Unfinished Teshuvah
Por David A. Sylvester
_________
The Deepest Wound: Why the Catholic Church Needs to Heal its Anti-Jewish Legacy?
By David A. Sylvester
To read the headlines this week, you'd think that this past Easter weekend was more about the Roman Catholic Church itself than the Christian message of hope and new life. A chorus of Church leaders used the Easter services to rally around Pope Benedict XVI for his handling of the scandal over the sexual abuse of children by priests. During Easter Sunday ceremonies at St. Peter's Square, Cardinal Angelo Sodano called the pope «the unfailing rock of the Holy Church of Christ» and obliquely referred the growing anger over the scandal as «gossip of the moment». Elsewhere, the archbishop in Mexico City said the pope was facing «defamation and attacks of lies and vileness,» and the archbishop of Paris complained of a «smear campaign» that aims at «destabilizing the pope, and through him, the church.» [1]
To a lay Catholic who loves the Church, the cases of abuse and the reactive defensiveness of the leaders were distressing enough, but another remark actually sent shivers down the spine, because it revealed the terrible reality of another, more profound and persistent crisis within the Church. And this is the crisis over Christian identity left in the wake of the Holocaust, a crisis that haunts the soul of the ordinary Catholic in the pews, whether he or she is conscious of it or not.
This realization was triggered, fittingly enough, on Good Friday, a day remembered by Christians for Jesus' ultimate sacrifice of love for all humanity and remembered by Jews for the rampages through Jewish communities by the church-goers leaving their services. With Pope Benedict XVI sitting before him at the service in St. Peter's Basilica, Fr. Raniero Cantalamessa tried to speak words of sympathy to him that had come from an unidentified Jewish friend. This friend, Fr. Cantalamessa said, had written a letter with the following:
«'I am following the violent and concentric attacks against the church, the pope and all the faithful by the whole world,' " Fr. Cantalamessa said, quoting the friend. «The use of stereotypes, the passing from personal responsibility and guilt to a collective guilt remind me of the more shameful aspects of anti-Semitism.' » Then in his own words, Fr. Cantalamessa said that Jews "know from experience what it means to be victims of collective violence and also because of this they are quick to recognize the recurring symptoms." [2]
Perhaps his Jewish friend was exaggerating through an excess of sympathy for the pope, but Fr. Cantalamessa was obligated to respond to him with the obvious: There is no comparison between the collective violence of 1,800 years of systematic persecution and destruction of Jews - a role in which Catholic Christians played their own shameful role -- with the collective justice that is now sought by the victims of pedophile priests and their protectors, whether deliberate or unintentional. The use of stereotypes and collective guilt are the methods of propagandists everywhere, but anti-Semitism is a historically unique and murderous form of propaganda.
For such a high Church leader forget this distinction, especially on Good Friday, was a painful reminder how little the understanding of the Holocaust has changed among Catholic Christians, especially the understanding of how it was made possible historically by Catholic anti-Semitism and anti-Judaism. It showed that the work of repentance and penance, teshuvah if you will, is still incomplete for the Church and that even after 65 years, the Church has not fully faced the meaning of the failures of many Catholic leaders and members during the catastrophe.
Why does this still matter, you might ask? Isn't this now history that should recede into the past? Isn't it time to move on from what might be seen as a preoccupation with the horrors of the Holocaust? My answer is no, it matters a great deal, and it's an illusion to think we can move on unless the past is healed enough to enable us to move on. In coming to terms with any past of oppression, it can be argued that the individual today is not responsible for the sins of the ancestors. But the individual today is completely responsible for the extent to which his or her identity is still shaped by those sins and his or her behavior still reflects that distorted identity. And that is exactly the problem reflected in Fr. Cantalamessa's obtuse remarks.
They show that the Christian identity today still suffers from the Church's insufficient response to an essential moral imperative: How can I be a good Christian without being anti-Jewish? If Jesus calls on us to accept him as the Messiah, how do we understand those good and holy people who disagree? How do we hear the Gospel accounts, the Church confessions and the great spiritual writings when we know that some of them were used to justify centuries of persecution and destruction? Have we really changed the way we live to account for the horrific mirror that the Holocaust held up to the Christian world?
