Dear Friends,
This month’s Newsletter is rather a mixed bag of reviews, but I trust it
will indicate the range of our endeavours, and will therefore prove to be of interest.
Contents:

1) Book reviews:

a) Hill, Lord Acton
b) Fell, Christianity in Iceland
c) Thorne, Congregational Missions and Imperialism
d) Putney, Muscular Christianity
e) Raum, Dietrich Bonhoeffer

2) American Lutherans and the Jews
1a) Roland Hill, Lord Acton. New Haven and London: Yale University Press
1999 xxiv + 548 pp. £25 (ISBN 0-300-07956-7)
What a pleasure it is to review once in a while a biography which is
honest historically and elegantly written. Hill, the first biographer to
use the entire Acton family correspondence housed since 1973 with Acton’s
library and card index in Cambridge University Library, gives us at last a
comprehensive look into Acton’s life and times. Amongst previous attempts,
only Gertrude Himmelfarb, Lord Acton: A Study in Conscience and Politics,
published as long ago as 1952, comes anywhere near. Hill’s biography can
be recommended, therefore, also without hesitation to historians who write
about the church of their own times: as refreshment on how to practice
their controversial craft, and as food for thought about the relationship
of the Church with the modern nation-state, and the Church with modern
science and scholarship. Both Actonian issues came nowhere near to any
reasonable solution in our troubled European century which followed his
death (in 1902). Only the briefest comments here. Hill reminds us that it
is Acton, the teacher who continues to influence historians. Acton’s
Cambridge colleague, the great English legal historian, Maitland, put ‘le
pourquoi du pourquoi’, Acton’s favourite saying, in this context with
remarkable insight when he wrote on Acton’s death – generously given
Acton’s lack of publications – in the introduction Acton was supposed to
write for a 1901 collection of Essays on the Writing of History: ‘When all
men get their due, a large share of credit will be given to those whose
patient and self-denying labours as tutors and lecturers have left them
little time for the acquisition of such fame as may be won by great books’.
But Maitland added in his official obituary the following year, that Acton
would continue to influence the young because he was as a teacher, ‘at
home, no doubt, upon the frontstairs, but supreme upon the backstairs, and
(as he once said) getting his meals in the kitchen: acquainted with the use
of cupboards and with the skeletons that lie therein; especially familiar
with the laundry where the dirty linen is washed; an analyst of all the
various soaps that have been employed for that purpose in all ages and all
climes’. One of the joys of this book is Hill’s skill in bringing back to
life this backstairs in the cosmopolitan world of high society and high
politics in which Acton moved, part of the Europe we lost in 1914. To
learn to ‘suspect power more than vice’, was an Actonianism coined
backstairs. There are wonderful passages and chapters in this book, not
just the frontstairs like ‘Papal Infallibility and Beyond’, and the
touching portraits of Döllinger, Newman and Gladstone (each aware of their
sharing lost causes), but the private sorrows and boredoms of Acton and his
wife (in particular the death of their seventeen year-old daughter
Elisabeth from scarlet fever in Tegernsee in 1881; the gravestone
inscription devised a little later with Döllinger’s help, ‘Divinitus data,
brevi revocata, ad coelestam patriam, aviam praecedens, evolavit’ giving a
Latin form to a loss which Acton recorded in an undated note, ‘what can
religion be worth, if there is not more in God to comfort us than there can
be in the loss of any, even the dearest and most cherished of his
creatures, to distress us’)
Humility united Döllinger and Acton, teacher and pupil, in the Christian
faith. It is what made both look behind the facade of institutional
religion. The three sets of illustrations are needless to say well-chosen
and very revealing. Döllinger rather typically placed Lenbach’s fine
portrait of the mature Acton, given to him by the painter as a present in
1883, above his desk in his study at a time when his pupil had criticized
his own integrity as a historian – how, Acton had asked in a letter written
in the middle of 1882, could Döllinger treat Luther as a German hero if the
evidence showed that Luther could preach freedom but in fact establish the
doctrine of passive obedience to princes he allowed to be absolute, or had
conceded the royal privilege of bigamy to Henry VIII and Philip of Hesse,
or had wanted ‘the peasants to be treated even worse than Marat wanted to
treat the rich’?

Nicholas Hope, University of Glasgow
b) Michael Fell, And some fell into good soil. A History of Christianity
in Iceland (American University Studies, Series VII, vol. 201).
New York/Berne: Peter Lang 1997 405pp
It tells us something about the state of the writing of church history
when a scholarly account appears for even such a remote and little-known
country as Iceland., written by Michael Fell, an American professor. His
survey of Christianity in Iceland from the earliest days is an
authoritative and well researched account, based on his familiarity with
the sources and the Icelandic language. A full bibliography and twenty
pages of illustrations add to the book’s value. Particularly interesting
are the parallels and contrasts to the history of the Church in other
Scandinavian lands, especially since the Reformation. The last third of
the book is devoted to the twentieth century.
Following the new constitution of 1874, decreeing religious freedom, the
autocratic hold of orthodox Lutheranism waned. Liberal theology was
imported from Germany. One reaction was a remarkable if short-lived
spiritualist revival; but orthodoxy was revitalized through the work of
the YMCA and the charismatic movement. The ensuing tensions within the
National Church are still apparent. Nevertheless Lutheranism remains the
established church, and has followed the pattern of other Scandinavian
churches in democratizing its governing structures, opening the way for
women priests and modernizing its liturgies. But the growth of religious
indifference is worrisome. Professor Fell clearly hopes that his tribute
to the great Icelandic traditions and leadership of the past will help to
ensure their continuity in the future.
JSC
c) Susan Thorne, Congregational Missions and the making of an imperial
culture in 19th century England. (Stanford University Press, 1999), 247 pp.
Over the past generation, the writing of missionary history has undergone
revolutionary changes. With the overthrow or disappearance of the European
colonial empires, the kind of triumphalist histories depicting missionary
advances, written from the top downwards, can no longer be found. Instead,
new depictions of these encounters, composed by the recipients, and
relating the story from the bottom upwards, are now in vogue. But this is
a long-term project. In the meantime, Susan Thorne seeks a new angle by
investigating the impact the campaigns for foreign missions had on their
home base, and the possible effect they had in stimulating social reform in
England. She bases her enquiry on the Congregational Church, which by the
mid-19th century was the largest non-conformist body, having been
rejuvenated through the evangelical revival started by the Wesleys.
Her account begins with paradoxes. Throughout their history,
Congregationalists were suspicious of the established Church’s pretensions
and its links to the ruling classes. But in pursuit of new missionary
fields overseas, or in such activities as the anti-slavery campaign, they
needed the British state. Equally, the Congregationalists’ belief in the
equality of all believers led them to attack the privileged elite, which
they regarded as morally corrupt and effete. But without aristocratic
leadership, Britain’s imperial expansion would not have happened. After the
Napoleonic war, Britain controlled nearly a quarter of the world’s
population, from Greenland’s icy mountains to India’s coral strands. Most
of these newly acquired populations were unsaved heathens. The task was
enormous. The resources were few. But the missionary belief was that even
such vast numbers could be rescued by the Christian church’s civilizing
mission. Saving China’s millions, for example, was always seen as an
urgent obligation.
The Congregational Church was highly successful in mobilizing its
constituency, drawing mainly from self-made men of the commercial classes,
whose enterprise and vitality gave a remarkable cohesion to their religious
interests, especially foreign missions. This involvement, in turn, defined
Congregationalists, and other non-conformists, setting them apart from the
governing establishment above them and the labouring poor below. Their
hallmark was moralizing earnestness; their greatest success the abolition
of slavery. By mid-nineteenth century, organized Nonconformity had proved
its respectability and was a power to be taken seriously.
In the second half of the century, Susan Thorne contends, the missionary
movement was profoundly altered, principally due to its increasing
feminization. Women were no longer prepared to be merely auxiliaries to
their menfolk, but established their own missionary societies and sent out
their own women missionaries. By 1900 they had almost reached parity with
the men. The women’s contributions totaled 70% of the income of the major
missionary organizations. The mission cause was probably the largest mass
movement of women in 19th century Britain, and provided an institutional
space in which to rival men.
Yet this was also the period when the habit of racial characterization
became widely popular amongst the Anglo-Saxon intelligentsia, offering an
undoubted ideological boost to imperial autocracy. Secular critics of the
missions were therefore scornful of the sentimentality and superficiality
of their belief in egalitarian salvation, which could be dismissed as
absurd wishful thinking, contradicting the hard facts of social Darwinism.
The women’s missionary impact was however both persistent and painstaking.
They recognized that preaching alone – a man’s task – was not enough.
Rather the whole social fabric needed to be redeemed by Christian love,
starting in the areas of health, education and family maintenance., in
which feminine skills excelled. But of course such an extension of the
missionary’s efforts meant that the task became limitless. The gap between
expectations and achievements grew ever wider.
But as the empire expanded, the arrival of more English officials,
settlers, business men and adventurers marginalized the missionaries, who
now found their aspirations for rural self-supporting village units were
increasingly challenged by the capitalist exploitation of the native races
as favoured by the European imperialists. David Livingstone’s belief that
Christianity and commerce could assist each other seemed simplistic, and
foreign missionary strategists were driven on the defensive. At the same
time, home missions began to rebound. Congregationalists began to join with
others in recognizing their more local opportunities and obligations. In
the slums of Britain’s cities, Congregational missions sought to bring the
advantages of moral uplift and Christian teaching, and the techniques
formerly concentrated overseas were now seen to also be applicable to
domestic problems. By 1915 “the fight against social heathenism at home and
against the degradations of non-Christian lands abroad are simply one war”.
Susan Thorne’s description of how the working classes responded to these
missionary enterprises is interesting. She points out how much the missions
were dependent for their funding on the pennies of the Sunday schools,
which drew in a substantial proportion of working class children. But in
the chapels, the ideal of Christian democracy was less apparent. Leading
positions in the Congregational Church were almost always held by those
with wealth and influence, who took care not to be too closely associated
with those considered to be their social inferiors. To be sure some
chapels embraced a more radical political stance. They produced future
political leaders of stature, like Ernest Bevin. But it was soon clear to
the workers’ leaders that agitation with the ballot box rather than moral
uplift in chapel was the route to go.
Already by the beginning of the 20th century, the image of the Empire no
longer reflected the missionaries’ humanitarian impulses. The benefactor
who saved was replaced by the nationalist who conquered. But the disasters
of the First World War paradoxically outweighed the territorial additions
to the British Empire. European imperial domination no longer had moral
validity. Its civilizing mission to lesser breeds without the law no longer
had credibility. The resulting decline in church attendance as well as in
foreign missions in the 1920s was obvious. Congregationalism, like most
nonconformist churches, lost heavily in numbers and hence in financial
support. So too did its main political expression, the Liberal Party. In
addition, theological liberalism led many to abandon the old protestant and
biblical certainties which had been the missionaries’ standby. These rifts
were to produce enormous and ambiguous tensions. Nonetheless Dr.Thorne
claims that the subsequent British espousal of notions of trusteeship and
development for the former Empire can be seen as the legacy of missionary
imperialism.
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d) Clifford Putney, Muscular Christianity. Manhood and sports in
Protestant America, 1880-1920. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press,
2001. 300 pp. ISBN 0-674-00634-8
In the last two decades of the nineteenth century, there arose in the
white middle-class Protestant communities in the United States a cult of
muscular Christianity, which sought to link religious and physical health
amongst young men. A whole range of institutions, most prominently the
YMCA, were developed to propagate this cause. Putney’s well-researched but
somewhat ambivalent account places this movement in its secular context, as
part of the optimistic mood of the so-called Progressive Era, which looked
for American cultural and imperialist expansion to be undertaken by
resolute, robust men. At the same time, Putney sees a narrower motive,
namely a reaction against the feminization of the church. This was to be
the Protestant churches’ equivalent of all-male societies, such as the
Elks, the Moose and other such fraternities, seeking to counteract the
danger of effeminacy in religion.
But, more positively, muscular Christianity was held to be a vital
prerequisite for the success of the missionary movement overseas. Hence
the deliberate cultivation of well-known athletes as a means of arousing
evangelistic fervour – a development which continued well into the
twentieth century.
Though first propagated in England by such Christian liberals as Charles
Kingsley and Thomas Hughes, the author of “Tom Brown’s School Days”, the
movement soon caught on in the United States, particularly among the
Protestants of the northern states. The belief that manly athletes,
suitably trained in Protestant rhetoric, could take up the task of
overcoming society’s ills, was part of the reformist movement following the
victory of the Civil War, and of the resurgence of Protestant evangelical
fervour, sponsored by such men as Moody and Sankey. Their aim was worldly
power, divinely blessed – a task felt for men only, and their prototype was
to be Theodore Roosevelt, later President.
In England, muscular Christianity became institutionalized in the famous,
but elitist, public schools, such as Rugby, or was known through the
publicity accorded to the “Cambridge Seven”, a group of athletes who in
1885 went out to convert China’s “heathen masses” through the China Inland
Mission. But it was in America that this combination of vibrant Christian
faith and athletic ability found its greatest success. Muscular piety
became highly popular as an antidote to earlier puritan asceticism, and,
once freed from its English class-ridden associations, could be embraced by
forward-looking American Protestants with enthusiasm. Character building
for the individual matched national building for a rapidly expanding
society. Moreover, the growth of American cities and the evident dangers of
ill-health, physical and spiritual, arising from such conditions, called
for effective practical steps to combat moral decline. George Williams’
successful development of gymnasia in the YMCA’s city-based facilities
exactly met the perceived needs. Moreover, such Protestant endeavours could
be seen as an effective remedy against the degenerative effect of having
too many non-Anglo-Saxon immigrants, and the consequent danger to the
health of the American race. The spread of the summer camping movement
across all of North America, largely undertaken under church auspices, as
it still remains, can be seen as one of muscular Christianity’s most
lasting successes.
Criticism of this movement was not absent. From the beginning, many
churches, particularly those derived from the stricter forms of Calvinism,
were suspicious of promoting the glories of the flesh. Others challenged
the anti-intellectualism, the athletic snobbery, the implicit anti-feminism
and the sometime explicit racism of the cause. In the long run, however,
as Putney makes clear, the weakest point in muscular Christianity was the
link between religion and physical activity. As the opportunities for the
latter grew rapidly, the motivation became increasingly secularized, and
the connection between physical and spiritual health evaporated. The
YMCA’s noted red triangle of “body, mind, spirit” no longer met its
founder’s ideal of bringing men to Glory.
The same thing happened with the link between religion and political
engagement. Whereas the activities of muscular Christians made them
natural allies of the Social Gospel cause at the turn of the century, such
engagement increasingly came to be regarded as valid for its own,
humanitarian sake, and the explicit Christian motivation died away.
Indeed, Putney rightly sees that the inherently Pelagian character of
muscular Christianity, which attempted to attain salvation through the
building of body and character, was inherently flawed. Its progressive
rejection of outside divine intervention watered down the essential
Protestant insights of earlier centuries, and substituted a humanistic, if
strenuous, heartiness for Christ’s sacrificial salvation. When Jesus was
upheld, it was always as a manly, heroic figure, a Nietzschean superman,
combatting the evils of the day, but in effect de-mythologized. Putney
could have, perhaps, pointed out the similarities of this stance with that
of those Nazi Protestants who in the 1930s also upheld a heroic “aryan”
Jesus, and enthusiastically endorsed Hitler’s crusade to restore German
nationalism by manly example.
Another problematic instance of muscular Christianity’s impact was the
involvment with overseas missions. By the end of the nineteenth century, a
remarkable confidence in America’s destiny led to the Student Volunteer
Movement’s setting itself the goal of: “The Evangelization of the World in
this Generation”. It appealed to the heroic side of Christian commitment,
and was often sacrificial. It called for men ready to venture forth into
inhospitable lands with torrid climes, deprived them of the civilizing
resources of their upbringing, banished them for long,often life-long,
periods of exile, was ill-paid and increasingly was disdained not only by
those they sought to convert, but even by the general public at home. Yet
the remarkable fact is that thousands of well-educated young men, who could
certainly have looked forward to good careers at home, dedicated themselves
to this task, inspired by far-sighted and ambitious missionary strategists.
Possibly the most famous of these was John R. Mott, a leading American
YMCA worker, chairman of the Student Volunteer Movement, and inspirer of
the world-wide Protestant ecumenical movement, whose efforts were rewarded
in 1946 with the Nobel Peace Prize. But the questionable identification of
this Christian missionary endeavour with American cultural imperialism,
including the championship of manly muscular sports, led in the long run to
the movement’s eclipse.
The apotheosis of this development came in the first world war. Muscular
Christians were almost all fervently patriotic. But the Christian soldiers
marched onwards to their deaths in the Flanders trenches. The subsequent
disillusionment of the survivors entirely destroyed the attractiveness of
this, and indeed most other forms of Christianity. The result was a
widespread crisis of credibility from which the churches have never
recovered. No amount of later repentance for their former ultramilitant
muscular Christianity could restore the hold of the Protestant
establishment in the hearts of many Americans. The sceptical undermining
of the churches’ moral and political influence proved irresistible.
Secular institutions sought to take over the propagation of personal
manliness as a civic duty, with very mixed results. Main-stream Protestant
clergy, to their credit, came back to the realization that divinity resided
not in men’s muscles, but with God. It was left to some of the more
peripheral fundamentalist churches to keep the cause of muscular
Christianity alive in America even today. So we can be grateful to
Clifford Putney for charting the rise and fall of this flamboyant, but
overall aberrant, version of American Christian discipleship.
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e) Elizabeth Raum, Dietrich Bonhoeffer. Called by God.
New York: Continuum Press 2002, 184pp.
Elizabeth Raum’s purpose is clear. She has produced a concise and
readable account of the life of Dietrich Bonhoeffer, the noted German
Protestant theologian murdered by the Nazis in 1945. This is no
substitute for the comprehensive biography written by Bonhoeffer’s pupil
and close friend, Eberhard Bethge, which first appeared in 1965. Bethge’s
study, however, now newly revised and retranslated by Victoria J.Barnett,
extends to 1048 pages. It will, according to Ms Raum, “never be surpassed,
but will be read by only the most devoted”. So a much shorter precis is
needed for a new generation, no longer conversant with the events of sixty
to seventy years ago.
Dietrch Bonhoeffer’s appeal, especially to North Americans, is two-fold.
His theological writings, particularly the now well-known, if unfinished,
Letters and Papers from Prison, offered a new reformist and attractive
perspective for the personal discipleship of modern Christians. Second, his
involvement in the Resistance movement against Hitler, and his subsequent
martyrdom in this cause, lent authority and authenticity to his views.
Over the past few decades, interest in Bonhoeffer and his ideas has
continued to grow. Hence the desire for a handy summary of his
achievements, such as Elizabeth Raum delivers.
Dietrich Bonhoeffer belonged to the upper middle professional class, whose
members already before 1914 had contributed enormously to Germany’s
intellectual stature and technological achievements. But their confidence
in their nation’s and the world’s future had been shattered by the
catastrophe of the first world war. So too the religious and moral
securities of earlier days were now overlaid with much darker and more
dangerous forces. Bonhoeffer’s career was in some ways an attempt to find
appropriate answers to this new ominous situation, especially after the
triumph of the Nazi dictatorship in 1933. He was among the first to shed
the illusion, shared by most of his contemporaries in the church, that
Nazism and Christianity were fully compatible in the service of the
nation. Partly because members of his family were affected, his
opposition to the Nazi persecution of the Jews was easily and early
aroused. His sense of moral outrage at the Nazis’ radical crimes, and at
the complicity of so many church members, led him to adopt an isolated
stance. He and a few followers set up a semi-secret seminary where pastors
true to the gospel could be trained. But soon the Gestapo closed it down.
The outbreak of war intensified Bonhoeffer’s dilemma. In 1939 he had been
offered the chance of exile in America, but after a month returned home.
“Christians in Germany”, he wrote, ” will face the terrible alternative of
either willing the defeat of their nation in order that Christian
civilization may survive, or willing the victory of their nation and
thereby destroying our civilization. . . . . I will have no right to
participate in the reconstruction of Christian life in Germany after the
war if I do not share the trials of this time with my people.”
From the outbreak of war, Bonhoeffer lived a double life. Outwardly he
supported the nation’s war effort, but secretly was increasingly drawn into
the conspiracy, led by army officers and civil servants, to overthrow the
regime, and if necessary to assassinate Hitler. In addition he was
marginally involved in a complicated but successful plan to smuggle
fourteen Jews to safety in Switzerland. When the Gestapo caught up with
this scheme in April 1943, Bonhoeffer was arrested and spent the rest of
his life in prison.
Here he was able to bribe a friendly guard to take letters out to his
family and friends. His theological reflections, which were to have such
an impact later, were carefully saved by Bethge and buried for safe-keeping
in the family garden. But after the failure of the attempt on Hitler’s life
in July 1944, all those associated became marked men. Bonhoeffer was
transferred to Flossenburg concentration camp and there executed on 9 April
1945, only days before the camp was liberated. His family, fiends and
fiancee had to wait months before they learnt of his fate.
Elizabeth Raum’s vivid account of this tragedy lays emphasis on his life
rather than his thought. She supplements Bethge’s biography with some
newer sources written later. While her data and insights are not
original, nevertheless she provides her intended audience with an excellent
introduction. Those interested in exploring further the world-wide
significance of Bonhoeffer’s theological and ethical ideas will soon be
able to turn to the English translations of his collected works, as well as
to more popular books such as The Cost of Discipleship. Bonhoeffer
deserves to be remembered as a challenging thinker, whose Christian witness
led him to pay the ultimate price for his ideals.
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2) American Lutherans and the Jews
Readers of this Newsletter will be interested to learn about the resolute
efforts being made by the Evangelical Lutheran Church in America to
encourage its members to have a deeper understanding and greater
sensitivity towards Judaism and the Jewish people.
American Lutherans have long been embarrassed by the legacy of their
founder, Martin Luther, on this topic, especially by the vitriolic
outbursts of his two notorious pamphlets written against the Jews in 1538
and 1543. The Holocaust, executed by Germans many of whom were at least
nominally Lutherans, made this dilemma even more acute. After 1945, in
Germany, the prevailing mood was one of denial and self-justification. Only
a few voices called for repentance; none advocated a new Christian stance
towards their Jewish neighbours. Not until the end of the 1950s – when the
word Holocaust was first propagated – did a significant change begin. The
impetus of the Second Vatican Council undoubtedly influenced Lutherans in
this direction.
In the United States, a new edition of Luther’s complete works, published
by Fortress Press, appeared in 1971. The Editor, Franklin Sherman, put the
offensive pamphlets in their historic setting as part of the late mediaeval
cultural and theological trends. “The fact that much of the theological
argument is borrowed from earlier Christian polemics against Judaism is a
mitigating factor, though by no means an excuse for Luther’s views.”
Aware of the danger of possible misuse of this material, Sherman was
careful to state that “such publication is by no way intended as an
endorsement of the distorted views of Jewish faith and practice or the
defamation of the Jewish people which this treatise contains.”
In April 1994 a Declaration to the Jewish Community spelled out even more
clearly and publicly the new stance of the Evangelical Lutheran Church in
America:
“Grieving the complicity of our own tradition within this history of
hatred, moreover, we express our urgent desire to live out our faith in
Jesus Christ with love and respect for the Jewish people. We recognize in
anti-Semitism a contradiction and an affront to the Gospel, a violation of
our hope and calling, and we pledge this church to oppose the deadly
working of such bigotr

y, both within our own circles and in the society
around us.”
This was followed in 1998 by the adoption of new guidelines, encouraging
congregations throughout the church “to renew and enhance our relationship
with the Jewish people”. Two pamphlets, “Luther, Lutheranism and the
Jews” (1995) and “Towards a new day in Jewish-Lutheran Relations” (1999)
provided material for such desired dialogues. At present a new series of
“talking points” is being created, to cover such topics as Covenant
Theology, Law and Gospel, Jewish Concern for the State of Israel, Tikkun
Olam-mending the world.
These initiatives all have to reckon with the inherent difficulty of Lutheran
Jewish conversations in the shadow of the Holocaust. Lutherans are now
being encouraged to deal honestly with this tragic chapter of their
history. Discussions will undoubtedly be very strained, if not impossible,
at times. But seriously addressing the Holocaust is a necessity in
building trust. It also leads Lutheran congregations to realize the full
dimensions of what it means to be a Jew, loyal to Judaism. In the more
open atmosphere of America, the possibility of a new relationship based on
mutual trust and respect is certainly much to be hoped for. We wish these
Lutheran initiatives every success.
(With thanks to Rev. John Matthews, Afton, Minnesota for his paper on this
subject)
Best wishes,
John S.Conway
jconway@interchange.ubc.ca

Dear Friends,
A warm welcome to those of you returning this month to the academic fray!
I trust you all had a good holiday, and will be glad to hear from you on
any matter relating to our interest in Contemporary Church History.
We return this month to the affairs of the Catholic Chrch, beginning with
the continuing debate about Pius XII and his policies, this time from a
Canadian perspective. We are most grateful to Gregory Baum, one of
Canada’s most distinguished theologians, for allowing us to reprint the
following article, which is a valuable contribution to the debate about the
character and aims of Pope Pius XII, as seen by one of the pioneering
champions of a new stance towards Judaism, Jacques Maritain. We are also
glad to reprint a review of a new book by our noted colleague from New
Brunswick, Peter C.Kent, which is here reviewed by one of our younger
scholars, Robert Ventresca of King’s College, University of Western
Ontario, London, Ontario. We are also grateful to Jay Hughes for is
insightful review of a new book about Pope Paul VI.
Contents:

1) German Studies Association meeting, Oct. 4-6th 2002
2) Gregory Baum, Essay on Jacques Maritain and the Vatican’s stance on Judaism and the Jews
3) Book reviews:

a) Kent, The Lonely Cold War of Pius XII
b) Brechenmacher and Ostry, Paul VI – Rom und Jerusalem

4) Journal article: Pius XII and diplomacy
1) The following papers in our field are to be given at the GSA meeting
next month:
The Text and Context of Nazi ‘Theology’ – R.Steigmann-Gall
‘Christian Charity’ and ‘Jewish Vengeance’, Bishop Muench 1946-7
– Suzanne Brown-Fleming
Protestant Theology and the Conversion of Jews, 1945-1950 – M. Hockenos
The DEK’s Foreign Office and the Spanish civil war – G.Besier
NS Church policy in Poland – M. Phayer
Protestantism in Austria in the Third Reich – K. Schwarz

(We shall hope in a future issue to have a precis of these papers for those
unable to attend this meeting.

(2) Maritain Puzzled By Pius XII – in 1946
(Reprinted from The Ecumenist, Vol 39, Spring 2002, p.1-3)
On February 12, 2002, Professor Michael Marrus, honoured historian at the
University of Toronto, gave a lecture at McGill University in Montreal on
the Vatican and the Holocaust. He focused his lecture on a letter of July
12, 1946 written by Jacques Maritain to Giovanni Montini, who at that time
held a high post at the Vatican’s Secretariat of State. Since Maritain’s
letter is not well-known, I have asked Professor Marrus’ permission to
draw upon his research and write a short article based on his lecture.
Maritain’s solidarity with Jews
Maritain was one of the first Catholic thinkers who was troubled by
antisemitism in western society and raised the question to what extent the
Church and its theology have been responsible for this. In 1937 he
published the essay “L’impossible antisémitisme” and a year later the book
“Les juifs et les nations.” That his wife Raïssa was of Jewish origin may
have given him a special sensitivity to the topic. As a democrat and
defender of human rights, Maritain opposed fascism in all its forms and
therefore supported the republican side in the Spanish civil war – while
the great majority of Catholics stood behind Franco. In 1939, Maritain
taught at the Pontifical Institute of Mediaeval Studies in Toronto, and
after France fell in 1940 he moved to New York, where he became a
unofficial ambassador for the Free French, supported the cause of General
de Gaulle and entertained associations with Jews and other refugees in that
city. In April 1945, de Gaulle named him the French ambassador to the Holy
See where he remained till June 1948. In Rome he became a friend of
Giovanni Montini, effectively the pope’s chief of staff, who regarded
himself as a student of Maritain and who had introduced Maritain’s thought
to Italy.
In his letter of July 12, 1946, Maritain addresses Montini as a friend, not
as an ambassador. He pleads with him to submit an urgent appeal to Pope
Pius XII. He ” feels impelled as a Catholic to present this plea at the
feet of the Holy Father, together with sentiments of filial and profound
devotion.” Maritain explains that he has been troubled for many years by
the most savage hatred visited upon the Jews. “During the [recent] war six
million Jews have been liquidated, thousands of Jewish children have been
massacred, thousand of others torn from their families and stripped of
their identity .. . . Nazism proclaimed the necessity to wipe the Jews off
the face of the earth (the only people whom they thus wanted to exterminate
as a people)”. In his judgement “among the many other crimes that have
ravaged and debased humanity,” this genocide was a “mysterious tragedy”
that expressed “a hatred of Christ,” targeting as it did “the people who
gave to the world Moses and the prophets and from whom Christ himself came.”
Maritain then refers to “the tireless charity with which the Holy Father
hastried with all his might to save and protect the persecuted,” and to
his “condemnations against racism that have won for him the gratitude of
Jews and all those who care for the human race” Yet he continues. ” What
Jews and Christians need above all [at this time] is a voice – the paternal
voice, the voice par excellence, that of the Vicar of Christ – to tell the
truth to the world and shed light on this tragedy. This has been, permit
me to say it, greatly lacking in the world today.”
Maritain recognized that “for very good reasons, and in the interests of a
higher good, and in order not to make persecution even worse, and not to
create insurmountable obstacles in the way of the rescue that he was
pursuing, the Holy Father abstained from speaking directly about the Jews
and [from] calling the attention of the whole world to the iniquitous drama
that was unfolding. But now that Nazism has been defeated, and the
situation has changed, could it not be permitted, and this is the purpose
of this letter, to transmit to the Holy Father the appeal of so many
anguished souls and to beg him to make his voice heard?” “It seems to me –
and I hope that your Excellency will not see any presumption in what I am
writing in all humility – it seems to me that this is a particularly
opportune moment for such a sovereign declaration of the thought of the
Church. On the one hand the conscience of Israel is particularly troubled,
many Jews feel deeply within them the attraction of the grace of Christ,
and the word of the Pope would surely awaken in them echoes of exceptional
importance. On the other hand, the antisemitic psychosis has not vanished,
on the contrary one sees that everywhere in America and in Europe
antisemitism is spreading in many segments of the population, as if the
poisons issuing from Nazi racism continue to do their work of destruction
of souls . . . .”
Maritain notes that his appeal is “urgent”; he refers to “the part that
many Catholics had in the development of antisemitism” both in the past,
during the war, and in the present.
Pius XII: Charity and Reticence
Maritain wrote to Montini on July 12th. Four days later, on the 16th, he
had an audience with the Pope. On that occasion, the pope told him that he
had “already spoken [on this issue], and that he had done so “on receiving
a Jewish delegation.” A Jewish delegation had indeed come to see the Pope
on November 29, 1945. This was a group of 70 Jewish refugees coming from
German concentration camps who had asked for “the great honour of thanking
the pope in person for the generosity that he had shown when they were
persecuted during the terrible period of Nazi-Fascism.” The Pope’s speech
was published in Osservatore Romano the next day.
“Your presence, Gentlemen, seems to us an eloquent testimony to the
psychological transformations and the new orientations that the world
conflict has, in its different aspects, created in the world· The abyss of
discord, the hatred and the folly of persecution which, under the influence
of erroneous and intolerant doctrines, in opposition to the noble human and
authentic Christian spirit, have engulfed incomparable numbers of innocent
victims, even among those who took no active part in the war· The Apostolic
See remains faithful to the eternal principles of the law, written by God
in the heart of every man, which shines forth in the divine revelation of
Sinai and which found its perfection in the Sermon on the Mount and has
never, even in the most critical moments, left any doubt as to its maxims
and its applicability .. . Your presence here is an intimate testimony of
the gratitude on the part of men and women who, in an agonizing time, and
often under the threat of imminent death, experienced how the Catholic
Church and its true disciples know how, in the exercise of charity, to rise
above the narrow and arbitrary limits created by human egoism and racial
passions·. You have experienced yourselves the injuries and the wounds of
hatred; but in the midst of your agonies, you have also felt the benefit
and the sweetness of love, not that love that nourishes itself from
terrestrial motives, but rather with a profound faith in the heavenly
father, whose light shines on all men, whatever their language and their
race, and whose grace is open to all those who seek the Lord in a spirit of
truth.”
Maritain was deeply disappointed. On July 19, he writes in his diary:
“Visite à Montini. Je lui parle des Juifs et de l’antisémitisme. Le Saint
Père ne les a jamais nommés. Conscience catholique empoisonné, il faut
l’éclairer.” Maritain appreciated that during the war the Holy See
articulated its opposition to racism without naming antisemitism or the
Jews, but he did not understand why even after the war the Pope still
refused to use the word antisemitism, speak to Jews as Jews and
acknowledge the relation of the contempt for Jews to a certain Christian
theological discourse. Writing to his friend Charles Journet, Maritain
confesses that “he felt an absence of papal leadership on the Jewish
question”.
Reflections
Why do I think that Maritain’s exchange with the Pope in 1946 is
significant? It sheds lights on the complex personality of Pius XII. It
confirms that he sorrowed over hatred, persecution and death inflicted by
the Nazi Germany upon innocent people and that he offered his help to them
whenever this was possible. Maritain’s exchange reveals that the Pope
believed he had done his Christian duty. Yet we also learn from this
exchange that Pius XII refused to reflect thematically on the experience of
the Jewish people and on the contempt in which they were held in western
society. He addressed the Jewish delegation in universal terms, recalling
God’s love for all human beings and expressing the Church’s respect for
people beyond her borders. The only specific reference to Jews in the papal
address was the claim that the Christian law of love was more perfect than
the law of the Mosaic covenant. Having announced to the world the divine
summons to love and justice, the Pope had a good conscience; at the same
time he was unable to address the Jews as Jews, utter an explicit
condemnation of antisemitism and acknowledge the Church’s religious
anti-Judaism. One has the impression that the Pope was inhibited by the
traditional orthodoxy, according to which the Jews had missed the boat of
salvation in the first century and were in need of hearing the Christian
truth in the present. Pius XII lacked a theology that would permit him to
do what Maritain had asked for, namely to speak to the world of the
pervasive contempt for Jews in western society and to repudiate this hatred
in properly Christian terms. Admittedly, such a theology was hardly
available in the Church of that time. Jacques Maritain and Charles Journet
were perhaps the only Catholic philosophers before 1946 who adopted a
Christian approach to the Jews that respected them as Jews and honoured
their religious faith. Maritain’s letter reveals that even he still longed
for the eventual conversion of the Jews to the faith in Christ.
I think Maritain’s exchange with the Pope in 1946 sheds light on the
contemporary debate between historians over the role played by Pius XII
during WW II. Some scholars defend Pius XII as a man of great charity who
had condemned racism, lamented the persecution of the innocent, and
extended his help to great numbers of Jewish refugees. Other scholars judge
him severely because he did not condemn the persecution of the Jews in
specific terms nor acknowledge the religious roots of antisemitism. These
different interpretations do not seem to be in contradiction. If Pius XII,
moved by Maritain’s plea, had made a public declaration in 1946, he would
have created a different image of himself. For such declarations we had to
wait for the Vatican Council II (1962-1965) and the pontificate of John
Paul II.
Gregory Baum, Montreal.
3) Book Reviews:
a) Peter C.Kent, The Lonely Cold War of Pope Pius XII.
Montreal/Kingston: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 2002, 358 pp. $45.00
(Reprinted from the Montreal Gazette, July 13th 2002)
When Eugenio Pacelli was elected Pope in March 1939 – taking the name Pius
XII – some cardinals complained that the new pope was a “man of peace” at a
time when the world needed a pope prepared to “do battle”. What they meant
was that Pacelli was too timid, too much the diplomat, to provide the kind
of resolute leadership needed in a world threatened by totalitarian
repression and war.
Though the charge of timidity dogged Pius XII for the duration of his
pontificate, and well beyond, a new book by historian Peter C. Kent
suggests that Pacelli was not so much timid as he was selective, choosing
to do battle with enemies he identified as most dangerous, and then
fighting them with all the spiritual, political and diplomatic means
available to a pope.
Pius XII’s resolve to “do battle” against one declared enemy – Soviet
Communism – while fulfilling the role of universal pastor to a world
divided by war and ideology is the subject of Kent’s The Lonely Cold War of
Pope Pius XII.
Drawing largely on the diplomatic records of western countries, Kent, a
professor at the University of New Brunswick, offers us a detailed look at
the role of the papacy in the early Cold War. To his credit, Kent has
balanced a narrow time frame – 1943 to 1950 – with a comprehensive
geographic focus, providing readwers with valuable insights on Roman
Catholicism in various national contexts. Though narrow, Kent’s choice of
time frame is the book’s great virtue. With a focus on PAcelli’s
pontificate after 1945, Kent offers an important corrective to our skewed
version of Pius XII. Yes, Pacelli was pope throughout World War II:
yes, this is the pope many people condemn as “Hitler’s Pope” for not having
done more to save Jews during the Holocaust. Yet, as Kent reminds us, the
pope so closely associated with the events of the watr reigned as head of
the Roman Catholic Church for 13 years after 1945. In a sense, it was the
Cold War, not World War II, that defined the pontificate of Eugenio Pacelli.
Kent’s study is centrally concerned with a simple question: to what extent
did Pacelli act on a “predetermined political agenda” in exercising his
power as spiritual head of Christianity, and as sovereign head of state?
Kent maintains that Pius XII was indeed a “pope with an agenda”, namely to
fight the spread of Coimmunism and protect the interests of the Catholic
Church within the Soviet bloc. This agenda, Kent asserts, clashed with the
“great powers,” and often ran counter to the “demands of good sense.”
So it was, Kent suggests, that Pius XII went against the interests of the
western powers, the national Catholic churches of eastern Europe, even
common sense itself; this to the detriment of his own influence and the
interests of his flock in the East. To hear Kent tell it, Pius XII was very
much left out in the cold in Cold War Europe; a shivering, lonely cold
warrior, you might say.
This is where the narration of historical facts and the interpretation of
those facts begin to diverge. And this is precisely where Kent’s
conclusions begin to falter. For one thing, Kent argues that had he had
less of a “predetermined agenda,” Pius XII would have been a more effective
shepherd to his flock, and a more effective cold warrior. Yet, this
argument sounds more compelling than it is convincing. Take, for instance,
the question of Catholic co-operation with Communist regimes in eastern
Europe. Kent maintains that Pius XII’s refusal to sanction Catholic
co-operation with Communist rulers made things even more difficult for
Church leaders in eastern Europe, and weakened his own pastoral leadership.
Feeling the heat of growing persecution, the Catholic bishops of eastern
Europe found themselves under pressure to co-operate with Communist regimes
or risk even graver persecutions.
And co-operate they did, often signing agreements with Communist
governments without the Vatican’s authorization. Yes, the pope disapproved,
but that was about it. Faced with the option of imposing its authority and
denouncing the agreements, the Vatican said and did nothing – an implicit
acceptance of the agreements. In so doing, perhaps Pius XII showed greater
pastoral leadership than Kent appreciates.
Indeed, in apparent contradiction, Kent admits that the pope’s stature
among Catholics in eastern Europe was “enhanced” because of his willingness
to fight Communism beyond the Iron Curtain. Does this sound like a papal
agenda that ran counter to the demands of good sense?
This brings us to a more serious flaw in Kent’s assessment of Pius XII’s
record as a cold warrior. Accused by so many of moral equivocation of the
worst kind when it came to saving Jews during the Holocaust, Kent seems to
criticize Pius XII for displaying considerable backbone in fighting Soviet
Communism. When, in 1949, the Communist government of Hungary sentenced
the primate Cardinal Jozsef Mindszenty to life in prison, Pius XII publicly
denounced the arrest with a passion and eloquence uncharacteristic of
someone known for his quiet reserve and diplomatic caution.
Yet, despite such public condemnation from the lips of the pope himself,
Kent would have us believe that national churches in places such as
Hungary, Czechoslovakia and Poland were left to defend the interests of the
church with “slight assistance” from the Vatican.
On the contrary, what emerges from Kent’s research is that the church of
Pius XII stood alone in confronting Communism behind the Iron Curtain. The
U.S. and other western powers were neither willing nor able to do much more
than preach the gospel of containment. As bishop of Rome, however, Pius XII
preached a different kind of gospel, conscious of his role as shepherd to a
universal flock.
Sadly, Kent’s book misses an opportunity to buck the trend made
fashionable by the commercial success of John Cornwell’s dubious Hitler’s
Pope (Viking, 1999). Clearly, Kent is not out to demonize Pius XII, nor
does he blame Pacelli — as Cornwell would have it — for all the ills of
the 20th century, from world wars to genocide. But Kent’s book is clouded
by a predetermined agenda of its own: to damn Pius XII if he does, and damn
him if he doesn’t; condemn him for remaining silent, and for speaking out.
Yes, readers will learn much about the early Cold War from Kent’s
exhaustive research. But they will search in vain for a deeper
understanding of Eugenio Pacelli the man, the pope and the cold warrior.

