Edward Cardinal Idris Cassidy
President of the Commission for Religious Relations with the Jews
Jubilee Year 2000: A Graced Time for Reconciliation
We Remember: A Reflection on the Shoah

Edward Cardinal Idris Cassidy is a prominent member of the Catholic Church assigned at the Holy See's in Rome. He serves as president of the Pontifical Council for Promoting Christian Unity and of the Commission for Religious Relations with the Jews. The 74-year-old Australian-born Cassidy has led recent efforts to examine the role of the Catholic Church during World War II and its failure to respond to the persecution and suffering of the Holocaust. The Vatican document We Remember: A Reflection on the Shoah is the platform upon which the following address is focused.

The following address was presented by Cardinal Cassidy on November 9, 1998 in Reno, as part of the Wiegand Foundation Millennium Speaker Series. The Center for Holocaust, Genocide & Peace Studies thanks Cardinal Cassidy for his permission for publishing his presentation.

Introduction

Already in his early years in Vienna, Hitler had felt uncomfortable having to rub shoulders, as he wrote later in Mein Kampf with "Czechs, Poles, Hungarians, Ruthenians, Serbs, Croats, and everywhere, the eternal mushroom of humanity _ Jews and more Jews." His was a profound racism, based on the understanding that the Aryan-German race was to be the culmination, the supreme fruition of human evolution. The inhabitants of Poland, Ukraine, and Russia were judged to be inferior, Untermenschen, and hence could justifiably be removed from their lands, enslaved, and even exterminated if circumstances required. Millions of these peoples, together with Gypsies, homosexuals, and handicapped, were in fact killed for who and what they were, for racist reasons.

But of all these so-called inferior peoples, the Jewish people were to be considered the lowest. Their experience was unique. All were destined to be pursued relentlessly, terrorized brutally, transported like cattle on trains, murdered in the gas chambers of the concentration camps.

On the night of 9-10 November 1938, widespread attacks took place in Germany and Austria on Jews, some 30,000 of whom were arrested and many sent to concentration camps. Almost 200 synagogues were set on fire and a further 76 completely destroyed. So much glass of Jewish property was shattered that this night became known as Kristallnacht, the night of glass.

This was the prelude to the great persecution of the Jewish people in Europe during the Second World War, the Shoah _ or as it is often called the Holocaust. How can one even imagine, in our time and in the very center of Christian Europe, such a crime!

The Tragedy of the Shoah

There are no words that are adequate to describe the tragedy of the Shoah. In the document We Remember: A Reflection on the Shoah, published on March 16th of this year, by the Holy See's Commission for Religious Relations with the Jews, we read:

The victims (of the Shoah) from their graves, and the survivors through the vivid testimony of what they have suffered, have become a loud voice calling the attention of all of humanity. To remember this terrible experience is to become fully conscious of the salutary warning it entails: the spoiled seeds of anti-Judaism and anti-Semitism must never again be allowed to take root in any human heart. [Holy See's Commission for Religious Relations with the Jews. We Remember: A Reflection on the Shoah. Vatican City: Libreria Editrice Vaticana, 1998, pp. 13-14]

As we approach the year 2000, we Catholics have been challenged by Pope John Paul II, in his Apostolic Letter Tertio Millennio Adveniente, to become more fully conscious of the sinfulness of the members of our Church down through the centuries. His Holiness writes:

Hence it is appropriate that, as the Second Millennium of Christianity draws to a close, the Church should become more fully conscious of the sinfulness of her children, recalling all those times in history when they departed from the spirit of Christ and his Gospel and, instead of offering to the world the witness of a life inspired by the values of faith, indulged in ways of thinking and acting which were truly forms of counter witness and scandal. [Pope John Paul II. Apostolic Letter Tertio Millennio Adveniente. Vatican City: Libreria Editrice Vaticana, 1994, No 33: AAS 87 (1995), p. 25]

The document We Remember: A Reflection on the Shoah is to be read in this context. Indeed, it concerns one of the main areas in which Catholics should seriously take to heart the Pope's summons. For, as the document itself points out, the church has very close bonds of spiritual kinship with the Jewish people; it remembers the injustices of the past; and it acknowledges that the Shoah took place in Europe, in countries of long-standing Christian tradition.

