Abstract

Arguably there is a direct link between centuries of Christian supersessionist teaching and the Shoah, and Christian culpability in the nearly total destruction of European Jewry cannot be denied. Nazi Germany lived in the shadow of religious fratricidal teaching and applied this hatred to the murder of Jews. In light of Auschwitz, however, the Roman Catholic Church confronted and fully rejected Christian imperialism, for example, the deification and crucifixion of Jesus Christ validate and intensify anti-Semitism, through the advocacy of reconciliation and fraternity with the Jewish People. Yet a number of Jewish organizations (religious and secular) were "perplexed and angered at the way the Vatican is crafting its memory and symbols of the nadir of modern Jewish-Christian relations—the Shoah." By examining linguistically, philosophically and scripturally the power of words in the much publicized Auschwitz Convent controversy, I will attempt to correct a major fault in self-identity and vision of the other. A necessary front in Holocaust education today: teaching and correcting the usage of words in order to prevent disputation in erstwhile Catholic-Jewish dialogue.

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