Reflections
on Anti-Semitism and the Church
Cardinal
William H. Keeler
June 6, 2004
Cardinal Keeler is
the Archbishop of Baltimore and the Episcopal Moderator for Catholic-Jewish
Relations of the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops. This address was
delivered at a Jewish-Catholic dialogue sponsored by the Brazilian Conference
of Catholic Bishop in Salvador, Brazil.
The Church and
Anti-Semitism
The first half of the 20th
Century was arguably the most violent and tragic period in human history.
Two World Wars devastated much of the globe. Advances in technology
enabled totalitarian regimes to destroy entire populations.
Indeed, a new vocabulary with words such as "genocide" and
"Holocaust" had to be developed to describe the horrors visited on
whole peoples in so many parts of the world.
The second half of the 20th
Century saw new beginnings and renewed hopes as new nations arose and
democratic principles began to spread to lands long suffering under
oppression. Among Christians, the
ecumenical movement articulated the deep longing for unity.
Between Christians and people of other religions, dialogue began to
replace disputation, a quest whose spirit was embodied in the gathering at
Assisi in 1986 of the leaders of the world's great religions to pray for
reconciliation and peace. Similarly,
the prayerful visit of Pope John Paul II to the Great Synagogue of Rome
earlier in the same year vividly exemplified the Church's attitude of respect
for the Jewish People and for Judaism, as did his Liturgy of Repentance in St.
Peter’s in Rome and his subsequent visit to Yad
va Shem and the Western Wall (Kotel)
in Jerusalem in 2000.
For Catholics, the impetus
for involvement in these movements of the Spirit came chiefly from the Second
Vatican Council in the 1960's, which condemned both anti-Semitism and
Christian theological polemics, and called for "fraternal dialogues"
with Jews.
The Holy See's Commission for Religious Relations with the Jews was
established after the Council to implement this vision, and has issued three
major statements. Also, it has
co-sponsored a series of international dialogues with representatives of the
Jewish people.[2]
At the same time, episcopal
conferences around the world have issued statements and guidelines to foster
understanding of Jews and Judaism among Catholics.
Central in all of these official Catholic reflections, including Nostra
Aetate, as the 1985
Notes affirmed, has been the necessity to preserve "the memory of the
persecution and massacre of Jews which took place in Europe just before and
during the Second World War."
Pope John Paul II has
repeatedly called upon Catholics "to see where we stand" in our
historic relationship with the Jewish People. In doing so, we must remember how much the balance (of these
relations) over two thousand years has been negative.
This very long period, "which we must not tire of reflecting upon
in order to draw from it the appropriate lessons,"
has been marked by many manifestations of anti-Semitism and, in the last
century, by the terrible events of the Shoah.
In meeting with Jewish leaders at the beginning of his September 1987
pastoral visit to the United States, the Pope referred to the Shoah and
called for the development of "common educational programs" to
"promote mutual respect and teach future generations about the Holocaust
so that never again will such a horror be possible.
Never again!"
There is no future without
memory."
Memory and memories are crucial for understanding Jewish-Christian
relationships in the past and for the future.
They need to be approached with great sensitivity and care for the
truth, which is often complex and ambiguous.
How did European civilization, largely Christian for so many centuries,
reach the point where there could emerge and prevail such a profoundly
un-Christian and, indeed, anti-Christian idea as dividing the one human race,
into groups perceived as subhuman? “Anti-Christian”
I say, because of the Christian teaching that every man and woman is
infinitely precious as made in “the image of God.”
And then slate those groups for elimination as though they were less
than human? Why the fanatical
focus on the Jews? Why was the
opposition of civil, intellectual and religious leaders so ineffectual? Why
did the rest of the world look on and, with very few exceptions, refuse
life-saving refuge? Why did the genocidal hatred against God's People, the
Jews, emerge in the 20th Century and not before in medieval times when the
Church had more political power?
These and many other
questions are raised by the history of the past centuries.
They still concern us today. They
concern the whole of humanity. They
concern the Church. It is greatly
encouraging to note, in this context, the development of so many centers and
institutions of Christian-Jewish studies, many connected to Catholic
universities, both in Europe and the United States.
These have joined to form the Council
of Centers of Jewish-Christian Relations, which will enable them to share
research and respond to new developments.[9]
The Relationship of
Christian Teaching to the Development of Modern Racial Anti-Semitism
One of the reasons for the
urgency of confronting the Shoah in Catholic thinking today lies in the
question of whether there exists a relationship between the modern racial
anti-Semitism propounded by National Socialism in the 1920's and '30's, and
the negative images of Jews and Judaism that had encrusted themselves on
Christian teaching itself over the centuries.
