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Reflecting on the 'Shoah'On March 16th, the Vatican Commission for Religious Relations with the Jews issued a statement entitled "We Remember: A Reflection on the 'Shoah'." Shoah is a Hebrew word designating the Jewish Holocaust. The Commission's document must be located in the broader context of other declarations concerning Catholic-Jewish relations which stem back to the Second Vatican Council. Its Declaration on the Relation of the Church to Non-Christian Religions (Nostra Aetate) marked a pronounced shift of the Catholic Church's relationship to Judaism. Nostra Aetate was revolutionary in this regard. The Church's relationship to Judaism was the centerpiece of the declaration. On this question, several elements are especially noteworthy. First, in a positive sense, this landmark conciliar document affirmed the spiritual kinship between the Church and biblical Israel. Secondly, even more importantly, the bishops at the Council disassociated Catholicism from several doctrinal and biblical misconceptions which at times had generated, anti-Semitic prejudices. Thus, the declaration firmly denied any grounds for projecting a collective guilt on all Jews of the New Testament era or on contemporary Jews. The Jewish people are not accursed and cannot be viewed as guilty of deicide. God remains faithful to his promises in the First Testament. Once and for all, then, the Council repudiated the foundation, rooted in erroneous end unjust readings of the scriptures, for discrimination against or persecution of the Jewish people. The more than thirty years of Catholic-Jewish dialogue launched by this seminal teaching have enjoyed marked progress in mutual understanding. However, there remains a protracted need for the healing of memories incurred by the tragic history of sin. This latest document from the Vatican Commission focuses specifically on the Holocaust. The Shoah is identified as an "unspeakable tragedy which can never be forgotten." Catholics must confront the implications of the Shoah. "We Remember" was published within the time of preparation for the commemoration of the millennium. In the spirit of the approaching Jubilee, Pope John Paul II has exhorted Catholics to undergo purification of conscience through repentance of past errors and infidelities. As part of that process --- remembrance, reflection, and repentance --- Catholics are called to an examination of responsibility which they may bear for the evils of this day. "We Remember" confesses that the relations between Christians and Jews have comprised a "tormented history." Catholics are asked to confront the stark reality of the Holocaust, this "unspeakable tragedy which never can be forgotten." An agonizing and searching question seeks an answer about the origins of the Shoah. Why did the most perverse symbol of human degradation and inhumanity originate in countries long associated with the history of Christian civilization? While there is a denial of any direct causal link between religious anti-Semitism and Nazi anti-Judaism, there can be no easy exoneration of the Christian conscience. Admittedly, the systematic genocide aimed at the Jewish people as such was based on a racist theory which finds no roots in Christian teaching. But, did the "teaching of contempt" facilitate the state of affairs which culminated in that Nazi genocide? The answers are complex. "We Remember" addresses them at an abstract and general level. The statement acknowledges that numbers of Christians did not exercise the moral courage to raise their voices in protest concerning the fate of their Jewish neighbors. It reads: "For Christians this heavy burden of conscience of their brothers and sisters during the Second World War must be a call to penitence." Of course the degree of complicity end indifference varies from nation to nation. Prior statements by various national hierarchies on the occasion of the fiftieth anniversary of the Holocaust have been more telling. For instance, a 1997 statement of the Catholic bishops of France expressed a candid realism. The French Catholic bishops noted the courage of some Christians in defense of their fellow human beings. By contrast, they conclude their analysis thus: "... we must recognize that indifference won the day over indignation in the face of the persecution of the Jews and that, in particular, silence was the rule ... whereas speaking out in favor of the victims was the exception." Again, at the commemoration of Auschwitz in 1995, the German bishops repeated an earlier assessment of the situation: "... we were nevertheless, as a whole, a church community who kept living their life in turning their back too often on the fate of this persecuted Jewish people, who looked too fixedly at the threat to their own institutions end who remained silent about the crimes committed against Jews and Judaism." Did anti-Jewish sentiment, suspicion, and contempt effect a moral insensitivity of Christians to the political and cultural climate of Hitler's National Socialist ideology? At the very least, the Shoah serves as a reminder of some failure of Christianity. "We Remember" includes an insight taken from the writings of Pope John Paul II --- "there is no future without memory." These words echo the thought of the Holy Father in his introductory letter to the Shoah statement: "May it enable memory to play its necessary part in the process of shaping a future in which the unspeakable iniquity of the Shoah will never again be possible."
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