Seton Hill College 2000 Nostra Aetate Award

I am honored to receive this award and to follow in the footsteps of the outstanding scholars and activists who received it before me. Those footprints are very large indeed. Father Edward Flannery - whom I am proud to remember as a beloved friend and professional colleague - was the first Roman Catholic priest in the United States to look squarely and forthrightly at the issue of Christian antisemitism, to write a book about it, to trace its origins in his own church and its development from polemic to pogrom. He was an imposing figure, and he transfixed audiences with his courage and clarity, and with that unforgettable basso profundo. I am not a Catholic, and I can claim ignorance - indeed, invincible ignorance - as to what constitutes the grounds for canonization in the Church, but if it is a question of healing and of miracles, then I believe that Father Flannery’s self-critical initiatives helped to heal a deeply wounded relationship, and his writings brought about a kind of miracle in Catholic-Jewish understanding, and that he is as worthy a candidate for canonization as some others whose names have been forwarded recently. Here’s to Saint Ed.

As for Jan Karski, what a story! What a personal journey! What a courageous, and ultimately heartbreaking, record of a noble effort to report to the leaders of the world what he saw with his own eyes, what was happening in the Warsaw Ghetto and throughout occupied Europe, the systematic destruction of the Jews, through starvation, overwork, disease and outright murder - and then to discover that they didn’t want to hear about it. I read about Dr. Karski’s death in the Spanish newspaper, just after the annual meeting of the International Council of Christians and Jews in Spain this summer, and offered my own moment of silent tribute and prayer of gratitude for a life devoted to preserving life.

As for Eva Fleischner, theologian, historian, author and teacher - and for me, admired friend, I have met few people who could hold gentleness and fervor, rigorous honesty in scholarship and compassion in understanding in such a delicate balance. These predecessors cast a long shadow. I am deeply moved to be in their company.

It’s particularly gratifying that the first national Catholic center for Holocaust education should be the initiative of a women’s college, conceived, directed, and implemented by women - exceptional women! In its approach to the most horrifying historical event of our time, Seton Hill has taken very seriously the obligations of memory and of moral instruction. Those of us who carry the images and the wounds of the Holocaust as part of our personal memory and experience are beholden to Seton Hill and to the National Catholic Center for Holocaust Education for confronting the immensity of the event, for exploring its roots and development, for raising a generation of educators to affirm its reality in the face of denial and trivialization, and to offer us concrete hope that the hatreds of the past can be overcome.

A few brief words about my own journey. I tend to joke that I came into the field of Jewish-Christian relations before it was a field. It was before the Second Vatican Council, before the adoption of Nostra Aetate, before the Declaration on Religious Liberty. With a few exceptions, Christian-Jewish dialogue was largely Protestant-Jewish dialogue. My port of entry was a series of textbook self-studies of Protestant, Catholic, and Jewish religious materials that had been stimulated by the American Jewish Committee beginning in the 1950s. It should not come as a surprise to anyone that Jews were concerned about how Christians described them and taught about them, because Jews believed that a tradition of negative and hostile teaching and preaching was a potent source of antisemitism. The findings of these studies certainly bore out our concerns. They revealed teachings of hostility and contempt for Jews and Judaism of frightening dimensions. I had the opportunity to report on these findings at the International Liaison Committee Meeting of the Pontifical Commission for Religious Relations with the Jews and the International Jewish Committee for Interreligious Consultations in Baltimore, May 1992. It might be helpful to repeat some of the observations from that report.

In light of the progress toward Christian understanding of Jews and Judaism in recent years, it is distressing to look back on some of the excerpts found in Catholic textbooks used at the time of the St. Louis University research…
Accusations of collective guilt and assertions that Jews are a people accursed and rejected by God found frequent expression in these texts, as did the change that the Jews willfully and culpably blinded themselves to Jesus’ significance. A single example will suffice:
However, when the mob saw this, the chief priests took up a cry that put a curse on themselves and on the Jews for all time: “His blood be upon us and our children.”

I believe that the findings of the St. Louis University research, submitted to Cardinal Augustine Bea over a year before the convening of Vatican Council II, helped convince him and other fathers of the Church of the need for an authoritative repudiation at the highest level of the Church of the “decide” charge and other religious expressions of antisemitism.