And if there is a relationship, we ask, how ought it to be understood?
And how do we inoculate future generations of Catholics against its
reemergence?
The great French Jewish
historian, Jules Isaac, was one of the first to study this issue in a
systematic way, beginning his studies even as he hid from the Nazis during
World War II.
His work showed that very early in the history of the Church passages
of the New Testament originally written in the context of what was then an
internal Jewish controversy between the Evangelists, who were Jewish, and
other Jewish leaders, were taken out of that context by gentile Christians of
subsequent generations, embroidered with already existing Greco-Roman
anti-Jewish rhetoric, and then "read back" into the New Testament
creating a systematic distortion that he aptly called "the teaching of
contempt" against Jews and Judaism. Cardinal
Joseph Ratzinger, in introducing the 2001 document of the Pontifical Biblical
Commission, The
Jewish People and Their Sacred Scriptures in the Christian Bible
asks the question: "Did not the
presentation of the Jews and of the Jewish people, in the New Testament
itself, contribute to creating a hostility to this people which the ideology
of those who wanted to suppress it has encouraged?"
This document and that of the Holy See’s Commission for Religious
Relations with the Jews (We
Remember, 1998) candidly admit the historical link between the
ancient and modern forms of anti-Semitism. The Biblical Commission states that
many passages in the New Testament that are critical of the Jews "served
as a pretext for anti-Jewish sentiment and, effectively, have been used for
this purpose" (n. 87), while the latter acknowledges that
"sentiments of anti-Judaism in some Christian quarters, and the gap which
existed between the Church and the Jewish people, led to a generalized
discrimination" towards the Jews over the centuries, in particular in
Christian Europe.[11]
Over the centuries the
anti-Jewish teaching was refined, developed, and made ever more negative
until, in the 20th Century, the majority of Christians in Europe had such a
negative (and false!) understanding of Judaism and such a negative attitude
toward Jews that they became easy prey for the Nazi racial categorizations
that rationalized genocide. Within
Christianity, Pope John Paul II has noted, "erroneous and unjust
interpretations of the New Testament relative to the Jewish people and their
presumed guilt circulated for too long, engendering sentiments of hostility
toward this people. That contributed to the lulling of many consciences, so
that when Europe was swept by the wave of persecutions inspired by a pagan
anti-Semitism that in its essence was equally anti-Christian, alongside those
Christians who did everything to save those who were persecuted, even to the
point of risking their own lives, the spiritual resistance of many was not
what humanity expected from Christ's disciples."
It needs to be noted that
this framing of the issue, while acknowledging fully the historical link
between Christian anti-Judaism and Nazi anti-Semitism, also acknowledges the
distinctions between them. Distinctions
are necessary for the historical record. Christian
anti-Judaism was not racial in character.
It adhered, for example, to the teaching of Genesis on the oneness of
humanity in the divine image.
It sought a vision of the Church itself in which the distinction
between Jew and Gentile would be overcome by baptism.
History, too, shows the difference.
Historian Yosef Yerushalmi asked why, if genocide had been latent in
the Christian teaching of contempt, no such attempt was made in the Middle
Ages when the Church held sufficient political power within
"Christendom" to implement such an idea: "There is no question
but that Christian anti-Semitism through the ages helped create the climate
and mentality in which genocide, once conceived, could be achieved with little
or no opposition. But even if we
grant that Christian teaching was a necessary cause leading to the Holocaust,
it was surely not a sufficient one. The
Holocaust was the work of a thoroughly modern, neo-pagan (secularist) state. .
.The slaughter of the Jews by the state was not part of the medieval Christian
world order. It became possible
with the breakdown of that order."
One of the great graces of my
life was to attend the Second Vatican Council (1962-1965).
It seems like yesterday to me that Cardinal Augustin Bea rose, on
November 19, 1963, to introduce what evolved into Nostra Aetate,
telling us that Pope John XXIII wished the Council to make clear that
Christian Scriptures and teachings should not be twisted to anti-Semitic ends,
much less used as an excuse for violence against the Jewish people.[16]
It does not diminish the
failures and sins of Christians on all levels in Church and society over the
centuries to acknowledge the multiplicity of causes that lead to the
unthinkable becoming reality in the 20th century.
Today we must, for the sake of future generations, confront all the
causes that led to the Holocaust so that, in understanding them, we can
effectively ensure nothing similar can ever occur again, whether to Jews or to
other peoples. It is vital to
continue the work of the Second Vatican Council to reject and to eliminate
from Catholic teaching anything that might be used to present the Jews
"as repudiated by God or accursed, as if this followed from Sacred
Scripture."
