From Enemy To Brother: The Revolution in Catholic Teaching on the Jews, John Connelly, author. Harvard University Press, 2012, 376 pp.
By David Strom
CHULA VISTA, California— From Enemy to Brother is a powerful and moving account of the origins and passage of the 1965 Vatican II document on Jews that changed centuries of official Catholic teaching. It is a religious proclamation that pushed historians to explore new avenues in intellectual and religious history. In a mere fifteen sentences of the Nostra Aetate, which came out of the Second Vatican Council in 1965, the Catholic religious world’s outlook towards Jews and Judaism changed dramatically.
The Nostra Aetate statement explicitly condemned the centuries-old understandings of the Jews as accursed murderers of Jesus Christ. With this declaration, Jews were now the older brothers and no longer guilty of deicide. The Nostra Aetate concerned relations with non-Catholic and non-Christian religions as well. However, the bulk of the document concerned the Church’s relations with the Jewish people. A few of the key elements were:
- The Church’s spiritual line of descendants from “the stock of Abraham.”
- A fresh look at what St. Paul wrote in three chapters of Romans about God’s abiding love for the Jews. This helped shift the “church’s understanding of its relation to the Jews.”
- The Church’s condemnation of anti-Semitism.
- Jews, as a people, cannot be held responsible for the death of Jesus; nor are they living under a curse because of their ancient ancestors’ role in his crucifixion.
- Hope of a day when “all peoples will address the Lord in a single voice and ‘serve him shoulder to shoulder.’”
What caused the dramatic change? How and why did this revolutionary change take place? Was it the memory of the recent Holocaust? Did the Vatican discover new documents that forced the dramatic theological shift in the thinking of the officials of the Church?
It was not the creation of new documents or the Holocaust alone that brought the changes to the way the Roman Catholic Church (RCC) viewed Jews today and historically. The Church’s view of other religions changed as well. The major shift in Catholic thinking came about because of Pope Paul VI (who reigned from 1963 to 1978) and the work of theologically-oriented clergy, many of whom had converted to Catholicism from Judaism and Protestantism. (I call them the “outsiders”.)
The “pseudo-science” of eugenics was popular in the United States in the late nineteenth century and up until World War II. Many German Catholics supported the Nazi agenda. The Jesuit Muckermann was an advocate and professor of eugenics, preaching the superiority of the “Nordic race.”
“Let no one defend themselves on the grounds of baptism making a Jew a Christian, baptism makes a person a child of God, but never changes his basic heredity.” In other words, according to Muckermann, a Jew could not become a full-fledged Christian in his or her lifetime. Karl Adam, a widely read and popular Catholic theologian, “portrayed Nazi-orchestrated boycotts of Jewish business as the fulfillment of Christian charity, acts of ‘Christian-German self-assertion’ aimed at stemming the ‘Jewish deluge.’
The most seductive element of the racist syndrome was the word Volk. It evoked blood kinship dating back to time immemorial. Jews lived in Germany for hundreds of years could not be a part of the Volk. Their blood was “tainted.”
The Vatican did not propagate such teachings but it did little to officially disavow them. Nor did it silence the anti-Semitic speakers. For instance, the Church did not silence Father Coughlin in the USA for his anti-Semitic radio show for many years.
Prior to Vatican II, the Church had not spoken forcefully about Jews or their religion. Indeed, an encyclical prepared by Pope Pius XI as late as 1938 (and fortunately never released) included lines such as this: “Jewry… has frivolously sacrificed its exalted historical calling once and for all… lost the enveloping communal life in race by turning against its own precious blood and calling it in vengeance against itself and its children.” (Pius XI reigned from 1922 to 1939.)
In the author’s opinion, the Vatican did not speak openly or even forcefully enough against the slaughter of Jews and many other innocents during the Holocaust. Connelly describes how many Catholics didn’t help Jews during the 1930s and 1940s, but some did. Those who helped Jews most—like women’s groups—were farthest removed from theological disputes. The absence or the lack of clarity by the Vatican and European bishops, Catholic and Protestant alike, seemed to the author to be the Catholic and Protestant churches’ greatest failure.
