October 21, 1999

Below is an article entitled "Catholics and Jews Confront the Holocaust and Each Other," published recently (September 11) in America magazine by Dr. Eugene Fisher, Associate Director of the Secretariat for Ecumenical and Interreligious Affairs at the National Conference of Catholic Bishops. Dr. Fisher is also a consultor to the Holy See’s Commission for Religious Relations with the Jews and an expert on Jewish Catholic relations with whom the organized Jewish community has worked closely over many years. In this article, he offers a thoughtful disquisition on why American Jews and Catholics, despite years of substantial progress in Catholic-Jewish relations, continue to view a variety of issues from fundamentally different viewpoints.

The issues, as Dr. Fisher notes, include a range of controversies "from concerns over who the Pope meets (Waldheim, Arafat) and where cloistered convents and crosses should be located (Auschwitz/Bikenau) to who the church should declare a saint (Edith Stein, Cardinal Stepinac, Pope Pius XII)." His analysis adds a valuable dimension of insight, which you may find useful in addressing some of these issues with members of the Jewish community locally and also in furthering positive relationships with Catholic colleagues.

Your reactions to the article and any thoughts you may have about the issues raised are welcome. Send your thoughts via e-mail to ksenter@thejcpa.org.

Catholics and Jews Confront the Holocaust and Each Other
The 1999 John Courtney Murray Lecture

by Eugene J. Fisher

ny discussion of the current controversies between Catholics and Jews over issues related to the Shoah (and they are many) must be set within the much larger context of the truly astounding progress in Catholic/Jewish relations in the final third of the 20^th century. Indeed, I would argue that the current level of high-voltage Jewish criticism of contemporary actions of the Holy See is itself a reflection of that progress. In no previous century since the Church assumed vast political power following the conversion of Constantine have Jews felt secure enough in Christian-dominated societies to speak as freely and frankly as they do today.

While the framers of the Second Vatican Council’s declaration on the Jews, Nostra Aetate no. 4, might not have foreseen such a result, this unintended but certainly lively byproduct of the renewal of Catholic teaching on the Church’s relationship with the Jewish People is to be welcomed as a sign of a dialogue that is doing what it was intended to do, allow the participants to bare their souls to one another without inhibition or fear of intimidation.

Those who follow the newspapers will have heard of these controversies, which range from Jewish concerns over who the pope meets (Waldheim, Arafat), to where cloistered convents and crosses should be located (Auschwitz/Birkenau), to who the Church should declare saints (Edith Stein, Cardinal Stepinac, Pope Pius XII). Many Catholics, Jews need to know, are understandably confused as to why some in the Jewish community feel constrained to second guess so many of what are, after all, internal matters in the life of the Church. Catholic confusion is only compounded when we consider that these complaints are coming at a time of rapid progress in the dialogue vigorously lead by a Pope, John Paul II, who is deeply committed to it and whose active promotion of Catholic-Jewish relations is unprecedented in the history of the Church. And why beat up on Catholics all the time? Why not go after somebody else once in a while? We don’t go around setting up Messianic Jewish synagogues, or saying that God doesn’t hear the prayers of Jews, or opining that the Anti-Christ will be a Jew. Why us? (Many Jews are surprised to learn that there is such a thing as Catholic paranoia, but there is.)

The answers, on reflection, are not too difficult to discern. First, Roman Catholicism is by far the largest church within the community of the baptized. Its pope, certainly in our time, is thus the most visible single individual within that community. So Jews concerned about what that community might do (and history has taught them all too well that such concerns are not by any means paranoid) will tend to watch very closely, even minutely what the leadership of the Catholic Church does that might affect them. That great pioneer of the dialogue, Msgr. George G. Higgins, once likened the point of view of the Jews in Catholic-Jewish relations to that of a mouse in bed with an elephant. The mouse gets little sleep, watching for any little tremor in the elephant’s body that might indicate that it is about to turn over.

Second, in my experience, many Jews have a very heightened notion of the power and authority of the papacy. A major Jewish journal just this month published without comment a letter to the editor that Pope Pius XII could have ended World War II just by telling the troops, most of whom were at least nominally Christian, to lay down their arms and go home. Would that it were so! Popes have not even aspired to that kind of direct political clout over secular authorities and the laity in a long, long time.