Robert Ventresca, King’s College, University of Western
Ontario, London, Ont.
b) Thomas Brechenmacher and Hardy Ostry, Paul VI. – Rom und Jerusalem.
Konzil, Pilgerfahrt, Dialog der Religionen. (Trier: Paulinus Verlag. 2001.
Pp. 303. 18.90 Euros) ISBN 3-7902-1359-4.
With Pope John Paul II’s journeys outside Italy approaching the one
hundred mark, it is difficult to appreciate the astonishment caused by Pope
Paul VI’s announcement at the end of his address on December 4, 1963, the
closing day of Vatican II’s second Session, that he would undertake a
pilgrimage to Jerusalem exactly a month later. In preparation since the
previous September (prior to the opening of the Council’s second Session on
October 11), the trip was a personal initiative of the Pope. Though two of
his aides had flown to Jerusalem in November to plan the itinerary, and
though the number of others informed was not small, there was not even a
rumor of the Pope’s intention until he exploded his bombshell. This
secrecy, almost unprecedented for Rome, was a tribute to the care with
which Paul had selected those charged with the planning.
Speculation about the Pope’s intention in making the trip
approached that which had greeted his predecessor’s announcement of the
Council five years earlier. Though the Holy See had no diplomatic
relations with either Jordan (then in control of east Jerusalem) or Israel,
the Pope would meet with officials of both governments, and with Orthodox
prelates, including the Ecumenical Patriarch Athenagoras. There were also
possible implications for the Council’s proposed declaration on the Jews,
already the cause of sharp controversy at the second Session. In this
fraught situation people had difficulty accepting the Pope’s repeated
assurance that he was going as a simple pilgrim.
In the first hundred pages of this book Thomas Brechenmacher describes
in great detail the trip’s preparation, the widespread advance speculation
about its significance, the crowded and sometimes tumultuous events of its
three-day duration, and the Pope’s triumphal return to Rome, where he was
received at the airport at nightfall by the Italian President and his
government. Despite darkness and cold, jubilant throngs greeted Paul on
his two-hour drive to the Vatican in an open car: “The greatest and most
moving reception any Pope had received for a century.” Addressing the
cardinals the same evening, the Pontiff, clearly moved, recounted his warm
reception in the Holy Land, especially by Patriarch Athenagoras.
In the pages following Hardy Ostry describes in similar detail the
stormy controversies and Byzantine intrigues preceding the Council’s
passage of its declaration on the Jews (Nostra aetate) at its final session
in 1965. Opposition came from Near Eastern Catholics, small in number and
dependent on the goodwill of Arab governments. They were supported by
powerful sympathizers in the Roman curia. Before the Council’s final
session an Italian bishop demonstrated that anti-Judaism was not dead by
declaring in an article that responsibility for the death of Jesus Christ
fell not only on the Jews of his day but on all Jews today.
Jewish spokesmen several times almost torpedoed the efforts of their
Catholic friends by indiscretions, moving the American Rabbi Tannenbaum to
say in 1964 that if the Council approved its declaration on the Jews, it
would be “in spite of the Jews, not because of them.” Cardinal Bea refused
to give up, despite numerous setbacks. He had strong support from western
European and especially from American bishops. The latter made a
condemnation of anti-Semitism a personal cause celebre at the Council.
The book is an example of meticulous German scholarship at its best.
In contrast to most such works, it is consistently interesting. The account
of the struggle for the Council’s declaration on the Jews could almost be
called a page-turner.
John Jay Hughes, St. Louis.

4) Journal article:
K. McDonnell, Pius XII and the Holocaust: Fear of Reprisals and Generic
Diplomacy in Gregorianum, 83/2 (2002), p 313-334
In this article Fr McDonnell argues that the policies of Pius XII towards
the international crises of his day were derived from the long practice of
the Vatican and the experience of successive popes in dealing with
situations of crises over many centuries. The aim was to resolve, or at
least to mitigate, the rivalries and hostilities of over-ambitious rulers,
and at the same time to seek to prevent the escalation of outright warfare
with its consequent disasters for civilian populations. Fr McDonnell then
traces the responses of the Vatican to the international crises of the
twentieth century. Certainly not all of these responses look advantageous
from the perspective of seventy years later. But we are here warned
against what a Cambridgeprofessor calls “the self-righteousness of vulgar
hindsight”.
With every best wish
John Conway
jconway@interchange.ubc.ca

Dear Friends,
A happy and restful holiday to all in the northern hemisphere! But I
hope you find time to peruse this issue. I am most grateful to
Matthew Hockenos for corralling the second contribution, which
derived from a conference earlier this year, as also to the authors for
putting their stimulating thoughts on paper. Any comments you
may like to make will be most welcome. Let me repeat for your
guidance that Letters to the Editor should be sent to me personally at
jconway@interchange.ubc.ca. If you use the list address i.e.
kirzeit-l@interchange.ubc.ca, then your message will go out around
the world to all the more than 300 members.
Contents:
1) 2002 KZG colloquium, Tacoma, Washington, USA
2) A Continuing Debate: Christian-Jewish Relations Today
Martin Rumscheidt and Victoria Barnett.
3) Book notes: In God’s Name
4) Journal articles
1) For the first time, the Kirchliche Zeitgeschichte group, mainly
based in Europe, will hold its annual meeting in North America, to
be co-sponsored with the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum This
will take place at Pacific Lutheran University, Tacoma, Washington
State, USA, from September 26th – 29th. (Accommodation can be
arranged at own expense at the Sheraton Hotel, Tacoma). The
theme for the Colloquium will be: “Christian Teaching about Jews:
National Comparisons in the shadow of the Holocaustî, with
emphasis on the period 1920-45.” Papers, all of which will be in
English, will be presented on Germany (Gerhard Lindemann),
Poland (Anna Lysiak), Spain (Graciela Ben Dror), Denmark
(Thorsten Wagner), Estonia (Mikki Ketola), after an opening
statement on Christian-Jewish Relations in the late 19th century
(Susannah Heschel). There will be a session with Jewish scholars,
including remarks on the Vatican and antisemitism (David Kertzer).
There is no registration fee. More details can be obtained from
Robert Ericksen = ericksrp@plu.edu
2a) The Imperative of Rethinking Christian Theology
During the 2002 Annual Scholars Conference on the Holocaust and
the Churches, I participated, together with Victoria Barnett, my
esteemed colleague in the work on the new critical edition of
Dietrich Bonhoeffer’s Works in English, in a panel discussion on the
crisis of Jewish-Christian relations. I had based my reflections on
the highly illuminating, frank and, in fact, devastating public
dialogue between Jews and Christians in Germany after the 1991
Gulf War. The participants in that dialogue had for years engaged in
far reaching and informative discussions about the relationship of
Jews and Israel, on one hand, and Christians in Germany after the
Holocaust, on the other. The focus of this particular discussion,
which took place during the 1991 Kirchentag, was the response by
churches and individual Christians to the Second Gulf War and the
scud-missile attack on Israel by Iraq.
I sought to establish the position, in which I was joined by one of the
Jewish participants, that the Holocaust had clearly not entered the
minds of Christians deeply enough to understand that since
Auschwitz things worse than war are possible. Christian theology
and church had manifested themselves once again as placing their
cardinal theological virtues and principles ahead of solidarity with
the threatened Jewish people. From that conclusion and how it was
supported, I developed my belief that a truly new relation between
Jews and Christians, one that takes Jews, the Holocaust and Israel
seriously without reserve, has yet to develop. I believe that Christian
theology, in order to survive at all, has radically to re-think itself if it
seeks to contribute to such a relationship and, apart from that, revive
as something properly to be undertaken at all today.
My sense of the imperative of rethinking theology is grounded in
several factors, each of them inescapable to me existentially. – One
of them comes from Karl Barth, whose student I was also and still
am. As a public witness to the living God and God’s presence in and
to the world, theology is ever in need of reformation in response to
the realities in which human beings find themselves, on the one
hand, and in need of reflecting on its own appropriateness to the
living God’s self manifestation, on the other. Rabbi Irving Greenberg
succinctly phrases the necessity of theology ever to be reforming
and self reflective in his unambiguous statement: “No statement,
theological or otherwise, should be made that would not be credible
in the presence of burning children.” His instruction is itself a call
into better citizenship and, consequently, for better theology.
Another such factor is the fact that my native country, Germany,
deftly built the long tradition of Christian teaching of contempt into
the destruction of Jews and all things Jewish in the Holocaust.
Something thoroughly unholy indeed was woven soon after the fall
of Jerusalem in 70 c.e. into the very heart of Christian theology.
Simply to walk away from theology, in the belief that
thereby one makes for better citizenship and, above all, for new
relationship with Jews and non-Jews, Jews and Christians, is to be
gullible to the facile Enlightenment credo that consciousness
unencumbered by “faith” and moved by “reason” will create right
relationships between humans, irrespective of personal
idiosyncrasies. No! Theology will have to go deeply into the
darkness of Western civilization and, in shame, seek its metanoia.
And it can do this only together with the very ones whom it held so
long to be its quintessential “other”: the Jew whom it defined,
proscribed, tolerated, maligned but never embraced with genuine
hospitality. – A third factor that forms my sense for the need to
rethink theology is that during my personal coming to terms with the
traditions of home, church and nation that gave me the values I grew
up with, Jews have urged me to tackle the theological dimension
energetically. Once a woman told me, while showing me the
tattooed number on her wrist, not to let go of this endeavour. She
gave me what she called “a commandment from one who survived
Auschwitz,” namely not to remain silent on this subject. Her utterly
clear admonition to me is a different form of what Emil Fackenheim
called the commanding voice of Auschwitz: not to give Hitler a
posthumous victory.
An uncontextual theology, seeking to satisfy itself with being
measurable by the standards of so-called “science” and desirous to
being assessed in ways divorced from the daily realities of life in the
world, rejecting them as unrelated to the theological task, is not able
to make for “better citizens.” The Holocaust demonstrated that
clearly. Upholding specific “principles” as being appropriate to both
the living God and to fellow humans in their actual realities is not
theology as I have come to understand it. Of course, theology as I
seek to pursue it is not immune to mistakes and seduction. But
Christian theology, if it is done in the absence of Jews today, cannot
save itself from its past and its falsehood. But if it is done together
with Jews, whether they are also about the theological task or not, it
has the chance of making for a new relationship between Christians
and Jews which, as I see it, is itself a way of being “better citizens.”
Victoria Barnett’s phrasing of her sense of how a new relationship
between Jews and Christians may emerge, appears to be not so
much a rejection of theology as such but an insightful way of calling
theology into reformation and critical reflection, into its
responsibility and accountability before the living God to the world
and humankind. For that I can only be grateful.
Martin Rumscheidt, Atlantic School of Theology, Halifax, Nova
Scotia, Canadab) Remarks on the “crisis” in Jewish-Christian relations

One of time’s advantages is the opportunity to clarify oneís thoughts,
and one of the services of this newsletter is the chance to put such
clarifications on record. I am grateful, not only for my friendship
and dialogue with Martin Rumscheidt and the chance to respond
here to his comments, but because I think the issues at stake are
relevant to the work of many who read this newsletter.
At our session at the Scholar’s Conference, each panelist approached
this “crisis” from a quite different perspective. John Morley
analyzed the Catholic-Jewish conversation of recent years,
particularly the work of the interfaith committee of
scholars (on which he served) that reviewed the question of access
to the Vatican archives. Henry Knight addressed issues of liturgical
and confessional authenticity for Christians in the post-Shoah world.
Martin Rumscheidt made a strong case for a continued critique and
rethinking of Christian theology, and I actually agree with his
analysis of the fracture in Jewish-Christian relations
in Germany during the Gulf War.
My own remarks reflected my frustration with what I would
describe more as an impasse than a “crisis.” The impasse comes, I
think, from some inherent limitations to what our theological work
in this context can achieve, and my sense that we tend to ignore
these limitations. I do not dispute the necessity and ethical
responsibility for Christians to address, critique and repudiate those
traditions and scriptural interpretations that have been used against
the Jews. Nor do I dispute the role these traditions played in
legitimizing the persecution and genocide of the Jews, and in
making Nazism “salonfaehig” for far too many Christians. In the
Holocaust’s wake, a critique of this part of Christian
tradition is a primary moral task facing Christians. The kind of
reformulation described by Martin Rumscheidt has led to important
new theological insights that can only serve the Christian faith and
its institutions. Some of the work in this area has led to
groundbreaking developments in interfaith relations
— particularly the years of dialogue at the Institute for Christian and
Jewish Studies in Baltimore that led to the “Dabru Emet” statement
and the book “Christianity in Jewish Terms.” (Westview Press,
2000)
Yet our relationship to our neighbors of other faiths, and the worldly
manifestations of that relationship, are more than the sum of our
theology. This is evident in the history of the churches during the
Nazi era. Their failures were not only the product of theological
anti-Judaism. They reflected the legacy of Christendom and its
effect upon the churches’ institutional structures, political alliances,
legitimation of political power, and embrace of ideologies such as
nationalism. These, too, must be critiqued; our Christian complicity
in them must be dismantled.
Historically, though, the dismantling of European Christendom was
not the outcome of progressive Christian theological trends, but the
result of intellectual and political developments that strengthened
the foundations for civil society and laid the groundwork for a
viable social pluralism. Such developments often lead to new
theological work, since good theology, as Martin notes, emerges
from our living fully within the world.
This, too, is evident from history. In the wake of the first world war,
certain political developments helped spark the social gospel
movement and the subsequent blossoming of interfaith dialogue.
This, in turn, led to the founding of the National Conference of
Christians and Jews, to local “tolerance” initiatives in most major
cities, and to some very solid statements by U.S. Christian
leaders that repudiated supercessionism and the proselytization of
Jews — all during the 1920s. After 1933, it led the Federal Council
of Churches and European ecumenical leaders in Europe to issue
several strong statements condemning Nazi measures against the
Jews. There were condemnations from church leaders of the
November 1938 pogrom. In 1943, explicit condemnations of the
genocide came from church leaders in the U.S. and Great Britain.
Gerhardt Riegner, head of the World Jewish Congress in
Geneva, later described the efforts of the ecumenical
leaders there as one of the few lights “in the darkness that
surrounded us.”
The history of Christian anti-Judaism has led many of us to define
the Christian failures between 1933 and 1945, and the lessons we
draw for today, in almost exclusively theological terms. I would
like to make a case for a much broader understanding of
this history that, while not dismissing our theological task,
acknowledges the complexity of this history. The Christian record
during the Nazi era is largely one of failure. But it would be a
mistake to ignore the above history, and to frame the Christian
failures (or the small successes) exclusively in theological
terms. As I’ve indicated, the attitudes at the time of
Christian leaders toward Jews were not monolithically anti-Judaic.
And if that’s the case, we need to reflect on the non-theological
components of their failure. The focus upon theological
anti-Judaism to the exclusion of other relevant factors skews our
understanding of the complexity of the churches’ behavior during the
Holocaust, and it also frames the subsequent interfaith dialogue in a
way that is unproductive.
As mentioned, many of the problems in the Christian response to
Nazism emerged from the legacy of “Christendom.” Assumptions
about “Christian culture” drew upon theological language for
legitimation, but “Christendom” was a political and cultural
phenomenon — which is why Jewish citizens suffered for centuries
in Christian Europe. During the Nazi era, this was best understood
(and critiqued) by those Christians who understood this
complexity. The writings and statements of Reinhold Niebuhr,
William Temple, George Bell, and Willem Visser ‘t Hooft — all
Christians who actually did speak and act in solidarity with the Jews
— are remarkable for their strong commitment to civil society and an
implicit (in some cases, explicit) affirmation of pluralistic political
democracy. This, I would argue, is also the direction in which
Dietrich Bonhoeffer was moving with his concept of
“religionless Christianity.”
Historically, then, good interfaith work and solidarity have been
accompanied by a common commitment to civil liberties and civil
society. Between 1933 and 1945, this commitment sometimes
surpassed the individual theological biases of Christian leaders
who only worked out its theological consequences in the aftermath.
But that’s all right: saving lives is more important than working out
the theological fine points. This is what I was trying to describe in
my brief remarks about the necessity for Christians to understand
themselves not only theologically, but as citizens of a much greater
and more complex world. The historical dominance of Christianity
in Europe, and the effect of this on much of western thought and
its institutions, has led to the tendency among Christians to see our
religious identity and theology as determinative in the larger context
of civil society. But civil society might be better off without that
kind of deterministic understanding. There’s something to
be said for secularism, and I actually believe that the Enlightenment
was a positive historical development in this respect. We can still
live as Christians and do good works and good theology in that
context — something that religious minorities have already
discovered, when their civil and religious freedoms are protected.
Thus — to reply directly to some of Rumscheidt’s remarks: my hope
is not that ëbetter citizens’ begin to ‘do’ theology, nor do I believe
that theology has “outlived its usefulness” for building interfaith
relations. Nor am I walking away from theology. I am
simply noting that, even in the world after Auschwitz, our
interactions with our non-Christian neighbors are not always, or
even primarily, theological. I am reminded of Albrecht Goes’ 1985
remark that a normal conversation between Christians and Jews,
“after all that has happened, is not possible.” It is impeded by what
Goes described as a “double-edged pain.” Over 50 years after the
Holocaust, this is still the case. Much interfaith dialogue —
including that described by Martin Rumscheidt — still defines itself
as a dialogue with “the other,” shaped by a heightened sensitivity to
theological differences and our problematic Christian history. I
certainly do not advocate the denial or forgetting of this history. Yet
not all differences of opinion between Christians and Jews can be
reduced to theology.
Finally, the context for our panel, and for the entire conference this
year, was the theme of genocide in general and the lessons we might
derive from the Holocaust for the dilemmas that confront us today.
One lesson, I think, is that despite a great deal of interfaith work and
theological rethinking, the best way to stop genocide, then and now,
is the use of military force. And if we as religious people want to
prevent genocide, or the complicity of our members and institutions
in it, we must indeed ensure that our theology is not a contributing
factor — but we confront other, more immediate, non-theological
tasks as well.
Victoria Barnett, Arlington, Virginia, USA

3) Book Notes: eds. Omer Bartov and Phyllis Mack, In Godís
Name. Genocide and Religion in the
Twentieth Century. New York/Oxford:
Berghahn Books, 2001, 401 pp.
This collection of papers originally given at a 1997
conference contains four contributions by list members:
R.P.Ericksen, Genocide, Religion and Gerhard Kittel: Protestant
Theologians face the Third Reich; Susannah Heschel, When Jesus
was an Aryan: The Protestant Church and Antisemitic propaganda;
Beth Griech-Polelle, A pure conscience is not enough: Bishop von
Galen and Resistance to Nazism; Doris L.Bergen, Between God
and Hitler: German Military Chaplains and the crimes of the Third
Reich.
4) Journal articles of note in recent issues:
a) Kirchliche Zeitgeschichte, 2001, no 1. Christliche Religion in der
Geschichtsschreibung des 20 Jahrhunderts. This whole issue is
devoted to the papers given as part of the 19th International
Congress of Historical Sciences in Oslo, Norway in August 2000.
The three themes covered as: On the Road to a History of 20th
Century Christianity; Writing the History of Religion under the
Conditions of Marxism and Stalinism, 1945-1989; and The
Catholic Church and the Nation States of Europe in the 19th and
20th Centuries. There are many provocative essays in this issue,
which merit examination.
b) Evangelische Arbeitsgemeinschaft fur kirchliche Zeitgeschichte:
Mitteilungen 20/2002. This issue contains essays on two main
subjects: the present state of research on the role of the Evangelical
Church in the divided Germany, and Protestant Martyrs of the 20th
Century. Also a list of recent publications in this field, and of the
various German provincial associations for contemporary church
history – useful for those wanting to find the right contacts for
archives etc.
c) Jennifer Wynot, Monasteries without walls: secret monasticism in
the Soviet Union 1928-39, in Church History, Vol. 71 no 1, March
2002, p.63ff.
d) Jonathan Luxmoore, Eastern Europe 1997-2000. A review of
Church life, in Religion, State and Society, Vol 29, no. 4, p.
305-30.
e) Ina Merdjanova, Religious Liberty and New Religious
Movements in Eastern Europe, in Religion, State and Society, Vol
29, no 4, p. 265-304.

With every best wish to you all,
John S.Conway

Dear Friends,
This month we are indebted to Matthew Hockenos, an
assistant professor of history at Skidmore College,
Saratoga Springs, New York, for kindly arranging to
edit this issue of our Newsletter. Matthew’s research
focuses on the various and conflicting ways in which
German Protestants attempted to come to terms with the
church’s complacency and complicity during the Nazi
years. His most recent project addresses the
Protestant Church and the Jewish Question in Germany,
1945-1950, so it is most appropriate that the
contributions this month are connected with this
theme. I am most grateful for this help, and invite
others who may care to do so to volunteer to edit
another month’s issue. If you would like to contact
Matthew, his address is mhockenos@skidmore.edu
Contents:
1) Research Report: German Catholics and Forced labour in World War II
2) Book Reviews:

a) Feldman, Catholics and Jews in 20th century America
b) Lindsay, Covenanted Solidarity. Karl Barth and antisemitism

1) Research Report:
Recent Revelations Concerning the German Catholic
Church and Nazi Forced Labor during World War II
During the Second World War, Nazism’s military
conquests sent millions of Germans abroad thereby
aggravating a labor shortage at home. As a result,
over seven million foreign laborers were recruited or
forcibly transported to Germany by war’s end. Most
remained trapped in the Reich until 1945. Many of
these civilian workers, POWs, forced laborers and
slave laborers came from Eastern Europe. The general
plight of these millions was usually grim, capable of
being quite cruel, and even deadly.
Only recently has Germany decided to partially
compensate a portion of the survivors with a package
of public and private funds. German companies, long
known to have profited at the expense of forced labor,
were urged and expected to contribute. Some
businesses resisted the call to provide the requisite
funding but others heeded it. By the summer of 2000,
Germany’s compensation package neared realization.
Increasing social awareness broadened expectations of
wider institutional responsibility and financial
support for the state’s fund. Thus any organization
that had utilized forced labor was asked to
contribute. On July 12, 2000 developments suddenly
took a dramatic turn. Germany’s Evangelical Church
announced that it had utilized forced laborers. It
acknowledged guilt and contributed a sum of 10 million
DM to Germany’s compensation fund. That admission and
gesture raised more questions in political circles and
the media about possible Catholic involvement with the
Nazis’ deployment of forced labor. Germany’s Catholic
Church responded that examinations of records in its
many bishopric archives barely addressed the issue and
in some archives not at all. The very few indicators
encountered did not warrant the action called for by
those who assumed significant church involvement. The
situation, however, changed dramatically on July 20th.
Monitor, a national news magazine show, aired a
stunning report of forced laborers having been
utilized at a seminary in Paderborn and at two
Bavarian abbeys. The evidence produced included
videotaped interviews of former forced laborers in
Poland, memories of a German Catholic eyewitness of
the Nazi period, municipal records from Bavaria,
credible statements by a German priest, and a
chronicle from Ettal’s Benedictine Abbey, one of the
identified monasteries. The weight of that alarming
evidence and Monitor’s editorial accusations provoked
the German Catholic Bishops Conference to launch a
nation-wide research project.
Within days, dioceses and archdioceses established
high-profile historical commissions, which headed
intensive research efforts and worked in conjunction
with archivists and officials at the local level.
General Vicars instructed every parish, religious
order, and Catholic institution in Germany to proceed
rapidly in determining whether and to what extent
forced labor was utilized in their areas of authority
during the Nazi period. Local church officials were
to search out and forward copies of any and all
pertinent information. These same officials issued
public appeals for information in circular letters,
diocesan newsletters, church newspapers, and on the
Internet. Those and subsequent appeals asked
eyewitnesses, and those possessing any evidence, to
contact designated historians or historical
commissions. German Caritas launched a website in
five languages urging former laborers of the church to
contact them directly. The German Catholic Bishops
Conference invited Dr. Karl-Joseph Hummel, Director of
Bonn’s church-related Kommission für Zeitgeschichte,
and Father Wolfgang Schumacher O.Carm., General
Secretary of Vereinigung der Deutschen Ordensobern, to
summarize the preliminary findings in an initial
report.
The Bishop of Mainz, and current Chairman of the
German Bishops’ Conference, Karl Lehmann, announced
the findings at a press conference of August 29, 2000.
He acknowledged that church institutions had utilized
“foreign workers” or Fremdarbeiter during the Nazi
period. Their numbers, he stated, “probably did not
reach 1%” of Nazi Germany’s wartime high figure of 7.6
million foreign workers/POWs. His choice of words, it
appears, aimed to undercut the accusations made by
Monitor and Der Spiegel that the church had used
forced laborers “im großen Stil” i.e., “on a large
scale” or “to a large extent.” Try though he did to
soften the blow, 7,000 amounted to a very large
number– and that turned out to be a low estimate. By
early October, the Bishop and other leading church
officials revised the estimate to 10,000 based on
subsequent research. Moreover, and more urgent, was
that up to 1,000 of those people could still be alive.
The bishops chose not to join the state fund which
held little to no prospect of compensating church
workers (i.e., a category of laborers not placed in
labor camps, concentration camps, or in guarded
barracks and working in gangs for German industry).
It is worth noting that the state fund’s neglect of
church workers dawned on Evangelical Church officials
only in the wake of their quick pledge and
contribution. The resulting disappointment within
their ranks reached deep. In rejecting the state’s
fund, the Catholic bishops indicated the Church’s
responsibility for its own foreign workers instead.
They set aside 10 million DM for two special church
foundations: one to provide direct compensation
amounting to 5,000 DM for individual laborers who
worked for the church; and a second to initiate
projects of reconciliation in affected communities of
Eastern Europe.
The events of the past two years are far from over.
Much is still unfolding and much more is planned,
including: regional conferences, special publications
of individual dioceses and most importantly, a
thorough and methodical Kommission für Zeitgeschichte
compilation of documentation and source material. The
diocese of Rottenburg-Stuttgart and the archdiocese of
Munich and Freising have, for example, already
published the proceedings of their initial
conferences. The reports and documentation made
available to date have placed forced laborers at a
wide range of church institutions. The long list
includes parishes, monasteries, abbeys, and convents.
Church educational and charitable institutions such as
nursing homes, homes for the disabled, schools for
troubled youth, vocational schools, Catholic schools,
and hospitals depended on forced laborers to carry out
their missions. Much more research will follow as
state archivists, historians inside as well as outside
the church, and local church officials delve into this
seemingly forgotten chapter in the history of the
church.
Lack of postwar conscientiousness within the church
and silence in broad circles of the church at the
local level managed to bury an entire chapter of very
important and recent church history. The result was
an inexcusable institutional lapse or loss of memory.
For the sake of those who toiled, died without
compensation, were never approached for forgiveness,
and lastly, for the sake of the Church itself, there
needs to be effective institutional fix. It needs to
be one that at the very least fights against future
institutional losses of memory. Historians of the
Church need to exercise a vital and role in that
process through the influence exerted by their work.
John J. Delaney (Kutztown University of Pennsylvania)
2) Book Reviews
a) Egal Feldman, Catholics and Jews in
Twentieth-Century America (Urbana: University of
Illinois Press, 2001)
Inter-group relations between American Catholics and
Jews have traveled a long way since the dreaded 1930s,
when the notoriously antisemitic radio priest, Father
Charles Coughlin, dominated American broadcasting;
when Jewish and Irish street toughs came to frequent
blows on the sidewalks of Brooklyn and Boston; when,
as a matter of course, Catholic liturgy made reference
to perfidious Jews; and, more generally, when
reciprocal suspicion underscored many of the everyday
interactions between members of each community.
In Catholics and Jews in Twentieth-Century America,
Egal Feldman has presented a lively, informative and
eminently readable account of the sometimes-halting
journey away from mutual animus and suspicion, toward
popular reconciliation and understanding. For Feldman,
an Emeritus Professor of History at the University of
Wisconsin at Superior, this welcomed historiographical
contribution crowns a long and successful career
dedicated to chronicling and examining the American
Jewish community’s varied experiences with
Christianity. It is a topic that has surely assumed
new urgency over the past several months, given the
complicated political and theological jockeying
currently underway over the Israeli-Arab conflict.
Readers will find Feldman’s book a highly useful
introduction to certain key topics, including: Jewish
and Catholic responses to the Holocaust and the
founding of the State of Israel; the development of
Catholic liturgy and religious doctrine; Catholic
proselytizing in Jewish communities; and the
interfaith movement that took root after the Second
Vatican Council (1962-1965). While experts will
benefit from this comprehensive review (they will also
find some of the author’s primary sources both
revealing and instructive), the book is strongest in
its appeal to non-experts. For the graduate student
preparing for his or her general exams, the new
instructor developing lectures from scratch, or the
generalist looking to solidify his or her grasp of
these topics, Catholics and Jews is an invaluable
interpretive and informational source.
These praises notwithstanding, the book suffers a
structural flaw. In his preface, Feldman sets out to
examine how Jews and Roman Catholics learned to
accommodate each other and live more comfortably with
their differences (p. xi). In truth, Feldman’s title
and preface are misleading. His book is not a social
history, or a broad, integrative account of
interactions between American Jews and Catholics. It
is an intellectual and political history that follows
the development of religious doctrine, liturgy and
official group policy. This is an important
distinction.
Readers hoping for a synthetic history will find
Feldman’s book disappointing. Conspicuously missing
from his bibliography, for instance, are standard
community studies of Jewish-Catholic relations, like
Ronald Bayor’s Neighbors In Conflict (New York City),
and John Stack’s International Conflict in An American
City (Boston). This omission seems deliberate.
Feldman is concerned with the evolving ideas of
leading clerics, theologians and group policy makers
— not with the grassroots-level experience of regular
Jews and Catholics. Absent from these pages are famous
Catholic-Jewish encounters like the 1949 Peekskill
riots, or historiographical debates over the sources
or Catholic anti-communism (e.g., was it partly rooted
in a reflexive antisemitism?). This caveat aside,
Feldman’s book is in many ways a great success.
The author argues provocatively (but not without
ample documentation) that the basic causes of
inter-group tensions were Catholic religious doctrine
and historiography, broad intellectual currents
running back two millennia, which singled out Jews for
their betrayal of Jesus Christ, for their consistent
refusal to embrace the one true church, and for their
alleged misdeeds (think, blood libel) and
ill-intentions (think, international communist
conspiracy). In this sense, Feldman’s argument is an
entirely one-sided charge to which he would probably
admit freely. Perhaps rightly so, he does not appear
to consider seriously that Jews also may have harbored
a long-standing distrust of, or animus toward,
Catholics. In effect, his book begins with a measured
indictment of Catholicism (though, importantly, not
Catholics) and focuses disproportionately on its
development over the course of a century.
Feldman’s chronicle of Catholic policy and doctrine
culminates with a fascinating chapter about the
development of Nostra Aetate, No. 4., the Church’s
famous revision of its position on Jewry and Judaism,
adopted during the Second Vatican Council. The author
especially credits leading American bishops like
Richard Cardinal Cushing and Francis Cardinal
Spellman, who argued forthrightly and consistently for
a correction of the Church’s traditional anti-Jewish
bias. Only after the Catholic Church freed itself
from the shackles of antisemitism, Feldman argues,
could American Jews and Catholics find common
political, social and religious ground. Only then
could they seriously discuss matters of long-standing
division, including the role of Israel in Jewish life,
and the Church’s complicity or non-complicity in the
Holocaust.
Feldman ably demonstrates that, even after Vatican II,
these topics were not easily resolved. While many
Jewish leaders embraced new opportunities for
inter-group dialogue, others — like the scholar Jacob
Neusner and the Orthodox rabbi, Joseph Soloveitchik —
remained politely wary of the potential for a
meaningful religious accord between two groups with
such fundamentally different theological positions and
identities.
Likewise, though post-Vatican II Catholic
intellectuals and church leaders clearly seized the
chance to forge better and lasting ties to the
American Jewish community, nagging questions about the
Holocaust (did Pius XII do enough to aid Jews? was
the Church in Germany and Poland complicit in the
destruction of European Jewry?) and Israel (should
Jerusalem be an international city? should there be a
Palestinian state?) continued to serve as sources of
friction. Feldman’s book does a great service by
implicitly challenging the reader to consider whether
cordial disagreement is in fact an improvement over
outright (but entirely honest) animosity.
Because Feldman is primarily concerned with leading
theologians and intellectuals (prominent examples
include Abraham Joshua Heschel, Augustin Cardinal Bea,
and Robert Drinan), he neglects other possible causes
of inter-group tensions, like the Jewish-Catholic
divide over communism, which receives only a few
pages. He altogether ignores others, like economic
grievances and urban political competition. Here, a
more integrative approach might have been useful. By
the same token, it is odd that the author devotes
significant space and praise to Drinan, without
mentioning that the Jesuit priest and Boston College
law school dean represented a heavily Jewish district
in Congress for ten years. Again, these oversights
betray the limitations of a strictly intellectual
history.
Likewise, at times Feldman is given to
over-statements. He claims that Catholics shared with
other Americans in the 1930s a dislike of Jews (p.
49), but he doesn’t produce polling or survey
information that might — and probably would
substantiate either charge. He writes that American
Catholics had reason to be concerned about the
security of the Spanish church (p. 56) after 1936; yet
on the next page he acknowledges that the Catholic
community was deeply divided on the question of the
Spanish Civil War. Since Feldman’s focus is on big
thinkers and religious leaders, he is weakest when he
tries to generalize about public opinion.
These criticisms notwithstanding, Catholics and Jews
in the Twentieth Century is an important intellectual
history that will surely serve students and scholars
well. As such, it ably fills a conspicuous void
heretofore filled mostly by popular writers and
historians.
Joshua Zeitz (Brown University)b) Mark R. Lindsay, Covenanted Solidarity: The
Theological Basis of Karl Barth’s Opposition to Nazi
Antisemitism and the Holocaust (New York: Peter Lang, 2001)
Mark Lindsay, who is currently teaching at the
University of Melbourne, presents a contentious thesis
in his published dissertation titled Covenanted
Solidarity: The Theological Basis of Karl Barth’s
Opposition to Nazi Antisemitism and the Holocaust. He
argues that not only did Karl Barth actively oppose
the persecution of Jews during the Third Reich, but
also that Barth’s opposition to antisemitism was
theologically grounded in his doctrine of revelation
and election. By combining the methodological
approach of a historian and a theologian Lindsay
offers insights into Barth’s theological approach to
Israel by interpreting it within the historical
context of the growth of antisemitism in central
Europe.

