More Anti-Semitism?

By Russell Shaw
HERALD Columnist
(From the issue of 2/21/02)

The New Republic, a liberal weekly of political and cultural commentary, turned over more than half of its Jan. 21 issue to the most savage attack on the Catholic Church I’ve ever read. The piece by Daniel Jonah Goldhagen carries the title "What Would Jesus Have Done?" The subtitle explains its focus: "Pope Pius XII, the Catholic Church, and the Holocaust."

Although ostensibly a review of recent books, the article is a platform for the ranting of Goldhagen, a teacher at Harvard who is author of a Holocaust book and of a forthcoming volume ominously called The Catholic Church During the Holocaust and Today. Acting as prosecutor, judge, and jury, he sets out a simple thesis at enormous length: Pope Pius XII was an anti-Semite who responded shamefully to the Holocaust; ditto the Catholic Church.

Considering how much water has flowed under the dam on this issue, there is little to say about the charge against Pius XII except that it’s absurd. The most powerful refutation resides in the fact that from 1945 until several years after his death in 1958, Jews universally hailed him as a friend of Jews and lavished praise on his efforts to help Jews during the war. Are we to suppose Jews of the 1940s did not know which Gentiles had helped them during the Holocaust and which had not?

The anti-Pius XII campaign began in a big way in 1963 with German playwright Rolf Hocchuth’s The Deputy, a tendentious drama now being turned into a film by leftwing director Constantin Costa-Gravas. Hocchuth’s caricature of a venal pope was discredited, but the campaign has gone on, drawing new life in 1999 from the dishonest book Hitler’s Pope by John Cornwell, a British Catholic with a progressive agenda for the Church. Now defamation feeds off itself.

Unlike the supposed anti-Semitism of Pope Pius, anti-Semitism among Catholics and other Christians is a historical fact, although its relationship to the racial balderdash of the neo-pagan Nazis isn’t so clear.

But Goldhagen is not content to skewer anti-Semitism as a despicable aberration among some Christians. He strains to place it at the heart of Christian belief, in the New Testament accounts of the passion. And "for those who haven’t heard," he writes, "Jews were not responsible for Jesus’ death. It was the Romans who decided to kill him as a political subversive." So much for that!

Growing up Catholic over half a century ago, attending Catholic schools, participating in Catholic worship, I got a different picture.

Jesus fell afoul of the Jewish leaders of His day because He challenged their ideas about the Messiah by claiming to be Son of God. The leaders handed Him over to the Roman occupiers of Palestine and demanded his death. The Romans, reasoning that the life of one Jew didn’t matter much, complied. So Romans and Jews — certainly not all Romans and all Jews, but some — shared responsibility for Jesus’ death.

Was this schooling in anti-Semitism? Certainly not. Half a century ago my Catholic contemporaries and I learned something else: that all of us shared responsibility for Jesus’ death by our sins. And that all of us — Catholics and Jews alike — could hope to share in the redemptive merits won by his death.

Yes, Christian anti-Semitism is a historical fact. But the account of Jesus’ death familiar to me and many other Catholics is not its seed. And Goldhagen’s tirade is a reminder that, as anti-Semitism was and is a tragic fact, so was and is anti-Catholicism. Shame on The New Republic!

Shaw is a freelance writer from Washington, D.C.

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