'We cannot hide you from Jesus'

...The document, Nostra aetate ("In Our Time"), proclaimed on October 15, 1965, was supposed to have put an end to official Catholic anti-Semitism, in word, tone, and deed...

...He is author of the forthcoming book Of Life and Limb: The Humane Use of the Human Body (Free Press...

...On the theme of the broken covenant, the document acknowledges that, despite the rejection of the Gospel by large members of Jews, "now as before, God holds them most dear, for the sake of the patriarchs...

...But we cannot hide you from our Lord Jesus...

...For we knew not what we did...

...Pope John XXIII, who called Vatican Council II and set its agenda against great internal opposition, was reported to have composed, three months before his death, the following prayer of reparation that he intended to be read aloud in all Roman Catholic churches on Good Friday: We are conscious today that many many centuries of blindness have cloaked our eyes so that we can no longer either see the beauty of thy chosen people nor recognize in them the features of our privileged brethren...

...The message of Nostra aetate, therefore, bears recalling...

...Emphasis added...

...The concurrence of the pope's homilies with the Auschwitz affair may have been no more than an unfortunate coincidence...

...still, what happened in his Passion cannot be attributed indiscriminately to all Jews then alive, nor can it be attributed to the Jews of today....The church's being the new people of God notwithstanding, the Jews may not be presented as rejected or accursed by God...

...In an August 2 discourse on the beginnings of Christianity, the pontiff stated that God had covenanted with the ancient Israelites to be "his special people...on condition that they remained faithful to his law...

...They have all been killed and we are the only friends you have • left in the world...

...But surely this does not surprise...

...All four of them-two married couples-came down into the cellar in their holiday finery, their faces solemn...

...Their lives could depend on it...

...The new course set by Nostra aetate for Jewish-Catholic relations was prompted largely by a recognition of Christian complicity in the murder of Jews during World War II...

...I, a Jew, exist at all because of the courage and humanity of Catholics...

...By mid-1943, my father had managed to escape from Janover Camp, a notorious extermination center, and to join four other Jews who were being hidden by two Polish Catholic families in a cellar...

...or that the church would have liked to help Jews but was constrained from doing so for geopolitical reasons...

...He knows you are here, and if it is his will to annihilate the Jews, he will find a way to have you discovered by the Germans...

...We held our breaths...

...Jews hold Christians to high moral standards precisely because they accept Christ's moral teachings...

...Jews as well as Catholics must hold onto the vision expressed in the prayer of John XXIII...

...Thus fifty years after the war, it remains incomprehensible that the Holocaust was committed, not by pagan Mongols, but by Christians in Christian societies...

...And if Jesus wishes that you should die, we will not be able to help you...

...After her mother, two younger sisters, and a brother were taken by the Germans and killed, she managed to escape and find refuge with a Lithuanian priest, Father Paukshtis...

...for irrevocable are his gifts and calling-such is the witness of the apostle...

...My father and his brother were sent initially to work camps and later to concentration camps...

...Forgive us for the curse we falsely attached to their names as Jews...

...Just before Christmas 1943, their Polish caretakers, Stanislaw Nendza and Franz Janiewski, announced that they had a proposition to present...

...However, it is important for the church not to appear to be yielding to forces for retrenchment...

...Naturally, my father and the other Jews hiding with him were very anxious about what this proposition might be...

...What is undeniable, however, is that honest, humane, simple Polish peasants could believe, based on the teachings and actions of their church, that Jesus might want the Jews to die, and that by saving Jews they might be acting against the wishes of God, and therefore sinning...

...Hence, God sent the prophets as his messengers to call the people to conversion, to warn them of their hardness of heart, and to foretell a new covenant still to come, [a covenant that] was established through Christ's redemptive sacrifice and through the power of the Holy Spirit...

...When the Germans invad-ed his part of the world in June 1941, he and his family were rounded up by the Gestapo...

...This year will mark the twenty-fifth anniversary of Vatican Council IPs historic declaration absolving Jews of the murder of Christ, and affirming that the rise of Christianity did not nullify the special covenant Jews had with God...

...How were we to escape the wrath of Jesus, who our Polish caretakers thought was using the German Gestapo as his agents...

...EMANUEL D. THORNE is a member of the department of economics at Brooklyn College and a visiting fellow at the Kennedy Institute of Ethics at Georgetown University...

...I don't have to tell you that outside there are no more Jews...

...Across the centuries our brother Abel has lain in the blood which we drew or shed the tears we caused by forgetting thy love...

...One of the women was first to speak...

...Simply by converting to Catholicism...

...One may believe that the church under Pope Pius XII actively saved some Jews in secret (and there is evidence of this...

...his first wife, sister, and elderly father were murdered...

...However, recent events, such as the Auschwitz incident last summer, permit a glimpse of how much more still needs to be done...

...We realize that the mark of Cain stands upon our foreheads...

...We have been hiding you from the Germans these last few months and we can go on hiding you until this war is over...

...At the same time, while a Jew may not tell a Catholic what to believe, it is proper to remind Catholics of their history and of the consequences of their beliefs, in the hope that they will be vigilant against the revisionist tendencies that have recently found official expression in some church circles...

...if there is no antipolonism there will be no anti-Semitism"-they also seemed to find resonance among some Catholics here and abroad...

...Forgive us for crucifying thee a second time in their flesh...

...or that the church was indifferent to their fate (and there is evidence of this, too...

...Not only my father but also my mother was saved by a Catholic...

...Her voice was hoarse and nervous: "Listen carefully, my dear friends," she said...

...and that Judaism was a useless thing, ar* invalid ethic, an invalid way of life, an invalid method of worship, which had been rendered pointless by the advent of Christ...

...Since the earliest days of the church, Christian believers have drawn a whole range of practical conclusions from that ancient premise...

...Even more distressing to me was a series of homilies on the theme of Pentecost offered by Pope John Paul II while the Auschwitz incident was in the news...

...Jews must remember that when Catholics, such as those who saved my parents, acted heroically and humanely, it was because, whatever else they had been taught about Jews, they also had absorbed Christ's teaching, "love thy neighbor...

...While the threats and admonishments from Poland's primate, Cardinal Joseph Glemp, seemed archaic-"Dear Jews, do not talk to us from a position of a nation raised beyond all others and do not dictate...

...A renascent Jewry with its own state of Israel must not turn inward with bitterness and give up on dialogue with Catholics...

...And regarding the crime of deicide, it states, "True, the Jewish authorities and those who sided with them pressed for the death of Christ...

...In his memoirs, my father writes: On Christmas Eve, we had our answer...

...To them, it meant, in the words of Malachi Martin, "that the sufferings of the Jews were to be understood as part of their punishment for the crime of having rejected Christ and their original destiny...

...When New York's Cardinal John O'Connor condemned Cardinal Glemp's statement on the Jews and acknowledged that many Catholics are anti-Semitic, he was roundly criticized by some influential Catholics...

...In two of these homilies, the pope chose to advance a theological position that has served as the traditional Christian rationalization for the persecution of Jews...

...She reports, as others have, that, in her desperate search for refuge, she perceived all persons and institutions clearly identified as Catholic-priests, nuns, churches, and monasteries-as potential sources of sanctuary...

...But the history of the Old Testament," the pontiff continued, "shows many instances of Israel's infidelity to God...

...The pope returned to the "broken covenant" theme in his homily a week later...

...and "Esteemed Jews...