mose
2009-12-20 10:29:59 UTC
"***@yahoo.com" <***@yahoo.com> wrote in message news:f84063fd-8510-4c6c-8841-***@a39g2000pre.googlegroups.com...
November 2003
The Holocaust: What Was Not Said
Martin Rhonheimer
LETS BARE IT ALL WITH THE JEWS PHILOSOPHY?
SPITTING ON CHRISTIANS
http://www.jpost.com/servlet/Satellite?cid=1259231077244&pagename=JPArticle/ShowFull
http://www.wvwnews.net/story.php?id=8225
AD AS THE CATHOLIC CHURCH THE ATTACKS BY JEWS OF ALL RANKS.
SARAH BERNHADT
http://theaterjblogs.wordpress.com/2008/09/13/first-footage-of-sandra-live-on-stage-at-theater-j/
AND IF YOU DO NOT KNOW YOU ARE IN A WAR SOON CHRISTIANS WILL NOT HAVE A
PRESENCE IN JERISALEM.
Christians http://uk.reuters.com/article/idUKLH76404
ABOUD, West Bank, May 18 (Reuters) - Israel's land barrier is slowly
destroying the fabric of this Palestinian village of Christians and Muslims
in the West Bank, setting a prime example of why the United States wants
settlements to stop.
http://www.wrmea.com/archives/July_2006/0607020.html
Palestinian priests join a Dec. 16, 2006 protest against Israel's
construction of its annexation wall in the West Bank village of Aboud (AFP
Photo/Abbas Momani).
Retired army officers at the Economic Cooperation Foundation, a Tel Aviv
think tank, believe the wall creates a climate of hatred. "I think it may be
producing another generation of terrorists," Brig. Gen. Ilan Paz told me.
That is even worse than driving out the Holy Land's remaining Christians.
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.
SEEING THE ONLY THING THE CHURCH COULD DO WAS LOOK OUT FOR THE CATHOLICS
AND THE CATHOLIC CHURCH AND NOT BE MISLED BY JEWISH STORIES OF CAMPS AND
GASSINGS THAT DID NOT EXIST, IN THE INTERESTS OF TRUTH AND UPHOLDING OF
CATHOLIC SHRISTIAN STANDARDS ONE WOULD EXPECT A NEGATIVE VIEW OF THE
FRAUDELENT JEWISH ATTEMPT TO HI JACK PROMINENCE IN WW2 BY EXAGERATION OF
CONDITIONS AND NUMBERS.
REMEMBER THAT WHEN EXAMINED WITH TRUTH IN MIND THE FORENSICS SHOW JEWS UP
FOR HORRENDOUS LIARS WHICH THE CHURCH SHOULD NOT BE SUPPORTING THEIR LIES
FOR REPARATIONS.
IN FACT THE CHURCH SHOULD MAKE ITSELF FAMILIAR WITH THE BELIEFS OF JUDAISM
BEFORE TRYING TO DEAL WITH ITS MEMBERS.
IT IS CLEARLY NOT , AS CHIST POINTED OUT, BASED ON GOD IF IT IS GUIDED BY
THE TALMUD WHICH IS A LAW WRITTEN BY RABBIS.
CHECK THE Talmud SOMETHING I THOUGHT WOULD HAVE BEEN COMPULSORY IN A
CATHOLIC SEMINARY.
http://video.google.ca/videoplay?docid=-6657600254881054584&hl=en
DONT JUST HAVE TO TAKE TED'S WORD
http://www.revisionisthistory.org/talmudtruth.html
http://www.sacred-texts.com/jud/talmud.htm
http://www.iahushua.com/JQ/talmud.html
CHECK THE WHOLE HOLOHOAXING BUNCH.
http://images.google.co.id/images?hl=id&um=1&sa=1&q=%2251+documents%22&btnG=Telusuri+gambar&aq=f&oq=&start=0
The Alternative Tour of Auschwitz: An Independent Investigation of the
http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=4138523842550891901#0h53m09s
http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=-8424408632716421689
Rassinier seems to wrap it up. NOT A DENIER A MAN IN THE CAMPS AS A
PRISONER FOR HELPING JEWS, BUT ABSOLUTELY ANNOYED BY THE LIES THE JEWS WERE
TELLING.
http://www.ihr.org/books/rassinier/debunking1-0.html
http://www.ihr.org/books/hoggan/A4.html
http://www.fpp.co.uk/bookchapters/articles/HowWarsBegin.html
http://www.anti-rev.org/textes/VidalNaquet92a/part-6.html
http://www.alibris.com/search/books/author/Paul_Rassinier
(http://www.amazon.com/Perpetual-Peace-Harry-Elmer-Barnes/dp/0939484013
http://www.courts.fsnet.co.uk/harryelmerbarnes.htm
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?
In addressing this question, I am conscious of a double loyalty. I am
a Catholic priest-but I come from a family that is three-quarters
Jewish. I love my Church. I believe in the truth that the Church
proclaims. I proclaim that truth myself. Yet I also have an emotional
bond to Judaism, and to my Jewish relatives. I am pained by unfair
Jewish attacks on the Catholic Church. But I am also pained by a one-
sided Catholic apologetic that minimizes the injustice done by
Christians to Jews in history, or seeks to relegate it to oblivion. I
am especially aware of the Jewish sensitivity to topics that Catholics
often pass over either too quickly or in silence. Even if some of the
Church's present-day critics are clearly more interested in promoting
their own careers or ideological agendas than in seeking the truth,
some of the blame for their "success" clearly rests on Catholic
shoulders.
Even when we have taken full account of the enmity between the
Catholic Church and National Socialism, the Church's "silence"-the
astonishing fact that no Church statement about Nazism ever mentioned
Jews explicitly or defended them-cries out for explanation. Also in
need of explanation is the lack of any fundamental Church protest
against the Nuremberg and Italian racial laws. Even after the November
1938 pogrom against the Jews, the only person to speak out was the
Berlin cathedral provost Bernard Lichtenberg (since canonized), whose
protest ultimately cost him his life. A Catholic apologetic that seeks
to cover over this record by constant repetition of other facts,
however undeniable they may be, plays into the hands of those who
unfairly criticize the Church.
Prominent Catholic historians mostly offer a different apologetic.
Before and even after 1937, they argue, there was no need for Church
statements to mention Jews specifically, to defend them, or to issue
an explicit condemnation of anti-Semitism: the Roman Holy Office had
already condemned anti-Semitism on March 25, 1928. Thereafter (the
argument goes) anti-Semitism, defined in the 1928 decree as "hatred of
the people once called by God," was inadmissible for Catholics. Some
historians also cite an alleged "condemnation of anti-Semitism" from
1916.
We are told that the Church's condemnation of racism and the Nazi
ideology of the state, expressed most clearly in Mit brennender Sorge,
and in the "Syllabus against Racism" of 1938 (a Vatican decree
directing Catholic universities throughout the world to counter racist
theories), was clear to everyone. Equally clear, according to this
argument, was the Church's defense of the Jews and its condemnation of
their persecutors. The same is sometimes claimed also for Pius XII's
first encyclical, Summi Pontificatus, issued in October 1939.
This defense of the Church, however, fails to account for a number of
important facts. It ignores the existence of a specifically modern
anti-Semitism, shared in varying degrees by Catholics. Nourished by
traditional Christian anti-Judaism, it had social, political, and
economic aspects as well. In its Catholic form it was rooted in the
Church's political and social antimodernism, especially its opposition
to liberalism and all its works. For German Catholics this resulted in
openness to volkisch and racist ideas that blurred the boundaries with
Nazi ideology. Finally, there was the Catholic openness to an
authoritarian state, which allowed people to think, at the start of
Hitler's rule, that the Nazi state might be an acceptable alternative
to liberal democracy and a bulwark against the looming threat of
Bolshevism.
It was thus possible in 1933, and even as late as 1937, for a Catholic
to reject Nazi racial doctrine yet remain an anti-Semite and a
supporter of the Nazi regime. Indeed, historical research has shown
that after 1933 parts of the Catholic press in Germany, and even more
so in Austria, were increasingly hostile to Jews-and this despite
their consistent rejection of Nazi racial doctrine. As a "Christian
anti-Semite" and patriotic German, a Catholic could approve of the
Nazis' treatment of the Jews, or at least show understanding for it.
Take, for example, an article on "The Jewish Question," published in
the Catholic Augsburger Postzeitung on March 31, 1933, which
incorporated a statement of the (Catholic) Bavarian People's Party.
Deploring "the increasing 'judaizing' (Verjudung) of our intellectual,
cultural, and scholarly life in Germany," the article asserted that
"there is a certain kind of Jewish intellectualism which, despite its
high intelligence, mixes with the German element in a destructive and
baneful way. A people striving for national and intellectual renewal
is reacting in a healthy manner when it opposes this admixture and
demands that the German mind be thoroughly cleansed of Jewish
influences."
Such statements require us to reconsider the Church's public
declarations about the Nazi concept of the state and racism in the
encyclical Mit brennender Sorge. Not only were Church declarations
belated. They were also inadequate to counter the passivity and
widespread indifference to the fate of Jews caused by this kind of
Christian anti-Judaism and anti-Semitism, especially when it was
combined with newly awakened national pride. The encyclical, then,
came far too late to be of any help to Jews.
In reality, however, the Church's statements were never really
designed to help the Jews. The "Catholic apologetic" described above
is something developed after the fact and has no roots in the
historical record. Indeed, given the dominant view of the Jews in the
Nazi period, it would have been astonishing if the Church had mounted
the barricades in their defense. As we shall see, the failure of
Church statements about Nazism and racism ever to mention the Jews
specifically (save in negative ways) corresponds to an inner logic
that is historically understandable-but no less disturbing to us
today.
By the beginning of the twentieth century Christian anti-Judaism,
traditional for centuries, had attained virtual canonical status. In
association with modern racial doctrines, and influenced by political
and economic considerations, it had developed in many instances into a
Church-promoted anti-Semitism, which in the years following the First
World War grew in scope and intensity. An example that can stand for
many others is the article on "Jews" in the Lexikon für Theologie und
Kirche, published in 1933 under the editorship of Bishop Michael
Buchberger of Regensburg. There we read: "Since their emancipation the
Jews have achieved political and social power. They soon attained
leading positions in the capitalist system and exploited their power
in ways which were often ruthless. In addition there is the bad
influence of many Jewish writers who do not respect the Christian
religion. Especially important is the dominance of Jews in business,
in the press, often in politics. Moreover, their great influence in
the theater permits Jews with revolutionary and libertine ideas to
undermine religious sentiment and the national character. Combined
with the concept of race, this has produced in recent years a reaction
in the form of increased anti-Semitism. The accession to power of the
National Socialists has brought about a widespread exclusion of Jews
from public and cultural life." (Without further discussion of this
exclusion, the article concludes by mentioning the prohibition of
kosher butchers!)
In the first volume of the same lexicon, published in 1930, the well-
known article on "Anti-Semitism" by the German Jesuit Gustav Gundlach
had drawn a distinction between a volkisch anti-Semitism promoted for
strictly racist motives (which was to be rejected), and an anti-
Semitism promoted for general political, economic, and cultural
reasons that Christians might accept. As examples of the latter
Gundlach cited two Austrian politicians, Karl Lueger and Georg von
Schoenerer, prominent and outspoken anti-Semites who had strongly
influenced Hitler during his years in Vienna. It is noteworthy that in
the same article Gundlach rejected as unjust "laws which single out
Jews simply because they are Jews," while not hesitating to call
"global plutocracy and Bolshevism" forces that manifest "dark aspects
of the Jewish soul expelled from its homeland" and which are
"destructive of human society."