As the pope has said:
For Christians the heavy
burden of guilt for the murder of the Jewish people must be an enduring call
to repentance. Through it we can
overcome every form of anti-Semitism and establish a new relationship with
our kindred nation of the Old Covenant.
The Church, mindful of her common patrimony with the Jews, and
motivated by the Gospels' spiritual love. . .deplores the hatred,
persecutions, and displays of anti-Semitism directed against the Jews at any
time and from any source (Nostra Aetate n. 4).
Guilt should not oppress and lead to self-agonizing, but must always
be the point of departure for conversion.”
The failure and guilt of that
time have a church dimension. Despite
the exemplary behavior of many Christian individuals and groups, most
Christians kept on living their lives, in essence turning their back on the
fate of their Jewish neighbors, looking fixedly at the threat to their own
institutions, and remaining all too often silent.
Though the Shoah was conceived and carried out by a thoroughly
"modern" neo-pagan regime, the classical teaching of contempt was a
central factor in "lulling the consciences" of Christians, enabling
them to remain appallingly indifferent to Jewish suffering, and even in
generating popular support among many for the Nazi crimes.
Thus it happened that Jewish men, women and children were
systematically put to death without the Christian community as a whole having
raised a successful and effective opposition.
The fact that throughout
history and during the Shoah many people in the Church, leaders as well
as ordinary faithful, did speak up and act in defense of the Jews at the risk
of their lives (for example, the convents and monasteries of Italy in which,
in response to the personal leadership of Pope Pius XII, thousands of Jews
were hidden during the Nazi occupation),
does not take away the guilt of those other Christians, leaders as well as
ordinary faithful, who committed the sin of anti-Semitism by action or
omission.
God will judge them.
The “New” Anti-Semitism
Already in 1988, the Holy
See’s Commission for Justice and Peace, in its document, The Church and
Racism, noted that “anti-Zionism – which is not of the same order (as
anti-Semitism), since it questions the State of Israel and its policies –
serves at times as a screen for anti-Semitism, feeding on it and leading to
it.”[21]
Old conspiracy theories and world domination fantasies are being given
new life and are exploiting the conflict between Israel and the Palestinians.
In January of 2004 the European Monitoring Centre on Racism and
Xenophobia completed a study, begun in 2002, of “Manifestations of
Anti-Semitism in the European Union,” which concluded that while the
‘familiar’ threat by ‘ordinary’ right-wing anti-Semitism is obvious,
left-wing, anti-globalization, Muslim and pro-Palestinian groups are backbones
of contemporary anti-Semitism as well.
At the same time, I do wish to note some cautions about the Middle East situation.
One is the fact that Christians living there, living in Israel and under
the Palestinian authority, feel themselves under constant pressure.
As Father Drew Christiansen has pointed out, there has been a lack of
:
effective police involvement in protecting Christians and their holy sites in
Nazareth and other places.
The lack of police action in Nazareth, whether in protecting Christians
against attack or in preventing illegal construction, is a recurrent problem.
When the militants rioted a few years ago, attacking Christians, the
police held back for three days before intervening in the fray.
Some time later the police commander for the northern region admitted he
had been under orders not to get involved. With
repeated court orders and top government decisions to end the construction in
Nazareth, it is hard to comprehend how the authorities could have permitted the
protest site to become half completed—under such conditions, you can
understand why the Christians of Galilee live in fear.
The vulnerability of Israel’s
indigenous Christians is made apparent in the vulnerability of the holy places.
Just like the illegal construction in Nazareth, the occupation and siege.
. . [some time] ago of the Church of the Nativity in Bethlehem revealed the
pressures to which the Holy Land’s Christians are now exposed.
In both cases they found themselves and the holy places at the mercy of
the worst of their neighbors, along with outside agitators.
Before the al-Aqsa intifada, there were some 50,000 Christians on the
West Bank. Today, as a result of
emigration, there are fewer than 35,000. The
ambiguities in police protection, whether by the Palestinian Authority or the
Israeli police, including the border police, is a source of grave concern for
the future of the Church in the Holy Land.
Also, there is the issue
of the Latin Patriarch, Michel Sabbah. As Father Christiansen points out:
Patriarch Sabbah is a
Palestinian National, but he is also a bishop with responsibilities after
Vatican II—and I would add after World War II and the Holocaust—to speak
out on issues of justice, peace and human rights.
When asked, he consults with police officials on some security matters.
With the Anglican and Lutheran bishops, both Palestinians, he has gone
to Gaza to meet with Sheikh Yassin, the spiritual head of Hamas, to ask him to
end suicide bombings. He has met .