Perhaps the single issue underlying all the controversies is memory. How, Jews ask, will the next generation of the world’s more than one billion Roman Catholics be taught about Jews and Judaism, about the Holocaust? What is at stake for Jews is not just the past, but the remembrance of the past since they understand very well that how we Catholics define the past for the next generation will deeply influence the fate of future generations of Jews within Western civilization. One great strength of tradition-oriented institutions, like the Church and rabbinic Judaism, lies in their ability to frame the issues of human continuity from generation to generation. Stalin was right. The Catholic Church has no troops. But it has a prodigious memory and a gift (we believe from the Holy Spirit) to interpret for its followers the meaning of human history. It has preachers and teachers. The Jewish community, having lived with and under us for much of the last two millennia, understands quite well the long-range significance of Catholic memory. That is why they worry about it so much. If I were Jewish, I might worry about us, too.

Sensitivities on both sides, some spoken, some unspoken, abound in each of the Holocaust-related controversies. Jews for an entire generation hesitated to talk very much even with each other about what had happened to them (2 out of every 3 Jews in Europe murdered, one third of the entire world Jewish population). It was only in the mid-1970’s, perhaps in response to the TV miniseries, Holocaust, that survivors felt able to talk to their children and to other Jews. And when they did, Holocaust revisionists popped up in colleges and on the media to deny that it ever really happened! So began the period of building Holocaust museums and pushing for Holocaust education in public and private schools, twin efforts that have greatly enriched the educational and moral environment of the last remaining superpower (and thus potential world bully). As Pope John Paul II has said, the Jewish witness to the Shoah is ‘a saving warning for all humanity, which shows (them) to be still the heirs of the Prophets.’

Yet even though the Holy See’s Commission for Religious Relations with the Jews, and the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops (among others) have on numerous occasions condemned Holocaust denial for the great lie that it is, still Jews worry. Now, Jewish worry manifests itself a little differently than does Catholic worry. On the one hand, the spokes people for the worriers tend to have grown up in New York City, which is not as sensitivity-conscious in its public discourse as, say, Virginia, or Michigan, or even California. On the other hand, many of the spokespersons are rabbinically trained, and if not, nonetheless profoundly influenced by the rabbinical style of discourse. Anyone who has read even a few chunks of the Talmud will realize quickly that it is quite a different genre of religious literature than either the protracted ruminations of Augustine or the clipped logical framework of Aquinas. It is argumentative, not only among rabbis ("But, Rabbi X said. . .") but also with the biblical text itself. How, the argument raged among rabbis over the centuries, "could Joseph have been so morally callous? He knew for all those years of his opulent living in Egypt that his father mourned his death. Yet he could spare not one messenger to tell his grieving father that he lived and prospered? What a breach of the commandment to honor your father and mother!" I know of no Christian preacher who has ever raised this question. Yet arguing with the texts, and with the most revered of Jewish ancestors is typical of rabbinic discourse.

So when Jews look at a Vatican text which they take seriously, they probe it for weaknesses, dissecting its logical and moral vulnerabilities. Here again they have done us Catholics a great service. The Jewish reception of every one of the statements of the Holy See, beginning with Nostra Aetate itself (which none other than Abraham Joshua Heschel panned as too little and too late), has been negative and even fractious. It is what Jews do to their own texts. It is an honor, perhaps oddly enough, when they do it to ours. The service is to hold our feet to the fire; to temper thereby our dross metal statements into solid steel capable of serving the ages. Consequently, one can discern in official Church statements over the years a steady progress in Catholic teaching about Jews and Judaism. Since getting this teaching right has everything to do with authentic Catholic teaching (Vatican II noted wisely that it is when searching her own mystery that the Church encounters the mystery of Israel), we should, despite the often fractious format in which it is presented to us, be grateful for the honor Jews pay us in disputing on their own terms with us.