But what about the supposed "condemnation of anti-Semitism" by the
Vatican in 1916? The facts are these. On February 9, 1916, Cardinal
Secretary of State Pietro Gasparri, acting at the behest of Pope
Benedict XV, wrote a letter to the American Jewish Committee in New
York, responding to a letter from the Committee to the Pope on
December 30, 1915. The latter asked the Pope to exert his supreme
moral authority to halt mistreatment of Jews throughout the world-in
particular the pogroms then raging on the Russian front (in Polish
Galicia). The letter from New York was accompanied by a lengthy
memorandum. The papal response was a courteous rejection of the
request, on the grounds that the Pope had no way of verifying the
facts alleged in the memorandum. The papal letter assured his Jewish
correspondents, however, that according to Christian principles Jews
were included in the universal law of love according to which all men
are brothers. The Pope wrote also that he never ceased "to inculcate
among individuals, as well as among peoples, the observance of the
principles of the natural law. . . . This law must be observed and
respected in the case of the children of Israel, as well as of all
others, because it would not be conformable to justice or to religion
itself to derogate from it solely on account of divergence of
religious confessions." This was merely a restatement of the Church's
traditional position.
The letter was immediately published in La Civiltà Cattolica and in
the London Tablet. The New York Times reported it under the headline:
"Papal Bull Urges Equality for Jews." That was an exaggeration. The
document was a private letter, not a papal bull. And it said nothing
about equality in civil rights. Nor did the letter contain any
rejection of social, political, or legal restrictions on Jews (as long
as such restrictions did not violate natural law and the law of love)
aimed at limiting "harmful" Jewish influences on society. It is
reasonable to assume that those who were responsible for the pogroms
which the American Jewish Committee had asked the Pope to halt never
learned of the papal letter. We must remember: Europe was at war. The
Holy See was determined to have a voice in future peace negotiations
and hence wanted to preserve strict neutrality. The situation had
certain analogies to later events, especially when we recall that it
was precisely at this time that Eugenio Pacelli-later Pope Pius XII-
was learning the craft of papal diplomacy.
There are similar problems with the 1928 condemnation of anti-Semitism-
this one public and official-that is frequently cited in Catholic
apologetics. It came in a decree of the Holy Office suppressing "The
Friends of Israel," an organization that sought to overcome
traditional Christian anti-Judaism in theology and liturgy, and that
included a number of priests, bishops, and cardinals among its
members. The 1928 decree stated that the organization's goal could not
be reconciled with the Church's traditional faith. The condemnation of
anti-Semitism was incidental, and it was defined very narrowly: as
"hatred" (and only that) against "the people once called by God." That
we read this statement today, like that of 1916-as well as others
discussed below-as condemnations of anti-Semitism in any form is an
indication of the distance we have traveled since the Second Vatican
Council, and especially during the pontificate of Pope John Paul II.
In a day when the Catholic Church not only tolerated but actively
promoted the view that Jews were a harmful influence on society, such
statements had a very different-much more limited-significance from
what we assume today. They were simply injunctions not to hate,
persecute, kill, or unjustly expropriate Jews.
This is evident in the fact that the 1928 decree left the Church's
traditional anti-Judaism untouched; indeed, the same document
explicitly confirmed it. This tradition, based on patristic biblical
exegesis, declared that the Jews were the people "once called by God,"
but now cursed and guilty of Christ's death; condemned, moreover, to
wander the earth without a homeland; and as such witnesses to the
truth of Christianity. To be sure, Jews must not be persecuted. But
society, and Christians especially, must also be protected from the
Jews' harmful influence in culture and education.
The Christian view at that time was that the only solution to the
"Jewish question" was conversion to Christianity. Hence racial anti-
Semitism was unacceptable for Catholics: a baptized Jew ceased to be a
Jew. Racism was an attack on the essence of Christianity, which had
its roots in the Old Testament, and which embraced all people in the
world. Opposition to racial anti-Semitism was thus a defense of
Christians' self-understanding and a challenge to faithfulness.
Precisely for these reasons it was a necessary part of the Church's
strategy for survival in the face of the ideological pressures exerted
by a totalitarian dictatorship. As such it was a clear rejection of
the Nazis' doctrine of a master race, which would end by bringing
death to "non-Aryans." In no way, however, did this imply rejection of
"moderate" anti-Semitism, which included a certain understanding for
volkisch policies and corresponding limits on the "judaizing" of
society.
This comes out clearly in the semi-official commentary on the 1928
decree of the Holy Office in the very influential Jesuit journal La
Civiltà Cattolica. Entitled "The Jewish Danger and the 'Friends of
Israel,'" it was approved (like all the articles in that journal) by
the Vatican Secretariat of State. Moreover, it was in full accord, as
we now know, with the view of the Jews formed by Monsignor Achille
Ratti-reigning in 1928 as Pope Pius XI-during his years as papal
emissary and Nuncio in Poland (1918-1921). According to the author
(the editor, Father Enrico Rosa, S.J.), the decree condemned anti-
Semitism "only in its anti-Christian form and mentality," which was
"morally and religiously unjust." The Holy Office rejected "excessive"
and "extreme" anti-Semitism, the article said, but not anti-Semitism
based on a clear recognition of the danger posed to society by Jews,
as a consequence of their emancipation and of their connection with
liberalism, socialism, and Bolshevism. "Jews are a danger to the whole
world because of their pernicious infiltration, their hidden
influence, and their resulting disproportionate power which violates
both reason and the common good." This danger, the article said, was
especially acute for people in Christian countries.
As late as 1936 the same journal wrote about the need to render the
Jews "incapable of inflicting harm," always with the proviso that this
must "of course be done without any persecution." The ideal remained
the historic ghetto. Only in 1938 did La Civiltà Cattolica moderate
its tone. By that time, however, the boundary between persecution,
discrimination, and "other measures" against the "judaizing" of
society had been blurred.
As the Nazi regime's campaign against the Church intensified, it
became increasingly clear that Catholic opposition to racism had more
to do with defending the Church than with any fundamental rejection of
anti-Semitism or of hostility to Jews. True, the Church was always
nonconformist because of its opposition to totalitarianism. But
because the Nazis viewed Christianity as the heir of Judaism, the
Church, especially in Germany, had to defend itself against the
combination of hatred for Jews and Christians alike. The more the
Church devoted itself to this task, the more it was forced to
distinguish between Old Testament and post-Christian Jewry, with the
inevitable result that contemporary Jews were left to look after
themselves.
This was already clear in Michael Cardinal von Faulhaber's 1933 Advent
sermons, in which he defended the Old Testament as the foundation of
Christianity. The Munich archbishop had long been known as a friend of
the Jews. In order to prevent his sermons from being exploited for
political purposes, however, he had his secretary write to the Jewish
World Congress to say that they did not deal with the present-day
Jewish question; the sermons were only a defense of the Old Testament
and of the "children of Israel" in Old Testament times. It is clear
that Faulhaber's steadfast opposition to Nazi racial theories was
never intended as a defense of post-Christian Jewry or of his Jewish
fellow citizens against their persecutors.
The clearest example of this attitude was the pastoral letter of the
Austrian Bishop Johannes Gföllner of Linz, issued on January 21, 1933,
which branded as "radically un-Christian" all "contempt, hatred, and
persecution of the Jewish people." No less irreconcilable with "the
position of the Church" was "the rejection of the Holy Scriptures of
the Old Testament on racial grounds." "Nazi racial views," Gföllner
explained, were "regression into the worst kind of paganism . . .
completely irreconcilable with Christianity, and must therefore be
totally rejected." At the same time, however, he didn't hesitate to
claim that many "irreligious Jews had a very damaging influence in
almost all areas of contemporary cultural life." This influence was
also visible in business and trade, in the law, and in medicine.
Indeed, "many of our social and political upheavals are permeated by
materialistic and liberal principles stemming primarily from Jews.
Every committed Christian has not only the right but the conscientious
duty to fight and overcome the pernicious influence of such decadent
Judaism."
Bishop Gföllner, who was one of the sharpest opponents of National
Socialism in the Austrian episcopate, was speaking in the tradition of
Christian Socialism represented by Karl Lueger (mentioned above).
Gföllner's words are a clear example of the tranquil coexistence of
Catholic anti-racism in the service of the Church and a Christian anti-
Semitism nourished by traditional anti-Judaism that made Jews the
scapegoats for modern trends that opposed the Church. In this view,
the Jews were held responsible for everything opposed to Christianity
in politics and society-and Christians had a duty to distinguish
between "good" and "bad" Jews, the latter being identified as
irreligious and fully assimilated Jews.
Such an outlook made it difficult for Catholics to develop any clear
and fundamental opposition to the Nazis' Jewish policy. The constantly
repeated rejection of "hatred" and "persecution" of Jews, with the
insistence that the "Jewish question" could be solved only in a
framework of "justice and charity," should not blind us to the fact
that Church spokesmen fundamentally approved of measures to limit
Jewish influence. This helps explain why, at least at first, Catholics
saw little reason to defend Jews. Indeed, any attempt to do so would
have caused astonishment. It also explains why Catholics were unable
to react clearly to Nazi racial policy until the opportunity to
influence events had long passed. The argument that, for example,
protests against the November 1938 pogrom would have been useless can
be turned against the Church. For it was the Church's own attitude
toward the Jews that had made it difficult, if not impossible, to
mobilize Christian consciences against Nazi anti-Semitism at an
earlier stage, when protests might have been effective.
It is of course true that the Catholic Church was itself exposed to
brutal persecution. Catholics of that time felt that they had quite
enough to do defending their own interests. The tragedy is that due to
Church-generated anti-Semitism and anti-Judaism, and also because of
the Church's initial sympathy for a government that fought against
liberalism and communism, the Church itself had done much to
legitimize the very regime that persecuted it.
The "Catholic position" described above certainly did not entail any
approval of Nazi anti-Semitism. Indeed, Nazi ideology and methods were
totally incompatible with the Catholic position. This comes out
clearly, to cite one example, in a letter written by Cardinal
Faulhaber on April 8, 1933 (a week after the Nazi-instigated boycott
of Jews), to Alois Wurm. A Regensburg priest, Wurm had written the
Cardinal protesting that following the proclamation of the boycott
"not a single Catholic paper has had the courage to proclaim the
teaching of the catechism, that no one may be hated or persecuted-
certainly not on racial grounds. Many people see this as a Catholic
failure." Wurm pleaded for a clear protest by the bishops against Nazi
policy.
What the Nazis were doing to the Jews, Faulhaber wrote in his reply to
Wurm, was "so un-Christian that not only every priest but every
Christian must protest." At the moment, however, Church leaders had
more important matters to deal with. "The preservation of our schools
and Catholic organizations and the question of compulsory
sterilization [of the mentally ill] are more important matters for
Christianity in our country-especially when we consider that the Jews,
as we have already seen in some recent instances, are quite able to
look after themselves. We must not give the government an opportunity
to turn the campaign against the Jews into a campaign against
Jesuits." Faulhaber added that he was "astonished" by repeated
questions as to "why the Church is doing nothing about the persecution
of Jews. When Catholics or their bishops are persecuted we hear not a
peep. That is and remains the mystery of the passion."