Since Barth never systematically developed a doctrine
or theology of Israel, Lindsay points us in the
direction of Barth’s doctrine of revelation and
election for an understanding of the Swiss
theologian’s interpretation of the role of Israel in
God’s salvation plan. Lindsay proposes to undermine
the prevailing thesis held by many American scholars
that Barth’s occasional interventions on behalf of the
Jews had little to do with his theology, which was,
some argue, anti-Judaic. In support of his claim
Lindsay maintains that for Barth there was an
unbreakable solidarity between Israel, i.e., the Jews,
and the Church based on God’s election of Jesus, which
made opposition to antisemitism the duty of every
Christian. While historians and theologians
universally praise the pro-semitic stand of Dietrich
Bonhoeffer, who in April 1933 drafted his acclaimed
reply to the Nazis’ Law for the Reconstruction of the
Civil Service, (the so-called Aryan Paragraph),
Lindsay contends that Barth too should be lauded for
developing his theologically based opposition to
antisemitism around the same time.

Lindsay takes issue with earlier studies on the German
Evangelical Church and the Jews by Richard Gutteridge
(1976) and Wolfgang Gerlach (1987), as well as Klaus
Scholder’s two-volume study of the early years of the
Church Struggle (1972, 1985). He claims that these
widely respected works either give short shrift to or
entirely deny Barth’s political and theological
struggle against antisemitism. He reserves his
strongest criticism, however, for Katherine
Sonderegger’s thesis that “Barth represents the
broadest tradition of Christian anti-Judaism,
preserving, sharpening, and elaborating the
controversial theology that has been standard in
Christian apologetics since Justin Martyr” (That Jesus
Christ was Born a Jew [1992], p. 6). Lindsay
recognizes that Barth is guilty of using unflattering
and even hostile language to describe Jews and that he
often spoke as if God elected the Jews only to reject
them. But Lindsay insists that a close reading
reveals that “Barth’s theology is (and was) a bulwark
against theological and socio-political Antisemitism”
(p. 298). And, to support of his controversial
reading of Barth’s Church Dogmatics, Lindsay relies on
the recent works of Bruce McCormack (1995) and
Eberhard Busch (1996).
Lindsay contends that Barth developed the theological
basis for his opposition to antisemitism within the
context of “the bankruptcy of German Christianity
during the interwar years” (p. 19). During these
years a number of völkisch-nationalist theological
movements attempted to replace the liberal theology of
the nineteenth century by building on the
late-nineteenth- and early-twentieth-century
conservative Lutheran doctrine of revelation, which
sought to include the German family, Volk and race as
secondary revelations parallel to the primary
revelation in Jesus Christ. The perversion of the
Lutheran Schöpfungsordnungen (orders of creation) by
völkisch-nationalist theologians to include the
deification of Hitler and Nazism in the 1930s went
hand-in-hand with the de-judaizing of Jesus and the
Bible.

In opposition to religious nationalism and attacks on
the Jewish origins of Christianity Barth developed an
alternative doctrine of revelation that entailed a
rejection of antisemitism. Lindsay contends that
Barth’s vocal opposition to natural theology and
rejection of völkisch perversions of revelation
(September 1933 Rengstorf Theses critique; January and
May 1934 Barmen declarations) constitute, in fact,
opposition to antisemitism. By stating in the Barmen
declaration that “Jesus Christ, as he is attested for
us in Holy Scripture, is the one Word of God which we
have to hear . . . trust and obey . . . ” and
rejecting the notion that the church “could and would
have to acknowledge . . . still other events and
powers, figures and truths, as God’s revelation” Barth
was mounting, according to Lindsay, “a confessional
critique of the church’s anti-Semitism” (p. 180). He
acknowledges that this is a maverick thesis. Many
historians/theologians including Richard Gutteridge,
Martin Stöhr and Jörgen Glenthoj are critical of the
(May 1934) Barmen declaration precisely because it
fails to directly address the “Jewish Question”. But
Lindsay maintains that from Barth’s perspective, his
emphasis on the one Word of God “implied not only the
rejection of all natural revelations but also a
critical challenge to both ecclesiastical and
political antisemitism” (p. 179).

Barth’s doctrine of election is also essential to
Lindsay’s thesis. By emphasizing the Jewishness of
Jesus and through Jesus the election of both Israel
and the Church as God’s chosen people, Barth
reinforced the necessary solidarity between Jews and
Christians. We cannot, Barth insisted in Church
Dogmatics (II/2), “call the Jews the ‘rejected’ and
the Church the ‘elected’ community. The object of
election is neither Israel for itself nor the Church
for itself, but both together in their unity.”
Lindsay is willing to admit that Barth’s portrayal of
Israel as “unbelieving,” “obdurate,” “disobedient,”
and a “vessel of dishonor” is “gloomy in the extreme”
(p. 219). Indeed it is. But isn’t it more than just
gloomy? Isn’t this anti-Judaic rhetoric and doesn’t
it therefore contradict his thesis? By Lindsay’s
reading, Barth’s theology is neither anti-Judaic nor
supersessionist because for Barth “the Jews remain the
original elect community, whose election is neither
abrogated nor suspended by their present resistance to
the gospel” (p. 222).
The central point of Covenanted Solidarity is that
Barth’s doctrine of revelation and election led him to
condemn Nazi racial policy toward Jews because Barth
equated it with “an attack upon the God of the gospel”
(p. 315). Even before 1935, when Barth was fired from
his professorship at the University of Bonn for
refusing to swear an oath of allegiance to Hitler and
returned to Switzerland, Lindsay insists he was
speaking out on behalf of Jewish-Christian solidarity
and in opposition to antisemitism. Unfortunately,
Lindsay must, time and again, qualify this contention
with comments like, “Certainly, Barth did not at this
time [June 1933] address himself to the plight of
non-Christian Jews, which was nothing less than a
regrettable omission” (p. 247). And, referring to
Barth’s lack of explicit protests against Nazi
antisemitism in 1934 Lindsay writes, “his stance can
only in retrospect–and to that extent unfairly–be
described as deficient” (p. 251). To bolster his
defense of Barth, Lindsay touts Barth’s work with the
Swiss Evangelical Society for Aid and other agencies
that provided “non-Aryans” with support. Barth served
on the society’s theological commission, which
declared in 1938, “The persecution of the Jews, and
with them the Christians of Jewish descent, is
becoming more horrible day by day . . . Rise up in the
power of the Holy Spirit [and] refrain from letting
Christendom be contaminated by Antisemitism” (p. 259).
In the same pamphlet, however, Lindsay notes that the
authors make “regrettable references to the Jews’
‘destructive influences’ and ‘parasitic existence'”
(p. 260). The reality was–and Lindsay should
acknowledge rather than rationalize these ambiguous
actions and words–that prior to Kristallnacht Barth
said very little explicitly about antisemitism and
when he did talk about Israel or the Jews he often
used degrading language.

Kristallnacht was a turning point for Barth. From
this time forward he began to specifically ground his
criticisms of the Nazi state on his opposition to the
Nazis’ exterminationist antisemitism. In December
1938 Barth described the physical and theological
attacks on Israel as an attempt “to strike a mortal
blow to the roots of the Church” (p. 264) and for
Advent 1938 Barth was one of the signatories of the
“Word of Reflection,” which declared that Christians
could not be indifferent to attacks on the Jews
because an attack on God’s chosen people was an attack
on Jesus Christ. During the war years Barth defended
the statement “salvation comes from the Jews” against
criticisms by Emil Brunner, who insisted on using the
past tense “came”. And finally, in the summer of 1944
Barth took his most concrete action on behalf of the
Jews when he was alerted to the fate of Hungarian Jews
and initiated a campaign to urge Swiss officials to
help stop the deportations.

Lindsay’s Covenanted Solidarity makes a significant
contribution to the debate over Karl Barth’s
theological and political interpretation of the
“Jewish Question”. In this volume he convincingly
challenges those who maintain that Barth’s doctrine of
Israel is nothing more than a contribution to the long
history of Christian anti-Judaism. Although he is
reluctant to address Barth’s anti-Judaic sentiments as
such, Lindsay must nevertheless be credited for his
sustained and convincing argument that Barth’s
political opposition to antisemitism was inextricably
intertwined with his firmly held belief in the unity
of Israel and the Church in God’s election of the Jew,
Jesus of Nazareth.
Matthew D. Hockenos (Skidmore College)

Dear Friends,
I am most grateful to my colleague, John Jay Hughes, for once
again undertaking to edit this issue of our Newsletter, which is
devoted to the still vibrant debate about Pius XII. This month a
major conference was held at Millersville University, Lancaster,
Pennsylvania, so we are glad to be able to supply a report on the
proceedings.
Contents:

1) Conference Report, XXII Annual Conference on the
Holocaust, Millersville University, Pennsylvania
2) Book reviews:

a) McInerny, Defamation of Pius XII
b) Lawler, Popes and Politics
c) Sanchez, Pius XII and the Holocaust

1) The 22nd Annual Holocaust Conference at Millersville

University in Lancaster/PA on April 14/15 was devoted this year to
“Pius XII and the Holocaust.” Almost all the pope’s critics were
present save John Cornwell, who according to reports avoids
academic venues. Well represented also were the pope’s
supporters. In his opening address, Professor emeritus of
Bridgeport University, Richard L. Rubenstein, while conceding
that our information was still incomplete, stated that Pius was
neither “Hitler’s Pope” nor personally anti-Semitic. Since his
office required him to put church interests ahead of personal
views, however, he inevitably regarded the elimination of Jews as
“a benefit.” Unaddressed was the question, why the pope
protested Nazi persecution, and worked through his nuncios to
save Jews when he could. In a somewhat disorganized paper
Michael Phayer repeated the charges in his book, “The Catholic
Church & the Holocaust.” Fr. John Pawlikowski ascribed the
Pope’s muted reaction to Hitler to fear, not of communism, but of
liberalism (of the continental European variety). In a session on
the Vatican archives John Jay Hughes sketched their history,
explained the practical difficulties delaying their opening (the need
to catalogue, with inadequate staff, 3 million pages for Pius XII
alone), and pleaded for mutual trust without which archival
research becomes not history but politically driven polemics. John
Conway argued that the failure of papal peace efforts in World
War I, the first major European war with major Catholic
participation on both sides, damaged the church’s credibility, thus
limiting Pius XII’s peace and rescue efforts in WW II. The
Catholic-Jewish study group, which broke up in acrimony in 2001,
was an attempt to mend fences. It foundered on the lack of a
clearly defined mission and the political agendas of some
members. Seymour Reich, Jewish coordinator of the group,
defended the Jewish members, while conceding the violation of
confidentiality by one of them which precipitated the breakup.

Keynote speaker on the second day was the resigned priest
and novelist,James Carroll. In a highly emotional speech he linked
today’s defenders of Pius XII with the defenders of Boston’s
Cardinal Law’s handling of sexually abusive clergy. Scholarly
discourse resumed with Stewart Stehlin’s description of the
negotiations for the Concordat of 1933. This was not a “pact with
Hitler” but a guarantee of church rights. The weight of evidence
was that without the treaty the position of the Catholic Church in
Hitler‚s Nazi Reich would have been even worse than it was.
José Sánchez summarized his analysis of arguments by the pope’s
critics and defenders in the book reviewed below. His plea that
partisans on both sides view all the evidence “in context” provoked
a question: did he believe that examining the whole record in
context would compel agreement with the pope’s defenders?
Sánchez replied in the affirmative, adding that his conviction was
the result of long study and reflection. Michael Feldkamp of
Berlin, speaking on “A future pope in Germany,” argued that
Pacelli’s German years (1917-29) disclosed a skilled and realistic
diplomat devoid of anti- Semitism, admiring the best in German
culture, and a consistent foe of Hitler. The charge that
Pacelli had sacrificed the Center Party to obtain the Concordat
rested on unsupported assertions in Heinrich Brüning’s memoirs
which are refuted by other contemporary evidence. Rabbi David
Dalin repeated the arguments in defense of Pius XII which
appeared in his “Weekly Standard” article of Feb. 26, 2001.
Sergio Minerbi criticized papal rescue efforts on the
basis of his personal experience in wartime Rome. Rabbi James
Rudin carefully analyzed the pope’s Christmas messages, pointing
out that Pius was specific when he wanted to be, e.g. about his
concern for POWs. The implied question: why were his references
to Jews non-specific? Rudin did not address the answer frequently
given: because Pius knew that any mention of “Jews” sent Hitler
into a frenzy, thus increasing the danger of deadly reprisals. Susan
Zuccotti repeated the charge in her most recent book: that
extensive rescue efforts for Italian Jews were unconnected with the
pope and unauthorized by him. Without repeating the arguments
in his book defending the pope, Ronald Rychlak, in “A
lawyer looks at history,” said that if the charges against Pius XII
ever reached a court of law, they would be thrown out for lack of
evidence. John Roth spoke, as a Protestant, in the breast-beating
mode of James Carroll. Fr. John Morley, the sole member of the
Catholic-Jewish study group present, pleaded for moderation,
sensitivity, and humility on the part of historians. In response to a
question about supposed Vatican approval of French anti- Semitic
legislation, Morley cited the Sept. 1941 report of the Vichy
Ambassador to the Holy See, Leon Bérard, that the Vatican had
“no quarrel with us” over the anti-Jewish statute. Unmentioned was
documentary evidence showing that Bérard’s report was
unauthorized and swiftly contradicted by the Vatican. The
omission of this correction was an example of the many loose ends
during the long and intensive conference.

Were any minds changed? Partisans on both sides
remained unswayed. Members of the public, who attended in
considerable numbers, may have been influenced in one direction
or the other, if they came with views unformed.
JJH
A parallel assessment of this Conference by a professional
journalist from the Pitttsburgh Post Gazette can be found on the
website: www.post-gazette.com/World/20020421pius0421p3asp2a) Ralph McInerny, The Defamation of Pius XII. South Bend,
Indiana: St. Augustine’s Press, 2001 xii + 211 pp, $19; ISBN
00-010831.
Ralph McInerny holds a chair in philosophy at the
University of Notre Dame. He is the author of almost 100 books in
philosophy and fiction,including dozens of mysteries. With candor
and clarity he states the “Thesis” of his book at the outset: “Since
the heroic efforts of Pius XII during World War II are a matter of
history and the attacks on him are risibly easy to dismiss, the
question becomes: Why is this good man being defamed? Who are
those attacking the man who behaved most nobly during the
darkest period of the twentieth century? Anti- Catholicism has
been called the anti-Semitism of the liberal. It has now become
the trademark of the Culture of Death.”
A point-by-point refutation of the charges against the
Pontiff is a Sisyphus task. One no sooner demolishes one count in
the indictment than three others are added. And proving a negative
is a philosophical impossibility, as McInerny knows. What he
does, therefore, is to set forth what Pius XII did, and compare it
with what his contemporaries did ÷ or failed to do. The book is
thus not so much a defense of the pope as an offense against his
critics. Written entirely from secondary sources, the book appears
to be directed not so much at professional historians, as to the
interested general reader. This impression is strengthened by the
frequent insertion into the text of journalistic sidebars illustrating
specific points. Because McInerny often cites Pinchas E. Lapide’s
1967 book, The Last Three Popes and the Jews, those who claim
that work is “discredited” (without offering any serious evidence
for their claim) will find it easy to dismiss this book. Especially
interesting, because still little known, are the sections
describing the response of Jews outside Europe, especially those in
the United States, to the suffering of their co-religionists. The
Jewish Agency in Palestine focused entirely on the Zionist aim of a
Jewish state and “rarely discussed the Jews of occupied Europe
during 1940 and 1941… Apart from weak support for illegal
immigration [legally there were quotas] the Agency did nothing for
them.” Jewish leaders in the United States reacted to reports
reaching them from October 1941 onward about the Nazi slaughter
of Jews with skepticism or disbelief. When these reports were
confirmed by the State Department on November 24, 1942, “the
American Zionist leadership campaigned against those Jews who
were trying to aid the stricken. American Jews were told by the
State Department that sending parcels to Poland was not in the
interest of the Allies, and [the prominent New York rabbi] Dr.
Stephen Wise said, ŒWe must stop for the good of England.'”
Refusing to blame the victims, McInerny narrates this
record soberly, helping the reader to understand why a policy
which today seems shameful was understandable in the
circumstances of the time. The unspoken question is clear: why is
Pius XII judged by a different standard? The book will be
welcomed by those convinced that the attacks on Pius
XII are unjust. It may influence the undecided. It will be
dismissed, however, (if read at all) by those who are convinced
that the Pontiff is guilty as charged. Their conviction is rooted not
so much in history as in ideology. Rejecting the claim of the
Catholic Church to hold a divine commission to teach the truth,
they cherish any evidence that during the Holocaust the Church’s
principal spokesman failed a crucial moral test.
McInerny contends that what drives the increasingly shrill
onslaught on Pius XII is what Pope John Paul II calls “the Culture
of Death:” the ideology which considers abortion and euthanasia to
be major advances in humankind’s upward march and hence sacred
rights. Motives are difficult to prove. Those (like this reviewer)
who accept the Catholic Church’s condemnation of these attacks
on life’s beginning and end will find McInerny’s ascription of
motive plausible. Few fair minded people, however, will reject his
parallel contention: “Early defamers of Pius XII were content to
distort the history of what he had actually done for Jews during
World War II. But as the attacks continued, it was clear that
authors were after bigger game. They were after the papacy as
such. They were after the Church.” They still are ÷ today more
than ever.
JJH
2b) Justus George Lawler, Popes and Politics: Reform,
Resentment and the Holocaust. Continuum. 252p $24.95 ISBN
0826413854
In Popes and Politics Lawler has written two books. His first
four chapters analyze recent works about Pope Pius XII and the
Holocaust. His final three chapters address issues of church
renewal and reform. So massive has been the devastation inflicted
on Pius XII by Rolf Hochhuth’s pseudo-historical drama, The
Deputy (1963), that the praise heaped upon the pontiff before 1963
by Jews and Gentiles alike for his wartime rescue efforts is now
largely forgotten. Hochhuth’s “third-rate literary effort,” as Lawler
calls it, did more than besmirch the reputation of a man widely
acknowledged at his death to have been a leader of towering moral
stature. It defined the terms of all subsequent debate. “What is
asked of Pius,” Lawler writes, “is not a deed which would achieve
the cessation of the Jewish slaughter, but merely a statement, a
proclamation, a word.”
Overlooked in the strife of tongues which Hochhuth unleashed
are two incontrovertible facts. First, the pope himself was
convinced that he had spoken clearly, not only in papal allocutions
but through his personally directed radio station and newspaper.
He said exactly what he thought would save lives, and carefully
avoided anything which could cause more deaths. Moreover, the
pope’s contemporaries on all sides heard and understood the pope’s
words clearly, even if six decades later critics living comfortably
“in the precincts of somnolent libraries at claustral universities
with their snug professorial digs” cannot. And overlooked, second,
is what Lawler calls “the fatuity of mere Œspeaking out’ when
action was called for.”
Lawler criticizes the pope’s defenders (“ideological
consecrators”) and excoriates his critics (“ideological
denigrators”). Of the former (Ralph McInerny and Margherita
Marchione) he is dismissive. They “proffer testimony to the
righteousness of their viewpoint rather than exposition or argument
to support that viewpoint.” About the denigrators he is
devastating. In great detail, and with biting sarcasm reminiscent of
Jonathan Swift, Lawler analyzes the anti-papal books of John
Cornwell, James Carroll, Michael Phayer, and Susan Zuccotti. He
finds in their books an “omnipresent papaphobia …the startling
phenomenon of slanted and bogus scholarship where one
might least expect it … among the acknowledged professional
exponents of candor, honesty, and rectitude.”
He shows Zuccotti constructing a “tissue of suppositions
[which] displays an astonishing reliance on unverified and
unverifiable assumptions,” and cites examples of her “doctoring of
facts.” In her 1993 book, “The Holocaust, the French, and the
Jews,” Zuccotti excused the French and others for inactivity in the
face of Nazi atrocities because “during the war [the Holocaust] was
almost inconceivable.” In “Under His Very Windows,” by
contrast, Zuccotti gives “a vitriolic description of the allegedly
precise knowledge [of the Holocaust], grasped early in the war
years and conveyed to his emissaries by the detached and
indifferent figure of the pope frigidly gazing down at the
swelling ranks of the doomed Œunder his very windows.'”
In devastating detail Lawler shows how both Zuccotti and
Phayer “distort facts to support personal prejudice.” A case in
point: Phayer writes that Pius failed to condemn the German
bombing of England during 1940 and 1941, but then spoke out
against the bombing of civilians when the Allies gained aerial
superiority.” In fact, the pope repeatedly condemned the bombing
of civilian centers, starting in 1939, less than a week after the Nazi
ten-day bombing of Warsaw. He continued these
condemnations later, when Allied planes devastated German cities.
Allied leaders paid as little attention to these protests as the Nazis
had earlier in the war. “Might not a similar fate have met any
repeated denunciations of what led to the Holocaust?” Lawler asks
rhetorically.
Lawler’s indictment of Carroll and Wills is even more severe.
Wills’ “Papal Sin” “is not distinguished by any discernible narrative
sequence or development, save for its leitmotiv of papal sin and
deception. And it is as jumbled thematically as it is
chronologically.” Lawler charges Wills with “deliberate
mistranslation of texts … textual truncation and mutilation” and
“authorial fabrication, in short, a hoax.” And Carroll is worse. His
“Constantine’s Sword” displays “an author whose cutting edge is so
severely blunted by self-indulgent effusions” that he is unable “to
envision any phenomenon, social, cultural, or religious outside the
constricted ambit of its impingement on matters related almost
exclusively to him and his.”
Lawler’s final chapters, on church renewal and reform, reject
both the nostalgia of the right, and the experimental restlessness of
the left. Too original to wear any label, Lawler comes closest to
the position of the extreme center once claimed by the Belgian
Cardinal Suenens. “What will count”, he says in a quotation from
Bernard Lonergan which prefaces the book, “is a perhaps not
numerous center, big enough to be at home in both the old and the
new, painstaking enough to work out one by one the transitions to
be made, strong enough to refuse half-measures and insist on
complete solutions even though it has to wait.”
The insistence on complete solutions and the willingness to
wait are equally important, in Lawler’s view. Little is achieved by
compromisers or by the impatient. As examples of reformers who
took the long view Lawler repeatedly cites Newman and, on the
final page, Yves Congar. “Cardinal Congar had faith in history and
faith in the power of the spirit ultimately to reform the distortions
and errors which he saw about him.” Censured and suppressed
before the Council, Congar’s writings are “bearing now in these
more propitious times ÷ completely unforeseeable five decades
ago ÷ the richest and most lasting fruit. Paul VI and John Paul II
have stated publicly that the work of Congar had nurtured their
own spirit and instructed them in the ways of religious renewal. It
is no small thing to be a teacher of popes.”
Lawler’s original book stretches the mind and, in its final
chapters, the imagination. It deserves a wide readership.
JJH
2c) Pius XII and the Holocaust: Understanding the Controversy.
By José M. Sánchez. Catholic Univ. of America: Washington,
2002. ISBN 0-8132-1081-X. ix + 197 pp. Cloth $39.95; paper
19.95.
The sub-title is all-important. Sánchez, professor of modern
European history at St. Louis University, sets out not to offer new
evidence but to analyze the existing evidence and its interpretation
by others. He succeeds admirably.
Text, endnotes, and bibliography show impressive familiarity
with the sources and the already enormous and steadily expanding
secondary literature. In considerable detail Sanchez tells the
reader what Pius XII said, personally and through the Vatican
press and radio; and what he did, personally and through others.
He portrays the pope’s personality: “mild and shy, not a fighter … a
trained scholar, he approached problems with the belief that many
scholars have: that common folk read encyclicals and statements
as carefully as scholars do, and that they are capable of discerning
meanings that appear to be hidden.”
With the meticulous care characteristic of his subject Sánchez
examines in turn each of the alleged motives for the pope’s actions:
anti-Semitism, concern for the security of the Vatican and the city
of Rome, personal fear of capture and imprisonment, the need to
protect German Catholics, adherence to the caution traditional in
Vatican diplomacy, fear of Communism, the desire to mediate
peace, belief that stronger and more explicit protests would make
things worse.
Sánchez’s conclusions: Pius XII was no anti-Semite; his concern
for the security of Rome and the Vatican was never a major factor,
though his concern for German Catholics was; his training in
Vatican diplomatic caution did not prevent his serving as a conduit
for secret talks between German dissidents and the British early in
the war; and the claim that he feared Communism more than
Nazism “lacks substance.”
The Pope “did not want to create a crisis of conscience for
German Catholics [who like] common folk everywhere, would not
be able to defy an omnipotent totalitarian state.” He certainly
wanted to mediate peace. Most importantly, he did not want to
make things worse. … He believed that private diplomacy and
private action would save more lives than public protest.” To
those who ask how could anything be worse than
Hitler’s determination to kill all Jews, Sánchez responds that
“during the war few people outside the Nazi hierarchy knew that
the Germans intended to kill ALL of the Jews.”
Sánchez questions the common assumption that both the Pope’s
critics and his defenders are extremists. “In fact, most of the Pope’s
critics tend to extremism, while defenders tend toward
moderation.” The reason? The critics argue that strong papal
action would have diminished or even averted the Holocaust,
“while defenders of the Pope argue more convincingly that a strong
papal protest would have had little effect upon the Nazi machine
of destruction.”
Readers who know little of the controversy would do well to
start their investigation with this book. It would be an invaluable
textbook for advanced undergraduates, or starting graduate
students, teaching them that judgments about historical causality
and events cannot be made without close attention to chronology,
context, and critical evaluation of the arguments even of those
considered authorities in their field.
JJH
The June issue of this Newsletter is very kindly being edited by
Professor Thomas Hockenos of Skidmore College, Saratoga
Springs, New York.
The July-August issue will, as usual be a joint one, and will appear
in late July.
Subscription to this Newsletter is open to all interested scholars in
contemporary church history, without charge, but on submission of
a request to me personally, along with a postal address, to
jconway@interchange.ubc.ca
Your comments on any aspect of the contents will be welcomed.
If you have some comment which you wish to share with all subscribers,
(approximately 250), then use the return address:
kirzeit-l@interchange.ubc.ca
All previous issues are now to be found, in reverse chronological
order, on the website noted below.
Best wishes to you all
John Conway

Dear Friends,
Contents:

1) Book reviews

a) T.Dudley-Smith, John Stott, Vol .2.
b) B.Christophers, Positioning the Missionary
c) E.Wolgast, Die Wahnehmung des Dritten Reiches