Yet dispute is not dialogue. Dialogue seeks to know what is hurtful to the other and to avoid it. For dialogue is not debate. It’s goal is not winning but understanding. It would, therefore, be helpful if our Jewish partners in dialogue would learn that utilizing the level of rhetoric on Catholics that is common within the Jewish community can block understanding as often as it communicates to us legitimate Jewish concerns. This is especially true, I would submit, when the subject is the papacy.

Until quite recently, the history of Catholics like the history of Jews in the U.S. was one, by and large, of immigration and discrimination, of being excluded from the ‘better’ neighborhoods, schools, jobs, and social clubs. Entire political movements were formed whose primary purpose was to keep Catholic immigrants out, first out of the country and then, failing that, out of the established economic and social system. We were numerous and unsavory. We would swamp and bring down social and educational standards, polluting American culture. Above all, we were dangerous, subjects of blind obedience to the whore of Babylon, the Pope, and thus at once un-Christian and un-democratic, of uncertain loyalty to the American experiment.

The Pope. Symbol of what was really wrong with the poor, huddled, teeming, ethnic masses of Papists who swarmed into America, threatening all that was good and sacred about the great city set on a hill. If only Catholics would give up the Pope, the mantra went, they could be socialized, Americanized, Christianized, sanitized and made fit for respectable company. But we wouldn’t and, by and large, we didn’t, holding back our assimilation and acceptance in this country for generations for the sin of holding on to the papacy.

The papacy, as the viciously anti-Catholic political cartoons of Conde Nast and his cohorts constantly reminded us, was the symbol of what was wrong with us, what was inassimilable. So the papacy, then and even now when the great century-long wave of Nativist, Know-Nothing bigotry has subsided to a trickle, remains for Catholics a symbol of who we are as Americans, and what it cost our parents and grandparents to remain Catholic in a land of legal equality and ethno-religious discrimination.

So when Jewish leaders criticize the Pope, whether Pius XII or John Paul II, even many of the progressives (whatever that actually means) among us find ourselves a bit disoriented, with sensitivities triggered that we may not have known that we had. For Catholics with an historical memory, Jews are fellow immigrants who suffered from much the same set of discriminatory attitudes and systemic exclusions. It is not at all accidental that the names of the leaders of the labor movement tend to be ethnic, Jewish and Catholic. Nor is it accidental that Catholics and Jews tended, again until recently, to cluster in the same urban ghettos. So how is it, we ask, when we recognize our American story in the Jewish American story, that so many Jews seem to miss the, to us, deeply obvious point that to attack the papacy (never mind that we criticize the Pope, he is OUR pope to criticize, after all, just as Israel is the Jewish community’s prerogative to criticize) is to raise up for us the specter of the Nativist bigotry we thought had been left behind after John F. Kennedy’s campaign for the presidency (when he had to go to Texas to swear loyalty to America).

In jumping all over the Popes, many Jews do not seem to realize, they are by no means speaking truth to power as they themselves I feel sincerely believe. They are triggering the half-buried paranoias of the grandchildren of unwelcomed immigrants. If Jews are to communicate with American Catholics what should be real concerns for both communities, there will need to be a softening of the rhetoric until the volume is turned down enough so that we Catholics can hear what they are saying. Right now, the discourse is too loud to be comprehensible.

The difficulty of communication, of course, is very much two-sided here. If Jewish discourse tends to Catholic ears to be too disputatious, pointed and at times judgmental, Catholic discourse (especially that of Rome) can strike Jewish ears as too soft, nuanced and hesitant on what are, for them, the big issues, especially the Holocaust. The recent statement of the Holy See, We Remember: A Reflection on the Shoah is a case in point. As the Jewish responses (mostly emanating from the headquarters in New York of national Jewish groups) were, understandably, written in Jewish, so the Vatican document, emanating from Rome and addressing at once all of the world’s one billion Catholics, was decidedly written in Catholic (or, more precisely, Vaticanese, a sub-dialect that many American Catholics have difficulty comprehending sometimes). One of the characteristics of Vaticanese, in certain circumstances (not so in others but that is another story) is its desire not to say more than it actually wants to say. This can result in a plethora of caveats and distinctions, a habit with which anyone familiar with medieval scholasticism will find themselves at home, but which in the larger world is, shall we say, an acquired taste.

