Statement Cites Vatican’s Role in Rise of Nazis

In an unprecedented move, Southern California Jewish and Catholic leaders Friday unveiled a statement that suggests that the Roman Catholic Church inadvertently helped Adolf Hitler rise to power before World War II.

The statement, released in Anaheim, is the first joint document regarding the Nazi Holocaust designed to teach Catholic children about the infamous event, the religious leaders said, and the first to speak about the Vatican’s role as an unwitting accomplice in building the powerful Nazi regime.

The document is to be sent initially to 3,000 Catholic schools, seminaries and parishes across the country, as well as to Jewish leaders and rabbis nationally. Copies of the five-page statement are also being sent to the National Conference of Catholic Bishops in Washington and to the Vatican, according to the statement’s drafting committee.

“This is in my opinion unique and is pioneering and groundbreaking,” said Rabbi A. James Rudin, the national director of interreligious affairs for the American Jewish Committee in New York, who attended the Anaheim press briefing at which the document was released.

The paper was prepared by a committee of 23 Southern California Catholic and Jewish religious and education leaders. They include Msgr. Royale M. Vadakin, representing Los Angeles Archbishop Roger M. Mahony, and Rabbi Alfred Wolf, a longtime leader in Catholic-Jewish relations and a founding member of the drafting committee.

Titled “The Holocaust: At the Edge of Comprehension,” the document deals with the history of the Holocaust and is an attempt to reconcile the Catholic Church’s role during that period.

A section called “Complicity and Righteous Action,” questions whether the Vatican tacitly condoned the rise of the Third Reich with the signing of a 1933 Concordat that ostensibly protected the church’s rights with the presumption that it would not protest growing and strident German nationalism. The Nazi motive in securing the Vatican’s endorsement was to silence Catholic opposition to Hitler’s power, the statement says.

In fact, the statement says, “in the face of the growing threats against the Jews, all too few Christian groups raised their voices to protest. Many Christians closed their ears to the Jews in their darkest hour.”

But Hitler disregarded the Concordat’s protective clauses, the statement continues, paving the way for him to achieve a totalitarian one-party state without hindrance.

“In light of this, we are now free to ask whether the compromises made by the Vatican with the Nazis did not, in the long run, do more harm than good,” the statement says, adding:

“It would be misleading to suggest that the Roman Catholic Church did everything in its power to come to the aid of the Jews.”

But, the document added, that “it would also be an inaccurate rendering of history to assert that every Roman Catholic stood by idly and watched as the demonic strategies of the Nazis claimed the lives of 6 million Jews.”

Wolf, director of the Skirball Institute on American Values of the American Jewish Committee, said the Catholic-Jewish Respect Life Committee, which authored the statement, reached its conclusions about Hitler and the Concordat “not from church sources or books, but from historians.”

Vadakin, interreligious affairs director of the Archdiocese of Los Angeles, added that although many Catholic-Jewish committees across the country have discussed the Holocaust, the statements released in Anaheim are the first published and distributed to educators.

Parishes across the nation will then decide whether they want to incorporate the materials into their curriculums for teaching children.

Jewish-Catholic relations in Southern California have long been considered exemplary by religious leaders, who point to a series of interreligious dialogues held through the years that have served as a model for religious groups nationwide.

The Holocaust statement was released with a second document, “Forgiveness/Reconciliation,” that explores how the Catholic and Jewish faiths address the theological questions of forgiveness and reconciliation. It is the work of the Los Angeles Priest-Rabbi Committee, which has produced statements on interreligious topics for nearly 20 years.

The news conference announcement came during the first day of the Archdiocese of Los Angeles’ Religious Education Congress, expected to attract 18,000 educators from the West Coast this weekend. The conference is being held at the Anaheim Hilton and Towers.

The two Los Angeles Catholic-Jewish committees, formed in the mid-1970s, worked to create the statements during the last two years. They decided to take on the issue of the Holocaust in light of Austrian President Kurt Waldheim’s visit with Pope John Paul II in 1987--an event that touched off a firestorm of criticism among Jewish leaders in Europe and America--and because of other recent tensions regarding the Holocaust.

Included is an overview of the Holocaust, based upon historical documents. The paper also includes a country-by-country list of the number of Jews killed during the war in European nations.