. . with Israel’s chief rabbis, in an unprecedented move for a Middle East
Christian leader, and he engages in regular bible study with rabbis and
priests of the Patriarchate. Because
of this he is shunned, as I was alarmed to discover, by even moderate, secular
academics of Muslim background. .
. .When he called for political leaders who could not bring peace to step
aside, he once again was criticized by the Palestinian side.
But he is given no credit by Israel.
Instead he is scorned by an [Israeli] official with an important role
in interreligious relations as ‘the Islamic Patriarch.’” The issues of
fairness and of honest respect deserve to be raised in this context.
Anything that we can do to promote both fairness and honest respect
among leaders will help to hasten the day of justice and peace in the land we
call Holy."
There has indeed been a huge
increase in anti-Semitic speech and incidents in Europe, the latter in the main
attributed to young Arabs influenced by anti-Israel propaganda.
European governments, to their credit, are now taking the rise over the
last three years quite seriously, though they did not seem to initially.
On April 28, 2004, over 500 representatives from the 55-nation
Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe convened in Berlin to
formulate an action plan to deal with the growing problem throughout Europe
Secretary of State Colin Powell represented the U.S, acknowledging
candidly that “regrettably, my own country has its share of anti-Semites,
skinheads and other assorted racists, bigots and extremists, who feed on fear
and ignorance and prey on the vulnerable.”
One
very distressing feature of the new anti-Semitism is the use in Muslim countries
of so much of the remnants of Christian anti-Semitism, such as the widespread
distribution of translations of the thoroughly discredited classics, The
Protocols of the Elders of Zion and The Talmud Unmasked.
Similarly, in some parts of the Arab world, certain elements of the
Gibson movie that derive from pre-Vatican II Passion Plays have been exploited
for anti-Israel and anti-Semitic propaganda.
I would hope that the United Nations, which will hold its first-ever
seminar on anti-Semitism on June 21, 2004, will confront the phenomenon not only
its “old” but also its “new” form as well.
The
Catholic Church takes the rise in anti-Semitism very seriously.
When, some three years ago, the situation appeared on the verge of
getting out of hand in France, and the politicians were silent because it was an
election year and they seemed unwilling to alienate French Muslim voters, the
French Bishops Conference issued a terse, strongly worded statement condemning
anti-Semitism that broke the logjam and allowed the politicians to find their
own voices and actions. Last fall,
Cardinal Walter Kasper, the President of the Pontifical Commission for Religious
Relations with the Jews, felt it necessary to publish in the October 1 edition
of L’Osservatore Romano, an article
he had written entitled “Anti-Semitism:
a Wound to Be Healed.” Cardinal
Kasper reminded his readers to be ever-alert for signs of anti-Semitism and to
probe its history and causes even within our own Christian teaching, in order to
root it out once and for all.
It
is not only a question of the cultural, social, political or ideological, and
in a more general way "secular", dimensions of anti-Semitism which
must also be a cause of concern to us, but of a specific aspect of it that was
firmly condemned in 1928 by the Apostolic See when it defined anti-Semitism as
"odium adversus populum olim a Deo electum" (AAS XX/1928,
pp. 103-104). Today, 75 years later, the only modification we feel duty bound
to make is the elimination of the word "olim" ("once"):
this is no small thing, because in recognizing the perennial timeliness of the
Covenant between God and his people, Israel, we in turn will be able to
rediscover, with our Jewish brethren, the irrevocable universality of the
vocation to serve humanity in peace and in justice, until the definitive
coming of his kingdom. This is what the Pontiff also recommends to us in his
Post-Synodal Apostolic Exhortation Ecclesia
in Europa of last 28 June, recalling the ‘relationship which binds
the Church to the Jewish people and of Israel's unique role in salvation
history’ (n. 56). Pope John Paul II continues, observing that ‘there is
need for acknowledgment of the common roots linking Christianity and the
Jewish people, who are called by God to a covenant which remains irrevocable
(cf. Rom 11: 29) and has attained definitive fullness in Christ.
Consequently, it is necessary to encourage dialogue with Judaism, knowing that
it is fundamentally important for the self-knowledge of Christians and for the
transcending of divisions between the Churches’ (ibid.). Dialogue and
collaboration between Christians and Jews ‘also implies that
‘acknowledgment be given to any part which the children of the Church have
had in the growth and spread of anti-Semitism in history; forgiveness must be
sought for this from God, and every effort must be made to favor encounters of
reconciliation and of friendship with the sons of Israel' (ibid.). In
this spirit of rediscovered brotherhood a new springtime for the Church and
for the world can bloom once more, with the heart turned from Rome to
Jerusalem and to the land of the Fathers, so that there too a just and lasting
peace may quickly germinate for all and mature like a banner flying in the
midst of the peoples.”
