Catholic Excuses

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Dealing with
Catholic Church Excuses

[ Excerpts from the book A Moral Reckoning, which follows up on the author Daniel Jonah Goldhagen's earlier ground-breaking work, Hitler's Willing Executioners :]
Why the R.C. Church must account for its failures [ pp.120-121 ] :
As agents, as moral actors the Church and its clergy were morally responsible for their stances and actions, and are worthy of praise or blame accordingly. The Catholic Church agrees that when someone is a voluntary agent, "freedom makes man responsible for his acts."
Second, it is our right and obligation, as people who were not actors of the time or "in their shoes�, to adjudicate such praise or blame. That anyone would assert otherwise is odd. We judge people all the time in our daily lives: the man who fired someone, perhaps unjustly; the woman who extends or fails to extend aid to a friend or relative in need; the man who spreads vicious rumors about another; the woman who harms someone with a lie so that she can advance her fortunes. We regularly judge people for their extraordinary deeds: Hitler, Saddam Hussein, the perpetrators of the Holocaust, the Serbs who tortured and killed Muslims in Bosnia or Kosovo, the perpetrators of the September 11, 2001 World Trade Center bombing and mass murder, people who commit or conspire to commit other crimes in the past and today. We judge people who, in every imaginable way, act badly or fail to act well. We also dole out praise to all manner of actors during all periods, including the Nazi years. We honor the people who saved Jews, anointed at Yad Vashem "Righteous among the Nations." Father Peter Gumpel, the all but official Church spokesman regarding Pius XII, not only praises him but also judges him saintly. And when Father Gumpel and others attack Pius XII's critics as malevolent (Father Gumpel invents a "Jewish faction" that has something "against Catholics"), they are judging others." If praising is morally permissible and obligatory, then so is its counterpart, blaming.
Why should people be excused from all responsibility just because the Nazis were brutal? They deserve such immunity only if three things had been true: (1) that they wanted to act well, (2) that they themselves were clearly subjected to that brutality, and (3) that this is the reason they did not act on their good convictions. In this case that would mean that churchmen thought the Jews were innocent, or, if they did not, then they still felt great compassion for the Jews and wanted to aid them, but were prevented from doing so because and only because of the alleged terror. The Church cannot show these conditions to be true (moreover, it was the Church's own desire and choice to preach the most damning antisemitic charges about Jews). If there were records of internal discussions in the Vatican, or among national church leaders, about the innocence of the Jews and the great injustice of all the eliminationist measures, including those of the Germans in the 1930s � and surely there would have been such discussions, had the churchmen believed such things � then it cannot be doubted that the Church would have long ago made them public. Even the sanitized selection of materials in the Church's official publication of wartime diplomatic material, contrary to the Church's claims about it, does not help the Church's case. In addition to all of the self-indicting correspondence and reports in the eleven volumes, the repeated absence in them -- of a recognition on the part of Vatican officials that the Jews were wholly innocent, and of a display of general concern for the general well-being of Jews, is striking." The Church and its defenders, when trying to exonerate the Church, do not even attempt to show that the three conditions obtained that are necessary for the Church to be absolved of responsibility for its failures. The extensive evidence from this period incontrovertibly confounds such a notion. The best that the Church and its defenders can do is say, mantralike, the equivalent of "The Nazis were brutal."
Why should only the Church, Pius XI and Pius XII, bishops, and priests be immune from our moral judgment, and be immune specifically for the conduct with respect to one of the greatest crimes in human history? Because they claim to be servants of God, and therefore devoted to living moral lives? That would, if anything, make them subject to a more exacting application of our moral judgment. The Church itself doctrinally supports judging others and itself. For example, it judges people who do not accept its authority to be unworthy of entering heaven ("outside the Church there is no salvation") with the strong doctrinal implication, notwithstanding some official claims to the contrary, that they will tend to end up in hell. And it judges itself to be innocence incarnate ("the Church . . . is held, as a matter of faith, to be unfailingly holy"). Regarding the Holocaust, the Church is not bashful to judge itself and its leading members loudly and insistently. Its judgment, the self-critical French bishops' statement from 1997 notwithstanding, is a finding, by and large, of innocence. Since when are those who may be culpable, or their representatives allowed to dictate the terms of judgment? Since when are they allowed to be their own sole and definitive judges, attacking and denigrating as prejudiced those who do not share their allegiances, identities, or institutional affiliations, who would dare to critically investigate and judge them?
To assert that we may not judge the Pope and other Catholics acting as Catholics during the Holocaust is to maintain that we may not judge people in circumstances we have not faced. Virtually no one accepts or, whatever he might say, practices such a precept. This would mean that there is no morality, because morality consists of rules of good conduct that apply, and that we may apply, to people regardless of whether we have found ourselves exactly in their situation. Not to judge is to deny that people can do good, can do praiseworthy things. No one, least of all the Church, trumpeting its belief in its own infallible praiseworthiness, denies this. Not to judge is to deny the existence of morality. It is therefore to deny our human agency which is to deny our humanity, philosophically, theologically, and just plain and simply. Judging the popes, bishops, and others is not a transgressive act but the fulfillment of our moral duties to one another as people.

