The Vatican's statement on the Holocaust
Steinfels, Margaret O'Brien
0N MARCH 16, the Vatican Commission for Religious Relations with the Jews released a long-awaited statement, "We Remember: A Reflection on the Shoah," examining the Catholic Church and the...
...Is Pius on trial a stand-in for God on trial...
...That kind of examination is, thank God, well underway in Catholicism...
...The rest assumes that the Vatican and Pius XII did the best they could...
...Personifying in Pius the question of Christianity's and the Catholic Church's complicity in making the death camps possible both obscures and obstructs what should be a searching examination of centuries of toxic teaching...
...Well, not exactly the the Catholic church, as Lenny Bruce used to say...
...But repentance, in the end, cannot be compelled...
...Or even, given the unique horror of the Holocaust, can it be carried out without somehow domesticating an evil that must radically subvert all of our ideas about God, morality, and the intelligibility of life...
...it is less easy to understand the efforts to demonize him...
...The bishops of Germany and France have also uttered their mea culpas...
...For the Vatican statement very carefully distanced "the church as such," from the sins of her sons and daughters...
...A veteran participant in the Jewish-Christian dialogue, Judith Banki recalls that similar critical reactions greeted earlier documents, including Vatican Ifs Nostra aetate...
...An array of critics, Jewish and Catholic, has dissected these and other weaknesses in the document (see, Commonweal's editorial "Misremembered," April 10, 1998), while acknowledging its positive points: its clear statement that the Shoah took place, that hostility to Jews had religious roots, and that remembrance of the part Catholics played is necessary to repentance...
...Amid outright crimes, inaction and indifference, and swamps of moral ambiguity in which good people floundered, Pius possibly saved as many Jewish lives as anyone else...
...One hopes so...
...Pius XII, pope during World War II and the Vatican's representative to Germany during the 1930s, has been lighted upon as the man who did too little, said too little, and, above all, who failed to denounce Nazi actions loudly and clearly (even though, then as now, there was considerable evidence that such actions would have increased rather than checked the killings...
...commonwealmagazine.com . DISSENT / Summer 1998 15...
...0N MARCH 16, the Vatican Commission for Religious Relations with the Jews released a long-awaited statement, "We Remember: A Reflection on the Shoah," examining the Catholic Church and the Holocaust...
...there are both doctrinal and organizational limits to his power, and many of the latter lie in the curial offices meant to serve him, in the very offices that wrote and vetted "We Remember...
...The statement also defined antiSemitism as a modern and pagan phenomenon distinct from anti-Judaism—Christian theological objections to Judaism that go back to the first century...
...It is not in the power of popes or presidents to apologize unless there is a genuine sense that they speak for a repentant people...
...IT IS EASY to understand demands that these questions about Pius be taken up by church officials...
...But how should this moral reckoning be carried out...
...State Department: "We forgive you for killing our brothers and sisters, for complicity, for ignoring their plight, for not doing enough to rescue them...
...We Remember," with all the defensive cuts and stitches of a committee report, illustrates the problem...
...For what, exactly, should the church apologize...
...And we must ask as well, "How can anyone apologize for sins committed by others...
...He has been forthright in seeking reconciliation with Jews and has set the church on a journey of repentance leading up to the millennium...
...Is a bill of particulars to be drawn up and agreed upon...
...How does an institution or a government truly apologize...
...veteran lives who believes it saved his life...
...Who in the Jewish community can say to the German or French governments, the Catholic Church, or the U.S...
...Although herself critical of "We Remember," Banki expects it, too, will make a contribution to that dialogue...
...The distinction has some merit, but a church that once prayed for the conversion of "the perfidious Jews" can hardly defend the notion that a neat divide separates anti-Judaism from the development of antiSemitism...
...Only its opening and closing paragraphs convey a spirit of heartfelt regret...
...Yet complex questions intrude here about institutional apologies and collective responsibility (as they have elsewhere: over slavery, the dropping of the atomic bomb, the rape of Nanking, the war in Vietnam...
...That is why it is unlikely that a U.S...
...By failing to acknowledge these questions surrounding Pius's decisions, "We Remember" reinforces the unfortunate tendency to make him the focal point of the church's examination of conscience...
...yes, Catholics have sinned, but the Catholic Church is sinless...
...And when apologies are offered, who's in charge of forgiving— or not...
...Yes, the Jewish community can receive expressions of remorse and sorrow...
...It must arise from a sincere and truthful heart...
...This theological distinction is lost on most non-Catholics, but it is hotly contested territory within the church...
...Or, at least in some circles, do we not hear an echo of "Ecrasez l'infame...
...Stereotypes to the contrary, the pope is not a divine-right monarch...
...MARGARET O'BRIEN STEINFELS IS the editor of Commonweal...
...The editorial "Misremembered" and Judith Banki's article "Catholics and Jews" can be found on Commonweal's Web site: www...
...it can receive compensation and take note of acts of repentance, but forgive sins committed against others...
...Nonetheless, she concludes, these statements ultimately have had "powerful and positive consequences" in fostering greatly improved relations between Jews and Catholics (Commonweal, April 24, 1998...
...Yet no institutional leader is ever free of historical and bureaucratic memory or can ignore the resistance of those who genuinely believe no wrongs were committed...
...Still, hope is held out that Pope John Paul II might do more...
...An institutional apology is mere surface, even hypocrisy, unless in some real sense an entire people comes to an understanding of where and how they have wronged others...
...So perhaps this statement is just another blip on a trajectory that continues toward greater understanding between Jews and Catholics...
...Collective apologies are complicated...
...We may agree that such travesties cry out for repentance and 14 DISSENT / Summer 1998 reconciliation, for apologies and pleas for forgiveness...
...Well, presumably the president of the United States, the prime minister of Japan, or the pope in the case of the Vatican is an appropriate authority...
...president will apologize for the dropping of the atomic bomb as long as one U.S...
...Who is to make a collective apology on behalf of a government or institution...
Vol. 45 • July 1998 • No. 3