In the same Apostolic Letter Tertio Millennio Adveniente, Pope John Paul II calls upon the sons and daughters of the Church to "return with a spirit of repentance" to those occasions in history when acquiescence was given, "especially in certain centuries, to Intolerance and even the use of violence in the service of truth". [Ibid., No 35]

The Vatican document We Remember expresses deep sorrow and repentance (teshuvah) for the failures of the sons and daughters of the Church with respect to Catholic-Jewish relations down through the centuries. It makes, moreover, a binding commitment to ensure that "evil does not prevail over good as it did for millions of the children of Jewish people [...]. Humanity cannot permit all that to happen again." "Most especially," we read in the Vatican document, "we ask our Jewish friends whose terrible fate has become a symbol of the aberrations of which man is capable when he turns against God, to hear us with open hearts."

I should like to reflect with you briefly this evening on some aspects of Christian-Jewish relations, in the light of the approaching Jubilee 2000, and the call to use this "graced time" for reconciliation between our two faith communities.

The document We Remember makes a clear distinction between anti-Judaism and To some it seemed that the Vatican Statement was seeking to absolve the Catholic Church of all responsibility for the Shoah. That is certainly not the purpose of the Vatican Statement. In making a distinction between the anti-Judaism of the Christian Churches and the anti-Semitism of the Nazis, We Remember does not intend to deny the relationship between these two evils.

Together with other similar official documents from the Catholic Church, the document We Remember acknowledges clearly that the "long-standing sentiments of mistrust and hostility that we call anti-Judaism, of which, unfortunately, Christians also have been guilty," made members of the Christian Churches less sensitive and even indifferent to the persecutions launched against the Jews by National Socialism. [Holy See's Commission for Religious Relations with the Jews, We Remember: A Reflection on the Shoah, IV, p. 10] For their part, the Nazis made use of this sad history in their attacks on the Jewish people, adopting symbols and recalling events of the past to justify their deadly campaign. But to make a jump from the anti-Judaism of the Church to the anti-Semitism of the Nazis is to misread the nature of the Nazi persecution. As the Vatican Statement points out, "the Shoah was the work of a thoroughly modern neo-pagan regime. Its anti-Semitism had its roots outside of Christianity and in pursuing its aims, it did not hesitate to oppose the Church and persecute her Members." [Ibid.] It is our firm conviction that there is no intrinsic link between the anti-Judaism of the Christian Church and the anti-Semitism of the National Socialism, or direct responsibility of the Church for the Nazi persecution.

The French Bishops, in their Drancy Statement on the Shoah, had already made this affirmation:

To the extent that the pastors and those in authority in the Church let such teaching of disdain develop so long, and that they maintained among Christian Communities an underlying basic religious culture which shaped and deformed peoples' attitudes, they bear a heavy responsibility [...]. This is not to say (however) that a direct cause and effect link can be drawn between these commonly-held anti-Jewish feelings and the Shoah, because the Nazi plan to annihilate the Jewish people had its sources elsewhere.

As I mentioned in my opening remarks, there was no place in Nazi ideology for the Jewish people, because of their race. To a lesser extent, other peoples - many or even most of whom were themselves Christian - were similarly the object of their contempt. This was no Christian anti-Judaism. Even the Christian Church itself was considered an enemy of the Nazi Regime. As my predecessor, Cardinal Johannes Willebrands observed in London in 1988, Aaron Steinberg clearly saw as early as 1934 that "the deeper motive of Nazi anti-Semitism is its anti-Christian, politico-cultural Pan-Germanism." [Johannes Willebrands. "The Church Facing Modern Anti-Semitism," in: Christian Jewish Relations, Vol. 22, No 1 (1989), pp. 5-17]

Abraham Heschel reflects deeply on this very point and provides us with the following insight:

Nazism in its very roots was a rebellion against the Bible, against the God of Abraham. Realizing that it was Christianity that implanted attachment to the God of Abraham and involvement with the Hebrew Bible in the hearts of Western man, Nazism resolved that it must exterminate the Jews and eliminate Christianity, and bring about instead a revival of Teutonic paganism. [Abraham Heschel. "No Religion is an Island," in: Union Theological Seminary Quarterly, Vol. 21, No 2,1 (January 1966)]

Yet we must not seek to play down or neglect the evil of anti-Judaism. Reflection within the Catholic Church over recent years has raised the question as to how this anti-Judaism entered into Christian thought and resulted in the centuries-long Christian teaching of contempt for the Jewish people. Fundamental to the Gospel of Jesus Christ is the commandment of love, based on the Law of Moses (Deut. 6:5). The followers of Jesus were told: "Love your enemies, do good to those who hate you, bless those who curse you, pray for those who abuse you" (Luke 6:27-28). As Christ died on the Cross, he prayed for the Roman soldiers and for his Jewish brothers who were involved in his own crucifixion: "Father, forgive them; they do not know what they are doing" (Luke 23:34).

