A Polish Pope, The Vatican and the Holocaust
April 24th, 1998

My grandmother came to America from Poland as a young girl at the turn of the century from a small town called Bielsk, northwest of Warsaw. She worked in the Lower East Side of New York in order to pay for her family’s immigration to America. If she hadn’t succeeded in her task, then my family would also have been consumed in the Holocaust, which we have commemorated this past week. While her moma loshen was Yiddish, she also knew Polish a language that she refused to speak. I eventually learned more about the Jewish sojourn in Poland, and especially the brutal and bloody history during the Shoah, though there were notable exceptions such as the family that hid and maintained Jay and his family. I later appreciated my grandmother’s repulsion of that language. This is my personal stage and consciousness as I reflect on a most ironic twist, and a current difficult situation, which I will explain further.

The irony: It is because of a Polish Pope, John Paul II, that the Vatican and European bishops have begun accepting responsibility for Christianity’s sins of omission and commission before and during the Holocaust. He is the first pope to visit and preach in a synagogue, has called us his “elder brothers,” visited the concentration camps, opened diplomatic relations with Israel, and rewritten Catholic teaching about Jesus’ origin as a Jew. For a pope of any other origin, the changes in Catholic posture towards their theology and their history are enormous, even unbelievable. Though the process was begun by Pope John XXIII, I reiterate, it is a Polish pope, a man on whose home soil was conducted ninety per cent of the killing of the Shoah, that has instigated and shepherded the revision of modern Catholicism visa a vis Judaism and the Jewish people. My grandmother, if she could see this now, would be beyond words. Maybe she would even have spoken Polish.

The difficulty: On March 16th, 1998 the Vatican issued a landmark publication entitled: “We Remember: A Reflection on the Shoah.” It was intended as the fulfillment of a promise made in 1987 by the pope that the Vatican would publish the church’s history in dealing with antisemitism and the genocide of European Jews. In a preface Pope John Paul II wrote that he expressed hope that the historic declaration of repentance by the Vatican “will indeed help to heal the wounds of past misunderstandings and injustices.” The document has been received with mixed feelings of disappointment and even dismay because of essentially three elements. It does not honestly and candidly reflect on “the pope of the Holocaust”, Pius XII. It tries to make a separation between “antisemitism” and “antiJudaism.” It claims that “the Shoah was the work of a thoroughly modern neo-pagan regime. Its antisemitism had its roots outside of Christianity.” Especially in light of the actions of this pope and the apologies of the German and French bishops for their churches roles in the Shoah, there was a high expectation for this document. Headlines have read: “Sincere Apology or Sorry Excuse?” and “Too Little, Too Late.”

What are we to make of all this? How are we supposed to react, to feel? How much force or pressure could we, the small Jewish people exert on the Vatican to transform essential parts of Catholicism? I remember classmates in public school referring to my killing of Christ and searching my hair for horns. We were in third and fourth grade. They learned this somewhere. That has been radically altered. Catholic teaching and scholarship had been directed away from understanding the historical context of Jesus, of the place of his birth, of the people of his birth, of his faithfrom his birth. The foundation of their past teaching was that we were only a necessary pretext in order for Jesus to come, and since we did not accept their new religion, became a barrier and obstruction to his return. Either we needed to convert or perish. This, too, has been unalterably changed, as Vatican instructions for teaching have redirected efforts exactly in the reverse. It is not that the Vatican has rejected its essential theology about Jesus, but it has now accepted the reality Christianity must coexist with other religions. It may believe that it has the truth, while realizing that other religions believe that they have the truth, too. This is a plateau never before achieved. The most powerful voice in Christianity has reversed Catholic teachings and practices.

I am grateful for these changes. Since the birth of Jesus the Jew in the Land of Israel while the Temple still stood, the animosity of Christianity towards Judaism has caused untold suffering and death. Before the Shoah, The Crusades, in the part never told in our children’s history books in public school, made the rivers of Europe run red with Jewish blood. Nearly at the end of the century that saw both the Shoah and the State of Israel, Pope John Paul II has taken the church where it has never been: to honor and respect us. While it might grate upon the ear, of this we should be appreciative and thankful.

Yet I join with critics of the document. I don’t understand the difference between “antisemitism” and “antiJudaism”. I don’t even understand the second word. Is there an “antiChristianity” or an “antiIslam?” And even if one was to make the case that wars have been motivated by theology, how does one separate between a fight for or against faith and fighting, killing, the bearers of the faith? The message is demolished when the messenger is annihilated. When the Church preached its negative message against Judaism it was also preaching against the Jews. Time after time Jewish communities were destroyed and Jews expelled or killed because of the preaching from the pulpit. This leads to another component of the paper that is untenable: that Nazism’s antecedent was paganism and disassociated the Church’s history from it. The document avoids dealing with the fact that the listeners to Hitler’s diatribes were all Christians, who were familiar with the teachings about us, which they heard every Sunday, which had been repeated for millenium. Even if the source for racial theories was outside the Church, the Church had long stigmatized Jews in the most horrendous fashion. Nazi preaching fell on well-tuned ears. I sympathize with the struggle confronting the Church. It is a terrible history. I am sorry for us, too, for it is our history.

I have long had the fantasy: what if someone had shot Hitler dead? Could Nazism have survived and the Holocaust ensued anyway? What if one person had stood up and offered his or her life on this altar? Then perhaps this century would not be the bloodiest in human history. In that time the most eligible person was Pope Pius XIIth. No matter what he might have done quietly and behind the scenes, history will record him as the silent pope. Even if he could not have stopped a Hitler, he could have galvanized many Christians to save Jews or oppose the imposition of the Holocaust in their country. The document states: “Did Christians give every possible assistance to those being persecuted, and in particular to the persecuted Jews? Many did, but others did not.” The truth is, a few did, and most did not. They took their cue from the Father of the Church.

Where does this short sketch of affairs leave us, as we conclude our remembrance of the Shoah and turn to celebration of the birth of the State of Israel, even at the close of our services tonight? We acknowledge that we are at a turning point in Jewish – Catholic, Jewish – Christian relationships. The head of millions of Catholics admits the need to do teshuvah, atonement, using our language, which is only used when one has sinned. Pope John Paul II has thus publicly stated that the Catholic Church and all that that means has sinned against the Jewish people. This document is not the first nor will it be the last in the Jewish-Catholic dialogue. There is room for additional papers for the Church will can be more explicit, which will be used in Catholic education for their adults and youth. It paves the way for opening the Church archives so that its total history can be reviewed critically, to reflect on questions from the past as well as the present. Lastly, anyone who dares arise and deny that the Holocaust ever happened, say that we made it all up, when the last survivor will be in Gan Eden, will told, ‘don’t believe us.’ ‘Go listen to the Pope.’ The force of the document is to forever substantiate the Shoah so that its memory will be unsullied.

I have attempted in my remarks tonight to, in the briefest way, share a most complicated subject that is most current and important. These matters are most important, to set the record of the past correct, to redeem honor and respect for the Jewish people, and to open up doors of understanding and cooperation between different faith communities. It is good that Bishop Sullivan has visited our Holocaust museum and that I have sat at the Bishop’s table. Regardless of our separate and distinct theologies, made the prayers of all rise to God on high that the century ahead be filled with peace, that the future will be better than the past.

Amen.