Finally, Ecclesia in America,
the post-Synodal Apostolic Constitution promulgated by Pope John Paul II in
Guadalupe, Mexico, in January 1999 says,
American society also includes Jewish communities, with
which the Church has fostered increasing cooperation in recent years.
The history of salvation makes clear our special relationship with the
Jewish people. Jesus belongs to
the Jewish people and he inaugurated his Church within the Jewish nation.
A great part of the Holy Scriptures, which we Christians read as the
word of God, constitute a spiritual patrimony which we share with Jews.
Consequently any negative attitude in their regard must be avoided,
since 'in order to be a blessing for the world, Jews and Christians need first
to be a blessing for each other. [Ecclesia
in America,
N.
50.]
.
"Declaration on the Relationship of the Church to Non-Christian
Religions," Nostra Aetate, no. 4 (28 October 1965).
"Fraternal" or "brotherly" here is intentionally
theological, to show the intimacy of the Church's relationship with the
Jewish people.
[2]
Guidelines and Suggestions for Implementing the Conciliar
Declaration, Nostra Aetate n. 4 (1 December 1974), Notes on the
Correct Way to Present the Jews and Judaism in Preaching and Catechesis in
the Roman Catholic Church (24 June 1985), We Remember: A Reflection on the Shoah
(16 March 1998). Cf.
International Catholic-Jewish Liaison Committee, Fifteen Years of
Catholic-Jewish Dialogue, 1970-1985 (Libreria Editrice Vaticana &
Libreria Editrice Lateranense, 1988). Such
dialogues provided the basis for the statements' understanding of Jews and
Judaism.
.
In 1995 the German, Polish, Dutch and U.S.Bishops, for example,
issued statements on the 50th anniversary of the liberation of Auschwitz-Birkenau.
On 30 September 1997 the French Bishops issued a remarkable
"Statement of Repentance" on the occasion of the 57th anniversary
of the enactment of anti-Semitic laws in wartime Vichy France.
The French bishops argued there that the Catholic Church must
confront the past with integrity since "conscience is formed in
remembering."
.
Pope John Paul II to Jewish Leaders in Miami (11 September 1986).
It is heartening to note the many academic programs and institutes
which have developed, especially within the past decade, to foster
Jewish-Christian relations and Holocaust education.
.
Pope John Paul II, Prayer of the Angelus, 11 June 1995, cited
in We Remember: A Reflection on the Shoah, Holy See’s Commission for Religious Relations with the
Jews, March, 1998, section I.
.
See Jules Isaac, Jesus et Israel (Paris, Fasquelle
Editeurs, 1948; New York: Holt, Rinehart, Winston, 1971).
The story of Professor Isaac's meeting with Pope John XXIII on 13
June 1960 and its subsequent influence on the decision to include a schema
on the Jews in the Second Vatican Council is well known.
.
Address to the Vatican Symposium on "The Roots of Anti-Judaism
in the Christian Milieu," 31 October, 1997
.
Galatians 3:28-29. The
exception of the Spanish principle of limpia de raza or "purity
of blood," with its tragic consequences in the Expulsion of the Jews
from Spain in 1492 and the Spanish Inquisition over the succeeding centuries
deserves special study.
.
In Eva Fleischner, editor, Auschwitz: Beginning of a New Era?
(New York: KTAV, 1977) p. 105.
[16]
Council Daybook, Vatican II, Sessions 1 and 2, pp. 282-284.
[18].
John Paul II, “Address to the New Ambassador of the Federal
Republic of Germany to the Holy See,” November 1980.
.
Yad VaShem in Israel preserves the memory of many more of these
"righteous gentiles."
.
Pope John Paul II first characterized anti-Semitism as a sin in
his address to Jewish representatives in Sydney, Australia on 26 November
1986: "For the Jewish people themselves, Catholics should have not only
respect but also great fraternal love for it is the teaching of both the
Hebrew and Christian Scriptures that the Jews are beloved of God, who has
called them with an irrevocable calling.
No valid justification could ever be found for acts of discrimination
or persecution against Jews. In
fact, such acts must be held to be sinful."
The General Directory for Catechesis, issued by the Holy See's
Congregation for the Clergy in 1997, emphasizes that "In particular, an
objective of catechesis should be to overcome every form of
anti-Semitism" (no. 199).
[21]
The
Church and Racism, no. 15. Text
and commentary can be found in Anti-Semitism is a Sin by Eugene
Fisher and Leon Klenicki (New York: Anti-Defamation League, 1990).