Yet the Christian Church, down through the centuries, certainly did not teach its members to show to the Jewish people that love which its founder, Jesus Christ, made the fundamental principal of his teaching. Rather, an anti-Jewish tradition stamped its mark in differing ways on Christian doctrine and teaching.

Already in the Second Century, Melito of Sardis, in a sermon on Good Friday accuses the Jewish people of being guilty of deicide. This was a time of bitter polemics between the Jewish community and the young Christian community, yet one cannot speak yet of anti-Judaism. Many of the members of the early Church had come from a Jewish background. But the seed was already being sown and there can be no denial of the fact that from the time of Emperor Constantine on, Jews were isolated and discriminated against in the Christian world. There were expulsions, and forced conversions. Christian theology taught supersessionsism. The "old Law" was ended and the Church had superseded Judaism as the Chosen People of God. The Jews were doomed to homeless wandering for their part in the crucifixion of Jesus. Literature propagated stereotypes; the Ghetto, which came into being in 1555 with a Papal Bull, became in Nazi Germany the antechamber of the extermination. Jews naturally reacted to this with distaste, distrust and a polemic of their own. Over the centuries economic, political, sociological, and the above-mentioned theological factors resulted in two communities that defined themselves in opposition to each other.

In the closing address of a Symposium on The Roots of anti-Judaism in the Christian Milieu, held in the Vatican from October 30th to November 1st, 1997, Pope John Paul II, makes a statement that is important for a correct understanding of the Christian Scriptures and of Christian anti-Judaism:

In fact, in the Christian world - I do not say on the part of the Church as such - erroneous and unjust interpretations of the New Testament regarding the Jewish people and their alleged culpability have circulated for too long, engendering feelings of hostility towards this people. They contributed to the lulling of consciences, so that when the wave of persecutions inspired by a pagan anti-Semitism, which in essence is equivalent to anti-Christianity, swept across Europe, alongside Christians who did everything to save the persecuted even at the risk of their lives, the spiritual resistance of many was not what humanity rightfully expected from the disciples of Christ. [L`Osservatore Romano, Weekly English Edition, 5 November 1997]

His Holiness goes on to declare once more that anti-Semitism has no justification and is absolutely reprehensible. A section of this statement is quoted in the Vatican Statement We Remember and has been much misunderstood. I refer to the distinction which is made there between "the Christian world" and "the Church as such."
This distinction - the "Church as such" and the "members of the Church" - runs through the Vatican document and is not readily understood by those who are not members of the Catholic Church. It can be found very clearly defined in the documents of the Second Vatican Council, especially in the dogmatic Constitution on the Church Lumen Gentium No. 6. I do not intend to enter in detail into this question, but simply to explain that when we make this distinction, the term "members of the Church" does not refer to some portion or particular category of Church members, but can include, and according to circumstances does include Popes, Cardinals, Bishops, Priests and Laity - all are considered as sons or daughters of the Church and as such members of the Church.

For us the Church is not simply the body of persons who go to make up its membership at any particular time, people who can and do sin. It is first and foremost, in the eyes of Catholics, "that Jerusalem which is above [...] the spotless spouse of the spotless lamb," for whom "Christ delivered himself up so that he might sanctify her." [Lumen Gentium, No. 6] We do not speak of the Church as such being sinful, but of the members of the Church as sinful _ a distinction you may find hard to follow, but one that is essential to our understanding of the Church. [No. 8 of the Second Vatican Council's Dogmatic Constitution Lumen Gentium distinguishes "the society furnished with hierarchical agencies and the Mystical Body of Christ" and states that they are not to be considered as two realities. "Rather they form one interlocked reality which is comprised of a divine and a human element". This reality is compared by the Council to the mystery of the Incarnate Word.]

