catholicism and the Jewish people - a test case for authority

Hi Dan, thanks for your interesting quotes! I think I need to clarify. My interesting quotes were meant to make the point that for hundreds of years, the normative Jewish experience of
the Catholic church was horrific. They could not be a definative history given the space,
but did show official councils and popes committing sin. They established that part of
your history is a problem, and asked you to deal with it. There were also popes who were
better, but that did not mean that my case was not also valid. I would also note in
passing that the pope’s attitude to the Nazis has not been the issue here, it is the catholic
church’s interaction with the Jewish people that is the topic.

Now, your latest quotes equally establish that there is more than one side to the behavoir
of the catholic church during WW2. Thats fine, and part of the complexity the historian
deals with. They do not mean, however that they are the only side or the complete
history. The Hungarian cardinal and bishops did still vote for Jewish exclusion and
boycott, etc. Character references for Pius do not change this.

Likewise, you need to assess your quotes seriously. The New York Times in 1943 is a
great source for what informed Americans thought during the war. It is not the definative
or infallable history of that war, however. Historians value the New York Times, but do
not say, “this is in the NYT, therefore it is absolutly accurate.” The fog of war, the
distance, the desire to see an ally in Pius etc., would all have been at work here. Why is
this NYT article more worthy than later articles in the same paper which decry the pope’s
behaviour? Is there a rule that articles without the benfit of hindsight are always better?
Now, you may be able to make out a case, closer to the original or what ever, but you
need to make that case. The article is not the infallabe, final word on the matter. Equally,
its nice to quote a rabbi who liked the pope. But is that conclusive? Is he correct because
he is a rabbi? What if another rabbi does not like the pope? Is he equally right, or are only
pro-catholic rabbis correct? Do you see my point? You can prove that there are 2 sides to
the case, and thats fine. That does not mean that the other side ceases to exist.

My next post will look at a large chunk of official catholic history which also occurred
during these years, and needs to be also taken into account if a truer picture is to be
arrived at. I will just make a general observation here.

One problem is differences in definitions of who is a Jew. The catholics, as a religion,
defined Jews in religious terms. For the Nazis, it was a question of race. Now, for the
majority of Jews, who were Jewish under both definitions, this difference was irrelevant,
but Jews who had converted to Catholicism created difficulties between church and state.
In France, Italy, Hungary and Slovakia, as well as in Germany itself, race-based
anti-Jewish legislation was enacted. The catholic church protested these laws in as much
as they affected their converts, but, especially in Slovakia and Hungary, publicly voted
for the impoverishment and exclusion of their Jewish neighbours. They did so because
they no longer considered these people to be Jews, and and did not want them to suffer
the same fate as Jews. Their protests were explicitly not about helping those they
considered Jews. They were about helping their own flock. Now, thats fine as far as it
goes, but such protests cannot now be considered as protests against anti-Jewish laws as
such, unless the catholic church has quietly decided to adopt the nazi definition. In Italy,
for example, the Vatican protested where the laws affected catholic marriage, but also
explicity asked that the rest of the laws be retained. Holocaust researcher R. Wistrich,
afer reading through the matterial released by the Vatican, estimated that 90% of its
protests focused only on this group.

In any event, you still have to answer my original question. Would you have obeyed the
pope in the 1850s and broken Gods command to love your neighbour, or obeyed God and
disobeyed the pope, synods and papal bull?

Take care, Colin

 

hi Dan, do you have the references for your earlier large quotes? I thought they were very interesting.
Take care, Colin

 

I never said you were pagans, Dan, I just asked if you would obey papal rules which involved sin.

Take care, Colin

 

Hi thess,
A quick point.
Any baptist who supported segregation etc was WRONG. Their behaviour was antiChristian and their actions shame the church. Would you also agree that any catholic (including popes and synods of bishops) who acted to impose ghettoes on Jews were wrong, their behaviour anti-Christian, and their actions shared the church?
Take care, Colin

 

Hi, Dan, firstly, thanks for your references! I have read several of them. They do tend to only present one side of the picture. I am going to present information on the other side, not because it is the complete picture, but because the complete picture needs both sides.

Here follows some more information concerning the official actions of the catholic church during and just prior to WW2. The question I am asking is, was the european
catholic church anti-semitic during this time? Did it oficially encourage the villification,
boycotts and expulsion of Jews?

This post concerns church teaching during this time.

Within German Catholicism during the 2nd Reich, the Catholic press portrayed the Jews
as “shameless intrigants, swindlers, venal, unscrupulous exploiters who lived off their
hosts like parasites and who seduced, and slandered all except their coreligionists.”
Jewish “dominance” was said to be responsible for “warping the German character,”
causing “the progressive de-Christianisation and weakening of public morality,” and of
“corrupting the German culture and economy.” As the Catholic theologian J. Rebbert put
it in 1876: “our struggle against Talmudic Judaism is nothing but self-defence ... for in
these days of the kulturkampf, Jewish emancipation is likely to infect Christians, so that
[the Jews] will bring about an emancipation of the Christian from his Christianity.” Jews
themselves were described as a “ferment of cosmopolitanism and of national
decomposition.” Traditional or religious anti-Semitism was also kept alive during this
time by the perpetuation of blood libel stories by Catholic writers and journals. The
writings of Justin Martyr and Tertullian were enlisted to back these accusations, and the
Kulturkampf itself was blamed on “the insidious work of the crafty Jews.” Note that Jews
made up less than 1% of the population at this time.

During the traumatic days of the Weimar Republic, Catholic vilification of Jews occurred
in both the pulpit and in print. In 1923, Father Philipp Haeuser of Augsburg wrote that
the Jews were a people disowned by God, a people under a curse, and referred to them as
“the cross of Germany.” This book received the Imprimatur of the diocese of
Regensburg, affirming that nothing in it contradicted Catholic teaching or morals. In the
same year, Erhard Schlund, a Franciscan Father, wrote of “the destructive influence of
the Jews” and concluded: “the Jews should be fought.” Also in this year, the Curate
Joseph Roth published his Katholizismus und Judenfrage, where Jews were described as
a morally inferior race, which must be eliminated from public life. If, in the course of
this, “some good and harmless Jews with whom immorality because of their race is latent
will have to suffer together with the guilty ones, this is not a violation of Christian love of
one’s neighbour.” Bishop Hudal likewise, in a book which received the Catholic
imprimatur, stated: “Certain extraordinary measures for members of the Jewish ethnic
group should not be seriously objected to even if such measures do not comply with ...
the principle of law.” During this time, official “Guidance books” were written for the
Catholic laity. In one such, the Lexicon fuer Theologie und Kirche, edited by Bishop
Buchberger of Regensburg, the Jesuit Gustav Gundlich wrote the entry on anti-Semitism.
The article distinguished between two types of anti-Semitism. The first type, based on
race, was rejected. The second type, however, which “combats Judaism ... because of the
excessive and deleterious influence of the Jewish segment of the population of a given
people” was “permissible when it combats, by moral and legal means, truly harmful
influence of the Jewish segment of the population in the areas of economy, politics,
theatre, cinema, the press, science, and art.” The article then went on to endorse both the
Protestant and Catholic anti-Semitic parties of the day. “The anti-Semitism of Adolf
Stoecker’s party in Berlin, and the Christian Socialists in Vienna (together with
Schonerer’s anti-Semitism), belong to the second type ... The Church ... has inspired and
supported measures opposing the unjust and harmful influence of economic and
intellectual Judaism.” Written to guide the laity, this was official Catholic support for
Christian anti-Semitism. Likewise, in 1930, the Vicar General of Mainz, Dr. Mayor,
wrote that Hitler, in Mein Kampf, had “appropriately described” the harmful influence of
Jews on German intellectual life. In affirming Hitler’s view of Jews in Mein Kampf, the
Vicar General was finding “appropriate” comments such as the following:

“Nothing gave me more cause for reflection than the gradually increased insight into the
activities of Jews in certain fields. Was there any form of filth or profligacy, above all in
cultural life, in which at least one Jew did not participate? When carefully cutting open
such a growth, one could find a little Jew, blinded by the sudden light, like a maggot in a
rotting corpse.”

Note that the Vicar General went on to find Nazism and Catholicism incompatible.

As G. Lewy has noted: “From the time the National Socialist movement appeared in the
1920s, organised German Catholicism came into repeated conflict with it, but
anti-Semitism was not one of the primary bones of contention.” The assistant editor of
the Catholic Schonere Zukunft wrote in 1930 concerning the anti-Semitism of the Nazi
party: “it is just this point of their program that wins them great sympathy in largely
Catholic circles as well.”

Throughout this time also, on the level of popular Catholic culture, the Oberammergau
Passion Play continued to present a demonic view of Jews. The Pharisees and Jewish
priests appeared in black, wearing devil’s horns, while Jesus and his followers and even
the Romans wore white. Indeed, after viewing its three hundredth anniversary
performance in 1934, Hitler praised it as “a precious tool” in the war against the Jews.

When the bishops did protest the breaking of the sacrament of marriage proposed by the
compulsory disillusion of mixed marriages in 1942, they hastened to add that their
intervention was not due “to lack of love for the German nationality ... and also not due
to underestimation of the harmful Jewish influences upon German culture and national
interests.”

