Shoah document falls short

Fr. Richard P. McBrien, a University of Notre Dame theology professor, told a Jewish audience in New York that the recent Vatican document on the Shoah fell below the standard of earlier Holocaust statements by the Catholic bishops of Germany and France.

McBrien, a former president of the Catholic Theological Society of America, made his remarks June 29 in an address to the Interreligious Affairs Commission of the American Jewish Committee. He was commenting on "We Remember: A Reflection on the Shoah,' a document issued March 16 by the Vatican Commission on Religious Relations with the Jews.

McBrien questioned the distinction in the document of admitting that members of the church commit sin but denying that the church itself can sin. "There is no theological or doctrinal impediment to attributing sin to the church as such in tiffs whole terrible matter of the Shoah and of the church's own complicity in it," McBrien said. He noted that statements of the German bishops in 1995 and French bishops in 1997 acknowledged involvement of the church itself in guilt for the crimes of the Nazi era.

He also criticized the Vatican document for' its defense of the role of Pope Pius XII in the Nazi period. He said the document "attempts to exonerate him completely, without even an acknowledgment that at least some of the criticisms and questions that have been raised about his wartime posture might have some merit."

The distinction of the Vatican document between the prejudices many Christians have traditionally held against Judaism and the anti-Semitism of the Nazi regime was also questioned by McBrien. He called the: distraction "unhelpful," and said the French bishops had not used it.

Noting that the Vatican document was not issued in the name of the pope but by a commission, McBrien said the German and French statements, as the teaching of two important national hierarchies, could be considered more authoritative.

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