If relations between Jews and the Roman Catholic Church are so good, why are they so bad? The Catholic-Jewish dialogue has deteriorated in recent months, with harsh and hurtful words being hurled in both directions. The latest outburst occurred last summer at a conference on antisemitism in Tel Aviv, where the Rev. David Yager, a Texas-based priest representing the Vatican, labeled the ongoing Jewish criticism of Pope Pius XII a "blood libel." Dr. Eugene Fisher, director of ecumenical affairs for the National Conference of Bishops, told a reporter that the blood libel remark was "entirely inappropriate," even as he half-defended Yager's insulting rhetoric, saying that it reflected the Vatican's concern about "groundless" Jewish attacks on Pius XII. To date, the Vatican has not issued a disclaimer or imposed discipline on Rev. Yager.
This incident occurred in the aftermath of a more serious breach in Jewish-Catholic relations: Cardinal Edward Cassidy, president of the Vatican's Commission on Religious Relations with the Jews, publicly rebuked "Jewish agencies" for their supposed "aggressive attitudes" against the Church. In a speech delivered in his name at an interfaith forum in Baltimore last February, the cardinal announced that the Church was severing its ties with the thirty-year-old International Jewish Committee for Interreligious Consultation (IJCIC) because, he charged, one of IJCIC's organizations is "involved in a systematic campaign to denigrate the Catholic Church." He was referring to the World Jewish Congress (WJC), whose Israel office had published materials on the Church during the Nazi era and was putting pressure on the Vatican to open its archives to independent scholarly study. WJC Executive Director Elan Steinberg countered that his organization was engaged in a campaign for "historical truth."
Another setback came in March 1998, when the Vatican released its long-awaited document on the Holocaust, "We Remember: A Reflection on the Shoah." Jewish reaction was almost universally negative. The Anti-Defamation League (a member of IJCIC) dismissed it as "hollow" and as "an apologia full of rationalization for Pope Pius XII and the Church." The major criticism of the document, leveled both by Jews and non-Jews, was that the Church, as an institution, was unwilling to acknowledge any wrongdoing during the Holocaust, ascribing blame only to individual Catholics.
Jewish-Catholic relations eroded further in October 1998, when Pope John Paul II canonized Edith Stein, a Jewish convert who became a Carmelite nun and died in Auschwitz. The Nazis in Holland had deported her in 1942, together with other converted Jews, in retaliation for the Dutch bishops' open opposition to the persecution of Jews. At the time of her canonization, the question was raised repeatedly: Did Edith Stein die because she was born a Jew or was she a martyr for the Church? Some of Edith Stein's Jewish relatives asked Pope John Paul II to use the occasion to issue an apology for the inaction of the Holy See during the Holocaust. Pope John Paul II did not respond to their plea.
All of these events have set the stage for today's battle-potentially the most bruising of all-the Vatican's intent to canonize Pius XII, who long has been criticized by some historians, including Catholic scholars, for failing to publicly condemn the Nazi persecution of the Jews, clinging to a policy of neutrality. With few exceptions, he intervened actively only to save baptized Jews. In March 1939, for example, the Holy See obtained visas to Brazil for hundreds of converts; no such effort was made on behalf of Jews.
The pontiff's defenders insist he worked behind the scenes to save Jews. In 1943, they point out, following the German occupation of Rome, Pius XII quietly opened many Catholic institutions in Italy to Jews. As a result, thousands of Jews found shelter and were thus saved from deportation to Auschwitz. On June 25, 1944, Pius XII sent a secret cable to the Hungarian regent, Admiral Miklos Horthy, a Catholic, and asked him to spare the suffering of the Jews. Horthy responded by canceling the first wave of deportations. Catholic writers cite a number of reasons for the pope's public silence, among them: condemnation of the Nazis would have harmed the Jews whom the pope wanted to save; it would have given the Gestapo cause to seize the Vatican; it would have forced German Catholics to choose between loyalty to their nation or to their Church; and it would have prevented the Vatican from being a mediator or peace broker.
On the other hand, if Pius XII had publicly demanded an end to the extermination of the Jews, many thousands of the victims could have been saved.