What then happened between the 1930s and the Vatican II Proclamation of 1965 that declared the Jews to be the “older brothers” of Christians who ought not be converted to Christianity? Connelly argues that the roots of the proclamation came from a small group of Catholics in 1930s Vienna who were concerned with the treatment of the Jews in Nazi Germany.
Vienna proved to be a fertile ground for men like Karl Thieme and Johannes Oesterreicher who formulated a specifically Catholic argument against anti-Semitism. Thieme, Oesterreicher, and nearly all of the other anti-racist religious activists in their circle were converts to Catholicism from Judaism and Protestantism. They disdained narrow nationalisms and freely moved about from place to place without a feeling of rootedness. Without such outsiders, Catholicism could not have found a new language to speak about the Jews. Without them, he argues, “…the Catholic Church would never have ‘thought its way’ out of the challenges of racist anti-Judaism”.
It took years of verbal and written sparring between Karl Thieme and Johannes Oesterreicher, the two key architects of the Vatican II Proclamation, to come to the position that Jews were not guilty of deicide, that they need not be converted to be one with God, that God still loved the Jews, and at the end of times all who believe in one God will go shoulder to shoulder and serve Him with “one voice.” They were the major un-doers and the outsiders who changed the many centuries’ notions about Jews, their relation to the Church and Jesus of Nazareth.
In the USA, clergy of many faiths had been meeting and discussing before and after WWII with each other about religious issues. This did not happen often in Catholic Europe because the church hierarchy did not encourage dialog with other Christian religionists and Jews. With the occupation of Europe after the Holocaust the US armed forces encouraged such meeting between religious leaders. Now for the first time in years, different religions sat down and listened to each other. They talked about the response to the nightmare of the Holocaust by the churches. Why had they not responded more harshly and sometimes, not responded at all?
Out of this dialog came a greater understanding of the Jewish religion and people. This helped Thieme, Oesterreicher, and the many others who participated in the dialogs across Europe and USA to dramatically shift their thinking. It wasn’t political liberalism that moved the Catholic clergy to accept the Jews as brothers, nor was it a discovery of ancient written documents that impelled this dramatic shift in thinking, but it was a fresh new way at looking at some of the writings of St. Paul.
“The church’s understanding of its relation to the Jews” was based mainly on “…three chapters of Paul’s letter to Romans, which contain the Apostle’s most mature reflections on the Jewish people” and this molded the minds of the participants in the Vatican Council II. St. Paul’s teachings in the Book of Romans in the New Testament was neglected for a long time, but now it was used to frame new thinking on Jews and their role in the world of religion.
Even though the Nostra Aetate makes perfect sense to us today, it still hasn’t penetrated into all the Catholic clergy’s thinking of today. The past history has not gone, as it dies slowly. In Nostra Aetate, “The Church was content to think of reconciliation of humankind by God in an indistinct future, with no compulsion for Jews to turn to Christ…” However the recently retired Pope Benedict XVI (who reigned from 2005 to 2013) asked a few years ago for Catholics to pray for the Jews, “…that God our Lord should illuminate their hearts, so that they will recognize Jesus Christ, the Savior of all men.”
This call for prayers among Catholics for conversion of Jews contradicts the official Catholic theological position on the Church’s relationship with Jews. These words uttered by the Pope created mainly negative reaction among Jews. If only Pope Benedict XVI heeded the words of world famous American Rabbi Abraham Joshua Heschel who said he was ready “ to go to Auschwitz any time, if faced with the alternative of conversion or death” this world embarrassment for the church and Pope might not have occurred.
John Connelly describes the evolution of thought from a Vatican that was silent when it should have spoken to giving a new theological and doctrinal language for Catholics to speak about and to the Jews on the eve of, and in the shadow of, the Holocaust. Most of the architects of the Catholic statement concerning the Jews in 1965 were themselves, either by descent or practice or public definition, Jews who had converted to Christianity. The subject matter of his book is by no means small: these few paragraphs changed the official Catholic teaching on the Jews that had prevailed for 1,700 years. The book, From Enemy To Brother: The Revolution in Catholic Teaching on the Jews, 1933-1965, is a powerful and moving account of how words have power.
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Strom is professor emeritus of education at San Diego State University. He may be contacted at david.strom@sdjewishworld.com