Turning to Poland, Emanuel Ringelblum (a Jewish historian who perished in the
Holocaust) wrote that “before the war, the Polish clergy was distinguished for its
remarkably anti-Semitic attitude.” The role of the Catholic press was important in this.
The Catholic daily, the Maly Dziennik was a high profile shaper of Catholic opinion.
Anti-Semitism was a constant theme in it. Its activities in the area of boycotts and so
forth will be referred to later. In 1937, Jews were accused of spreading “moral decay and
a spirit of conspiracy against the Polish nation, church and state.” The Catholic youth
paper, the Pro Christo, affirmed that the Jews really did sacrifice Christian children at
Passover. In 1926, 1929 and 1935 it carried articles to this effect, and quoted the
beatification by the Vatican of Simon of Trent, and the articles in Civilta Cattolica
(1881-1882) in support of the blood libel. No Catholic officials charged with the
oversight of the paper (or any other officials), objected to these statements. In 1929, the
Catholic journal Echo parafialne was produced in the Polish parliament by a Jewish
member, objecting to an article in it detailing how Jews capture Christian boys so that
they can drink their blood at Passover. In 1932, the popular periodical for priests, the
Glos Kaplanski, spoke of the Jews waging a “time immemorial war against the church
and the “Aryan” world.” The Catholic youth paper, the Mlodziez Katolicka printed
Catholic university students comments concerning Jews. The Jewish “psyche,” these
students stated, was cynical, its ethic materialistic, and both posed a danger to the
spiritual, idealistic psyche and ethic of Catholic Poland. Austria’s bishop Gfoellener was
also quoted in the Mlodziez Katolicka as saying: “it is the duty of every good Christian to
fight against the spirit of international Judaism.”

The church leadership was also involved. The anti-Semitic National Democrats were
supported both by the first primate of the modern Polish state, and by a pastoral letter
written by the Polish bishops in 1927. Monsignor Dr. Stanislaw Trzeciak was one of the
leading Catholic anti-Semites of the time. While frequently criticised in the Jewish press
for his views, the Maly Dziennik vigorously defended him, noting that far from being
reproved by his superiors, they had promoted him to be pastor of one of Warsaw’s largest
churches. His anti-Semitic writings were widely quoted in the Polish Catholic press, and
his book defending the Protocols of the Elders of Zion was described by the Catholic
daily Glos Narodu as “priceless,” “exhaustive” and “a must read.” As a Catholic, he
defended his views with reference to the Church Fathers contra Judaios writings, and by
reference to the anti-Jewish legislation of the Church Councils. In 1936, in a public
speech, widely reported in the press, he claimed that Jews ritually murder Christian
children, and named a town in Poland where this had occurred.

Concerning blood libels, the Catholic cathedral in Sandomierz has a large oil painting by
Carlo de Parvo (done in 1712) depicting the 1698 blood libel in that town. The painting
shows “rabid looking” Jews holding innocent Christian babies in their prayer shawls,
preparing to slit their throats.

Within Hungary, in 1882 Bishop Ottokar Prohaszkaw wrote: “The Jewish cancer has
eaten at the Christian Hungarian nation until it wore it down and presented it a naked
skeleton. It has turned the Hungarian people into beggars. Judaism is a blight everywhere
... it lowers the moral level and transforms corruption into an accepted form of life.” On
July 29, 1919, he published the following:

“The Jews eat and consume us and we must defend ourselves against this flea epidemic
... We are dealing here with the rampaging of a tricky, corrupt, disbelieving and immoral
race which is waging against us a campaign of rats, and is working against us by flooding
us like invading fleas.”

The Synod of Bishops publicly supported the Etelkozi Szovetseg, the first goal of which
was “war against destructive Jewry,” and advised the faithful as to how to send it
donations.

After 1918, priests elected to the Hungarian parliament similarly used that venue to
express their anti-Semitic beliefs. On December 3, 1919, for example, Father Gyula
Zakany declared that it was “the fault of the Jews that Hungary’s internal integrity was
destroyed.”

In the 1920 election campaign, the United National Christian League stated in one of
their pamphlets: “Judaism is a parasitic being and, just like a mushroom, it, too,
flourishes and develops best in a place overwhelmed by rot: on the dung heap. Life
according to the Christian faith and following in the footsteps of Jesus is the only
effective cure for corruption and rot.” During this time, the party enjoyed the financial
and moral support of the Synod of Bishops, the cardinal archbishop himself donating
200,000 crowns to it. The most extreme anti-Semitic party in Hungary was the Arrow
Cross party. As well as receiving the support of many priests, it was also supported by the
Bishop of Kalocsa and by Bishop Jozsef Grosz of Szombathely. In October 1939, a crowd
of 5,000 celebrated the Arrow Cross. At this celebration, the head of the Papal Office,
Odon Jaszovary delivered the sermon.

The Catholic press at this time regularly vilified the Jewish people. The paper which
received the most financial support from the Synod of Bishops was the Nemzeti Ujsag,
and was the semi-official organ of the Catholic church in Hungary. Its editorials referred
to Jews as “sewer rats” and as “a destructive bacterium.”

Did such remarks encourage the Hungarian catholics to love their Jewish neighbours?

Take care, Colin

 

Hi again,
what was the role of the catholic church in europe concerning the boycotting of Jews?
Looking firstly at germany, The April 1933 boycott has been described by Saul
Friedlander as “the first major test on a national scale of the attitude of the Christian
churches towards the situation of the Jews under the new government.”

The Catholic church issued no protest over the boycott. When asked by Oskar
Wassermann, the president of the Committee for Inter-Confessional Peace, to intervene
against the boycott, Cardinal Bertram replied that the boycott “had nothing to do with
immediate church interests.” Cardinal Faulhaber, in a letter to the future Pope Pius XII,
stated that “The Jews can help themselves.” Likewise, on April 15, the archbishop of
Freiburg wrote that “the Catholics had not vigorously done anything for the Jews.” The
Catholic press justified the desire to eliminate the Jewish ‘alien bodies’ (Fremdkorper)
from Germany. “Taking action against the Jews, according to the body of these
publications, was ‘justifiable self-defence to prevent the harmful characteristics and
influences of the Jewish race’.”

In a clear indication of the path Catholic reaction would take, the church did show
concern for baptised Jews. Archbishop Grober wrote to a friend at the time: “I
immediately intervened on behalf of the converted Jews.” Faulhaber also expressed his
concern for the pain and injustice that “even those who have been baptised for ten and
twenty years and are good Catholics ... are legally still considered Jews, and as doctors or
lawyers are to loose their positions.” That is, as noted, his concern was for those he
considered to be Catholics, not for the Jews as such.

World renown Catholic theologian Karl Adam wrote in 1933 that it was necessary that
Jewish influence in the press, literature, science and art be repulsed. Not only was there
no protest, but less than three weeks later, Cardinal Faulhaber issued an order to his
clergy to support the new regime, and expressed his confidence in it. Likewise, on April
20 the Vatican sent birthday wishes to Hitler, and pledged its “unflinching cooperation”
with his plans to create social peace in Germany. A regime which boycotted Jews was
given the public support of the Catholic church.

In the immediate aftermath of the boycott, Hitler met with Bishop Berning on April 26.
Bishop Berning called on Hitler in his role as a delegate from the Conference of Bishops,
which was meeting at the time. The Jewish situation was not on the Bishop’s agenda, but,
in talks that were later described by Berning as “cordial and to the point,” Hitler himself
raised the topic, stating:

“I have been attacked because of my handling of the Jewish question. The Catholic
Church considered the Jews pestilent for fifteen hundred years, put them in ghettos, etc.,
because it recognised the Jews for what they were. In the epoch of liberalism, the danger
was no longer recognised. I am moving back toward the time in which a fifteen hundred
year long tradition was implemented. I do not set race over religion, but I recognise the
representatives of this race as pestilent for the state and for the church and perhaps I am
thereby doing Christianity a great service by pushing them out of schools and public
functions.”

The minutes of the meeting, kept by the observer from the Vatican, Vicar General
Monsignor Steinmann, do not record the bishop’s response to this statement, in which
Hitler both stated his policy of excluding Jews, and claimed for it a precedent in church
history. What is known is that on May 6, Cardinal Bertram commented on the results of
Berning’s talk, stating that, as a result of the talk, and of Hitler’s declaration before the
Reichstag, the serious misgivings of the German episcopate concerning the new regime
had been eliminated. As it is known that Hitler’s treatment of the Jewish people was
raised, this can only mean that this was not an area of “serious misgivings” for the
German Catholic Church. The rapprochement had immediate consequences. The Centre
Party ceased its policy of opposing Nazism. As their historian Karl Bachem stated: “after
the bishops have unanimously professed their recognition of the new government, such
resistance for us would have been morally unjustifiable ... We had no choice but to
follow the example of the bishops.”

This talk was part of the process which led, on July 9, to the signing of the Concordat
between the Vatican and the Nazi regime. The Concordat was welcomed by the Nazi
press as a “moral strengthening” of the government. On July 14, at a meeting of his
cabinet, Hitler summed up his own position on the Concordat, stressing “that one should
only consider it as a great achievement. The Concordat gave Germany an opportunity and
created an area of trust which was particularly significant in the developing struggle with
international Jewry.” By contrast, Hitler realised that his euthanasia policy would cause
problems with the Catholic church, and so, while the law approving it was passed on the
same day as the Concordat was signed, its publication was delayed to ensure it did not
affect it. In other words, after detailed discussions with the German Catholic hierarchy,
Hitler both believed that his euthanasia policy would be opposed by the Catholic church,
and at the same time saw the main benefit of the Concordat as providing support to his
anti-Jewish policy.