Faulhaber's words suggest that he was unable to see that the problem
was not just the Nazis' unjust and brutal methods, but their entire
anti-Jewish policy of discrimination and marginalization. He was also
blind to the immensity of the danger threatening the Jews, which would
soon render them defenseless. And at the same time, Church leaders
were hoping they could achieve an understanding with the regime
regarding the "more important matters" mentioned in Faulhaber's letter
to Wurm. (The Munich Archbishop still entertained this hope after the
appearance of Mit brennender Sorge in 1937.) Wurm's reference to the
racist and un-Christian nature of the Nazis' persecution of Jews
obviously did not prevent the Cardinal from being "astonished" by the
many questions he was receiving as to "why the Church was doing
nothing about the persecution."
Another person who urged Faulhaber to act publicly in defense of the
Jews was the Dominican student chaplain in Berlin, and a leader of the
German Peace League, Fr. Franziskus Stratmann. In a lengthy letter to
Faulhaber of April 10, 1933, Stratmann branded Nazi racism as heresy:
"But no one makes any effective protest against this indescribable
German and Christian disgrace. Even priests find their anti-Semitic
instincts appeased by this disgraceful behavior. . . . We know that
exceptional courage is required today to bear witness to the truth.
But we know too that only through such witness can humanity and
Christianity be saved. True Christianity is dying of opportunism."
There is no record of a reply to Stratmann from Faulhaber. Heinz
Hürten writes in his standard work, Deutsche Katholiken, 1918-1945:
"Stratmann was unable to move Faulhaber from the position he had
adopted. The Cardinal's concern remained baptized Jews, members of his
own Church, his own flock."
It is reasonable to assume that this stance of paralysis and passivity
was strengthened by the "official" Catholic understanding of Judaism.
An example can be found in an article published in 1933 in the
Catholic paper Junge Front. Written by the editor, Johannes Maaßen, it
stated: "The cry of the people who crucified Christ, Son of the
eternal God, 'His blood be on us and on our children,' echoes down the
centuries and brings upon the Jewish community ever new human
suffering." The article said that no one may increase this suffering.
But it also said nothing about any duty to alleviate the suffering or
to protest against it. An article in a subsequent issue of the same
paper-probably written by Karl Thieme-said that the injustice that the
Jews were experiencing had nothing to do with their race. However, the
Nazis' racist anti-Semitism confirmed "the unique status conferred on
the Jews in the Old Testament. From the standpoint of sacred history
their situation must be viewed as a punishment." No "political and
social solution" for the Jews could ever "replace redemption by Jesus
Christ." The solution of the "Jewish question" was their "fulfilment":
the Jews' conversion. "In the confusion of our time it is becoming
ever clearer that this fulfilment entails confession of Christ and of
the Father," Thieme wrote.
Such arguments no doubt soothed Christian consciences. They made
Christians spectators, witnesses to a divine-human drama of guilt and
expiation, of punishment and final conversion. As late as 1941
Archbishop Conrad Gröber of Freiburg, who was even then supporting
attempts to help persecuted Jews, stated in a pastoral letter that the
sad lot of the Jews was the result of the curse that they had called
down upon themselves when they murdered Christ. Anton Rauscher is
correct when he writes that Catholic theology of that time reflected
"a view of the Jews which provoked anti-Semitism on the one hand,
while on the other undermining the ability to oppose it." And the
historian Konrad Repgen is also correct when he says that "people
thought differently at that time." But this fact, which is precisely
the problem, and which distresses us today, should not be used to
excuse past Catholic failure.
The way Catholics of that time viewed Jews in no way diminishes the
fact that many Catholics-priests, religious, laity, and above all Pius
XII-helped a great many Jews, sometimes at the risk of the rescuers'
lives. There was little hatred or personal animosity to Jews as
individuals. Their steadily increasing misery, culminating finally in
their deportation to an unknown fate, aroused indignation or at least
pity. This was especially true in Holland and France, where some
bishops spoke out clearly against the deportations.
Sympathy for the increasing distress and misery of the Jews certainly
seems the best explanation for the words of Pius XI to Belgian
pilgrims in September 1938, which are constantly cited for apologetic
purposes. With tears in his eyes the aged and ailing Pope cried out
spontaneously: "Anti-Semitism is inadmissible. Spiritually we are all
Semites." The words were a reference to liturgical texts in the Missal
that the Belgian pilgrims had just presented: the phrase in the
Eucharistic Canon, after the narrative of institution, about the
"offering of Abel, Abraham, and Melchizedek." The Pope's words were
never officially published; they were reported later in some Belgian
papers. As David Kertzer writes, the words were "heartfelt and
sincere, the cry of a man who saw a dark shadow growing ever darker
across Europe."
In any event, the Pope's words remained without influence on official
Church policy. They were a one-time emotional outburst of a large-
hearted and impulsive man who counted Jews among his personal friends.
Despite the fact that Italian racial laws had been issued shortly
before this address, Pius XI did not mention them. Nor is this really
surprising. For immediately before the famous words, he declared: "We
recognize the right of all people to defend themselves, to take
measures against all who threaten their legitimate interests." Only
then did he say: "But anti-Semitism is inadmissible-spiritually we are
all Semites." It is reasonable to understand the words as meaning:
legitimate defense against undue Jewish influence, Yes; "anti-
Semitism," hatred of the Jews as a people, No.
Had the Church really wanted to mount effective opposition to the fate
that awaited the Jews, it would have had to condemn-from the very start
-not only racism but anti-Semitism in any form, including the social
anti-Semitism espoused by not a few churchmen. This the Church never
did: not in 1933, not in 1937, nor in 1938 or 1939. It is of course
true that there was no direct road from Christian anti-Judaism and
anti-Semitism to Auschwitz. For Christians the solution to the "Jewish
question" was conversion, not liquidation (although the history of
Christian anti-Judaism also features examples of the latter). But
racism alone did not lead to Auschwitz, either. Something more was
needed: hatred of Jews. Rooted in large part in Christian tradition,
it was this hatred that made modern anti-Semitism possible.
It is a truism to say that racism devoid of hatred for the Jews would
not have endangered them. Even though the racist anti-Semitism of the
Nazis and Christian anti-Judaism or Christian anti-Semitism differ
fundamentally and are even mutually incompatible, the precondition
that made the Nazis' racial anti-Semitism (which led in turn to
Auschwitz) even conceivable was the heritage of traditional anti-
Judaism and anti-Semitism. Together they created what Steven Theodore
Katz, Director of the Center for Judaic Studies at the University of
Boston, has called the "terrifying otherness" of the Jews, thus
stigmatizing and demonizing them. Traditional Christian anti-Judaism
was the breeding ground for what Jules Isaac has called "the teaching
of contempt." Without this contempt modern racism would never have
been able to forge its alliance with enmity toward Jews and anti-
Semitism. At a time when no one could even have imagined Hitler's
"final solution" (not even the bureaucrats who would later carry it
out), the only thing that could have derailed the trains to Auschwitz-
if indeed that was ever possible-was unmistakable condemnation of anti-
Semitism in any form.
It is true that the Church's condemnation of racism was an implicit
rejection of the policy that led to the Holocaust. Seen, however,
against the background of Christian and official Church attitudes
towards the Jews, this was insufficient to prevent the inexorable
course of events. That would have required a mobilization of Christian
consciences by Protestants as well as Catholics. Germany was, after
all, a predominantly Protestant country. On that side of the
confessional divide, however, things were no better for the Jews: in
fact they were worse. Most of the official Protestant Church failed.
In growing measure German Protestants were receptive to the Nazis'
racist and volkisch ideology and to their myth of the German people's
rebirth. Even the "Confessing Church" (the most anti-Nazi group in
German Protestantism) continued, like the Catholic Church, to uphold
traditional Christian anti-Judaism, and defended only baptized Jews.
Later episcopal protests against the deportation of Jews in Holland
and France cannot conceal the fact, noted by the respected Italian
historian Giovanni Miccoli, that up to then not a single bishop
anywhere had said a word about discrimination against non-baptized
Jews. During the 1930s no one ever imagined that the culmination of
the persecution of Jews would be their systematic liquidation. Hence
people were unable to perceive the murderous danger that lurked behind
the Nazis' racist theories (and, later on, the mass deportations), let
alone connect it with something like the Holocaust.
This was not on anyone's horizon. The only motive people could discern
for what the Nazis were doing was enmity towards Jews pure and simple.
Anyone wanting to avert the Jews' fate would have had to condemn even
nonracist forms of anti-Semitism. For it was these, at least in the
early years, that gave the Nazis' racial policy a certain legitimacy
even in Catholic eyes. And anti-Semitism was what made the Nazis'
racist ideology-the deifying of "Aryan man"-into an engine of death
for Jews. Questioning the legitimacy of the Nazis' racial policy, and
possibly even slowing it down, required the condemnation from the very
start of measures that discriminated against Jews and deprived them of
their rights-as well as condemnation of the regime that instituted
such measures. This is precisely what Edith Stein, bitterly aware that
the German bishops were allowing themselves to be deceived, demanded
of Pius XI in her now widely publicized letter of early April 1933.
This was the very time when Hitler was trying to convince the bishops
of his benevolent intentions towards the Church in order to obtain a
Concordat. Far from excluding the "Jewish question," Hitler put it
front and center. Receiving the representative of the German Bishops'
Conference, Bishop Wilhelm Berning of Osnabrück, in audience on April
26, Hitler declared: "I have been attacked because of my handling of
the Jewish question. The Catholic Church considered the Jews pestilent
for fifteen hundred years, put them in ghettos, etc., because it
recognized the Jews for what they were. In the epoch of liberalism the
danger was no longer recognized. I am moving back toward the time in
which a fifteen-hundred-year-long tradition was implemented. I do not
set race over religion, but I recognize the representatives of this
race as pestilent for the state and for the Church, and perhaps I am
thereby doing Christianity a great service by pushing them out of
schools and public functions." The transcript that records these
remarks contains no response by Bishop Berning. This is hardly
surprising: for a Catholic Bishop in 1933 there was really nothing
terribly objectionable in this historically correct reminder. And on
this occasion, as always, Hitler was concealing his true intentions.
It is also true that no institution opposed the Nazis' deification of
the state, people, and race as clearly as the Catholic Church. To
judge rightly, however, the significance for the Jews of the
condemnation of racial absolutism in the encyclical Mit brennender
Sorge (issued, as noted above, very late in the day), we must keep in
mind the morally compromised historical context. By 1937 clarification
of the Church's doctrine had become urgently necessary in order to
refute the Nazis' mendacious anti-Catholic propaganda. This was the
encyclical's precise purpose: to defend the Church in the face of
totalitarian dictatorship. As Secretary of State Pacelli wrote to
Cardinal Faulhaber on April 2, 1937, the encyclical was theologically
and pastorally necessary "to preserve the true faith in Germany." The
encyclical also defended baptized Jews, considered still Jews by the
Nazis because of racial theories that the Church could not accept. But
the encyclical never discussed Jews in general.