This coming Sunday is Yom HaShoah, the day of remembrance of the Holocaust, and it would be well for Christians to consider that the Holocaust showed how un-Christian the majority of Christians can be. It showed that in failing to honor and defend the divinity in anyone, Christians failed to see Christ in everyone. In this way, the Shoah is still questioning the meaning of the churchy words that we claim to live by. As Rabbi Irving Greenberg has rightly said, no one can say anything about their religious life that isn't credible before the cries of those 1.5 million Jewish babies, burned alive by the Nazis to save the cost of killing them with poison gas. [3]
If Fr. Cantalamessa had been remembering those cries, he never would have said what he said last Good Friday at St. Peter's Basilica. Later, he showed his lack of understanding when he later apologized; he did not mean to "hurt the feelings of Jews and victims of pedophilia. But the problem really isn't about hurt feelings. It isn't about attacks on the Pope or the stability of the Roman Catholic Church. And it isn't about rebutting the usual anti-Catholic demagoguery and ignorance[4] that often surfaces in times like these, reviving those old slanders against the Church as «the whore of Babylon» and the Pope as the Anti-Christ.» [5]
It's about justice and the duty of the Church to stand with the least among us and feel «the grief and anguish of the people of our time, especially those who are poor or afflicted in any way.» [6] By its own Sacrament of Reconciliation, it is called upon to confess its sin of missing the mark, take action of penance with a firm resolve to amendment and take the actions necessary to «avoid the near occasion of sin» in the future. In other words, it needs to change.
Right now, the poor and afflicted who are crying out are those where were sexually abused as children and young adults. Yes, this day of reckoning is uncomfortable. Yes, the pope is taking a lot of heat - but this is surely no surprise, considering the magnitude of the crimes. In Ireland alone, some 30,000 boys and girls were tormented, beaten, molested and at times raped in Catholic orphanages and reformatories over a period of six decades. And no one reported this or was prosecuted. Elsewhere, thousands of other young people, mostly between the ages of 11 and 14, have been molested in Catholic churches in the United States, Canada, Australia, and now from new cases surfacing, in France and Germany. Worst of all, church officials ignored reported and allowed the pedophile priests to continue in parishes.
The issue requires much more than a pastoral letter or a conference of bishops to resolve. It may well require a thorough re-examination of a host of difficult social, ethical and doctrinal questions. To get to the bottom of the problem and make the necessary changes, nothing should be left off the table: priestly celibacy, church teachings on homosexuality, screening and supervision of priests, traditions of secrecy, and assumptions of authority that can lead to authoritarianism and models of domination. And it may also require the insights from spiritual disciplines, such as fasting and penitence, as Fr. Cantalamessa himself suggested to the pope in 2006. [7]
Ultimately, the Church must face the awful failings of its priests, the culture that permitted the abuse and the changes that are needed to eliminate the near occasion for sin in the future.
However, as this crisis is being resolved - and it must be - the Church must also listen to the cries of a less audible group of poor and afflicted, those babies who suffered agonizing deaths in self-professed Christian Europe. This is a deeper, more uncomfortable self-confrontation, but one that is desperately needed, because it's clear that the efforts during the past decades by Pope John XXIII and Pope John Paul II to repair the past have not been enough.
In the spirit of constructive dialogue to help resolve a painful wound shared by lay members and leaders alike, I think the Catholic Church needs to consider at least three important changes. First, it must re-examine more thoroughly and reject more cogently its anti-Judaic theology dating back centuries. Second, it must permanently ban the mention of the perfidious Jews at any Good Friday Mass, an insulting remnant of anti-Judaism that has been revived recently by reactionaries in the Church. And third, it needs to own up to the hidden contribution that Christian anti-Semitism has made toward the catastrophe of the Palestinian people. Why? Because Israel's intransigent and ruthless policies towards its neighbors only make sense in the light of historical trauma, including the centuries' of European persecution that made possible the widespread abandonment of Jews and collusion in their destruction by self-professed Christians throughout Europe during the Holocaust.