The church’s own self-expressed understanding of the Concordat was that it gave moral
backing to a regime which it also explicitly knew had, and intended to continue,
discriminating against Jews. Before the Concordat was signed, the Vatican knew how
Hitler would view it. Faulhaber had told von Papen: “He is a great spirit, he sees what a
halo his government will have in the eyes of the world if the Pope makes a treaty with
him.” Writing to Hitler in 1933, Faulhaber commented: “For Germany’s prestige in east
and west and before the whole world this handshake with the Papacy, the greatest moral
power in the history of the world, is a feat of immeasurable blessing.” In 1937, Cardinal
Faulhaber stated in a sermon: “at a time when the heads of major nations in the world
faced the new Germany with cool reserve and considerable suspicion, the Catholic
Church, the greatest moral power on earth, through the Concordat expressed its
confidence in the new German government. This was a deed of immeasurable
significance for the reputation of the new government abroad.” Following the ratification
of the Concordat, a thanksgiving service was held at St. Hedwig’s Cathedral in Berlin.
The Papal Nuncio, Orsenigo presided, and Nazi and Catholic flags were placed together.
Those inside the cathedral sang the Horst Wessel song, which was relayed by
loudspeakers to the thousands outside. In the public mind, the Concordat clearly gave
papal blessing to the new regime. With the signing of the Concordat, Cardinal Bertram
also expressed his own “joyous preparedness to co-operate with the new government.”
On the popular level, members of the Nazi Party now attended church services in their
SA uniforms.

Upon ratification of the Concordat, Parcelli wrote to the German charge d’ affairs:

“The Holy See takes this occasion to add a word on behalf of those German Catholics
who themselves have gone over from Judaism to the Christian religion or who are
descended in the first generation, or more remotely, from Jews who adopted the Catholic
faith, and who for reasons known to the Reich government are likewise suffering from
social and economic difficulties.”

Here, the future pope acknowledges without censure the persecution of Jews in Germany,
and speaks only on behalf of those he no longer considers to be Jews. Clearly, the policy
of exclusions of Jews from German life encountered no opposition from the Catholic
leadership.

Catholic comment on the race laws of 1935 was given when Bishop Hudal stated that the
Nuremberg Laws were “a necessary measure of self-defence.” He continued that “the
Ghetto walls had not been torn down by the church, but by nineteenth century liberalism.
Consequently, from the point of view of the church, there could be no objections to laws
which contained discriminatory provisions for Jews.” No church leader is known to have
disputed these claims. Indeed, the clerically oriented Klerusblatt agreed, calling the
Nuremberg race laws “indispensable safeguards for the qualitative make-up of the
German people.” It was at this time that Archbishop Grober also wrote of “the right to
safeguard the purity of the race, and to devise measures necessary to that end.” Cardinal
Faulhaber had expressed similar sentiments in 1933. In other words, exclusions and
boycotts were publicly supported by important elements within the German Catholic
church. The wording used to justify these discriminatory measures, that of “self-defence”
was also precisely that which would be used by Pius XI in his “we are all Semites”
comment.

There were individual voices of protest. Concerning the April 1933 boycott, the Bavarian
pastor, Alois Wurm, who was also the editor of the journal Seele, complained to Cardinal
Faulhaber in Munich “that in this period when the most extreme hatred is being fomented
against Jewish citizens, surely more than ninety-nine percent of whom are innocent, not a
single Catholic paper, as far as I can see, has had the courage to proclaim the teaching of
the Catholic catechism that one may not hate and persecute any human being, least of all
for his race. To very many people this appears to be a Catholic failure.” He noted that he
himself had written such an article, but that it had been rejected by a large Catholic
paper. The cardinal replied that he did not feel inclined at that time to take up even the
cause of baptised Jews.

Members of the Catholic laity and lower clergy seem also to have desired a better
standard of moral leadership from their superiors. At the end of 1942, Monsignor
DiMeglio, a member of the Berlin nunciature staff, prepared and brought a report of the
situation of German Jews to Rome. In it, he concluded by stating that some Catholic
priests and lay people were amazed that the German bishops had said nothing about the
treatment accorded to the Jews.

The Church would protest about certain aspects of the Nazi policy, but its Jewish policy
was not one of them. As far as the boycott and exclusion of Jews was concerned, at no
time did the Catholic church in Germany protest it, either to the Nazi leadership, or to
their own congregations. Rather, the policy was supported both by statements from
church leaders and articles in the church press. In 1934, the Civilta Cattolica commented
on the Nazi exclusions, noting with regret that the Nazi anti-Semitism “did not stem from
the religious convictions, nor from the Christian conscience ... but from the desire to
upset the order of religion and society ... We could understand them, or even praise them,
if their policy were restricted within acceptable bounds of defence against the Jewish
organisations and institutions.” The semi-official Vatican paper thus thought that, if it
stemmed from a Christian conscience, legislation against Jews could be termed
praiseworthy.

The practical consequences of this essentially unanimous public support for the State
boycott of Jews in Germany by the Christian churches (Catholic, German Christian,
Confessing and Evangelical) was immense. The exclusion in 1933 of “non-Aryans” from
the German civil service meant that a large portion of the population had to prove their
“Aryan” status by showing that all four of their grandparents were Christian. The
churches were the custodians of baptismal records and marriage registrations going back
several generations. They supplied this information as a matter of course, even printing
forms labelled “Certificates of Aryan Descent” to serve their clients. The Catholic
Church did however complain that they were not being paid by the state for this service.
Catholic Church historian Lewy wrote: “The very question of whether the [Catholic]
Church should lend its help to the Nazi state in sorting out people of Jewish decent was
never debated. A priest wrote in the Klerusblatt in 1934: ‘We shall also do our best to
help in this service to the people’.” The co-operation of the Church in this matter
continued throughout the war years, when the price of being Jewish was no longer
dismissal from a government job but deportation and death. Thus, the most significant
role the Church played in Germany during the Second World War in relation to the
Jewish people was isolate, identify and expose German Jews. Without this voluntary
assistance, the Nazis would have been unable to kill the assimilated Jews of Germany.
Yet the filling out of these forms occasioned no Church Struggle, no pastors went to jail
rather than do it, no pastors simply burnt their registers because human life was more
sacred than paper.

Clearly, the implementation of “the Boycott” and exclusion laws in Germany, the first
administrative step towards the Holocaust, was not taken with either the opposition or
silence from the German churches, but with their official support, and indispensable and
freely given assistance.

 

What were the reactions of the catholic churches in the rest of europe to the boycott of
Jews?
The Catholic desire to isolate Jews from the rest of Polish society can be traced back to
the Council of Breslau in 1267. This demanded the strict segregation of Jews from
Christians. In modern Polish history, the first call for a boycott of Jewish businesses was
made in 1893, when the Catholic Congress in Cracow had called for a Catholic boycott
of all Jewish businesses. In 1936 Cardinal August Hlond, the new primate of Poland,
wrote in an official pastoral letter:

“It is an actual fact that the Jews fight against the Catholic Church, they are free thinkers,
and constitute the vanguard of atheism, bolshevism and revolution ... It is also true that
the Jews are committing frauds, practising usury and dealing in white slavery. It is true
that in the schools the Jewish youth is having an evil influence, from an ethical and
religious point of view, on Catholic youth ... One does well to prefer one's own kind in
commercial dealings and to avoid Jewish shops and Jewish stalls in the markets,”

The Catholic daily newspaper, the Maly Dziennik, regularly spoke of the “moral
obligation” of Catholics to boycott Jewish business. The banner over its advertisements
read: “A Pole buys only from other Poles.” Everything from razor blades (“lets not allow
ourselves to be shaved by the enemy”) to school supplies were mentioned, while
Christian merchants “did not have a moral right to work together quietly with Jews.”
The Maly Dziennik printed out lists of Christian businesses and doctors, and asked its
readers to write in listing the assets of Jews in their areas.

In 1936, Monsignor Trzeciak addressed a large audience on the topic “The Jewish
problem in the light of Christian ethics.” He stated:

“Saint Jerome hated the Jews and Pope Pius V expelled all Jews from the Papal domain.
Poland should follow this example: Jews should be destroyed, exterminated and expelled
from Poland ... Noble are those Christians who refuse to sit with Jews on the same bench
at university ... every Polish woman who buys from a Jew is a traitor. The Christian
religion imposes a penalty for dealing with Jews.”

In a synod of Polish bishops resolved in 1937 to demand that Jewish children be
segregated in schools, and that Jews be prohibited from teaching Polish children. The
Archbishop of Krakow had reported to the Vatican in 1928 about how he had managed to
isolate Jewish children from Catholic ones, “so that the evil influence of the Jews might
be removed from the Catholic children.”
In 1938, the official Catholic daily recommended Germany among others as a role model
for how Catholic Poland should treat its Jews. It would likewise support the boycotts of
Italy, Romania and Hungary. Calling for a wider boycott, the Jesuit journal Przeglad
Powszechny praised the “cultural and social separation from Jews” among young Poles.
There were also calls in the Catholic press for Jews to be excluded from the professions
of law, medicine, dentistry, pharmacy, veterinary science, architecture, education and
athletics The Glos Kaplanski commented that “there were good reasons why the church
had enacted strict laws enjoining Catholics from living together with Jews, from sharing
the same table, using the same public baths or employing Jewish physicians.”
In 1937, writing in the Maly Dziennik, Monsignor Trzeciak called for a boycott and
expulsion of the Jews. He quoted from Pope Alexander III, Innocent III and Benedict
XIV, as well as Jerome, Ambrose, the Apostolic Canons (canons 69, 70), the Council of
Nicea (325 CE, canon 52), the Ecumenical Council of Constantinople (692), the Fourth
Lateran Council (1215), the Council of Vienna (1267) and the Council of Valencia
(1388). Written in the main Catholic daily, by a leading member of the Catholic clergy,
who was indeed promoted within the Catholic church the following year, quoting such a
lineage for support, and with no Catholic rebuttal, but rather the support of the highest
ranking Catholic in Poland, the Polish Catholics could not but have concluded that the
Catholic Church fully supported the boycott and exclusion of the Jews. Between 1937
and 1939 the Maly Dziennik carried at least nine articles by Trzeciak. In August 1939,
just prior to the German invasion, he defended Hitler’s anti-Jewish legislation, by
showing where popes had issued similar laws.

