Correspondence: Terrorism, human rights, 'The Popes against the Jews'...
Resurrecting Powers I'm very happy to see that J. F. Powers is again coming into his own (John Garvey, "Not a Wasted Word," October 12). He was a wonderful writer and certainly a light...
...As papal envoy to Warsaw, Achille Ratti, three years before becoming Pope Pius XI, reported to the Vatican secretary of state that "the most evil" influence in Poland was the 28 Jews...
...I especially remember Powers's deep blue eyes...
...ALBERT B. HAKIM Summit, N.J...
...Saperstein maintains that I provide no evidence that such racial thinking had any influence within the twentieth-century church...
...Yet the author makes the Holocaust hover over the book—from the introduction to the final pages, especially in part 3, which he titles "On the Eve of the Holocaust," though (except for the last two pages) its story ends in 1922...
...Their self-proclaimed rationale was based in religious absolutism and political fanaticism, thus in this instance the search for the "root causes" of terrorism points more to the need to combat evil in the world than to the question of economic injustice...
...This short excerpt doesn't do justice to the depth and breadth of Archbishop Martino's remarks, which move into complex issues of world conflict reduction...
...Every single one of these elements of modern anti-Semitism was not only embraced by the church but actively promulgated by official and unofficial church organs...
...Let me, instead, suggest a different question...
...Brown began that first column by professing to be in a state of "fear and trembling" at the prospect of writing for Catholics but, ecumenist that he was, he concluded by noting that one function of the column was his "writing not primarily as a Protestant to Catholics, dealing with points of difference, but writing rather as a Christian to fellow Christians, presupposing points of conviction we already share, (Continued on page 28) 4 (Continued from page 4) and examining some problem or issue in the name of our common allegiance to Christ, as we face together, whether as Catholics or Protestants, a world that is tragically torn asunder precisely because it does not share the perspective we share—that the resources of both wisdom and grace are manifested through a cross and an empty tomb...
...Is Kertzer really asserting that had the local population not been anti-Semitic, the Nazis would have been unable to murder millions of Jews in conquered and occupied Poland, where the penalty for aiding a Jew was summary execution...
...Assume, for the sake of argument, that the Polish population harbored a deep hatred of the Jews, and that this was instilled by the Catholic Church...
...Poverty along with other situations of marginalization that engulf the lives of so many of the world's people, including the denial of human dignity, the lack of respect for human rights and fundamental freedoms, social exclusion, intolerable refugee situations, internal and external displacement and physical or psychological oppression are breeding grounds only waiting to be exploited by terrorists...
...Hence, it is a logical and historical mistake to exclude from the sources of modern anti-Semitism those groups or institutions that did not attribute the Jews' evil to race...
...There is, however, one point I should like to enlarge on...
...If you are referring strictly to Osama bin Laden's anti-U.S...
...We will miss him...
...EDWARD CALLAN Kalamazoo Mich...
...Jews are unpatriotic, a foreign body ever threatening the well-being of the people among whom they live...
...dennis doyle TERRENCE W. TILLEY Dayton, Ohio From the editors: The American Heritage Dictionary now prefers "bark" to "barque," so we have it on higher authority...
...What, after all, were the major tenets of this modern anti-Semitic movement if not such warnings as these: Jews are trying to take over the world...
...Continued on page 4) 2 (Continued from page 2) False dichotomy Congratulations to Mary Ann Glendon for her enriching article on "The Sources of 'Rights Talk/" (October 12), an article I will certainly use in my own classes in ethics...
...Throughout the 1960s, Professor Brown was a regular contributor to Commonweal...
...JOHN COLACINO, C.PP.S...
...I simply look for a story that elucidates truth...
...they did not produce the "Final Solution...
...Saperstein] dismisses the second [component of the book] as polemical...
...GEORGE DARDESS (REV...
...May we suggest a vacation for your spell-check program...
...The reviewer replies: Professor Kertzer misrepresents some of the points in my review, and fails to respond to others...
...It is quite the other way around: When we see that an action is right, that it befits what it means to be human, it is thereby understood as a dictate of our nature, a natural law...
...Yet what are we to make of such episodes as the following...
