Editorial: Misremembered
STAFF Editor: Margaret O'Brien Steinfels Executive Editor: Paul Baumann Managing Editor: Patrick Jordan Productiou Editor: Tiina Aleman Senior Writer: Robert G. Hoyt Business Manager: Gregory...
...The tradition holds that any suggestion of error on the part of Christ's mystical body is a theological oxymoron...
...Copyright _9 1998 Commonweal Foundation...
...Erroneous and unjust interpretations of the New Testament regarding the Jewish people," Christian teachings that engendered "feelings of hostility," are acknowledged...
...But as "We Remember" exemplifies, the doctrine of inerrancy errantly applied is no real help to authority in the end...
...columnist portraits, Elaine Mills...
...p. 28, Ross, Rothco...
...The Catholic church desires to express her deep sorrow for the failures of her sons and daughters in every age," but never, it seems, does the church as a responsible entity have anything to repent for...
...That reaction is understandable, although in fairness to the Vatican it should be said that Pius's alleged moral insensibility is not as self-evident as many--thanks largely to the distortions of Roll Hochhuth's 1963 play, The Deputy--assume...
...But I did have a chance afterward to ask Archbishop George what he meant, and he started to tell me...
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...The document's embrace of the religious heritage and aspirations shared by Jews and Catholics is another reason for commendation...
...Although the sincerity of the statement's desire for genuine reconciliation between Christians and Jews cannot be second-guessed, the document as a whole is a grievous disappointment...
...Other Jewish spokespersons have commended the Vatican statement for its unequivocal condemnation of anti-Semitism, and of past Christian persecution and violence against Jews...
...if until very recent times anti-Semitism was given vivid expression in the Good Friday liturgy (the "perfidious Jews") and in religious art...
...I have to take responsibility for what I said...
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...But "the church as such," according to the Vatican, was never responsible...
...It has shown itself unable to pass on the faith in its integrity and inadequate, therefore, in fostering the joyful self-surrender called for in Christian marriage, in consecrated life, in ordained priesthood...
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...STAFF Editor: Margaret O'Brien Steinfels Executive Editor: Paul Baumann Managing Editor: Patrick Jordan Productiou Editor: Tiina Aleman Senior Writer: Robert G. Hoyt Business Manager: Gregory Wilpert Poetry: Rosemary Deen Design: Emil Antonucci Screem Richard Alleva Media: Frank McConnell Stage: Celia Wren Cohtmnists: John Garvey, Abigail McCarthy, E.J...
...Nazi totalitarianism was, as the document argues, an unprecedented modern horror whose unique evil was difficult for all but the most prescient to grasp at first...
...Nazi racial anti-Semitism is attributed to "a false and exacerbated nationalism....essentially more sociological and political than religious...
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...But Nazism did not spring full grown from the atheistic brow of the modern world...
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...p. 10, Schwadron, Rothco...
...But that very subtle distinction, expressing as it does a valid understanding of the church's unique Commonweal 5 April 10, 1998 access to religious truth, will certainly be lost on most readers of "We Remember.'" More likely, this assertion of the church's metaphysical reliability will be read, with reason, as the worst kind of this-worldly moral evasion...
...Essentially a critique, even a necessary critique at one point in our history, it is now parasitical on a substance that no hmger exists...
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...SIMPLY CATHOLICISM' Please explain t a recent meeting of the National Center for the Laity in Chicago, Archbishop Francis George presided at a Saturday-evening liturgy...
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...The document insists that the Holocaust had "its roots outside of Christianity" as the "work of a thoroughly modern neo-pagan regime...
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...This is brought home again when "We Remember" calls Western democracies to account for their failure to give refuge to Jews seeking asylum from the Nazis...
...ht tp://www.commonwealmagazine.org Misremembered leven years in the writing, "We Remember: A Reflection on the Shoah," released last month by the Vatican's Commission for Religious Relations with the Jews, will not and should not satisfy those on any side of the tortuous debate about the church's responsibility for antiSemitism and possible complicity in the Nazi extermination of 6 million Jews...
...Similarly, for "We Remember" to rehearse the political history of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries and not acknowledge how the church's opposition to liberalism and democracy weakened the forces best able to deter fascism is equally disingenuous...
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...For many involved in the ongoing Catholic-Jewish dialogue, "We Remember" is rightly seen as an incremental step in a long journey, in this regard resembling Nostra aetate (1965), Vatican II's groundbreaking repudiation of the idea of collective Jewish guilt for Christ's death and affirmation of God's continuing covenant with the Jews...
...Liberal Catholicism is an exhausted project...
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...Although it is not likely that Pius's moral culpability will be greatly clarified in the process, there is no chance that Pius will be dealt with fairly until all relevant documents are made public...