The church proclaimed “Defence of Polish Trade Week” of December 1938 began with
a Mass in the cathedral. Poles were even told that it was a moral duty to buy lotto tickets
from Catholic and not Jewish stores.

At the same time as the Nazi boycotts were taking place, the official Catholic Church in
Poland led the moves for boycotts and exclusions of Jews in Poland. Without a word of
protest from the Pope, and in conscious conformity to their own religious traditions, their
actions strongly suggest that the Catholic church at this time was not opposed to the
boycotting of Jews.

The public support of the Hungarian catholic church for boycotts has already been
posted. The 1938 law, for example, was debated by the catholic synod. After the debate,
the Bishop of Szekesfehervar stressed that “the synod of bishops was unanimous in its
desire to put an end to Jewish destructiveness” and the apostolic delegate of Rozsnyo
demanding that “additional, very firm steps be taken to remove the Jewish spirit.” At the
same time, the ecclesiastical paper, Namzeti Ujsag carried an article which asked:

“Does anti-Semitism contradict Catholicism? Not at all! Ever since the inception of
Christianity, a struggle with no compromise has been waged unceasingly between the
church and Judaism. Our Lord Jesus began this struggle on a practical level when he
drove out at a whip’s end the moneychangers from the Temple ... the popes and church
councils, year after year, generation after generation, have engaged in legislating laws to
limit the rights of Jews and to issue decrees aimed at achieving this goal.”

The writer went on to list many of these laws and decrees, and concluded: “No one has
ever cancelled these papal edicts and church laws. And so they are all valid in our day as
well.” This article appeared while the second anti-Jewish bill was being debated in
parliament. Note also that in this debate, Bishop Glattfelder also spoke with approval of
former popes and church leaders who had enacted numerous anti-Jewish laws.

Within France, not a single Catholic Bishop opposed the racial laws of October 3. This
silence was deliberate. Two assemblies of cardinals and archbishops did discuss the laws.
At the Paris assembly, Farther Riquet called upon the assembly to condemn the racial
laws as “a scandal for the Christian conscience.” He continued:

“What should astonish Christians and scandalise non-Christians is that such an abuse is
not meeting with any protest from the episcopate, which, for years, has not ceased to
claim religious freedom as a common right. The tacit approval of this unjust oppression
of consciences today distresses a great number of young Christians. It discredits the
church in the eyes of those who, in such great numbers during recent years, have become
accustomed to think of her as the supreme champion of the human person’s dignity and
freedom of spirit. It might seem to them that the Church in France, having obtained a
little more justice for herself, is now not interested in the injustices committed against
others.”

The assembly rejected this and called instead for “a sincere and complete loyalty to the
established power.” Indeed, both assemblies decided not to comment publicly on the
laws excluding Jews. Xavier Vallat was the commissioner for Jewish affairs at Vichy,
and during his trial after the war, stated that he took the lack of protest by the episcopate
as tacit consent. He also maintained that had any authorised representative of the Vatican
or of the French hierarchy protested about any of the measures, he would have modified
them. He also stated that the Catholic Church had not opposed the anti-Jewish
legislation, and in a handful of important cases had given its approbation. A number of
leading bishops and Catholic publications did publicly thank Petain for the anti-Jewish
laws. The bishop of Marseille wrote positively about the Statut des juifs that “already we
see the face of a more beautiful France, healed of her sores,” while in his 1941 Easter
sermon, the bishop of Grenoble congratulated Petain on his repression of Freemasons and
“that other, equally harmful power, the half-breeds of which the Jews are a particularly
outstanding specimen.” The Jesuit journal Constuire wrote of the anti-Jewish laws as
“measures of moral purification.”
That these laws were passed in France without public clerical opposition had
international consequence. King Boris III of Bulgaria, speaking in defence of his own
anti-Jewish laws, noted that similar measures had been imposed in Hungary, Romania
“and even France.” Interestingly, he did not refer to Nazi Germany as a precedent, but
rather to countries with a strong Christian reputation.
On 7 August, 1941, Petain wrote to his ambassador to the Vatican, Leon Berard, asking
for the papal view of Vichy’s anti-Jewish measures. Berard replied quickly, saying he had
heard nothing at the Vatican that might suggest disagreement. On September 2 he
submitted a full report. This stated that “at no time did the papal authority seem occupied
or preoccupied with this part of French policy.” The only disagreement he could find was
over the law’s definition of Jews by race rather than by religion. This was “the sole point
on which the law.. is in opposition to a principle espoused by the Roman church.” Even
here, the issue was not considered serious: “It does not follow from this doctrinal
divergence that the Etat Francais is threatened with.. censure or disapproval.”
Concerning its economic and social legislation: “there is nothing in these measures that
can give rise to criticism, from the viewpoint of the Holy See.” The letter indeed quoted
Thomas Aquinas as approving restrictions being placed on Jewish participation in
society, and concluded that it was, from the Vatican’s point of view, legitimate to
prohibit or restrict them from various professions. He also reminded his reader that it was
the church which had originally required Jews to wear a distinctive dress in order to set
them apart, and had established ghettos. The letter concluded “as I have been told by an
authorised person at the Vatican, no quarrel will be started with us because of the statute
on the Jews, however, a twofold plea has been express to me,” firstly, that no regulations
concerning marriage be added to the legislation, and secondly, that the laws be
administered with justice and charity. Petain paraded the letter publicly within days of
receiving it to prove that his laws were in line with the Vatican. His letter became a key
factor in Petain and Laval’s conduct towards the Jews. When the Papal Nuncio to France
wrote to the Papal Secretary of State to find out who was responsible for the letter,
Cardinal Luigi Manglione informed him that Bernard’s sources were highly placed
within the Secretariat of State, and included monsignors Tardini and Montini (the future
Pope Paul VI). As the Vichy press stated soon after, and without any contradiction from
Rome: “it is clear that nothing in the laws passed to protect France from Jewish influence
is in opposition to Church doctrine.” Clearly, had the contents of the letter been offensive
to the Vatican (and especially after its public usage by Petain), it had ample opportunity
of distancing itself from it. It never did so. The regime continued to enjoy the support of
the Vatican and of its bishops.

In June 1941, the second Jewish Law (which worsened their conditions) was enacted.
The episcopate maintained its silence. The Archbishop of Toulouse, Jules-Gerard
Salliege did however protest against the anti-Jewish laws. Several priests also protested,
leading to a telegram from the bishops of Nice, Frejus and Monaco, and the abbots of
Leyrins and Frigolet to Petain, disassociating themselves from any such protest, and
affirming their loyalty to the regime. It was at this time also that four professors of
theology at Lyon issued an unofficial document condemning the racial laws.

In general, however, the official leadership and institutions of the Catholic Church in
France made no protest at the introduction of discriminatory laws against its Jewish
population. The Vatican also, when specifically asked for a comment, expressed no
moral outrage over these laws.

Anti-Jewish laws were promulgated by the Italian ministerial council on November
10-11, 1938. Suggestions that such laws were being considered started in February 1938,
and were intensified in July 1938. During this time, the Vatican made no official
comment concerning such a possibility, but the Vatican press did call for a “lasting
solution to the formidable Jewish question” (in the context of the deportations from
Austria), and criticised the “preponderance” of Jews in Hungarian professions, and
supported discriminatory laws against the Jews there. Given that Mussolini was known to
be considering similar laws at the time, this sentiment in Civilta Cattolica was not
without domestic significance. Likewise, on August 12, L’Osservatore Romano reminded
its readers of how good the Jews had had it under Papal rule, prior to 1870. The paper
went on to remind its readers that during this time: “Jews had been prevented from
holding any public positions, civil or military, and that the prohibition was also extended
to the sons of converted Jews. The precautions applied to the exercise of the professions,
teaching and even commerce.” The Vatican writers were thus aware of and affirming of
the historic church exclusions of Jews even as the Fascist government considered similar
laws. Three weeks later, on the fifth of September, Jews were banned from public
schools. The next day, Pius XI made his now famous remark: “Spiritually, we are all
Semites.” This speech, however, was never published in Italy, but appeared in print in
Belgium and France. Equally, as noted, in the same speech, the pope said “We
acknowledge everyone’s right to self-defence” This disclaimer used precisely the
language adopted to justify anti-Jewish legislation across Europe. The pope may have
been reacting to the anti-Jewish hatred, but he was explicitly not objecting to anti-Jewish
laws.

The Vatican press noted the anti-Jewish law, without condemning it. The Catholics of
Italy heard no word of protest from their church about it. On September 17 and October 1
the Civilta Cattolica charged that emancipation had enabled the Jews to rise above the
Christians in power and wealth, and called for the repeal of the emancipation through
changes in the law. This can be seen as semi-official support for the laws of September 5.
Again, on October 7, one day after the Declaration of Race spelt out the future course of
the Fascist anti-Jewish legislation, the Italian ambassador to the Vatican informed the
Foreign Minister of the Vatican’s reaction. “They pointed out some good aspects of the
deliberations” he reported, and noted further that the prohibition of marriages between
Catholics of different races “is the only point of the racist proclamation of the Grand
Council to which the Church would formulate objections.” Once again, the concept of
discriminatory laws against Jews failed to be condemned, and may even have been
praised by Vatican officials.