2) Book notes: Besier and Scheuch, Die neue Inquisitoren

3) Journal articles:
1) Timothy Dudley-Smith, John Stott. A Global Ministry. A
biography. The Later years. Downers Grove, Illinois:
InterVarsity Press, 2000. 538 pp
John Stott is now in his 80s, and is still active as a
leading figure in British Evangelicalism. Timothy
Dudley-Smith’s massive two volume biography will therefore
probably require at least a concluding Epilogue. In the
meantime, this second volume describes Stott’s career during
the four decades from 1960 onwards, and is rightly entitled „A
Global Ministry”‘. This is the record of how Stott’s preaching
and teaching, which had established his reputation at All Souls
Church, Langham Place in central London, came to be shared
around the world, primarily in English-speaking communities.
As in Volume 1, (reviewed in this Newsletter, December
2001), Dudley-Smith is at pains to avoid a hagiographic tone.
Stott’s achievements are allowed to speak for themselves, and
fortunately he maintained an extensive paper trail, has an
excellent memory and a most capable secretarial staff – all of
which helped his biographer immensely. But once again
Dudley-Smith’s close friendship with his subject possibly
prevents him from standing back for a more critical assessment
of all this global activity, or from investigating more intensely
the long-term impact of Stott’s remarkably consistent
missionary endeavours. But this volume presents a convincing
case that Stott made a decisive contribution to the building up
of the Evangelical community around the world, despite the
alarming spread of secularism in so many societies.
In 1960 Stott had already had ten very successful years
in central London, working with and training a whole
succession of curates and assistants. Dudley-Smith first tackles
the question of why Stott was never given preferment in the
Church of England, or selected as a bishop. He believes the
ecclesiastical hierarchy was still too much in the hands of the
Anglo-Catholic wing of the Church, and cites the Archbishop
of Canterbury, Michael Ramsay, as one of those most
implacably opposed to evangelicals. But there was also, as
Dudley-Smith admits, the issue of Stott’s seeming inflexibility,
and the difficulties he would undoubtedly have faced in
dealing with priests of other persuasions. Certainly, given the
increasing demands made on Stott’s services, particularly
overseas, these would have been hard to combine with
diocesan responsibilities. So Stott never became a bishop.
From the 1960s onwards, Stott’s frequent journeys to
conduct missions abroad, especially for the International
Fellowship of Evangelical Students, repeated the earlier pattern
developed in Britain. His addresses were thoughtful, biblical,
earnest and often successful appeals to the young to dedicate
their lives to Christ. Stott handed on the tradition he himself
had learnt in the 1930s, and now gained a world-wide
audience. But he came to see that such lengthy absences from
his parish required changes at home, and so persuaded All
Souls to appoint a Vicar to carry the pastoral load. In 1975,
after a quarter of a century, Stott retired as Rector, and so was
able to devote himself more fully and effectively to this global
ministry. Much of Dudley-Smith’s account reads like a
travelogue, as Stott journeys from mission to conference in one
part of the world or another.
It says something for the theological conservatism of
Evangelicalism that Stott and his confraternity, including Billy
Graham in the United States, were only marginally touched by
the traumatic upheavals of the 1960s and 1970s, especially
among the student generations. In contrast to the more liberal
supporters of the World Council of Churches, whose
endeavours became noticeably more focused on the social and
political plight of the poor and oppressed, Evangelicals like
Stott remained convinced that Scripture, and the need for
personal conversion to Christ, was and is their fixed
point. Political change, let alone political revolution, was a
dangerous diversion. Equally the World Council’s attempts to
seek dialogue with members of other faiths seemed to be an
ecumenical trend, which could lead to a regrettable syncretistic
mish-mash, which Evangelicals could only condemn. Their
understanding of world mission remained traditional, again
looking back to the good old days of the late nineteenth century
ambition to undertake „the evangelization of the world in this
generatiom”.
In the 1970s a considerable effort was made to give this
task a new institutional shape at the 1974 Lausanne
Conference. Although dominated by the American
Evangelicals, this conference did lead to an awareness that
evangelicals needed to find a better synthesis between personal
evangelism and social action. There was also a need to
recognize how much the previous patterns of evangelization
had been shaped as much by culture as by biblical
understanding. Stott‚s horizons were being slowly and
thoughtfully extended.
Lausanne was supposed to lay the groundwork to
challenge the World Council of Churches‚alleged promotion of
a sort of secular salvation, in the form of a political and social
liberation movement, and a consequent downplaying of
traditional evangelism. In fact, the evangelicals never gained
sufficient cohesion to organize any such rival structure.
Neither Stott nor Billy Graham wanted to be involved in such
organizational tasks. But whereas liberals agonized over the
increasing exploitation of the world’s poor and oppressed,
evangelicals dedicated themselves to their well-known
commitment to personal salvation. At the same time, they were
increasingly obliged to consider how best a missionary from
one culture can take a message from another to a people who
live in a third.
To undertake such a ministry of preaching and
teaching, study and writing, direct evangelism and strategic
evangelistic planning, year after year, required, to say the least,
durability. Billy Graham once wrote in admiration of all Stott
was doing, and pleaded as his own excuse for not competing
that he had a wife, five children, five in-laws and 15
grandchildren. As a bachelor, Stott had no such ties, but his
life-style was nonetheless characterized by diligence,
discipline, punctuality and orderliness. A certain formality
prevailed. His younger assistants were not encouraged to take
liberties, and eventually settled on addressing him as „Uncle
John”. His only relaxation, to be passionately pursued
whenever time allowed, was bird-watching.
Over the years, Stott maintained the hectic pace of this
global ministry. Invitations to address far-distant assemblies
flowed in constantly, as did importunate requests to add still
more engagements at each stopover. But Dudley-Smith tells us
little of what Stott actually said. The emphasis is on the
messenger, rather than on the substance of the message, on the
context not the content, which is a pity. Dudley-Smith fails to
show how Stott’s thought about the proclamation of the Gospel
evolved during these decades. He does acknowledge that in
later years, Stott’s biblical, orthodox, reasoned vision came to
be challenged even in evangelical ranks. On the one side,
there were those who sought a more direct commitment to
practical social action; on the other, many evangelicals were
attracted to a more intense spiritual experience through the
charismatic movement, which Stott had found to be
unbalanced and unbiblical. He continued to plead for standing
firm against the prevailing winds of fashion, and refused to
compromise with the allurements of novelty. To be sure, this
demanding programme of international tours fulfilled Stott‚s
inner needs, when he saw ministry to the rising generation of
Third World pastors, and building bridges amongst Christians
around the globe, as his prime calling.
David Edwards, a prominent liberal church historian,
described John Stott as „the most influential clergyman of the
Church of England in the twentieth century, apart from
Archbishop William Temple.” Timothy Dudley-Smith’s
appreciative,. if lengthy, portrait of the man and his
accomplishments goes far to substantiate this claim.
JSC
1b) Brett Christophers, Positioning the Missionary. John
Booth Good and the Confluence of Cultures in
Nineteenth-Century British Columbia. Vancouver: UBC Press
1998. 200 pp.
Brett Christophers‚ account of the life and times of an
Anglican missionary in the wilds of British Columbia a
hundred and fifty years ago is an excellent case study in the
history of cross-cultural contacts and conflicts. Christophers is
well aware of the problems of this genre of writing. For one
thing, all surviving literary records are from one side only; it
is virtually impossible to do more than speculate about the
motives and responses of the native Indians. Secondly,
missionary records are particularly weighted, not merely
because their authors knew they would likely be used, after
suitable editing, for fund-raising purposes at home in England.
But even more because the theological frame of mind of these
men, consciously or unconsciously, interpreted events through
a special religious prism, not shared by many readers today.
Most such narratives are now dismissed as being the record of
British cultural colonialism, or as attempts to justify the white
man‚s racial superiority over lesser breeds.
Christophers, however, is at pains in this short book to
dispute such a simplistic, or as he sees it, reductionist stance.
He shows that Rev. John Good, in taking up his mission to the
Indian people in the canyon of the Fraser River, was part of a
special Anglican world-wide movement, which drew its
inspiration from St. Paul and St. Augustine. Its aim was not
subjugation of the native peoples, but transformation. These
missionaries believed in the redemptive power and grace of
their message, which would lead the heathen out of
superstition and darkness, and make them equal to all other
Christians in the faith. To be sure this faith was to be lived
within the parameters of nineteenth-century English manners
and morality. Like other missionaries, Good aimed to establish
settled pastoral and self-supporting communities, linked by a
common devotion to the church. This was all part of that great
destiny which had brought the Gospel to such far-distant
places, where its champions were filled with the anticipatory
hope that the Christian message would be accepted by all.
As such, Anglican thinking did not concur with the dominant
white settlers‚ ideas about racial differences and the imperial
imperative.
This imagery clashed violently with the actual events
on the ground. The Fraser Canyon was the only access route
from British Columbia‚s coast to the remote gold fields in the
interior. Thousands of itinerant white miners passed through
with scant regard for the natives, and usually with explicitly
racist attitudes. Their behaviour and total disdain for moral
decencies made them the worst examples of the white man’s
so-called civilization. It was hardly surprising that the native
Indians were quick to point out the discrepancy. The
missionaries were therefore obliged to defend the white man’s
religion, despite the conduct of their fellows. Anglicans of
this period were also increasingly conscious of the earlier
crimes committed against colonial peoples. They saw
themselves as expiating these sins by repairing the damage in
these newer mission fields. Theirs was far from a jingoistic
racism.
To carry out these aims, Anglican strategy called for the
replication of the familiar English parish structure with a
resident priest, whose influence would serve to create the basis
of a morally harmonious society. But the geography of British
Columbia was too vast; the terrain too formidable; the
missionaries were too few; the Indians were too reticent and
their languages too complex; the viability of these settlements
too dubious. The mobility of the white population, especially
miners, prevented any lasting impact on such a recalcitrant
audience. The migratory habits of the natives also hindered the
plans for a sedentary agricultural life-style. And the recurrent
clashes between the whites and natives placed the missionary
in a constant dilemma.
Despite all these obstacles, when John Good
established St. Paul’s Mission in the village of Lytton, he
succeeded in attracting a considerable following amongst the
local Indians. Christophers rightly does not attempt to elucidate
the natives‚ motives, but infers that Good’s presence was seen
as helpful at a time when the Fraser Canyon became the scene
of highly disruptive railway construction and settlers‚
incursions. Good was torn between a desire to assist his
charges and an unwillingness to draw in recruits to his church
for the wrong, i.e. non-spiritual reasons. In the event he proved
to be an impotent advocate. The British Coluimbia authorities
were totally on the side of the settlers, and actively sought to
dispossess the natives. The policy of establishing reserves left
the Lytton bands with minimal, infertile land without adequate
water or fishing access. The Church failed them, and soon
enough they deserted the Mission.
In addition, Good and his bishop made their acceptance
more difficult by rejecting the existing habit of polygyny, and
insisting that baptism could only be conferred on those natives
who were monogamous. Such a ruling caused a moral crisis
amongst those who were anxious to follow the Christian path
but not to cast aside their multiple partners. It was a cruel
dilemma, here as elsewhere. The widely-held view that
missionaries played a cushioning role between natives and
settlers is therefore only partially true. In fact, Good’s mission
in Lytton, as here described, demonstrated most of the
weaknesses of Anglican strategy. The cultural and linguistic
barriers were too immense, and the intrusive impact of the
settler society too great, for any church agency to provide an
effective defence of native interests. Christophers‚ account is
well-researched, and in this regard persuasive.
JSC
1c) Eike Wolgast, Die Wahrnehmung des Dritten Reiches
in den unmittelbaren Nachkriegszeit (1945/1946).
Heidelberg: Universitätsverlag C.Winter. 2001. 360pp
How, in the immediate post-war years, did the
surviving leaders of Germany’s churches and universities, and
subsequently of the re-established political parties, come to
terms with their Nazi past? This is the question capably
researched and examined in Eike Wolgast’s doctoral
dissertation from Heidelberg’s Department of History. The
widespread failure to recognize the enormity of Nazi crimes
has often been noted. Reasons such as entrenched nationalism
and anti-Semitism, or alternately a psychological „inability to
mourn”, have been put forward as a general explanation. But
Eike Wolgast examines the contemporary statements made by
the leaders of these institutions to demonstrate the various
strands of opinion, and thereby discloses a suitably
differentiated picture.
In the ruins of defeat, the churches were unique in
emerging with their structures and leading elites virtually
intact. As such, they were inevitably drawn to fill the role of
being spokesmen for their fellow countrymen, now deprived of
any political representation and impacted on by the exigencies
of the military occupation. But, while these churchmen could
claim to identify with their parishioners, their credibility was in
question. As Konrad Adenauer pointed out in February 1946,
the Catholic bishops had not resisted the Nazi government.
They had even supported it. „Much might have been achieved
if the bishops had taken a stand on a particular occasion from
their pulpits against the misdeeds of the regime. But this did
not happen. If the bishops had been taken off to concentration
camps, this would only have done good. But it didn’t happen,
and therefore they should be silent.”
How to resolve this dilemma? The first issue was to
come to terms with the institution’s own behaviour. The
Catholic bishops, for example, as early as August 1945, issued
a pastoral letter, justifying their conduct. They depicted
Catholics as the victims of Nazi excesses, saw the 1933
Concordat as a necessary attempt to preserve legally binding
arrangements and praised their parishioners for their loyalty to
the Church and its doctrines. No mention at all was made of
the mass murder of the Jews, or of the crimes committed
against other nations during Germany’s aggressive war. The
bishops were also at pains to avoid any suggestion of collective
guilt for all Germans. The whole tone owed much to a similar
pronouncement made in Rome in June by Pope Pius XII, who
also praised German Catholics and avoided any wholesale
condemnation. In the short run, these pronouncements served
to preserve the Catholics‚ sense of patriotism and to dispel the
Nazi charges of disloyalty to the nation. But they also
encouraged a convenient amnesia about the past. In the long
run they were to prove an embarrassment. Adenauer’s
proposed silence would have been better.
For their part, the Protestants were more aware that
Germany, and their churches, were on trial. As a result, the
surviving Confessing Church leaders, who had staunchly
resisted the Nazi encroachments on the churches‚ preserves,
were prepared, in October 1945, to issue the well-known
Stuttgart Declaration of Guilt. Its strongest wording, however,
which condemned Germany’s external aggressions, was only
inserted after pressure from Pastor Martin Niemöller who had
endured seven years in a concentration camp. Even so, this
statement aroused fierce opposition within the ranks of the
Evangelical Church. Its leaders were accused of selling-out to
Germany’s enemies and the Allied Military occupation. Few
recognized that this admission of guilt, though couched in very
general terms, did have the result of enabling the German
Protestants to be received back into the wider ecumenical
fellowship, and eventually into the World Council of Churches.
But, even such leading figures as the senior bishop
Wurm of Württemberg could publicly accuse Germany‚s new
rulers of engaging in a campaign to starve Germans to death,
comparable to or worse than Hitler‚s misdeeds. In the Stuttgart
Declaration and similar statements, Germany’s victims were
never mentioned. It is clear that none of these clerics had the
imagination or the sensitivity to rise above a preoccupation
with their own alleged sufferings. They too, like the Catholics,
were only too ready to avoid facing the concrete details of the
past – particularly their own past. Instead they readily likened
the rise of Nazism and its ill-fated conduct of affairs, to the
onslaught of a demonic force which had seized power and
misled the people. The Church too had been misled into
giving support to this chimera of a triumphal Germany based
on racism, which could be seen as the culmination of the
dangerous secularization process of the previous 150 years.
Only by upholding the truth of the Christian gospel had these
satanic tempters been resisted. After their overthrow, the way
was now open for a re-Christianization of the nation.
This mystification of the past had an obvious
exculpatory function, and did little to enable church people to
come to terms with the nation’s past. By seeking to lay the
blame on Hitler personally, or at most on a small handful of his
criminal associates, such explanations fitted in well with these
church leaders‚ conservative and nationalist views. Thus
Hitler‚s rise could be blamed principally on the Treaty of
Versailles, or on the foreign-induced Depression, or on the
communist or even the Jewish threat. Such themes resounded
all too frequently in 1945 and 1946. Naturally this led to a
virtually unanimous and strident repudiation of the Allies‚
denazification attempts. Even Martin Niemöller showed his
nationalistic colours in his intemperate outbursts against Allied
policy. Other clergy intervened frequently for convicted war
criminals, again in defence of the national honour. This
one-sided pleading on behalf of Nazi activists, rather than on
behalf of their victims or the persecuted, remains one of the
most notable and reprehensible features of the churches‚
post-war stance.
Did the leaders of the universities do any better in
facing the facts? Wolgast rightly points out that virtually all
the professors who survived the war had been at least passive
non-resisters to the Nazification of their institutions. Their
speeches on the re-opening of the universities in late 1945 had
therefore to be particularly circumspect. Virtually all
concentrated on the future. Their students who had served in
Hitler’s armies were now to be excused as having been filled
with idealism but then misled. National Socialism was treated
in general, but now pejorative, terms, as a betrayal of
Germany’s enlightenment traditions, and as the expression of a
fanatical barbarism unworthy of the nation’s history. Rarely
were the actual Nazi crimes mentioned. Even more rarely was
the universities‚ obligation outlined to engage in any public
process of information, clarification and analysis about the
Nazi past. In such a climate, the failure of the historians to
take up such a task was noteworthy. It was left to isolated and
often heavily criticized individuals like Karl Jaspers to
undertake to examine the moral dimensions of Germany‚s fate,
or like Friedrich Meinecke, belatedly, to seek for the roots of
the „German Catastrophe”.
The tone of lamentation in these speeches was echoed
in the memorial services held to honour those who had „fallen”
– exclusively German soldiers, but not their victims – which
painfully avoided examining the cause for which these young
men had so wantonly died. At the same time, the universities
were seen to have been at fault for failing to teach their
students a better set of values than those so stridently
propagated by the Nazis. But now a new beginning had to be
made, and for the most part this meant a return to the rational
goals and ideals of Goethe and Schiller, Kant and Humboldt.
The emphasis on such a legacy was preferable to any critical
examination of the universities‚ sinister participation in the
Nazi debacle or support for its perverted ideology.
Only in the ranks of the newly-established political
parties was a more critical tone to be heard. These were
necessarily formed from outspoken opponents of the previous
regime. Yet even here, with the exception of the members of
the Communist Party in the Soviet Zone of occupation, the
necessity of gaining popular support among the population led
to a toning down of any radical examination of the Nazi past.
Instead, politicians, clergymen and professors alike came to
give credence to the idea that the German people had been the
first victims of racial fanaticism. Conservative and nationalist
overtones were still heard, and the spirit of the „true” Germany
could be contrasted with the regrettable and jacobinical
mobilization of the masses under Hitler and Goebbels. From
such a perspective it was easy to absolve one’s own group from
guilt. All became adept in looking elsewhere for the source of
Germany’s misfortunes and Nazi successes. It was only in later
years that Germany’s elites began the demanding and still
unfinished task of coming to terms with this horrendous
legacy
Wolgast’s indictment, following the lead already given
by G.Besier, M.Greschat and C.Vollnhals, is well-deserved,
and yet, nonetheless, serves to show that in the last fifty years,
a remarkable ideological recuperation has taken place. For that
we can all be grateful.
JSC
2) Book notes: ed. G.Besier and Erwin K.Scheuch, Die neuen
Inquisitoren. Religionsfreiheit und Glaubensneid, 2 Vols.
Zurich: Edition Interform 1999. 535 and 495 pp
These two volumes are a collection of essays on the subject of
the threats to religious freedom, especially in Germany, and
particularly from the activities of the State and the established
churches. Written from a sociological point of view and with
considerable indignation, these are informative about the
controversies in which minority religious groups are involved.
3) Journal articles: Michael Kellogg, Putting Old Wine into
New Bottles.The East German Protestant Church’s desire to
reform State Socialism, 1989-90 in Journal of Church and
State, Autumn 2001, Vol. 43, no.4, pp.747-72.
A highly critical analysis of the main East German Protestant
Church newspaper Die Kirche and of the views of its editor
Gerhard Thomas during the pivotal years 1989 and
1990.Kellogg shows how the editor’s opinions, in seeking to
reform the existing Socialist regime, were increasingly out of
touch with the majority of the population. This lost cause is
here skillfully dissected.
With best wishes for a blessed Easter season
John S.Conway
jconway@interchange.ubc.ca

Dear Friends,

To my great delight but also regret, I find that there are so many
new books appearing in our field of interest that there is simply
no room to do all of them justice. Some of these, therefore, have
to be merely mentioned in Book Notes. I hope this will at least
alert those interested in these publications, so that they can
follow up accordingly

Contents:
1) Book reviews: a) Religion and Public Life in Canada
b) W.Callahan, The Catholic Church in Spain
1875-1988
c) Donald Gray, Percy Dearmer

2) Book notes: a) Christian Hanke, Die Deutschlandpolitik der
Evangelischen Kirche in Deutschland von 1945 bis 1990.
b) Emma Klein, The Battle for Auschwitz. Catholic-Jewish
relations under strain.

1a) Review of: Religion and Public Life in Canada: Historical
and Comparative Perspectives, edited by Marguerite Van Die,
Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2001.

The status and functions of religion in Canadian public life
have become increasingly problematic in recent decades. The
expectations that Canada would follow the projections of
modernization and secularization theory and the strict
separationist jurisprudence that temporarily came to guide
American church-state relations proved to be premature, or
perhaps wrong — although the ‘old-line’ churches have recessed
to the periphery and Catholicism has nearly disappeared from
public life in the province of Quebec. Religion remains
politically problematic at nearly all levels of government across
Canada, as the expected ‘solution’ of privatization has proved
politically elusive, while religious elites protest their exclusion
from public affairs. This excellent symposium, mainly
representing papers presented to a conference on Religion and
Politics in Canada held at Queen’s University, Ontario, 13-15
May, 1999, goes a long way to bring new historical and
sociological understanding to the present dilemmas and
opportunities which confront the role of religion in Canadian
public life.
The diverse subjects addressed by the authors can be but
briefly noted. Four authors examine aspects of public religious
functions in the wake of mid-nineteenth century Canadian
disestablishment of Anglicanism: William Westfall elucidates
the ways in which Anglicanism reconstituted powerful public
functions at private sites, in university education and
imperial churches; T. W. Acheson portrays the dominant role of
evangelicals in Southern New Brunswick as they shaped
education and moral reform through the years 1839-1880; Brian
Clarke analyzes the diffuse public expressions of religion in
Protestant Toronto in the last two decades of the nineteenth
century, mainly in celebrations of religious holidays and
parades. The next section surveys contested and
ambiguous public functions of religion: J. R. Miller describes
the presently contentious issue of the role of the state and the
churches in Indian residential schools; Alvyn Austin explores the
rich legacy of scholars and diplomats generated by Canada’s
China missions; and Mark Noll compares political functions of
religion in Mexico, the United States and Canada, contrasting
the respective religious responses to civil wars and reviewing
contemporary religious sampling data. A third section addresses
the sphere claimed by religiously engaged women in the
state: Sharon Anne Cook charts the leadership of evangelical
women in the war against tobacco, 1874-1900; and Mary
Kinnear presents case studies of the religious dimension of six
women who played prominent political roles in the post-suffrage
era. Case studies of two male politicians with strong religious
commitments follow: Eleanor J. Stebner traces the early
religious evolution of Stanley Knowles who emerged as a
leader of Canada’s social democratic party, the Co-operative
Commonwealth Federation; while David Marshall analyzes the
Protestant fundamentalism, religious broadcasting and politics
of Premier Ernest C. Manning of Alberta. Three authors then
investigate central features of recent Canadian politics and
religion: David Seljak studies the influential role of the liberal
Dominican journal, Maintenant, in the attempt to fashion a new
public role for Catholicism in Quebec’s ‘quiet revolution;’ R. D.
Gidney and W. P. J. Millar assess the Christian recessional in
Ontario’s public schools since the 1950s; and Don Page
gives testimony to the emergence of a new political voice and
role by Canadian religious conservatives active in the Public
Service Christian Fellowship, which was centered in Ottawa.
Finally, three chapters are devoted to the voices of ‘religious
outsiders:’ Gerald Chultinsky presents case studies of the social
voice of leading reform rabbis in Canada; Harold Jantz surveys
the broadening domestic and international social vision of
Canadian Mennonites; and Hugh Johnston presents the
struggle of Canadian Sikhism with secular authority.
The listing of content suggests the diversity of topics
included in this book; but what evaluative generalizations can be
drawn? Reviewers of symposia perhaps eagerly look for
unevenness in quality to facilitate hammering weak
contributions and lauding the better ones. In this book,
however, such a strategy fails; the chapters never fall below very
good, and most are excellent. Three qualities contribute to the
exceptional nature of this symposium: many authors have
conducted extensive new historical research on
centrally-important topics and their chapters represent fresh,
summary findings of much larger studies; a good number
of the contributors, perhaps in part a result of the deft hand of
the editor, find theoretical guidance and unity in drawing from,
and testing, the rich sociological conceptualizations of José
Casanova’s Public Religions in the Modern World (Chicago:
University of Chicago Press, 1994); and finally, the authors
nearly all exhibit an empathetic engagement in studying and
re-thinking the public functions of religion in Canada.
This collective effort, along with an earlier companion
volume: Rethinking Church, State, and Modernity, David Lyons
and Marguerite Van Die, eds., (Toronto: University of Toronto
Press, 2000), will appeal widely to academics and students in
history, sociology, religious and women’s studies; it would be
salutary if politicians and lawyers also took note, as the nature of
Canadian pluralism is presently being renegotiated.
George Egerton, History Department, University of British
Columbia

1b) William J.Callahan, The Catholic Church in Spain,
1875-1998. Washington, D.C.: The Catholic University of
America Press, 2000. 695pp ISBN 0-8132-0961-7

For centuries Protestants have been indoctrinated to
regard Spanish Catholicism, especially its Inquisition, with
dread and foreboding. The University of Toronto Professor
William Callahan,s massively researched survey of the Spanish
Catholic Church over the past 125 years is therefore welcome as
an antidote against such ingrained prejudices. He provides
English-speaking readers with an articulate and authoritative
account, which breaks new ground by giving a sympathetic
description of the many travails this Church has endured during
a traumatic period of Spanish history. His ability to describe,
throughout the length of this 690 page volume, the essence of
Spanish Catholic political attitudes is a fine example of how the
difficulties of writing church history for a foreign, and in this
case often hostile, audience should be overcome.
The dramatic and often tragic events of the Spanish Civil
War in the 1930s were clearly the crucial experience during
Callahan,s time frame. His early chapters are valuable in setting
the scene for this conflict. But, in fact, the question he has to
tackle is: to what extent was the Catholic Church a victim of
left-wing ideological fanaticism, or how far was it the author of
its own misfortunes? Like a good scholar, he knows both sides
of the issue, though his sources are almost all drawn from the
church perspective. On the one hand, the traumatic changes in
political, social and economic developments of the 1920s and
1930s brought to an end the traditional authoritarian hold on
Spanish society enjoyed by the Church for so long. But at the
same time, Callahan also points out how too often the Church
displayed a disorganized and ineffective approach to its religious
mission.
The nineteenth century had seen a long drawn out battle
between the upholders of an autocratic church and Spanish
liberalism. The conflicts between the various royalist parties led
to the increase in Catholic ultramontane sympathies, a
development which only increased the narrowing of clerical
horizons. The clergy,s attitudes were marked by an intellectual
rigidity which could easily see Spain,s liberal social structures
as a rebellion against God. On the other side, anticlericalism in a
variety of guises flourished. Political attacks designed to put an
end to clerical wealth and power were matched by popular
hostility encouraged by a guerrilla press. The whole place of the
church in society became unsettled and divisive. Although
officially the Church remained established as the nation,s sole
religion until 1932, ambiguity and conflicts persisted. But the
Catholics too were divided into various camps, with moderates
and extremists agitating against each other and politicizing every
issue. The picture painted by Callahan is one of deep national
malaise.
In a situation where the Church was unwilling to admit
either a reduction in its legal privileges or any concessions in the
direction of religious toleration, conflict was inevitable. For the
early years of the twentieth century, the Church,s opponents
were driven to sharper attacks, and a heightened polarization
ensued. On the other side, the permanent political crises endured
by Spain failed to bring any moderating consensus. Social unrest
added fuel to the left-wing parties of protest. Alienation from the
Church amongst workers, especially in the Barcelona region,
reached massive proportions. And in the rural areas of the south,
where the clergy were thin on the ground, the Church faced a
pastoral crisis of staggering dimensions. Some Catholic leaders
urged the fuller application of Catholic social teachings, or
engaged in moral exhortations for reform. But others became
obsessed with the dangers of social revolution, as had happened
in the Soviet Union. This fear, already endemic in Spanish
Catholicism for many years, was only to grow during the crises
of the 1930s. Intransigent positions were thus adopted long
before the Civil War erupted. And for many Catholics, as they
contemplated the rise of new social forces, it was easy to believe
the Church was surrounded by enemies. Secularization,
destructive economic changes, dangerous political philosophies,
the fatal inheritance of Protestantism and of the revolutions
which had swept over Europe since 1789, all foreboded dark
days ahead.
Callahan,s account of the traumatic 1930s, from the
overthrow of the dictatorship, the fall of the monarchy, the
struggles of the Second Republic and the onset of the Civil War,
is a masterpiece of both narrative and analysis. He skillfully
steers between sympathy with the victims of the successive
tragedies and distancing himself above the battles. To be sure
he makes clear that the virulent and violent anticlericalism of the
street mobs, often deliberately incited for political reasons, was
ugly and vicious. The number of clergy killed in the Republican
areas of the country was horrendous: 13 bishops, 4184 diocesan
priests, 2365 male religious and 283 nuns. No less serious was
the abyss of hatred which engulfed both sides and made future
reconciliation almost impossible.
But Callahan shows that the Church leaders were also at
fault in striving to preserve all their privileges and wealth, or
even to seek a return to the golden days of the ancien regime. In
fact, the Church was often the scapegoat of Spain,s social ills.
But its prominent, impenitent position only led to greater attacks
and heightened ideological confrontations.
It is also true, as Callahan maintains, that the implacable
enmities of the Civil War and the reimposition of dictatorship
under Franco led to a polarization, both on the ground, and in the
history books which is still resounding. From a larger
perspective, the reforms of the Church,s position, introduced
and imposed by the Republic, were not much more severe than
those seen in France in 1905, and certainly less painful than the
Nazi or Stalinist persecution. But the Civil War,s antagonisms,
and the unprecedented wave of murders, prevented any
moderate policies of accommodation, let alone of reconciliation.
Catholic anger and resentment often boiled over in extreme
forms, provoked by and provoking the same intransigence from
the Church,s enemies.
The majority of Catholics readily supported Franco,s
cause. Indeed the Catholic readiness to campaign with crusading
zeal against the Republic, and to regard this regime as being
Communist-controlled, was encouraged by the Vatican,s
hostility, where the exiled Primate of Spain, Cardinal Segura,
inflamed papal fears. Yet this same Cardinal, after his return to
Spain, became equally outspoken against Franco,s attempts to
control the Church. Such developments, Callahan shows, point
to the complex relationship between the Church and Spain,s
political forces. The religious justification given to Franco,s
insurrection was, for most Catholics, an automatic response to
the anti-clericalism of the Left. But it also envisaged the kind of
reactionary re-Christianization of the nation, drawn from the
models of earlier centuries. The savagery of the Civil War
destroyed such dreams and led to widespread disillusion. Yet by
sacralizing the Nationalists, rebellion, the clergy now found
themselves obliged to defend the excesses and crimes of the
Falange Party. And after the civil war ended, the Church was left
with no other option but to endorse Franco,s dictatorship for
better or for worse. It was to be a fateful legacy for the future of
Christian witness in Spain.
Franco,s victory did not put an end to the Church,s
difficulties. In fact his regime had very different views of the
Church,s position from those of the hierarchy or the Vatican.
Most obviously, Franco sought to control both clerical
appointments and church finances, to the advantage of the state.
It took years of controversy before a compromise was reached.
Too often the Church seemed to be gagged in order to serve the
State,s interest. But it is also true that most Spanish Catholics
accepted this situation.
Callahan devotes more than two hundred pages for a
account of the post-civil war period. Despite the frequent showy
professions of loyalty between Church and State, in fact, as he
shows, this facade concealed continuing tensions. Not until the
mid-1960s when the regime began to crumble, and the Second
Vatican Council changed the Church,s agenda, did the situation
change. Authoritarian traditionalism in both Church and State
was now to be effectively challenged.
By the 1970s a new generation of younger church
leaders, who had not experienced the horrors of the Civil War,
guided the church,s path out of the ancien regime. These clerics
were more tolerant, less autocratic, more willing to welcome
pluralism and less obsessed by the Communist danger. The
fortress mentality of former “integrists was slowly dissipated.
Consequently the church was regarded as a legitimate partner in
the democratization of the country, following Franco,s death in
1976. The passions of earlier decades were deliberately
avoided, and instead Spanish Catholics came to adopt many of
the policies already in place in other European countries. In
this sense, Spain rejoined Europe, and its church history is no
longer the exceptional story of previous eras. Callahan,s ability
to covey the essence of these historic processes is much to be
praised. His skillful presentation will go far to alleviate
Protestant or other hesitations about the nature of Spanish
Catholicism today.
JSC

1c) Donald Gray, Percy Dearmer. A Parson,s Pilgrimage,
Norwich: Canterbury Press 2000 212pp.
Anglicans, especially Anglo-Catholics, owe a lot to a
now forgotten Canon of the Diocese of London, Percy Dearmer.
Today he is remembered, if at all, as the author of several
popular hymns. But a hundred years ago he championed the
cause of liturgical reform in the Church of England, seeking to
bring back colour and inspiration into its services. So a new
tribute by Donald Gray is all the more welcome in bringing to
life this warm, sensitive and artistic figure.
Percy Dearmer went to Oxford at the age of nineteen a
conservative evangelical. But he graduated in 1891 an
enthusiastic devotee of Christian Socialism. Like many young
idealists, he found the combination of Christian witness and
humanitarian service to the poor very appealing. Their leader
was a charismatic priest, Stewart Headlam, founder of the Guild
of St. Matthew. His theology was derived from F.D.Maurice, but
his inspiration came more from William Morris. Both wanted to
find a richer, kinder alternative to the selfish corporate
materialism of Victorian England. Dearmer was an early
convert.
Christian Socialists were particularly appalled by the
squalor they saw in the Victorian city slums. They sought to
relieve the sordid physical conditions there by bringing
splendour and beauty to the activities and liturgies of the
Church. But they went further. The richness of the service
through the sacrament of the altar was a means of restoring the
fullness of the Incarnation, and hence was an important spur to
promote political and social action on behalf of all members of
the community.
Percy Dearmer,s interest was not so much in Christian
Socialism,s political goals as in its artistic ambitions. He
eagerly espoused the cause of opening the Kingdom of art and
beauty to all, and fully believed that colour, ceremony and good
poetry were dear to the heart of God. It was a goal he pursued
throughout his life.
Following ordination in 1891, Dearmer served his curacy
in a slum parish in south London, where his artistic tastes and
personal shyness made life difficult. Later he moved to central
London where he had more time for his literary and political
interests. In 1899 he published his best known book, The
Parson,s Handbook, which resolutely promoted decorum,
dignity and decency in the Church,s services in order to remedy
“the lamentable confusion, lawlessness and vulgarity which are
conspicuous in the Church at the present time. Dearmer,s
contribution was to research the history of the Church of
England,s liturgies, and to urge his colleagues to follow the
Prayer Book,s rites and ceremonies as originally intended. He
sought a middle way between the extravagances of the extreme
“Ritualists, most of which were borrowed from Rome, and, on
the other side, the plain dryness of Geneva. He asked
particularly: what did priests under Queen Elisabeth say, do and
wear when in Church? His answers surprised most of his
colleagues, but made his book wildly popular with the artistic
avant garde.
The Parson’s Handbook gave practical, even humdrum
directions about the ordering of church furniture, vestments and
ceremonies, but all within the scope of the Catholicity of the
Faith as upheld in the Church of England formularies. It was so
useful that it had to be reprinted and expanded many times over.
And his researches helped to promote interest in the mediaeval
church, and even had a notable influence on church architecture.
Dearmer and his wife were both keen supporters of the Arts and
Craft movement, wanting to move away from Victorian gloom
and bring in vibrant colourful design as a more fitting
proclamation of the God of truth and beauty.
In 1901 Dearmer became Vicar of St. Mary,s, Primrose
Hill in Hampstead, a small parish where many of his
like-minded friends already lived. From the first his care was
not only to conduct the services reverently and decently, but to
emphasize the social teachings of the Church as the visible daily
expression of its worship. His quest for high standards led him
to deplore the kind of hymns being used, which were so often
deficient in poetry, depraved in sentimentality and mawkish in
music. Instead, he and his friends began to compile a
completely new collection which eventually appeared in 1906 as
The English Hymnal. He succeeded in recruiting as its musical
editor the talented young composer Ralph Vaughan Williams.
For the first time, such favourites as Bunyan,s He who would
valiant be, Christina Rosetti,s In the bleak midwinter, or
Vaughan Williams, tune Down Ampney were introduced to
Anglican congregations.
When war broke out in 1914, Dearmer needed a change,
and so volunteered to act as Chaplain to the British Hospital
Unit going out to Serbia. His wife bravely went too, as a nursing
orderly. But tragically she fell ill of enteric fever and died there.
Three months later his younger son was killed at Gallipoli.
After these shocks, he resigned from his parish and undertook
chaplaincy work for the YMCA in France. Luckily, he then fell
in love and married a young member of his congregation.
Together they went for an extended lecture tour of India and the
United States. But when they got back in early 1919, the church
hierarchy had nothing to offer him. He never got to be Dean of a
Cathedral, where his talents could have been fully deployed.
Donald Gray believes that his Christian Socialism and
unconventional life-style led his superiors to find him lacking in
ecclesiastical correctness.
It was not until 1931, when he was already 64, that
Dearmer received preferment and was made a Canon of
Westminster Abbey. Unfortunately he had little chance to make
changes in England,s national shrine, and was out of sympathy
with a highly autocratic Dean. In any case, the Great
Depression and the rise of Fascism made his kind of romantic
idealism seem irrelevant. Five years later, in 1936, he died, just
short of his seventieth birthday.
Dearmer,s legacy, Donald Gray suggests, is that he set
the sights for improving the church,s rites and ceremonies,
incorporating into its worship the highest standards of art and
beauty. Today,s church architecture and hymnody in many ways
may be seen to reflect his aims, even if at the time his struggles
seemed to be unavailing. But like Bunyan,s hero, he was not
confounded and his valour remains an inspiration to many
pilgrims following after. JSC

2) Book notes: a) C.Hanke, Die Deutschlandpolitik der E.K.i.D.
von 1945 bis 1990. Berlin: Duncker & Humblot 1999 This
1997 dissertation is an excellent compilation of the varying
attitudes held in the German Evangelical Church about the
relations between Church and State and also about the political
developments in the post-war period in both West and East
Germany.
b) Emma Klein, The Battle for Auschwitz. Catholic-Jewish
Relations under strain. London/Portland.Or: Valentine Mitchell,
2001. 86 pp.
This is a short account of the recent controversies between Jews
and Catholics, particularly over the disposition of the Carmelite
Convent just outside the Auschwitz concentration camp, which
dragged on for too many years. As the Foreword by a Jewish
professor at Oxford states: “We read here of cardinals
pronouncing anti-Semitic statements, of Jewish sit-ins at a
convent, of Christians being accused of dejudaising the
Holocaust, of rivalries between different Jewish organizations,
of Christians feeling the need to defend the cross, of Jewish
leaders failing to consider the consequences of their public
positions, of plain ignorance, confusion, and the constant
stereotyping of others. Sad stuff, but carefully and judiciously
narrated by a British journalist.

My best wishes to you all for a blessed Lent,

John Conway
jconway@interchange.ubc.ca

Dear Friends,

We revert this month to Europe, as follows:

Contents:
1) A Quotation from Martin Luther:

“Dear Germans, take advantage, because our moment
has come. Gather in, while it still shines and is good weather.
Use Godís grace and Word while they are present. For you
should know that Godís Word and grace is a traveling object that
rains blessings. It does not return to where it once has been. It
was with the Jews, but away it went and now they have nothing.
Paul brought it to Greece. But again it went away through
neglect, and Greece now has the Turks. Rome and the Latin
lands have also had it, but away it went and now they have the
pope. And you Germans are not allowed to think that you will
have it forever because it cannot be retained by those who show
ingratitude or contempt. Grasp it and retain it, whoever can.”

2) Book review: G. Besier, Die Kirchen und das Dritte Reich

3) Pius XII – revisited

4)Book notes: Historisches Jahrbuch 2001
Zeitgeschichte in Lebensbildern

5) Future conferences: a) Annual Scholarsí Conference on the
Holocaust and the Churches, March 2-5th 2002
b) 22nd Millersville Annual Holocaust Conference,
April 14-15th, 2002

2) Gerhard Besier, Die Kirchen und das Dritte Reich.
Spaltungen und Abwehrkampfe 1934 bis 1937. Propylaen:
Munich 2001, 1262 pp.

The author is to be congratulated for giving us at long last some
sixteen years later the next volume of the massive unfinished
two-volume torso on the Christian churches (1933-34) left by his
mentor, Scholder (d.1985); as it happened at a time of
passionate historical debate prompted by the fiftieth anniversary
of the Barmen Declaration. Continuation is, as it was then, a
labour of love. And there is more to come. Nine impressive
chapters cover the period November 1934 to March 1937.
These were years of crisis for Christians and Jews. Increased
Nazi church control was accompanied by religious and racial
persecution: inter alia, the Interior Minister Frick’s prohibition
of open discussion of church questions in the press, books, and
pamphlets (November 1934); the arrest and brief detention of
some 700 Prussian pastors, and the start of state control of
church finance (March 1935); the establishment of Kerrl’s Reich
Ministry for Church Affairs accompanied by Frick’s and
Goering’s calls for the suppression of Christian church influence
in public life (July); show trials against members of religious
orders for alleged violation of the foreign currency laws and a
bitter struggle over Catholic schooling (spring 1935 onwards);
the discriminatory anti-Jewish Nuremberg laws (September); the
establishment of the Church Committee system under
the aged Superintendent Zoellner (October); Kerrl’s dictatorial
abolition of the executive functions of church organizations
(December); show trials for alleged sexual perversity by
members of religious orders (May 1936); the Oldenburg crucifix
struggle (November); renewed Catholic persecution after the
publication of the encyclical ‘With Burning Anxiety’ (March
1937); and renewed state-abetted Jewish emigration (1936-37) –
some 150,000 by mid-1938. New and revelatory in this
context are chapter 3 “Revolutionierung des Religiosenî
(1934-37), and a final chapter 9 on the Christian Church
(singular!) and Nazi Racial policy. This reviewer would have
preferred closer proximity of these two chapters. In all, the
reader is presented with a daunting 900 pages of text. Telling
photographs are collected in the centre as in volume one. There
are 261 pages of footnotes, and 69 pages devoted to Sources and
Bibliography. It is a volume which is meant to impress at an
affordable price (45 Euros) using good quality paper with sewn
covers and a gold bookmark tassel.

To be as brief as possible with initial remarks. The production
of this single-authored volume in such lengthy detail with the
promise of more of the same to come is almost impossible
today, certainly in a busy British university environment. The
labour of Research Assistants is essential. Besier’s thanks (p.10)
– and ours – are therefore more than justly deserved by his team
whose Herculean effort is hidden in the 337 pages of footnotes,
archives and libraries visited, and bibliography. Their
impressive work on the documents presents problems for the
reviewer, however. How much does Besier see through the eyes
of his research assistants? Could the evidence have been
interpreted differently? Should Besier and his team follow the
same aims and objectives of Scholder in 1977, or those in the
1985 posthumous second volume today? In the latter his
assistants including Besier emphasized the need for distance
from the interpretations given by the Catholic and Protestant
Commissions for Contemporary Church History and the
so-called ‘Dahlem Trend’ of the 1960s. What we now know
twenty-five years later is so much more than the ‘Grosse Politik’
of Germany’s Protestant and Catholic church leaders, however
fascinating the labyrinthine intrigue recorded here. Does Besier’s
coverage convey adequately what it meant to be a Christian (and
Jew) in an increasing climate of fear? Besier makes no
concessions either to changes in historical fashion such as the
recent move to the view from downstairs. Even a contemporary,
Birger Forell, chaplain to the Swedish embassy in Berlin, Bell’s
reliable informant about the crisis in the German churches,
warned Bell in a letter dated 17 October 1936 apropos the
pastoral letters, memoranda, and high-profile diplomacy of
Germany’s Catholic bishops, that ìthe real danger for the
Christian church today is to be too diplomatic. The only thing
which impresses a totalitarian state and its representatives is to
show strengthî (p.742). Does not a preoccupation with the
formal etiquette visible in the carefully chosen photographs
really mask what Besier admits, following Hans Mommsen and
Ian Kershaw, namely, that the Nazi system underwent a
cumulative radicalization, especially during these years? Can
today’s reader, with little sense of life under this racial regime, or
even Christian belief and its values, really grasp this religious
Crisis? And we are promised possibly a further three volumes, if
we assume coverage of two to three years at a time. Besier gives
the reader no simple year-by-year chronology of events, and
concludes with only an Index of names. Might it not be best
after all to leave this kind of treatment to the Protestant
Commission and its published documents? The recent
impressive third and fourth volumes edited by Grunzinger
and Nicolaisen cover July 1935 to August 1939, and are much
shorter – 447 and 476 pages respectively.

