|
|
|
|
|
|
|
Introduction
Edward Cardinal Cassidy,
Australian head of the Vatican's Commission for
Religious Relations with the Jews, called in
reporters to announce the long-awaited results of his
investigation. It was March 16, 1998--eleven years
after Pope John Paul II had asked the Commission to
determine what responsibility, if any, the Church
bore for the slaughter of millions of European Jews
during World War II. For the Church, a more explosive
subject could hardly be imagined. It had been
thirty-five years since Rolf Hochhuth's play The
Deputy had first raised the charge of papal
complicity in the Holocaust, triggering Catholic
outrage worldwide. Yet the suggestion that the
Vatican bore any responsibility for what had happened
to the Jews continued to grate on Catholic
sensibilities. And so nervousness mixed with
curiosity as the report was finally released to a
public sharply divided between those worried that it
might criticize the Church, and those who feared it
would not.
Heightening the drama and
underlining the significance of the event, the Pope
himself wrote an introduction to the report. John
Paul II hailed the Commission document--"We
Remember: A Reflection on the Shoah"--as an
important part of Church preparations for the
upcoming millennial celebrations. To properly observe
the jubilee, the Pope wrote, the Church's sons and
daughters must purify their hearts by examining the
responsibility they bore for sins committed in the
past. He voiced the hope that by providing an
accurate account of past evils, the Commission report
would help ensure that such horrors as the Holocaust
would never be repeated. The report's preamble echoed
this theme, not only stressing the Pope's commitment
to repentance for past sins, but also linking the
proper understanding of the past to the building of a
brighter future.
At the heart of the problem,
as the Vatican commissioners recognized, was the fact
that the Holocaust had taken place "in countries
of long-standing Christian civilization." Might
there be some link, they asked, between the
destruction of Europe's Jews and "the attitudes
down the centuries of Christians toward the
Jews"?
Those who feared that the report
might criticize past popes or past Church actions
were soon relieved to learn that the Commission's
answer to this question was a resounding
"no." True, the report admitted, Jews had
for centuries been discriminated against and used as
scapegoats, and, regrettably, certain misguided
interpretations of Christian teachings had on
occasion nurtured such behavior. But all this
regarded an older history, one largely overcome by
the beginning of the 1800s.
In the
Commission's view, the nineteenth century was the key
period for understanding the roots of the Holocaust
and, in particular, the reasons why the Church bore
no responsibility for it. It was in that turbulent
century that new intellectual and political currents
associated with extreme nationalism emerged. Amid the
economic and social upheavals of the time, people
started to accuse Jews of exercising a
disproportionate influence. "There thus began to
spread," the Commission members argued, "an
anti-Judaism that was essentially more sociological
and political than religious." This new form of
antagonism to the Jews was further shaped by racial
theories that first appeared in the latter part of
the nineteenth century and reached their terrible
apotheosis in the Nazis' glorification of a superior
Aryan race. Far from supporting these racist
ideologies, the Vatican commissioners asserted, the
Church had always condemned them.
And so,
according to the report, a crucial distinction must
be made. What arose in the late nineteenth century,
and sprouted like a poisonous weed in the twentieth,
was "anti-Semitism, based on theories contrary
to the constant teaching of the Church." This
they contrasted with "anti-Judaism,"
long-standing attitudes of mistrust and hostility of
which "Christians also have been guilty,"
but which, in the Vatican report, had nothing to do
with the hatred of the Jews that led to the
Holocaust.
When I read the news story of the
Vatican press conference, and later read the text of
the Commission report, I knew that there was
something terribly wrong with the history that the
Vatican was recounting. It is a history that many
wished had happened, but it is not what actually
happened. It is the latter story, sometimes dramatic,
sometimes hard to believe, often sad, that I try to
tell in the pages that follow.
Just how
little this history is known was driven home to me by
reader reactions to my recent book The Kidnapping
of Edgardo Mortara. The book tells of a
six-year-old Jewish boy in Bologna, Italy, who, in
1858, was taken from his family on orders of the
local inquisitor. Having been secretly baptized by a
servant--or so it was claimed--the boy, the
inquisitor argued, was now Catholic and could not
remain in a Jewish household.