When indeed the anti-Jewish decrees were introduced on November 17, the pope made
no public comment on them, but wrote privately concerning them to the head of the
government and the king. The Catholic press in Italy gave the exchange a great deal of
attention. The only specific area of concern was that of the prohibition of marriages
between Catholics of different races. As expected, it was the fate of baptised Jews that
concerned the Vatican, not the fate of Jews per se. In fact, the Civilta Cattolica ran an
article only days after the introduction of the new laws in which it stated that the Catholic
battle against the Jews “is to be understood as a struggle inspired solely by the need for
the legitimate defence of Christian people against a foreign nation in the nations where
they live, and against the sworn enemy of their well-being. This suggests [the need for]
measures to render such people harmless.”

On January 15, 1939, L’Osservatore Romano printed the Epiphany homily of the bishop
of Cremona, thereby indicating Vatican approval of its contents. In this homily the
bishop stated:

“The Church has always regarded living side by side with Jews, as long as they remain
Jews, as dangerous to the faith and tranquillity of Christian people. It is for this reason
that you find and old and long tradition of ecclesiastical legislation and discipline,
intended to break and limit the action and influence of the Jews in the midst of
Christians, and the contact of Christians with them, isolating the Jews and not allowing
them the exercise of those offices and professions in which they could dominate or
influence the spirit, the education, the customs of Christians.”
He concluded that “the Church has never denied the state’s right to limit or to impede the
economic, social and moral influence of the Jews ... The Church has never said or done
anything to defend the Jews.” The homily also made clear that converted Jews should be
treated just like any other Catholic, but, coming only two months after the introduction of
Italy’s anti Jewish laws, made it clear that, while objecting to the racial definition of
those laws, Catholic history and doctrine otherwise supported their content. Less than a
month after this article was published by the Vatican, the Archbishop of Florence, one of
the most prominent cardinals in Italy, wrote in his archdiocesan bulletin that “above all,
however, the Church has in every epoch judged living together with the Jews to be
dangerous to the faith ... hence the laws promulgated by the Church for centuries aimed
at isolating the Jews.” The church had never changed this policy, he concluded.
While the Jews of Italy saw their families impoverished as they lost their jobs, and their
children expelled from their schools, less than a decade after the Italian state recognised
Catholicism as the official state religion, not a word of protest was heard from the
Vatican. Rather, loud and important Catholic voices, amplified by the Vatican press, and
opposed by none, affirmed the principle that this impoverishment and exclusion were
pleasing to the Church. Confirmation that this remained Vatican policy, even after it
became aware of the mass murder of Jews, is found in the Vatican’s approach to the
Italian government which existed for the forty five days between the overthrow of
Mussolini and the occupation by the German forces. During this time, a Vatican
representative met with the new Italian minister of the interior, and propose certain
changes to the anti-Jewish laws which would benefit converts to Catholicism. In his
report back to Cardinal Maglione, the representative, Father Venturi, stressed that he had
not “alluded in any way to the total abrogation of laws which, according to the principles
and tradition of the Catholic Church, have some dispositions that should be abrogated,
but contain others worthy of confirmation.”

In general, across Europe, Cardinals, Archbishops, Vatican papers and church councils
publicly backed and praised the impoverishment and exclusion of European Jews. Rather
than opposing or re-examining their past history, for a number of church leaders, there
was a reaffirmation of it.

 

How did the catholic churches react to the deportation of Jews?
In February 1942, the German Catholic bishops received a report detailing the conditions
of the deportees in the Lodz Ghetto, where over 20,000 Jews from Germany and Austria
had already been resettled. It read in part:

“Housing in unheated rooms. Between 32 and eighty persons to a room ... Sustenance:
about 200 grams of bread a day, together with a watery soup once or twice a day ...
Indescribable cold. No possibility to change clothes. No flushing toilets; no running
water. Huge epidemics. Death rate in the first weeks was 35 a day, and, according to one
man, 200 a day in January.”
The bishops made no response to this report for over a year. In 1943, however, at bishop
Preysing’s request, Margarete Sommer drew up a draft petition which was intended to be
sent to Hitler and other top Nazis, under the signatures of all the bishops. Presented to the
bishops at the Fulda Conference that year, the petition read in part:

“With deepest sorrow - yes, even with holy indignation - have we German bishops
learned of the deportation of “non-Aryans” in a manner which is scornful of all human
rights. It is our holy duty to defend the unalienable rights of all men guaranteed by
natural law ... The world would not understand if we failed to raise our voice loudly
against the deprivation of rights of these innocent people. We would stand guilty before
God and man because of our silence. The burden of our responsibility grows
correspondingly more pressing as ... shocking reports reach us regarding the awful,
gruesome fate of the deported ...”
The draft then made five requests:

“We urge therefore:
1. Reverence for life and protection for the health of camp prisoners - hence, humane
living conditions, sufficient nutrition and tolerable working conditions.
2. The possibility of a regular exchange of letters with relatives and friends in Germany,
also the possibility of with their pastors in Germany.
3. With great urgency we urge above all the admittance of Catholic priests into the
displaced persons camps, who would be named by the German bishops in concert with
the competent bureaucrat, so that a regularised program for pastoral care will be assured.
4. Notification of all camps (or ghettos) in which deportees are presently living, and
notification of the camps (or ghettos) which have been evacuated in the meantime; in
addition, information regarding the destination of these people along with an explanation
for the reasons for the evacuation.
5. The assurance that a commission would visit the camps and meet personally with the
displaced persons.”

These requests were aimed at making living conditions in the camps humane and open to
public scrutiny, as well as seeing to the spiritual needs of Catholic deportees. It
concluded: “We would not want to omit to say that meeting these stipulations would be
the most certain way to deflate the crescendo of rumours regarding the mass death of the
deported “non-Aryans.”

Two aspects of the draft stand out. On the positive side are its clear moral outrage and its
concern for all Jews, not just those who were baptised. More problematic are its list of
recommendations, which essentially call for nice ghettos in Poland rather than lethal
ones. There is no call to cease deportations, or to return those deported. There is also no
objection to the forced placement of people it describes as innocent into ghettos, where it
itself describes them as “camp prisoners.” The real target of the draft would seem to be
the mass killings. It is unfortunate that, had it been sent and accepted, it would have
given a de facto acceptance by the German Catholics of the deportations and of the
ghetto system.

In fact, the draft was rejected by the bishops. The bishops found themselves unable to
directly ask Hitler even that the ghettos should be run humanely. After much argument,
the bishops did decide to repeat their statement of November 1942 that “other races”
should be treated humanely, and also sent a pastoral letter to their churches admonishing
them not to violate the right to life of others, specifying hostages, prisoners of war and
“human beings of alien races and origin.” They further stated that “Killing is wrong, even
when supposedly committed for the common good.” Commenting on this, Preysing told
von Moltke, the leader of the Kreisau resistance group, that the Sommer draft had been
rendered toothless. Jesuit Alfred Dlep spoke at this conference, asking “has the Church
forgotten how to say ‘thou shalt not?’ Has the church lost sight of the commandments.”

The only clear protest was delivered by the sixty six year old Provost Lichtenberg of
Berlin. He was arrested one week after the first mass deportation, and told his
interrogators that the deportation of Jews was irreconcilable with Christian moral law. He
asked to be allowed to accompany the deportees, and died during transport on November
5, 1943.

The average Catholic in Germany at this time would have received no indication from his
or her church that the deportations were wrong. Their bishops chose not to inform them
of the fate of the deportees, or to protest conditions which they knew to be horrific. Their
silence was deliberate. There were also no Papal protests to Germany at any time
concerning the deportations.

Within Poland, emigration was the solution most commonly proposed by the Catholic
church for the “Jewish problem.” The Endeks, whose official slogan was “Poland
without Jews” were supported by the Catholic Church, and commended in the 1936
pastoral letter of Cardinal Hlond. In 1936, the Polish Catholic daily, the Maly Dziennik
declared: “we want the Jewish enemies of Christian Poland to leave our country.”
Writing in Pro Christo and Maly Dziennik in 1937, Monsignor Trzeciak’s plan was first
for the Jews to be deprived of their civil rights, and then for them to be removed from
Poland. Father Wisniewski (who would later become editor of Pro Christo) was an
“ardent” exponent of expulsion, describing Jews as a gangrenous limb on the body of
Poland, and as unjust aggressors. Jews, he wrote in 1933, must be deprived of their rights
and removed from Christian society. This, however, should be done in a Christian
manner. The Christian Democratic paper, Dziennik Bydgoski and the Maly Dziennik
agreed that the Jews would not leave voluntarily, and that they would need to have their
rights revoked to encourage them. In 1939, the Maly Dziennik would echo Luther, and
suggest that confiscating Jewish wealth would be an acceptable way to finance the
proposed forced emigration. Contrasting this proposed “planned, organised economic
action” with “physical violence,” the paper was able to make a clear distinction between
their proposal and the “methods of the Nazis.” “Jews” it wrote “must be compelled to
emigrate ... there is no other way.” In 1937, Kultura noted that Polish anti-Semitism was
a “healthy reaction against a foreign body” that required expulsion. In the same year,
bishop Pradzynski called for “an accelerating deportation of the tribe of an alien race.” In
1938, the Jesuits published a pamphlet which quoted Thomas Aquinas, who said that
“Jews should be expelled from Christian societies.” The Maly Dziennik stated that Polish
colonies for Jews were not merely a necessity, but a “moral right.” Concerning this, the
Mlodziez Katolicka wrote: “like Jesus, Poles must drive away Satan and all those who
aided him.”

