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  • Do We Remember?The Catholic Church and the Holocaust
  • Catherine Craft-Fairchild
Abstract

Catherine Craft-Fairchild is a professor of English at the University of St. Thomas. She has published articles on film in Woolf Studies Annual and The Journal of Religion and Film. She is currently completing a book, The Vatican at the Movies: The Catholic Church's Changing Relationship to Cinema in the Twentieth Century, which both traces the history of Catholic responses to cinema and offers detailed studies of selected Catholic filmmakers.

There is no future without memory.

WE REMEMBER: A REFLECTION ON THE SHOAH1

But the lessons that we draw from history are a poor guide for the future if they are based on a past that we wish had happened, rather than the past that truly did.

DAVID KERTZER2

During the final decade of the twentieth century, the Catholic Church issued two documents that garnered international attention. The first, a list of the forty-five "top films of the century," compiled and published by the Pontifical Council for Social Communications in 1995, appeared as a welcome historically oriented, family-friendly addition to the many lists of "best" films being compiled at the millennium's close. The second, a document published in 1998, was far more controversial: We Remember: A Reflection on the Shoah, prepared by the Vatican-called Commission for Religious Relations with the Jews, was intended to "help to heal the wounds of past misunderstandings and injustices" between Catholics and Jews.3 [End Page 68] Unfortunately, as will be seen, this publication mainly succeeded in reopening and salting the wounds it was intended to succor.

Concerned with Christian-Jewish relations, Pope John Paul II directed that a Vatican study be undertaken to draft a statement on Catholicism and the Holocaust. The product of that study, We Remember: A Reflection on the Shoah, begins promisingly by rightly asking "whether the Nazi persecution of the Jews was not made easier by the anti-Jewish prejudices imbedded in some Christian minds and hearts" (WR, 4). Although honest enough to raise the question, the Vatican document stirred heated debate by offering what many feel an unacceptable answer, one emphasizing the "difference which exists between anti-Semitism, based on [racial] theories contrary to the constant teaching of the Church on the unity of the human race . . . and the long-standing sentiments of mistrust and hostility that we call anti-Judaism" (WR, 4). Claiming that Nazi anti-Semitism was "more sociological and political than religious," the authors of We Remember conclude, forcefully, that modern "anti-Semitism had its roots outside of Christianity" (WR, 3, 4).

That astonishing claim has fueled three recent studies, any one of which would be sufficient to refute it: James Carroll's Constantine's Sword: The Church and the Jews (2001), David Kertzer's The Popes Against the Jews: The Vatican's Role in the Rise of Modern Anti-Semitism (2001), and Daniel Jonah Goldhagen's A Moral Reckoning: The Role of the Catholic Church in the Holocaust and Its Unfulfilled Duty of Repair (2002).4 In The Popes Against the Jews, for example, David Kertzer meticulously traces the ongoing waves of anti-Jewish attacks published in Catholic newspapers across Europe from the middle of the nineteenth century through the war years; Kertzer's research reveals how deeply entrenched anti-Semitism was in every branch of the Church, including the Vatican itself, which approved whole series of articles on the "Jewish problem" in L'Osservatore romano and Civiltà cattolica, articles that differed little from those of secular anti-Semites. Even the question of race, that element most strongly denied by the authors of We Remember as being a feature of anti- Judaism, [End Page 69] did appear in Catholic periodicals, where Jews were called "a foreign race . . . a race that has neither our blood, nor our instincts, nor our ideals" or a "parasitical and vampire race."5 Kertzer rightly concludes that any significant distinction between Nazi anti-Semitism and Catholic anti-Judaism "will simply not survive historical scrutiny."6

Serving as Catholic apologists (in the older sense of the word, that is, defenders of the Church rather than the more recent sense of one...

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