The European studies, covering Catholic teaching materials in a variety of languages, showed that the teachings of contempt were widespread throughout the religious culture. One was conducted at the International University of Social Studies, Pro Deo, in Rome (Italian and Spanish language materials). The Pro Deo and Louvain studies were summarized by Claire Huchet Bishop in How Catholics Look at Jews. Once again, negative generalizations and accusations against Jews were triggered most by lessons dealing with such conflict themes as the Crucifixion and the Jewish rejection of Jesus as the awaited messiah. According to Bishop, many young Catholics in Italy, Spain, and the French-speaking countries were still being taught classic deicide theology into the 1960s - twenty years after the Holocaust.
The studies provide an abundance of excerpts illustrating these themes. Just a few will demonstrate the extent of the animus. From an Italian textbook:
The people will be torn from their land… scattered through the world… under the burden of a divine curse, which will accompany them through the course of their history.
From a Spanish textbook:

The first persecutors were the Jews, who were consumed with rage when they saw the rise of the wonderful Holy Church of Jesus Christ whom they out of envy and hatred had condemned to the cross.

Or the Jews were described in pejorative terms, for example:
The Sanhedrin, which consisted of 71 bearded, miserly Jews… Or, occasionally, they were accused of being Masons or Bolsheviks. In some Spanish texts, the ritual murder accusation found expression. Even some of the simplest descriptions betrayed an astonishing maliciousness:
The first eleven [of the Apostles] were born in Galilee; the last, Judas, was a Jew.

(I should note that there were two cardinals in the room at that reading, and I had to run that last excerpt past them a second time. They couldn’t quite believe it.)

The Pro Deo researchers, assessing their survey findings as a while, were struck by the amount of hostility they uncovered toward Jews and other groups in both the Italian and the Spanish materials.

The scholarship that demonstrated the extent of what has come to be called “the teaching of contempt” undoubtedly embarrassed many church leaders and helped steer the declaration through the Council. But, lest you think that a reference to today’s conflicts in the Middle East is gratuitous at this point, I must note that the adoption of Nostra Aetate at the Second Vatican Council called forth the most rabid and vehement objections from Arab leaders, who threatened reprisals against the Catholic Church for passing the declaration which they variously described as contrary to the Bible, a capitulation to Zionist pressure, an “imperialist” attempt to exonerate the Jews of their “major sin.” Jordon’s Foreign Minister stated that “history testifies to Jewish intentions of destroying Christ and Christianity.” And this was well before the 1967 war. Israel had not yet gained control over the Old City of Jerusalem or the West Bank, and Israeli Jews and Arabs were denied access to their holy sites in violation of the truce agreement with Jordan. It was also nearly thirty years before the establishment of formal diplomatic ties between Israel and the Vatican. From the perspective of thirty-five years later, it is clear that this toxic language was not occasioned by Israel’s occupation of Arab-held territories, but by Israel’s very existence.

Since the promulgation of Nostra Aetate, statements by national bishops’ conferences (United States, Dutch, Belgian, French, Swiss, German and Brazilian), guidelines issued by the Vatican’s Commission for Religious Relations with the Jews and various papal statements have gone far beyond the Declaration itself. Such authoritative documents have called for “a frank and honest treatment of Christian antisemitism in our history books, courses and curricula” and “an acknowledgement of the living and complex reality of Judaism after Christ and the permanent election of Israel” (Guidelines for Catholic-Jewish Relations, U.S. National Conference of Catholic Bishops’ Subcommittee for Catholic-Jewish Relations, 1967); have stressed that “the points on which Jesus took issue with the Judaism of his time are fewer than those in which He found himself in agreement with it” (Vatican study paper, 1969); have stated that “the Jewish people is the true relative of the Church, not her rival or a minority to be assimilated” (study paper, National Catholic Commission for Relations with the Jews, Belgium, 1973); have regretted “that an often faulty and hard-hearted presentation of Judaism led to a wrong attitude of Christians toward Jews; hence great care must be taken in religious instruction, liturgical services, adult education and theological training, to offer a correct interpretation of Jewish self-understanding” (Swiss Bishops’ statement, 1974); have urged Christians “to strive to learn by what essential traits the Jews define themselves in the light of their own religious experience” and emphasized that information regarding the Jewishness of Jesus, the similarity of his teaching methods to those employed by the rabbis of his time, the repudiation of Jewish collective guilt for the trial and death of Jesus and the continuing development of Judaism after the emergence of Christianity “is important at all levels of Christian instruction and education,” including “the thorough formation of instructors and educators in training schools, seminaries and universities” (Vatican Commission for Religious Relations with the Jews, 1975); have asserted that Jews are “a still living reality,” whose permanence in history, “accompanied by a continuous, spiritual fecundity,” is a sign to be interpreted within God’s design (Notes on the Correct Way to Present the Jews and Judaism in Preaching and Catechesis in the Catholic Church, 1985).