From the above quotes from official Catholic papers, it can be seen that the Catholic
Church in Poland did not view its policy of boycotts as an end in themselves, but desired
a drastic decrease in the number of Jews living in Poland. Emigration and or expulsions
were their suggested ways to their desired means. That is, the Catholic church in Poland
did not oppose deportations, but instead, actively promoted the idea of them. A Catholic
paper advocated robbing the Jews before they were thrown out.

Turning to Hungary, the deportations were carried out by the Hungarian police under the
orders of the Hungarian government (led by a strong catholic). 437,000 Jews were
deported to their deaths with no protest from the catholic church. While the catholic
leadership knew death awaited the deportees, to chose neither to protest or to inform the
Jews (who did not know) about it. As Eli Wiesel notes, the information itself could have
saved thousands of lives. Speaking of the Hungarian deportations, Elie Wiesel said: “We
were taken just two weeks before D-Day, and we didn’t know Auschwitz existed. How is
that possible? Everybody knew except the victims. Nobody cared enough to tell us ... we
listened to the radio. I don’t understand it.” The cardinal did finally issue a written
protest over the deportations. It concerned only baptised Jews - the rest could go to their
deaths.
“We do not deny that a number of Jews exercised a wicked, destructive influence upon
Hungarian economic, social and moral life ... We do not doubt that the Jewish question
must be solved in a legal and just manner. And so, we do not voice any opposition to the
steps which have been taken against them until now in the economic field in the interests
of the state. Similarly, we lodge no protest against the eradication of their undesirable
influence. On the contrary, we would like to see it disappear. Nevertheless, we would be
neglecting our moral roles in the church, were we not to speak up against the damage to
justice and the harm to Hungarian citizens of our own Catholic faith who are being
harmed only because of their racial origin.” Again, only catholics were included in his
protest. for the Jews as such, he had no concern.

The deportations from France began on July 16, 1942, when 12,884 stateless Jews were
rounded up in Paris to await deportation. The cruelty with which this was done, and the
separation of the children from their parents, shocked the French population. This wave
of deportations continued until December, and in all, 42,000 Jews were sent to
Auschwitz. The French police and administrators were “conspicuously involved.” The
Catholic hierarchy considered, but voted against a public protest, as they feared that it
might lead to government retaliation against church institutions.

While no bishops in the Occupied Zone protested the deportations publicly, six in the
Unoccupied Zone did so. At a time when there were around one hundred bishops in
France, these protests were nevertheless significant. Thousands of Catholic clergy and
laity responded with acts of kindness towards the Jews. Unfortunately, the hierarchy
received no backing in this from the pope, and did not again speak out. Laval indeed used
the Papal silence when he visited the Cardinal Suhard in Paris. Noting that the pope had
stayed silent over the deportations, he advised the cardinal to do the same.
In early October, Cardinal Saliege distanced himself from his own earlier protest, and
publicly renewed his “most complete loyalty to the Marshal and the government of the
country.” Cardinals Suhard and Gerlier followed suit, and at the end of October, as
representatives of the Church in both zones, they appeared with the Vichy leaders at a
military review. Never again did Catholic Church officials speak out on behalf of the
Jews. During this time, Petain himself never visited a provincial city without receiving a
public welcoming ceremony in the local cathedral. In January 1943, Cardinal Suhard of
Paris visited the Vatican to discuss the relationship between France and the Vatican. The
French ambassador attended these talks, and reported that the Pope “warmly praised the
work of the Marshal [Petain] and took a keen interest in government actions that are a
sign of the fortunate renewal of religious life in France.” The fate of the 42,000 deportees
was apparently not raised.

When the deportations resumed in 1943, they did so without protest from the Catholic
hierarchy. Suhard stated in early 1943: “Our bishops refuse to join certain protests which
are currently going around certain Catholic circles.”

Within Slovakia, Jewish leaders appealed to the Pope on March 10 to exert his influence
to cancel the planned deportations. On March 19, the Jewish Agency for Palestine and
the World Jewish Congress also appealed for papal intervention. The Archbishop of
Westminster was also asked to request that the pope use his “influence with the Catholic
ruler of the Slovak state” to halt the deportations. On March 13, an appeal from the
Jewish community in Bratislavia was also sent to the Pope:

“Most Holy Father! The Jewry of all Slovakia, 90,000 souls, has recourse to your
Holiness for help and salvation. We are condemned to destruction ... No one can help us.
We place all our hope and confidence in Your Holiness as the safest refuge of all the
persecuted.”

A second appeal was sent a week later. The Pope chose not to respond in person, but his
Secretary of State met the Slovak ambassador, and gave him a protest concerning the
reports, and expressed the hope that “such information does not correspond to the truth.”
One month later, in April 1942, the Vatican again issued a protest over the deportations
to the Slovak legate. While these protests were prompt, they were never made public, and
were therefore ineffectual. The Vatican was capable of discerning that quiet protests
were not working, and of increasing its pressure. It chose, however, not to do so, even
after, in his letter of May, the Nuncio begged the Vatican for a public protest:

“I have decided to act because it is impossible for me to remain a mute witness to the
horrible suffering with which my Jewish fellow creatures are afflicted. I am distressed to
the depths of my heart ... I would like to raise the conscience of the whole world against
these persecutions, but, unfortunately, I have no way to make my voice heard outside this
small circle. It is you I am asking to rouse the conscience of the world; do everything to
alleviate the cruel suffering of the Jews of Slovakia.”
The pope chose not to act on this appeal, and the Vatican remained mute. The Slovak
Rabbis also appealed to Tiso to halt the deportations, noting that “in existing
circumstances, the deportations meant physical extermination.” Appeals to the churches
were also disappointing, as the Catholic and Protestant letters of protest to the
government were “concerned only with obtaining privileges for baptised Jews.” In April
1942, the Catholic episcopate issued a pastoral letter concerning the situation. It declared
that the Jews were a cursed people because of their deicide:

“Also, in our eyes has the influence of the Jews been pernicious. .. Not only
economically, but also in the cultural and moral spheres, they have harmed our people.
The church cannot be opposed, therefore, if the state with legal actions eradicates the
dangerous influence of the Jews.”

The majority of the Catholic hierarchy thus officially and publicly supported the
government decision. When in 1942, Archbishop Kametko of Slovakia was approached
by the Nitra Rebbe, asking for the church to intervene to try and halt the deportations, he
stated: “This is no mere expulsion. You will not die there of hunger and disease. They
will slaughter all of you there, young and old alike, women and children, at once. It is the
punishment that you deserve for the death of our Lord and Redeemer, Jesus Christ.” In
general, the population and priests of Slovakia watched the deportations with
indifference. President Tiso, without public contradiction from the churches, declared on
August 15, while preaching at Mass, that it was a Christian deed to expel the Jews, and to
thereby rid Slovakia of “its pests.” When questioned about the deportations, Prime
Minister Tuka replied that he was a practising Catholic, and that he had the consent of
his confessor.
Reports (later found to be false) that the Germans were deporting Jewish girls to serve in
brothels at the front line led to the pope personally instructing his minister of state to
deliver a protest. Burizo wrote to the Vatican further on this issue, noting that the girls
were deprived of all personal belongings (pens, rings, foodstuffs and so on), and beaten
and kicked if they protested. “These poor children” he wrote: “are destined for
prostitution or simply for massacre.” A meeting with the Slovak ambassador led to
exemptions being made for baptised Jewish girls.

A law giving retroactive legality to the deportations was passed in May. It excluded from
the deportations baptised Jews, and, while a number of priests in parliament voted for it,
none voted against it. While the deportations continued, with the law excluding converts,
the Vatican protests stopped.

When baptised Jews were again threatened in 1943 with deportation, the Catholic
bishops wrote to the government, stressing that the converts had made a complete break
with their Jewish past. Nearly five months after the main deportations were completed,
and in this context of baptised Jews being deported, the bishops issued a second pastoral
letter. Without mentioning Jews, it condemned persecution that was race based. It was
written in Latin, and read out from the countries’ pulpits. The German minister in
Bratislavia noted that many priests refused to read it, and indeed, due to clerical
opposition to it, it was published without the official seal. With the 20,000 Jews
remaining in Slovakia under threat, Burzio informed the Vatican of the situation. Writing
in early 1943, he also included a statement from a priest stating that the Germans were
engaged in mass murder in Poland. The Pope was also visited personally at this time by
Margit Slachta who informed him of the immanent deportation of the remainder of
Slovakia’s Jews. The next day the Vatican Secretary of State Manglione promised her
that the Holy See was doing and would do all that it could to help.

It was at this time that the British government informed the Vatican that it would be
willing to allow Jewish children access to Palestine. Coming from two different sources,
one proposal (sent via Archbishop Roncelli, and including an appeal from the Jewish
Agency for Vatican intervention in this matter with the Slovak government) specifically
mentioned children from Slovakia, the other, (delivered in person by a British official at
the Vatican) referred to Jewish children from all over Europe. Given that the pope had
already expressed concern for the fate of Jewish girls from Slovakia, and when increasing
evidence was reaching the Vatican about the German policy of mass murder, with the
Vatican’s help, the proposal had a real chance of success in a Catholic country like
Slovakia, which remained determined to expel its Jewish population. In light of Secretary
of State Maglione’s recent word that “the Holy See has done and is doing all that which
is in its power on behalf of the Jews ... and particularly, in regard to the case at hand, on
behalf of Slovak Jews,” there was every reason for optimism.