...It is certainly true that the Holocaust was the brainchild of the Nazis, and that the Nazis were a fundamentally pagan, anti-Christian movement...
...In addition to reviews and articles, he wrote a column, "A Protestant Viewpoint," the first installment of which appeared in the issue dated January 4, 1963...
...Saperstein takes issue in particular with the brief chapter dealing with "race...
...We'd be grateful to find Commonweal sharing in that responsibility by, for instance, reprinting the whole of Archbishop Martino's address...
...Catholic Church of the forties and fifties...
...ROBERT J. KENNEDY MARVIN MICH PEGGY ROSENTHAL Rochester, N.Y...
...I clearly state, however, that the pseudo-scientific theory of Jewish racial inferiority had always been in conflict with the church's position on human universality and on the desirability of converting the Jews...
...diatribes, then your point is well taken...
...But, as we assume our letter writers agree, even if the terrorists' actions were rooted in the disparities between rich and poor, that would still not in any way justify what happened on September 11...
...ANNE LAURANCE Ann Arbor, Mich...
...He could look at you as if he saw where your soul's energy originated...
...The Italian Fascists produced discriminatory legislation...
...I did not ask for precise "quantification" of the role of the church...
...david i. kertzer Providence, R.I...
...The formulation of the question "Is Saperstein really denying that this underlying mass anti-Semitism was unrelated to the Holocaust" is so convoluted that I would not attempt an answer...
...JOHN A. O'CONNOR Port Angeles Wash...
...Human rights, because they befit our nature, are dictates of our nature and are therefore encompassed by the natural law...
...Though poverty is not by itself the cause of terrorism, we cannot successfully combat terrorism if we do not address the worsening disparities between the rich and poor...
...Our apologies to Mr...
...Powers thought very carefully about those questions, looked at his student, and said in his deliberative way: "I'm not anticlerical...
...The editors reply: The best information available at this time indicates that the "motives" of those responsible for the World Trade Center bombings had nothing to do with the amelioration of poverty or the expansion of political freedom...
...But any serious crime reduction effort cannot be confined only to intensified police work...
...Indeed, Italy—the only country where most of the inhabitants could read the periodicals cited so extensively in the book—was one of the least anti-Semitic countries in Europe, and the survival rate of its Jewish population was one of the highest...
...Saperstein complains that I nowhere show that the Catholic Church played any role in making the Holocaust possible...
...A consistent philosophical effort since the Enlightenment tried to retire the supernatural from the human sphere and to found human values on the natural alone, hence it was an effort to dislodge "natural law" in favor of "human rights...
...In fact, this is not a book about the Holocaust...
...The church documents cited clearly reject such a separation...
...Volf...
...29 No such assertion is in my review...
...Saperstein disputes my argument that the Jesuit ban (in effect until 1946) on accepting any candidate for membership contaminated by Jewish blood up to five generations back was used by Nazis and Italian Fascists to bolster their own case for anti-Semitic practices...
...Saperstein maintains that no evidence is provided in the book that racial thinking ever had any influence within the twentieth-century church...
...If a human being buys an insurance policy, that's not much of a story...
...My argument is summarized in the introduction: "As modern anti-Semitic movements took shape at the end of the nineteenth century, the church was a major player in them, constantly warning people of the rising "Jewish peril...
...Catholic anti-Semitism Marc Saperstein's review ("An Indictment: Half Right," September 28) of my book, The Popes against the Jews: The Vatican's Role in the Rise of ModernAnti-Semitism, argues that two books coexist uneasily here...
...I asked for clarification as to whether he is claiming that it would have been impossible for the Nazis to have risen to power in Germany, and to have put their genocidal program into effect, without the material documented in his book, or just a bit more difficult...
...The issue is whether they taught that even after baptism, this uniquely sinister nature remained, and was transmitted to future generations genetically...
...The final report of his mission, penned by his assistant—whom he would shortly make an archbishop— characterized Poland's Jews as follows: "Not only do they differ visibly from Poles owing to their racial characteristics (shortness of stature, large nose, prominent ears, bags under their eyes, etc...