Let's examine these one by one. First, and most importantly, too often Christianity has taught an implicit rejection of Judaism that has led to contempt for Jews and a gross misunderstanding of rabbinic Judaism. This anti-Judaic theological tradition, known as adversus Judaeos, began in the polemical debates against Jews during the early formation of the Catholic Church. This early history contributed to shaping a European anti-Semitism that became a complex blend of Christian theology, folk culture, ignorance and fear-driven superstition. After the Holocaust, this tradition must be identified and rooted out as false Christianity. As Christian theologian Clark M. Williamson has written: The 'teaching of contempt for Jews and Judaism was a necessary but not sufficient cause of the Holocaust. Now that we see the complicity of that teaching in making possible the Holocaust, we may not morally repeat it."[8]
It's true that since the Holocaust, the Catholic Church has taken considerable steps toward a reconsideration of its past. In 1965, the landmark declaration of Nostra Aetate, the first major re-thinking of its relations with non-Christian religions, the Church took the most basic step in rejecting any collective blame for Jesus' death on Jews in general. It affirmed the "common spiritual heritage" shared by Jews and Christians and condemned "all hatreds, persecutions, displays of anti-Semitism directed against the Jews at any time or from any source." [9] In 1998, a papal commission issued its reflection on the Holocaust entitled "We Remember," in which it expressed "sorrow for the tragedy" of the Holocaust, and admitted the "heavy burden of conscience" and the "call to penitence" for Christian behavior.
However, these admissions were far from enough. The statement was rife with euphemisms and equivocations. It only mentioned "the errors and failures of those sons and daughters of the Church," not the actual writings of Church thinkers. It pointed with pride to those Catholics who risked their lives to defend Jews during the Nazi terror but then added that "the spiritual resistance of other Christians was not that which might have been expected by Christ's followers," -- an utterly insufficient characterization of the actual events.
Moreover, the Church statement inaccurately lumped the Holocaust together with other genocidal outbreaks, such as "the massacre of Armenians" or the "countless victims of the Ukraine in the 1930s, or the "genocide of the Gypsies." [10] In the 4th Century, C.E., St. Gregory of Nyssa was not referring to the Armenians when he was excoriating the "slayers of the Lord, murderers of the prophets, enemies of God," and "advocates of the devil, brood of vipers, slanderers, scoffers, folk of darkened minds. It was not the Ukrainians that in the 13th Century, C.E., Pope Innocent III called a people of Cain, protected from death so that "yet as wanderers upon the earth they must remain, until their countenance be filled with shame and they seek the name of Jesus Christ the Lord." And St. Thomas Aquinas did not mean keeping Gypsies confined, «because of their crime, in perpetual servitude" and their possessions «as belonging to the State» as long as they are not deprived of things necessary to life. [11]
No, the Holocaust was a uniquely anti-Jewish genocide in a Europe conditioned by centuries of Catholic Christian theological teachings that targeted, marginalized, ghettoized and persecuted the Jews as Jews. At the same time, it is wrong to think the Nazi catastrophe as primarily an outcome of Catholic anti-Judaism. The Church has accurately identified the Holocaust as an outgrowth of "a thoroughly modern neo-pagan regime" that involved the deifying the nation-state. Also, it's true that Nazi anti-Semitism exploited historical Christian anti-Jewish feelings but in the end, «had its roots outside of Christianity» [12] - a characterization that Jewish scholars have largely agreed with. [13] And certainly, some key Catholic figures were remarkably courageous in their efforts, such as the future Pope John XXIII who saved thousands of German and Slovakian Jews during the war and issued false baptismal certificates and visas to protect thousands of Hungarian Jews.
