EDITORIAL: Act of repentance (04/12/98)

EDITORIAL

Act of repentance

Under the direction of Cardinal Edward Idris Cassidy, the Vatican's Commission for Religious Relations with the Jews issued a 10-page document on March 16 titled "We Remember: A Reflection on the Shoah." More than 11 years in the writing, the Vatican statement about the Holocaust was greeted both with high praise and disappointment.

According to The New York Times of March 17, Rabbi Jack Bemporad, director of the Center for Interfaith Understanding at Ramapo College in New Jersey, called the Vatican's statement "spectacular ... they are repudiating anti-Semitism," and Rosann Catalano, a Catholic theologian at the Institute for Christian-Jewish Studies in Baltimore commented, "I applaud it ... It makes me proud." However, the Rev. Richard P. McBrien, professor of theology at the University of Notre Dame, claimed the language of the document "was very, very cautious, very restrained," while Elan Steinberg, executive director of the World Jewish Congress, said "there were positive elements to the document ... there are also problems - the gratuitous defense of the silence of Pius XII, and the failure to discuss the role of the Church as an institution."

It is this difference between the Vatican and many Jewish leaders over the role, and responsibility, of Pope Pius XII and the Church that seemed to cause the greatest disappointment regarding this document. Many Jews believe that Pope Pius XII and the Catholic Church did nothing, or not enough, to prevent the Holocaust and a failure on the part of the Vatican to agree with this assessment and to either condemn or apologize for Pope Pius XII makes this document, in their view, inadequate. In addition, The New York Times in a March 18 editorial flatly writes: "the pope did not encourage Catholics to defy Nazi orders."

However, Kenneth Woodward in his column in Newsweek on March 30 writes "blaming the wartime pope for failing to stop the Holocaust from the Vatican is a neat bit of revisionist history. ... Something shameful is going on. ... During the second world war, Pope Pius XII was lauded for his singular efforts to halt the carnage. ... That Golda Meir ... and leaders of Jewish communities in Hungary, Turkey, Italy, Romania and the United States thanked the pope for saving hundreds of thousands of Jews is now considered irrelevant. ... No one person, Hitler excepted, was responsible for the Holocaust. And no one person, Pius XII included, could have prevented it."

In its editorial of December 25, 1941, The New York Times wrote, "The voice of Pius XII is a lonely voice in the silence and darkness enveloping Europe this Christmas ... He is about the only ruler left on the Continent who dares to raise his voice at all." Now The New York Times demands "a full exploration of Pope Pius' conduct" and that Pope John Paul II and his successors "take the next step to full acceptance of the Vatican's failure to stand squarely against the evil that swept across Europe." And whereas Israel's Chief Rabbi Meir Lau stated that the document "is too little, too late," the chief rabbi of Palestine wrote in 1945, "the people of Israel will never forget what his holiness and his illustrious delegates are doing for our unfortunate brothers and sisters in the most tragic hour of our history."

This acrimonious debate unfortunately has obscured what is in many ways a remarkable document. In his cover letter, Pope John Paul II asks Catholics to "place themselves before the Lord and examine themselves on the responsibility which they too have for the evils of our time."

As many Catholics and Protestants celebrate Holy Week and Easter Sunday, the resurrection of Christ the Savior, other passages from this document bear reflection:

"In addressing this reflection to our brothers and sisters of the Catholic Church, we ask all Christians to join us in meditating on the catastrophe which befell the Jewish people ... Most especially, we ask our Jewish friends, 'whose terrible fate has become a symbol of the aberrations of which man is capable when he turns against God,' to hear us with open hearts. ... The Catholic Church desires to express her deep sorrow for the failures of her sons and daughters in every age. This is an act of repentance ... The Church approaches with great compassion the experience of extermination, the Shoah ... We pray that our sorrow for the tragedy which the Jewish people has suffered in our century will lead to a new relationship ... We wish to turn awareness of past sins into a firm resolve to build a new future in which there will be no more anti-Judaism among Christians or anti-Christian sentiment among Jews, but rather a shared mutual respect, as befits those who adore the one Creator and Lord and have a common father in faith, Abraham."