Current Issue: Spring 2007 (Vol I)
Wisdom Through the Awful Grace of God
It was a sunny day in Oxford when I first realized that I am responsible for the Holocaust. What clued me in was the following excerpt from a book by Andrew Linzey:
I remember, years ago, being confronted by a professor of Judaism with the details of the holocaust. Squirming inside, I feebly protested that Christianity couldn’t really be all to blame, only to face the full thunder of his question (which has remained with me since): “Where else, then, did it come from?” Since for at least ten centuries before the holocaust, Christianity held unique sway over European culture, where else indeed?1
That professor of Judaism was Dan Cohn Sherbok, author of The Crucified Jew: Twenty Centuries of Christian Anti-Semitism. Like Linzey, I feebly protested. As part of that process, I researched three Catholic figures who I expected would have spoken out against Hitler and the Nuremberg Laws of 1936 that stripped Jews of German citizenship: Hans Ansgar Reinhold, John La Farge, SJ, and Pope Pius XI. Though they endeavored to be men of good conscience, all suffered from prioritizing what they perceived to be a greater danger: communism.
Hans Ansgar Reinhold was twenty-eight years old when he was arrested by the Gestapo in Hamburg; he would shortly thereafter flee Germany as an exile. Earlier in his school days, he had been thrust into unlikely solidarity with his Jewish classmates during the Lutheran catechisms: “For either out of my Catholicism or my attitude I was always identified with the Jewish minority at the school.”2 Conceivably these experiences would have conditioned a fervent reaction against the Nazi race laws. Instead, we see only traces of concern for Jews embedded within a larger concern for the liturgy and communism. Reinhold recalls the anti-Semitism he experienced among his fellow Catholics in New York and how he nearly joined a league combating it.3 Persistent rumors that the organization’s leader, Emmanuel Chapmen, was a communist unfortunately precluded Reinhold from accepting the invitation. His articles on communism, among them “Decent Godless People” and “Christian Liberty and Economic Systems,” offer a cynical but forgiving portrait of communists as men who have mistaken a capitalist idol for the true God. “In the depths of the souls of these rebellious men is a hidden image of the true God, the just Creator, the Father of Christ and our Father.”4 Standing between communists and the true God are Christians: “[Communists] found injustice all about them, perpetrated by a world which claimed to be Christian. They did not find believers in God with a consuming zeal for justice.”5 Reinhold holds Christians accountable for representing the true God poorly to communists; where does he hold Christians accountable for anti-Semitism? Though he calls the Jews our “waiting brethren,” he does not call out for either Christian action or accountability.6
John La Farge, SJ, served as editor for America magazine in New York City, writing and working for racial equality decades before the American civil rights movement hit full stride. He traveled to Europe in 1938 to complete three tasks: gather information on the Spanish Civil War for America, attend a conference on the Eucharist in Budapest, and experience Nazi Germany firsthand. What his biography leaves out is the work that he completed in Paris for Pope Pius XI. After a group audience at the Castelgandalfo, La Farge was called back for a private meeting with His Holiness. The pope, who admired the universal applicability of La Farge’s Interracial Justice, charged him with the writing of an encyclical that would condemn Hitler’s race policy. La Farge worked on the encyclical with two other Jesuits in Paris and handed it in to the head of the Jesuits in Rome, where it lay dying along with Pius XI. It was never published. Though the encyclical condemns racism, it can also be criticized as exhibiting a poor theology of Judaism, particularly in its treatment of the “Wandering Jew” myth.7
After he returned to the United States, his writing shared thematic similarities with Reinhold’s. Instead of directly attacking racism in Germany, La Farge preferred to attack nationalism itself. “The personal ambitions of Hitler or Stalin, the nationalistic aims of Russia or Germany are but incidents in a vast campaign to destroy through revolution the very foundation of human liberty, belief in God and man’s immortal “Although Pope Pius XI’s soul.”8 Though his focus is not on Nazi eventual attitude towards race laws, the essay does contain an the Nazi race laws was implicit attack on nationalism as racist. commendable, some ill This image of nationalism is important; advised choices along the La Farge considered such a movement way validated the Reich.” threatening to human freedom, the very same ideal compromised by racism. By presenting nationalism as an urgent threat to human liberty, La Farge’s attack shares the motivation that an attack on racism would.