The deputy in charge of Extraordinary Affairs (foreign relations), Monsignor Domenico
Tardin, made the first Vatican response to this proposal when he wrote on the British
offer that “The Holy See has never approved the making of Palestine a Jewish home ...
And the question of the Holy Places? Palestine is by this time more sacred for Catholics
than ... for Jews.” Maglione, the second highest official in the Vatican, waited nearly two
months to respond to the offer. On 4 May, he replied to the British that the Vatican had
done all it could to aid the Jews, especially Jewish children. The Vatican however
opposed the idea of a Jewish homeland in Palestine, as it was land sacred to Catholics.
Writing to the apostolic delegate in Washington two weeks later, Maglione detailed his
thoughts. Control of Catholic holy places was his first concern, and the second was that a
Jewish predominance in Palestine would offend Catholic piety. “Palestine, under a
Jewish majority ... would displease Catholics throughout the entire world, would provoke
the justifiable protest of the Holy See.” He concluded asking that the delegate make these
objections known to the President through Roosevelt’s personal representative to the
Pope, and that he also alert the American bishops to be aware of any change in the public
opinion of the American people toward Palestine which could be harmful to Catholic
interests.

The Vatican response to a plan to rescue Jewish children’s lives was not to embrace it, or
even to ignore it, but rather, to take active steps to block it. Jewish children were a lesser
priority than Catholic holy places, and Catholic piety would be offended if there were too
many Jews in Palestine. Maglione’s earlier words to the nun were revealed as a lie.
Catholic ideas of holiness were better served if Jewish children died in Poland than if
they lived in Palestine. A strange way to serve the one who said: “permit the little
children to come unto me.”
The Vatican never gave the people of Slovakia reason to believe that a policy, carried out
by a priest in the name of Christianity, was anything but what it claimed. Summing up
Vatican policy in this area, John Morley wrote: “The failure of Vatican diplomacy in
Slovakia must be attributed as much to its own indifference to the deportation of Jews as
to any other factor. The unique conditions presented to the Vatican in the case of this
truly Catholic nation were not exploited ... Vatican diplomacy, however, was content to
limit itself to the narrow confines of strictly Catholic interests, and an opportunity for a
great moral and humanitarian gesture was lost.”

 

How did the catholic church react to violence against Jews?
Within Poland, in 1936, a pogrom in Przytyk clubbed a Jewish couple to death in front of
their five children. After being acquitted by a Polish court, the perpetrators returned to a
heroes welcome, and had their victory celebrated with a Te Deum in the local church. E.
Ringelblum reflected back on this: “When year after year the blood of Jewish students
was shed in institutions of higher learning, when anti-Semitic savages rioted in Przytyk,
Brzesc-on-the-Bug and other Polish towns, the clergy either kept silent or approved these
deeds ... One could hardly expect any considerable help from a clergy like this in the
present war, if it gave no help when it was still possible to do so.” Between 1934 and
1938 over 500 Jews were murdered and over 5,000 wounded in such attacks. This was
described, not wholly negatively, by the Maly Dziennik as “the reaction of almost all
informed Polish society which intends to shake off its dependence on Jews.” When the
city of Czestochowa experienced nearly a week of anti-Jewish riots, the Maly Dziennik
printed the accusation that the Jewish press had “lied” in its account of it. The rioters had
not robbed the Jews, it stated, they had rather thrown their goods into the streets.
In 1936 Father Paul Kuczka wrote in the Catholic Action journal, Kultura: “The ethical
stand in our war with the Jews is clear. Christian ethics allows you to defend yourself
against an aggressor, even if the aggressor should thereby loose his life.” While speaking
out against violence, Father Turbak in the Glosy Katolickie also called for a moral and
legal war against the Jews. While this could, he conceded, also turn violent, experience
showed that, when this occurred, there was “always some kind of provocation from the
Jews.” When a French paper criticised the anti-Jewish violence, the Papal Nuncio to
Poland objected. Poland, he replied, was simply fulfilling its providential role in the
“fight for Christian civilisation.” The Vatican itself made no comment on the pogroms.
During the German occupation, three Councils were held by the Polish bishops. Even
though the third of these was held less than two weeks after the destruction of the
Warsaw Ghetto, the mass murder of Jews was not raised at any of these councils.
Likewise, in Cardinal Sapieha’s correspondence with Rome, no mention is made of the
Jewish situation. The only official Catholic intervention was on behalf of their own
converts.
Writing at the time, Immanuel Ringelblum noted: “the Polish clergy has reacted with
almost indifference to the tragedy of the slaughter of the whole Jewish people.”

Looking at specific instances, in 1941, 1600 Jews were murdered by their Polish
neighbours (with German approval) in the village of Jedwabne. A few days earlier,
approximately 800 Jews had been killed in the nearby village of Radzilow. A local Jew
who survived this massacre, Menachem Finkelsztajn, wrote of the incident in 1946:

“One could feel, it was in the air, that the Polish population was getting ready for a
pogrom. Thats why we all decided that my mother should go and plead with the local
priest, Aleksander Dolegowski, whom we knew well. We wanted him, as a spiritual
leader, to influence the believers not to take part in the persecution of the Jews. But how
great was our disappointment when the priest, with great anger, replied, ‘It is well known
that every Jew, from the youngest to those sixty years old, are communists,’ and said that
he had no interest whatsoever in defending them. My mother tried to argue that his
position was false, that even if some deserved to be punished, women and small children
were surely innocent? ... But his cruel heart did not soften, and he said in the end that he
would not say anything good about the Jews, because his believers would throw mud on
him. The same answer was received from all other prominent Christian town citizens to
whom Jews appealed to intervene in this matter ... no Christian let any Jew into his house
or offered any help.”
Turning to the motives of the murderers, Finkelsztajn continued:

“It was time to settle scores with those who had crucified Jesus Christ, with those who
take Christian blood for matzoh and are a source of all evil in the world-the Jews ... The
seeds of hatred fell on well nourished soil, which had been prepared for many years by
the clergy.”

At Dzialoszyce, Poland, on 2 September 1942:

“the old, the sick, pregnant women and children, two thousand innocent Jewish souls,
were shot and brutally thrown into freshly dug graves, one on top of the other. Many of
them were still alive. For most of the children, they didn’t even waste a bullet, they were
just thrown in alive, and together with those only wounded, finished their lives under the
pressure of the human mass ... The larger grave contained a thousand bodies, and the two
smaller graves contained five hundred bodies each. We learned of the massacre from the
Polish police themselves. they told ... about it in great detail, because they themselves
had taken part in that slaughter. On the following Sunday they went to church with their
families as if nothing had happened. They suffered no guilt feelings. After all, they were
only murdering Jews, with the blessing of their priests, who inflamed them from their
pulpits on Sundays.”

These Poles were not Nazis. The survivor directly implicates the church as an instigator
of their deeds. The bitter fruits of the church’s vilification are seen here. The people
believed that the Jews were guilty, and that God himself was against them. In Kreznica a
priest named Pankowski called upon his parishioners in his Sunday Mass sermons to kill
Jews, while in Niechcice, another priest, with a Ph.D. in theology, preached on his
appreciation for the Nazis for their extermination of the Jews. When rescuer Genia
Parska spoke of her activity to a prominent priest, a Jesuit, he replied: “You should not
have done it, it was wrong to save Jews ... to help was wrong.” Another priest refused
absolution to a nun who confessed that she had hidden Jewish children. A Catholic
peasant who was hiding Jews told them that his priest had preached that Catholics bear a
sacred duty to deliver Jews to the authorities. He then commented: “the devil finds his
way even into the church.” In December 1944, as the Red army advanced, the local priest
in Pabianice told his congregation: “We can expect very soon to be under the rule of the
Jewish communists who were always the enemies of the church. As our dear cardinal
said at the time, Jewish influence is immoral ... This is why, my dear Polish brothers, if
you should meet a Jew, take revenge as long as there is time.”

The rescuer Stach Kaminski placed a group of Jewish children in a convent. When the
Germans requisitioned the building, he and his group tried to find out what had happened
to their Jewish charges. After three months efforts, one of the nuns agreed to speak to
him. She told him that all of the children of the old convent had been moved to a new
convent. Kaminski recalled:

“She added that the new convent had been inspected by a bishop. As the bishop walked
among the children, he said: ‘Here among the faces of our children, I also see the faces of
strangers. When I come back, they should not be here.’ I interrupted her, shocked: ‘But
sister, this is outright murder. This is contrary to Christianity!’”

A proposal to settle a few hundred children from the Warsaw Ghetto in convents came to
nothing: “mainly because the Polish clergy was not very interested in the question of
saving Jewish children.” Elsewhere, when a Jew who had escaped from the death camp
at Majdanek asked for help from a Pole, the Pole replied: “if God takes no pity on your
people, how can you expect pity from a human being?” The wording of such sentiments
makes it clear that they did not come from Nazi propaganda, but from their churches.
Consider also the account of David Rodman, who was hidden by the Polish Catholic,
Lech Sarna: “Essentially a highly moral and good person, he changed after each visit to
Church. At such times, he would grumble, swear and scream at his wife. ‘I am sure to
loose in both worlds. They will kill me for keeping Jews and then I will loose heaven for
helping Jews.’ He would go on and on, arguing with himself, with his wife, feeling
totally miserable ... He usually calmed down after a while, until the next sermon.”
Similarly, when Leopold Socha, a Lvov Gentile who had been involved in the rescue of
Jews, was accidentally run over by a truck shortly after the war, Halina Wind, one of
those who had been rescued by Socha, reported: “As he lay on the pavement with his
blood dripping into the sewers, the Poles crossed themselves and said it was God's
punishment for hiding Jews.” Had the Catholic leadership, or the pope issued a public
call to aid the Jews, such attitudes might have been changed, and lives saved. As survivor
A. Kimel noted, such an appeal might have stopped Catholic Polish peasants from
handing Jews over to the Germans for 2lbs. of sugar. Equally, Schmalzowniks could have
been threatened with excommunication. The Jews of Poland indeed petitioned the pope
to make such a call, but he refused.