"You mean
there was still an Inquisition in 1858?" readers
asked. "I thought the Inquisition was back in
the 1500s or 1600s." I also kept
hearing--especially from non-Jewish readers--how
amazing it was for them to learn that forcing Jews to
wear yellow badges and keeping them locked in
ghettoes were not inventions of the Nazis in the
twentieth century, but a policy that the popes had
championed for hundreds of years.
Although
various histories of the fraught relations between
the Roman Catholic Church and the Jews have been
published, most focus on a more remote past. Others
examine Church doctrine, engage in biblical exegesis,
or analyze various other texts, and so do not capture
the actual struggle between the Church and the Jews.
Someone, I thought, needed to write a book about the
Church and the Jews in modern times, one that would
use original archival documents--many never before
examined--to tell a story that has remained in
important ways unknown.
This last point is
worth emphasizing, because while recent scholar-
ship--especially in Italy--has brought to light
important new information about the Vatican and the
Jews, much has remained buried in the archives. In
this light, Cardinal Ratzinger's announcement in 1998
that, for the first time, the archives of the Holy
Office of the Inquisition were being opened to
scholars, offered a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity.
Sources never before seen by scholars were now
available, offering the tantalizing prospect of new
insights into Church history. This book rests heavily
on these newly available documents from the
Inquisition archives, as well as from other Vatican
archives that have become open to researchers in
recent years. Together with evidence that has been
reported in the specialized scholarly
literature--mainly in Italy and France--over the past
few years these new sources shed light on a history
that until now has remained hidden.
Back in
early 1998, news of the impending release of the
Vatican report on the Holocaust had brought hope that
the Church itself might help rectify the ignorance
that surrounded the history of the Church's dealing
with the Jews. Pope John Paul II had done much to
foster an ecumenical spirit and warmer relations
between the Catholic Church and the Jews, and he had
called on the Commission to be fearless in
confronting the truths of the past. The Commission
did not take its task lightly, studying the question
for over a decade before formulating its conclusions.
Surely, thirty-six years after the Second Vatican
Council opened, the time had come for the Church to
face up to its own uncomfortable past.
The
report's key passage on the rise of modern
anti-Semitism explains:
By the end of the
eighteenth century and the beginning of the
nineteenth century, Jews generally had achieved an
equal standing with other citizens in most states and
a certain number of them held influential positions
in society. But in that same historical context,
notably in the nineteenth century, a false and
exacerbated nationalism took hold. In a climate of
eventful social change, Jews were often accused of
exercising an influence disproportionate to their
numbers. Thus there began to spread in varying
degrees throughout most of Europe an anti-Judaism
that was essentially more sociological and political
than religious.
The anti-Semitism embraced by
the Nazi regime, the report goes on to say, was the
product of this new social and political form of
anti-Judaism, which was foreign to the Church, and
which mixed in new racial ideas that were similarly
at odds with Church doctrine.
This argument,
sadly, is not the product of a Church that wants to
confront its history. If Jews acquired equal rights
in Europe in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries,
it was only over the angry, loud, and indeed
indignant protests of the Vatican and the Church. And
if Jews in the nineteenth century began to be accused
of exerting a disproportionate and dangerous
influence, and if a form of anti-Judaism "that
was essentially more sociological and political than
religious" was taking shape, this was in no
small part due to the efforts of the Roman Catholic
Church itself.
As this book will show, the
distinction made in the report between
"anti-Judaism"--of which some unnamed and
misinformed Christians were unfortunately guilty in
the past--and "anti-Semitism," which led to
the horrors of the Holocaust, will simply not survive
historical scrutiny.
