Christian Theological Response at the Time of the Holocaust

• In Event: Re/Considering Religious Traditions at the Time of the Holocaust Jewish and Christian Theological Attitudes

Abstract

As difficult as it may be to believe, evidence suggests that there was no theological response at the time of the Holocaust on the part of Catholicism, either in the official church or among individual catholic thinkers. The view about Judaism current at that time still drew upon age-old ideas of Jews living a fate of suffering in the world in anticipation of their eventual conversion. Even precise knowledge of the extent of the killing directly after the war failed to change the assumption associated with this view that the churches must focus on conversion. In the Catholic communion first serious rethinking occurred among tiny groups whose conscience had been shaken by the genocide, and who groped for new understanding, often through conversation with Jews and Protestants. In other words, the breakthroughs in thought occurred through early ecumenism.

I argue that around 1949/50 a few of them overturned traditional thinking basing themselves on Paul's last letter. Later in the decade then came the challenge of eroding and transforming the almost universal consensus that held this shift was unfounded. These figures, many of them converts, had unusual influence in the Church as a whole because one of them became an advisor at the Second Vatican Council where new teaching was adopted. Many of the bishops felt remorse over "Auschwitz" but had little sense of how to respond theologically. Thus ushering in a new age of Catholic thought toward the Jews two decades after World War II was therefore the task of a small, unrepresentative group of Christian thinkers, several of whom had been born as Jews, and provided the Catholic communion a new language to think about the church's relation to the Jews, because it touched them personally.

Author

• John Connelly, UC Berkeley