A few days after the German arrival, the head of the Catholic church in Lithuania wrote:

“The thoughts of Mein Kampf concerning the poisonous Bolshevik influence exercised
by the Jews on the nations of the world are worthy of note ... They are true to life and
present an insight into reality ... this testifies to Hitler not only being an enemy of the
Jews, but to the correctness of his thoughts as well.”

During these initial killings, the Jews hoped that the churches would issue a call for their
followers to stop. In Lvov, Rabbi Lewin, along with two other representatives of the
Jewish community, travelled to the Metropolitan of the Catholic Church in the Ukraine,
Andrej Septyckyj, and asked him to condemn the killings. This was not done, and on
their way home, Rabbi Levin was killed by Ukrainians. Likewise, when a Jewish
delegation in Lithuania was informed by the German Commandant that his orders for
ghettoization were in response to a request from the Lithuanians, they asked Bishop
Brizgys to tell the German Military Commandant that this was not his wish he refused,
saying: “I cannot do it ... this may endanger the position of the Catholic church in
Lithuania.” In 1941, German Einsatzgruppen Operational Situation Report No. 54 stated:

“The attitude of the Church regarding the Jewish question is, in general, clear. In
addition, Bishop Brizgys has forbidden all clergymen to help Jews in any form
whatsoever. He rejected several Jewish delegations who approached him personally and
asked for his intervention with the German authorities.”

When Rabbi Snieg inquired about sheltering Jewish children in monasteries, the bishop
replied that these institutions were for practical purposes autonomous, and their abbot
and priors “did not excel in mercy and love.” These Jewish children were rounded up in
1944 and killed. In Shavli, the second largest city of Lithuania, after Jewish leaders
appealed for his help, the local priest Lapis did intervene, both to prevent further killings,
and the expulsion of the Jews. When he travelled to Kaunas to try and further aid the
Jews, he was ordered by his church superiors to stop these activities.

Rabbi Ephraim Oshry, one of the few Lithuanian rabbis to survive the Holocaust, wrote:

“Another shocking surprise for us was the position taken by our "good" Christian
neighbours. There was literally not one Gentile among the Christians of Slobodka who
openly defended a Jew at a time when Slobodka's ten thousand Jews, with whom they
had lived all their lives, were threatened with the most horrible pogrom imaginable.”
As German governance became more orderly, tens of thousands of Lithuanians,
Estonians, Latvians and Ukrainians were recruited to participate in the killings and in the
running of the death camps. The churches in the Baltic states at no time protested the
murder in their midst, or told their people not to join such paramilitary units. Indeed, the
Catholic Church in Lithuania provided chaplains for these units, as did the Lutheran
church in Latvia and Estonia. This can only be construed as complicity.
In the Ukraine, priests of the Autocephalous Church preached sermons urging their
hearers to kill Jews. On June 2, 1942, in the city of Kowel, a Ukranian police unit entered
the church, received a blessing from the chief priest, and then proceeded to kill thousands
of Jews on the city outskirts. Other priests joined with militia units hunting down Jews
who had escaped into the forests, and preached sermons encouraging their congregations
to hand Jews over to the Germans. A survivor recounted a priest’s sermon in Kowel. In
May 1942, he preached: “Dear merciful people, I beg you and warn you, do not give a
piece of bread to a Jew ... whoever knows any hiding place of a Jew, look for him and
inform the Germans. No trace of a Jew is to remain. We should erase them from the face
of the earth.”

 

What then of the good guys? The rescuers?
The terrible truth is that in their own day, the majority of these people were largely
disowned by their churches. It was as individuals that they took action, not as members of
an organisation. For example, concerning clergymen who aided Jews in Poland: “In
almost all cases, their activity was the result of personal initiatives taken by the lower
clergy.” They received no encouragement or support, and their behaviour often went
directly against the advice of their churches. In a real sense, they were the heretics of
their day. Writing in 1963, the German Catholic Carl Amery stated: “If then the Catholic
heroes, upon whom so much worth is placed today were prophets, it must be said that
they were prophets taking a stand against their own religious milieu fully as much as
against the domination of the heretics.” That these same churches now desire to use these
“heretics” to define their own behaviour at this time is simple hypocrisy. Chandler states
the case well:

“Christians who resisted the terrible manifestations of Nationalist Socialist power
stepped out of the heart of the Church and into a bleak and little charted region of moral
individualism. They were ruthlessly persecuted, and many were executed. Now we like to
think that we have reclaimed one of them, Dietrich Bonhoeffer, for the mainstream of
Christian identity. In fact, our view of Bonhoeffer has become iconographic, not
historical. He has become our definition of the Christian experience of National
Socialism, and that is not credible. More than that, he has even become our excuse, our
reason not to think. In Bonhoeffer we find Christianity vindicated. Impossible as it may
seem, we have even become complacent. Devout Christians who supported Hitler are
forgotten, or become crooks.”

N. Tec comments that “pious rescuers had to rely on personal rather than official
religious values ... moreover, the rescuers who were devout seemed to be devout in a
special way. They were independent in their interpretation of religious values, and this
independence prevented them from blindly following the teachings of the Church.”

Concerning the rescuers, the following statistics have been found; Less than 1% of
people who were affiliated with Christianity were rescuers. Church affiliation was the
same for rescuers and non rescuers, as was attendance of church schools. More rescuers
described themselves as either “very” or “not at all” religious than non rescuers. A
surprisingly low percentage of rescuers cite religion as even one of their motivations
(12-27%). This is true even with those who defined themselves as “somewhat” to “very”
religious. That is, even most very religious rescuers did not find in their religion their
motivation to rescue, there was no relationship between Christianity and goodness. A
Polish rescuer commented: “When I saw all the dying and dead Jews around me, then I
thought that Christianity was worthless, then I became convinced that I must save whom
ever I could.”
When Gushee goes on to analyse those for whom faith was important, he notes: “We do
so in order to see what we can salvage from the wreckage, not to engage in any kind of
misguided and historically unwarranted celebration of Christian moral goodness during
WWII.”

Within Poland, roughly 50,000 Poles in some way gave assistance to Jews. Between 900
and 2,000 Poles were executed for such help. While the majority of Poles were Catholic,
the majority of rescuers were not motivated by their religion. Indeed, for many, religion
was more likely to be an inhibiting factor. “It is, I believe, altogether remarkable that so
many thousands, arguably tens of thousands, of Poles risked their lives to save people
whom their church’s leaders for years had marked as alien and hostile to Polish
interests.” The only rescue organisation, Zegota, had no clergy in its leadership, and
received no money from the Catholic church. A number of lower clergy did aid it,
however, and 33 died as a result. In all, 60 Polish clergy were killed for giving aid to
Jews (out of a total number of approximately 20,000 clergy) and 10 nuns were also killed
for helping Jews (out of a total of 17,000). All Polish rescuers faced incredible danger,
and are worthy of the highest admiration. The role of the Catholic church in this effort
does not appear to have been large, and was carried out by members of the lower clergy
operating at a local level. There is no evidence at all that the church leaders, who were
well aware of the tragedy, gave any encouragement to such rescue work. Speaking of the
clerical rescuers, Tec notes that “because the church took no official stand towards
Jewish persecution, those priests and nuns were acting in terms of their personal values.”
The point is valid. Given that very few clergy were involved, and that those who were not
acting because of instructions from their organisation, how much credit can the church
take for their actions?

By a factor of thousands, more people who described themselves as “devout Christians”
personally murdered Jews than personally rescued them.
Estrea Asseo tried to find a refuge for her two children, an eleven year old girl and a four
year old boy, from three different church institutions in Avignon, but was turned away by
the nuns at each of them. Noting the vast number of Catholics who both directed and
performed the killings, M. Phayer writes “The small number of Catholic rescuers are
obscured by the mountain of evil cast over them by these perpetrators.”

“The far more appropriate reason for Christian silence about the Righteous Gentiles has
been the need for Christians to confess and confront their guilt for the Holocaust rather
than to celebrate their handful of heroes. Eva Flieschner, one of the few Christians who
has undertaken Righteous Gentile research, has written: “It has always seemed fitting to
me that this remembering [of the rescuers] be done by Jews rather than Christians. We
Christians have so much to account for vis-à-vis Judaism that is not good, not heroic ... it
is not for us, I have always felt, to speak of the light.”

That Jews asked their Gentile neighbours for help is indisputable. Across the whole
occupied territory Jews were turning to the Christian population for assistance-in vain.

Take care, Colin

 

Hi Dan, if you are still reading, I hope my long posts have not put you off. Thinking about your posts, you have obviously done a lot of reading and put effort into this.
For myself, I do not believe that either catholic or protestant churches did what they should have. I believe that they were aware of the anti-semitism in their own histories, and affirming that history, seeing it as a guide to God's will, led both into sin. Looking specificaly at catholics (although the same is true for protestants), they continued to vilify, supported the policy of boycotts and found it incredably hard to object to either deportation or murder. It is not a story of virtuous Christians banding together to save the poor Jews from the wicked Nazis. I wish with all my heart that it had been, but we too were sinners.

I look forward to hopefully fruitful discussion with you.

God bless, colin