Although Pope Pius XI’s eventual attitude towards the Nazi race laws was commendable, some ill advised choices along the way validated the German Reich. In 1933, the Holy See signed a concordat with Germany that essentially guaranteed church freedom in Germany and granted Germany certain concessions: if Germany allowed Catholics to attend Catholic schools and services, then the Holy See would pray for the success of the Reich.9 Seen within the context of his papacy, it is clear that Pius intended, however naively, to protect the lives of Catholics as Catholics; unfortunately the cost for this protection was the endorsement of Nazi Germany. Hitler’s negligence of the concordat first inspired Pius’ anger. He responded to Germany’s dishonor with the blistering Mit brennender Sorge [With Burning Anxiety], written in German for the benefit of the German laity. The encyclical itself offered many condemnations of the Reich, mostly concerning its sensational nationalism, but also denouncing the injustice of its race policy: “Whoever exalts race, or the people, or the State, or a particular form of State…above their standard value and divinizes them to an idolatrous level, distorts and perverts an order of the world planned and created by God.” In 1937 Pius directly labeled Germany as racist and unjust. He continued his tenure as a compassionate leader when he commissioned the aforementioned encyclical from John La Farge. No longer interested only in condemning Germany within an encyclical written for Germans, he asked for an encyclical explicitly against racism that would be promulgated to the world. Although at last his mind was firmly set on opposing the race crimes that plagued Europe’s Jews, his body at age eighty-one did not sustain him. The completed encyclical allegedly lay on his desk as he died in February 1939, a week before he was to publicly decry Germany and its racial law.
How can thoughtful Catholics deal with this legacy, as discomforting in its appearance as it is ignorant? Though the writers evidently worked for the advancement of human rights, there is a lingering sentiment that they simply did not do enough, or did enough only after causing irreparable damage. If we value tradition then we cannot and should not ignore the less attractive of our inheritances; we should instead embrace the lessons learned, seek reconciliation in appropriate places, and seek to understand and forgive our Catholic predecessors. To honor the victims of the Holocaust and to appropriately seek reconciliation with their descendants, we have to start by effectively addressing racial violence and mass killing wherever it occurs. Finally, we have to try to learn why our Catholic predecessors acted as they did and, by doing so, learn to forgive them.
What can be seen from the above accounts is that these intellectual Catholics did not run from the manifold injustices of the ’30s and ’40s, but rather sought to address what problems they could. Each found anti-Semitism to be problematic, but when pressed to prioritize, chose communism (and its sister nationalism) as a more dangerous foe. If we think for a moment about their understanding of communism, their true fear is exposed: they all saw communist societies as places devoid of God and of human freedom. Perhaps they were right to believe that a more frightening place could not exist. When we begin to understand their image of communism, whether or not we consider it accurate, we can begin to forgive them for prioritizing its evil over the evil of the Nazi race policy. Likewise, we begin to understand that we may be unfair in submitting them to criticism that benefits from years of hindsight, a fact that we hope our descendants will remember when they consider the deeds of our age.
1. Gays and the Future of Anglicanism, Eds. Andrew Linzey and Richard Kirker (Hampshire: O Books, 2005), xxi.
2. H.A. Reinhold, HAR: The Autobiography of Father Reinhold (New York: Herder and Herder, Inc, 1968), 6-7.
3. Ibid., 133.
4. H.A. Reinhold, “Timely Tracts: The God of the Godless,” Orate Fratres, Vol 14, No 11 (1941): 313.
5. Ibid.
6. H.A. Reinhold, “Spiritually Semites,” Orate Fratres, Vol 23, No 4 (1949): 172.
7. Humani Generis Unitas 132, 136.
8. John La Farge, “War May Be in Europe while America is at Peace,” America, November 4, 1939: 188.
9. Konkordat zwischen dem Heiligen Stuhl und dem Deutschen Reich, November 13, 2006, http://www.salvator.net/
salmat/pw/pw1/macht/konktext.htm, 30.
Charles Joseph III is a senior in the college of Arts and Sciences, majoring in Philosophy and Theology. His research interests include social ethics, especially the Holocaust and HIV/AIDS, as well as post-modern philosophy and film. After completing a Master’s Degree in Theology at BC, he hopes to live compassionately as a volunteer and eventually as an academic.