But the heroism of a few doesn't clear the conscience of the many. Perhaps the best summation of the Christian role in the Nazi catastrophe comes from historian Saul Friedlander: Anti-Semitism and its theological anti-Judaism created in Europe the dry underbrush that was only waiting for the flame of Hitler, the arsonist, to catch fire. «Without the arsonist the fire would not have started; without the underbrush it would not have spread as far as it did and destroyed an entire world.» [14]
What, then, is to be done? Besides a rethinking of its theology and history, the Catholic Church should require a corrective teaching at every Good Friday service about the responsibility of everybody, Jew and Gentile, aristocrat and commoner, the rulers and ruled - and the disciples too -- in the death of Jesus. The Church cannot rest until every single one of its members understands that the charge of deicide, that "the Jews killed Christ" is a false understanding of Jesus' death. It was heartening to hear exactly this preached in my own parish, Our Lady of Lourdes in Oakland, California, when Fr. Tom Weston called on Christians to examine their own violent behavior. At the very least, Christians might follow Christ by not killing other Christians, he said. [15] «We are always looking for someone to blame,» he said. "We blamed the Jews. But let's be clear: Gentiles and Jews joined in the death of Christ." In some churches, it is the congregation itself who shouts Crucify him, Crucify him during the crowd's response at Jesus' trial to underscore the universal human participation in the destruction of life that comes through human sin.
Rabbi Michael Lerner thinks the Church should go much farther and broaden its educational efforts. He proposes that it could require every students in Catholic high school and college as well as priests in every seminary to learn about the history of the Church's role in creating and fostering anti-Semitism, perhaps by studying Edward Flannery's classic The Anguish of the Jews or some other comparable work. In addition, it could devote one Sunday a year, perhaps on Yom HaShoah, for teaching lay members too. "This would begin to help Catholics understand that anti-Semitism was not some mysterious phenomenon that popped up from nowhere, but rather a product of a systematic anti-Judaism that was already being built into the Gospels by those who wrote them, and then expanded upon dramatically once the Church took power in Rome», Rabbi Lerner has said.
In the very least, a more immediate second effort is also needed to eliminate a festering remnant of anti-Judaism. Pope Benedict XVI needs to prohibit the Good Friday prayer in the Tridentine Latin service for the conversion of the perfidis Jews. This Latin word is most accurately translated as non-believing but has been often rendered into English as perfidious, meaning treacherous. Pope John XXIII ordered this word removed in 1960, and actually stopped a Mass in 1963 when he heard it and ordered the prayer repeated without it. Through Vatican II, the modernized Mass changed the offensive prayer. But the Latin Mass, including this word, has been revived by some Catholic ultra-traditionalists who have defied Vatican II. Instead, the pope needs to defend his predecessor's legacy by making sure this word is never again heard in any Roman Catholic Church.
Finally, the Catholic Church enter into a dialogue with Jewish leaders over what changes in Christian teachings could help relieve some of the trauma that Jews have carried with them to Israel. In a way, we might say that Christians are the unindicted co-conspirator in the suffering of the Palestinian people. How so? It seems to me that Israeli policies towards the Occupied Territories reflects a community suffering from the results of severe trauma - a distrust of all other nations, a fanatic determination for safety and security, a terror for its existence in spite of overwhelming military superiority. Israel is behaving as if it always expects to be alone, persecuted and endangered - a fairly accurate assessment of the historical position of the Jewish people throughout Christian Europe. On top of this, Israel seems to be re-enacting the trauma of the medieval ghetto by erecting of its Wall through Palestine against a sea of surrounding enemies, a physical embodiment of the psychological walls that victims of severe trauma establish after repeated violation. Rabbi Lerner has correctly noted the signs of a communal post-traumatic stress disorder in Israel's policies, [16] and traces the trauma to terrorism, the 1948 war and the Holocaust. But he could go further back to centuries of Christian discrimination and its "dry underbrush" of anti-Semitism that was ignited during the Holocaust.