The question is: How thoroughly have these exemplary guidelines and suggestions been implemented at the parish level, and to what extent has the Church’s new policy of respect and friendship for Jews and Judaism been reflected in textbooks, classroom teaching, religious formation and public worship?

Here there is much good news and some bad news. Eugene Fisher’s study of post-Vatican II Catholic textbooks in the United States bears out the expectation that they would be more sympathetic to Jews and Judaism.

Fisher noted substantial progress, but he also pointed to the sources of remaining anti-Judaism in Catholic education, mainly, inadequate treatment of New Testament themes, particularly the Jewish rejection of Jesus. He also noted a lingering triumphalism, including the tactic of taking Jewish tenets from the Hebrew Scriptures, subsuming them into Christianity, and then using them to “prove” that Christianity is superior to the Judaism that gave birth to these ideas. Here is a particularly rich illustration of this process of appropriating Jewish values for Christian polemical purposes:

For a certain person in a certain place, in a certain time, Judaism may be the best religion… However, Christianity remains the best objectively for three reasons:
1. Christianity is built on love, not fear.
2. Christianity teaches that the whole person is good, both the body and the spirit.
3. Christianity teaches that each person is free to be uniquely him or herself.


Needless to say, each of these three precepts is essential Jewish teaching, and all are rooted in the Hebrew Scriptures. The above example, which according to Fisher, appears in more sophisticated form in many graduate-level texts, is not maliciously intended. But the tendency - or temptation - to make Christianity look good by making Judaism look bad is very deeply ingrained in Christian thinking. It still finds frequent expression in systematic and artificial dichotomies such as law vs. grace, justice vs. mercy, wrath vs. love, flesh vs. spirit, before vs. after, old vs. new, promise vs. fulfillment. Basic Christian teaching and preaching across the ages has drawn from these simplistic oppositional categories. Undoubtedly they have served Christian apologetic defenses, and there are profound psychological barriers to replacing them.

A [later] study of Catholic textbooks, undertaken by Philip Cunningham, confirms the findings of previous research, continued progress in correcting negative stereotypes of Jews and Judaism, with the remaining problem areas still centering on New Testament conflict themes and the Jewish rejection of Jesus.

Closer to home, that is, closer to the program and scope of the National Catholic Center for Holocaust Education, there has been ample encouragement from the highest levels of the Church to pursue Holocaust education. The Vatican’s Reflections on the Shoah, (March 16, 1998) titled “We Remember,” concludes with an invitation to “all men and women of good will to reflect deeply on the significance of the Shoah… To remember this terrible experience is to become fully conscious of the salutary warning it entails: the spoiled seeds of anti-Judaism and antisemitism must never again be allowed to take root in any human heart.”

It is no secret that “We Remember” got mixed reviews in both the Jewish and Catholic communities. In my own comments, published in an op-ed in Commonweal Magazine (April 4, 1998) I compared widely expressed Jewish disappointments over the document with similar negative reactions to earlier Vatican statements:

The documents were not perfect; their defects rankled those who expected more - more self-criticism, more contrition, a more scrupulous accounting of the Church’s role in specific historical circumstances. But they nevertheless initiated a systematic dialogue, studies and scholarship, informal networks, a fragile but genuine mutual trust, some real friendships. Committed Christians and Jews used the opportunities opened by these documents to build a new relationship.

Critics of the Vatican’s recent Reflections on the Shoah should bear this history in mind, even as they express their disappointments. Yes, it has weaknesses. It falls short of a full reckoning of the role of the Church in fomenting antipathy to Jews across the centuries. It attributes to individual Catholics - “sons and daughters of the Church” - errors of commission and omission and failures of courage without relating these to the church’s policies and practices. It calls for an individual, not institutional, examination of conscience.

