilgrims in September 1938, that "[s]piritually we are all Semites" (50-51).