Excerpts from �Constantine�s Sword�, by James Carroll,
which shows how the seeds of the Holocaust were sown in Catholicism 2000 years ago.
The crucial role of THE CHURCH in Germany�s antisemitism [ p. 476 ] :

To imagine that the Catholic Church was craven in the face of the challenge posed by Adolf Hitler, that it failed to oppose him out of cowardice, is to ignore, as we shall see, the brave history of Church resistance in the not too distant past - this Church was not cowardly. Nor does the Church's anxiety about Bolshevism adequately account for its relatively more benign stance toward Nazism. Not even the other usual explanation, that the Church was too concerned with its own power and prerogatives to risk defending the Jews, is enough to account for what happened. No: Nazism, by tapping into a deep, ever-fresh reservoir of Christian hatred of Jews, was able to make an accomplice of the Catholic Church in history's worst crime, even though, by then, it was the last thing the Church consciously wanted to be.
Obviously, there were precedents to Hitler's attempted genocide of the Jews - Stalin's terror-famine aimed, in 1932-1933, at the people of Ukraine, the extermination of Armenians by Turkey during World War I, the brutal reductions of native peoples in remote lands colonized by Europeans, beginning with the Canary Islands in 1478 and continuing in the Americas, Australia, Asia, and finally Africa at the turn of the twentieth century.
That an effectively genocidal exploitation of the New World was launched around the time of Ferdinand and Isabella�s expulsion of Jews from Iberia is not lacking in significance, to put it mildly. A religious assumption underlies both events. The record of European imperialism from the fifteenth century on is the record of the movement from aliens defined as condemned in the afterlife to aliens defined as condemned in this life, from aliens defined as less than worthy, to aliens defined as less than human. The Church, at the onset of the colonial era, was conditioned, and was conditioning others, to see unbaptized strangers as belonging to the company of devils.
And the scientific Enlightenment, pursuing its decidedly nonreligious agenda, added its own twist to this legacy, especially in the figure of Charles Darwin (1809-1882). He applied his own idea of the survival of the fittest to racial, ethnic, and national groups of human beings. Like certain species of grass, some racial groups are destined to survive and thrive while others, like less hardy grasses in the scorched savanna, are destined to wither and disappear. "At some future period not very distant as measured in centuries," Darwin wrote in The Descent of Man, "the civilized races of man will almost certainly exterminate and replace throughout the world the savage races.� The Swedish writer Sven Lindqvist, reflecting on this legacy of European colonialism, commented, "We want genocide to have begun and ended with Nazism.� But it didn't. Hitler was less the beneficiary than the product of religious and racial assumptions that had their origins, perhaps, in the Jew-hating sermons of Saint John Chrysostom or St. Ambrose, and certainly in the blood purity obsession of Torquemada.
The line between these two phenomena carves the narrative arc that achieves its apogee with the "Germanizing" of Darwin, especially in Nietzsche, at least as he was caricatured by the Nazis. Hitler's all-encompassing ideology of race was "a vulgarized version,� in one scholar's phrase,' of social Darwinism that held sway in the imperial age among both intellectuals and the crowd. It was the dominant cultural and political idea of the day. "The air he [Hitler] and all other Western people in his childhood breathed was soaked in the conviction that imperialism is a biologically necessary process, which, according to the laws of nature, leads to the inevitable destruction of the lower races. It was a conviction which had already cost millions of human lives before Hitler provided his highly personal application.
So however much Hitler twisted what preceded him, it is also the case that he emerged from it. Nowhere is this more true than in the way Jews served him in that "highly personal" way. When Nazism defined Jews as the negative other, in opposition to which it defined itself, it was building on a structure of the European mind that was firmly in place before Hitler was born. If nothing else is clear by now, it is that that structure of mind had its foundation in Christianity, and moreover, that defining the Jew as the negative other had served as a self--protecting Church's modus operandi down the centuries, from the Gospel of John to the sermons of Luther, from Saint Ambrose to the anti_Dreyfusards. Antisemitism was a consistently exploited organizing principle, a pillar of Protestant and Catholic identity. Individual Jews and whole Jewish communities were periodically sacrificed to this principle. We have seen that again and again. And we have seen, too, the even more pathological turn in the European imagination when the Jew went from being the hated other to being the attached parasite that was attacking society from within.

