Are Catholics responsible for the Holocaust?

New York City– Pope Benedict XVI seems to have adopted as a priority of his papacy the continued reaching out to Jews. He has asked for much better understanding between Jews and Catholics. If that is indeed one of his priorities, he will have to do a better job than his predecessors in understanding and acknowledging the responsibility of the Catholic Church, and particularly past popes, for making the Holocaust possible.

In 1987, Pope John Paul II tried to settle this issue once and for all. He directed that a study be made to determine the responsibility of the Church for the slaughter of millions of European Jews during World War II. On March 16, 1998, the Vatican’s Commission for Religious Relations with the Jews came out with the results of its investigation.

In an introduction to the report, entitled "We Remember: A Reflection on the Shoah," the Pope urged the members of the Church to examine their responsibility for past sins. The Pontiff hoped that by providing an accurate account of the past, the report would ensure that horrors such as the Holocaust would never happen again.

A central problem which the Commission saw was that the Holocaust occurred in Christian countries of long-standing. The crucial question was whether there was any link between the destruction of European Jews and the attitudes of Christians towards the Jews down through the centuries. The blame, it must be said, needed to be shared between Catholics and Protestants who were the majority in Germany.

The Commission concluded that the Church had no responsibility for the Holocaust. While it was true that Jews had been discriminated against for centuries and had been the victims of misguided misinterpretations of Christian teachings, these were historical errors which had largely been overcome by the start of the 19th century.

According to the Commission, it was during the 1800’s that extreme nationalism emerged. Jews began to be accused of wielding influence beyond their evidently small numbers. There then began to spread, said the Commission, "an anti-Judaism that was essentially more sociological and political than religious."

A crucial distinction had to be made, writes David L. Kertzer in "The Popes Against the Jews." What rose in the late nineteenth century, and sprouted in the twentieth, was, the Commission argued, "anti-Semitism, based on theories contrary to the constant teaching of the Church." This had to be contrasted with anti-Judaism, long-standing attitudes of mistrust and hostility which, however, had nothing to do with the hatred of Jews that eventually led to the Holocaust.

Kertzer quotes a key passage of the Commission report: "By the end of the 18th century and the beginning of the 19th century, Jews generally had achieved an equal standing with other citizens in most states and a certain number of them held influential positions in society.

"But in that same historical context, notably in the 19th century, a false and exacerbated nationalism took hold. In a climate of eventful social change, Jews were often accused of exercising an influence disproportionate to their numbers. Thus there began to spread in varying degrees throughout most of Europe and anti-Judaism that was essentially more sociological and political than religious."

The Nazis, the Commission seemed to say, appropriated this new social and political form of anti-Judaism which was anathema to the Church. Ideas of racial superiority added by the Nazis were not only contrary to Church doctrine, they were routinely condemned by the Church.

And yet, this distinction in the Vatican Commission report did not seem acceptable to Jews as a whole. Kertzer, among many Jewish authors, contends: "The notion that the Church fostered only negative ‘religious’ views of the Jews, and not negative images of their harmful social, economic, cultural, and political effects–the latter identified with modern anti-Semitism–is clearly belied by the historical record."

Kertzer says, obviously from a Jewish perspective, that as anti-Semitism grew at the end of the 19th century, the Church was a major player in warning people of the "Jewish peril."

"What, after all," Kertzer asks, "were the major tenets of this modern anti-Semitic movement if not such warnings as these: Jews are trying to take over the world; Jews have already spread their voracious tentacles around the nerve centers of Austria, Germany, France, Hungary, Poland, and Italy; Jews are rapacious and merciless, seeking at all costs to get their hands on the world’s gold, having no concern for the number of Christians they ruin in the process; Jews are unpatriotic, a foreign body ever threatening the well-being of the people among whom they live; special laws are needed to protect society, restricting the Jews rights and isolating them. 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." (Italics mine)

These sentiments lie at the core of the issue of why Jewish-Catholic understanding is so difficult. While the gestures of the late Pope John Paul II, his visiting Israel twice and praying at the Wailing Wall, for example, were appreciated, much remains to be done. Even the questions of Pope Pius XII’s troubling silence about the Holocaust, and his historical role in a concordat with Nazi Germany which arguably cleared the way for Hitler’s assumption of power, still linger despite the Vatican’s exoneration of that Pope in the 1998 Vatican Commission report.

The history of Christian-Jewish relations is so inextricably bound up with old, some would say obsolete, notions of the Jews’ alleged unworthiness to live side by side with Christians it really is difficult to see where religious antipathies ended and sociological and political ideas began.

One thing is clear: The distinction drawn by that Vatican Commission between anti-Judaism and anti-Semitism doesn’t work. I don’t think it worked in 1998; it doesn’t work in 2005. Pope Benedict XVI, by keeping the issue of Catholic-Jewish relations on the front burner, seems to acknowledge that the responsibility of the Catholic Church for the slaughter of millions of European Jews during the Holocaust has not been resolved.