The Holocaust and Catholic Conscience: Cardinal Aloisius Muench and the Guilt Question in Germany (review)

In The Holocaust and Catholic Conscience: Cardinal Aloisius Muench and the Guilt Question in Germany, author Suzanne Brown-Fleming has made a critical contribution to the growing research on the question of the Roman Catholic Church's policies and actions with regard to the Holocaust during World War II. Brown-Fleming's research concentrates specifically on the post-war diaries, personal and pastoral letters, and papers of a very influential but somewhat forgotten American-born Cardinal, Aloisius Joseph Muench. Through the author's socio-historical, contextual analysis of these documents, the reader is brought into this shocking narrative of German Catholicism's post-war discourse on the issue of Germany's and the Church's own guilt and/or responsibility for the antisemitic horror inflicted on European Jews throughout the war.

From 1935 to 1959, Muench was the Bishop of the diocese of Fargo, North Dakota, one of several Sees—including that of Milwaukee, where he was born, raised, and consecrated as a priest—that had a large German American Catholic population. As the author explains, although it became more socially minded in the early 20^th century, German American Catholicism still remained highly conservative and nationalistic in its world-view. This conservative ethnic influence along with the teachings and encyclicals of Roman Catholicism, particularly in its rejection of socialism and communism, were the foundational elements of Muench's theory of the world. During this same period of time, 1946–1959, Muench also held five important ecclesiastical-political positions in Germany, ultimately being named Archbishop by Pope Pius XII and becoming the Vatican nuncio to Germany in 1951. In 1959, Muench was made a Cardinal by Pope John XXIII.

Based on her research, Brown-Fleming gives a blistering analysis of the failure of the Roman Catholic Church for not taking a strong and public position of resistance against the Third Reich and its systematic policy of persecution and extermination of Jews. According to the author, this all too little effort if not silence by the "Body of Christ" in its Roman Catholic—and I would also add its Protestant/Evangelical—form in the face of the destruction of European Jews was due in part to the Church's political strategic rationality and maneuvering to procure its own institutional survival as expressed in Muench's writings. As the author points out, another essential part of this story is the Roman Catholic Church's own theological and practical history of antisemitism that remained intact after the war and is expressed in the writings of Muench. Through these writings, Muench and the Roman Catholic Church are seen as being primarily concerned about the welfare of German Catholic church members, no matter what their position or involvement was with Nazis, be it victim or convicted war criminal.

It was in this context of post-war Germany that Muench's 1946 Lenten five-sectioned Pastoral letter, One World in Charity, which was composed in December 1945 and thus prior to his appointment to Germany, takes on increasing political import. In this letter, Muench powerfully criticized the notion of collective German guilt and responsibility for the war and particularly for Nazi crimes against humanity. This remained Muench's position and policy on this issue throughout his life. As Brown-Fleming explains, the important distinction between "collective guilt," in which all Germans share the blame for the Holocaust, and "collective responsibility," in which all Germans share the obligation to assist the living victims of Nazi crimes, was repudiated and denied by Muench for Germans as a people and particularly for German Catholics. In the name of the innocent victims of the war—in this case the German and Japanese people—Muench called for the enactment of the cancellation of the Jewish lex talionis—the law of revenge: "eye for eye, tooth for tooth"—through the praxis of Christian love and mercy...