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

Cross Currents, Winter, 2000 by Kevin Madigan

As these comments suggest, the problem here really is the diplomatic and legalistic character of the document. Indeed, one of the main reasons this document touched such a nerve is undoubtedly that many Jews sensed, as Holocaust survivor Pierre Sauvage tells us he did, in its feebleness and vagueness an expression of diplomatic hesitation, equivocation, and timidity all too painfully redolent of papal attitudes toward Nazi policy during the war. [29] As Efraim Zuroff, director of the Israel office of the Simon Wiesenthal Center, has bluntly put it, "the statement still lacks the guts that would make it satisfactory." [30] Some commentators felt particularly and painfully surprised by these features of the document, ironically in part because of the perceived excellence of John Paul II's record on Jewish-Christian relations. Abraham H. Foxman, national director of the Anti-Defamation League and a Holocaust survivor, for example, observed, "We expected more from this pontiff, who has been so courageous in reco nciling the church with the Jewish people." [31] Other commentators noted that expectations had been heightened by the French Catholic Bishops' document. Elan Steinberg, executive director of the World Jewish Congress argued, that We Remember compared unfavorably both with it and with the apology issued by the German Bishops' Conference. [32]

In terms of specific criticisms, virtually all Jewish commentators faulted the document for failing to acknowledge the deep connection between ecclesiastically sponsored anti-Judaism and the anti-Semitism that achieved such disastrous expression in the Shoah. Foxman, for example, observed: "Two thousand years of teaching contempt of Jews by the church was part of the underpinning of the Holocaust....The people who killed Jews during the day then went to church on Sunday....They were not aberrations. They were part and parcel of what Western civilization was." [33] Bauer noted that, despite the examples of Catholic heroism, "it is still true that the vast majority of individual priests and Catholic faithful were completely indifferent, or downright hostile to Jews" and that this indifference is traceable to the two-thousand-year-old tradition of contempt for the Jews. [34] Zuroff added that doctrinal anti-Semitism "enabled Catholics" not simply to be passive or indifferent but to participate in the Holocaust, not only in Germany, but "more especially in places like Lithuania and Croatia," where the Nazis almost effortlessly found enthusiastic collaboration. [35] In short, Nazi ideology, policy, and genocide all presupposed a cultural framework that had been fashioned," as Wistrich has summarized the matter, "by centuries of medieval Christian theology, ecclesiastical policy and popular religious myth." [36]

However, it was over We Remember's flawed portrayal of the hierarchy as ever-heroic and compassionate that created the most profound frustration for Jewish commentators. While most of them focused on the picture of Pius XII, a few, though very few, found unconvincing and even offensive the portrayal of the German bishops lionized for their heroism. If the document was surely right to honor the memory of Bernard Lichtenberg, they thought, for speaking out from his Berlin Cathedral pulpit against anti-Jewish atrocity -- actions that eventually led to his perishing on a train en route to Dachau -- it attempted to distort the facts by mentioning Cardinals Faulhaber of Munich and Bertram of Breslau in the same breath with the martyred Provost Lichtenberg of Berlin Cathedral. Robert Wistrich talks at some length about the ambiguous legacy of both of these princes of the church, and then, widening his scope to the German episcopate in general, observes that their elevation is anomalously accompanied in the document by "utter silence about the German church's acquiescence and, at times, complicity in the Shoah." [37] Unlike their counterparts in France, Belgium, Italy, and Holland, Wistrich observes, leaders of the German Catholic Church, "rather than attempting to guide their flock, tamely chose to follow it." [38] They accepted the Nuremberg race laws and offered virtually no protest in the wake of Kristallnacht. Worse still, the German Catholic Church collaborated with the Nazis in helping to establish who in the Third Reich was of Jewish descent. [39] At best, Wistrich concludes, the German bishops were disastrously naive; at worst, they were complicit in genocide. Either way, they should not have been candidates for glorification in We Remember.