The Vatican's statement on the Holocaust
Heschel, Susannah
THE VATICAN statement on the Shoah* addresses two questions: Why didn't Church authorities speak out against the murder of the European Jews? And is there a relationship between Christian...
...Both Italy and Germany are Christian countries and their DISSENT / Summer 1998 13 very different attitudes toward Jews are more likely based on cultural differences than on religious background...
...Under National Socialism, Christianity fell victim to its own canards...
...Later, when the Nazis campaigned against Catholicism in Bavaria, some protests did erupt (for example, over the removal of crucifixes from schoolrooms in 1937), but Nazi actions against the Jews sparked almost no reaction whatsoever...
...Pius XII might have been intimidated before the spring of 1945, but why did he remain silent after Hitler's defeat...
...The Catholic leadership in Germany had been wary of the Weimar democracy and came to see National Socialism as a "We Remember: A Reflection on the Shoah," Vatican Commission for Religious Relations with the Jews, March 1998...
...Yet the hostility of the Nazis toward Christianity, which is undeniable, was itself the product of Christian anti-Jewish teachings...
...Moreover, the historian Jonathan Steinberg has noted striking differences between the responses of Italian and German officers to SS requests to turn over Jews for transport to death camps...
...The Vatican statement simply reiterates the old argument about the necessity of caution, according to which Pope Pius XII was silent because he feared the Nazis would take retaliatory measures against Catholic targets, and even against the Vatican itself...
...And is there a relationship between Christian anti-Judaism and Nazi anti-Semitism...
...Still, this is surely not the last word we will hear from the Vatican on this matter, and as a first step it is to be welcomed...
...The intriguing question is what might have motivated the Vatican to assist those murderers...
...Its anti-Semitism had its roots outside of Christianity and, in pursuing its aims, it did not hesitate to oppose the Church and persecute her members also...
...Christians, they argue, may have hated Jews, but always held the door open to conversion—thus, there was no racism there...
...For centuries, Christian theology had taught the degeneracy of Judaism...
...Christian teachings of contempt for the Jews, especially the charge of deicide, were crucial in creating a receptivity toward Nazi anti-Semitism...
...bulwark against Bolshevism, an attitude shared by Rome...
...Christianity is a factor in the Shoah, but not necessarily the decisive one...
...Progress between Jews and Catholics has not been made by the Vatican statement, nor is it ever likely to occur through the language of diplomacy...
...Nor has it been made clear to non-European Catholics why teaching of contempt for Judaism is a significant theological issue...
...Although German bishops kept their distance from Hitler during his early years, forbidding Catholics to join the National Socialist Party, they quickly changed their minds once he came to power...
...Surely money was not a factor, nor was political gain...
...SUSANNAH HESCHEL is Eli Black Associate Professor of Jewish Studies at Dartmouth College and the author of Abraham Geiger and the Jewish Jesus...
...Disappointment over the Vatican statement on the Shoah reflects the hope that a stronger expression might have been formulated, one that would mirror in courage the 1965 Vatican statement on relations with the Jews, Nostra aetate...
...Once the Nazis defined Christianity as a Jewish, rather than Aryan, religion, its degeneracy, too, was indisputable...
...This defense of the Vatican's silence fails to come to grips with the most damning piece of evidence: how the Vatican behaved at the end of the war...
...Although Pope John Paul II has taken a great interest in recent years in demonstrating philo-Semitic attitudes, he has not set a pattern for Vatican theologians...
...Of course, this argument can't quite account for experiences like that of the medieval Spanish Jews who converted: once they became Christians, they were relegated to second-class status and hunted by the Inquisition for signs of Jewish practices...
...the Germans obeyed promptly, while the Italians simply didn't cooperate...
...Still, although Christianity laid the foundation for Nazi anti-Semitism, it never called for mass extermination of the Jews...
...The most incriminating insight into the Vatican's real attitudes is its effort to secure safe passage out of Europe for former SS officers being hunted by the Allies...
...THAT ARGUMENT is not new...
...Quite a few historians have declared that there was no direct link between Christianity and Nazi anti-Semitism because the Nazis adhered to an anti-Semitism based on racism and nationalism rather than religion...
...No less a figure than Franz Stangl, former commandant at Treblinka, wanted for the murder of six hundred thousand people, was spirited to South America by an underground railroad of Catholic priests, under the guidance of the Vatican's own Bishop Alois Hudal...
...On the second question, the carefully crafted language of the Vatican statement repudiates any linkage between Nazi antiSemitism and Christian anti-Judaism: "The Shoah was the work of a thoroughly modern neo-pagan regime...
...Finally, the Vatican statement stresses that Nazi hostility was expressed toward Christianity as well as toward Jews, an argument also heard from some church historians who like to depict Jews and Christians as common victims of National Socialist persecution...
...Could it be that the Vatican felt a closer bond to the Nazis than the Jews...
...It is still unclear why Pope Pius XII remained silent in the face of his knowledge of the death camps...
Vol. 45 • July 1998 • No. 3