And then there is the emphasis placed by Besier. It seems that
the heart of this book consists of Protestant chapter 5 (The
Struggle over the Committees October 1935 to February 1936)
followed by a massive Protestant chapter 6 (The Failure of
Committee Policy March 1936 to February 1937). The latter
contains 226 pages with 1736 footnotes – more than twice the
size of each of the other seven chapters, of which chapters 2, 7,
and 8 concern the Catholic church, and chapter 9 the Jews.

This reviewer would like to leave the reader with two thoughts.
A fundamental Nazi attack on the substance of Christian and
Judaic belief encapsulated in Frick’s public phrase of July 1935,
‘Entkonfessionalisierung des offentlichen Lebens’, became
obvious in 1936 and 1937. Hans Ehrenberg’s correspondence in
which he begs not to be named or to name his friends contained
in the Bell Papers in Lambeth Palace Library (mentioned briefly
by Besier in very informative sections on the ecumenical
perspective) are, for example, still very moving to read today as
warnings. Ehrenberg was possibly more important than either
Franz Hildebrandt and Bonhoeffer in making Bell aware that the
phoney ‘positive Christianity’ period 1933-34 was now over. On
this reading, Crisis is not to be seen in the detailed interaction
between institutional churches and the Nazi State; in the
increasing disarray amongst Protestants after Barmen or in an
allegedly united Catholic defence of the Concordat, in questions
of power, in this period. It was rather, as Besier himself admits
in the flyleaf, but does not pursue sufficiently enough in the text,
a question of what a Christian or Jew could possibly do in a
climate where ‘uncompromising ideologues of the (Nazi) regime
forged (subtly masked) plans for the total subjugation of the
Churches or a radical division of Church and State’. Secondly,
the years 1935, 1936 and 1937(-38), were ones where the Nazis
made a concerted effort to capture the minds and hearts of young
people including Protestant and Catholic clergy. They used Nazi
youth training camps and the Hitler Youth to combat Christian
youth organizations, and they staffed school and university with
their own ideologues and sympathisers. For a young ordinand
who took Christian teaching and principles seriously, this was an
extremely frightening world – the more so because Nazi
anti-religious policy was often disguised. To stand for the
integrity of what one believed in, or to preach it openly, was
often a one-way curate’s ticket to imprisonment as a common
criminal and to loss of citizenship. It needed a sense of fun and
ready wit which youth could supply to hoodwink the Gestapo in
the pew. Young parish clergy of both mainline churches bore
the brunt. They were not necessarily tactless hotheads disliked
by church leaders in an age where rank and form mattered. In
this context, it is a pity in the Protestant chapters, that Besier
prefers to dwell on the growing chasm between the so-called
‘Dahlemites’ and the ‘intact’ Lutheran churches of Hanover,
Wurttemberg, and Bavaria; on the opposing views
north and south of the river Main (p.417). There were others,
particularly those schooled by Schniewind and Iwand in
Konigsberg, or those who supported Stuttgart’s
Kirchlich-Theologische Sozietat, who thought like Niemoller.
The Barmen Declaration, however flawed a statement of
Christian teaching, was under the circumstances the best
doctrinal compass suited to Christian emergency. The problems
of ecclesiology, what Besier calls the constantly aired question
of a Volkskirche or a Freikirche 1933-45 (p.53), could be dealt
with at a later date. What to do as a Christian was a hard daily
learning curve. Besier is disingenuous to insert in his fascinating
chapter 3 Niemoller’s later Dachau thoughts about conversion to
Catholicism (pp.276-7, 284) as evidence of a Confessing Church
clergy’s ‘sterile’ intellectual emphasis on religious truth, or to
state that it was not by chance that intensive discussion about
Rosenberg’s ‘Mythus’ really began when signs of internal
dissolution appeared in Confessing Church circles in the winter
of 1935-36. That is to push aside the question of what to do as a
Christian when the substance of Christian belief was under
attack. What is also significant about this particular period is
the way both mainline churches, clergy and congregations,
moved to the essential in worship and to more informal
worship which emphasized congregational participation. On
this Besier says little, if nothing at all. Theodor Mass Ewerd’s
pioneering studies of Catholic liturgical reform, ‘Liturgie und
Pfarrei’ (1969) and ‘Die Krise der Liturgischen Bewegung (1981)
are passed over.

This said, this volume will no doubt become an indispensable
guide, provided that the reader can rise above the immense
detail. Besier tells us much, not only about institutions and
personnel like Kerrl’s ministry, but also about Nazi surveillance,
the Ecumenical perspective given in British and American
sources, and about Christian and Jew in these eventful years.
There is still room, perhaps in a volume to follow, for the
contemporaneous remarkable religious pamphlet war peaking in
the years 1935-38 despite massive censorship; for what church
worship and parish life was like; and on how average Christians
and Jews coped with a constant sense of fear and foreboding.
Nicholas Hope, Glasgow University

2) Pius XII and the Holocaust- revisited

At the risk of inciting what might be called ìPius fatigue
syndromeî, we should note that this debate continues with
seemingly unabated intensity. In the past three years no fewer
than a dozen authors, with a wide range of perspectives, have
written books in English on the career of Pope Pius XII and the
Vaticanís policies during the Second World War, and in
particular have examined the Churchís responses to the Nazisí
mass murder of the European Jews. A further work on this
topic appeared this week: Jose M.Sanchez, Pius XII and the
Holocaust. Understanding the controversy, Washington, D.C.:
Catholic University of America 2002, 197 Pp. This will be
reviewed by Rev. J.J.Hughes in the June issue of this Newsletter.
In the meanwhile, the controversy was not lessened by
the unfortunate demise of the joint Catholic-Jewish Commission
established to examine the adequacy of the already published
Actes et Documents du Saint Siege relatifs a la seconde guerre
mondiale. The regrettable frustration of this unprecedented
experiment was reported in last Septemberís issue of this
Newsletter (http:www.calvin.edu/academic/cas/akz)
But, since then, the debate has flared up again in two influential
magazines in the United States. Kevin Madigan, a Chicago
professor, wrote an article for Commentary (October 2000),
entitled ìWhat the Vatican knew about the Holocaust and
whenî. This article refuted some of the more extreme views,
such as that Pius XII was in Hitlerís pay, or was a secret
sympathizer with Nazi antisemitism, but still adopted an
adversarial stance. The best response to this article came from
Professor Doris Bergen, a Canadian Protestant, teaching at Notre
Dame University, South Bend, Indiana, who rightly pointed to
the failures of sympathy and imagination shared by almost all
Christians towards the Jewish minorities in their midst. The
Vaticanís war-time failures should be seen as part of the wider
ìsins of commissionî by large segments of the Christian
churches, especially in Germany.
Last month a still more strident view was expressed by
Daniel Goldhagen in the January 21st issue of The New
Republic, Vol 226, no.2, 21-45, with a glossy cover of Pius XII
in full regalia and the provocative title ìWhat would Jesus have
done?î Goldhagen is not known for his expertise on the
Vatican, but his command of invective is undoubted. His
outburst prompted the following response from Professor
Michael Marrus, Dean of Graduate Studies and Chancellor Rose
and Ray Wolfe Professor of Holocaust Studies at the University
of Toronto, and one of the members of the above-mentioned
Commission.

ìTo the Editors of The New Republic:

Readers familiar with Daniel Jonah Goldhagenís 1996 work,
Hitlerís Willing Executioners, will recognize the flavour of his
ìPope Pius XII, the Catholic Church, and the Holocaustî: an
unrelieved bitter attack on his subject, a sneering disparagement
of other analysts for moral equivocation, a dismissal of most
contemporary scholarship, and a hunger for the black-and-white,
the simplest of historical explanations. Unfortunately, this is a
subject in which tunnel vision and a highly selective use of
evidence is becoming rampant, producing distorted images of
Pius XII as a vicious antisemite, on the one hand, or as a saintly
rescuer of Jews on the other. It is high time – as Goldhagenís
rant reminds us – to examine the events of more than half a
century ago with an eye to the culture of that day, and not our
own. The Church could assist this effort by making available, to
all responsible researchers, its full range of archival material on
the subject. Writers could also help by putting aside their angry
self-righteousness, or a zest for denunciation or exculpation. To
an important degree, Pope John Paul II and many within the
Catholic Church have pointed the way forward with indisputable
efforts for Catholic-Jewish reconciliation. The work is far from
complete. Those who take up this question should do so
responsibly, even-handedly, and with a spirit of openness to the
full range of evidence.î

Marrusí eminently sane words should help to limits the defects
noted in his letter. The whole subject will be explored in depth
at the forthcoming conference planned for April 14-15th at
Millersville University, Pennsylvania. (see below). But while
we can support this plea for more open access to the
long-withheld Vatican archives, we have to recognize that this
goal is still a long way off. I should be surprised if the papers
became available in my life-time. I should be even more
surprised if they produced significant new evidence on this
disputed topic. Of course, the sad fact is that those who accuse
Pius XII as being co-responsible for the Holocaust will believe
that, so long as the archives are not open, the Vatican has
something to hide; once they are open, they will say that the
incriminating documents have already been removed. In the
meanwhile, I can only recommend a more thorough and
perceptive study of the already published evidence in the
under-used, much-neglected but enormously valuable Actes et
documents. The Vatican would do us all a great favour by
sponsoring an English translation of the whole series.
JSC

4) Book notes: Historisches Jahrbuch, im Auftrag der
Goerres-Gesellschaft, hrsg. F.Felten et al, 121 Jahrgang 2001
Freiburg/Munich: Verlag Karl Alber 592 pp
ISBN 3-495-45278-8
This compendious volume of essays mainly on Catholic themes
is put out by Germanyís most reputable conservative historical
society. For our readers, the fifty-page essay by one of our
list-members, Christoph Koesters, Katholische Kirche und
Katholizismus in der SBZ/DDR. Ein Bilanz neuere Forschungen
will be most helpful, since the author provides a collective view
over the whole 40 year period of Communist rule, and seeks to
place previous publications, both before and after 1989, in their
context. Here the various opinions about the tactics of the
Catholic Church vis-a-vis the Communist state and its notorious
Stasi are outlined. It is still too soon to have a definite
reckoning, but most of the material is now available from one
source or other.
A shorter essay by Kartsen Ruppert analyses two
biographies of the significant Catholic politician of the 1920s,
Joseph Wirth, taking up the issue of whether he or the Centre
Party could have more effectively prevented the rise of Nazi
totalitarianism.

Volume 10 of Zeitgeschichte in Lebensbildern – Aus dem
deutschen Katholizismus des 19. und 20. Jahrhunderts, ed.
J.Aretz, R.Morsey, A, Rauscher (Munster: Aschendorff) has now
appeared. This is a useful compilation of short biographies of
Catholic notables, and this volume contains essays by two of our
list members, Marie-Emanuelle Reytier and Greg Munro,
covering the careers of Alois Furst zu Lowenstein and Georg
Moenius respectively. As well the volume contains essays on
Cardinal Schulte of Cologne, Rupert Mayer, the courageous
anti-Nazi preacher in Munich, and on Heinrich Boll.

4) Future Conferences: a) The 32nd Annual Scholarsí
Conference on the Holocaust and the Churches, with the theme
ìThe Genocidal Mindî will be held from March 2-5 at Kean
University, Union, New Jersey. Details can be found at website:
www.kean.edu/hrc/scholarsconf/home.htm

b) The 22nd Annual Holocaust Conference at Millersville
University, Pennsylvania will be held on April 14 – 15th. The
Theme is Pius XII and the Holocaust. Keynote presenters
include Richard Rubenstein, Michael Phayer, Susan Zucotti,
Ron Rychlak, Jose Sanchez, Seymour Reich, John Pawlikowski,
James Carroll and John Conway. Registration is $25 and can be
made by contacting Maggie Eichler at 717-872-3555 or by
e-mail, maggie.eichler@millersville. edu
Millersville University is located in Lancaster, Pennsylvania
and we have a limited number of rooms available at our Best
Western located on campus. Reservations can be made by
contacting Ms Eichler at the above addresses.í

Best wishes
John Conway

Dear Friends,

The beginning of a New Year is perhaps the appropriate time to
widen our horizons, so I am delighted to be able to offer you a few
observations on the world-wide ecumenical mission of the Church
during the last century, from the point of view, first of a missionary
to India, and one of the founding bishops of the new Church of
South India; and secondly a review of the masterly survey of church
history in Africa by the late Swedish scholar Bengt Sundkler, as
completed by his research partner Christopher Steed. Once again,
these comprehensive studies made me very envious of their authorsí
skills. Perhaps they will be an incentive for all us church historians
to follow in their footsteps.

Contents:
1) Book reviews: a) Wainwright, Lesslie Newbigin
b) Sundkler and Steed, A history of the Church in
Africa

2) Bonhoeffer Symposium – Bonhoeffer and the Pomeranian aristocracy

3) Christian-Jewish Relations revisited

4) Journal articles a) Moses, Australian Anglican leaders and the
Great War
b) Fletcher, Anglicanism and National Identity in
Australia

Index of books reviewed in 2000

1) Geoffrey Wainwright, Lesslie Newbigin. A theological life.
Oxford University Press, 2000 459pp. ISBN 0-19-510171-5

In retrospect, it is clear that twentieth century church history
falls into two periods. The caesura is in the mid-1960s: for the
Catholics, it came with the Second Vatican Council and its
reforming pronouncements; for western Protestants it was marked
by such events as the 4th Assembly of the World Council of
Churches in Uppsala, Sweden. The earlier period saw the attempt
to recover the authority and authenticity of Christianity after the
disasters of the two world wars, the skeptical attacks of modern
secular science, and the onslaughts of radical political ideologies,
such as Nazism and Communism. But the later years saw a
different challenge, coming from within and from below. A newer
generation, mainly from the so-called Third World, brought
different priorities than the restoration or reinvigoration of
ecclesiastical institutions. Instead, Christian witness was now seen
as renouncing the structures of the past, even living as though God
did not exist, and identifying with the worldís poor and oppressed,
and taking up the cause of justice, righteousness and peace.
Lesslie Newbiginís long life straddled both periods. As a
bishop in South India, a high-ranking official in the missionary arm
of the world ecumenical movement, and as an accomplished
practical theologian, he can be seen as demonstrating how an older
generation came to terms with the newer trends, sometimes with
enthusiasm but sometimes wistfully longing for past patterns of
witness and service. Geoffrey Wainwright, who is a professor at
Duke University, has written, not a biography, but an extended
examination of Newbiginís numerous theological writings. He
provides an excellent and ìthickî guide to the various phases of
Newbiginís thought, and shows how, in both India and Europe, he
wrestled with the issues of the day, and sought a theological
response to personal, political as well as institutional challenges.
Since Newbigin contributed his own Unfinished Agenda: An
Autobiography in 1985, Wainwright concentrates on the literary and
theological legacy, rightly convinced that here is a treasure trove
deserving a wider reception.
Like Joe Oldham a generation earlier [K.Clementsí
biography was reviewed here in July], Newbigin was brought, in
part, to dedicate his life to Christ and his services to the missionary
movement through John R. Mott and the Student Christian
Movement, while at Cambridge. After ordination he was posted to
the Presbyterian Mission in Madurai, South India and soon made his
mark there. In the 1930s and 1940s South India was the worldís
most promising experiment in the search for visible unity between
the various Protestant denominations. As such it attracted an
enormous amount of attention, and theological arguments surged to
and fro. Finally in 1947 unity was achieved, at least between the
Presbyterians, Anglicans and Methodists. Newbigin became one of
the new churchís champions and, despite his background, was made
a bishop at the opening ceremony. In the following year he attended
the inaugural Assembly of the World Council of Churches, which
also had Christian unity, and the overcoming of the disastrous
denominational rivalries of the past, as one of its chief goals. From
then on, Newbigin was in constant demand at ecumenical gatherings
around the world at frequent intervals. Many of these required him
to write extended papers or lectures or even books, all of which
Wainwright carefully and systematically examines.
From 1959 to 1965, Newbigin served as General Secretary of
the International Missionary Council and its successor the Division
of World Mission and Evangelism in the World Council of
Churches. Early on he recognized that the tasks of world mission
and ecclesial unity were deeply affected by the rapid dissolution of
the thousand-year synthesis between the Gospel and the cultures of
western Europe, by which Christianity had become more or less a
folk religion for that region. But now it was necessary to rescue the
Gospel from such outward clothing and to find a new authentic
witness suitable for all continents. Obviously Newbigin believed in
the need for a unified expression of this new witness, but he was
also well aware of the difficulties of moving beyond the legacies of
the past, in order to achieve some new reality beyond mere
occasional co-operation. Such unity had to be both local and
universal – visibly one fellowship. ìOnly if the Church at every
level is moving towards the unity to which God calls all humankind
is it true to its natureî. But such idealistic hopes still remain to be
realized. In 1974 when he finally left India, Newbigin remarked:
ìThirty years ago we had been innocent enough to hope that three
decades would be enough to enable the divided churches of England
to catch up with Indiaî. But, sadly, the goal is no nearer twenty five
more years on. The united churches on the Indian subcontinent are
regarded as marginal oddities rather than pioneers.
Similarly Newbigin could not fail to be disappointed by the
performance of the World Council of Churches whose meetings he
attended for forty years. He increasingly found himself out of tune
with the politicized rhetoric of its recent gatherings, so different
from the traditional emphasis on biblical and personal witness and
on the unique claims of the Gospel. Where some church leaders
stressed the need to accept religious pluralism lest rival claims for
hegemony produce a fatal clash of cultures, Newbigin lamented the
absence of any Good News to redeem the world.
Wainwrightís chapter on Newbigin as a missionary strategist
is excellent. Going out to India in the last decade of the Raj, he
quickly saw the need to abandon the racially-dominated paternalist
structures of the former missions, with their innate assumption of
European superiority. He readily accepted the need for the new
Indian church to be self-governing and self-reliant, just because this
was a far more healthy recipe for Christian witness and expansion.
For too long the local converts had been willing to be dependent and
avoided the necessity of responsibility. So too, at the international
level, it was Newbigin who led the way in uniting the structures of
the International Missionary Council – heavily centred in Europe and
North America – with those of the World Council of Churches with
its emphasis on the full participation of the younger churches. One
Body, One Gospel, One World was the title of his book justifying
this integration. Yet he continued to insist that the Churchís priority
was to bring more people to recognize Jesus as Saviour, and
opposed any identification of political or social revolutionary
movements with the work of redemption. The danger of
Pelagianism in such an approach was obvious. But increasingly
Newbigin was concerned about the need for a missionary attack on
the powerful paganism of the western world, which too often had
successfully relegated Jesus to the irrelevance of the private sector.
Wainwrightís exposition of Newbiginís writings on other
themes is equally cogent and supported by lengthy quotations. His
leadership positions and involvement in world-wide church agencies
meant that he was frequently required to speak, lecture or preach on
significant issues, which were then incorporated in his writings. For
example, as a European present when India gained independence,
his publication on Christian Participation in Nation-Building was
an attempt to chart the constructive role which the minority
community of Christians could play if it so chose. Luckily he found
Indian partners, such as M.M.Thomas, who attempted to carry out
this programme. Political responsibility was what all the avant
garde argued for in moving from a church-centred to a more secular
approach, as reflected at the 1968 WCC Assembly in Uppsala. But
later in his life he retreated from the overblown expectations of such
a stance, and again emphasized the need to witness to Christ and His
Kingdom as a transcendental reality. On his final return to Britain
from India in 1974, he was shocked by the decline of the religious
faith he had known as a boy. He now summoned the churches to a
new missionary encounter with the culture. Relying on the Christian
heritage of the past was not enough for a Britain where there were
now more Muslims than Methodists.
In his old age, he set out valiantly to combat the social
fragmentation, the intellectual skepticism, the moral cynicism and
the spiritual despair of late twentieth-century society. His particular
targets were the relativistic interpretation of freedom and the
acquisitiveness of consumer capitalism. Both he believed led the
individual to a paganism of a deadly kind, worshipping gods that
were not God. His two books, Foolishness to the Greeks and The
Gospel in A Pluralistic Society, along with other writings, such as
his last book Faith and Power – Christianity and Islam in ìSecularî
Britain, were powerful reflections of the need for a redemptive
missionary approach, which would confront modern culture with its
failings and call for repentance. In the light of the centuryís
disasters, he believed, the popular assumptions aroused by the
Enlightenment, especially the belief in education and
self-development, could only be seen as illusory. The Churchís task
was to witness against such fallacies, to resist the temptation of
accommodating to the surrounding culture, and instead to be a sign
and foretaste of Godís Kingdom, as both a promise and a warning
for the present day. With such views, it was hardly surprising that
Newbigin was ìlionizedî by certain conservative circles in the
church.
Wainwrightís thoughtful and thorough analysis of
Newbiginís writings is obviously imbued with his admiration for the
man, whom he compares to the great bishop-theologians of the early
church. This careful assessment of his career and achievements
should surely serve to uphold the causes he embraced with such
Christian devotion and skill.
JSC

1b) Bengt Sundkler and Christopher Steed, A History of the Church
in Africa. Cambridge: University Press 2000. 1232 pp. ISBN 0521
58342 X
Inevitably this huge compendious tome will be compared
with the only slightly less voluminous study (706 pp) by the British
Catholic scholar, who sadly died in May of last year, Adrian
Hastings, The Church in Africa 1450-1950, (Oxford University
Press, 1994). Both were attempting to do the impossible: cram
within the covers of a single volume the story of the Christian
presence in Africa over many centuries and many societies.
Hastings limited himself to black Africa and dealt only with four
hundred years. But Sundkler was more ambitious, or shall we say
more visionary. He wanted to take in the whole continent from the
time of the Holy Familyís flight to Egypt up to the present, and
resolutely includes all branch

es of the Church in his wonderfully
ecumenical panorama.
Equally inevitably, the question of methodology arises. Both
Hastings and Sundkler was deliberately reacting against the old-style
missionary history, which reflected the nineteenth century carving
up of Africa by European imperial powers. Such histories were
designed to record the missionary societiesí successes, but were
inevitably top downwards in focus and often limited by
denominational blinkers. African Christians were often merely the
passive recipients of the European-bestowed blessings. So in
contrast, Sundkler stresses the African character of the Christian
presence from the time of the desert fathers, through the unbroken
native tradition of the Ethiopian Church, unconquered until 1936, to
the full transfer into black hands from 1950 onwards. Sundklerís
qualifications were unrivaled – as a former missionary, and
subsequently a Lutheran bishop in Tanzania, he was committed
throughout his career to the cause of Africanization of the church
structures and institutions. He later studied these developments
closely from his professorial chair at Uppsala University. This
massive tome was twenty years in the making. Unfortunately
Professor Sundkler did not live to see its completion, which was
undertaken by his research associate Christopher Steed. But his
overarching vision certainly shows through, and his mastery of
detail makes this an encyclopaedic account, both as a reference
work, but also as a guide to outside readers eager to follow events in
the continent where Christianity is growing at its fastest.
Half the book is dedicated to the twentieth century, and
begins with a survey of the impact of the European-started wars of
this era. Even though Africa was only tangentially involved,
nevertheless Sundkler makes the point that thousands of Africans
were recruited for service overseas, thus widening their horizons and
expectations irrevocably. This was to be the first stimulus towards
self-rule, both political and ecclesiastical. The challenge to imperial
control began after 1918 and swept to victory over the whole
continent after 1945. But it was matched by the European churchesí
own changed feelings, with the desire for a creative abdication of
the white manís control and a willingness to transfer power into
African hands. Of course, missionary paternalism made many
missionaries on the spot reluctant to anticipate this handing over of
authority. But instructions from home base, and expectations from
below, swept the board in a remarkably short time. In the case of
the Catholics, as early as the 1920s, Pope Pius XI had issued
instructions for the training of an African clergy, and the first
African bishop in the modern era was consecrated in 1939. On the
Protestant side, despite the example of Bishop Crowther on the
Niger, consecrated in 1864, it took longer for the British missionary
societies to see the need for change or to recognize that the era of
white-controlled local churches had come to a close. But the
evidence soon proved overwhelming. The success of African-led
churches in preaching the gospel was far greater. Conservative white
missionaries or their supporters might deplore the rapid growth of
African sectarianism, or the rise of independent churches, along
with a syncretic mixture of native traditions. But their vitality could,
and can, not be denied. And who is to say that Gregorian chant, a
baroque mass or a Wesleyan revival meeting are the only true
models for Christian witness?
For most of the century, African education was entirely in
the hands of the missions. But its long-term impact was to be
disruptive of the traditional agricultural societies. Revolutionary
expectations were aroused, not least, as Desmond Tutu so frequently
noted, by that revolutionary book, the Bible. The village teacher
now appeared to be the key to the future. Many of this centuryís
great political leaders, from Nkrumah to Nyerere, began their
careers as school teachers. As a result the churchesípolitical role has
often been conspicuous, though not uncontroversial. But in
Sundklerís view Christianity modified the potential for
revolutionary violence, and kept in check both secularism and
socialism. Its formative impact on the transition to black majority
rule in South Africa was one of the centuryís most notable
achievements.
After these general remarks, Sundkler turns to 300 pages of
detailed description of conditions in each locality or country. This
demonstrates a vast empirical knowledge, which only whets the
appetite for more. But it also makes clear the multifaceted
pluralism of conditions for the Christian presence, which makes
general conclusions virtually impossible. Paradoxically, rapid social
and political change can sweep the church along with it; yet islands
of age-old tradition still remain, such as the Coptic monasteries in
Egypt or Ethiopia, where the same liturgy has been celebrated for
fifteen hundred unbroken years. In many countries, a new found
passion for politics undermined the old social arrangements,
including those supported by the early missionaries. Nationalism
and urbanization often caused a critical escalation of tension and
violence, especially in Southern Africa. The influence of the
churches could, at best, be palliative. And yet their connections,
both to the past, and to other Christian societies abroad, proved to be
significant in fashioning the new Africa.
If indigenization was the hallmark of the Christian
experience in the second half of the twentieth century, it still took a
wide variety of forms. Inevitably there will be some who find
Sundklerís attempts to include all church expressions in all
countries to be rather breathless. Others will find fault that too little
has been said about a corner of the continent they know best. Even
such a monumental tome has its limitations. But the vignettes
Sundkler provides of the Churchís struggles and successes, the
confidence of his analyses and the inclusive comprehensiveness of
his broad brush strokes are magisterial, and magnificent. This is not
a book many will want to read right through. But invaluable to have
on hand to refer to, and to use its excellent bibliography and
footnotes. Its achievement will not likely be repeated until, perhaps,
an African scholar comes along as well equipped to survey his
continentís Christian destiny in so sympathetic a manner.
JSC

2) The International Bonhoeffer Society – German section has
recently published the texts of a Colloquium held in 1990 on the
topic of Bonhoeffer and the Pomeranian aristocracy. Commentaries
by four members of these families, with whom Bonhoeffer was to be
associated had he lived to be married to Maria, along with other
Bonhoeffer relatives, seek to explain the seemingly strange links
between this highly educated scholarly theologian and the landed
gentry, still caught up with their militarist, nationalist and hunting
and shooting backgrounds. No satisfactory conclusion was reached
at this Colloquium, and the whole issue was highlighted even more
sharply in the collection of letters between Bonhoeffer and Maria,
Love Letters from Cell 92, ed. Ruth-Alice Bismarck (Mariaís sister),
translated by John Brownjohn, London: HarperCollins 1994, or
Nashville, Tenn: Abingdon Press 1995.

3) Christian-Jewish relations revisited.
Last month, a new stage in Christian-Jewish relations was begun at
Sacred Heart University, Fairfeld, Connecticut which was in marked
contrast to the controversy described in last Septemberís Newsletter.
This conference consisted of presentations by Rabbi Norman
Solomon, Oxford and Cardinal Walter Kasper, President of the
Vaticanís Commission for Religious Relations with Jews. Their
helpful and constructive dialogue on the subject of ìCovenantî is
fortunately available on the web-site:
http://www.bc.edu/bc_org/research/cjl/articles
See also Marcus Braybrooke, Christian-Jewish Dialogue. The next
steps, London: SCM Press 2000, with a very pertinent response by
Rabbi Bayfield.

4) Journal articles:
John Moses, Australian Anglican Leaders and the Great War,
1914-1918: The ìPrussian Menaceî, Conscription and National
Solidarity in The Journal of Religious History, Vol. 25, no 3,
October 2001, 306-323.
John Moses portrays the Australian Anglican leadersí efforts to
convince their countrymen of the spiritual dimension of the struggle
against Germany, or most particularly against ìthe Prussian
menaceî, which they rightly saw as central to the future of
Australiaís place in the British Empire. For such men, a future
without the empire was unthinkable, since they were persuaded of
the Empireís mission bestowed by Almighty God to bring the
benefits of British political culture to distant parts of the earth.
Irish-born Australians were not convinced, especially after the
British denial of Home Rule to Ireland. The Roman Catholic
Church in Australia campaigned strongly against the ìBritishî war,
or conscription for Australians – a situation which led to heightened
resentments between the two denominations. Moses takes issue with
those Australian historians who have decried the influence of the
Anglican bishops, or indeed of all the clergy in this turning point of
Australiaís development.

Brian Fletcher, Anglicanism and National Identity in Australia since
1962 in The Journal of Religious History, Vol 25, no 3, October
2001, 324-345.
In 1952 Anglicans in Australia at last gained a new constitution,
breaking the link with the Church of England and providing an
opportunity to become more Australian. In the past four decades
other social changes, particularly in the position of women and the
indigenous people, have also challenged the ascendancy of the white
British-born males. But the Anglicansí new sense of identity still
has to be achieved, striving to shake off any nostalgic bondage to the
former mother country (or church), while adapting the old liturgies
and architecture to the new age. Fletcher argues that the widening of
the Anglican horizons, particularly through the arrival of non-British
immigrants, and a new openness to native spirituality, has benefited
the church, and prevented it remaining in an Anglo-Saxon ghetto. It
had brought its identity more fully into line with that of the nation,
thus opening new paths into the future.

With every best wish to you all for a successful and prosperous New
Year. I shall again appreciate having your communications and
comments, so please keep in touch.

John S.Conway
jconway@interchange.ubc.ca
Association of Contemporary Church Historians

List of books reviewed in 2001

Allen, John L, Cardinal Ratzinger June
Bedarida R, Les Catholiques dans la guerre July
Besier, G, Zwischen nationaler Revolution . . . October
Brenner, M., et al, Two nations January
Chadwick, K ed., Catholicism in 20th century France July
Clements, K, Faith on the Frontier. J.H.Oldham July
Denzler G., ed Theologische Wissenschaft April
Dixon, Joy, Divine Feminine November
Dudley-Smith, T, John Stott. The making of a leader December
Eman. D, Things we couldnít say: (Dutch resistance) December
Feldkamp, M, Pius XII und Deutschland June
Gerlach, W, And the Witnesses were silent May
Kertzer, D, The Popes against the Jews December
Lindemann, G., ìTypische judischî January
Locke, Hubert Learning from History February
Pangritz, A, Karl Barth in the theology of Bonhoeffer May
Pollard, J, The unknown Pope. Benedict XV July
Rauscher A. ed., Wider der Rassismus October
Sampson C., ed., From the Ground Up (Mennonites ) May
Schaeffer, B., Staat und katholische Kirche in der DDR February
Schjorring, J.H., ed History of the Lutheran World Federation
April
Stayer, J., Martin Luther January
Ustorf, W, Sailing on the next tide (German missions) November
Zucotti, S,Under his very windows (Pope Pius XII) April

Dear Friends,

Let me take this opportunity to wish you all a very blessed
Christmas season. Let us hope that it may be a message of hope
after the tumults and disasters of this opening of the new
millennium.

Christmas Trees

Bonhoeffer in his skylit cell
bleached by the flares, candescent fall,
pacing out his own citadel,

restores the broken themes of praise,
encourages our borrowed days,
by logic of his sacrifice.

Against wild reasons of the state
his words are quiet but not too quiet.
We hear too late or not too late
Geoffrey Hill
Contents:

1) Book reviews: a) Dudley-Smith, John Stott
b) Kertzer, The Popes against the Jews
c) D.Eman, Things we couldn,t say
2) New contemporary church history project
3) New book publications: Mark Lindsay, Karl Barth
S.Liebster, Facing the Lion
N.Railton, No North Sea
H.Marcuse, Legacies of Dachau

1a) Timothy Dudley-Smith, John Stott. The Making of a Leader.
Downers Grove, Illinois: Inter-Varsity Press 1999 513 pp.
John Stott was – and is – the most prominent member of the
evangelical wing of the Church of England in the second half of the
twentieth century. For more than fifty years he served as curate,
priest-in-charge, rector and rector emeritus of All Souls, Langham
Place on London,s fashionable west side – a strategic base where he
established his enviable reputation as a preacher and
communicator, and led the revival, so his biographer claims, of the
evangelical movement in England.
This laudatory and leisurely biography, written by a close
friend, is based on a wealth of personal papers, beginning with
schoolboy letters and diaries of bird-watching trips. In addition,
Dudley-Smith has marshaled an impressive array of secondary
sources, which are used to describe the setting in which Stott grew
up and had his initial training in Christian ministry. But since his
more than 500 pages cover only the early years and stops in 1958,
we will presumably have to wait for a second volume to show how
Stott,s leadership was most fully deployed.
What we are given here is a full and discursive description
of the religious climate of the early years of the last century, and of
the limited circle of English upper middle class people who upheld
the Church of England,s evangelical traditions and its institutions,
and their methods of recruiting the young. John Stott,s father was a
leading surgeon and lived in Harley Street, the most fashionable
address for doctors in London. As was customary in this class,
John was sent to boarding school at an early age, and as a teenager
went to Rugby, one of England,s most prestigious “public schools.
It was there that at the age of seventeen, the most important event
of his life took place – his conversion to a personal faith in Jesus.
Thanks to a visiting evangelist from the Scripture Union, Rev.
E.Nash, John along with others of his age was confronted with the
challenge: What shall I do with Jesus? and given the choice of
following the narrow way to salvation or the broader path to
destruction. The imagery of Holman Hunt,s picture The Light of
the World was a powerful influence, and very soon John was
confident that he was indeed committed to Christ, and released
from the bond of sin. The approach was personal and devotional
rather than intellectual. Nor was it original, since the model was
derived from Puritan roots and extensively used by John Wesley.
But under the auspices of the Scripture Union and other
evangelistic agencies, it was taken to groups of schoolboys of John
Stott,s class and age, and was remarkably effective.
The spiritual emphasis was that of traditional
evangelicalism: reliance on Holy Scripture, with a belief in biblical
inerrancy, acceptance of salvation by faith in the atoning death of
Christ, and a commitment to personal evangelism. This
programme was fostered by a series of summer camps and house
parties, with a view to recruiting more converts, and encouraging
those who had already accepted Jesus as their Saviour. Many
young participants, like Stott, were eventually to be ordained.
While still at Rugby, Stott was drawn into the organizational tasks
of running these gatherings. His abilities for leadership and
single-minded dedication were obvious even then. But to critics,
this enthusiasm for personal holiness seemed overdone, especially
when accompanied by a narrowness of view, doctrinal rigidity, and
at times a grating self-righteousness.
In 1939, while he was still in school, war broke out. The
British government generously ruled that young men intending to
be ordinands were exempt from military service. Stott decided to
take advantage of this ruling, even though he had not yet begun his
undergraduate career, let alone a course of theology. His father,
who was quickly called to high rank in the Royal Army Medical
Corps, found John,s refusal to enlist or volunteer for national
service profoundly disturbing. The rift was not healed for many
years. John argued that his calling to prepare for God,s service as a
minister of the Gospel took precedence, and so began his studies at
Trinity College, Cambridge, where he stayed throughout the war.
Dudley-Smith has the space to describe in full and
unflattering terms the kind of teaching Stott received in war-time
Cambridge. Liberalism was uppermost in the Faculty of Divinity.
Theology was taught purely as a secular subject, even by some men
who were non-believers. The cause of evangelicalism was upheld
by an eccentric librarian. There were, of course, very few men of
his own age with whom to trade ideas. And – as his biographer
suggests – he was too intense to establish any close relations with
women students. Indeed he never married. His education was
therefore mainly derived from the resources of the University
Library. It was here that he discovered the rich legacy of Charles
Simeon, the great evangelical who had dominated Cambridge in the
nineteenth century, and whose aura was still to be felt in his parish
church, Holy Trinity. But in every college there was also a small
group of fervent and enthusiastic students, members of the
Cambridge Inter-Collegiate Christian Union (CICCU). Stott spent
much of his free time leading their bible studies, extending pastoral
care to searching individuals, and generally building up their faith
along the conservative and rather puritanical lines advocated by the
CICCU leadership. Here again the emphasis was on the
individual,s need for faith in the redeeming love of Christ. Wider
social or political issues were rigorously set aside in the pursuit of
personal holiness and piety.
At the end of 1945 Stott was ordained by the Bishop of
London and invited to serve his curacy at All Souls, Langham Place
and its daughter church, St Peter,s, where he had worshipped as a
boy. It was really a homecoming, but to a London society deeply
changed by the war. For one thing, All Souls Church had been
badly damaged by a bomb and was out of commission until 1951.
His life as an assistant curate was a busy one, since the church was
understaffed. But his duties became heavier when the Rector was
taken ill and had to convalesce for lengthy periods. Stott was then
made Priest-in-Charge. When in early 1950, the Rector died, he
was invited to succeed him at the astonishingly early age of 29.
The latter part of this book covering Stott,s first decade as
Rector is frankly disappointing. Dudley-Smith describes his busy
life, his organizational skills, and the positions of leadership he
soon took up within the evangelical wing of the Church of England.
But little or no clue is given as to what characteristics led to Stott,s
reputation rising so rapidly. To be sure, he was in charge of a
well-situated, obviously prosperous and popular church. He had and
trained a succession of like-minded curates, and he was an
attractive and hard-working minister. His strengths lay in his
expository preaching and his evangelistic zeal, which particularly in
the early years attracted hundreds of young people, especially
students, to Langham Place. But we are not told why he succeeded
more than other similarly placed clergy.
So too with his university missions during the 1950s, to
which Dudley-Smith devotes a whole chapter. He quotes numerous
glowing testimonies to these successes – along with a few critical
comments – but fails to analyze the content of the message, let
alone to make any comparative evaluations. So the effect is
repetitive as one university after another is visited, challenged and
left behind. Possibly Dudley-Smith is too close to his subject, or
perhaps such assessments will be given in the second volume.
Alternatively it may be that he presumed that readers of this
biography would all have heard John Stott for themselves. But for
outsiders, there is a regrettable absence of context and content. We
can only infer that Stott maintained a remarkable consistency in his
approach, which was – and is – a reliance on the traditional
evangelical appeal for personal dedication to Christ, acceptance of
the invitation to let Jesus enter one,s heart, proclamation of the
substitutionary theory of the atonement, and an affirmation of the
release from sin,s bondage. From the evidence here supplied,
Stott,s message seems to be the same one which he accepted at the
time of his own conversion decades before, proclaimed with
intensity and conviction, but also with an unchanging narrowness of
focus. Nowhere does Dudley-Smith seek to expound the strengths
– and weaknesses – of this doctrinal position, or to place it in the
wider context of English or evangelical church life. Perhaps we
shall be given more in Volume II, but the chatty anecdotal
reportage adopted in this first installment suggests otherwise. Too
bad, since Stott is a man of stature whose views deserve a more
thorough and defensible examination and assessment.
JSC

b) Kertzer,D., The Popes Against the Jews: the Vatican’s Role in
the Rise of Modern Anti-Semitism. Alfred A. Knopf, New York,
2001, pp.358.

