Pope Benedict XVI’s visit to a synagogue in New York this week will evoke his visit to the oldest synagogue in Germany nearly three years ago. On that occasion, addressing leaders of Cologne’s Jewish community, Pope Benedict properly addressed the question of the Shoah. He deplored Hitler’s campaign to eliminate the Jewish people, and he condemned Nazi antisemitism – words which still need to be spoken. That this Catholic leader is himself a German, having had his own youthful glimpse of Hitler’s death-regime, made his remembrance of that history all the more compelling.
Yet there was something troubling in what Pope Benedict said on that occasion. As it happened, I was in Cologne while the pontiff was there. With the filmmaker Oren Jacoby, I was at work on a documentary film based on my book “Constantine’s Sword: The Church and the Jews – A History.” We were filming in the Rhineland because so much of that history was centered there. Europe’s first pogroms occurred in the 11th century when mobs poured from the Cologne cathedral on Good Friday looking for “Christ-killers.” Blood libel charges arose there during the plagues of the 14th century. The Dreyfus family had its origins nearby, as did the German Catholic celebrations of the 1933 treaty between the Vatican and the Third Reich. Nazi antisemitism had its own diabolical character, but it built on the deep-seated contempt for Jews that had become second nature to Christians, and even a shallow acquaintance with German history (both Lutheran and Catholic) shows that.
But in condemning Nazi antisemitism before that Jewish congregation in Cologne, Pope Benedict defined it univocally as having been “born of neo-paganism.” That was true, a reference to the odd mysticism that underwrote the Teutonic myths on which claims for Aryan racial superiority rested. But Nazi hatred of Jews was born of two parents, and the other one – the long history of Christian anti-Judaism – the pope did not mention. This was not a slight omission. It is urgently important, in going forward into the 21st century, that the context out of which the Nazi genocide of the Jewish people grew, and within which it nearly succeeded, not be forgotten. The crimes of Hitler were not the crimes of Christianity, but the Final Solution depended, both for the recruitment of active perpetrators and for the passivity of a continent’s worth of bystanders, on the ingrained anti-Jewishness of Christian theology, liturgy, and tradition. You would not know that from what the pope said in the Synagogue in Cologne.
Some months later, Pope Benedict went to Auschwitz. Again, he was unsparing in condemning what the Nazis did. But now he implicitly exonerated the German people, effectively defined the Nazi’s ultimate target as having been not Jews but Christianity, and complained not of the Church’s silence in the face of the horror, but of God’s.
Benedict went to Auschwitz, he said, “as a son of the German people, a son of that people over which a ring of criminals rose to power by false promises of future greatness and the recovery of the nation’s honor, prominence and prosperity, but also through terror and intimidation.” In Germany itself by now, there is an established tradition of a much fuller recognition of national complicity in the Nazi project. For a generation, Germans have declined to portray themselves as mere victims and dupes, and German church leaders in particular have been forthright in confessing their sin in relation to the Holocaust. In his portrayal of the past, both at Cologne and Auschwitz, Benedict is becoming a German apart.
And as a Christian? Here is how he defined the Nazi aim in murdering Jews: “Deep down, those vicious criminals, by wiping out this people…by destroying Israel, they ultimately wanted to tear up the tap root of the Christian faith.” As if to dramatize this astounding claim that the “ultimate” Nazi target at Auschwitz was the Church, Benedict greeted 32 camp survivors, all but one of whom were Polish Catholics. A lone Jew represented the more than one million Jews who died there. With no apparent embarrassment, the pope prayed, “Why, Lord, did you remain silent?”
“Constantine’s Sword,” a film by Oren Jacoby, has its theatrical premier in New York on the day of the pope’s visit to the Synagogue.* The coincidence has no significance, although, in my mind, it raises these questions. In the film, Oren Jacoby and I show that the dark legacy of Christian antisemitism began to be redeemed when the Second Vatican Council both repudiated the “Christ-killer” charge against the Jewish people, and affirmed the on-going validity of Jewish religion. The days of scapegoating Jews, and seeking their conversion are over. Or are they? When Pope Benedict meets with Jewish leaders in New York this week, the cordial greetings will be heartfelt, but so will an undercurrent of wondering. Why, under his authority, has the Vatican recently restored the pre-Vatican II Good Friday prayers for the conversion of Jews? Does this pontificate represent a retreat from Christian moral reckoning with the Holocaust? Does it intend to restore the lethal Christian conviction that God’s only plan for Jews is baptism?
Beginning April 18, the film screens in New York at the Lincoln Plaza Theater and at the Quad Theater. For scheduled screenings in other cities, see constantinessword.com
James Carroll is the author most recently of “House of War: The Pentagon and the Disastrous Rise of American Power.” He is Distinguished Scholar in Residence at Suffolk University.