...Robert McAfree Brown There are great teachers and people who influence your life, but Robert McAfee Brown stands out as a star in a world of trouble and confusion...
...REV...
...May he rest in peace...
...Well, the unthinkable was attempted and proved successful...
...Bob Brown: pastor, theologian, teacher, novelist, friend...
...The issue is not, as Kertzer puts it here, whether some leading churchmen held "that the Jews were sinister by nature...
...My point was that he provided no documentation for the assertion that this precedent was "used by Nazis...
...Quoting Acton In Dennis O'Brien's admirably lucid discussion of "Power and Powerlessness" (October 26), there is a minor flaw deriving from of a common misquotation...
...Yet I discuss one of the major Fascist proclamations issued in support of the anti-Semitic racial laws, a speech (subsequently widely distributed) by Roberto Farinacci, one of the highest ranking members of the central Fascist Grand Council, that relies heavily on exactly this Jesuit racial policy...
...The surprise or shock some Catholics experienced would have been less, or nonexistent, if they were aware that the "shift" in question was only terminological...
...A teacher, activist, and public intellectual, Brown participated in the great struggles of his lifetime, serving as a freedom rider during the civil rights movement, a protester during the Vietnam War, a solicitous friend of Central American theologians and pastors in the 1980s, and, at the invitation of John XXIII, as an official Protestant observer during Vatican II...
...Any serious campaign against terrorism needs to address the social, economic, and political conditions that nurture the emergence of terrorism...
...Here a broad canvas of political, economic, social, religious, and cultural factors emerge...
...Saperstein complains that I nowhere show that the Catholic Church played any role in making the Holocaust possible...
...The wit and the wisdom...
...taught a creative writing course that I took...
...In my book, The People versus Rome (Random House), Bob was one of my heroes whom I asked to add to the pages his philosophy and wisdom...
...Do you consider yourself anticlerical...
...His death is such a sad note...
...Thank you, John Garvey, for an updated view of Powers's writing gifts...
...Surely you don't include, among explanations to be rejected, those like the analysis of Archbishop Renato Martino, the Vatican's permanent observer at the United Nations, in his October 16 address: "We do a disservice to those who have died in this tragedy if we fail to search out the causes...
...In searching out the root causes of terrorism, we are in no way condoning terrorism...
...The full text of Archbishop Martino's address can be found at www.zenit.org...
...in Tilley's review essay, and that in Lawrence S. Cunningham's review of Doyle's book, the theologian "Miroslav Volf" was renamed "Miroslav Wolf" (another howler...
...Should historians ignore the major role played by the Catholic Church—and various Protestant churches—in instilling deep hatred of the Jews because we cannot quantify the impact this had on making the Holocaust possible...
...This part of the book is indeed polemical...
...With Jews described by the Vatican as drinkers of the blood of Christian children, plotting to enslave the Christian population, eager to cheat, rob, and murder Christians at any opportunity, it was a short step to the belief that the Jews were sinister by nature...
...For Saint Thomas, natural law is the human being's participation in the eternal law and is not to be thought of as a changeless Platonic entity to be contemplated and then translated into human action...
...This wording, implying that power does not necessarily corrupt, aligns comfortably with O'Brien's eloquent response to some leftist critics of U.S...
...Saperstein criticizes me for not offering any quantification of exactly what proportion of responsibility Christian anti-Semitism bore for these widespread views, or for the murder of the Jews of Europe...
...In my own life as a Roman Catholic he taught me to look at my own tradition and to see our two traditions (Bob's enlightened and evangelical Presbyterianism and our own sometimes haughty Romanism) as in a joyful, embracing, complementing, pilgrimage...
...policy...
...It is, in short, our understanding of the Tightness or oughtness of an action that is the natural law...
...Farinacci cited the great influence the Vatican-supervised Jesuit biweekly, Civilta Cattolica, had in teaching people "that Judaism still aims for world domination," and observed that "the Aryan racism of the Jesuits is thus more severe than that of Germany itself...
...MARC SAPERSTEIN Peter & the Volf We noticed, in the November 9 issue, that the "barque of Peter" became the "bark of Peter" (woof, woof...
...leaves a dangerous impression, which we hope you did not intend...