Pius XI�s anti-modernism, anti-semitism and the battle with Dollinger:
[p.484] In articles and speeches, especially after Pius IX's campaign against modernism was in full swing, [The leading German Catholic theologian] Johann Dollinger [Professor of Church History at the U. of Munich] condemned the ways that the modern errors against which the pope had set the Church were so cavalierly identified with Jews. Dollinger shrewdly analyzed the long history of Church abuse of Jews, drawing the connection between antisemitism and a Christian pursuit of power. "The fate of the Jewish people," he wrote, "is perhaps the most moving drama in the history of the world.� Reflecting on his own era, Dollinger set himself against the dominant twin motif of Church resistance to revolution defined as Jewish socialism and Church resistance to materialism defined as Jewish greed.
Dollinger railed against Pius IX's decision in 1867 to raise to sainthood one of sixteenth-century Spain's notorious grand inquisitors, Don Pedro Arbues de Epilae. According to Kornberg, it was Dollinger's conviction that canonizing the inquisitor "served the pope's campaign of riding roughshod over liberal Catholics. The pope was celebrating a man who had sanctioned compulsory baptism of Jews, then inflicted judicial torture to make sure these conversions were sincere. Dollinger saw the origins of the Inquisition in a drive to enhance the papacy's `worldly dominion and compulsory power over the lives and property of men. . . In this sense, the decree on Papal Infallibility was the logical culminating point of the Inquisition� Not surprisingly, given such an attitude, Dollinger openly opposed the Vatican Council's decree on infallibility, and was promptly excommunicated (in 1871) for doing so. His position, however, was clear. As Kornberg sums it up, "Dollinger had linked medieval anti-Jewish hostility to the papacy's coercive temporal and religious dominion as well, thus emphasizing that Jews and liberal Catholics had a common enemy. Hatred of Jews was nourished by the same survivals of the Middle Ages that had produced the triumphs of Ultramontanism, the Syllabus of Errors (1864) and the decree on Papal Infallibility (1870), namely the belief that `we alone are in possession of the full saving truth,' coupled with a lack of respect for the `right of independent action' of others.'
One of the things that makes the Dollinger episode another of those all too rare sanctuaries of a better way in this otherwise unrelieved narrative is the fact, as Kornberg puts it, that this German Catholic theologian "considered nineteenth-century Catholic anti-Jewish hostility no inevitable outcome of Catholic doctrine, but rather the result of Ultramontanism's fortress mentality. Not `essential' Catholicism, but those who wished to prevent Catholics from being contaminated by modern ideas, had made an unholy alliance with antisemitism.
In 1881, Dollinger delivered an address to the "festal meeting" of the Academy of Munich, a major convocation of German Catholic intellectuals. His subject was "The Jews in Europe,� and his purpose, as he said at the beginning of his remarks, was "to show how the skein [of Jew hatred] was gradually twisted which none at the present day can hope to unravel.� But attempt to unravel it he did. After a long description of the very history we have traced in this book, Dollinger returned to the baseline source of Christian antisemitism: "The false and repulsive precept that mankind is perpetually called upon to avenge the sins and errors of the forefathers upon the innocent descendants, has ruled the world far too long, and has blotted the countries of Europe with shameful and abominable deeds, from which we turn away in horror.� As a historian, he had set for himself a purpose I attempt to emulate here, to show "how History, the guide of life, points to her mirror in which past errors are reflected as warnings against fresh mistakes which may be impending. " Little did he know.
Dollinger was unusual. Far more than from within the Church, opposition to Pius IX's absolutist claims came from outside, and nowhere more violently than in Germany, where the complaint had nothing to do with the Church's antisemitism.

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