Pacelli himself added to Faulhaber's milder draft of the encyclical
the well-known and more sharply worded passage: "Whoever exalts race,
or the people, or the state, or a particular form of state, or the
depositories of power, or any other fundamental value of the human
community-however necessary and honorable be their function in worldly
things-whoever raises these notions above their standard value and
divinizes them to an idolatrous level, distorts and perverts an order
of the world planned and created by God." Speaking as pope to the
cardinals on June 2, 1945, the author of this passage gave what may be
considered its authentic interpretation. "The fundamental
incompatibility of the National Socialist state and the Catholic
Church culminates in this sentence of the encyclical. Once this had
become clear, the Church could not refrain, without being unfaithful
to its mission, from stating its position before the whole world."
Astonishingly, there is not a single reference in this allocution,
delivered a month after the end of the war in Europe, to the slaughter
of millions of Jews. Instead the Pope, with his vision still limited
to Catholics and Church concerns, lamented the killing of thousands of
priests, religious, and laypeople. He added: "With virtual unanimity
German Catholics recognized that the encyclical Mit brennender Sorge
gave direction, consolation, and strength to all who took the
Christian religion seriously and wished to put it into practice."
It is clear that as late as June 1945, and despite knowledge of the
Holocaust, Pius XII still did not view the condemnation of racism as
something intended to benefit the Jews. And it is also questionable
whether the condemnation was so viewed in 1937. The same may be said
of the oft-cited "Syllabus against Racism" (1938). This Vatican
document says nothing about Jews or their persecution, but does
mention "grief at the terrible persecution to which, as everyone
knows, the Church in Germany is exposed."
The general condemnation of racism of course included the Nazis' anti-
Semitic racial mania, and condemned it implicitly. The question,
however, is not what the Church's theological position with regard to
Nazi racism and anti-Semitism was in 1937, but whether Church
statements were clear enough for everyone to realize that the Church
included Jews in its pastoral concern, thus summoning Christian
consciences to solidarity with them. In light of what we have seen, it
seems clear that the answer to this question must be No. In 1937 the
Church was concerned not with the Jews but with entirely different
matters that the Church considered more important and more urgent. An
explicit defense of the Jews might well have jeopardized success in
these other areas.
This is confirmed by a remarkable (and sadly characteristic) exchange
in November 1941 between Cardinal Faulhaber and Adolf Cardinal
Bertram, President of the Fulda Bishops' Conference. Faulhaber wrote
that he was being asked by laypeople whether the bishops could not do
something about the "brutal deportation of non-Aryans to Poland under
inhuman conditions paralleled only in the African slave trade."
Bertram replied that in view of the Church's limited ability to
influence the regime's policy, the bishops must "concentrate on other
concerns which are more important for the Church and more far-
reaching"; in particular "the ever more urgent question of how best to
prevent anti-Christian and anti-Church influences on the education of
Catholic youth."
This concentration on specific pastoral concerns and Church affairs
was already dominant in 1933. The Catholic Church was in imminent
danger. Priority had to be given to the conclusion of a Concordat
guaranteeing Church rights. Defending Jews was inadvisable, Cardinal
Faulhaber wrote to Pacelli on April 10, 1933, "because that would
transform the attack on the Jews into an attack on the Church; and
because the Jews are able to look after themselves" (these are the
same arguments used in Faulhaber's letter to Wurm two days earlier).
Needless to say, the assumption that the Jews could look after
themselves turned out to be a monumental error.
After the Catholic Church had spent four years trying, with the help
of the Concordat, to keep its head above water through a kind of
"hostile cooperation" with the regime, it finally had to clarify its
position and take a stand if the faithful were not to become
hopelessly confused. At least until the outbreak of war, Church
pronouncements, as well as its diplomacy, were restricted to intra-
Church concerns. This was true in Italy as well, where the Vatican's
protest against the Italian racial laws (autumn 1938) concerned only
baptized Jews, and the Church's right, guaranteed in the Italian
Concordat, to regulate their marriages by canon law.
Pius XII's 1939 encyclical Summi Pontificatus contains no explicit
reference to racism. The topic is covered implicitly in the section on
"The unity of the human race"-which is possibly an echo of the famous
and never-issued encyclical against racism. That document would have
dealt with anti-Semitism and the "Jewish question"-topics which Summi
Pontificatus does not mention.
It is undeniable that the Church's defense of natural law was a major
factor in causing people to recognize the injustice of what was
happening to the Jews. (This is brought out in Bishop Clemens von
Galen's July 31, 1937 commentary on Mit brennender Sorge.) This
injustice was the basis for the decision to draft another encyclical
that, on the basis of natural law, would condemn the persecution of
the Jews explicitly. "Equality in natural law," however, was not
equivalent in the Church's eyes to equality in civil law. What the
Church defended above all was the right of physical inviolability,
property rights, the right of parents to bring up their children in
the parents' faith. The Church did not necessarily advocate equal
political and economic rights. Indeed, the Church had denied these
rights to Jews for centuries. In Christian eyes Jews remained a danger
in politics and economics.
Moreover, the contemplated encyclical against racism and anti-Semitism
was never published, and the drafts that have come to light in recent
years do not make entirely pleasant reading. We can be thankful that
the document never reached the level of papal teaching. Gustav
Gundlach's draft, for instance, called Jewish emancipation "an error,"
and defended the "social separation of the people of Israel" as a
divinely willed necessity to "prevent harmful contacts between
Christians and Jews." The draft condemns as unjust and a violation of
charity "laws which withhold civil rights from baptized Jews, thus
interfering illegitimately with the Church's marriage laws." That was
a matter of legitimate concern. But the perspective remains very
limited.
And it was precisely this perspective which dominated. Consider
another letter from Cardinal Faulhaber to Cardinal Bertram, written on
October 23, 1936. "The state is justified in proceeding against Jewish
excesses in civil society, especially when Jewish Bolshevists and
Communists endanger public order. With regard, however, to Jews who
enter the Catholic Church . . . the state can have every confidence
that they are not Communists or Bolshevists." The passage immediately
following shows why the rejection of racism is so crucial: "With their
insistent principle, 'Once a Jew always a Jew,' the Nazis treat
baptized Jews the same as those who are not baptized. The bishops hold
that a converted Jew . . . has truly become a child of God. . . .
Hence baptized Jews are entitled to be treated by the Church as
Christians and not as Jews, and at least not to be delivered into the
hands of their anti-Semitic enemies."
Granted, we must judge such statements in their historical context: at
stake was the compelling concern to keep baptized Jews out of the
Nazis' clutches. The protection of baptized Jews-and not a general
condemnation of all hostility to Jews-was always the dominant
perspective whenever the "Jewish question" was discussed, and whenever
the Church condemned racism. The Church's opposition to racism (though
belated) was a defense of its own teaching as well as natural law. As
such it merits admiration. Claiming that it was something more is
questionable.
We must also bear in mind that Catholics never entirely rejected the
idea of national or volkisch identity based on race. Here too the
boundary was blurred. There is, for example, the article on "race"
from the Handbook of Contemporary Religious Questions, published in
1937 and edited by Archbishop Gröber of Freiburg. While clearly
rejecting Nazi racial theories, the article recognizes the need for
measures to safeguard German racial purity. It adds that a people that
has proved itself before the bar of history is endangered by the
admixture of foreign blood.
Even the encyclical Mit brennender Sorge states that "race" is a
"fundamental value of the human community . . . necessary and
honorable . . . in worldly things." What the encyclical condemns is
the "exaltation of race, or the people, or the state, or a particular
form of state . . . above their standard value . . . to an idolatrous
level." In Cardinal Faulhaber's original draft this passage was
considerably weaker: "Be vigilant that race, or the state, or other
communal values, which can claim an honorable place in worldly things,
are not magnified and idolized." Against this background we can hardly
be surprised that Faulhaber proposed in an internal Church memorandum
that the bishops should inform the government "that the Church,
through the application of its marriage laws, has made and continues
to make, an important contribution to the state's policy of racial
purity; and is thus performing a valuable service for the regime's
population policy." Even if Faulhaber was referring only to the Nazi
policy of "eliminating parenthood for the mentally ill," his proposal,
coming at the time, remained highly ambivalent.
The Church's "silence" in the years prior to the outbreak of war arose
from a complex combination of anti-Jewish and anti-Semitic thinking on
the one hand, and on the other hand the feeling of Church leaders that
other matters were more important. This feeling arose from the belief
that they were really not responsible for Jews in general.
It is of course not even remotely true to say that there was a
positive intention not to help the Jews. It would be false, indeed
slanderous, to claim that the Church deliberately delivered the Jews
to their Nazi executioners. Nor can anyone claim that there was no
desire, at least on the part of the Holy See, to help the Jews. As the
London Jewish Chronicle reported on May 12, 1933, the Pope had
recently met a delegation of Jewish leaders, including his personal
friend Rabbi da Fano. "It is understood," the paper wrote, "that the
Pope was extremely concerned about the sufferings imposed on the Jews
in Germany."
Moreover, on April 4, 1933, Cardinal Pacelli, at the request of
"important Israelite personalities," wrote the Papal Nuncio Cesare
Orsenigo in Berlin directing him to explore the possibility of a
diplomatic intervention against "anti-Semitic excesses" in Germany.
Orsenigo answered immediately that any intervention by the Holy See
was impossible, since anti-Semitism was now part of the official
policy of the German government. The Church could not protest against
German laws; that would be rejected as interference in internal
politics. Orsenigo was presumably referring to the "Law for the
Restoration of the Civil Service," passed on April 7, 1933. This
excluded "non-Aryans," including Catholics and Protestants, from the
civil service. This response from the Berlin nuncio, along with the
letter of April 10 from Faulhaber to Pacelli, appears to have set the
course for the Vatican's future policy. Once the Concordat was agreed
to the following July, the Holy See was definitively barred from
interceding explicitly and publicly for the Jews. When the Concordat
was ratified in September 1933, Pacelli handed the German chargé
d'affaires, Hanns Kerrl, a "Promemoria" of the Holy See stating merely
that "the Holy See permits itself a word in favor of Catholics who
have come to the Church from Judaism." Jews as such were not a topic
for discussion.
It would appear that this is the point at which the policies of the
Vatican and the German bishops (led by Cardinals Bertram and
Faulhaber) began to converge, and the notorious "silence" about the
Jews commenced. It is astonishing nonetheless that the Church
continued to intervene on behalf of Catholic Jews, which Hitler's
government always sharply rejected as political interference,
forbidden by the Concordat, and anti-German. In the event, Orsenigo's
warning, cited above, that protests against German laws would not be
entertained by the government was not heeded in regard to non-Aryan
Catholics. The encyclical Mit brennender Sorge is a prime example,
since it confirms that the Catholic Church, and especially the German
bishops who were in the front line, did risk total confrontation with
the Nazi state. But as we have seen, they never did this on behalf of
the Jews in general. The Church acted in self-defense, to defend its
pastoral interests and the faithful-and always in the hope of bringing
the Nazi state to some kind of modus vivendi that the Church could
accept.
Does this make Church leaders "guilty"? 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.
Martin Rhonheimer
a native of Switzerland and a priest of the Opus Dei Prelature, is a
professor of ethics and political philosophy at Rome's Pontifical
University of the Holy Cross. The article was translated from the
German by Father John Jay Hughes.
