Opinion
Converts Who Changed the Church
By John Connelly
Forward,
July 30, 2012
[emphasis in blue added by
Radio Islam]
Fifty years ago this fall, Catholic bishops gathered in Rome for
a council that would bring the church “up to date” by making it
speak more directly to the modern world. After three years of
deliberation, the bishops voted on and accepted statements that
permitted the faithful to attend mass in their own languages,
encouraged lay reading of scripture and entreated Catholics to
think of other religions as sources of truth and grace. The
council referred to the church as “people of God” and suggested
a more democratic ordering of relations between bishops and the
pope. It also passed a statement on non-Christian religions,
known by its Latin title, Nostra Aetate (“In our times”). Part
four of this declaration, a statement on the Jews, proved most
controversial, several times almost failing because of the
opposition of conservative bishops.
Nostra Aetate confirmed that Christ, his mother and the apostles
were Jews, and that the church had its origin in the Old
Testament. It denied that the Jews may be held collectively
responsible for Jesus Christ’s death, and decried all forms of
hatred, including anti-Semitism. Citing the Letter of St. Paul
to the Romans, Nostra Aetate called the Jews “most beloved” by
God. These words seem commonsensical today, but they staged a
revolution in Catholic teaching.
Despite opposition from within their ranks, the bishops knew
that they could not be silent on the Jews. When the document
stalled in May 1965, one of them explained why they must push
on: “The historical context: 6 million Jewish dead. If the
council, taking place 20 years after these facts, remains silent
about them, then it would inevitably evoke the reaction
expressed by Hochhuth in ‘The Deputy.’” This bishop was
referring to German playwright Rolf Hochhuth’s depiction of a
silent and uncaring Pius XII in the face of the Holocaust. That
was no longer the church these bishops wished to live in.
The problem was, they had possessed no language of their own
with which to break the silence. More than most academic
disciplines, theology is a complex thicket with each branch
guarded by a prickly coterie of experts. Those wanting to grasp
the complexities of the church’s relations to Jews had to study
eschatology, soteriology, patristics, Old and New Testament, and
church history through all its periods.
The bishops thus found
themselves relying on tiny groups of experts who had cared
enough to amass the unusual intellectual qualifications for this
task.
As I discovered while researching my recently published book,
“From Enemy to Brother: The Revolution in Catholic Teaching on
the Jews, 1933–1965,” these experts did not begin their work in
the 1960s. From outposts in Austria and Switzerland, several had
tried to formulate Catholic arguments against anti-Semitism
under the shadow of Nazism three decades earlier. They were as
unrepresentative of Catholicism as one can imagine. Not only
were they, Central Europeans, brave enough to stand up to Hitler
when it counted, but they mostly had not been born Catholic.
The
Catholics who helped bring the church to recognition of the
continuing sanctity of the Jewish people were converts, many of
them from Jewish families.
Most important was Johannes Oesterreicher, born in 1904 into the
home of the Jewish veterinarian Nathan and his wife, Ida, in
Stadt-Liebau, a German-language community in northern Moravia.
As a boy, he took part in Zionist scouting and acted as elected
representative of the Jews in his high school, but then, for
reasons that remain inexplicable (he later said he ”fell in love
with Christ”), Oesterreicher took an interest in Christian
writings (Cardinal Newman, Kierkegaard and the Gospels
themselves), and under the influence of a priest later martyred
by the Nazis (Max Josef Metzger) he became a Catholic and then a
priest. In the early 1930s he took over the initiative of the
Diocese of Vienna for converting Jews, hoping to bring family
and friends into the church. In this his success was limited.
Where he had an impact was in gathering other Catholic thinkers
to oppose Nazi racism. To his shock, Oesterreicher found this
racism entering the work of leading Catholic thinkers, who
taught that Jews were racially damaged and therefore could not
receive the grace of baptism. His friends in this endeavor
included fellow converts like philosopher Dietrich von
Hildebrand and the theologian Karl Thieme and political
philosopher Waldemar Gurian. In 1937, Gurian, Oesterreicher and
Thieme penned a Catholic statement on the Jews, arguing, against
the racists, that Jews carried a special holiness. Though it
constituted orthodox teaching, not a single bishop (let alone
the Vatican) signed on.
Oesterreicher escaped Austria when the Nazis entered, in 1938,
and continued work from Paris, broadcasting German-language
sermons into the Reich, informing Catholics that Hitler was an
“unclean spirit” and the “antipode in human form,” and
describing Nazi crimes committed against Jews and Poles. In the
spring of 1940 he barely eluded an advance team of Gestapo
agents, and via Marseille and Lisbon he made his way to New York
City and ultimately Seton Hall University, where he became the
leading expert on relations with Jews in America’s Catholic
Church.