Reviewed by Eugene J. Fisher, Associate Director, Secretariat for
Ecumenical and Interreligious Affairs, National Conference of
Catholic Bishops, USA.

Unlike the wholly discredited Hitler’s Pope by journalist John
Cornwell, with which this book is likely to be forever paired
(indeed, the publisher places a promotional blurb by Cornwell on
the back jacket cover), David Kertzer’s book is the work of a
professional historian. Kertzer has gone through the archives of the
Holy Office of the Inquisition, opened up by the Holy See for
researchers in 1998, for the 19th & early 20th centuries, and written
up his results in lively and compelling fashion. This work will be
useful to other historians for the details it brings to a story whose
major outlines have long been well known.
Kertzer narrates, for example, cases of “forced” baptisms of
infants in the House of Catechumens in Rome. If a Jewish man
decided to convert to Christianity, he writes, he would be obliged to
sign a document signing over his rights to his wife and children.
The latter then could be taken out of the Roman ghetto and placed
in the House of Catechumens. Those who were of the age of
reason were subjected to 30 days of intensive efforts to convert
them (so the law allowed). If they were still obdurate in their
Jewish faith, they were released to return to the ghetto. Children
under the age of reason were simply baptized and taken to be raised
as Catholics, since their father, who was considered to have this
legal right over his children, had so mandated by his signature.
Kertzer goes on to narrate the appallingly squalid conditions of
the Jews in the ghettos of the Papal States, their efforts to gain their
freedom, and how those efforts became symbolically linked in the
minds of the people who ran the Papal States with all that they felt
was dangerous about the Enlightenment and its ideology of militant
secularism. All of this will be painful, but ultimately healthy
reading for American Catholics, who came to terms with the theory
and praxis of religious pluralism and religious freedom in, shall we
say, 1776.
These “enlightened” theories, of course, were in fact dangerous to
the monarchical ideas behind the Papal States. And one can argue
that the loss of the papacy’s temporal power, so that it could better
understand and exercise its deeper, spiritual authority, was
ultimately one of the better things to happen to the Catholic Church
in its long history. I would be of that persuasion. And I would
offer the example of the present pontificate, with the nonviolent but
effective role Pope John Paul II played in the dissolution of the
Enlightenment’s greatest heresy, the Communist Soviet Union, as a
case in point.
The bishops of the world gathered together at the Second Vatican
Council, I believe, also saw it this way in voting overwhelmingly
for the declarations on religious liberty and on the Jews (Nostra
Aetate no. 4). Whereas before the Council, as the saying went,
“error has no rights,” since the Council the right of human
conscience has been the consistent teaching of the Church.
Kertzer’s problem, however, is that he does not see this, or perhaps
has not done sufficient homework to understand it. The useful
material, which I would hope every Catholic would read, the
material that comes out of his actual research, is contained in the
first of the three parts of his book, a bit over a hundred pages. The
rest, sadly enough, reads more like a polemic in tone and content.
Kertzer sets up his accusation of a Vatican plot to infect an
innocent Europe with anti-Semitism by misconstruing the Holy
See’s document, We Remember: A Reflection on the Shoah. He
wants it to say that there is no relationship at all between modern
racial anti-Semitism and the Christian teaching of contempt for Jew
and Judaism that led to the institution of the ghettos of Europe. But
it does not say that. And here Kertzer’s scholarship deserts him. He
states (p. 205) that We Remember states, “The Catholic Church can
bear no responsibility for the rise of modern anti-Semitism.”
Nowhere does it say that, of course. What Kertzer has done
(unpardonable in a professional historian) is turn a both/and into an
either/or. True, the Holy See’s document does spell out at one point
the logically and historically necessary distinction between
Christian anti-Judaism and modern racial anti-Semitism. But
making a distinction does not, contrary to Kertzer’s odd logic, imply
that there is no relationship between the phenomena being
distinguished. Indeed, the entire structure of We Remember is
based on an acknowledgment of and repentance for the fact that
Christian anti-Jewish polemics against Jews and Judaism over the
centuries, teachings, as Pope John Paul II has said, by the 20th
century had so “lulled the consciences” of Christians that far too
many did not see the dangers of taking the radical step of
dehumanizing the Jews. But attempting to exterminate a whole
group of people is, pace Kertzer, a qualitatively different thing from
forced conversions and ghettos, bad as these were. The U.S.
bishops’ conference, in its document providing guidance for the
implementation of We Remember in Catholic schools, put it this
way: “Christian anti-Judaism did lay the groundwork for racial,
genocidal anti-Judaism by stigmatizing not only Judaism but Jews
themselves for opprobrium and contempt. So the Nazi theories
found tragically fertile soil in which to plant the horror of an
unprecedented attempt at genocide. One way to put the
connectedness between the Christian teaching of anti-Judaism and
Nazi antisemitism is that the former is a ‘necessary cause’ to
consider in explaining the development and success of the latter”
but not a sufficient cause. Christian anti-Judaism alone cannot
account for the Holocaust.” (Catholic Teaching on the Shoah,
USCCB, 2001). Many other historical factors, which Kertzer
studiously ignores, were involved. Kertzer, having set up his straw
person, proceeds to waste an awful lot of the reader’s time
demolishing it with great relish.
Had he done his homework, Kertzer would have realized that the
phrase he uses to title one of his chapters, “Antechamber to the
Holocaust,” was used precisely with reference to the ghettos of
Europe by Cardinal Edward I. Cassidy, then president of the
Pontifical Commission for Religious Relations with the Jews, in a
statement made in May of 1998 clarifying We Remember. Kertzer
likewise fails to give credit to a fellow scholar, Professor Ronald
Modras of St. Louis University for the theory of why so may in the
European clergy at the turn of the last century were attracted to a
form of anti-Semitism, even while denouncing its harsher
implications (see The Catholic Church and Anti-Semitism: Poland
1933-39, Harwood, 1994.
Kertzer’s prosecutorial stance leads him to omit key facts and, at
times, to very tortured arguments. He concludes, for example, that
there was a Vatican “campaign” to popularize the infamous
Protocols of the Elders of Zion because a French priest (whom he is
sure had a close personal relationship with the pope because he was
made–are you ready?–a Monsignor!) did do just that in the 1920’s.
This is to ignore the fact that another French priest, Fr. Pierre
Charles, SJ, wrote an article in the 1930’s thoroughly debunking the
forgery which was picked up in Jesuit journals in Europe and
America. And with regard to the discussion between the Vatican
Secretary of State and the German ambassador in 1943, which
some scholars believe led the Germans to end their deportations of
the Jews of Rome, Kertzer omits the telling detail that the
deportations did stop on the day of that conversation, however it is
interpreted, and that the Jews of Rome went into hiding, in large
part in the monasteries and convents of the city, with the
knowledge of the Vatican, which regularly supplied them with food
to feed the hidden Jews.
This book may have been begun as serious scholarship, but it
ended up as anything but, which is a loss for all of us, Jews and
Catholics alike, since the author is capable of much better work
than exhibited here.
Dr. Eugene J. Fisher
Associate Director, SEIA

c) Diet Eman with James Schaap, Things we couldn,t say, Grand
Rapids, Mich: Eerdmans 1994/2001 pback 392pp

The new paper-back edition of Diet Eman’s reminiscences,
first published a few years ago, provides another opportunity to
share the experiences of this young Dutch student during the years
of Nazi occupation of her homeland. She and her fiancé became
deeply involved in resistance activities, for religious as well as
nationalist reasons. Both paid the price. Diet Eman,s account of
their efforts to hide Jews, procure safe havens, and obtain ration
cards, while evading the Gestpo-led pursuit, clearly testifies to her
Christian-based commitment to the cause, very similar to that of
Corrie ten Boom. Her description of her imprisonment and
harrowing interrogations are vividly recalled. Unfortunately her
fiancé was deported to Germany and died in Dachau. The resulting
shock led her to emigrate and to suppress these dark years from her
memory. Not until fifty years later, when she met a talented writer
James Schaap, did she consent to face the painful remembrance of
these sufferings and to reopen her long-closed diary of those years.
Through their collaboration, Diet Eman and James Schaap give
today’s English-speaking audience another valuable eye-witness
account of both the heroism and the sufferings endured by the
Dutch people at the hands of the Nazis.
JSC

2) New contemporary church history project
Five European universities have been given a joint grant by the
European Commission – its first in the field of Humanities – to
undertake a collaborative study of the role of the churches in the
integration of Europe. Coordinated by the University of Helsinki
(Prof. Aila Lauha), this project will involve the universities of
Glasgow, Tartu, Lund and Münster. In Glasgow, list-member
Nicholas Hope of the Department of History is supported by his
research assistant Philip Coupland. The scope of the project is to
examine the relationship of the churches to political events of the
last fifty years from the Cold War to the present. Each university
will have its own assignment relating to the whole project. For
example, Glasgow concentrates on British archival material, and
looks at local churches and religious faiths in politics and society.
We look forward to reporting on the progress of this excellently
ecumenical initiative.

3) New book publications:
Mark Lindsay, Covenanted Solidarity: The theological basis of Karl
Barth,s opposition to Nazi Antisemitism and the Holocaust,
(Issues in Systematic Theology, Vol. 9) Frankfurt, Berne, New
York: Peter Lang. 2001.

Simone A.Liebster, Facing the Lion. Memoirs of a young girl in
Nazi Europe. Grammaton Press, New Orleans 2000 408pp
This is one of a new series of memoirs written by members of the
Jehovah,s Witnesses sect, following the pattern set by their Jewish
partners in suffering. Liebster,s account of her youth in Alsace, and
her persecution after the Nazi conquest is on familiar lines, but
brings out again the courageous obstinacy with which members of
the J.Ws accosted their persecutors.
Their witness has not been much written about in secular terms,
partly because this religious fraternity is still discriminated against,
and partly because such literary exercises does not belong in their
culture. But this glimpse of their fate is an excellent example of
how such experiences should be recorded for posterity.

Nicholas M.Railton, No North Sea. The Anglo-German Evangelical
Network in the middle of the nineteeenth century. Leiden: Brill.
2000 286pp
Although this study is limited to the mid-nineteenth century, its
subject matter will be of interest to our list members, since it
portrays a happy period of collaboration between German and
British Evanglicals in a variety of constructive endeavours. Possibly
the most striking was the establishment of the Anglo-Prussian
bishopric in Jerusalem, which is nicely described in detail. The
Pietist tradition in Prussia and the Evangelical wing of the Church
of England together believed in the supremacy of biblical witness,
and were ardent in their championing of missions. Perhaps too
literal, perhaps too dogmatic, but certainly fervent and full of good
works. Railton clearly sympathises with this stance, and it is only
too bad that he stops short just before the nationalist tensions of
later years drove these friends apart apparently irreversibly.

Harald Marcuse, Legacies of Dachau, Cambridge University Press,
2001, 590 pp

Harald Marcuse, who now teaches in Santa Barbara, is the grandson
of the eminent German philosopher. This compendious, splendidly
researched and well illustrated volume is really the story of how the
community of Dachau, near Munich, came to terms with its being
the site of the Nazis, first concentration camp, and with the
subsequent horrors which happened there. Our readers will be
particularly interested in the two chapters on “Catholics celebrate at
Dachau (p. 221-241) and “Protestants make amends at Dachau
(p.276-289).
In 1940 all the Christian clergy held in “protective custody were
consolidated in Dachau, 2579 Catholics – mainly Poles – and a very
much smaller number of Protestants. Those who survived after the
war wanted to erect a memorial. In line with Catholic practice, a
place of martyrdom and suffering could be sanctified if a shrine
was buiilt over the spot, especially if relics of the martyrs could be
found. The cult reflects Christ,s sacrifice and becomes a focus for
religious pilgrimage, not for historical commemoration. The
Catholic chapel in Dachau was finally built in 1960, largely
because of pressure from abroad, and against the opposition of the
local citizens. But again religious elements predominate over
historical references. There is no mention of the Nazi past.
By contrast the Protestants, led by Martin Niemöller, himself a
Dachau inmate, and supported by a youth group, Action for
Atonement, stressed the Church,s failings in the Nazi years. Their
chapel was named the Chapel of Reconciliation and sought to attest
Protestant solidarity with all of the Nazis, victims, even though the
record of the German Protestants, assistance to these victims after
1945 had been sparse. But the need to learn the lessons from the
past was markedly emphasized in Niemöller,s speech at the
chapel,s ceremonial dedication in 1967, when he compared his own
experience of injustice in Dachau with the United States,
aggression in Vietnam. Reconciliation had to be earned by an
active commitment to peace and justice.

With best wishes to you all at this festive season,

John S.Conway
jconway@interchange.ubc.ca
Association of Contemporary Church Historians website:

Dear Friends,

Contents:
1) Book reviews:

a) J.Dixon, Divine Feminine
b) W.Ustorf, Sailing on the next tide. Missions, missiology and the Third Reich

2) New journal articles
3) Short notices:

Remembering for the Future
Anderson, Practicing Democracy

Zugger, Catholics in Soviet Union
O.Bartov and P.Mack, In God,s Name
Liebster, Facing the Lion

1a) Joy Dixon, Divine Feminine: Theosophy and Feminism in
England. (The Johns Hopkins Studies in Historical and
Political Science, 119th Series) Baltimore and London: The
Johns Hopkins University Press 2000. 293pp
ISBN 0-8018-6499-2

Joy Dixon, who teaches at the University of British
Columbia, breaks new ground in describing the links between
the rising feminist movements of early twentieth-century
England and the esoteric religions, particularly theosophy,
which enjoyed a considerable boom in the same period.
Historians – mostly men – have dismissed theosophy and the
antics of its foundress, Madame Blavatsky, as a crackpot cult
unworthy of serious attention. Joy Dixon is more sympathetic.
While she does not seek to examine the truth-claims of this
sect, she is prepared to recognize that it had a considerable
impact, especially among women. Her interest lies in the
historical context in which such movements operated. Both
the political branch of feminism and such “spiritual groups as
the Theosophical Society, she claims, can be regarded as a
kind of counter-culture which challenged the male domination
of British politics, society and the churches. Her sprightly and
well-researched account argues that, in fact, theosophy can be
said to be still at work in such counter-cultural movements as
New Age.

In the early years of the last century the members of the
Theosophical Society believed they were about to lead the
world into a new dispensation, spiritually and politically. The
success of the T.S. was due at least in part to its attempt to
reconcile all religions, philosophies and scientific systems in a
higher synthesis. When combined with the exotic glamour of a
mystic East, the attraction was undoubted, especially since its
founder was a woman. At a time when conventional religion
was being undermined by the claims of secular science, Mme
Blavatsky,s appeal was a combination of mystery and
scientism. She spent much of her time in India where she
claimed to be in touch with her spiritual sources, but
successfully translated these esoteric teachings and practices to
the upper middle-classes of London. Of course she met with
opposition. One of the rival movements, the Society for
Psychical Research, even commissioned an investigation of her
activities, which concluded that she was to be regarded
“neither as the mouthpiece of hidden seers, nor as a vulgar
adventuress; we think she has achieved a title to permanent
remembrance as one of the most accomplished, ingenious, and
interesting imposters in history.

Nevertheless, by the time of her death in 1891, the
Theosophical Society had established itself in London,s
clubland, and when the leadership fell to another equally
forceful woman, Annie Besant, its influence grew still further.
After she had lost her faith and divorced her husband, an
Anglican vicar, at the age of 25, Besant developed considerable
administrative and oratorical skills, which brought her the
same kind of publicity, or notoriety, as her suffragette
counterparts. With women of such calibre in leadership
positions, it was more difficult to see theosophy as being based
on moonshine or its devotees recruited from the moonstricken.
Rather, by stressing her Irish roots and Indian connections,
Besant made a claim to have greater spiritual insight than the
average “Anglo-Saxon philistine. The impression that
emerges from the writings of English theosophists is that India
and the “Celtic fringe, along with women, were the repository
of a spirituality that English men had forfeited in exchange for
material progress.

Under Besant, the Theosophical Society became
dominated by women, and its spiritual activities would be
characterized, or criticized, as distinctly feminine. But this
evolution was complex. As over against the rationalist and
materialist culture of main-stream Christianity, theosophy,s
emphasis on “astral forces and the importance of emotion,
even when it led to excessive credulity or sentimentality, was
seen by many women to be a more valid and vital experience
in their lives. Devotional services began to displace the earlier
reliance on cerebral lectures as a more appropriate way to
support a feminine agenda and to express the wisdom of the
East in a suitable western idiom. And particularly after the
outbreak of war in 1914, theosophy capitalized on its female
adherents, need for spiritual consolation in the face of death
and bereavement. Theosophy offered unambiguous spiritual
answers and supplied comfort to some of the war,s despairing
survivors.

Under Besant, more stress was laid on political
activities. The T.S. became part of a loosely socialist and
feminist political culture. Its immanentist theology posed a
challenge to middle-class masculinity with its capitalistic and
imperialistic individualism. Theosophism was welcomed both
by feminists and by Indian nationalists, following Besant,s
statement that: “India is in advance in things spiritual, England
in things material. They are two complementary halves which
if put together might make the greatest empire ever known.
Social reform was at first seen as a spiritual duty and a
necessary preparation for the New Age. But after the
disillusionment of the first world war, the rise of Communism –
distinctly unspiritual – cooled such enthusiasms. Indeed in the
1920s and 1930s, some theosophists turned to corporatist
movements, such as the British Union of Fascists. Here the
T.S.,s hierarchical and elitist mentality felt more at home, but
in fact, as Joy Dixon rightly notes, theosophy could sustain
both a corporatist and a collectivist vision, and as such its
occult body politics existed in an unstable relationship with the
existing British political parties.

Equally interesting is the author,s analysis of the
various trends within femininism. Some women sought to
recreate Christianity in a femininist guise, while others
condemned it, and Judaism, as irremediably patriarchal.
Theosophy sought to incorporate the insights of the great
religions of the East, but these were also suspect for failing to
overcome the subjection of women. Opinion was also divided
about the suffragettes, whose behaviour appeared more
masculine than feminine. To be sure, the roots of the world,s
evil lay in male supremacy and the misuse of male power. But
the Divine Feminine Principle required a higher consciousness,
which would lead to a democratic and communistic society.
This of course could be combined with a belief in women,s
superior sexuality, untainted by masculine bestiality.

Joy Dixon is particularly good at describing the crucial
nexus of theosophy in the wider feminist cause. For a
significant number of women, and particularly for women in
the militant wing of the suffrage movement, spirituality was a
constitutive element in their feminist politics. It was, of course,
an eclectic, as yet unformed, spirituality. And, therefore, the
vagueness of theosophy,s beliefs encouraged an inclusive
debate as part of a wider spiritual crusade. The fact that
theosophy celebrated women,s special excellence over men
fitted well with the suffrage movement,s political instincts. It
was all part of the attempt to reclaim the public and political
realms as a sacred space. Dixon,s brief biographies of several
leading women in her final chapters are revealing of the
strengths and weaknesses of such spiritual searchings. But, as
conditions changed, so the Theosophical Society was no longer
so influential in England. Its numbers, never large, have since
declined almost to vanishing point.

Although the debates here described took place less
than a hundred years ago, they now seem passé. Feminism has
won its battles and is now politically correct. But the Divine
Feminine Messiah has not appeared. Utopianism is at a
discount, even if the wisdom of the East is still capable of
finding adherents. The current New Age, with its hedonistic
self-indulgence, is a far cry from the ascetic spirituality of its
predecessors. So these earnest and dedicated women
influenced by theosophy,s high ideals, seem distant. And
because we see them only through their writings, rather
desiccated. Did they ever laugh? Perhaps some interviews
with surviving family members would help to make their
personalities more rounded, and fill out the legacy they left
behind.

In any case, we owe Joy Dixon a debt for two things:
first, for her capable research into a considerable number of
obscure printed sources and for surveying the records of the
Theosophical Society, as far as she was allowed; second, for
steering a fine line through unknown territory, avoiding both
admiration and denigration. Given the exotic and esoteric
links between theosophy and feminism, this was no mean
achievement.
JSC

1b) Werner Ustorf, Sailing on the next tide. Missions,
missiology and the Third Reich (Studies in the Intercultural
History of Christianity 125) Frankfurt, New York: Peter Lang.
2000. 274 pp ISBN 3-631-37060-1

Werner Ustorf is a German scholar, now professor of
Mission at Birmingham University. U.K. In this book he looks
into the theory of missions as developed in his homeland
during the first half of the last century. He begins by widening
the concept of mission to examine how this notion could be
taken up by non-Christian groups such as Hitler,s Nazi Party or
by Professor Hauer,s neo-pagan Germanic religion. Ustorf
agrees with those who see Nazism as a political religion,
affirms that much of its ideology was derived from Christian
sources, and demonstrates that Hitler consciously used (and
perverted) religious language in pursuit of his racial goals. He
therefore rejects a purely instrumental view of Nazi cult
performances or propaganda, and instead stresses its
missionary endeavour to save the German Volk in its
life-and-death struggle against the forces of evil, as incarnated
in the Jews. The mission of the German people was to
safeguard their blood and soil from contamination by outside
forces and thus show the way of salvation to other nations.
The Christian hope for deliverance was transferred to the
political sphere, whereby Hitler became the Saviour, or indeed
the Messiah, of the Third Reich.
This ethno-centric religious ideology found a partner in
the German Faith Movement, propagated by Professor Hauer
of Tubingen University. Both challenged the Christian
churches by insisting on the priority of national faith-identity.
The impact, in the political circumstances of 1933, was
considerable. But Ustorf,s chief concern is to show how such
notions affected the thinking of the German missionary
community, especially among the Protestants. He advances the
view that sympathy for the Nazi political and ideological goals
led many of the German missionaries to accept the idea of a
“special revelation to be found in each nation, and thus to
attempt a kind of syncretism between “blood and soil and
traditional Christianity.
By contrast, the emphasis of the historic mission
societies under British or American auspices was on
universalism. The Gospel was to be preached to all the world,
and this task was often equated with the advance of
“civilization. Missionaries abroad may have had some
reservations about the methods by which imperialism imposed
its rule over so much of Asia and Africa, but they readily
accepted the “white man,s burden, and rejected all attempts to
syncretize with local ethnic beliefs. But in the 1930s, both
European imperialism and Christian exclusivism came to be
increasingly challenged, and the traditional missionary
structures and ideas came under corrosive attack both at home
and in the field.
Creative thinkers on the future of Christian missions in
this decade, such as Joe Oldham, Visser t Hooft, John Mott or
William Hocking, believed that a new impetus was now
necessary. They criticized the institutional inertia of the
existing missionary bodies, and argued that a new injection of
mainly lay talent was now required. Less stress on traditional
dogmatism and more on humanitarian engagement, less
paternalism from colonialist structures, more local initiative
and control. But the resistance of the mission boards and their
conservative constituencies delayed such an agenda for another
thirty years.
In the meanwhile, the shock of the world-wide
depression and the onslaught of totalitarian regimes, such as
Nazism, overshadowed the debate about missions abroad. By
the end of the 1930s there was a widespread recognition that
there was now a “life and death struggle between Christian
faith and the secular and pagan tendencies of our time
(Oxford Life and Work Conference, 1937). In view of such
enormous dangers, the Church must “assert the claim of Jesus
Christ, as the incarnate Word of God, to the Lordship of all
human life. There were authoritarian overtones to this
demand, largely unrecognized at the time. But such a
Christo-centric doctrine rallied the Church even though it made
the task of relating to other religions more difficult.
In his third section Ustorf describes the German
mission scene during the Third Reich, mainly concentrating on
the leading figures in their home base.Virtually all were
conservative nationalists, antisemitic and anti-bolshevik, and
totally opposed to the iniquitous Versailles Treaty. The
missionaries had a special grievance against the 1919
settlement. After the British conquest of the German colonies
in Africa and Asia in 1915, the missionaries had been sent
packing. Very quickly they saw themselves as maltreated
victims of the British rape of their mission posts, and readily
told the tale of their sufferings to the war-time German press.
Versailles confirmed their unanimously-held suspicions of a
British plot to confiscate their missions, and hence reinforced
the trauma of their expulsion. In fact, Article 438, which had
been included at the specific desire of Joe Oldham and his
colleagues in London, rescued these German properties from
being seized as war reparations, and instead stipulated that they
be placed under the trusteeship of non-German representatives
of the same denomination – usually Swedish. But the whining
tone of resentment and victimization echoed throughout the
German missionary press for many years, reinforcing their
anti-ecumenical and nationalist stance, and hence making them
particularly susceptible to Hitler,s appeal. In the field, where
German missionaries were again active, Hitler,s propaganda
was easily and eagerly perused. In such British-controlled
territories as Tanganyika or southern India, it was hardly
surprising that the missions were suspect of creating Nazi cells.
Indeed the enthusiasm with which the Nazi take-over of power
was greeted in these circles is rightly characterized by Ustorf as
“an amalgamation of racist thought, political ideology and
Pietistic elements.
The leaders of the Protestant missions, such as
Siegfried Knak, Martin Schlunk and Walter Freytag, were all
captivated by the spirit of the new regime. To be sure they
were subsequently to become disillusioned when the Nazi
radicals made clear their disdain for all church support. The
consequent friction could later be used as an alibi, and in the
post-1945 world enabled these men to retain their positions
without any damaging enquiries. But Ustorf carefully records
just how compromised their behaviour after 1933 was.
Plans to integrate the overseas missions under the
control of the “German Christian dominated Reich Church
were thwarted. But the leaders eagerly enough supported the
Nazi plans to re-establish a German colonial empire. It was
then hardly surprising that Nazi attitudes towards the Jews
pervaded the missionary societies. But here the answer lay in
conversion, which would put a stop to “the Jewish peril.
Overall, the missions sailed with the Nazi tide and made
willing and easy accommodations to its demands.
With the defeat of Nazism, the German mission seemed
finished. For the mission agencies,survival was paramount.
But very soon they joined the politically conservative
campaign for the re-Christianization of the nation. As
defenders of the true faith, they now claimed they had opposed
Nazism all along. And surely their services would be required
for the even greater struggle against atheistic Communism?
They also sought the return of their missionaries to their
overseas posts, and the restoration of their properties. But the
International Missionary Council demanded that, before that
happened, there had to be some coming to terms with their
Nazi past. This provoked lengthy discussions and at last a
reluctant acceptance of a modified Declaration of Guilt. By
this time, however, the ecumenical context had moved on. The
younger churches now had to be consulted as to whether they
wanted the Germans back. To their great chagrin, for example
in India, these missionaries, who had spent the war interned in
a hill-station, now found themselves rejected by their own
parishioners and obliged to return to a war-devastated
Germany. Their dismissal marked the end of a chapter.
Ustorf pertinently points out that the German
Protestants had sought to propagate their faith by relying both
on the political aid of the state and on the ideology of German
nationalism, with its racialist and imperialist overtones. In so
doing they had failed to come to terms with the 20th century,s
most important issues, particularly religious pluralism and
secular materialism. We can be grateful for Ustorf,s
description of the illusionary nature of the voyage on which
these German missionaries set sail, and for his encouragement
to tackle the renewed missiological debate for the years ahead.
JSC

2) New Journal Articles:
Wolfgang Hardtwig, Political religion in Modern Germany:
Reflections on Nationalism, Socialism, and National
Socialism: in Bulletin of the German Historical Institute,
Washington D.C., Spring 2001, no. 28 p.3ff

This perceptive article takes up the theme discussed in last
month,s review of Hans Mommsen,s chapter on Nazism as a
political religion. Hardtwig rejects the view that Nazism was
an ersatz faith, but adopts Hitler,s own view that this was a
“political belief. The reason it gained so much ground,
especially among Protestants, was largely because of the
disarray in the theology of the 1920s. Nazism offered a wholly
immanentist view of the possibility of political salvation once
Germany,s enemies had been eliminated. This is a secular
belief not a religion, which, in Hardtwig,s view, must include a
transcendent dimension. He thus reinforces the arguments
advanced in the massively-researched volume by
Calus-Ekkehard Bärsch, Die politische Religion des
Nationalsozialismus, (Munich 1998) which examines the
thought and writings of the leading Nazis, finding a large
diversity of views, but powerfully expressed.

The June issue of Church History, Vol. 70 no 2, is devoted to
this Newsletter,s themes, and indeed several list members have
contributed articles:
Roland Blaich, German Methodism and the Nazi State,
Donald Dietrich, Totalitarianism
Doris Bergen, German military chaplains in world war II
Kevin Spicer, Msgr B.Lichtenberg,s conflict with Karl Adam
John Delaney, Clerical opposition to Nazi anti-Polish racial
policy,
Kyle Jantzen, Strategies for clerical survival amid the German
Church Struggle,
Michael Phayer, Questions about Catholic Resistance.

3) Short notices:
Remembering for the Future: The papers given at the July
2000 Conference in Oxford, entitled as above, have now
appeared in print in three massive volumes, each of 1000
pages, all published by Palgrave. Vol. 2: Ethics and Religion
contains a number of interesting papers, some by our
list-members. The chapters are headed: Ethical Choices,
Rescue, The Catholic Church, The Protestant Churches,
Post-Holocaust Theology and The Search for Justice. A
wonderful cornucopia, if your library manages to afford a copy.

Margaret Anderson, Practicing Democracy. Elections and
political culture in Imperial Germany. Princeton U.P 2000
483pp.
This authoritative study of the initial stages of the growth of
participatory democracy under the watchful eye of the
Emperors William I and II is particularly good at showing how
precarious the whole experiment was, and how many forces
clashed in the process. Chapters 4 and 5 outline the conflict
over the role of the Catholic Church, and the viciousness of
anticlerical attacks. Such topics as Jesuit phobia and the
spectre of clerical influence are here analyzed, and placed in
their political context. Anderson skillfully describes the
political aspects of the Kulturkampf and the reasons for the
Catholics, eventual success.

Christopher L.Zugger, The Forgotten. Catholics of the Soviet
Empire from Lenin to Stalin. Syracuse U.P.2001 556 pp.
This is a splendidly compendious account of the sufferings of
the Roman Catholic minority in the Soviet Union at the hands
of the Communist revolutionaries and their leaders, Lenin and
Stalin. It makes for sad reading, all the more since the author,s
sympathies for the victims are outspoken. Excellently
researched and illustrated, this is a valuable and convincing
story of how this church survived – barely – the intolerant
bigotry of Communist political ideology and practice.

ed. O.Bartov and P.Mack, In God,s Name. Genocide and
Religion in the Twentieth Century. NewYork/Oxford:
Berghahn Books 2001 402 pp.
This collection of papers from a 1997 conference includes
contributions from a number of our list-members, Doris
Bergen, Beth Griech-Polelle, Susannah Heschel and Bob
Ericksen. Three themes are stressed -The Perpetrators,
Survival and Aftermath – but the plurality of views expressed –
some of them not very new, even in 1997 – makes for a good
mixture of stances, but not much harmonious reconciliation.
By extending the horizons to include genocide in Rwanda, we
get some balance from too much emphasis on the Jewish
Holocaust, but these essays are not fully integrated or related to
the rest – as inevitably happens as such conferences. But Ian
Kershaw,s final summary is excellent. He pinpoints the crucial
responsibility of religions over the centuries for the
perpertration of genocide, both in theory and practice, and
concludes that “the record of Christianity is probably most dire
of all religions. As a result, Kershaw laments, “there will
almost certainly be little prospect of looking to the Christian
Churches to put a brake on “future genocides, even if they are
not actively involved as they were in Rwanda.

John Conway
jconway@interchange.ubc.ca

Dear Friends,

I am sorry that this comes to you a few days late, but want to
thank all those who welcomed last month,s editorial essay on
the Joint Catholic-Jewish Commission and its regretted
demise.

Contents:
1) Quotation of the month:
2) Book reviews: a) Besier, German Church History 1934-39
b) Rauscher, Proposed Papal Encyclical 1939
3) Kirchliche Tourismus: V.Clark, Why angels fall.

1) Quotation of the month:
“Of all the roads that a historian may tread none passes
through more difficult country than that of religious history. To
a believer religious truths are eternal. The doctrine that he
preaches and accepts gives expression to their everlasting
validity. To him the historian who seeks to discover and
explain why the doctrine should have appeared at a particular
moment of time seems guilty of unwarranted determinism. But
Revealed Religion cannot escape from the bonds of time; for
the Revelation must have occurred at a particular moment . . .
It may be that man is continually refreshed by messages from
on high. It may be that there is a divine ordering of history.
But the historian himself is mortal, restricted by the limitations
of temporality, and he must have the modesty to know his
limitations. His business is to tell the story and make it, as best
he can, intelligible to humanity . . . At the same time, the
historian must attempt to add to his objective study the
qualities of interactive sympathy and imaginative perception
without which he cannot hope to comprehend the fears and
aspirations and convictions that have moved past generations.
These qualities are, maybe, gifts of the spirit, gifts which can
be experienced and felt but not explained in human terms.
Steven Runciman, The Great Church in Captivity, chap.1,
p.3-4.