As penance for its past, the Catholic Church should convey three-way talks with Jewish and Muslim leaders and examine the religious roots of the violence in the Middle East. One reason that political efforts at peace have been ineffective, apart from the violent nature of nation-states based on military power, is that in their hearts of hearts, Jews, Christians and Muslims still see each other as infidels. Ultimately, these three Abrahamic peoples will have to find some way to recognize and appreciate the validity of each other's religion without surrendering their own religious identity - perhaps an impossible task for mere humans but not for the healing spirit of God. The Catholic Church would go a long way by calling upon Christians throughout the world to ensure the safety of Jewish communities threatened with violence and discrimination. Muslims would need to recognize the Jewish right to return to its land as an integral understanding of its relationship with God. And Jews would need to live up to covenantal relationship not to wrong or oppress the strangers in its land "for you were strangers in the land of Egypt." [17]
If all this seems far afield of the tempest of the moment, I would beg to disagree. It is precisely at the moment of moral challenge, whether from the suffering of the sexually abused or the victims of anti-Jewish genocide, that the Catholic Church has the opportunity to show its true self. It has the powerful spiritual tools of prayer and Gospel values for uncovering the roots of the errors of the past and making the necessary changes. It is my faith and conviction that this will - and must - happen. This is why the sturm und drang of the moment does not disillusion me.
The best in the Catholic tradition reflects a pilgrim Church on the journey of growth and change. Who could predict the miracle of Vatican II, instigated by the pope at top of the hierarchy? Who cannot admire the courage of martyred bishops, like Monseñor Oscar Romero in El Salvador and Monseñor Juan Gerardi in Guatemala, who gave their lives standing up for the poor and afflicted? Who can not respect the sacrifice of Catholics like Maximilian Kolbe died in place of a Jewish brother at Auschwitz in spite of his own anti-Jewish past? Those who mock and deride the Catholic Church right now for its obvious human failings and weaknesses are only seeing its surface, its exterior shell of statues and stone. You have to love it to see its inner power and beauty, to understand its heart. If you did, you'd know this is a church capable of amazing transformation for itself and compassion for the victims of this world. You'd know that no matter how it trips over its robes and gets waylaid in the labyrinths of its palaces, it will eventually find its way out and bring comfort, hope and new life to the slums and shantytowns in this world, and in those rejected places in the human heart where people go to cry out silently, shivering, alone, wounded and afraid.
[David A. Sylvester, a dedicated lay Roman Catholic, has worked as a journalist and teacher in the San Francisco Bay Area for 25 years. In 2009, he received a Master's in Theological Studies from the Jesuit School of Theology in Berkeley. He is now studying Catholic-Jewish relations at the master's program at the Graduate Theological Union's Center for Jewish Studies in Berkeley. He can be reached at da_sylvester@yahoo.com ]
Notes:
[1] Vatican's Easter Message is Support for Pope, By Daniel J. Wakin, New York Times, Monday April 5, 2010, pg. A1.
[2] Wakin, New York Times, April 5, 2010.
[3] Quoted in: Clark Williamson, A Guest in the House of Israel: Post-Holocaust Church Theology, (Louisville, Kentucky: Westminster/John Knox Press, 1993) pg. 13.
[4] One good example of ignorance in the service of prejudice: "Abuse Charges Mount against Catholic Church" by Bill Underwood, April 3, 2010, San Francisco Examiner, which says this about religious identity: "People seem to equate 'being Catholic' with, I don't know, being blonde or Guatemalan or diabetic…as though it's something you're born with that can't be changed». http://www.examiner.com/x-17373-Phoenix-Signs-of-the-Times-Examiner~y2010m4d3-Abuse-charges-mount-against-the-Catholic-Church">Ver
[5] For a glimpse at the ugly history of anti-Catholic propaganda, see: Alexander Hislop, The Two Babylons: The Papal Worship, proved to be the worship of Nimrod and his wife, The mark of the Beast Revealed 666, (A&B Publishers Group, Brooklyn, N.Y., reprint of original 1858 edition.)
[6] Gaudium et Spes, Pastoral Constitution on the Church in the Modern World, Vatican II, Dec. 7, 1965.