As I read the document the first time (on a charter bus going into Rome from DaVinci after a flight from Jerusalem with a distinguished group of U.S. bishops and their rabbinical counterparts from around the country), I could see that what made eminent sense to me was in a number of key areas going to cause my rabbi friends no end of difficulty. In retrospect, I think I underestimated the difficulty, but was not surprised by its intensity.

The points at issue in the Vatican text are essentially related to its perhaps too-brief summary of the history of Jewish-Christian relations in only a few paragraphs. Naturally, things were left out which, from a Jewish point of view, needed to be said, but which the authors may have felt were implicit in the text and thus did not need to be spelled out.

Two key distinctions illustrate both this dynamic and the need for further dialogue. The first is the distinction in the text between ‘the Church as such’, which is held blameless for the Holocaust and what lead up to it, and the sons and daughters of the Church, for whose teachings, actions and inactions over the centuries and especially during the Holocaust the Church as a whole is called upon by the document to repent. This language struck many Jews as less than straightforward. In fact, it is traditional. Although it not the most fashionable ecclesiology in certain academic theological circles today, it cannot be said (as some Jews feared) that it was invented just to get the Church off the hook with regard to its evident historical responsibility for setting the stage for the Shoah. Indeed, to the authors of the document, which was after all essentially a ringing statement of repentance for past Catholic sins, the Church’s acknowledgment of responsibility was obvious in the statement’s structure and very existence. How and why repent if there was no sin?

Cardinal Cassidy, who signed the document as President of the Commission which authorized it, has explained on various occasions that the distinction is made, traditionally in Roman Catholicism, between the Church as a sacramental, saving institution, the Body of Christ on earth, and the Church as a human institution, which includes all levels of the sons and daughters of the Church, from Popes to newly baptized infants. The latter can indeed be as an institution guilty of sin and therefore needs, constantly to repent (‘semper reformanda’). The former sense of Church, since it refers directly to the actions of Christ in heaven and on earth, and thus to the integrity and validity of the sacraments necessary for salvation, including the sacraments of Eucharist and reconciliation, cannot be said to be sinful without impugning the Godhead as sinful and the sacraments as corrupt and ineffective.

So the Church as a human institution and as a whole must repent of its manifold sins against Jews and Judaism, sins which paved the way for something, namely genocide, that the Church at its worst never contemplated as a possibility. This, to me, and taking the validity of the document’s distinction into account, is the clear teaching of the Vatican’s We Remember. Yet in explaining how this is so the document makes a second distinction which again sounded to many Jews as a less than an honest reckoning but which, again, I believe is vital to an accurate historical record of the period and any discussion of the Church’s role in it. This is the distinction between anti-Judaism and anti-Semitism.

The distinction as made in the Vatican document has clear, logical merit. The Church’s traditional polemic against Judaism, which was aptly named ‘the teaching of contempt’ by Jules Isaac, whose theory was accepted by Pope John XXIII and formed the basis of the Second Vatican Council’s declaration, Nostra Aetate, was as it manifested itself in the first and second centuries, intended to show Christianity’s superiority over the then equally young Rabbinic interpretation of texts common to Jews and Christians. (In the first century, one should recall, virtually all Christians were Jews, so the New Testament is properly read as an internal Jewish document, an argument by Jews directed to Jews about the most authoritative way to read the Jewish scriptures, i.e. to understand what Judaism should become after the destruction of the Jerusalem Temple.)

But beginning already in the Second Century, as the Pope trenchantly pointed out in his address to the Anti-Judaism/Anti-Semitism seminar sponsored by the Holy See in November of 1977, the need of Christians (now increasingly Gentile) to polemicize against rabbinic Judaism became so strong that a series of misinterpretations of the New Testament text were introduced that were, wrongly but ultimately, accepted by subsequent generations of (Gentile) Christians as the gospel truth about Judaism. These included the nefarious and insidious notion of collective Jewish guilt for the death of Jesus—as if all the Jews spread around the Roman empire in Jesus’ time had somehow (through an early yet undiscovered version of an email chatroom?) learned of the trial of Jesus in time to go to Jerusalem to scream, Crucify him! And that they could all have fit in Pilate’s courtyard. Absurd, of course, but no more absurd than the scripture-defying notion that such personal guilt could be handed down, collectively, to succeeding generations of Jews, as a people, by birth.