2a) ed G.Besier, Zwischen “nationaler Revolution und
militärischer Aggression. Transformationen in Kirche und
Gesellschaft 1934-1939. (Schriften des Historischen Kollegs
Kolloquien 48). Munich: R.Oldenbourg Verlag, 2001 xxviii +
276pp ISBN 3-486-56543-5

Despite its cumbersome title, this book contains a
useful summary of the present research on the period of most
intense confrontation between Nazism and the German
churches, 1934-1939. These papers were given at a
Colloquium in Munich in 1998, organized by the Historisches
Kolleg and now published in one of their series. The first half
consists of essays by German scholars on various aspects of the
German Church Struggle, particularly on the Evangelical
Churches, experiences, while the second half consists of six
essays by foreign scholars dealing with the reactions to this
struggle from the vantage points of Austria, Czechoslovakia,
Sweden, France, Great Britain and North America.
Sixty years after the events is a good time for a
retrospective evaluation. Following the immediate post-war
apologias and self-justification, there came years of more
critical examinations of the various participants, motives and
actions. Now the emphasis is less on moralizing judgments
and more on context, seeing National Socialism in a wider
parameter of nationalist aggression. At the same time, the
churches, responses are examined in the context of being
caught between the contradictory pressures of political
accommodation or traditional conservatism. Overall, the
findings of these papers show how readily other factors than
the Gospel,s demands governed the response of German
churchmen.
Still relevant as a topic of discussion is whether
National Socialism should be regarded as a secular religion.
Hans Mommsen,s essay suggests that the reasons why so many
church people, both Protestant and Catholic, were attracted by
Adolf Hitler arose mainly out of their politicized illusions, and
the lack of credibility of their own doctrinal beliefs. Hence the
enormous wave of support in 1933. It was only after the
extreme radicals in the Nazi Party showed their hand that
opinion began to change. In fact, these Nazi attempts to
expunge the churches in favour of a new racial religion, along
with their proponents, dogmatical anti-clericalism, were the
prime cause of a reluctant resistance from their victims. Had
these extremists been kept in check, there can be little doubt
that the Churches, nationalist loyalties would have cemented
their support of Hitler and his Party. As it was, Hitler,s tactical
opportunism only encouraged the churchmen,s mistaken view
that “if only the Führer knew, he would restrain his fanatical
followers. But, on the other hand, despite the readiness to
manipulate religious vocabularies, and to organize vast
pseudo-religious ceremonies for propagandistic purposes, the
absence of any coherent logic or substance in Nazi ideology
does not amount to a “political religion.
By contrast, Julius Schoeps argues that no better
explanation can be found for the Nazis, campaign to
exterminate the Jews than to see this combination of political
apocalyptic and destructive will as a religion. This
“heilstheologie dimension was the product of a systematic
unity going far beyond mere propagandistic tactics, but
mobilizing the kind of antisemitic sentiments which
Goldhagen, for one, believed all Germans shared. Hitler was
both saviour and deliverer from the evil threat of international
Jewry – a sentiment to which many Christians subscribed. But
essentially, Schoeps argues, without this suprapolitical and
indeed metahistorical belief, the whole radical Nazi fanaticism
cannot be adequately explained.
For his part, Klaus-Michael Mallmann, in his
examination of the policies of the Gestapo and the Security
Service (SD) towards the churches, stresses the contradictory
attitudes of these agencies. Chaos and confusion marked what
he calls a multivoiced, frequently dissonant and inconsistent
concert, whereby the Nazi leaders failed to reach a consensus
on how to deal with the churches, and indeed “doves and
“hawks often changed sides. Hitler personally ordered
Niemöller,s imprisonment in a concentration camp, but
prevented similar action against Bishop von Galen. Such
inconsistencies, however, did not remove the overall threat. In
fact, there is evidence enough of the process of radicalization
which demonized the churches, just as it had international
Jewry and world Freemasonry. The SD became the guardian of
Nazi ideological purity, and from 1939 the RSHA took action
accordingly. This excellently researched article only confirms
the view that, if Hitler had won the war, the place of the
churches would have been drastically reduced or eliminated.
The remaining essays, while not so provocative, are
also carefully researched with helpful footnotes and
bibliographies, and together form a valuable addition to our
knowledge.
JSC

1b) ed. Anton Rauscher, Wider den Rassismus. Entwurf einer
nicht erschienenen Enzyklika (1938). Texte aus dem Nachlass
von Gustav Gundlach SJ. Paderborn: Ferdinand Schöningh
2001. 208pp DM 39.90 paperback.

Historians have known for almost three decades about a
projected encyclical on racism prepared for Pope Pius XI but
never issued. Fragments of a draft were published on
December 15, 1972 by the Kansas City weekly, The National
Catholic Reporter. They came from the papers of the
American Jesuit John LaFarge, a pioneer for racial justice in
the United States who died in 1968. In a private audience on
June 22, 1938 Pius commissioned LaFarge to draft an
encyclical on racism. LaFarge had come to the Pope,s attention
through his book Interracial Justice (1937). No intellectual,
LaFarge felt unequal to the task. At his request the Jesuit
General Wladimir Ledochowski assigned two European Jesuits
to assist LaFarge: the German Gustav Gundlach and the
Frenchman Gustave Desbuquois. Both had worked on the
encyclical Quadragesimo anno (1930) which dealt with
questions of social justice. The three laboured in Paris
throughout the summer of 1938, completing their work in
September. Pius XI died on February 10, 1939 without
publishing the encyclical. His successor Pius XII did not revive
the project.
An article in L,Osservatore Romano for April 5, 1975
by the German Jesuit Burkhart Schneider, one of the four
Jesuits then working on the Actes et documents du Saint-Siége
relatifs a la Seconde Guerre mondiale disclosed the existence
of a draft in German, written by Gundlach. This differed from
the English and French drafts, most significantly in the
concluding section on antisemitism. In 1995 two Belgians, the
Benedictine Georges Passelecq and the Jewish sociologist
Bernard Suchecky, published L,encyclique cachée de Pie XI.
Une occasion manqée de l,église face a l,antisemitisme.
Translated into English in 1997 under the title The Hidden
Encyclical of Pius XI, this contained the full French and
English drafts from LaFarge,s papers, but not the German
version. In the work under review, the Augsburg professor
Anton Rauscher presents Gundlach,s German draft, letters
from him to LaFarge which clarify the chronology, an analysis
of this material, and a discussion of the reasons for the
non-appearance of the encyclical.
Gundlach,s text, over a hundred single-spaced typed
pages, is dense: in Rauscher,s words, “as difficult to read as
all of Gundlach,s writings. The draft emphasizes the unity of
the human race, commends patriotism, and condemns
nationalism and racism. The final paragraphs (170-183)
declare antisemitism incompatible with Christian faith. “The
Church today views with indignation and pain measures
affecting Jews which, because they violate natural law, do not
deserve the honorable name of laws. The most fundamental
claims of justice and charity are violated without hesitation or
limit. The draft concludes by reaffirming the condemnation
of antisemitism by the Holy Office on March 25, 1928.
Why was the Encyclical never published? Rauscher
argues convincingly for the simplest explanation: time ran out.
Encyclicals require lengthy scrutiny. Reconciling the
differences between the English and French drafts on the one
hand, and the German text on the other, required further time.
The editor of Civilta Cattolica, charged with evaluating the
drafts died on November 26,1938,without completing his task.
Pius XII, elected on March 2, 1939, shared his predecessor,s
abhorrence of Nazism. As Secretary of State he had drafted the
encyclical Mit brennender Sorge (1937). With the political
situation in Europe rapidly deteriorating, however, the new
Pope thought he must devote all his efforts in the spring and
summer of 1939 to averting the outbreak of war. A flaming
denunciation of Nazi racial policy would have eliminated
whatever chance still existed that his pleas for peace would be
heeded in Berlin. Had Pius XII issued the planned encyclical,
it is not difficult to imagine his present-day critics charging
that he had recklessly extinguished the last slender chance for
peace. His first encyclical, Summi Pontificatus, issued on
October 20, 1939 (after the quest for peace had been lost) drew
on the draft prepared for Pius XI and contained an explicit
condemnation of Nazi racial policy.
Rauscher writes that an earlier papal denunciation of
Hitler is unlikely to have found the ready response inside or
outside Germany which the Pope,s critics assume today. In
1939 there was little willingness anywhere to assist Jews who
wished to flee Germany. At an international conference in
Evian, France in 1938, no less than thirty-two nations declined
to receive Jewish refugees.
This book shows that Gundlach was a man of unusual
clear-sightedness. Consider, for instance, his letter to LaFarge
of May 30, 1940: “The western powers did not take the dictator
[Hitler] seriously enough. Following the [first] World War their
intransigent and non-conciliatory foreign policy prepared the
way for the Nazi dictatorship in Germany. After 1933 they
strengthened Hitler through concessions and appeasement,
making it possible for him to achieve a series of foreign policy
successes. This lack of principle and clearly displayed
indifference in the face of the dictator,s thousandfold violation
of natural and divine law has now brought the western powers
a terrible revenge. Rauscher,s work, dispassionate and
meticulous in presentation, is an example of German
scholarship at its best and an important contribution to the
history of the Catholic Church,s role in events preceding the
Holocaust.
John Jay Hughes, St Louis, Missouri

2) Kirchliche Tourismus – a journey through Orthodox Europe

Victoria Clark, Why Angels Fall. A journey through Orthodox
Europe from Byzantium to Kosovo. London: Picador 2000
£7.99 460pp ISBN 0-330-48788-4

Victoria Clark is an experienced journalist, having
worked for the London Observer in eastern Europe for a
number of years. In 1998 and 1999 she decided to embark on a
voyage to examine the fortunes of Orthodoxy by seeking out
the places and times which have proved vital in making
Orthodox Europe what it is today. So she traveled from
northern Russia to Cyprus, and from Bosnia to Siberia,
skillfully seeking audiences with leading figures in the
Orthodox church world, and recording their answers to her
often pointed questions. Her only regret was her failure to
reach Mount Athos because of the monks, age-long ban on
women. But her percipient account of the “angelic ethos
emanating from the Holy Mountain more than makes up for
this lacuna.
In setting out on her pilgrimage, Clark takes up the
long-held view, lately recharged by Professor Samuel
Huntingdon, that the basic division in Europe is not between
the rival nationalisms, such as France and Germany, or the
competing ideological systems, such as Communism and
capitalism, but the centuries-old religious separation of the
western churches, both Catholic and Protestant, from Eastern
Orthodoxy. The frontier between these two runs from
Archangel in the north to Albania in the south and has
remained the focus point of turmoil and strife for a thousand
years, ever since the notorious rift between the Latin and the
Byzantine churches of 1054. As a result, western church
members know all too little about the culture of Eastern
Orthodox Europe, stretching back east from Bosnia all the way
to the Urals. The recent removal of the political and
geographical barriers imposed by the Soviet regime for so long
now reveals how differently Orthodoxy has prospered with its
own scale of values and priorities.
In many ways Orthodoxy has for centuries seen its
mission to conduct a defensive war against both the alien
culture of materialism of the west and the constant threat of the
Islamic world to the south. This embattled position can be
traced back to Orthodoxy,s reaction to the plundering rampage
of western Crusaders who sacked Constantinople in 1204, and
the equally appalling and conclusive overthrow of Byzantium
by the Ottoman Turks in 1454. But the same determination to
protect their territorial and spiritual heritage still plays a part in
the current violence between Orthodox Serbs and Bosnian
Muslims, promotes the quarrels between Uniate Catholic and
Orthodox communities in the Ukraine, turns the Chechnya war
into a religious crusade, leaves Cyprus and its capital, Nicosia,
irreparably divided for decades, and leads to a regrettable lack
of ecumenical goodwill, which not even the eirenical gestures
of Pope John Paul II have been able to overcome.
For centuries eastern Orthodoxy has been characterized
by two forces, sometimes contrasting, sometimes reinforcing
each other, the one hellish in its practical consequences, the
other heavenly in its ideal. On the one hand, there is the
religious nationalism, called Phyletism, which invests political
structures with divine authority, while providing a historical
mythology or justification of its claims. Serbia is a trenchant
example of this tendency. The Serbian Orthodox Church
backed even the outrageous ethnic-cleansing of Milosovic, and
helped to unify the people in their defiant opposition to what
they saw as the “imperialist ambitions of the westerners,
especially Americans, whose sinister plots are now believed to
be part of the continuous conspiracy against Serbia and
Orthodoxy which began so long ago. As one recent Serbian
patriarch explained: “the entire ascent of the Serbian people in
history was won only and exclusively by the sword, in a sea of
spilled blood and countless victims, which means that without
all this there is no victory, as there is no resurrection without
death.
This sense of defensive nationalism is only reinforced
by the Orthodox sense of history, which is circular rather than
linear. Nations can be defeated, but will rise again. Their
sufferings can be readily equated to those of Christ, and
bravely borne for the sake of the final recompense. The past is
never forgotten because it may recur – especially where
iniquitous foreigners are concerned. So the Catholic crusaders,
sack of Constantinople in 1204 – for which the Pope recently
apologized – can be immediately linked to the Catholic
Croatians, persecution and extermination of Orthodox Serbs in
the Second World War, or the NATO bombing of Belgrade.
All too readily, the Orthodox churches see themselves as
victims of outside forces, and turn inwards to fortify
themselves through all their sufferings, confident that
resurrection will eventually come. This pattern can be seen all
along the Orthodox frontier, where the mixed populations have
co-existed for centuries but are armed with mutually exclusive
versions of history, and always on the alert for fresh injuries to
tear the scabs off old wounds. These rivalries easily lead to
competition. In Transylvania, for example, hostility to the
neighbouring Hungarians has led to a continuing need to build
bigger and better institutions. “What you have to understand is
that there is a kind of war going on here and the weapons are
churches. But at times such sentiments can turn to an uglier
confrontation,as in the bitter struggles over the former Uniate
churches in the Ukraine.
Clark is wonderfully perceptive in her descriptions of
conditions in such haunts of Orthodoxy as the former Yugoslav
republic of Macedonia, which was once famously dismissed by
the Encyclopaedia Britannica as a political problem rather
than a geographical entity,. The home to an explosive mixture
of every race and religion in the Balkans, its fate has been to be
coveted by each of its neighbours, regularly swept by war and
too often drenched in blood. Yet here the small but fiercely
independent Orthodox church maintains that out of Macedonia
came the apostles of the Slavs, saints Cyril and Methodius, and
that its monastery on Lake Ohrid was the first Slav university,
whose holy learned lights had shone brightly enough to be seen
as far away as Kiev. Here too the revival of monastic life has
seen results in such isolated places as Veljusa, even though
there are overtones noted by Clark of xenophobic bias against
the snobbish Greeks over the border. And there are also critics
who regard sacrificing the flower of Macedonian youth to the
monasteries as a criminal waste of resources when the country
needed to concentrate all its energies on becoming
economically viable. But Orthodoxy has other values and a
different time scale.
The other characteristic of Orthodoxy is very different,
and consists of a spiritual, even mystical response to political
troubles. First propagated by the monks of Mount Athos, this
Hesychasm, after the Greek word hesychia meaning inner
silence, enjoins true believers to experience the energies of
God by seeing the Light, the splendour and glory of
everlasting happiness, the Light that transforms into light those
whom it illumines, the Light that is uncreated and unseen,
without beginning and without matter, but is the quality of
grace by which God makes himself known., It was this
Hesychast spirit which has promoted a strong revival of the
long-held mystical traditions. Monasteries have always been
the power houses of Orthodoxy, even more than of
Catholicism, and today this tradition is winning growing
numbers of converts from the west. It is part of a remarkable
revival throughout the Orthodox lands of monastic life, both
male and female. The search for sanctification, or even
identification with God, is being wonderfully successful. In
Roumania new monasteries and convents are being built – at
vast expense – to the considerable bewilderment of western
observers. In a land ruined by its former communist rulers,
where the social infrastructure needs to be completely rebuilt,
and where living standards are pitiably low, nevertheless the
monastic ideal thrives. In the heart of Transylvania, a brand
new, even dazzling showpiece of neo-mediaevalism, the
Monastery of the Birth of the Mother of God, with its red-tiled
roofs, multi-steepled church and pretty balconied buildings,
surrounded by a neat brick wall, proclaims itself as a patch of
heaven on earth. And it is not alone. The spiritual practice of
mystical inner stillness flourishes in Orthodox monasteries, as
a means of embarking on the necessary journey of inner
cleansing and contemplation – a work that men and angels have
in common.
The heartland of this tradition is to be found on Mount
Athos, the rocky peninsular protruding into the Aegean Sea in
northern Greece. Here, for centuries, monasteries have been
maintained – and women barred from entry – and missionaries
have gone forth to proclaim the sublime ideals of the mystical
life. These communities see themselves as the heirs of the
ancient desert hermits of primitive Christianity, but also as the
vanguard providing the spiritual energy for the next stage of
Orthodox history. The influence of Mount Athos reverberates
throughout the whole Orthodox world, from the tiny white
chapels dotted all over the Greek islands, to Roumania,s
painted monasteries among the orange-tinged beech forests of
Moldavia, to the fortress-like battlements on the edge of White
Sea in northern Russia, or the intimate, yet profoundly moving
icons which decorate and uplift every church. Orthodoxy is
both timeless and yet timely. Its spiritual pilgrimage is very
different from that of western Christianity. But it deserves to
be studied, and, at times, emulated.
JSC
P.S. In August, President Vladimir Putin visited the bleak
and isolated Solovetsky Monastery on the Solovki Islands in
Russia,s northern White Sea – which is described most vividly
in the above book by Victoria Clark, p.255-287. On this
occasion, Russia,s leader declared unequivocally his belief that
his country needs to seek its inspiration from its Christian
roots. “Without Christianity, without the Orthodox faith and
culture which sprang from it, Russia would hardly have existed
as a state. Today, now that we are rediscovering ourselves, it is
very important, useful and timely to return to these sources
in our search for the moral foundations of our life. (quoted
from Ecumenical News International, 22 Aug.2001)

All the best for those of you now beginning a new academic
year.

Warmest regards
John Conway
jconway@interchange.ubc.ca

Dear Friends,

Thanks to all of you who responded so warmly to my last issue
at the end of July, despite the holiday season! I trust that you
will now take advantage of my offer to send me some
contribution, either a review of a book you have recently read,
or a note on some event of interest to our fraternity, such as
announcements of future conferences.
This month’s Newsletter which comes to you a day or two early
because of the forthcoming Labour Day, consists of one item:
an Editorial. I hope this proves interesting and would welcome
your comments.

Contents:
1) Editorial:
How not to deal with history

At the end of July the Joint Catholic-Jewish
Commission established in 1999 up to assess the Vatican’s
wartime role announced that it had suspended its deliberations
because the Vatican authorities had supposedly posed
unacceptable conditions for the continuation of its work. This
is a setback for the desirable goal of improved relations
between Catholics and Jews through collaborative
investigations of contentious historical issues. It is to be hoped
that the flurry of recriminations and unwarranted accusations
which have resulted in the past few days will soon be forgotten
and the whole incident regarded as no more than a regrettable
stumble. But because there are significant issues involved for
all historians, this commentary may be of some help to those
who have not been able to pay close attention to this
controversy.

As is well known, debate has recently been stirred up
again over the policies of the Vatican during the Second World
War, and more specifically, over the alleged failure of Pope
Pius XII to adopt an attitude of protest against the Nazi
persecution of the Jews, culminating in the Holocaust. In the
past few months, no fewer than 10 books on this topic have
been published, and more are now in the works. Some, like
John Cornwell’s Hitler’s Pope, take a highly critical view of
the Pope, Eugenio Pacelli, personally, while others stress the
deficiencies of the Vatican structures. Not surprisingly these
publications have given rise to defensive replies by outraged
Catholics, or alternatively have been applauded by some
Jewish commentators, who see these authors, views as
vindicating their own critical appraisal of institutional
Catholicism’s stance in the 1940s.

This controversy arose at the time when the present
leaders of the Catholic Church, led by Pope John Paul II
himself, are engaged in striking measures to improve relations
with the Jewish people. In the eyes of one Jewish scholar,
these efforts constitute “the most remarkable progress in
Catholic-Jewish relations that seasoned observers can ever
remember, . . .and are a genuine and sincere effort of the
leadership of the Church to promote awareness of the
Holocaust among Catholics and a climate of healing between
the two communities.

It was in part a result of this new approach that in 1998
Cardinal Cassidy, then President of the Pontifical Commission
on Religious Relations with the Jews, proposed that a team of
Catholic and Jewish historians should together review what
was already published on the sensitive issue of the Vatican,s
wartime activities, and if so desired, “pose questions about
unresolved matters. This unprecedented team of six scholars,
three Catholic and three Jewish, began its work in October
1999. Five men and one woman were selected by their
respective agencies: on the one side by Cardinal Cassidy,s
Pontifical Commission, and on the other by the International
Jewish Committee for Interreligious Consultation. The
Catholic members were all American citizens, and apparently
were asked to serve because of a known sympathy for the aims
of Catholic-Jewish reconciliation. So far so good.

But the terms of their mandate were less satisfactory.
They were invited to look first and foremost at the eleven
volumes of documents from the Vatican archives dealing with
this subject which were published between 1967 and 1982.
These large collections of documents, entitled Actes et
documents du Saint Siège relatifs a la seconde guerre
mondiale had been compiled and edited by an international
team of four Jesuits, Fathers Blet, Graham, Schneider and
Martini, acting on the explicit instructions of Pope Paul VI.
The purpose of this publication was clearly to provide the
documentation to refute the criticisms and attacks launched in
the early 1960s against Pope Pius XII’s wartime policies,
beginning with Rolf Hochhuth,s sensational drama The
Representative. In order to undertake this task, the Jesuit
editors were given unique and unprecedented permission to
have access to the otherwise closed Vatican archives.
According to Fr. Graham, they were able to see all the
documents they wanted and were not subject to any censorship
or pressure to produce results favourable to the Vatican
authorities. But the very fact that these editors were all Jesuits
and that no one else was allowed to see the documents in
question raised objections from outsiders. Despite assurances
to the contrary, suspicions remained that the whole venture had
been a well-organized effort at damage control.

The documents themselves are drawn from the files of
the Vatican,s Secretariat of State, and consist mainly of the
telegrams and memoranda exchanged between the Holy See
and its representatives, principally the Nuncios or Apostolic
Delegates accredited to the various governments around the
world. These exchanges are almost all in Italian, though
documents in other languages, English, German, French and
even Latin also appear. The editorial introduction to each
volume is however in French. Acting on a traditional principle,
the editors included only those documents which originated in
one of their own diplomatic service,s offices, or related
ecclesiastical structures, and hence did not print, but only
referred in a footnote to other documents, however significant,
supplied by outsiders, such as, for example, statements
presented to the Vatican,s representatives by Jewish contacts.
Had these been included, it is possible that much criticism of
these Vatican volumes might have been averted, even though
in fact these valuable documents have usually appeared in print
elsewhere.

The scope of these eleven volumes is two-fold. The
editors sought to present the documentary evidence on two
main subjects: first, the efforts made by the Vatican, from the
beginning of Pope Pius XII’s reign in March 1939, to preserve
peace, or, after the outbreak of war in September 1939, to
prevent the spread of hostilities. These efforts included the
hope that the Vatican could play an effective part in any
mediated peace settlement – as it had sought to do in the First
World War. Also included were the various endeavours to
mitigate the effects of the war, such as the extensive efforts
designed to secure agreement to making Rome an Open City
and hence spared from bombing attacks. The second theme
was to record the Vatican’s endeavours to assist the victims of
the war. Almost daily exchanges on this subject occurred
throughout the Vatican,s network of diplomatic contacts.

It is in this latter context that the Vatican,s actions on
behalf of the stricken Jewish communities are to be found.
Although, at first, the prime concern was to seek to provide
relief supplies and assistance to the Catholic victims of Nazi
aggression in Poland, very soon the horizons widened.
Catholics of Jewish origin soon came to the Vatican’s notice,
through appeals to find them some refugee haven in a Catholic
country overseas. But from 1941 onwards, it is clear that the
Vatican’s leaders were aware of the scale of persecution
inflicted on all the Jews, and were prepared to instruct their
officials to offer help, including protests against these
atrocities to those governments where such Papal pressure
might be effective. The documents relating to Slovakia,
Roumania, Hungary and France are a clear indication that these
interventions went beyond a defence merely of Catholic
interests or persons. These interventions were all the more
notable since the Vatican officials were well aware that the
Catholic leaders in these countries were unsympathetic to the
plight of the Jews. In Slovakia, for instance, the situation was
made more difficult by the fact that the President of Slovakia
was Monsignor Josef Tiso, a well-known antisemite.
Energetic representations were made by the Papal Apostolic
Delegate in Bratislava, Msgr Burzio, in 1942 and 1943. But the
results were disappointingly negative. Indeed, in July 1942,
Msgr Tardini, one of the Vatican,s senior staff members,
bitterly commented:

“It is a great misfortune that the President of Slovakia is
a priest. Everyone knows that the Holy See cannot
bring Hitler to heel. But who will understand that we
can’t even control a priest? 1)

From 1942 onwards, the Pope’s prudent and fearful
stance brought him to the conclusion that a more outspoken
policy of protest would lead to increased repercussions or
vengeance from the Nazis and hence inflict still more suffering
on the victims. The overall picture to be drawn from these
volumes is therefore of the significant reduction of Papal
influence during these years of war and terror. The evidence
makes clear that, despite the Pope’s sincere efforts to mitigate
the effects of the war and to bring relief to its victims, his
initiatives were spurned, and his advice ignored, as the forces
of violence and destruction escalated.
Particularly in the later volumes, and especially for the
period of nine months when the German army occupied Rome,
the sense of foreboding and frustration is very evident. The
Pope and his officials were imprisoned within the Vatican’s
boundaries, surrounded by German troops. Their offices were
infiltrated with Nazi spies, and their communications censored.
At any moment, they feared, the Pope might be carried off into
captivity and exile. This claustrophobic nightmare was only in
part moderated after Rome was liberated by Allied troops in
June 1944, and its precious architectural heritage preserved
from any further bombing raids. But the premonition of
apocalyptic doom which the end of the war might bring,
through the use of new and even more terrible weapons of
destruction, was still present. The powerlessness of the Papacy
to prevent any such final catastrophe was an unwelcome but
undeniable reality.

The critics of Pius XII and his wartime policies,
beginning with Hochhuth in the 1960s and repeated by the
more recent authors, have ignored these considerations.
Instead they claim that a more vigorous and prophetic stance of
protest against the Nazi atrocities would not only have been
effective but would have resulted in the saving of many more
lives, particularly Jewish lives. Several of the recent books
contain numerous passages advancing such hypotheses as: “If
only the Pope had protested at this juncture . . ” or “The
Papacy should have taken steps . . ” Historical evidence to
back up such claims is however lacking, and certainly is not to
be drawn from the Actes et documents. Rather such notions
are the product of wishful thinking. In effect these claims
vastly exaggerate the moral and political power of the Papacy,
and fail to recognize its greatly diminished influence during the
Second World War. And while no one can say what might have
happened if the Vatican and its local representatives had
adopted other policies, it is necessary to recognize that such
optimistic speculations have been put forward mainly for
non-historical reasons.

It would seem that many of the Vatican’s critics,
whether Jewish or Catholic, are unfamiliar with the already
published documentary sources. This is hardly surprising since
these volumes appeared at irregular intervals over a fifteen
year period, and the language barrier, particularly for
English-speaking commentators, is clearly evident. This was
also the case for some of the members of the Joint Commission
who apparently found themselves “linguistically-challenged.
But, more seriously, this series of documents, and the historical
value of the contents, has suffered the same fate as befell other
significant collections of documents relating to the policies and
actions of various governments in both the First and Second
World Wars. Starting in 1919, all the major European states
authorized the publication of extensive documentary series,
designed to provide the evidence of their nation,s purity of
motives and tactics in the crisis of 1914 which led to the
outbreak of war. The self-justifying and apologetic purpose
was obvious. And even though these collections were edited
by distinguished historians, they inevitably came to be regarded
as self-serving and biased presentations. Their appearance did
not in fact prevent or dissuade criticism, and the charges
continued to be made that such editions, prepared by
“in-house professionals, were carefully screened to suppress
publication of any embarrassing material which would damage
their nation,s reputation, if necessary by the removal of
incriminating documents altogether. Officially-sponsored
document collections of this kind were suspect.

It was exactly this consideration which led the Joint
Commission to refrain deliberately from inviting any member
of the Vatican,s staff from joining their team, including the
sole survivor of the four Jesuits, Fr Pierre Blet, or the current
“expert in the Vatican, Fr. Peter Gumpel S.J., the
officially-appointed relator in charge of promoting the cause
for the beatification of Pope Pius XII, who for several years has
been assembling documents for this purpose. It would seem
that the presupposition was made that an independent panel of
experts would be able to reach an accurate version of events
which would carry greater credibility, especially in hostile
circles.

The issue of credibility has been a sensitive and indeed
vital issue throughout the history of this controversy over the
past forty years. But it has to be placed in a wider context than
merely the question of the authenticity of the Jesuits, selection
of documents. We have to recognize – and indeed to
sympathize with – the continuing and sincerely-motivated
search, particularly by survivors of the Holocaust, but also by
the Jewish community at large, and a growing number of
Christians, for some overall explanation for the unprecedented
persecution and destruction of so many million Jews at the
hands of the Nazis and their accomplices. There is a
widely-shared view that the horrors of the Holocaust may be
made more tolerable if the failures of other governments and
agencies to halt the Nazi atrocities can be pin-pointed and
brought to light. What might appear to be a search for
scape-goats should, in reality, be appreciated as a kind of
therapeutic necessity to bring relief for the unmitigated
suffering involved – regardless of the historical facts of the
case. It is in this context that the view has grown up that, if
only Pope Pius and his officials had been more energetic in
protesting the Nazi crimes, or in mobilizing Catholics to take
inhibitory action, the Holocaust might never have happened, or
at least that its devastating effects would have been modified
or lessened. The concomitant expectation is that evidence to
support such an hypothesis exists in the Vatican’s files. If the
previous publication did not lead to this conclusion, it was
because of the officially-sponsored nature of the project, or
because the editors were determined not to reveal “the
smoking gun, which advocates of this theory believe still
exists hidden in the Vatican vaults. Hence the demand put
forward that the Vatican should give access to its unpublished
files and open its archives for this period to all comers, so that,
once and for all, the issue can be resolved.

The view that an independent, but part-time, group such
as the Joint Commission could reach a more conclusive verdict
than the editorial team which laboured for so long in the 1960s
and 1970s is, by any objective standard, a questionable one.
But it had its own political dynamic. Necessarily the Joint
Commission felt impelled to adapt a critical stance towards
their predecessors, labours. But in the end, their Preliminary
report on the Actes et documents, which was presented to the
Vatican in October of last year, sought clarification of 47
specific issues which they felt had not been adequately
answered in the printed collection. Yet, even while expressing
appreciation for the work of the four Jesuit editors, the Joint
Commission members adopted the professionally
understandable point of view that another look based on wider
access was desirable. And this in turn led on to their explicit
request, echoing demands frequently made by the Vatican,s
critics, that full disclosure and unfettered research should be
made possible through the release of all relevant
documentation, and that the Vatican archives for the period
should be opened up, thereby allowing the truth to emerge.
Any continued refusal to accede to this request would
seemingly confirm the impression that there are still secrets or
scandals which the Vatican wants to conceal.

This suggestion, or request, however, also rests on the
questionable assumption that such a wider enquiry would in
fact discover materials substantially different from those
already published. If such a freer enquiry found only that the
earlier editors had been correct in their selection, then the
Vatican,s original case would be vindicated, and any new
investigation would be superfluous. On the other hand, as one
of the Joint Commission members noted:
“Every documentary collection is based on a selection
of material; inevitably, scholars want to make their own
selection, and decide for themselves what is relevant. Further,
historians also need to know what material was not in the
published volumes – again highlighting the need to see the
unpublished material. And finally, the original selection was
made by scholars of another era – in some instances working
more than thirty years ago. Once again, an argument for
access.

This is the counsel of perfection. No historian is happy
about archival closures. All would like to see free and open
access on an unlimited scale. But the reality is otherwise. All
governments and agencies have rules about the extent to which
their records are open to public scrutiny. In many democratic
countries, such as the United States, Canada, or Britain, their
government collections are not made available for research
purposes until thirty years after their inception. But even here
there are exceptions when materials are withheld and no
reasons provided. The situation in countries such as Russia is
even more erratic. In the case of the Vatican, the world,s oldest
diplomatic entity made up its own rules. Until the end of the
nineteenth century, the Vatican guarded its archives with total
secrecy. Only during the reign of Pope Leo XIII (1878-1903)
was it recognized that the mission of the Church could be
enhanced by opening up the rich treasures of the past, even if
this involved revelations about past scandals, such as the
Galileo affair. As a result, the Vatican authorities came to the
decision that public access could be granted, as a privilege, not
a right, after a suitable interval had elapsed. Because the
Vatican’s history is usually divided into the periods of the
reigns of successive popes, it was decided that the records of
each reign would be collected and then made available en bloc
to interested scholars. But no automatic date of transfer was
edicted. Rather, when this transfer is to take place is left up to
the current holder of the pontificate. So far, in the twentieth
century, the records are now released for the reigns of Pope
Leo XIII, Pope Pius X (1903-1914), and Pope Benedict XV
(1914-1922). Rumour has it that the papers of Pope Pius XI
are now being worked on, which would bring the story up to
1939. But no one has ventured to suggest a time-frame when
the records of Pope Pius XII (1939-1958) will become
available.

The Vatican archives are hence open only up to 1922.
The records of the more than 75 subsequent years remain
closed “for technical reasons. It would seem clear that the
Vatican has (too) few archivists and that the resources devoted
to this project are inadequate. Doubtless, for such lengthy
reigns as those of both Pius XI and Pius XII, the work of
preparing the papers for transfer a public reading room is a
massive task. But 75 years seems excessive. One further
factor has to be noted: the Vatican archives fall under the
supervision of the Cardinal Secretary of State, Cardinal
Sodano, who is the most senior official of the Curia under the
Pope. He thus outranks the newly-appointed Cardinal Walter
Kasper, the current President of the Pontifical Commission for
Religious Relations with the Jews. There could therefore be
no question that the latter could do no more than pass on to the
former the request made by the Joint Commission for the
opening up of the archives for the period of the Second World
War. Nine months after the submission of the Preliminary
Report, Cardinal Kasper wrote to the Joint Commission to say
that the archives would remain closed. A month later, the five
remaining members of the Joint Commission decided to
suspend their work – at least for the present period.

When the Joint Commission was established two years
ago, it would appear that the then President of the Pontifical
Commission, Cardinal Cassidy, expressed the hope that Jewish
and Catholic historians meeting together could move the
controversy away from inaccuracy and media sensationalism.
The Vatican,s understanding was that each scholar would read
the eleven published volumes, and add their authority to the
findings of the earlier editors. Cardinal Cassidy and his staff
were therefore disappointed when the Joint Commission failed
to do what it was charged to do, either because of other
commitments, or because its members did not know Italian.
But the Cardinal would have to be exceedingly naive if he did
not realize that the Joint Commission would inevitably take up
the long-standing and deeply-felt view voiced among the
Jewish community that only the release of the relevant
documents and unfettered access to these materials would
suffice. The Vatican authorities could surely have foreseen
(or even shared) the view that coming to terms with such a
traumatic past requires special steps to secure full disclosure of
the sources. The refusal of the Joint Commission,s very polite
request was bound to have repercussions. The justification
given – that the archivists are not yet ready to deal with the
documents of that period – must appear specious and
self-serving. The subsequent outburst of Fr. Peter Gumpel,
accusing the Joint Commission members of “irresponsible
behaviour, of misrepresentation of the Vatican,s intentions, or
of being engaged in a “campaign with a clear propagandistic
goal to damage the Holy See, is surely inexcusable.

On the other side, it remains to be clarified as to when
the Commission members were made aware that the records of
the reign of Pius XII could not and would not be opened within
a matter of months. It is inconceivable, in fact, that they were
not fully aware of this situation during their deliberations.
Their expectation that the Vatican authorities would yield to
this form of pressure from an outside group, at the instigation
of the “Jewish lobby, was surely unrealistic, and could even
be considered provocative. And it is far from clear that they
had thought through the consequences for the appropriate
officials, from the Secretary of State, Cardinal Sodano or the
Librarian and Archivist, Cardinal Jorge Mejia. Acceptance of
this recommendation would not only have meant the
abandonment of the Vatican,s established procedures, but
probably have led to other demands for a similar favourable
treatment by the advocates of other causes. In any case, giving
priority to this one issue, for what is clearly a political not an
historical reason, might set an unwelcome precedent. It would
also involve a massive reallocation of personnel and resources.
In view of these considerations, it was surely impolitic for one
of the Joint Commission members to accuse the Vatican of
“sending a message that would confirm many people,s worst
suspicion that there is something to hide. Similarly it was
unfortunate that a commentator from the World Jewish
Congress should make reference to a “cover up, or label the
Vatican’s stance as “a profound moral failure. Such mutual
accusations of bad faith or recriminations about lost
opportunities to open up the Vatican archives cannot help to
advance the cause of improved mutual understanding.

