The Pope at Auschwitz

Robert Imbelli at the dotCommonweal blog links to this article: Attempting to slay God was Auschwitz's greatest evil, pope says by John Allen, Jr. National Catholic Reporter 05/28/06. Allen writes:

In a sense, Benedict's Auschwitz speech marks a turning point in post-Auschwitz Christian theology, which in the last 60 years has tended to take Christian guilt for complicity in the Holocaust as its point of departure.

Jurgen Moltmann, for example, famously argued for a theology of "divine vulnerability," in part because he felt earlier triumphal understandings of God did not adequately predispose Christians to solidarity with victims of the Nazis; Johann Baptist Metz urged a new spirit of discipleship, based on the observation that too many Christians failed to follow the example of Christ during the war.

Without denying that the Holocaust was often implemented by professed Christians, Benedict argued that at a deeper level, Christianity and Judaism both represented systems of thought that the Nazis instinctively understood must be destroyed, because without God and God's moral law there is no bulwark against totalitarianism, or against evil.

Benedict thus offered a new touchstone for Christian reflection on Auschwitz - not guilt, but a profound sense of the starkness of the choice facing humanity: God or the abyss.

In fact, Pope Ratzinger I (Benedict XVI) is retreating to an older Catholic alibi for the Christian role in the Holocaust.

Hitler himself was a Catholic, though not a practicing one. As were a number of other leading Nazi officials. The Church never excommunicated Hitler. If you impersonate a priest, or have an abortion, you can be excommunicated. Or if you get divorced and remarry. But causing the most deadly war in Eurpean history and slaughtering six million Jews: not grounds for excommunication. At least not as applied to Hitler.

In the elections up through early 1933, the NSDAP (Nazi Party) did much better in Protestant areas than in Catholic ones. In fact, the only solid generalizations we can make about the Nazi voters is that they ran strongest in rural areas and among Protestants.

That was in part because the Catholic Church had its own political party, the Center Party. The Social Democrats (SPD) and the Center Party were considered the two pillars of the Weimar Republic. But in the early 1930s, the Catholic Center Party found itself vulnerable because, unlike the SPD or the Communists, they didn't have their own armed combat groups to counter those of the NSDAP. German political partiess at that time required more than polls and focus groups to maintain themselves. So the Center Party was subject to physical suppression.

But also, the Vatican pressured the Party to be more accomodating to the conservative and reactionary parties. In the crucial parliamentary vote in March 1933 for the Emergency Law that put the final nail in the coffin of the Weimar Republic and granted Chancellor Hitler dictatorial powers, the Center delegates voted with the NSDAP and the other parties on the right. The Communists had already been outlawed, so the SPD stood essentially alone in opposing the Emergency Law.

Once the Nazi dicatatorship was in place, though, the German Catholic Church hierarchy went out of their way to show their support of the new regime. During the 1990s, the bishops of Germany issued a formal statement acknowledging that the Church failed its Christian duty in the way it kowtowed to the regime.

In a longer term, both the Catholic Church and the Lutheran (Protestant) Church shared a great deal of blame in promoting hatred of Jews and creating an environment in which the kind of anti-Semitic propaganda promoted by the NSDAP and the Hitler government could find a fertile ground. The Catholic Church has tried to duck a recognition of that by emphasizing that the Nazi race theories were basic on pseudo-scientific, Social Darwinist theories. But that's just an alibi. The "scientific" racism and anti-Semitism of the Nazis was little more than the Christian anti-Semitism that had developed over the centuries repackaged.

Conservative apologists for the Church have also stressed the occult beliefs of the Nazis to distance the NSDAP ideology from Catholic Christianity. And while it's true that occult doctrines like the "hollow earth" belief were popular among many Party members, those doctrines were not central to their ideology.

Don't misunderstand me. Nazism was ultimately an anti-Christian phenomenon, and the Nazi government took repressive measures against both Protestant and Catholic Churches. But both the background climate and specific acts of collaboration are very much part of the real history of the Christian Churches.

It sounds to me like Ratzinger, and Allen interpreting his words, have tried to "Christianize" the Holocaust. It's an invitation to muddled thinking and alibi-making. Allen defends that approach this way, with that bizarre mirror-image concept that conservatives have made such a part of their personal canon, "political correctness", which he uses to mean something that he (Allen) believes is *in*correct:

In a Saturday press conference in Krakow, Vatican spokesperson Joaquin Navarro-Valls confirmed that the Auschwitz speech was written "from beginning to end entirely by the pope."

Once again, Benedict XVI proved himself a figure stubbornly indifferent to the canons of political correctness. From the point of view of public relations, what one might have expected from a prominent German [like Ratzinger] visiting Auschwitz would be an expression of national remorse, and an appeal against contemporary anti-Semitism. A "PC" Catholic would have steered clear of any reference to subjects that have been flashpoints for Catholic/Jewish controversy.

In fact, Benedict did no such thing.

He opened by acknowledging that Auschwitz is "particularly difficult and troubling for a Christian, for a pope from Germany."

"I could not fail to come here," he said.

Benedict went on, however, to call himself "a son of that people over which a ring of criminals rose to power," and said that Germans were "used and abused" by the Nazis. He praised Germans who resisted, calling them "witnesses to the truth and goodness which even among our people were not eclipsed."

There was no sense of collective national guilt in his remarks.

That's another standard conservative Catholic alibi tactic, to stress the Catholic resisters to the Hitler regime while trying to minimize the Catholic collaborators and the role of Christianity in producing German anti-Semitism. Allen does note that the Pope avoided any reference to present-day anti-Semitism and disappointed the expectations of those who hoped he might use the occasion to criticize anti-Semitic Catholic broadcasts by Radio Maryja in Poland.

Allen's comment about "collective national guilt" of the Germans, which he presents as the expected "politically correct" stance (by which Allen means *in*correct; it's so confusing), is especially strange. The standard, widely accepted formula, repeated again and again and again by German state and government spokespeople in a wide variety of settings, is that there is no such thing as collective guilt. But there is a collective responsibility.

Allen also uses the beloved posture of the Republican whiners in presenting Ratzinger's "non-PC" position as boldly speaking truth to power, when Ratzinger is the most powerful official in the Catholic Church, and despite the fact that he was retreating to a previous, very flawed position that the Church has (officially) gotten beyond.

And there are ways to address the responsibility of historical Christianity, and the more specific roles of specific Catholic authoritires in collaborating with the German government under the Nazis, while staying true to the humane core of the Christian faith that opposes anti-Semitism and mass murder.

The Protesant Karl Barth was the first major Christian theologian to treat the Holocaust as a central issue for Christian theology. Not in the sense of Christianizing the event, but in the sense of understanding how Christian teachings and attitudes went wrong in such a way over the centuries as to promote that kind of anti-Semitism and that kind of immoral action.

The Second Vatican Council addressed many of those issues, and its reformulation of elements of traditional Catholic theology that had been used against Jews was one of its most productive pieces of work. For instance, the doctrine the theologians call "supercession", the idea that Christians had taken the place of the Jews as the Chosen People of God and that Christianity had replaced Judaism as the legitimate religion, was explicitly rejected. Many Catholic theologians have built on those themes in the last four decades. The Pope had plenty of better material to draw upon.

The position taken by Pope Ratzinger at Auschwitz is a disappointing one. As conservative as John Paul II was, even his worst critics gave him a lot of credit for improving Jewish-Catholic relations. It remains to be seen whether his achievements will be built upon and improved by his successor.

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