Oesterreicher gradually abandoned his “missionary” approach to
the Jews and increasingly called his work ecumenical. He and
like-minded Christians tried to figure out how to ground their
belief in continued vocation of Jewish people in Christian
scripture. If the battle before the war was against the
superficial assumptions of Nazi racism,
after the war it took
aim at the deeply rooted beliefs of Christian anti-Judaism. In
the former period, the converts argued that, yes, Jews can be
baptized. In the second period, even if they continued to
believe that Jews must be baptized to escape the curse of
rejecting Christ, these thinkers began pondering the nature of
the supposed curse.
If history was a series of trials sent to punish the Jews for
failing to accept Christ, then what meaning did Auschwitz have?
Were the Nazis instruments of God’s will, meant to make the Jews
finally turn to Christ? To answer yes to this question was
obscene, but it was the only answer Catholic theology provided
as of 1945. In the years that followed, the converts had to
stage a revolution in a church that claimed to be unchanging.
They did so by shifting church teaching to Paul’s letter to the
Romans, chapters 9–11, where the Apostle, without speaking of
baptism or conversion, proclaims that the Jews remain “beloved
of God” and that “all Israel will be saved.”
Like Oesterreicher, the thinkers who did the intellectual work
that prepared this revolution were overwhelmingly converts. Soon
after the war, Thieme joined with concentration camp survivor
Gertrud Luckner to publish the Freiburger Rundbrief in southwest
Germany, where they made crucial theological breakthroughs on
the path to conciliation with the Jews. In Paris, the Rev. Paul
Démann, a converted Hungarian Jew, began publishing the review
Cahiers Sioniens and, with the help of fellow converts Geza
Vermes and Renée Bloch, refuted the anti-Judaism in Catholic
school catechisms.
In 1961, Oesterreicher was summoned for work in the Vatican II
committee tasked with the “Jewish question,” which became the
most difficult issue to face the bishops. At one critical moment
in October 1964, priests Gregory Baum and Bruno Hussar joined
Oesterreicher in assembling what became the final text of the
council’s decree on the Jews, voted on by the bishops a year
later. Like Oesterreicher, Baum and Hussar were converts of
Jewish background.
They were continuing a trend going back to the First Vatican
Council in 1870, when the brothers Lémann — Jews who had become
Catholics and priests — presented a draft declaration on
relations between the church and Jews, stating that Jews “are
always very dear to God” because of their fathers and because
Christ has issued from them “according to the flesh.” Without
converts to Catholicism, it seems, the Catholic Church would
never have “thought its way” out of the challenges of racist
anti-Judaism.
The high percentage of Jewish converts like Oesterreicher among
Catholics who were opposed to anti-Semitism makes sense: In the
1930s they were targets of Nazi racism who could not avoid the
racism that had entered the church. In their opposition, they
were simply holding their church to its own universalism. But by
turning to long-neglected passages in St. Paul’s letter to the
Romans, they also opened the mind of the church to a new
appreciation of the Jewish people.
What were the impulses behind their engagement after the war? In
a generous review of my book in The New Republic,
Peter Gordon
suggests that the converts’ willingness to advocate for the
other was driven by a concern for the self. They had retained a
sense of themselves as Jews even in the Catholic Church. Gordon
reminds us of Sigmund Freud’s skepticism about the possibility
of love of other. True love, Freud believed, “was always
entangled with narcissism: it is not the other whom I love but
myself, or at least it is only that quality in the other which
resembles me or resembles the person I once was.” Yet
in
Oesterreicher we see an enduring solidarity with the community
that once was his, most immediately his family. In 1946 he
pondered the fate of his father, who had died of pneumonia in
Theresienstadt (his mother was later murdered at Auschwitz).
Contrary to the ancient Christian idea that there is no
salvation outside the church, Oesterreicher did not despair for
his father. Nathan Oesterreicher had been a just man, to whom
the “beatitude of the peacemakers applied.” If Oesterreicher,
the son, had been a true narcissist, he might have rested
content in the belief that he was saved through baptism. Yet
intense love and longing for his Jewish father began opening
Oesterreicher’s mind to the possibility that
Jews could be saved
as Jews.
The lasting gift of the converts who helped rewrite Catholic
teaching on the Jews was to extend their familial sense of
solidarity to us, to Jews and Christians.
In 1964, Oesterreicher
personally crafted that part of Nostra Aetate according to which
the church no longer speaks of mission to the Jews, but looks
forward to the day when all “peoples will address the Lord in a
single voice and ‘serve him shoulder to shoulder.’” (The last
phrase is taken from Zephaniah 3:9.) With this new teaching, the
church gave up the attempt to turn the other into the self, and
after this point Catholics involved in Christian-Jewish dialogue
tend not to be converts. They live out of the
new understanding
that Jews and Christians are brothers.
The converts crossed a
border to the other while in some deep sense remaining
themselves, but by recognizing the legitimacy, indeed the
blessing, of our differences, they helped bring down a wall
separating Jews and Christians.
John Connelly is professor of history at the University of
California, Berkeley, and the author of “From Enemy to Brother:
the Revolution in Catholic Teaching on the Jews, 1933-1965,”
(Harvard University Press,2012).