...p. 12, Ray, Rothco...
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...p. 36, Punch, Rothco...
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...How the church can repent or correct the manifest errors of its past if it cannot honestly admit to any errors at all is, to say the least, something of a problem...
...our conversation ended amicably but unsatisfyingly...
...It had obvious roots in Europe's near and ancient Christian past...
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...p. 22, Lorey Sebastian...
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...To be sure, there are important distinctions to be made between Christian anti-Semitism and Nazi race hatred...
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...That failure to act placed a "heavy burden of conscience on the authorities in question," judges the Vatican...
...The Vatican is right to remind the world that the church condemned the "idolatry of race and of the state...
...Subsequently, at my request, he sent a copy of his notes, averring that although "I don't relish getting into a national debate at this time...
...If over the course of centuries anti-Semitism was rarely if ever condemned but rather ignored, tolerated, even encouraged...
...But is no similar burden to be placed on the shoulders of church authorities who failed to act in their own sphere...
...It no lony, er gives us life...
...if it infected not only the laity but priests and bishops...
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...It was a prayerful and impressive Mass at Old Saint Patrick's on West Adams Street...
...Various contemporary challenges to Catholic teaching seem to make the appeal to church inerrancy an increasing temptation on the part of the Vatican...
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...This is the quote he sent from his homily: "We are at a turning point in the life of the church in this country...
...Well, he said something like that, but darn, I didn't have my tape recorder...
...In that regard, certain aspects of "We Remember" will need revising...
...Sad to say, "We Remember" is also tendentious and unpersuasive in its analysis of the nature of Nazi anti-Semitism and its relationship to what the document calls historic Christian anti-Judaism...
...The newly renovated church glowed with its refurbished Celtic borders and symbols--a bit like being inside the Book of Kells...
...Fair enough...
...pp_ 3, 13, 18, 19, 26, 35, Chariot...
...Catholics familiar with the traditional theological distinction that places the "church as such" over and above its fallible human members will understand how this kind of language is being used...
...Although it proved to be a woefully ineffective obstacle to the Nazis, and millions of Catholics rallied to the Nazi cause, the Catholic church did not in any sense perpetrate the Holocaust...
...However one wants to understand the relationship between the mystical and the visible elements of the church, the incontrovertible historical record attests to the fact that "the church," and not just its members, taught erroneously, even perniciously, about Judaism and the Jews...
...and if this led to pogroms, to the terrors of the Inquisition--if, in short, anti-Semitism suffused much of Catholic culture for nineteen centuries, it is hard to see how "the church as such" can be held guiltless...
...Most unsatisfactory is the statement's refusal to attribute any fault or error for anti-Semitism to the church itself...
...However, to argue that there was no connection between nearly 2,000 years of church-inspired anti-Semitism and the Nazi assault on European Jewry is utterly fallacious and offensive...
...No one familiar with these issues can expect two thousand years of misunderstanding and worse to be set straight in a few decades...
...Most notably, some Jewish leaders have expressed sharp exception to, and even anger at, the Vatican's defense of Pius XII's failure to condemn Nazi atrocities in explicit terms...
...If the Vatican statement means only that no pope or ecumenical council or curial body ever elevated anti-Semitism to the level of formal doctrine, that is not so large a claim and will not, in the eyes of most people of any faith or none, absolve "the church as such" of responsibility for policies, attitudes, and actions that taught as clearly as any encyclical...
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...The answer is simply Catholicism, in all its fullness and depth, a faith able to distinguish itself from any culture and yet able to Commonweal 6 April 10, 1998...
...lllusfralioHs: Cover, Antonucci...
...p. 24, Carol Rosegg...
...p. 9, A l l e n , Rothco...
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...Toward the end of his homily, Archbishop George (whose elevation to cardinal was announced on the following day, January 18) said that liberal Catholicism was exhausted, that conservative Catholicism was sectarian, and that, in any case, there was only one Catholicism...
...p. 23, Merrick Morton...
...The answer, however, it not to be found in a type of conservative Catholicism obsessed with particular practices and so sectarian in its outlook that it cannot serve as a sign of unity of all peoples in Christ...
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...Nonetheless, calls for the opening of the Vatican's diplomatic archives to independent scholars should be heeded...
...if church councils promulgated laws segregating and discriminating against Jews...
...Or without missteps along the way...
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...Similarly, the pope's power "To Save Jews From Nazis" (as a recent New York Times headline put it) continues to be much exaggerated, even as the church's actual efforts to help hundreds of thousands of Jews are too easily dismissed...
...I didn't even have pen and paper with me...
Vol. 125 • April 1998 • No. 7