Yet most Christians believed it. Perhaps it was comforting. If a Christian could blame the Jews for the death of Jesus, then one would not have to take responsibility for the real culprit, one’s own sins. The awesome phrase, Christ died for YOUR sins could thus be domesticated and put aside (no matter that one thus put aside ones only chance for redemption and salvation, which theologically is dependent upon the extent to which one acknowledges one’s own responsibility as a sinner for Jesus’ death, as the Council of Trent, seemingly in vain, tried to remind Catholics).

Here, however, even more distinctions than are made in the Vatican document become necessary. While the teaching of contempt against Judaism was by the end of the third century so well developed and so widespread as to be uncontested among subsequent Fathers of the Church, it did not (save in far-away outposts such as the Iberian peninsula) result in any large scale violence or even forced conversions of Jews until the 11^th Century.

In other words, the first millennium of Jewish-Christian relations, despite the accretion of absolute power over Jews by the Church beginning with the conversion of Constantine in the 4^th Century, did not result in an attempt by the Church to wipe out Judaism. On the contrary, thanks to St. Augustine and to St. Gregory the Great who as pope instituted Augustinian theory as papal canon law, Judaism ALONE among the myriad of ancient cults of the Roman empire that pre-dated Christianity was allowed to survive—and accorded legal status (to which it could and did appeal to the popes for protection if and when civil authorities got out of hand.)

So there exists for the first millennium of the Christian era, not an unmitigated anti-Judaism (otherwise like paganism it would have been destroyed or absorbed) but a half-anti and half-philo- Judaism in Catholic theory and practice. It was protected and denigrated at the same time. What word can we give to this highly ambiguous theoretical and practical posture by the Church toward Jews and Judaism? Ambivalent anti-Judaism? Hesitant anti-Judaism? Certainly, a qualifier is needed.

In the 11^th Century, however, things took a decided and unequivocal turn for the worse. At the beginning of the Century/Millennium, apocalyptic fervor seems to have whipped up a rather large-scale pogrom against Jews in France (Jews, of course, being blamed for holding back the coming of the true messiah by not acknowledging that he had already come). In 1096, the third wave of the first crusade, being leaderless (the nobility & the clergy having already gone with the first two waves) turned into a mob that massacred thousands of Jews in the Rhineland area of what is now modern Germany. This was over the protests of the pope who had launched the crusade and the local bishop/princes who felt an obligation (going back to Augustine & Gregory) to protect the ignorant but theologically significant Jews (since they witnessed to the authenticity of the divine revelation of Sinai, without which the New Testament makes little sense).

There are a number of theories to explain why, but what is important here is simply to note that things changed radically after the 11^th Century. The ambivalence on the popular level faded, replaced by an increasingly negative anti-Judaism that began to take on the tinge of an anti-Jewishness. Whereas before, as in the classic French cathedral of Strasbourg, the Church and the Synagogue were depicted as two equally beautiful women, with the former resplendent and triumphant and the latter downcast and defeated, with the tablets of the Law falling from her hands, the Cathedral at Regensburg, Germany, has the infamous Judensau carved on its facade, with Jews suckling at its teats. This disgusting image is qualitatively different from the theological triumphalism of the French cathedral. It seeks to dehumanize the Jews, not simply illustrate the superiority of Christianity.

But if this is anti-Jewishness, a new term needs to be confected for the next step. Here, the Jews are demonized. Not just collectively guilty for the death of Jesus and therefore punished (destruction of the Temple, dispersion throughout the world—despite the fact that Jews already were spread around the then known world). But Jews, bitter and vindictive over Christian persecution of them, are out to destroy all of ‘Christian civilization.’ Jews are in league with the devil. Whereas for Augustine and the Fathers of the Church, the Jews were pitiable in their suffering, they are now seen as a threat to Christian society.

