Pope Decries Anti-Semitism During WWII

In the Vatican’s strongest condemnation of moral passivity during the Holocaust, Pope John Paul II said Friday that anti-Semitic prejudices based on “wrong and unjust interpretations” of the New Testament deadened the “spiritual resistance” of many Christians to the Nazi persecution of Jews.

But the pope, in a speech to theologians, sidestepped the question of whether such criticism applies to the Roman Catholic Church as an institution.

No pope has done as much as John Paul has to improve relations between Catholics and Jews.

His own quest for an end-of-the-millennium atonement for past errors and sins has put the church under pressure to address its record in World War II, when millions of Jews and others labeled undesirable by Nazi Germany were sent to death camps in regions where the church had influence.

Keeping a decade-old promise to American Jewish leaders, John Paul gathered 60 Catholic, Protestant and Orthodox Christian theologians for a three-day symposium on the “Roots of Anti-Judaism” in 2,000 years of Christian teachings.

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Many Jews had expected an institutional mea culpa. Instead, the pope said:

“In the Christian world--I am not saying on the part of the church as such--the wrong and unjust interpretations of the New Testament relating to the Jewish people and their presumed guilt circulated for too long, engendering sentiments of hostility toward these people.

“This helped to deaden consciences,” he added, “so that when Europe fell under a wave of persecutions inspired by a pagan anti-Semitism . . . the spiritual resistance of many was not that which humanity had a right to expect from the disciples of Christ.”

John Paul, who survived the Nazi occupation of his native Poland, noted that some Christians risked their lives to save Jews from death camps. But he spoke of actions by individuals, not of the church as a whole.

The question of the church’s role during the war arose a month ago when Catholic bishops in France issued a detailed apology to the Jewish people for not having done more to oppose the Holocaust. “Today we confess that silence was a mistake,” said Olivier de Barranger, the archbishop in the Paris suburb where tens of thousands of French Jews were deported to Nazi camps.

German and Polish bishops had previously apologized for their silence during the war, and speculation rose that the Vatican would follow suit.

But this week’s symposium focused on theology, not politics.

Until the 1960s, when the Second Vatican Council abolished the concept, many Catholics were taught that Jews held collective guilt for the death of Jesus Christ; they recited the term “perfidious Jew” in Holy Week liturgies.

Father Remi Hoeckman, secretary of the Vatican commission for relations with Jews, wrote in advance of the symposium that such teachings fed racial hatred and “an atmosphere in which the Holocaust . . . became possible.”

Even on this point, John Paul and the theologians resisted blaming the church as a whole for what one theologian called “pseudo-theological judgments” against Jews.

Some Vatican watchers said the pope, having apologized for centuries of Catholic mistreatment of Protestants and for Christian involvement in the slave trade, was under pressure from church conservatives to tone down the self-criticism.

“No other pontiff has apologized for moral failure among Catholics the way this one has,” said Father John Navone, an American Jesuit priest and professor of biblical theology at the Pontifical Gregorian University in Rome. “If he’s not apologizing today, he is telling the Jews that he wants to start the new millennium with reconciliation and friendship.”

John Paul, who once called Jews “our older brothers,” is the first pope to visit the sites of Nazi concentration camps, the first to enter and preach in a synagogue. Two years ago, he established relations between the Vatican and Israel.

His decision not to invite Jewish theologians to the symposium perplexed Jewish leaders. But he used the gathering to repeat his stand against anti-Semitism, calling it “totally unjustified and absolutely condemnable” as well as fundamentally anti-Christian.

The New York-based American Jewish Congress called the pope’s position on anti-Semitism “wise and forthright” and urged other religious leaders to follow suit. It lamented his failure to address the church’s own role “in the long and painful history of anti-Jewish hatred” but added:

“What the pope was saying loud and clear is that what was acceptable in the past will not be acceptable in the future. By the nature of his audience, by the theme of the presentation, John Paul made it clear the Roman Catholic Church will never again tolerate . . . the rank hatred of Jews.”

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Shimon Samuels, director for international liaison of the Los Angeles-based Simon Wiesenthal Center, said the pope’s speech was “a deep disappointment.” Samuels has been lobbying the Vatican to open its World War II archives.

Samuels said archives from Pius XII’s wartime papacy could shed light on how much the Vatican knew about the Holocaust and whether it helped Nazi war criminals escape justice.

He and others fault Pius for not speaking out against roundups and persecutions of Jews, including those in Rome.

Defenders say Pius worked behind the scenes to avoid wider Nazi persecutions and thus saved millions of Catholics.