Neither side is likely to convince the other. What needs to be examined, therefore, are two more fundamental questions: Why do Catholic leaders insist on making Pius XII a saint? And why can't the Jews be silent and let the Church act in what it says is its own affair?
One way to answer the first question is to go back in time to 1971, when the first meeting of the IJCIC was convened in Paris. I served as chairman of the Jewish delegation. The Vatican delegation was headed by the then archbishop of Marseilles, Roger Etchegaray, but the man who carried the Vatican's direct instructions was Archbishop Jean Jerome Hamer, then one of the deputies in the office of interreligious affairs. On the second day of the meeting, I decided to inquire about the Vatican's agenda and, in exchange, to let its representative know what practical results Jews desired.
Archbishop Hamer accepted an invitation to join me that night at my hotel for a private meeting. I began by asking him: "What do you and your people want from us?" He responded as an experienced diplomat: "You first." I did not hesitate. "The Jewish community needs and wants an end to Christian antisemitism, and we are waiting impatiently for the Vatican to recognize the State of Israel." Hamer responded equally quickly. "The eradication of antisemitism from Catholic teaching," he said, "is a prime objective of the Church, and it will happen soon." He added that the recognition of the State of Israel, however, was a political question and that "the Jews would have to take that up with the Vatican's Secretary of State." I then asked him what the Church's objectives were. "The Vatican wants the Jews to stop accusing it of not having helped during the Nazi period. We want you to realize that Pius XII was a far better friend of the Jews than is commonly acknowledged. In any event, we want the hostility to end."
The second item on the Vatican agenda, so Hamer told me, was a deep theological question, the lack of parallelism between Judaism and Christianity. Christians could not think about their faith without beginning with the Hebrew Bible (the "Old Testament") as the root of all they believe. Jews had no such relationship to the major figures of the New Testament or the "good news" that they announced. At this time of reevaluating our view of one another, Hamer asked, "hasn't the time come for Judaism to reassess Christianity in a more serious and more equal way?"
It had become clear to me that there was some linkage in the archbishop's mind between the Church's ridding itself of antisemitism and the Jews' muting their criticism of the Church's conduct during the Nazi era. "I cannot deliver the mainstream of the Jewish community to accede to either of your requests," I told him. "We are not centrally organized and have no mechanism whereby we could compel Jews to speak in one voice. Many Jews will continue to be critical, sometimes vehemently so, of the Church and Pius XII during the war. If shutting off the criticism is a precondition for cleaning antisemitism from Church teaching, then such a deal cannot be made. The Jewish community thinks that this is a step that the Catholics need to take for their own sake." The archbishop was not surprised at my response and agreed.
In fact, in the years since our meeting in Paris, the Church has condemned antisemitism repeatedly and excised anti-Jewish teachings from the Catholic schools at all levels. The present pope, John Paul II, was the first in history to visit a synagogue, crossing the river from the Vatican on April 14, 1986 to join Chief Rabbi Elio Toaff in what amounted to a prayer service. By actual count, John Paul II has thus far rigorously condemned antisemitism thirty-five times in his public speeches-and he took the unprecedented step of extending formal Vatican recognition to the State of Israel.
On the second issue raised by Archbishop Hamer-the place of Christianity in Jewish theology-we spoke at some length, concluding that it was not a subject that our two delegations should address. We agreed, however, that the very existence of an open relationship of equals would probably send some Catholic and Jewish scholars and theologians back to the classic texts of both traditions to find some root of a reevaluation. This had already happened in the past centuries when, on several occasions, Jewish theologians as far apart as Yehudah ha-Levi in the eleventh century, Jacob Emden in the eighteenth, and Franz Rosenzweig in the twentieth had said, with some variations, that the founders of both Christianity and Islam were messengers of God to bring the moral essence of biblical revelation to the non-Jewish world.
At that first meeting, it was already clear that our disagreement about what Pius XII should or could have done to save Jews would remain an insoluble problem -- and it has.
Today, we Jews are being asked by the Church, for the sake of Catholic-Jewish dialogue, to remain politely silent as it bestows upon Pius XII the mantle of sainthood. Vatican policymakers are pushing hard for his canonization, and warning the Jews off the subject, perhaps because they feel nothing more can be done to make the Jews accept the Catholic version of history in the era of the Holocaust. Having satisfied the agenda of the Jews on removing antisemitism and recognizing Israel, the Church seems to think that it has nothing more to give.