Passion plays beginning in the 14^th century thus go well beyond the gospels and even the Fathers of the Church in depicting Jews as part of a cosmic plot, lead by Satan, to destroy Christendom and enslave all humanity. The Protestant Reformation did not seek to reform this aspect of medieval thinking, and the Enlightenment merely secularized it, the latter taking it to a new and even more insidious stage of development.

While the logic of medieval anti-Jewishness lead to very serious crimes such as forced conversion and then (in Spain) an Inquisition to test the sincerity of the forced conversions (all of which was against the Jewish Policy established by the Popes over the centuries), the new logic wedded pseudo-science with greed to create the theory of racialism. This theory appears to have been developed initially to justify the slave trade. If Africans are a different, subordinate race they can be bought, sold and treated as chattel. With the break-down of the God-centered Christian world-view, with its strong teaching from Genesis of the unity of all humanity as created in the image of God, racial theories could be acted upon without the moral constraints of traditional Christian teaching. The great tragedy inherent in the new, racialist theory was that the sub-humans could not simply be baptized to become acceptable and full members of secular, Enlightened society. They were a different species.

Within Europe, there was one group above all that many in society were pre-disposed (because of the teaching of contempt) to see as different, inferior and threatening all at once: the Jews. Voltaire thus argued that no matter what one did to or for the Jews, they could never assimilate into Western society. It was not in their nature to be full and productive citizens. In the19th Century, secular Jew-haters such as Chamberlain and Gobineau began to pass their hatred off as science, euphemistically disguising it as anti-Semitism. Nazi ideology wedded racialist pseudo-science to its own neo-pagan, Romantic notion of Germany’s Aryan past, casting the now no longer fully human but still demonized Jews in the role of the great polluter of the purity of Teutonic blood lines, destined to rule the world for a thousand years.

The Vatican statement’s distinction between the anti-Judaism of the Fathers of the Church and the antisemitism that rationalized genocide is thus a quite cogent one. The latter on several grounds rejects theological elements central to Christianity. The one did not simply slide into the other. Over a millennium and a half of historical developments intervene between the two. We need, indeed, not fewer distinctions but more to do even basic justice to the complex ambiguities of Western history with regard to the Jewish people. There is Patristic anti-Judaism, which is distinct from but related to medieval anti-Jewishness. And centuries later there emerges a distinct new theory (again historically related to its predecessors): modern, racial antisemitism, which owes its theoretical essence not to the Christian teaching of contempt, but to the dark underside of an Enlightened Europe becoming rich on the slave trade and colonialism.

As Professor Yosef Yerushalmi said a number of years ago, if the logic of Christian anti-Judaism lead directly to genocide, that would have happened many centuries ago when the Church in much of Europe actually had the political power to carry out the logic of its beliefs. It didn’t. It only happened in our own secularized century, after the breakdown of the theocentric vision of Christendom, with the moral restraints that vision imposed. Yet it is unlikely that the Jews of the 20^th century could have been so easily pinpointed and scapegoated by Nazi theory were it not for the traditions of Christian anti-Judaism and anti-Jewishness that preceded the 19^th century invention of racial antisemitism. That Christian tradition of negative teaching about Jews and Judaism is thus a necessary cause, Yerushalmi argued for the Holocaust. But it is not a sufficient cause, since much more needs to be said to begin to explain the success of genocidal antisemitism in the first half of the Century in Europe.

However one defines the distinctions and causal links, the Vatican document’s call on the whole Church to repent its role in paving the way for the Holocaust is, at least to this reader, quite clear:

That is the mandate of the Holy See’s statement that Catholics need to keep firmly in mind.

(The full text of We Remember, along with relevant statements from European and U.S. hierarchies, and the statement of Cardinal Edward Cassidy clarifying the intent of the Vatican document, is available in Catholics Remember the Holocaust, publication no. 5-290, Washington, DC: U.S. Catholic Conference, 1999.)

Dr. Eugene J. Fisher is Associate Director of the Secretariat for Ecumenical and Interreligious Affairs of the National Conference of Catholic Bishops and a Consultor to the Holy See’s Commission for Religious Relations with the Jews.