[7] In an Advent sermon on Dec. 15, 2006, Fr. Cantalamessa urged the pope to declare a day of fasting and penitence for the victims of the sexual abuse by the Catholic clergy, «to publicly express repentance before God and solidarity with the victims». He called on the Church «to weep before God, to do penance, as God himself has been abused; to do penance for the offense against the body of Christ and the scandalizing of the 'least of his brothers,' more than for the damage and dishonor that has been brought upon us.» Ver
[1] Vatican's Easter Message is Support for Pope, By Daniel J. Wakin, New York Times, Monday April 5, 2010, pg. A1.
[2] Wakin, New York Times, April 5, 2010.
[3] Quoted in: Clark Williamson, A Guest in the House of Israel: Post-Holocaust Church Theology, (Louisville, Kentucky: Westminster/John Knox Press, 1993) pg. 13.
[4] One good example of ignorance in the service of prejudice: "Abuse Charges Mount against Catholic Church" by Bill Underwood, April 3, 2010, San Francisco Examiner, which says this about religious identity: "People seem to equate 'being Catholic' with, I don't know, being blonde or Guatemalan or diabetic…as though it's something you're born with that can't be changed». http://www.examiner.com/x-17373-Phoenix-Signs-of-the-Times-Examiner~y2010m4d3-Abuse-charges-mount-against-the-Catholic-Church">Ver
[5] For a glimpse at the ugly history of anti-Catholic propaganda, see: Alexander Hislop, The Two Babylons: The Papal Worship, proved to be the worship of Nimrod and his wife, The mark of the Beast Revealed 666, (A&B Publishers Group, Brooklyn, N.Y., reprint of original 1858 edition.)
[6] Gaudium et Spes, Pastoral Constitution on the Church in the Modern World, Vatican II, Dec. 7, 1965.
[7] In an Advent sermon on Dec. 15, 2006, Fr. Cantalamessa urged the pope to declare a day of fasting and penitence for the victims of the sexual abuse by the Catholic clergy, «to publicly express repentance before God and solidarity with the victims». He called on the Church «to weep before God, to do penance, as God himself has been abused; to do penance for the offense against the body of Christ and the scandalizing of the 'least of his brothers,' more than for the damage and dishonor that has been brought upon us.» Ver
[8] Williamson, pg. 13.
[9] Nostra Aetate: Declaration on the Relationship of the Church to Non-Christian Religions, Second Vatican Council, Oct. 28, 1965. Section 4.
[10] We Remember: A Reflection on the Shoah, March 16, 1998. Pontifical Commission for Relations with the Jews. Section IV.
[11] Adapted From Edward H. Flannery, The Anguish of the Jews (Paulist Press, 1985) in An Outline of the History of Jewish-Christian Relations, Graduate Theological Union, Berkeley.
[12] We Remember, Section III.
[13] Dabru Emet: A Jewish Statement on Christians and Christianity, National Jewish Scholars Project, Baltimore, MD., Sept. 10, 2000. "Without the long history of Christian anti-Judaism and Christian violence against Jews, Nazi ideology could not have taken hold nor could it have been carried out. Too many Christians participated in, or were sympathetic to, Nazi atrocities against Jews. Other Christians did not protest sufficiently against these atrocities. But Nazism itself was not an inevitable outcome of Christianity."
[14] Saul Friedlander, Nazi Germany and the Jews, 1939-1945: The Years of Extermination, (New York: HarperCollins Publishers, 2007.), pg. xix.
[15] Fr. Tom Weston: «We are a violent species, and blame/kill/torture/wound easily». The Vatican Council II specifically taught that «the Jews killed Christ» is a false and dangerous reading of history and the Gospel. And as Mr. Gandhi said: Christians are the only ones who have not yet noticed that Jesus was non-violent».
[16] Michael Lerner, Israel at 60, in Tikkun Magazine, May/June 2008 pgs 19-21.
[17] Exodus 22:20-21 "You shall not wrong a stranger or oppress him, for you were strangers in the land of Egypt.
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