Scrutiny & then some: What's behind the flood of books about the church and the Holocaust?
Baumann, Paul
OF SEVERAL MINOS PAUL BAUNANN SCRUTINY & THEN SOME The church & the Holocaust David I. Kertzer's The Popes against the Jews: The Vatican and the Rise of Modern AntiSemitism (Alfred A....
...All you have to do is pick up a copy of the Nation, the New Republic, the American Prospect, or the New York Times to see how alive that ecclesiastical bogeyman is...
...At a deep level, Catholicism was seen as the corrupting and oppressive "Other...
...Kertzer states that "traditional Catholic forms of dealing with the Jews became transformed into modern anti-Semitism," but he never accounts for the influence of pseudo-scientific Nazi doctrines of racial purity, something essentially alien to Catholicism...
...Professor Kertzer would also be on the panel, along with Commonweal contributor Jack Miles and Columbia historian Istvan Deak...
...Using the Vatican's own archives as well as articles from the Catholic press of the time, Kertzer demonstrates that the Vatican was a prominent source of anti-Semitic slander in the nineteenth century...
...Readers are likely to come away from the book with the impression that the popes and their henchmen were paranoiac, credulous, and driven by unmotivated hatred...
...I think there are several reasons...
...My remarks were brief—probably too brief—but they seemed to get the discussion going...
...Just the other night, a New York Times reporter on the 'Jim Lehrer News Hour" described Osama bin Laden as "the pope of terrorism...
...For modern thinkers like John Dewey, Catholicism represented a subversive threat to fundamental American values involving democracy, scientific progress, personal autonomy, and secularization...
...Historian Marc Saperstein's review ("An Indictment: Half Right," September 28) did a superb job of explaining Kertzer's strengths and weaknesses...
...Catholics should be grateful when such errors are corrected...
...Deak's unwillingness to accede to Kertzer's thesis earned him the lion's share of questions from the audience, all of which he answered, with great patience and authority...
...More anxiety-provoking, Leon Wieseltier, the literary editor of the New Republic, was to be the moderator...
...To begin with, the unfortunate effort to canonize Pius XII has focused attention on the issue...
...Nor does he sufficiently acknowledge the impact of shattering events such as World War I and the Depression...
...Most important, perhaps, as Paul Elie pointed out in the New York Times Magazine several years ago (April 26, 1998), John Paul II's predecessors are now being judged by the human-rights advocacy of this papacy, and they inevitably fall short...
...The causal connection between nineteenth-century Catholic anti-Semitism and the Holocaust is never established, merely asserted...
...How these men understood their duties and obligations, much less how their faith shaped the decisions they made, remains an enigma...
...Commonweal 8 November 9,2001...
...As it turned out, the evening went well...
...Finally, as Saperstein noted in his Commonweal review, Kertzer overreaches...
...Public forums about the church and the Holocaust usually draw a hostile audience in Manhattan...
...By and large, however, it is no longer a force for obscurantism or reaction, but rather an advocate for human dignity and religious freedom...
...It's a wash," Wieseltier argued, as to whether the forces of religion or explicitly atheistic regimes have been the source of greater violence...
...In short, liberals instinctively defined themselves over and against Catholicism...
...The Vatican had argued that there was a sharp line separating traditional Christian anti-Judaism from Nazi racial and "neopagan" anti-Semitism...
...His Essays on Hitler's Europe (University of Nebraska Press) is indispensable for anyone interested in this difficult subject...
...With our politics so dominated by abortion, questions of church/state separation, and the ongoing debate about the family, that enduring liberal suspicion of Catholicism has been given new energy...
...I was apprehensive about participating in the discussion...
...McGreevy argues that Catholicism has played a crucial role in shaping the self-understanding of liberal intellectuals...
...OF SEVERAL MINOS PAUL BAUNANN SCRUTINY & THEN SOME The church & the Holocaust David I. Kertzer's The Popes against the Jews: The Vatican and the Rise of Modern AntiSemitism (Alfred A. Knopf) is the latest in a stream of books examining the role of the church in the Holocaust...
...The church is far from perfect...
...Kertzer is less successful in bringing to life the worldview of the nineteenthcentury popes...
...But there is a measure of bias at work as well...
...The New Republic is not known for its dispassionate approach to this question...
...Deak's question about why the Catholic Church is the object of such disproportionate scrutiny is one shared by many...
...Nor is it surprising that critics are eager to debunk an institution that makes Commonweal 7 November 9,2001 such large claims for its own moral authority...
...It is possible to see it at work in the enthusiastic reception of the work of Catholics such as James Carroll, John Cornwell, and even Garry Wills, who have all made arguments similar to Kertzer's...
...Notre Dame historian John McGreevy's essay, "Thinking on One's Own: Catholicism in the American Intellectual Imagination, 1928-60" (The Journal of American History, Spring 1997), is illuminating in this regard...
...The continuity and visibility of the papacy also make for an inviting target...
...I wanted to make three points...
...I was asked to speak first, after Wieseltier had made a few remarks about the relationship between evil and religion and evil and modern secular ideologies...
...I've reviewed the book for the Washington Post's Book World, and last month appeared on a panel at New York University to discuss it...
...Deak is a longtime contributor to the New York Review of Books...
...Miles is the author of the Pulitzer prizewinning God: A Biography, and his new book, Christ: A Crisis in the Life of God (Alfred A. Knopf), has just been published...
...That fact is still "news" to many...
...Deak, whose command of this history is encyclopedic, raised similar questions, always emphasizing the complexity of historical analysis...
...Moreover, there is no reason for anyone to accept the dubious historical assertions of the Vatican...
...He also wondered aloud why so many books have been written about the Catholic Church's role in the Holocaust and so few about other, equally fallible institutions...
...First, Kertzer had done a brilliant job of refuting the self-exonerating claims made in the 1998 Vatican document "We Remember: A Reflection on the Shoah...
...In short, Kertzer's effort to link Nazism to medieval Christian bigotry does not give enough weight to the undeniably "modern" aspects of the Holocaust...
...You had to laugh even while cringing...
...Wieseltier was evenhanded, and did a fine job as moderator...
Vol. 128 • November 2001 • No. 19