November 2003
The Holocaust: What Was Not Said
Martin Rhonheimer
LETS BARE IT ALL WITH THE JEWS PHILOSOPHY?
SPITTING ON CHRISTIANS
http://www.jpost.com/servlet/Satellite?cid=1259231077244&pagename=JPArticle/ShowFull
http://www.wvwnews.net/story.php?id=8225
AD AS THE CATHOLIC CHURCH THE ATTACKS BY JEWS OF ALL RANKS.
SARAH BERNHADT
http://theaterjblogs.wordpress.com/2008/09/13/first-footage-of-sandra-live-on-stage-at-theater-j/
AND IF YOU DO NOT KNOW YOU ARE IN A WAR SOON CHRISTIANS WILL NOT HAVE A
PRESENCE IN JERISALEM.
Christians http://uk.reuters.com/article/idUKLH76404
ABOUD, West Bank, May 18 (Reuters) - Israel's land barrier is slowly
destroying the fabric of this Palestinian village of Christians and Muslims
in the West Bank, setting a prime example of why the United States wants
settlements to stop.
http://www.wrmea.com/archives/July_2006/0607020.html
Palestinian priests join a Dec. 16, 2006 protest against Israel's
construction of its annexation wall in the West Bank village of Aboud (AFP
Photo/Abbas Momani).
Retired army officers at the Economic Cooperation Foundation, a Tel Aviv
think tank, believe the wall creates a climate of hatred. "I think it may be
producing another generation of terrorists," Brig. Gen. Ilan Paz told me.
That is even worse than driving out the Holy Land's remaining Christians.
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.
SEEING THE ONLY THING THE CHURCH COULD DO WAS LOOK OUT FOR THE CATHOLICS
AND THE CATHOLIC CHURCH AND NOT BE MISLED BY JEWISH STORIES OF CAMPS AND
GASSINGS THAT DID NOT EXIST, IN THE INTERESTS OF TRUTH AND UPHOLDING OF
CATHOLIC SHRISTIAN STANDARDS ONE WOULD EXPECT A NEGATIVE VIEW OF THE
FRAUDELENT JEWISH ATTEMPT TO HI JACK PROMINENCE IN WW2 BY EXAGERATION OF
CONDITIONS AND NUMBERS.
REMEMBER THAT WHEN EXAMINED WITH TRUTH IN MIND THE FORENSICS SHOW JEWS UP
FOR HORRENDOUS LIARS WHICH THE CHURCH SHOULD NOT BE SUPPORTING THEIR LIES
FOR REPARATIONS.
IN FACT THE CHURCH SHOULD MAKE ITSELF FAMILIAR WITH THE BELIEFS OF JUDAISM
BEFORE TRYING TO DEAL WITH ITS MEMBERS.
IT IS CLEARLY NOT , AS CHIST POINTED OUT, BASED ON GOD IF IT IS GUIDED BY
THE TALMUD WHICH IS A LAW WRITTEN BY RABBIS.
CHECK THE Talmud SOMETHING I THOUGHT WOULD HAVE BEEN COMPULSORY IN A
CATHOLIC SEMINARY.
http://video.google.ca/videoplay?docid=-6657600254881054584&hl=en
DONT JUST HAVE TO TAKE TED'S WORD
http://www.revisionisthistory.org/talmudtruth.html
http://www.sacred-texts.com/jud/talmud.htm
http://www.iahushua.com/JQ/talmud.html
CHECK THE WHOLE HOLOHOAXING BUNCH.
http://images.google.co.id/images?hl=id&um=1&sa=1&q=%2251+documents%22&btnG=Telusuri+gambar&aq=f&oq=&start=0
The Alternative Tour of Auschwitz: An Independent Investigation of the
http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=4138523842550891901#0h53m09s
http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=-8424408632716421689
Rassinier seems to wrap it up. NOT A DENIER A MAN IN THE CAMPS AS A
PRISONER FOR HELPING JEWS, BUT ABSOLUTELY ANNOYED BY THE LIES THE JEWS WERE
TELLING.
http://www.ihr.org/books/rassinier/debunking1-0.html
http://www.ihr.org/books/hoggan/A4.html
http://www.fpp.co.uk/bookchapters/articles/HowWarsBegin.html
http://www.anti-rev.org/textes/VidalNaquet92a/part-6.html
http://www.alibris.com/search/books/author/Paul_Rassinier
(http://www.amazon.com/Perpetual-Peace-Harry-Elmer-Barnes/dp/0939484013
http://www.courts.fsnet.co.uk/harryelmerbarnes.htm
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?
In addressing this question, I am conscious of a double loyalty. I am
a Catholic priest-but I come from a family that is three-quarters
Jewish. I love my Church. I believe in the truth that the Church
proclaims. I proclaim that truth myself. Yet I also have an emotional
bond to Judaism, and to my Jewish relatives. I am pained by unfair
Jewish attacks on the Catholic Church. But I am also pained by a one-
sided Catholic apologetic that minimizes the injustice done by
Christians to Jews in history, or seeks to relegate it to oblivion. I
am especially aware of the Jewish sensitivity to topics that Catholics
often pass over either too quickly or in silence. Even if some of the
Church's present-day critics are clearly more interested in promoting
their own careers or ideological agendas than in seeking the truth,
some of the blame for their "success" clearly rests on Catholic
shoulders.
Even when we have taken full account of the enmity between the
Catholic Church and National Socialism, the Church's "silence"-the
astonishing fact that no Church statement about Nazism ever mentioned
Jews explicitly or defended them-cries out for explanation. Also in
need of explanation is the lack of any fundamental Church protest
against the Nuremberg and Italian racial laws. Even after the November
1938 pogrom against the Jews, the only person to speak out was the
Berlin cathedral provost Bernard Lichtenberg (since canonized), whose
protest ultimately cost him his life. A Catholic apologetic that seeks
to cover over this record by constant repetition of other facts,
however undeniable they may be, plays into the hands of those who
unfairly criticize the Church.
Prominent Catholic historians mostly offer a different apologetic.
Before and even after 1937, they argue, there was no need for Church
statements to mention Jews specifically, to defend them, or to issue
an explicit condemnation of anti-Semitism: the Roman Holy Office had
already condemned anti-Semitism on March 25, 1928. Thereafter (the
argument goes) anti-Semitism, defined in the 1928 decree as "hatred of
the people once called by God," was inadmissible for Catholics. Some
historians also cite an alleged "condemnation of anti-Semitism" from
1916.
We are told that the Church's condemnation of racism and the Nazi
ideology of the state, expressed most clearly in Mit brennender Sorge,
and in the "Syllabus against Racism" of 1938 (a Vatican decree
directing Catholic universities throughout the world to counter racist
theories), was clear to everyone. Equally clear, according to this
argument, was the Church's defense of the Jews and its condemnation of
their persecutors. The same is sometimes claimed also for Pius XII's
first encyclical, Summi Pontificatus, issued in October 1939.
This defense of the Church, however, fails to account for a number of
important facts. It ignores the existence of a specifically modern
anti-Semitism, shared in varying degrees by Catholics. Nourished by
traditional Christian anti-Judaism, it had social, political, and
economic aspects as well. In its Catholic form it was rooted in the
Church's political and social antimodernism, especially its opposition
to liberalism and all its works. For German Catholics this resulted in
openness to volkisch and racist ideas that blurred the boundaries with
Nazi ideology. Finally, there was the Catholic openness to an
authoritarian state, which allowed people to think, at the start of
Hitler's rule, that the Nazi state might be an acceptable alternative
to liberal democracy and a bulwark against the looming threat of
Bolshevism.
It was thus possible in 1933, and even as late as 1937, for a Catholic
to reject Nazi racial doctrine yet remain an anti-Semite and a
supporter of the Nazi regime. Indeed, historical research has shown
that after 1933 parts of the Catholic press in Germany, and even more
so in Austria, were increasingly hostile to Jews-and this despite
their consistent rejection of Nazi racial doctrine. As a "Christian
anti-Semite" and patriotic German, a Catholic could approve of the
Nazis' treatment of the Jews, or at least show understanding for it.
Take, for example, an article on "The Jewish Question," published in
the Catholic Augsburger Postzeitung on March 31, 1933, which
incorporated a statement of the (Catholic) Bavarian People's Party.
Deploring "the increasing 'judaizing' (Verjudung) of our intellectual,
cultural, and scholarly life in Germany," the article asserted that
"there is a certain kind of Jewish intellectualism which, despite its
high intelligence, mixes with the German element in a destructive and
baneful way. A people striving for national and intellectual renewal
is reacting in a healthy manner when it opposes this admixture and
demands that the German mind be thoroughly cleansed of Jewish
influences."
Such statements require us to reconsider the Church's public
declarations about the Nazi concept of the state and racism in the
encyclical Mit brennender Sorge. Not only were Church declarations
belated. They were also inadequate to counter the passivity and
widespread indifference to the fate of Jews caused by this kind of
Christian anti-Judaism and anti-Semitism, especially when it was
combined with newly awakened national pride. The encyclical, then,
came far too late to be of any help to Jews.
In reality, however, the Church's statements were never really
designed to help the Jews. The "Catholic apologetic" described above
is something developed after the fact and has no roots in the
historical record. Indeed, given the dominant view of the Jews in the
Nazi period, it would have been astonishing if the Church had mounted
the barricades in their defense. As we shall see, the failure of
Church statements about Nazism and racism ever to mention the Jews
specifically (save in negative ways) corresponds to an inner logic
that is historically understandable-but no less disturbing to us
today.
By the beginning of the twentieth century Christian anti-Judaism,
traditional for centuries, had attained virtual canonical status. In
association with modern racial doctrines, and influenced by political
and economic considerations, it had developed in many instances into a
Church-promoted anti-Semitism, which in the years following the First
World War grew in scope and intensity. An example that can stand for
many others is the article on "Jews" in the Lexikon für Theologie und
Kirche, published in 1933 under the editorship of Bishop Michael
Buchberger of Regensburg. There we read: "Since their emancipation the
Jews have achieved political and social power. They soon attained
leading positions in the capitalist system and exploited their power
in ways which were often ruthless. In addition there is the bad
influence of many Jewish writers who do not respect the Christian
religion. Especially important is the dominance of Jews in business,
in the press, often in politics. Moreover, their great influence in
the theater permits Jews with revolutionary and libertine ideas to
undermine religious sentiment and the national character. Combined
with the concept of race, this has produced in recent years a reaction
in the form of increased anti-Semitism. The accession to power of the
National Socialists has brought about a widespread exclusion of Jews
from public and cultural life." (Without further discussion of this
exclusion, the article concludes by mentioning the prohibition of
kosher butchers!)
In the first volume of the same lexicon, published in 1930, the well-
known article on "Anti-Semitism" by the German Jesuit Gustav Gundlach
had drawn a distinction between a volkisch anti-Semitism promoted for
strictly racist motives (which was to be rejected), and an anti-
Semitism promoted for general political, economic, and cultural
reasons that Christians might accept. As examples of the latter
Gundlach cited two Austrian politicians, Karl Lueger and Georg von
Schoenerer, prominent and outspoken anti-Semites who had strongly
influenced Hitler during his years in Vienna. It is noteworthy that in
the same article Gundlach rejected as unjust "laws which single out
Jews simply because they are Jews," while not hesitating to call
"global plutocracy and Bolshevism" forces that manifest "dark aspects
of the Jewish soul expelled from its homeland" and which are
"destructive of human society."