...But when a priest buys an insurance policy, there's something going on that needs to be said and I want to say it...
...LYNNE HELLEBUST Topeka, Kans...
...Kudos to Pfaff Just wanted to let you know that many of us appreciate the quality and clarity of William Pfaff's analysis of the motivation of Islamic fundamentalists ("Seeds of War," October 26...
...What Lord Acton actually wrote was "Power tends to corrupt...
...R.I.P., J.F.P...
...He characterizes the first, which shows how the Vatican treated the Jews where it had the power to treat them as it liked (in the Papal States 1814-70) as "a compelling work of scholarship...
...My point was actually different: Kertzer's claim that the teachings and actions of the church "helped make [the Holocaust] possible" is a nebulous innuendo rather than a testable historical assertion...
...Kertzer's work has many strengths that my review praised, but indictments of the leadership of a religious community for complicity in mass murder should be made with a precision I find lacking in The Popes against the Jews...
...Kertzer cites at length the Italian Fascist Roberto Farinacci to substantiate his claim that Jesuit practice was "used by Nazis and Italian Fascists to bolster their own case for the Christian basis of their own anti-Semitic practices...
...Is Saperstein really denying that this underlying mass anti-Semitism was unrelated to the Holocaust...
...What I maintained is that there is no evidence that the fifteenth- and sixteenth-century Spanish "purity of blood" legislation—the foundation of Kertzer's claim that "the church was involved in the development of racial thinking about Jews"—had any influence on the development of nineteenth-century racist doctrine...
...it is a false dichotomy...
...To this question, which strikes me as not at all insignificant, we have still not received an answer...
...Once Jews came to be demonized by the church it became hard to convince people that there was no difference in nature between Jews and Christians...
...He dismisses the second—aimed at showing that the Catholic Church contributed to the rise of modern anti-Semitism beginning in the last two decades of the nineteenth century—as polemical...
...Kertzer states that "this is not a book about the Holocaust...
...It was a sign of the times that an editorial took note of the column's first appearance: "There was a time, not many years ago, when the appearance of a Protestant theologian in the pages of a Catholic journal would have been unthinkable...
...That's why there is no dichotomy between the two...
...You urge the intellectual community, and especially liberals, to reject explanations of the terrorists' motives which seem to justify their murderous actions...
...But your warning against "explanations" (which you put in scorn quotes) seems more general, giving the impression that you scoff at all attempts to understand the root causes of terrorism in the world...
...special laws are needed to protect society, restricting the Jews' rights and isolating them...
...If the Nazis and Fascists could be faulted for anything, he concluded, it was "for not having applied all of their [that is, the Jesuits'] intransigence in our dealings with the Jews...
...Your editorial calls intellectuals to a "sense of responsibility" in this crisis...
...In my distant youth, J.F.P...
...He was a wonderful writer and certainly a light shining in and on the U.S...
...This is significant because a major basis for the church's claim not to have been involved in the rise of modern anti-Semitism is the church's opposition to racial thinking of the sort embodied in Nazi anti-Semitism...
...Roots of terrorism The conclusion of your October 26 editorial ("So far...
...What I did argue is that most of the grounds for hatred of the Jews incorporated into modern anti-Semitism had nothing to do with race...
...The Holocaust is prominent in the book's promotion...
...Yet the truth is that underlying the Holocaust was the widespread, deep hatred of the Jews found in large segments of the European population...
...Jews are rapacious and merciless, seeking at all costs to get their hands on all the world's gold, having no concern for the number of Christians they ruin in the process...
...From the editors: Robert McAfee Brown died on September 4,2001...
...I was, perhaps, too young to get what was available in that classroom but I remember someone asking him, "Why do you always write about priests...
...But is it dismissive to write, as I did, "After this book it will be considerably more difficult to defend the sharp demarcation between the church and modern anti-Semitism that the 'We Remember' statement maintains...
...Many Catholics," Glendon writes, "were surprised, and some were even shocked, at the extent to which the documents of Vatican II, and John XXIII's encyclicals...seemed to reflect a shift from natural law to human rights...
Vol. 128 • November 2001 • No. 20
