Interesting excerpt from a long Catholic article. "Atlantic Blog."
The Catholic Church’s undeniable hostility to National Socialism and racism cannot be used to justify its silence about the persecution of the Jews.
Martin Rhonheimer is a priest of the Opus Dei Prelature and a professor of ethics and political philosophy at Rome’s Pontifical University of the Holy Cross. In the latest issue of First Things, he reviews the difficult issues of the position of the Catholic Church with respect to anti-Semitism, and with respect to Nazism. It is not short (about 12 pages), and it makes for painful and difficult reading, but if the issue matters to you at all, read it.
For decades controversy has raged over the absence of any specific reference to Jews, or to their persecution by the Nazis, in Catholic Church statements between 1933 and 1945. In addition to historically justified questions, we have seen endlessly repeated charges against the Church and Pope Pius XII, some of them merely exaggerated, others (especially in books by John Cornwell and Daniel Jonah Goldhagen) so devoid of historical foundation that they range from the absurd to the outrageous.
A number of popular Catholic apologists, most of them nonhistorians, have answered these attacks in a similarly one-sided manner, by trying to demonstrate that the Church’s record during these years is beyond reproach. Their central focus is the undoubted enmity between National Socialism and the Catholic Church. They point to the Church’s uncompromising condemnation of Nazi racial doctrine, most specifically in the encyclical Mit brennender Sorge (1937), and to the Nazis’ increasing hatred of the Catholic Church, viewed by them as the heir of Judaism because of its roots in the Jewish Old Testament. But this apologetic somehow misses the point. The Church was indeed a powerful bulwark against National Socialism and its insidious racial theories. Was the Church, however, also a bulwark against anti-Semitism?
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We are not called to stand in judgment over the consciences of others—especially when they were subject to pressures we have never experienced. What is essential, however, is that we ascertain the facts and not mistake the Church’s condemnation of racism for a defense of Jews in general.
What is at issue, then, is not the question of guilt or innocence of individuals but recognition that the Catholic Church contributed in some measure to the developments that made the Holocaust possible. The “official Church,” to be sure, was certainly not one of the causes of the Holocaust. And once the trains started rolling toward Auschwitz, the Church was powerless to stop them. Yet neither can the Church boast that it was among those who, from the start, tried to avert Auschwitz by standing up publicly for its future victims. Given the undeniable intellectual and moral quality of the German episcopate of that era and the bishops’ impressive ideological opposition to Nazi persecution of the Church, their failure with regard to the Jews can only be described as tragic.
Well-intentioned Catholic apologists continue to produce reports of Church condemnations of Nazism and racism. But these do not really answer the Church’s critics. The real problem is not the Church’s relationship to National Socialism and racism, but the Church’s relationship to the Jews. Here we need what the Church today urges: a “purification of memory and conscience.” The Catholic Church’s undeniable hostility to National Socialism and racism cannot be used to justify its silence about the persecution of the Jews. It is one thing to explain this silence historically and make it understandable. It is quite another to use such explanations for apologetic purposes.
Christians and Jews belong together. They are both part of the one, though still divided, Israel. This is why Pope John Paul II has called Jews, in exemplary fashion, our “elder brothers.” Brotherhood includes, however, the ability to speak openly about past failures and shortcomings. This is true, of course, for both sides. But in view of all that Christians have done to Jews in history, it is Christians who should take the lead in the purification of memory and conscience.
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