But what about the supposed "condemnation of anti-Semitism" by the
Vatican in 1916? The facts are these. On February 9, 1916, Cardinal
Secretary of State Pietro Gasparri, acting at the behest of Pope
Benedict XV, wrote a letter to the American Jewish Committee in New
York, responding to a letter from the Committee to the Pope on
December 30, 1915. The latter asked the Pope to exert his supreme
moral authority to halt mistreatment of Jews throughout the world-in
particular the pogroms then raging on the Russian front (in Polish
Galicia). The letter from New York was accompanied by a lengthy
memorandum. The papal response was a courteous rejection of the
request, on the grounds that the Pope had no way of verifying the
facts alleged in the memorandum. The papal letter assured his Jewish
correspondents, however, that according to Christian principles Jews
were included in the universal law of love according to which all men
are brothers. The Pope wrote also that he never ceased "to inculcate
among individuals, as well as among peoples, the observance of the
principles of the natural law. . . . This law must be observed and
respected in the case of the children of Israel, as well as of all
others, because it would not be conformable to justice or to religion
itself to derogate from it solely on account of divergence of
religious confessions." This was merely a restatement of the Church's
traditional position.
The letter was immediately published in La Civiltà Cattolica and in
the London Tablet. The New York Times reported it under the headline:
"Papal Bull Urges Equality for Jews." That was an exaggeration. The
document was a private letter, not a papal bull. And it said nothing
about equality in civil rights. Nor did the letter contain any
rejection of social, political, or legal restrictions on Jews (as long
as such restrictions did not violate natural law and the law of love)
aimed at limiting "harmful" Jewish influences on society. It is
reasonable to assume that those who were responsible for the pogroms
which the American Jewish Committee had asked the Pope to halt never
learned of the papal letter. We must remember: Europe was at war. The
Holy See was determined to have a voice in future peace negotiations
and hence wanted to preserve strict neutrality. The situation had
certain analogies to later events, especially when we recall that it
was precisely at this time that Eugenio Pacelli-later Pope Pius XII-
was learning the craft of papal diplomacy.
There are similar problems with the 1928 condemnation of anti-Semitism-
this one public and official-that is frequently cited in Catholic
apologetics. It came in a decree of the Holy Office suppressing "The
Friends of Israel," an organization that sought to overcome
traditional Christian anti-Judaism in theology and liturgy, and that
included a number of priests, bishops, and cardinals among its
members. The 1928 decree stated that the organization's goal could not
be reconciled with the Church's traditional faith. The condemnation of
anti-Semitism was incidental, and it was defined very narrowly: as
"hatred" (and only that) against "the people once called by God." That
we read this statement today, like that of 1916-as well as others
discussed below-as condemnations of anti-Semitism in any form is an
indication of the distance we have traveled since the Second Vatican
Council, and especially during the pontificate of Pope John Paul II.
In a day when the Catholic Church not only tolerated but actively
promoted the view that Jews were a harmful influence on society, such
statements had a very different-much more limited-significance from
what we assume today. They were simply injunctions not to hate,
persecute, kill, or unjustly expropriate Jews.
This is evident in the fact that the 1928 decree left the Church's
traditional anti-Judaism untouched; indeed, the same document
explicitly confirmed it. This tradition, based on patristic biblical
exegesis, declared that the Jews were the people "once called by God,"
but now cursed and guilty of Christ's death; condemned, moreover, to
wander the earth without a homeland; and as such witnesses to the
truth of Christianity. To be sure, Jews must not be persecuted. But
society, and Christians especially, must also be protected from the
Jews' harmful influence in culture and education.
The Christian view at that time was that the only solution to the
"Jewish question" was conversion to Christianity. Hence racial anti-
Semitism was unacceptable for Catholics: a baptized Jew ceased to be a
Jew. Racism was an attack on the essence of Christianity, which had
its roots in the Old Testament, and which embraced all people in the
world. Opposition to racial anti-Semitism was thus a defense of
Christians' self-understanding and a challenge to faithfulness.
Precisely for these reasons it was a necessary part of the Church's
strategy for survival in the face of the ideological pressures exerted
by a totalitarian dictatorship. As such it was a clear rejection of
the Nazis' doctrine of a master race, which would end by bringing
death to "non-Aryans." In no way, however, did this imply rejection of
"moderate" anti-Semitism, which included a certain understanding for
volkisch policies and corresponding limits on the "judaizing" of
society.
This comes out clearly in the semi-official commentary on the 1928
decree of the Holy Office in the very influential Jesuit journal La
Civiltà Cattolica. Entitled "The Jewish Danger and the 'Friends of
Israel,'" it was approved (like all the articles in that journal) by
the Vatican Secretariat of State. Moreover, it was in full accord, as
we now know, with the view of the Jews formed by Monsignor Achille
Ratti-reigning in 1928 as Pope Pius XI-during his years as papal
emissary and Nuncio in Poland (1918-1921). According to the author
(the editor, Father Enrico Rosa, S.J.), the decree condemned anti-
Semitism "only in its anti-Christian form and mentality," which was
"morally and religiously unjust." The Holy Office rejected "excessive"
and "extreme" anti-Semitism, the article said, but not anti-Semitism
based on a clear recognition of the danger posed to society by Jews,
as a consequence of their emancipation and of their connection with
liberalism, socialism, and Bolshevism. "Jews are a danger to the whole
world because of their pernicious infiltration, their hidden
influence, and their resulting disproportionate power which violates
both reason and the common good." This danger, the article said, was
especially acute for people in Christian countries.
As late as 1936 the same journal wrote about the need to render the
Jews "incapable of inflicting harm," always with the proviso that this
must "of course be done without any persecution." The ideal remained
the historic ghetto. Only in 1938 did La Civiltà Cattolica moderate
its tone. By that time, however, the boundary between persecution,
discrimination, and "other measures" against the "judaizing" of
society had been blurred.
As the Nazi regime's campaign against the Church intensified, it
became increasingly clear that Catholic opposition to racism had more
to do with defending the Church than with any fundamental rejection of
anti-Semitism or of hostility to Jews. True, the Church was always
nonconformist because of its opposition to totalitarianism. But
because the Nazis viewed Christianity as the heir of Judaism, the
Church, especially in Germany, had to defend itself against the
combination of hatred for Jews and Christians alike. The more the
Church devoted itself to this task, the more it was forced to
distinguish between Old Testament and post-Christian Jewry, with the
inevitable result that contemporary Jews were left to look after
themselves.
This was already clear in Michael Cardinal von Faulhaber's 1933 Advent
sermons, in which he defended the Old Testament as the foundation of
Christianity. The Munich archbishop had long been known as a friend of
the Jews. In order to prevent his sermons from being exploited for
political purposes, however, he had his secretary write to the Jewish
World Congress to say that they did not deal with the present-day
Jewish question; the sermons were only a defense of the Old Testament
and of the "children of Israel" in Old Testament times. It is clear
that Faulhaber's steadfast opposition to Nazi racial theories was
never intended as a defense of post-Christian Jewry or of his Jewish
fellow citizens against their persecutors.
The clearest example of this attitude was the pastoral letter of the
Austrian Bishop Johannes Gföllner of Linz, issued on January 21, 1933,
which branded as "radically un-Christian" all "contempt, hatred, and
persecution of the Jewish people." No less irreconcilable with "the
position of the Church" was "the rejection of the Holy Scriptures of
the Old Testament on racial grounds." "Nazi racial views," Gföllner
explained, were "regression into the worst kind of paganism . . .
completely irreconcilable with Christianity, and must therefore be
totally rejected." At the same time, however, he didn't hesitate to
claim that many "irreligious Jews had a very damaging influence in
almost all areas of contemporary cultural life." This influence was
also visible in business and trade, in the law, and in medicine.
Indeed, "many of our social and political upheavals are permeated by
materialistic and liberal principles stemming primarily from Jews.
Every committed Christian has not only the right but the conscientious
duty to fight and overcome the pernicious influence of such decadent
Judaism."
Bishop Gföllner, who was one of the sharpest opponents of National
Socialism in the Austrian episcopate, was speaking in the tradition of
Christian Socialism represented by Karl Lueger (mentioned above).
Gföllner's words are a clear example of the tranquil coexistence of
Catholic anti-racism in the service of the Church and a Christian anti-
Semitism nourished by traditional anti-Judaism that made Jews the
scapegoats for modern trends that opposed the Church. In this view,
the Jews were held responsible for everything opposed to Christianity
in politics and society-and Christians had a duty to distinguish
between "good" and "bad" Jews, the latter being identified as
irreligious and fully assimilated Jews.
Such an outlook made it difficult for Catholics to develop any clear
and fundamental opposition to the Nazis' Jewish policy. The constantly
repeated rejection of "hatred" and "persecution" of Jews, with the
insistence that the "Jewish question" could be solved only in a
framework of "justice and charity," should not blind us to the fact
that Church spokesmen fundamentally approved of measures to limit
Jewish influence. This helps explain why, at least at first, Catholics
saw little reason to defend Jews. Indeed, any attempt to do so would
have caused astonishment. It also explains why Catholics were unable
to react clearly to Nazi racial policy until the opportunity to
influence events had long passed. The argument that, for example,
protests against the November 1938 pogrom would have been useless can
be turned against the Church. For it was the Church's own attitude
toward the Jews that had made it difficult, if not impossible, to
mobilize Christian consciences against Nazi anti-Semitism at an
earlier stage, when protests might have been effective.
It is of course true that the Catholic Church was itself exposed to
brutal persecution. Catholics of that time felt that they had quite
enough to do defending their own interests. The tragedy is that due to
Church-generated anti-Semitism and anti-Judaism, and also because of
the Church's initial sympathy for a government that fought against
liberalism and communism, the Church itself had done much to
legitimize the very regime that persecuted it.
The "Catholic position" described above certainly did not entail any
approval of Nazi anti-Semitism. Indeed, Nazi ideology and methods were
totally incompatible with the Catholic position. This comes out
clearly, to cite one example, in a letter written by Cardinal
Faulhaber on April 8, 1933 (a week after the Nazi-instigated boycott
of Jews), to Alois Wurm. A Regensburg priest, Wurm had written the
Cardinal protesting that following the proclamation of the boycott
"not a single Catholic paper has had the courage to proclaim the
teaching of the catechism, that no one may be hated or persecuted-
certainly not on racial grounds. Many people see this as a Catholic
failure." Wurm pleaded for a clear protest by the bishops against Nazi
policy.
What the Nazis were doing to the Jews, Faulhaber wrote in his reply to
Wurm, was "so un-Christian that not only every priest but every
Christian must protest." At the moment, however, Church leaders had
more important matters to deal with. "The preservation of our schools
and Catholic organizations and the question of compulsory
sterilization [of the mentally ill] are more important matters for
Christianity in our country-especially when we consider that the Jews,
as we have already seen in some recent instances, are quite able to
look after themselves. We must not give the government an opportunity
to turn the campaign against the Jews into a campaign against
Jesuits." Faulhaber added that he was "astonished" by repeated
questions as to "why the Church is doing nothing about the persecution
of Jews. When Catholics or their bishops are persecuted we hear not a
peep. That is and remains the mystery of the passion."