To return to the problem of how anti-Judaism entered into Christian teaching, I wish to recall that Pope John Paul II has claimed that this teaching does not find its explanation in the writings of the New Testament, but in "erroneous and unjust interpretations" of those writings. St. Paul states quite clearly in both Romans 4:25 and First Corinthians 15:3 that "Christ died for our sins and was raised to life to justify us."

If, however, the seeds of hatred against the Jewish people are not to be found in the New Testament writings, how and when did they enter into the teaching of the Church? In a sermon preached in St. Peter's Basilica on Good Friday 1998, in the presence of Pope John Paul II, Rev. Father Raniero Cantalamessa, O.F.M. Cap. reflected on this question and offered the following explanation. It is obvious, he said, from the New Testament writings that there existed a climate of tension and polemics between Jews like Paul and Stephen, who sought to preach Jesus as the Messiah and their Jewish brothers and sisters who rejected this claim. Paul speaks harshly about his Jewish brethren, but certainly no more so than did the Prophets of the Hebrew Scriptures. Paul was proud of his Jewish origin: "Are they Hebrews? So am I. Are they Israelites? So am I" (2 Cor. 11:22).

The trouble came, says Father Cantalamessa, when a Church that was predominantly of the Gentiles succeeded the early Jewish-Christian Church. Let me quote his words:

The gentiles received the polemics of Jesus and of the Apostles against Judaism, but not their love for the Jews! The polemics were handed on, but not the love. [...]. Herein lies the root of the problem: namely the lack of love, of fidelity to the central precept of the Gospel. [L' Osservatore Romano, 11 aprile 1998.]

I believe that Father Cantalamessa's reflection deserves our attention. Pope John Paul II had something similar in mind when he spoke to some Jewish leaders on February 15th, 1985, the following words:

The relationship between Jews and Christians has radically improved in these years. Where there was ignorance and therefore prejudice and stereotype, there is now growing mutual knowledge, appreciation and respect. There is, above all, love between us: that kind of love I mean, which is for both of us a fundamental injunction of our religious traditions and which the New Testament has received from the Old. [Information Service of the Pontifical Council for Promoting Christian Unity, 57 (1985) 8]

And without perhaps realizing it fully, it was this same thought that inspired me to state in Prague, in September 1990:

That anti-Semitism has found a place in Christian thought and practice calls for an act of teshuvah and of reconciliation on our part as we gather here in this city, which is a witness to our failure to be authentic witnesses to our faith at times in the past. [Address to the 13th meeting of the International Liaison Committee between the Catholic Church and IJCIC, Prague, September 1990, in: Information Service of the Pontifical Council for Promoting Christian Unity, 75 (1990) IV, p. 175]

The Church's Statements on the Shoah

I wish to bring to your attention this evening a recent publication from the Secretariat for Ecumenical and Interreligious Affairs of the National Conference of Catholic Bishops of the United States of America. It is entitled: Catholics Remember the Shoah.

Here we find the text of all the Statements issued by the Catholic Church in recent years on the tragedy of the Shoah: by the Hungarian, German, American, Dutch, Swiss, French, and Italian Bishops; together with the 1998 Vatican Statement and comments on it. In this publication we are able to grasp the depth of the Church's reflection on the Shoah and on the responsibility of Christians for their part in this "horrible genocide", this "catastrophe which befell the Jewish people" and "which will never be forgotten." [Holy See's Commission For Religious Relations with the Jews, We Remember: A Reflection on the Shoah, I]

An examination of these texts shows a fundamental agreement on the substance of the statements made. At the same time, each document is written for a particular audience and refers to a specific context, and hence has a tone and an emphasis of its own.

It is important to keep this fact in mind as one reads the Vatican's Statement, which is addressed to "our brothers and sisters of the Catholic Church throughout the world." It is also necessary for an objective understanding of the document to keep in mind that our Commission saw in this initiative the possibility of promoting among the Catholics in those countries that were far removed by geography and history from the scene of the Shoah an awareness of past injustices by Christians to the Jewish people and so encourage their participation in the present efforts of the Holy See to establish throughout the Church a new spirit in Jewish-Catholic relations.

