From Enemy to Brother: The Revolution in Catholic Teaching on the Jews, 1933–1965

On January 30, 1933, President Paul von Hindenburg appointed Adolf Hitler Chancellor of Germany. Uprooting and eventual annihlation of Jews immediately became and the signature value of Hitler Germany's national policy until the Third Reich was crushed in war in May 1945. On December 8, 1965 there ended the fourth and final session of the Roman Catholic Church's Second Vatican Council (1962 - 1965). That ecumenical council approved the "REVOLUTION IN CATHOLIC TEACHING ON THE JEWS 1933 - 1965" which is the subtitle of Berkeley History Professor's John Connelly's 2012 book "FROM ENEMY TO BROTHER." *** In his Introduction John Connelly notes that in in Rome in October 1965, 2,221 bishops had approved Nostra Aetate ("In Our Time") the solemn Declaration on the Relation of the Church to Non-Christian Religions, and only 88 bishops voted against. Chapter Four of Nostra Aetate at first blush seems unexceptional, in summary: "Christ, his mother, and the apostles were Jews. The church began in the Old Testament. The Jews -- whether from that time or ours -- may not be held responsible for Christ's death. The church decries all forms of hatred, including antisemitism. And finally, the church looks forward to a day when all humans will be united." *** Here are three crucially pragmatic passages from Nostra Aetate's very words on the Jews: the Council "remembers the bond that spiritually ties the people of the New Covenant to Abraham's stock. ... God holds the Jews most dear for the sake of their Fathers; He does not repent of the gifts He makes or of the calls He issues -- such is the witness of the Apostle (Paul). ... in her rejection of every persecution against any man, the Church, mindful of the patrimony she shares with the Jews and moved not by political reasons but by the Gospel's spiritual love, decries hatred, persecutions, displays of anti-Semitism, directed against Jews at any time and by anyone." *** And yet, according to Jesuit priest Stanislaw Musial: "the church had never in its history looked upon the Jews in the ways specified in Nostra Aetate." An American Paulist priest Thomas Stransky put it this way in 2006: The Declaration on relation with Jews signaled "a 180 degree turnabout." As early as the 200s A.D. onward important Church authorities taught "that the Jews' destiny was to wander the earth suffering retribution from God for rejecting Christ." Only at the end of time would Jews decisively accept Jesus as Messiah of Israel. *** The bulk of Connelly's book describes the anti-Judaic, even antisemitic early 20th Century theological framework which set the boundaries within which any official new Catholic speculation on the Jews had to evolve. In Europe, especially in Germany and to a lesser extent, in Austria and elsewhere, racial theories, eugenics and collective thinking inspired by Hegel and Darwin were propounded by many intellectuals, Christian or otherwise. Thus German antisemitic Protestant and Catholics alike interpreted Scripture in racist ways, even spinning the message of the parable of the Good Samaritan to insist that the first object of Christian love is the self, expanding naturally into the family, the clan, the Volk, the nation). Even baptized Jews bring with them a peculiar Jewish "Erbsuende" (Original Sin) -- for having murdered their Messiah. Baptism and the sacraments, faith in Jesus and Divine Grace, can indeed overcome the deeply inbred traits flowing from that peculiar Jewish guilt for killing Jesus and for rejecting his gospel. But to become a good Christian was far, far, far harder for Jewish converts than for Christians whose ancestors had accepted Christ while still non-Jewish pagans. *** Connelly names and studies the ideas of a handful of German, Austrian and French thinkers who in the 1930s and 1940s and even earlier had rejected anti-Jewish racism in terms much like those eventually adopted in 1965 in Rome. But those few radicals were not theologians. They did not play the academic theology game. Instead they applied common sense, a straightforward reading of the gospel and a natural human empathy for Jews as the good people of a good Creator God. Thus, thinkers such as Austrian activist and anti-Nazi Irene Harand cannot be numbered as forerunners of Vatican II. For they were outside the box, not in the theological mainstream. They influenced almost no one who would eventually matter. Change would have to come from courageous, dissident but orthodox theologians groping for new models and paradigms. *** The forerunners of Vatican II were therefore more conservative, even slower-thinking, less daring men like Catholic converts Dietrich von Hildebrand and ultra-Thomist philosopher Jacques Maritain. They rethought, often with only partial success, racism and antisemitism from within and using the tools of the dominant race-poisoned hoary Catholic theological and philosophical framework that not even Popes seemed able to break away from. Theologically, they emphasized not the often invoked anti-Judaism sentiments of the Gospels of Matthew and John, but four long ignored chapters of Paul's Epistle to the Romans. *** Of course there was more: twenty years before 1965's Nostra Aetate the Nazi Shoah/Holocaust of Europe's Jews had been seared into horrified, guilt-seared Christian consciousness. How all these currents came together to revolutionize Catholic teaching about the Jews is very well told and in massive but well selected detail by John Connelly in FROM ENEMY TO BROTHER. -OOO-