Faulhaber's words suggest that he was unable to see that the problem
was not just the Nazis' unjust and brutal methods, but their entire
anti-Jewish policy of discrimination and marginalization. He was also
blind to the immensity of the danger threatening the Jews, which would
soon render them defenseless. And at the same time, Church leaders
were hoping they could achieve an understanding with the regime
regarding the "more important matters" mentioned in Faulhaber's letter
to Wurm. (The Munich Archbishop still entertained this hope after the
appearance of Mit brennender Sorge in 1937.) Wurm's reference to the
racist and un-Christian nature of the Nazis' persecution of Jews
obviously did not prevent the Cardinal from being "astonished" by the
many questions he was receiving as to "why the Church was doing
nothing about the persecution."
Another person who urged Faulhaber to act publicly in defense of the
Jews was the Dominican student chaplain in Berlin, and a leader of the
German Peace League, Fr. Franziskus Stratmann. In a lengthy letter to
Faulhaber of April 10, 1933, Stratmann branded Nazi racism as heresy:
"But no one makes any effective protest against this indescribable
German and Christian disgrace. Even priests find their anti-Semitic
instincts appeased by this disgraceful behavior. . . . We know that
exceptional courage is required today to bear witness to the truth.
But we know too that only through such witness can humanity and
Christianity be saved. True Christianity is dying of opportunism."
There is no record of a reply to Stratmann from Faulhaber. Heinz
Hürten writes in his standard work, Deutsche Katholiken, 1918-1945:
"Stratmann was unable to move Faulhaber from the position he had
adopted. The Cardinal's concern remained baptized Jews, members of his
own Church, his own flock."
It is reasonable to assume that this stance of paralysis and passivity
was strengthened by the "official" Catholic understanding of Judaism.
An example can be found in an article published in 1933 in the
Catholic paper Junge Front. Written by the editor, Johannes Maaßen, it
stated: "The cry of the people who crucified Christ, Son of the
eternal God, 'His blood be on us and on our children,' echoes down the
centuries and brings upon the Jewish community ever new human
suffering." The article said that no one may increase this suffering.
But it also said nothing about any duty to alleviate the suffering or
to protest against it. An article in a subsequent issue of the same
paper-probably written by Karl Thieme-said that the injustice that the
Jews were experiencing had nothing to do with their race. However, the
Nazis' racist anti-Semitism confirmed "the unique status conferred on
the Jews in the Old Testament. From the standpoint of sacred history
their situation must be viewed as a punishment." No "political and
social solution" for the Jews could ever "replace redemption by Jesus
Christ." The solution of the "Jewish question" was their "fulfilment":
the Jews' conversion. "In the confusion of our time it is becoming
ever clearer that this fulfilment entails confession of Christ and of
the Father," Thieme wrote.
Such arguments no doubt soothed Christian consciences. They made
Christians spectators, witnesses to a divine-human drama of guilt and
expiation, of punishment and final conversion. As late as 1941
Archbishop Conrad Gröber of Freiburg, who was even then supporting
attempts to help persecuted Jews, stated in a pastoral letter that the
sad lot of the Jews was the result of the curse that they had called
down upon themselves when they murdered Christ. Anton Rauscher is
correct when he writes that Catholic theology of that time reflected
"a view of the Jews which provoked anti-Semitism on the one hand,
while on the other undermining the ability to oppose it." And the
historian Konrad Repgen is also correct when he says that "people
thought differently at that time." But this fact, which is precisely
the problem, and which distresses us today, should not be used to
excuse past Catholic failure.
The way Catholics of that time viewed Jews in no way diminishes the
fact that many Catholics-priests, religious, laity, and above all Pius
XII-helped a great many Jews, sometimes at the risk of the rescuers'
lives. There was little hatred or personal animosity to Jews as
individuals. Their steadily increasing misery, culminating finally in
their deportation to an unknown fate, aroused indignation or at least
pity. This was especially true in Holland and France, where some
bishops spoke out clearly against the deportations.
Sympathy for the increasing distress and misery of the Jews certainly
seems the best explanation for the words of Pius XI to Belgian
pilgrims in September 1938, which are constantly cited for apologetic
purposes. With tears in his eyes the aged and ailing Pope cried out
spontaneously: "Anti-Semitism is inadmissible. Spiritually we are all
Semites." The words were a reference to liturgical texts in the Missal
that the Belgian pilgrims had just presented: the phrase in the
Eucharistic Canon, after the narrative of institution, about the
"offering of Abel, Abraham, and Melchizedek." The Pope's words were
never officially published; they were reported later in some Belgian
papers. As David Kertzer writes, the words were "heartfelt and
sincere, the cry of a man who saw a dark shadow growing ever darker
across Europe."
In any event, the Pope's words remained without influence on official
Church policy. They were a one-time emotional outburst of a large-
hearted and impulsive man who counted Jews among his personal friends.
Despite the fact that Italian racial laws had been issued shortly
before this address, Pius XI did not mention them. Nor is this really
surprising. For immediately before the famous words, he declared: "We
recognize the right of all people to defend themselves, to take
measures against all who threaten their legitimate interests." Only
then did he say: "But anti-Semitism is inadmissible-spiritually we are
all Semites." It is reasonable to understand the words as meaning:
legitimate defense against undue Jewish influence, Yes; "anti-
Semitism," hatred of the Jews as a people, No.
Had the Church really wanted to mount effective opposition to the fate
that awaited the Jews, it would have had to condemn-from the very start
-not only racism but anti-Semitism in any form, including the social
anti-Semitism espoused by not a few churchmen. This the Church never
did: not in 1933, not in 1937, nor in 1938 or 1939. It is of course
true that there was no direct road from Christian anti-Judaism and
anti-Semitism to Auschwitz. For Christians the solution to the "Jewish
question" was conversion, not liquidation (although the history of
Christian anti-Judaism also features examples of the latter). But
racism alone did not lead to Auschwitz, either. Something more was
needed: hatred of Jews. Rooted in large part in Christian tradition,
it was this hatred that made modern anti-Semitism possible.
It is a truism to say that racism devoid of hatred for the Jews would
not have endangered them. Even though the racist anti-Semitism of the
Nazis and Christian anti-Judaism or Christian anti-Semitism differ
fundamentally and are even mutually incompatible, the precondition
that made the Nazis' racial anti-Semitism (which led in turn to
Auschwitz) even conceivable was the heritage of traditional anti-
Judaism and anti-Semitism. Together they created what Steven Theodore
Katz, Director of the Center for Judaic Studies at the University of
Boston, has called the "terrifying otherness" of the Jews, thus
stigmatizing and demonizing them. Traditional Christian anti-Judaism
was the breeding ground for what Jules Isaac has called "the teaching
of contempt." Without this contempt modern racism would never have
been able to forge its alliance with enmity toward Jews and anti-
Semitism. At a time when no one could even have imagined Hitler's
"final solution" (not even the bureaucrats who would later carry it
out), the only thing that could have derailed the trains to Auschwitz-
if indeed that was ever possible-was unmistakable condemnation of anti-
Semitism in any form.
It is true that the Church's condemnation of racism was an implicit
rejection of the policy that led to the Holocaust. Seen, however,
against the background of Christian and official Church attitudes
towards the Jews, this was insufficient to prevent the inexorable
course of events. That would have required a mobilization of Christian
consciences by Protestants as well as Catholics. Germany was, after
all, a predominantly Protestant country. On that side of the
confessional divide, however, things were no better for the Jews: in
fact they were worse. Most of the official Protestant Church failed.
In growing measure German Protestants were receptive to the Nazis'
racist and volkisch ideology and to their myth of the German people's
rebirth. Even the "Confessing Church" (the most anti-Nazi group in
German Protestantism) continued, like the Catholic Church, to uphold
traditional Christian anti-Judaism, and defended only baptized Jews.
Later episcopal protests against the deportation of Jews in Holland
and France cannot conceal the fact, noted by the respected Italian
historian Giovanni Miccoli, that up to then not a single bishop
anywhere had said a word about discrimination against non-baptized
Jews. During the 1930s no one ever imagined that the culmination of
the persecution of Jews would be their systematic liquidation. Hence
people were unable to perceive the murderous danger that lurked behind
the Nazis' racist theories (and, later on, the mass deportations), let
alone connect it with something like the Holocaust.
This was not on anyone's horizon. The only motive people could discern
for what the Nazis were doing was enmity towards Jews pure and simple.
Anyone wanting to avert the Jews' fate would have had to condemn even
nonracist forms of anti-Semitism. For it was these, at least in the
early years, that gave the Nazis' racial policy a certain legitimacy
even in Catholic eyes. And anti-Semitism was what made the Nazis'
racist ideology-the deifying of "Aryan man"-into an engine of death
for Jews. Questioning the legitimacy of the Nazis' racial policy, and
possibly even slowing it down, required the condemnation from the very
start of measures that discriminated against Jews and deprived them of
their rights-as well as condemnation of the regime that instituted
such measures. This is precisely what Edith Stein, bitterly aware that
the German bishops were allowing themselves to be deceived, demanded
of Pius XI in her now widely publicized letter of early April 1933.
This was the very time when Hitler was trying to convince the bishops
of his benevolent intentions towards the Church in order to obtain a
Concordat. Far from excluding the "Jewish question," Hitler put it
front and center. Receiving the representative of the German Bishops'
Conference, Bishop Wilhelm Berning of Osnabrück, in audience on April
26, Hitler declared: "I have been attacked because of my handling of
the Jewish question. The Catholic Church considered the Jews pestilent
for fifteen hundred years, put them in ghettos, etc., because it
recognized the Jews for what they were. In the epoch of liberalism the
danger was no longer recognized. I am moving back toward the time in
which a fifteen-hundred-year-long tradition was implemented. I do not
set race over religion, but I recognize the representatives of this
race as pestilent for the state and for the Church, and perhaps I am
thereby doing Christianity a great service by pushing them out of
schools and public functions." The transcript that records these
remarks contains no response by Bishop Berning. This is hardly
surprising: for a Catholic Bishop in 1933 there was really nothing
terribly objectionable in this historically correct reminder. And on
this occasion, as always, Hitler was concealing his true intentions.
It is also true that no institution opposed the Nazis' deification of
the state, people, and race as clearly as the Catholic Church. To
judge rightly, however, the significance for the Jews of the
condemnation of racial absolutism in the encyclical Mit brennender
Sorge (issued, as noted above, very late in the day), we must keep in
mind the morally compromised historical context. By 1937 clarification
of the Church's doctrine had become urgently necessary in order to
refute the Nazis' mendacious anti-Catholic propaganda. This was the
encyclical's precise purpose: to defend the Church in the face of
totalitarian dictatorship. As Secretary of State Pacelli wrote to
Cardinal Faulhaber on April 2, 1937, the encyclical was theologically
and pastorally necessary "to preserve the true faith in Germany." The
encyclical also defended baptized Jews, considered still Jews by the
Nazis because of racial theories that the Church could not accept. But
the encyclical never discussed Jews in general.