In the Guidelines and Suggestions for Implementing the Conciliar Declaration Nostra Aetate, n. 4, published on 1 December 1974, the Holy See's Commission for Religious Relations with the Jews recalled that "the step taken by the Council finds its historical setting in circumstances deeply affected by the memory of the persecution and massacre of the Jews which took place in Europe just before and during the Second World War." Yet, as the Guidelines point out, "the problem of Jewish-Christian relations concerns the Church as such, since it is when `pondering her own mystery' that she encounters the mystery of Israel. Therefore, even in areas where no Jewish communities exist, this remains an important problem." [Information Service of the Pontifical Council for Promoting Christian Unity, 26 (1975), p. 6]

The Vatican document We Remember had by its very nature to attract the attention of and not alienate those to whom it was addressed. As I stated in my presentation of this document on March 16, 1998, it is to be seen as "another step on the path marked out by the Second Vatican council in our relations with the Jewish people" and, quoting from Pope John Paul II's letter to me in this connection, I expressed our fervent hope at that time "that it `will help to heal the wounds of past misunderstandings and injustices.'" [Letter of Pope John Paul II to Cardinal Cassidy on the occasion of the publication of We Remember: A Reflection on the Shoah]

The Vatican document should not therefore be considered in isolation from those already issued by the Episcopal Conferences of several European countries or from the numerous statements made by Pope John Paul II in the course of his Pontificate. There is no contradiction in these various texts, but as I have already stated, a variety in the tone and in the emphasis placed on certain aspects of the question, due to the context in which they were issued and to the audience being addressed.

I would like, in concluding these remarks on the document We Remember: A Reflection on the Shoah, to recall just one paragraph from that Statement that is of special importance as we remember the tragedy of the Shoah and seek to make the Jubilee Year 2000 truly a graced time for reconciliation:

At the end of this Millennium the Catholic Church desires to express her deep sorrow for the failures of her sons and daughters in every age. This is an act of repentance (teshuvah), since, as members of the Church, we are linked to the sins as well as to the merits of all her children. The Church approaches with deep respect and great compassion the experience of extermination, the Shoah suffered by the Jewish people during World War II. It is not a matter of mere words, but indeed of binding commitment [...]. We pray that our sorrow for the tragedy which the Jewish people suffered in our century will lead to a new relationship [...]. We wish to turn awareness of past sins into a firm resolve to build a new future in which there will be no more anti-Judaism among Christians or anti-Christian sentiment among Jews, but rather a shared mutual respect, as befits those who adore the one Creator and Lord and have a Common father in faith, Abraham. [Holy See's Reflection, V]

Jubilee Year 2000: A Graced Time for Reconciliation

It is not enough, however, to express repentance. Our sorrow for the tragedy of the Shoah must lead to a new relationship between Catholics and Jews. Indeed we see this document as one step in the building up of that relationship. Over the past 50 years, Jews and Christians have begun slowly, but resolutely to forge a new relationship. The recently-elected President of the International Council of Christians and Jews, Orthodox Rabbi David Rosen, has described this process "as one of the greatest revolutions in human history." For him, the Church is no longer to be seen as being part of the problem for Jews, but rather as "part of the solution." [Ecumenical News Service of the World Council of Churches, 17 September 1998]

I am well aware that this new relationship, to which Rabbi Rosen refers, is still fragile. The coming Great Jubilee Year 2000 calls Christians to a real conversion, both internal and external, before God and before our neighbor. As members of the Church, but also as ordinary members of the human race, past history question us. The silences, prejudices, persecutions and compromises of past centuries weigh upon us. If we could heal the wounds that bedevil Christian-Jewish relations, we would contribute to the healing of the world, the tiqqun `olam (the mending of the world), which the Talmud considers to be a necessary action in building a just world and preparing for the kingdom of the Most High.

In his letter accompanying the Vatican document on the Shoah, Pope John Paul II expresses the fervent hope that We Remember: A Reflection on the Shoah will help heal the wound of the past and "enable memory to play its necessary part in the process of shaping a future in which the unspeakable iniquity of the Shoah will never again be possible."