Some Jewish organizations have stepped up pressure on the Vatican to open its wartime archives to researchers. Then, so the argument goes, we would finally possess the necessary facts to revolve this quarrel. But this demand is wrongheaded. It is simply inconceivable that the Vatican would not have removed incriminating documents, if such existed. This is what usually happens to document collections on sensitive issues everywhere in the world. I can attest to at least two vital documents which do not appear in the supposedly exhaustive eleven-volume compilation, The Acts and Documents of the Holy See Relative to World War II.
But to ask Jews to consider the subject out of bounds is inconceivable, because Pius XII, whose actions or inactions affected the lives of millions of Jews, is as much a part of Jewish history as he is a figure of the Church. There is not the slightest possibility that the Church will ever apologize for Pius XII. Faithful Roman Catholics are constrained, almost without exception, to believe -- and to insist -- that the Church itself is innocent. It remains the mystical bride of Christ, pure and beyond reproach. And it is almost inconceivable that the pope, though fallible as a human, could possibly be guilty of the error of looking aside while six million Jews were being murdered. Individual Catholics who were born, baptized, and raised in the Church may have acted sinfully, but not the Church and not Pius XII.
The Church rightly points to individual Catholics, including priests of every rank, who came to the aid of Jews. Six million Jews were murdered, but more than a million survived and, invariably, a Christian rescuer played a role. It should be noted, however, that in France, Holland, and Belgium, where the clergy openly challenged Nazi mistreatment of Jews and organized rescue efforts, thousands of Jews were saved. By contrast, in Germany, where the clergy were for the most part passive and unhelpful to Jews, "the large majority failed disgracefully in the face of this unheard-of provocation" (this assessment was the finding of a 1950 investigation by a group of German Protestant and Catholic theologians).
I am a witness, once removed, to one of the positive rescue stories. In the fall of 1941, the then chief rabbi of the Holy Land, Isaac Herzog, traveled from country to country on a mission to enlist the support of world leaders in stopping the slaughter of Jews in Europe. When the chief rabbi reached New York, his friend and my teacher, Professor Saul Lieberman, asked me to assist him. Late one night, after everybody had gone, Rabbi Herzog, who was a truly holy man, was sitting in a chair by the window reciting psalms. When he finished, he sighed and said, "Hertzberg, I want to tell you a story. Before arriving in America, I traveled throughout the Mediterranean on neutral ships, stopping in Malta, Cairo, Istanbul, and other cities to enlist help in saving our people. Wherever I went, I met with the papal legate and always I was told, 'What can I do? My hands are tied.' Everywhere, I met with indifference or helplessness. The one exception was Istanbul, where I went to see the Vatican's ambassador to Turkey, Archbishop Angelo Giuseppe Roncalli. As I told him of the mass murders, he started to cry, rose from his chair, put his arms around me, and said, 'Rabbi, what can I do to help?'"
Archbishop Roncalli later distributed false baptismal certificates which helped save thousands of Romanian Jews from deportation. In 1958, Cardinal Roncalli was elected pope and took the name John XXIII. He began a new era of friendly relations with the Jews. The "Declaration on the Jews" by the Second Vatican Council was issued in 1964, a year after his death, but the text represented his spirit.
It has been reported that the Vatican plans to canonize Pius XII in tandem with John XXIII. I have let the Vatican know of my desire to testify when the case of John XXIII is called up. I would bear witness to what a very holy man he was, citing the story told to me by another very holy man, the chief rabbi of Palestine during the war. If my request is granted, it would be the first time in history that a rabbi testifies in a canonization case.
Policymakers in the Vatican seem to think that they will canonize Pius XII and that the issue will go away. It will not. Jews and Catholics are not going to go forward by reenacting this battle over and over again. Let us therefore agree to disagree. We can, and must, go on to do what we can do together for the future of humanity: to help the poor, to defend the defenseless, and to live peacefully with our differences.
Rabbi Arthur Hertzberg is Bronfman Visiting Professor of the Humanities at New York University and the author of nine books, among them The Zionist Idea and, with Aron Hirt-Manheimer, JEWS: The Essence and Character of a People.
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