Pacelli himself added to Faulhaber's milder draft of the encyclical
the well-known and more sharply worded passage: "Whoever exalts race,
or the people, or the state, or a particular form of state, or the
depositories of power, or any other fundamental value of the human
community-however necessary and honorable be their function in worldly
things-whoever raises these notions above their standard value and
divinizes them to an idolatrous level, distorts and perverts an order
of the world planned and created by God." Speaking as pope to the
cardinals on June 2, 1945, the author of this passage gave what may be
considered its authentic interpretation. "The fundamental
incompatibility of the National Socialist state and the Catholic
Church culminates in this sentence of the encyclical. Once this had
become clear, the Church could not refrain, without being unfaithful
to its mission, from stating its position before the whole world."
Astonishingly, there is not a single reference in this allocution,
delivered a month after the end of the war in Europe, to the slaughter
of millions of Jews. Instead the Pope, with his vision still limited
to Catholics and Church concerns, lamented the killing of thousands of
priests, religious, and laypeople. He added: "With virtual unanimity
German Catholics recognized that the encyclical Mit brennender Sorge
gave direction, consolation, and strength to all who took the
Christian religion seriously and wished to put it into practice."
It is clear that as late as June 1945, and despite knowledge of the
Holocaust, Pius XII still did not view the condemnation of racism as
something intended to benefit the Jews. And it is also questionable
whether the condemnation was so viewed in 1937. The same may be said
of the oft-cited "Syllabus against Racism" (1938). This Vatican
document says nothing about Jews or their persecution, but does
mention "grief at the terrible persecution to which, as everyone
knows, the Church in Germany is exposed."
The general condemnation of racism of course included the Nazis' anti-
Semitic racial mania, and condemned it implicitly. The question,
however, is not what the Church's theological position with regard to
Nazi racism and anti-Semitism was in 1937, but whether Church
statements were clear enough for everyone to realize that the Church
included Jews in its pastoral concern, thus summoning Christian
consciences to solidarity with them. In light of what we have seen, it
seems clear that the answer to this question must be No. In 1937 the
Church was concerned not with the Jews but with entirely different
matters that the Church considered more important and more urgent. An
explicit defense of the Jews might well have jeopardized success in
these other areas.
This is confirmed by a remarkable (and sadly characteristic) exchange
in November 1941 between Cardinal Faulhaber and Adolf Cardinal
Bertram, President of the Fulda Bishops' Conference. Faulhaber wrote
that he was being asked by laypeople whether the bishops could not do
something about the "brutal deportation of non-Aryans to Poland under
inhuman conditions paralleled only in the African slave trade."
Bertram replied that in view of the Church's limited ability to
influence the regime's policy, the bishops must "concentrate on other
concerns which are more important for the Church and more far-
reaching"; in particular "the ever more urgent question of how best to
prevent anti-Christian and anti-Church influences on the education of
Catholic youth."
This concentration on specific pastoral concerns and Church affairs
was already dominant in 1933. The Catholic Church was in imminent
danger. Priority had to be given to the conclusion of a Concordat
guaranteeing Church rights. Defending Jews was inadvisable, Cardinal
Faulhaber wrote to Pacelli on April 10, 1933, "because that would
transform the attack on the Jews into an attack on the Church; and
because the Jews are able to look after themselves" (these are the
same arguments used in Faulhaber's letter to Wurm two days earlier).
Needless to say, the assumption that the Jews could look after
themselves turned out to be a monumental error.
After the Catholic Church had spent four years trying, with the help
of the Concordat, to keep its head above water through a kind of
"hostile cooperation" with the regime, it finally had to clarify its
position and take a stand if the faithful were not to become
hopelessly confused. At least until the outbreak of war, Church
pronouncements, as well as its diplomacy, were restricted to intra-
Church concerns. This was true in Italy as well, where the Vatican's
protest against the Italian racial laws (autumn 1938) concerned only
baptized Jews, and the Church's right, guaranteed in the Italian
Concordat, to regulate their marriages by canon law.
Pius XII's 1939 encyclical Summi Pontificatus contains no explicit
reference to racism. The topic is covered implicitly in the section on
"The unity of the human race"-which is possibly an echo of the famous
and never-issued encyclical against racism. That document would have
dealt with anti-Semitism and the "Jewish question"-topics which Summi
Pontificatus does not mention.
It is undeniable that the Church's defense of natural law was a major
factor in causing people to recognize the injustice of what was
happening to the Jews. (This is brought out in Bishop Clemens von
Galen's July 31, 1937 commentary on Mit brennender Sorge.) This
injustice was the basis for the decision to draft another encyclical
that, on the basis of natural law, would condemn the persecution of
the Jews explicitly. "Equality in natural law," however, was not
equivalent in the Church's eyes to equality in civil law. What the
Church defended above all was the right of physical inviolability,
property rights, the right of parents to bring up their children in
the parents' faith. The Church did not necessarily advocate equal
political and economic rights. Indeed, the Church had denied these
rights to Jews for centuries. In Christian eyes Jews remained a danger
in politics and economics.
Moreover, the contemplated encyclical against racism and anti-Semitism
was never published, and the drafts that have come to light in recent
years do not make entirely pleasant reading. We can be thankful that
the document never reached the level of papal teaching. Gustav
Gundlach's draft, for instance, called Jewish emancipation "an error,"
and defended the "social separation of the people of Israel" as a
divinely willed necessity to "prevent harmful contacts between
Christians and Jews." The draft condemns as unjust and a violation of
charity "laws which withhold civil rights from baptized Jews, thus
interfering illegitimately with the Church's marriage laws." That was
a matter of legitimate concern. But the perspective remains very
limited.
And it was precisely this perspective which dominated. Consider
another letter from Cardinal Faulhaber to Cardinal Bertram, written on
October 23, 1936. "The state is justified in proceeding against Jewish
excesses in civil society, especially when Jewish Bolshevists and
Communists endanger public order. With regard, however, to Jews who
enter the Catholic Church . . . the state can have every confidence
that they are not Communists or Bolshevists." The passage immediately
following shows why the rejection of racism is so crucial: "With their
insistent principle, 'Once a Jew always a Jew,' the Nazis treat
baptized Jews the same as those who are not baptized. The bishops hold
that a converted Jew . . . has truly become a child of God. . . .
Hence baptized Jews are entitled to be treated by the Church as
Christians and not as Jews, and at least not to be delivered into the
hands of their anti-Semitic enemies."
Granted, we must judge such statements in their historical context: at
stake was the compelling concern to keep baptized Jews out of the
Nazis' clutches. The protection of baptized Jews-and not a general
condemnation of all hostility to Jews-was always the dominant
perspective whenever the "Jewish question" was discussed, and whenever
the Church condemned racism. The Church's opposition to racism (though
belated) was a defense of its own teaching as well as natural law. As
such it merits admiration. Claiming that it was something more is
questionable.
We must also bear in mind that Catholics never entirely rejected the
idea of national or volkisch identity based on race. Here too the
boundary was blurred. There is, for example, the article on "race"
from the Handbook of Contemporary Religious Questions, published in
1937 and edited by Archbishop Gröber of Freiburg. While clearly
rejecting Nazi racial theories, the article recognizes the need for
measures to safeguard German racial purity. It adds that a people that
has proved itself before the bar of history is endangered by the
admixture of foreign blood.
Even the encyclical Mit brennender Sorge states that "race" is a
"fundamental value of the human community . . . necessary and
honorable . . . in worldly things." What the encyclical condemns is
the "exaltation of race, or the people, or the state, or a particular
form of state . . . above their standard value . . . to an idolatrous
level." In Cardinal Faulhaber's original draft this passage was
considerably weaker: "Be vigilant that race, or the state, or other
communal values, which can claim an honorable place in worldly things,
are not magnified and idolized." Against this background we can hardly
be surprised that Faulhaber proposed in an internal Church memorandum
that the bishops should inform the government "that the Church,
through the application of its marriage laws, has made and continues
to make, an important contribution to the state's policy of racial
purity; and is thus performing a valuable service for the regime's
population policy." Even if Faulhaber was referring only to the Nazi
policy of "eliminating parenthood for the mentally ill," his proposal,
coming at the time, remained highly ambivalent.
The Church's "silence" in the years prior to the outbreak of war arose
from a complex combination of anti-Jewish and anti-Semitic thinking on
the one hand, and on the other hand the feeling of Church leaders that
other matters were more important. This feeling arose from the belief
that they were really not responsible for Jews in general.
It is of course not even remotely true to say that there was a
positive intention not to help the Jews. It would be false, indeed
slanderous, to claim that the Church deliberately delivered the Jews
to their Nazi executioners. Nor can anyone claim that there was no
desire, at least on the part of the Holy See, to help the Jews. As the
London Jewish Chronicle reported on May 12, 1933, the Pope had
recently met a delegation of Jewish leaders, including his personal
friend Rabbi da Fano. "It is understood," the paper wrote, "that the
Pope was extremely concerned about the sufferings imposed on the Jews
in Germany."
Moreover, on April 4, 1933, Cardinal Pacelli, at the request of
"important Israelite personalities," wrote the Papal Nuncio Cesare
Orsenigo in Berlin directing him to explore the possibility of a
diplomatic intervention against "anti-Semitic excesses" in Germany.
Orsenigo answered immediately that any intervention by the Holy See
was impossible, since anti-Semitism was now part of the official
policy of the German government. The Church could not protest against
German laws; that would be rejected as interference in internal
politics. Orsenigo was presumably referring to the "Law for the
Restoration of the Civil Service," passed on April 7, 1933. This
excluded "non-Aryans," including Catholics and Protestants, from the
civil service. This response from the Berlin nuncio, along with the
letter of April 10 from Faulhaber to Pacelli, appears to have set the
course for the Vatican's future policy. Once the Concordat was agreed
to the following July, the Holy See was definitively barred from
interceding explicitly and publicly for the Jews. When the Concordat
was ratified in September 1933, Pacelli handed the German chargé
d'affaires, Hanns Kerrl, a "Promemoria" of the Holy See stating merely
that "the Holy See permits itself a word in favor of Catholics who
have come to the Church from Judaism." Jews as such were not a topic
for discussion.
It would appear that this is the point at which the policies of the
Vatican and the German bishops (led by Cardinals Bertram and
Faulhaber) began to converge, and the notorious "silence" about the
Jews commenced. It is astonishing nonetheless that the Church
continued to intervene on behalf of Catholic Jews, which Hitler's
government always sharply rejected as political interference,
forbidden by the Concordat, and anti-German. In the event, Orsenigo's
warning, cited above, that protests against German laws would not be
entertained by the government was not heeded in regard to non-Aryan
Catholics. The encyclical Mit brennender Sorge is a prime example,
since it confirms that the Catholic Church, and especially the German
bishops who were in the front line, did risk total confrontation with
the Nazi state. But as we have seen, they never did this on behalf of
the Jews in general. The Church acted in self-defense, to defend its
pastoral interests and the faithful-and always in the hope of bringing
the Nazi state to some kind of modus vivendi that the Church could
accept.
Does this make Church leaders "guilty"? 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.
Martin Rhonheimer
a native of Switzerland and a priest of the Opus Dei Prelature, is a
professor of ethics and political philosophy at Rome's Pontifical
University of the Holy Cross. The article was translated from the
German by Father John Jay Hughes.