Speaking recently to members of the United Jewish Appeal Federations of North America, His Holiness recalled the "very close bonds of spiritual kinship which Christians share with the great religious tradition of Judaism stretching back through Moses to Abraham" and went on to state:

For the good of the human family, it is crucial at this time that all believers work together to build structures of genuine peace. This is not just because of some political necessity which will pass, but because of God's command which endures forever (cf. Ps. 33:11). In our different ways, Jews and Christians follow the religious path of ethical monotheism. We worship the one, true God; but this worship demands obedience to the ethic declared by the prophets: "Cease to do evil, learn to do good; correct oppression; defend the fatherless; plead for the widow" (Is. 1:17). [L'Osservatore Romano, 4 settembre 1998]

This, I believe, is the challenge that faces us, Jews and Christians, in the face of growing secularism, religious apathy and moral confusion, in which there is little room for God. We may feel secure in a pluralistic, liberal-orientated society, and there are good reasons to do so. Yet, it might be wise to keep in mind the possibility that a society with little room for God may one day find little room for those who believe in God and wish to live according to his law and commandments. [In the former East Germany, less than 25% of the population have a church affiliation. The area known as "Lutherland" (Sachsen-Anhalt), which includes names dear to Lutherans, (such as Wittenberg, Eisleben, etc.) was 90% Christian before the war. Only 7% today are Lutheran, 3% Catholic. There are a few Jews and Muslims. The rest are without religion.]

And to quote again one of Abraham Heschel's insights:

Nazism has suffered a defeat, but the process of eliminating the Bible from the consciousness of the western world goes on. It is on the issue of saving the radiance of the Hebrew Bible in the minds of man that Jews and Christians are called upon to work together. None of us can do it alone. Both of us must realize that in our age anti-Semitism is anti-Christianity and anti-Christianity is anti-Semitism. [A.J. Heschel, op. cit.]

Christians and Jews have at last a new opportunity of contributing together to the well-being of the societies of which they are both members, and indeed to the world in which they live. We are no longer simply called to reconciliation, but to genuine partnership. Rabbi Rosen, in the interview already quoted puts it like this: "I think we have to try to have a deeper communion, while respecting those very fundamental differences. I see us as partners in divine destiny with two different models of the message." [Ecumenical News International of the World Council of Churches, 17 September 1988]

It is the one God who has called us to speak a prophetic word to the world in which we live, we do not live for ourselves alone but to be "a light to the nations" (Is. 49:6; Acts 13:47). For this we need to deepen our understanding, each of the other, and while we maintain our distinct identities, witness together to a new consciousness and a new conscience, based on the common core of belief that is embodied in the Hebrew Bible and the Christian Bible. In the address I have just quoted, Pope John Paul II reminds us that the key to understanding the bond between the worship of God and service to humanity is to be found in the Book of Genesis: "There we see that every human being has an absolute and inalienable dignity, for we are all created in the image and likeness of God himself (cf. Gen. 1:26)." [Address to members of the United Jewish Appeal Federations of North America, L'Osservatore Romano, 4 settembre 1998]

The possibilities for common witness and co-operation are immense. Is there any reason why we cannot work together for a better, more just society? or fight together against every form of evil in our societies, and especially every manifestation of racism and anti-Semitism? Are we not called by our common heritage to promote together the care and conservation of the environment, respect for life, the defense of the weak and oppressed? Have we not motives for defending together the family, protecting our children, and helping the young in their search for meaning, nurturing the hearts of all by sharing the treasures of our respective spiritualities? Could we not, for example, say something together to a world in which millions lack the basic necessities of human existence, while nations spend billions of dollars on armaments and weapons of mass destruction?

Then there are challenges for us in the field of human rights, for the protection of the rights of religion, for dialogue with the other great religions of the world - with a special place in this context for dialogue with the believing followers of Islam - and for collaboration in the realm of culture.

Conclusion

This calls for "co-operation, mutual respect and understanding, good-will and common goals," to quote once again the Prague 1990 Statement of the International Catholic-Jewish Liaison Committee. [Information Service of the Pontifical Council for Promoting Christian Unity, 75 (1990) IV, p. 176] As we prepare to cross the threshold of the new Christian Millennium, let us Jews and Christians take up this challenge. We cannot and should not forget the past. But we must not remain chained to the past. A new and wonderful opportunity has opened up before us. Let us not miss it! All that is required of us is to learn to listen to each other, to seek to understand the other as the other understands him/herself, to be open to and respect the other, to work together without compromising faith or distinct identity, to be seen as children of the one and only God who know that God loves them and wants all men and women to know and experience that love, to be together a "light to the nations."

A Covenant of Hope