Developments in Catholic-Jewish relations: 1990 and beyond

THE LAST 15 YEARS OR SO HAVE WITNESSED SIGNIFIcant new developments as well as the emergence of new challenges in the Catholic-Jewish relationship. Some of these developments and challenges concern the Holocaust; the theology of the Church's relationship with Judaism in the light of new biblical research; Jewish understandings of the Land; and joint social responsibility.

March 1998 saw the release of the Vatican statement on the Holocaust We Remember by the Holy See's Commission for Religious Relations with the Jews, then headed by Cardinal Edward Idris Cassidy. This long anticipated statement, first promised by Pope John Paul II in an address to the Jewish community in Miami in September 1987, garnered a mixed reaction. On the positive side, it lays to rest any possibility of Holocaust denial within Catholicism and renders it an important subject for further reflection and for education within the Catholic Church. It likewise affirms the religious roots of hostile attitudes toward Jews and Judaism in erroneous interpretations of the New Testament, which led to discrimination, attempts at forced conversion, and at certain moments outright violence and death. Overall, the document lends the Church's moral authority to the need to understand--and, most of all--to remember the Shoah. We Remember's use of the word "Shoah" was also seen as a positive move by many within the Jewish community. (1)

On the negative side, there was some disappointment that the document was not issued as a formal papal encyclical. The introductory letter from Pope John Paul II, however, did serve to moderate some of this disappointment. A number of Catholic and Jewish scholars, myself included, raised concerns about certain aspects of the document as did an editorial in the leading American Catholic publication Commonweal. (2)

From my perspective, there are three major problematical dimensions to We Remember, despite its very real accomplishments. The first has to do with the distinction between the sinful actions of the "sons and daughters" of the Church and the fundamental holiness of the Church itself. I am aware, as Cardinal Cassidy has stressed, that this distinction in rooted in classical Catholic ecclesiology, which views the Church as a sacramental reality unaffected by the sinful realities of history. There are also other ecclesiological understandings, however, including some emerging from Vatican II, that relate the sacramental church more directly to the historical dimensions of the Church as an institution. Surely, Catholics must take this classical outlook seriously, even if one feels that it can lead to major misinterpretations or that it is overly ahistorical. It clearly appears to be the dominant ecclesiology both for John Paul II and Benedict XVI.

If one were to accept the interpretation of the Austrian Catholic philosopher Friedrich Heer, there is a very dangerous "withdrawal from history" in such an ecclesiological understanding, which in his mind was responsible for a muted response by Catholicism to the Shoah. According to Heer, the disregard on the part of Christians for the well-being of the Jewish people throughout history, especially between 1918 and 1945, can be understood only as part of a general disregard for humanity and the world. He attributes this attitude to the dominance in Christian theological thinking to what he terms the "Augustinian principle." This attitude views the world under the aspect of sin and ultimately leads to a sense of fatalism and despair about the world. Heer remains convinced that this fatalistic tendency not only influenced Catholic behavior during the Nazi era, but remains as much a danger today as it did in the period of the incubation of Nazism. Hence, in not confronting such an ecclesiology, We Remember was in effect bypassing one of the root causes of Catholic failure during the Shoah. (3)

Surely the authors of We Remember were not in a position to resolve ecclesiological tensions within contemporary Catholicism. (4) Nonetheless the statement could have, and should have, made it clearer that the "sons and daughters" of the Church who fell into the sin of anti-Semitism did so because of what they had learned from teachers, theologians (including the Church Fathers), and preachers sanctioned by the institutional Church. Reading the document in its present form leaves the impression that the sinful "sons and daughters" of the Church who espoused anti-Semitism were led to this pernicious outlook by teachings and teachers outside the context of official Catholicism. This was one of the major criticisms of the document in the Commonweal editorial, which rightly argued that We Remember failed to urge the need for institutional self-examination within Catholicism. The statement of Pope John Paul II on the first Sunday of Lent 2000 as part of the Vatican's observance of the new millennium included an apology for the Church's actions against the Jewish people. That statement, which the Pope placed in the Western Wall during his historic visit to Jerusalem, served to rectify to some extent the lack of institutional self-examination of We Remember itself.