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John Samuel Tieman: On Catholic Anti-Semitism
Perhaps the greatest challenge for anyone religious is to consider The Answer, but hold off on The Rule.
Not long ago, I wrote an essay about growing up Catholic. It was generally sentimental. Among other things, I wrote about the comfort I took from the Church during an emotionally turbulent childhood. Comfort. Stability. When I think of the Church of my childhood, this stability is what I often remember.
A Jewish buddy wrote me about my essay. When he thinks about his family’s encounters with The Church, it is not comfort that comes to mind. His father fled the anti-Semitic Catholics of his city in Poland. For my friend, mention of The Church brings to mind a very different set of memories.
So consider this an addendum to my sentimentality.
As I said in the previous essay, I belong to an annoying Church. That’s how I experience The Church at its worst. Annoying. I’ve never been molested by a priest. I’ve never had my shtetl burned to the ground. I don’t get pregnant. I don’t cringe when I hear the word “crusade”. I have experienced anti-Catholicism – it was painful, but still well within the class of annoyance.
We Catholics are at our most small c catholic when we are in the minority. We are at our worst when we make The Rule.
There’s a three-fold trap to bad leadership. The first is when the leader can’t imagine the consequences of the new rule. The second is when the leader personally experiences no consequences from his or her new rule. The third is when that leader receives little or no accurate feedback concerning the new rule. There would be no pedophile scandal if Catholic bishops had children.
It would be easy at this point to simply say, “Well, we’re all human. We’re all flawed. It’s not the fault of the religion. It’s all the fault of the flawed humans. A flaw. A mistake.”
When I take my students to the Holocaust Museum here in St. Louis, I make it clear that anti-Semitism is very Christian. A lot of young folks want to treat this as yesterday’s flaw. I’m just old enough to remember when on Good Friday we prayed for the conversion of “the faithless Jews”. It’s a painful memory, this memory of a prayer. But remember we must. It was not a personal flaw. It was liturgy. It was Church policy. Lest we forget, here’s what we prayed when I was a kid in the ’50s and early ’60s –
Let us pray also for the faithless Jews: that almighty God may remove the veil from their hearts; so that they too may acknowledge Jesus Christ our Lord. Let us pray. Let us kneel. [Pause for silent prayer.] Arise. Almighty and eternal God, who dost not exclude from thy mercy even Jewish faithlessness: hear our prayers, which we offer for the blindness of that people; that acknowledging the light of thy Truth, which is Christ, they may be delivered from their darkness. Through the same our Lord Jesus Christ, who liveth and reigneth with thee in the unity of the Holy Spirit, God, for ever and ever. Amen.
That’s what we said. That’s exactly what we said. It was no mistake. The only flaw, the only mistake, is to forget that it was no mistake.
We Catholics also like to dismiss another painful memory. “Christ Killers”. Although apologists are correct in saying that Jewish deicide was not part of formal dogma per se, many Catholics, including members of the clergy, and not just a few bishops, preached that the Jewish people were collectively guilty for Jesus’ death. Vatican II repudiated that. That was a step in the right direction. But it didn’t change centuries of history. That damage was done.
If you sit where Adolf Hitler sat when he sang in his church choir, straight across from him was the statue of a much revered abbot. You can see that statue to this day. It is adorned with what was, long before Hitler’s youth, a common version of the cross of Christ. The swastika.
When someone feels they have The Answer, there is an overwhelming urge to take The Answer and make The Rule. How could The Rule be so wrong if The Answer is so right?
I love my Church. But we do need a new rule. My new rule is very small c catholic. It reads —
Just because you think you have The Answer doesn’t mean you get to make The Rule.
—
copyright 2015 John Samuel Tieman
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Bravo to John Samuel Tieman! This follow up essay is as candid clearsighted as the preceding one was heart-warming. Anti-semitism in the Catholic Church has a long and complex history; one that many Catholics, even today, prefer to minimize or ignore. The term “faithless Jews” in the pre-1959 Mass, which was removed by Pope John XXXIII at the request of Jules Isaac, has also been translated as “perfidious”, which connotes more than the absence of faith. It suggests active treachery, and was directly linked to the notion that Jews were – and in some strange but significant sense, still are – a deicidal people, who are collectively responsible for Jesus’ crucifixion; “Christ killers.” So these two items are really part of a single, distressing picture. Vatican II tried to change all this, but its work is far from finished. Indeed, by the end of Benedict XVI’s papacy, there had been so many reversals and missteps in Jewish/Catholic dialogue that many Jews felt that what the Church offered us was no longer Vatican II, but Vatican one and a half! Fortunately, Francis seems to be setting a wiser course for the future.
Full disclosure – my father is a native of Kielce, Poland, a devoutly Catholic country that he and his family left in childhood. His mother’s family – roughly one third of his entire extended family – perished in Treblinka, and those that survived were slaughtered in a pogrom that took place after the Nazis left, and the Soviets were in power – on July 4th, 1946, to be precise. Their killers were not Germans, but Poles, who evidently blamed the Jews returning from the concentration camp for the Soviet occupation. And make no mistake, anti-Semitism is not just a relic of the past. It is gaining ground again. In fact, it is almost as prevalent and “respectable” in Europe nowadays as it was in Europe, 1930.
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You write, “There would be no pedophile scandal if Catholic bishops had children.”
I’m not so sure: “About 44 percent of convicted pedophiles either are or have been married, … For all the worries about “stranger danger,” 70 percent of reported abuses involve an offender who knows the child, including relatives.”
http://theweek.com/articles/479986/pedophilia-guide-disorder
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