The notion that the
Church fostered only negative "religious"
views of the Jews, and not negative images of their
harmful social, economic, cultural, and political
effects--the latter identified with modern
anti-Semitism--is clearly belied by the historical
record. As modern anti-Semitic movements took shape
at the end of the nineteenth century, the Church was
a major player in them, constantly warning people of
the rising "Jewish peril." What, after all,
were the major tenets of this modern anti-Semitic
movement if not such warnings as these: Jews are
trying to take over the world; Jews have already
spread their voracious tentacles around the nerve
centers of Austria, Germany, France, Hungary, Poland,
and Italy; Jews are rapacious and merciless, seeking
at all costs to get their hands on all the world's
gold, having no concern for the number of Christians
they ruin in the process; Jews are unpatriotic, a
foreign body ever threatening the well-being of the
people among whom they live; special laws are needed
to protect society, restricting the Jews rights and
isolating them. Every single one of these elements of
modern anti-Semitism was not only embraced by the
Church but actively promulgated by official and
unofficial Church organs.
The Commission's
neat distinction between anti-Judaism and
anti-Semitism was not new to the 1998 document. In
the wake of the Second World War, scholars and
theologians close to the Church began to look for a
way to defend the Church from the charge of having
helped lay the groundwork for the Holocaust. The
anti-Semitism/anti-Judaism distinction soon became an
article of faith that relieved the Church of any
responsibility for what happened. Before long,
millions of people came to assume its historical
reality.
Given the important role played, as
we shall see, by the Jesuit journal Civilta
cattolica in this history, I was especially
struck by the use of this distinction in a recent
history of the journal. Written by the well-respected
Church historian and Jesuit priest Giuseppe De Rosa,
the book was published on the occasion of the
journal's 150th anniversary in 2000.
Father De
Rosa notes with regret Civilta cattolica's
century-long campaign against the Jews, observing
that the journal only changed course in 1965, in the
wake of the Second Vatican Council. "It is
necessary, however," he adds, "to note that
these [hostile articles] were not a matter of
'anti-Semitism,' the essential ingredient of which is
hatred against the Jews because of their 'race,' but
rather anti-Judaism, which opposes and combats the
Jews for religious and social reasons." He then
lists some of the charges that were regularly made in
the journal's pages: "that the Jews battled the
Church, that they practiced the ritual murder of
Christian children, that they had enormous political
power in their hands to the point of controlling
governments and, above all, that they possessed great
wealth, earned by usury, and thus had incredibly
strong economic influence, which they used to the
detriment of Christianity and Christian
peoples." Father De Rosa adds, quite correctly,
that the Jesuit journal was not alone in making such
accusations, for they filled the pages of many
mainstream Catholic publications.
By way of
illustration of Civilta cattolica's
anti-Judaism (as opposed to anti-Semitism), he
offers some passages from articles in the journal
authored by Fathers Rondina and Ballerini in the
1890s. These tell of Jews' thirst for world
domination, their hunger for gold, and their belief
that Christians are no better than animals. Wherever
the Jews live, in the words of these authors, they
"form a foreign nation, and sworn enemy of [the
people's] well-being." What should good
Catholics do about this terrible threat to their
livelihoods and happiness? The answer offered in the
pages of Civilta cattolica was clear: The
Jews' "civil equality" must be immediately
revoked, for "they have no right to it,"
remaining forever "foreigners in every country,
enemies of the people of every country that puts up
with them."
There is an unsettling logic
behind both Father De Rosa's use of the
anti-Judaism/anti-Semitism distinction, and that of
the Vatican Commission itself, for they share a
disturbing subtext. They suggest that if the
attitudes and actions promulgated by the Church can
be labeled "religious," they can be
minimized and, in any case, shown to be of a very
different kind than the truly dangerous forms of
anti-Semitism. Such a distinction also permits the
Roman Catholic Church to argue that it played no role
in spreading the hatred of the Jews in Europe that
helped make the Holocaust possible.
Excerpted from The Popes Against the Jews by
David I. Kertzer
Copyright 2001 by David I. Kertzer. Excerpted by
permission of Knopf,
a division of Random House LLC. All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt
may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
|
|
|
|
|
|
|