Its distinction between anti-Judaism - rooted in religious misconceptions - and antisemitism, the product of racism and exacerbated nationalism, which it sees as a pagan ideology totally opposed to Catholic values - is correct. But, if Lutheran scholar and theologian Krister Stendhal’s definition is correct (“Anti-Judaism is hostility to the tenets of Judaism; antisemitism is opposition to the bearers of Judaism”), the line was frequently crossed. Nazism was indeed neo-pagan in concept and ideology, but many of the regime’s repressive measures against the Jews - book burnings, quotas in universities, the mandated wearing of distinctive clothing, and confinement to ghettos - had their precedents in church legislation and practice. The document does not explore these parallels, nor does it address the question of the willing perpetrators of genocide - the murderers and torturers - who considered themselves faithful Christians.

But focusing on what the document says, rather than on what it does not say, it says a good deal.

First it affirms as “a major fact of the history of this century” the murder of millions of Jews for the sole reason that they were Jews. It stands as a forthright rebuttal to what has become an entire industry of Holocaust denial and revision. To some 800 million Catholic faithful and to the world at large, the Church says: “It happened!”

It affirms the religious roots of hostility to Jews in “erroneous and unjust interpretations of the New Testament,” and spells out the consequences when Jews refused to abandon their faith and customs: discrimination, expulsions, attempts at forced conversions, scapegoating, occasional violence, looting and even massacres. Jews, who are familiar with this history of persecution rooted in religious antagonism, should realize that it may come as a surprise to most Catholics, and that the Church has done an important service to truth and justice by calling attention to these painful realities in very concrete terms.

It adds the Church’s moral authority to the need to understand what gave rise to the greatest crime in the twentieth century, and to remember it “for there is no future without memory.”

The Vatican’s Reflections open a rich field for further common study, and its expression of human solidarity should guide the footsteps of those who seek to develop its teaching preaching implications - to end, in the Pope’s moving words, of “shaping a future in which the unspeakable iniquity of the Shoah will never again be possible.”

I apologize for quoting myself so often. But I would like to do so one more time in closing. In 1985, my mentor and colleague, the late Rabbi Marc H. Tanenbaum - namesake of the Tanenbaum Center for Interreligious Understanding, where I have found my professional home - invited me to deliver a brief reflection on Holocaust educators at a Nostra Aetate commemoration in Sao Paulo, Brazil. After reviewing the sorry record of Catholic hostility to Jews and Judaism, I suggested some approaches to teaching the subject, and I repeat them now because I believe that Seton Hill’s distinctive program has taken them to heart:

1. The universal lesions the Holocaust must emerge from its particulars and not replace them. It is not enough to describe the Holocaust as the greatest example of “man’s inhumanity to man.” The holocaust is a paradigm, but it is a paradigm of a specific process. It illuminates how ignorance and discrimination can be translated into hatred and dehumanization, how hatred and dehumanization can be translated into genocide. The specific historical process must be examined.

2. With either ignoring or downplaying the death and suffering of millions of non-Jews, the uniqueness of the Holocaust for Jews must be remembered… Governments and regimes which singled out Jews for discrimination and humiliation are now denying them the dignity of their own identity as Nazi victims. We cannot let that happen to our study of the event.

3. Righteous Christians should be held up as role models. Martyrs play an important role in the Catholic tradition. Resisters to and victims of Nazism should be located within that sacrificial tradition. The “Notes” also depict the faithful Jewish witness to God across the centuries as standing within or parallel to the Catholic understanding of martyrdom. There are rich catechetical opportunities here.

And I concluded with these words, which still have meaning for me today:

Let us resolve to pursue such instruction toward the goal of understanding and combating the pathology of group hatred and persecuting, in an atmosphere free of polemics. We are not responsible for the prejudices of the world into which we were born, but we are responsible for fighting them. We are not accountable for past events over which we had no control, bt we are accountable for the future. We are jointly responsible for facing history and for forging new traditions of human and spiritual solidarity - for the sake of our children, our world, and the sanctification of the One who is Holy to all of us.

Thank you again for this wonderful award.

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