Where do we go from here? The lesson surely to be
learnt from this unfortunate tale is that this is not the way to
deal with history. The pursuit of historical accuracy should not
be merged with other agendas drawn from political or
theological considerations. Nobody doubts that investigations
into the Holocaust, and the role of the Catholic Church in it,
should continue. In due course, the Vatican archives for the
period will be opened. The issue is not whether, but only
when. In the meanwhile, like historians of other epochs,
scholars should make more use of the abundant evidence
already available, which, as noted above, has been under-used
since the Actes et documents first appeared. It can only be
hoped that the example of scholarly co-operation set by the
Joint Commission members will be infectious enough to
encourage the continuing study of this significant if painful
subject, sine ira et studio. As the American Cardinal of
Baltimore, William Keeler, commented: “Joint efforts by
Catholic and Jewish scholars working together can bear fruit in
the long run, provided the dialogue is conducted in the spirit of
mutual respect and trust. 2)

1) Notes of Monsignor Tardini, Actes et documents, Vol. 8, no
426,598.
2) Statement by Cardinal William H.Keeler, Episcopal
Moderator for Catholic-Jewish Relations, United States
Conference of Catholic Bishops, 27th July 2001

With every best wish to you all,
John Conway
jconway@interchange.ubc.ca

Mr Karol Gajewski, who teaches history in Sandbach,
Cheshire, U.K. has sent the following response to my Editorial
of last week, which, with his permission, I now pass on to you
all:

Dear Professor Conway,

Many thanks for sending the editorial; the first, I hope of many.
Your analysis of the troubled history of the Catholic-Jewish
Study Group is truly excellent and I have much admiration for
your lucid synthesis. But may I suggest that your description of
the supporters and detractors of Popes needs some
differentiation. The former are not always outraged Catholics,
nor the latter critical Jews. For example, John Cornwell is a
Catholic. His attempt to write a ‘definitive’ biography of Pius
XII, has been heavily criticised not just by orthodox Catholic
historians but by Jewish commentators too and is of highly
questionable historical value. William Rubinstein, author of
ìThe Myth of Rescueî (1997) described ìHitler’s Popeî as ‘a
malign exercise in defamation and character assassination’ in a
review for the well-known journal ‘First Things’. Recently
Rabbi David G. Dalin wrote a most interesting piece in ‘The
Weekly Standard’ in defence of Piusí actions as I’m sure you
know.

There is a plainly observable tradition in which Jewish scholars
have proved to be among the most trenchant defenders of Pope
Pius XII and his wartime record (Lapide, Levai et al) whilst
some of the bitterest attacks have emanated from what is often
referred to as the ‘liberal’ Catholic wing of the Church
(Cornwell, Carroll). Furthermore, at least one Jewish admirer
of Pius (Alfred Lilienthal) describes himself as an ‘anti-Zionist’
Jew, whereas strong condemnation of Pius has come from
political organisations (ADL as an example) that see their
primary role as strengthening the state of Israel under sustained
attack from a hostile Arab world. Thus, the lines of – for want
of better terms, ‘attack and defence’ – cut through historical
levels to a theological/political argument involving sections of
both Jewish and Catholic populations. In a perfect world, it
might be possible to dissect out the purely historical from the
school of special pleading, but the historianís scalpel will have
to be specially honed to do this. I believe strongly, in spite of
this caveat, that the attempt must be made.

You write that ‘from 1942 onwards…a more outspoken policy
of protest would lead to increased repercussions or vengeance
from the Nazis . . ë My own feeling is that Pius was conscious
of the dangers of retaliation arising out of hasty official
condemnations from much earlier than this date. In fact the
genesis of Pius’ assessment of the value of ‘protest’ in wartime
resides not in World War II, but specifically out of his
experiences in World War I, even before he was appointed
Nuncio to Bavaria in 1917 by Benedict XV. An early
example was the demand from Belgium and its allies Britain
and France that Benedict must denounce the atrocities
allegedly committed by the Germans in August 1914. When an
immediate response was not forthcoming from the Holy
See, Benedict was accused of a morally culpable ësilenceí.
More food for thought must have been provided on the
publication of Mit brennender Sorge in 1937. There was a
dramatic increase in clergy/religious trials after the
reading of the encyclical in Germany: editors were arrested,
printing presses confiscated and journalists thrown out of their
offices. Admittedly a pinprick compared with what was to
come, these events did weigh heavily on the conscience of both
Pius XI and his Secretary of State, Cardinal Pacelli.
More importantly perhaps, it gave an insight into the
pathological response that could be expected from Hitler and
Goebbels when core beliefs of Nazi ideology were questioned
(from 1933 of course, both men had warned of the
ominous repercussions that would ensue for Jews in Germany
if the foreign press continued to file hostile reports on the
government-sponsored boycott of Jewish businesses).

The post-war criticism of Pius, although often assumed to
begin with Hochhuth’s ‘Representative’ in 1963 can, like Pius’
views on ‘protest’ above, be traced back through the years, in
this former case to political turmoil in the Europe of 1944 –
1948 and the efforts of Communists in Italy and Eastern
Europe to delegitimise the Papacy. Indeed, when ìDer
Stellvertreterî first appeared on the German stage,
commentators noted that Hochhuth had not worked
from a dramatic vacuum: there was a discernible Communist
agit-prop derivation. (One of the most eminent German critics
of Hochhuth at this time was Mgr. Klausener, son of the
murdered leader of Catholic Action, Erich Klausener). Of
particular note here was a publication that appeared in 1954,
translated into English in 1955: ìDer Vatikan im Zweiten
Weltkriegî by M. Scheinmann and published by the Historical
Institute of the Soviet Academy of Sciences and also in a
German edition by Dietz-Verlag, Berlin (1954).

The need for an ultimate explanation for the Holocaust which
you describe as a ‘therapeutic necessity’ is, of course, beyond
the realms of a purely historical investigation. It is not even
confined within a ëpsycho-analyticalí framework. It involves
much metaphysical examination into the deepest recesses of
the human psyche; into the nature of evil itself; into the
responses of ordinary men and women to the devastating
effects of a totalitarian stateís ëstructures of enslavementí.
Novelists are capable of providing essential insights too –
Orwell’s 1984, Koestler’s ìDarkness at Noonî and Golding’s
ìLord of the Fliesî spring into mind here.

Further, the ‘therapeutic necessity’ resides not only in a
determined investigation of horrendous events and in the
motivating factors behind them, but in actively suppressing
memories of the very same. Norman Finkelstein in
ìThe Holocaust Industryî makes this point about his own
family. My father, although not Jewish, witnessed many
devastating scenes and hardly spoke about his wartime
experiences. One of the striking points about the study of the
Holocaust per se is that the number of University departments,
books, courses etc concentrating on this phenomenon have
increased exponentially as the generation that were actual
witnesses psses away. Should we perhaps be talking about a
‘transferred’ psychological imperative: one that is transferred
from those who experienced the massive disruptions, trauma
and genocide of the war to those who, born too late, do not
possess the emotional scarring of the period? Even this latter
postulate does not, in my opinion, answer fully questions of
how the Holocaust has come to dominate historical
discussion of the war, particularly in North America.

I hope these comments prove useful and I emphasise they are
meant as a springboard for more discussion (if you feel like
taking them up) and may I reiterate my admiration for your
essay.

Kindest regards,

Karol Jozef Gajewski

Dear Friends,

I hope that all in the northern hemisphere are now enjoying their summer holidays with appropriate sunny conditions. But I send you this dual issue in case you have time or desire to consider these rather interesting new books on different aspects of our subject.

1) Book reviews:

a) K.Clements, Faith on the frontier. A life of J.H.Oldham
b) J.Pollard, The Unknown Pope. Benedict XV
c) ed. K.Chadwick, Catholicism, Politics and Society in 20C France, R.Bedarida, Les Catholiques dans la guerre 1939-1945

1) K.Clements, Faith on the Frontier. A life of J.H.Oldham. Edinburgh and Geneva: T.T. Clark and WCC Publications. 1999 515pp

Joe Oldham was one of the leading figures in the world-wide ecumenical movement of the Christian churches during the first half of the twentieth century. But he was a humble unassuming man who principally operated through behind-the-scenes diplomacy and advocacy. He is hence not so well known as such pioneers as William Temple, John R.Mott or Archbishop Söderblom with their more charismatic personalities. But now at last this masterly biography has appeared which does justice both to Oldham as a person and to his far-reaching and searching ideas on the future paths of Christianity at a time of particular travail.
The author, Keith Clements, is himself an experienced international ecumenical leader, based in Geneva as General Secretary of the European Conference of Churches, one of the many agencies now carrying out much of Oldham,s legacy. From this vantage point he brings an insider,s knowledge of the difficulties faced by the promoters of ecumenical and international Christianity. This is a first-rate scholarly biography which deserves full praise.
Oldham was born in India in 1874, but grew up in Scotland in a devout and pious family, very conscious of its Christian calling. Not surprisingly he was “converted while at Oxford after a visit by the renowned American evangelist, Dwight N.Moody, and resolved to devote his life to the burgeoning missionary movement, which drew so much inspiration from its annual meetings in Keswick. As a supporter of the Student Volunteer Missionary Union, he soon received a call to go to India, and served in Lahore for nearly four years until ill health forced him to return. He was, like so many young men in Europe and North America, fully inspired by the SVMU,s goal, as enunciated by its leader, John R.Mott, which sought the “evangelization of the world in this generation. But his experience in India taught Oldham that it was not enough to send out platoons of idealistic well-educated white males to undertake this task. The voices and interests of the recipients must also be heard and above all the disastrous divisions within the churches must be overcome. These were the themes adopted by Oldham as he returned to take up work for his church,s mission board in Edinburgh.
This city was to be the site of the first great international missionary conference in 1910, and not surprisingly Oldham was drawn into its organization. Clements shows how his resourcefulness, his high-minded energies and his skillful personal diplomacy made him the ideal person to become secretary of the whole enterprise, and subsequently of its continuation committee, in collaboration with its Chairman, Mott. Mott,s gift was to be able to inspire hundreds of young men at large rallies, and then give them their marching orders. “Young man, the Lord has need of you in Shanghai. Here is your boat ticket. Oldham was more restrained but no less effective.
For years the two men worked together in close harmony, especially after 1919 when the International Missionary Council became a permanent reality. Oldham recognized the need to have effective machinery for keeping missionaries in touch with each other and with new developments around the world. The International Review of Missions was started by Oldham in 1912 and is still going strong after 90 years. This was a successful vehicle for spreading new ideas across old frontiers, and of stimulating ecumenical contacts at a high intellectual and theological level.
But this optimistic era, looking forward to the rapid spread of the Gospel around the globe through ever wider campaigns of personal evangelism, came to a crashing halt with the outbreak of war in 1914. Clements rightly notes that Oldham, by 1916, had recognized the effect the war was having, particularly in two directions: first, that this mutually destructive European struggle had dealt an almost irreparable blow to Christian credibility in other parts of the world, and especially in the mission fields.
Secondly, it revealed the deficiencies of a limited appeal for personal salvation. From then on, Oldham began to call for the need to Christianize the social order as well as individuals in it. Christendom and its churches would have to adopt a much less triumphalist tone. He began to point prophetically to the need to mobilize a new moral passion sufficient to restore a broken world. To be sure, the traditional Protestant insights of the missionary movement, drawn from its Puritan and Wesleyan roots, were to be reaffirmed, but the emphasis had to be on forgiveness and reconciliation in order to find a new life in Christ.
One sign of this was Oldham,s concern for the overseas missions in war-time, particularly the German establishments in areas captured by the British in Africa, as well as in India. Contrary to the propaganda spread by the German missionaries and their home boards, these “orphaned missions were not confiscated by Oldham and his gang of robbers, nor were the missionaries unduly maltreated. Clements makes quite clear that Oldham fought hard against any such tendencies in British government policy, and indeed succeeded in having included in the Versailles Treaty a specific clause exempting German mission properties from being seized for reparations. But the resentment of the Germans lingered on – even to this day – as part of their unwillingness to face the loss of a war they had largely caused. These feelings were to cause great difficulties in the whole ecumenical movement throughout the inter-war period.
In the 1920s Oldham became directly involved in strategic planning for a new approach to mission problems in Africa. But his interest went beyond mere ecclesiastical organization. He saw that the new era called for a specific change towards the native inhabitants, and one which would recognize their paramount interests. This was strongly opposed by the white settlers of South Africa, Rhodesia and Kenya, and a heated debate continued throughout the decade over imperial and colonial policy. Oldham,s concern for education, which was largely in the hands of the missions, prompted him to lobby intensely the British officials in London and in the colonies, and even to take part in an official investigating committee. Not surprisingly, this new interest was not well understood by his more conservative colleagues on the mission boards.
But in the 1930s, when the focus turned back to Europe, Odham diverged further from the traditional evangelical approach. He now saw the need for new Christian social thinking in face of the challenges of totalitarianism and racism, and the threat to Christianity in its own heartland. By this time he had been much influenced by Karl Barth,s theology, and no longer accepted the progressive liberalism of earlier years. At the same time, he placed less faith in clerical gatherings and conferences, which seemed to be too often expressions of idealism without clear goals for remedying the world,s defects. Oldham,s forte was to match expectations with effective action. He was, in Clements, view, a sanctified pragmatist who considered carefully the practical steps towards his desired end. This made him a most dynamic stimulator of action. Memoranda, proposals, preliminary studies, letters to significant leaders, conference addresses poured forth from his desk, and the impact was undoubtedly significant, even after increasing deafness made it difficult for him to communicate directly. But he never abandoned his view that the Christian cause needed to mobilize its best brains and look carefully at future strategies. Organizing such meetings and ensuring that the results were put to work was his strength.
Notably Oldham,s preparations for the Life and Work meeting in Oxford 1937 was the high point of his career. Less well-known was his inside-track participation in the moves to unite all the international ecumenical bodies in a single World Council of Churches, and particularly to recruit a young Dutchman, Visser t Hooft, to be its General Secretary. This was achieved in 1938, but the outbreak of war delayed the actual founding until a decade later.
To meet the disasters of the second world war, Oldham pioneered one of his most memorable achievements – the Christian News-letter. This was a weekly initiative to maintain the Christian fellowship in war-time, based on Oldham,s extensive network of contacts, and specifically designed to deal with the war,s mortal challenges. Any repetition of the disastrous splits in Christendom of 1914 was to be sedulously avoided. Rather, constructive practical consideration was to be given as to what kind of society Christians should seek after the war ended. Readership quickly grew among informed laymen and women throughout Britain, and even abroad. Oldham,s personal touch ensured both a continuity and a welcoming call for a new engagement of Christian thought in the contemporary and changing world.
As Clements makes clear, Oldham was not really a team player. But he had the gift of finding very talented men and women and persuading them to join in his enterprises. His influence was therefore extensive and elitist rather than popular. On the one hand, his extraordinary creative services to the whole ecumenical world led to many outstanding developments. On the other hand, his habit of asking searching and critical questions was intolerant of complacency, timidity, or introversion. He also had an ingrained suspicion of ecclesiastical structures, which he feared would inevitably be conservative and stifling of creative thought. Church conferences, he knew from experience, had a regrettable tendency to indulge in moralizing pronouncements. Others, however, saw rightly that inspired freelancing by talented individuals would not be enough to sustain ecumenical institutions for the long haul. They would need to be clearly representative of the churches and accountable to them. Oldham, like his German counterpart Friedrich Siegmund-Schultze, feared that the result would be a dull mediocrity and ecclesiastical sclerosis. For this reason, as Clements admits, Oldham proved obstructive over the setting up of a British Council of Churches, which only followed in 1942. And he kept on insisting that his finest creation, the World Council of Churches, should have clear and pioneering thinking as its first priority. His faith in Visser t Hooft, as General Secretary, was to be vindicated, although at times Vim could be far more of a general than a secretary. But Oldham lived long enough, until 1969, to see the World Council firmly established as the major international focus point for all the Christian churches, with the exception of the Roman Catholics.
Oldham,s life,s work was undertaken at a time of world-wide catastrophe, political disorder and moral collapse. The institutions he sought to build, and the Christian heritage he sought to protect, have not – as yet – fulfilled his hopes. But this account of his struggles, urging his fellow Christians to grapple with the issues involved, and the possible roads ahead, is a convincing statement of a Christian visionary contribution in an age of violence and dissension.
We can be grateful to Keith Clements for this insightful and trenchant narration of Oldham,s theological pilgrimage, his administrative strategies, his prophetic discernment and his warm personal relationships. This is also a major account of the Christian churches,developments and interactions during the twentieth century from a sympathetic but not uncritical perspective. Above all, Clements correctly places Oldham on the frontier of Christian responsibility, prophetically seeking new forms of corporate Christian witness in the face of the new challenges of each succeeding decade. This is where, Oldham believed, faith must stand if it is to live and grow. Retrieving this interpretation of Christian mission was the objective of this biography. Clements is to be congratulated on so splendidly fulfilling his goal.
JSC

2) John F.Pollard, The Unknown Pope. Benedict XV (1914-1922) and the Pursuit of Peace. London: Geoffrey Chapman 1999 240 pp ISBN 0-225-66344-0

John Pollard calls Benedict XV the “unknown Pope mainly because his short reign was overshadowed by the First World War and its contentious aftermath, and also because later Popes, such as Pius XII and John XXII, have attracted more notice and controversy. But Pollard,s skillfully researched biography provides the English-speaking reader with a clear account of this pontiff,s career, which he sees as one of the most significant, though often overlooked, reigns of the past century. In particular, he contends that Benedict,s pursuit of peace in the midst of an unprecedented and horrific war raised the papacy to a new level of moral authority.
Giacomo Della Chiesa came from a noble but impoverished Genoa family. Thanks to various patrons he was able to be trained for the Vatican,s diplomatic service. He became a protege of Cardinal Rampolla, later Secretary of State to Pope Leo XIII. But in 1903, on Leo,s death, Rampolla failed to be elected Pope, and so he and his protege suffered an eclipse at the hands of the more “integrist Pius X and his much younger Secretary of State, Merry del Val. Eventually Della Chiesa was sent off to the provinces to be Archbishop of Bologna, but was denied promotion to the rank of Cardinal for seven years until the spring of 1914.
On August 1st 1914 war erupted across Europe. Less than a month later Pius X died. In the subsequent conclave, the Cardinals were clearly looking for someone in a different mould. Della Chiesa had the right combination of diplomatic, curial and pastoral experience. At 60, he was the right age, and had enough discretion to recognize how crucial his future policy would be for the welfare, or even existence, of the Church.
Pollard makes the claim that in 1914 the Vatican had reached the nadir of its international prestige. France had recently disestablished the Church, Britain and Germany were controlled by anti-Catholic leaders, and Russia brooded in distant hostility. The new nation of Italy was militantly anti-Papal. Only Austria with its aged Emperor supported the Holy See, but its involvement in the Balkans was to prove a self-inflicted and lethal wound.
With the 1914 outbreak of war, the situation changed. Pollard places much emphasis, as his sub-title suggests, on Benedict,s efforts to promote peace. He also skillfully outlines the parameters within which the Vatican was operating and the numerous frustrations which these constraints caused. In reality, the Holy See possessed little real power or influence, but it was presumed to have immense potential moral force. Hence both warring sides exerted themselves to attempt to win the Vatican over to their cause, or equally strenuously to prevent the other side from doing so. Benedict,s initial horror at the bloodshed and the losses inflicted on the Catholic populations impelled him to seeks ways and means to stop the hostilities, or at least to mitigate the results. Such a stand necessitated impartiality, and also led to large expenditures to assist the victims of the war without favour to either side.
Benedict,s strenuous efforts to hinder Italy from joining in were thwarted in 1915. Worse still, he found the Italian government continuously opposed to his humanitarian gestures, putting practical difficulties in the way of many of his initiatives. Such a situation revealed how much the Pope was a prisoner within the Vatican,s walls and at the mercy of Italy,s anti-clerical and Masonic politicians. As an example, the Italian High Command and censorship office broke all the, admittedly primitive, Vatican codes and intercepted its telegraph traffic. The security of the Vatican,s diplomatic mail was constantly violated. The Italian police were effectively spying on the Pope and Curia without hindrance. The unkindest cut of all came when the Italian government negotiated with the western powers to join the war in 1915, and deliberately included in their secret treaty the demand that the Holy See should be barred from taking part in any peace settlement once the war was won. Benedict only found out about this later to his great chagrin.
Benedict, and his closest advisor Cardinal Gasparri, were under tremendous pressure to move away from their impartial stance. Every move, every speech was scrutinized to see if it gave advantage to either side. Journalists constantly launched rumours of this or that piece of favouritism. This led to a spate of denials, and at times brought out in Benedict his obstinacy, his notorious irascibility and not a little paranoia. Nevertheless he was determined not to give up. Too much was at stake for the Catholic Church. By 1916 he realized that general moral exhortations for peace would achieve nothing. But he still believed that, as a neutral power, the Vatican,s influence could be effective at a time when both sides wanted to bring hostilities to a close. Such was the case in 1917. In Germany, a strong group of Reichstag members, led by the Catholic politician, Matthias Erzberger, passed a peace resolution in July. This seemed to offer possibilities, and the Vatican envoy to Germany, Eugenio Pacelli, was sent to explore with the Kaiser and his Chancellor, Bethman-Hollweg, what terms might be feasible, such as a general limitation of armaments, the German withdrawal from Belgium and other occupied areas, and the creation of international arbitration courts. Accordingly in August Benedict sent out a Peace Note to all the belligerent powers, setting out systematic proposals for bringing the war to an end and securing a just and enduring peace.
Unfortunately, at that very moment, Bethman-Hollweg was overthrown by the German army leaders, who were still fixated on a German military victory. Even the western powers showed reluctance. The British Government acknowledged receipt of the Note, but did nothing. The French never replied at all. And the Italians intrigued hard to prevent the Vatican from getting any increase in international prestige and profile. President Wilson usurped many of the Papal ideas in order to incorporate them in his own 14 Points a few months later. The Papal initiative failed.
Nevertheless, these attempts, and the large-scale humanitarian efforts launched by the Vatican, induced a much more open and friendly climate towards the Holy See, even in the ranks of the Italian government. To be sure, the Vatican was barred from taking part in the Versailles peace-making, but Pollard judges this to have been a disguised blessing, as the Holy See was therefore not burdened by having to defend this much-vilified Treaty. So too, Benedict was not able to find any solution to the vexed question of the Vatican,s own status in Italy, which was left to his successor, Pius XI, to solve.
More successful were Benedict,s efforts to alter the tone of theological debate within his own ranks. The intolerant dogmatism of his predecessor, Pius X, with its strident invectives and condemnations of anyone suspected of the so-called Modernist “heresy, had done much damage in the supposed interests of “integrisme. While not prepared to disavow the hierarchy,s stance, Benedict moved to eject zealots from sensitive positions.
But from the end of the war, it was political rather than theological radicalism which seemed to be the greater danger. All of Benedict,s conservative instincts were predictably brought into play against the spread of militant violence or disorder. The kind of bitter class warfare seen in the Soviet Union, Hungary and Germany, boded ill for the Church, as did also the unbridled agitation of more domestic foes such as Benito Mussolini. The rise of Fascism in Italy was constantly deplored by the Vatican, even when the alternative of a Socialist victory looked worse. In fact, when Mussolini eventually seized power, he wisely recognized the need for a more harmonious relationship with the Church. But Benedict did not live to see this development. As for the Vatican, it was to swallow the stifling of Italian democracy for the sake of a new and more stable settlement of its future international position.
Benedict,s conservatism, as Pollard points out, was equally displayed in his antagonism towards both Protestantism and Orthodoxy. Although the war had demonstrated the urgency of all Christians standing together, Rome remained implacable. Error had no rights. The post-war ecumenical movement was therefore built without Catholics. Yet it can be argued that what the Catholic Church needed was consolidation not experimentation. This is what Benedict in his short reign provided. And Pollard,s final verdict is surely correct: “He steered the barque of St. Peter through some very stormy waters. . . and in the process left his enduring mark on the Roman Catholic Church (p.215). We can certainly be grateful to John Pollard for this comprehensive and sympathetic account.
JSC

3) ed K.Chadwick,Catholicism, Politics and Society in Twentieth-Century France. Liverpool: Liverpool University Press 2000 295pp
Renee Bedarida, Les Catholiques dans la guerre 1939-1945. Entre Vichy et la Resistance.
Paris: Hachette litteratures, 1998

In recent years the writing of French church history has been very much an “in-house affair. Foreigners were not encouraged. The only significant work in English was W.D.Halls, Politics, Society and Christianity in Vichy France, (1995). So the appearance of this volume from Liverpool is much to be welcomed. Under the editorship of Kay Chadwick, this collection of essays is both bi-lingual and bi-national, where senior French scholars such as Emile Poulat and Y-M.Hilaire are joined by younger British scholars, mostly from the provincial universities. The title is clearly derivative from Halls, study, but covers the whole of the twentieth century. There is a variety of interesting perspectives on the position of the Catholic Church over this period, though the Church,s theology is virtually ignored, as is any treatment of Protestantism.
The century began with the controversial disestablishment of the Catholic Church in 1905. With the advantage of hindsight, Professor Poulat now argues that this can be seen as a beneficial move, by liberating the church from the state,s bondage. But at the time and for many years after, the imposition of this move at the hands of radical anti-clericals seemed to be a bitter blow. Hence the eagerness with which numerous Catholics greeted the overthrow of republicanism in 1940, and espoused the hopes for a better deal under Petain. But in fact, over the past fifty years, republicanism has shown a more moderate face, and the secular nature of the state is now assured. Catholic schooling plays a very considerable role, as an example of pluralism. There are even moves to urge Islam to follow the Catholic path as a means of integration within the French state.
The 1905 loss of status was undoubtedly induced, in part, by the reactionary stance of most Catholics in the Dreyfus affair. The rootedness of Catholic antisemitism cannot be denied. But as two of these essays show, attitudes have changed. To be sure, the stance of the Catholic hierarchy in face of the German war-time persecution of the Jews looks vacillating, but at least some bishops and several courageous priests and lay persons raised voices of protest to defy both Vichy and the Nazis. This paved the way for a new epoch of Christian-Jewish dialogue, led by such figures as Jules Isaac and Jacques Maritain. Though antisemitism and racialism still exist in France, such forces have no religious support from Catholics.
Another significant change over the years has been in the political stance of French Catholics. At first the polemical attacks of the republican left prevented any political sympathy from Catholics, and entrenched the right-wing attitudes of such groups as Action francaise or the Croix de Fer. After 1945, however, the scene changed. A new openness to at least some dialogue with Marxists showed that some Catholics were interested to have a potential stimulus to Catholic social thought or alternatives to capitalism. And this paved the way for a much more committed stance towards issues of social justice. Even though the experiment of worker priests was abandoned, the impact remained.
On the other hand, the rigidity of Catholic doctrine, especially on sexual matters, has undoubtedly contributed to Catholicism,s institutional decline in France. The majority of priests are elderly, more parishes are “orphaned and monastic life has suffered badly. In part, this is a reflection of the European-wide growth of a secular culture, but does not necessarily mean a loss of faith. France now has a multi-cultural appearance, in which French Catholicism appears in many guises.
Renee Bedarida and her husband Francois are among the most distinguished practitioners of French contemporary history, especially of that period of national tragedy, the Second World War and the ill-fated Vichy regime. Madame Bedarida has already written extensively on the spiritual resistance to the Nazi onslaught of those years, arising out of her own participation as a student in the resistance movement. Not surprisingly, therefore, in her sprightly survey of the fate of French Catholics during the war, those men and women who upheld their true Christian faith, alongside their French nationalism, occupy a place of honour. Following a chronological basis, Bedarida depicts the attitudes of the Catholic literate elite, from its troubled and ambiguous relationship to the anti-clerical secularist Third Republic before the war to the heartfelt patriotic response of 1939. But the 1940 defeat proved that patriotism was not enough. In its place, the Catholic hierarchy preferred to place their faith in Marshal Petain as the saviour of the nation. The majority of Catholics loyally followed this lead, though, as Bedarida shows, only a handful of Catholic intellectuals were seduced into giving their support. By contrast, those who for Christian reasons opposed Nazism were increasingly sceptical of Petain and his compromises with the conqueror. But de Gaulle, in London, never got any support from the church hierarchy. Several Catholic writers and other resisters expressed their opposition in clandestine publications, and when caught, paid the ultimate price. Others retreated to less obvious, but no less determined passive resistance, concentrating on assisting the Nazis, victims, such as the Jews. If, at first, French Catholics had been silent about the Nazi persecution of the Jews, this changed in 1942. In August and September, no fewer than five bishops protested publicly against the inhuman mistreatment of the Jews in France, and this signal produced a wave of support, much to the consternation of the Vichy authorities. Despite continued assertions of the clergy,s respect for Petain, these protests were the first breach of Catholic loyalty. Even more striking in 1943 was the response to Vichy,s ordering young Frenchmen to be conscripted for work in German factories. The bishops prevaricated, though they were much more vocal in protesting the idea of recruiting young French women. But only the underground press urged these recruits, as a Christian duty, to join the secret resistance movement instead. Those who took this step of joining the underground, or Maquis, were not given the support of the Catholics bishops, though a few clergy risked their lives by acting as chaplains. The moral dilemmas caused by the threat of civil war, and the fears of communism, restrained the church leaders from openly endorsing the resistance, but in fact the number of young Catholics who did so grew rapidly, and their witness was to be a significant factor in the post-war renewal of the church.
In the aftermath, recriminations and accusations abounded. The thorniest question for Catholics was what to do with those bishops who had so enthusiastically endorsed the Petain regime. Some demanded that at least twenty-five bishops be dismissed; others would have been content with an acknowledgment of their faulty judgment and an expression of repentance. In fact the hierarchy gave neither. It insisted that it had only done its religious duty in seeking to uphold the Christian faith and to safeguard the church,s autonomy. They now preached reconciliation and rebirth. And, in fact, the Vatican refused to hear of any forcible removals, but quickly appointed a new Nuncio, the future Pope John XXIII, to act as mediator.
In all, Bedarida stresses the positive impact of the war on the Catholic church in France. For the first time, barriers between Catholics and others were broken down. In captivity or deportation or concentration camps, the clergy and laity were thrown together to their mutual enrichment. As a result Catholics were willing to play a more constructive role in the new political order, and their spiritual renewal brought new life to the parishes. To be sure the old habits of mind were still found in some of the hierarchy, who still clung to their traditional conservative and moralistic mentalities. But, Bedarida claims, this clash between temporal political conformism and audacious creativity in the spiritual and pastoral spheres opened the way for the kind of reforms, which twenty years later, were to be adopted by the whole Church,s aggiornamento at the Second Vatican Council.

With every best wish to you all,
John Conway
jconway@interchange.ubc.ca

Contents:

1) German Catholic Martyrs of the Twentieth Century
2) Book review: a) Feldkamp, Pius XII und Deutschland
b) Allen, Cardinal Ratzinger
3) Declaration on Christian-Jewish Relations, Cardinal Ratzinger
4) Nuncio Roncalli’s efforts on behalf of the Jews

Dear Friends,
I am deeply indebted to my longtime friend Prof. John S. Conway, for
the opportunity to edit this issue of the Newsletter – the fruit of his
dedication and hard work over many years. It is devoted to Catholic
themes, previous issues having dealt extensively with Protestant ones.
In the forefront of current debate about twentieth-century Catholic
history is the controversy over the role of Pope Pius XII during the
Holocaust. The Pope’s severest critics today are Catholics: Gary Wills,
John Cornwell, James Carroll – an essayist, a journalist, and a novelist
respectively; and the historians, Susan Zuccotti and Michael Phayer.
Evident in their writings is a common agenda: discrediting papal
authority in the hope of influencing the selection of a more “liberal”
pontiff in the next papal election.
Prominent among the Pope’s defenders is the American rabbi, David L.
Dalin. At the end of a 4000-word article in the Feb. 26, 2001 issue of
“The Weekly Standard,” Dalin cites the Talmudic dictum: “Whosoever
preserves one life, it is accounted to him by Scripture as if he had
preserved a whole world.” Dalin comments: “More than any other
twentieth-century leader, Pius fulfilled this Talmudic dictum, when the
fate of European Jewry was at stake. No other pope had been so widely
praised by Jews – and they were not mistaken. Their gratitude, as well
as that of the entire generation of Holocaust survivors, testifies that
Pius XII was, genuinely and profoundly, a righteous gentile.”
“For Jewish leaders of a previous generation,” Rabbi Dalin writes, “the
[current] campaign against Pius XII would have been a source of shock.”
What caused this radical shift of opinion? Rolf Hochhuth’s play, “The
Deputy,” first performed in 1963, was the occasion, though not the
cause. The play appeared just as the rebellion against authority was
getting underway in Western democracies. The demonization of an
authority figure revered by millions was welcome to an age proclaiming
the death of God and rejecting the pretensions of those claiming to
speak in his name. It is equally welcome today to those who hold there
is no such thing as truth, only different opinions.
Among historians a consensus about the most extreme charges against Pius XII
appears to be forming. Whatever missed opportunities in
papal policy we can identify over a half-century later, Pius XII was
neither “Hitler’s Pope” nor an anti-Semite. At the recent debate
between Ronald Rychlak and Susan Zuccotti at Trinity College, Hartford,
all the Pope’s critics explicitly rejected both charges. That they
continue to be trumpeted by the media reflects a phenomenon observable
throughout history: the public’s appetite for sensation and scandal.

I can e-mail Rabbi Dalin’s article to anyone who requests it. Dalin is
at work on a book which will expand his findings.

John Jay Hughes,
Archdiocese of St Louis, Missouri, USA
jaystl@swbell.net

1) “Witnesses for Christ”
In his 1994 apostolic letter Tertio Millennio Adveniente Pope John Paul
II, after recalling the martyrs of the first millennium, wrote: “In our
century the martyrs have returned, many of them nameless ‘unknown
soldiers’ as it were of God’s great cause. As far as possible, their
witness should not be lost to the church. … The local churches should
do everything possible to ensure that the memory of those who have
suffered martyrdom should be safeguarded, gathering the necessary
documentation.” (37)
No local church has fulfilled the Pope’s wish as fully as that in
Germany. Two massive volumes in German, with a combined weight of 8
pounds, were published last year recording, in meticulous detail, the
stories of some 700 German Catholics of both sexes who, in the century
just closed, suffered violent deaths out of hatred for the faith: under
Nazism and Communism, in mission countries, and while resisting rape
(“martyrs of purity”) or defending its victims. The number of these
“witnesses for Christ” (the book’s title) is “far more than we initially
supposed,” writes the Bishop of Mainz and President of the German
Bishops’ Conference Karl Lehmann in a Foreword..
Criteria for inclusion are taken from those established by the learned
canonist Prospero Lambertini and later Pope Benedict XIV (1740-1758) for
the canonization of martyrs: a violent death, motivated by hatred of the
church and the faith, and willing acceptance of God’s will despite
mortal danger. No one is included whose death did not with certainty
satisfy all three conditions.
Writing of the martyrs in the Nazi period, the editor says: “The
church points with pride to its martyrs not in order to cover up its
failures, but out of gratitude.” More than 160 diocesan priests and
almost 60 male religious were martyred by the Nazis. There were also
110 lay martyrs of both sexes: among them a 17-year-old apprentice, and
two 19-year-olds, one a female convert from Judaism. The oldest lay
martyrs were 73 and 74 respectively. Women comprised 14 percent of the
total, many of them highly educated people in prominent positions or
persons of Jewish origin. “It is certain that there were many times
more than we were able to find,” the editor writes. He also pays
tribute to the many non-Catholic martyrs, part of the 12,000
commemorated by Pope John Paul II at an “Ecumenical Commemoration of
Twentieth Century Witnesses to the Faith” in Rome’s Colosseum on 7 May
2000.
The list of communism’s victims, starting in 1917 – a laywoman and 108
priests including 5 bishops and an abbot – consists mostly of
“Volksdeutsche”: ethnic Germans settled for generations in the Balkans
or Russia. This category also includes more than 60 “martyrs of
purity,” most of them religious Sisters (the oldest 93 and 88
respectively) but many laywomen as well. Of the 18 killed while trying
to defend victims of rape, 13 were priests, 2 religious Sisters. The
list of over 170 missionary martyrs begins in Papua New Guinea in 1904
and ends in Zimbabwe in 1988. Herewith a look at a few of the martyrs
under Nazism.
Army Lieutenant Michael Kitzelmann, age 26, was shot on the Russian
front in 1942 for writing in a letter: “At home they banish the
crucifixes from the schools, while here they tell us we’re fighting
against godless communism.” Before his execution he forgave the
sergeant who had denounced him. His farewell letter to his loved ones
said the Catholic chaplain had just visited him: “God has granted me
the grace of a holy death. I go ahead of you to our heavenly homeland.
Divine Redeemer, grant me a merciful judgment when I come to you.
Praised be Jesus Christ!”
The university student Robert Limpert, deeply religious and an open
critic of the Nazis, distributed fliers demanding that his home town of
Ansbach be declared an open city. On 18 April 1945, with American
troops already on the town’s outskirts, the local Nazi commander
personally hanged Limpert on the wall of the city hall. American troops
cut down the body four hours later. His memorial tablet bears the
inscription: “Executed for resistance to the Third Reich on 18 April
1945, aged 19.”
In Regensburg the 38-year-old diocesan priest and Cathedral Preacher,
Dr. Johann Baptist Maier, spoke in the late afternoon of 23 April 1945
at a demonstration by hundreds of citizens demanding that the city be
surrendered to the American troops, then only 20 km away. When the
protest threatened to get out of hand, Maier admonished the crowd to
respect constituted authority. As he started to give the reasons for
declaring Regensburg an open city, he was arrested. A hastily assembled
court martial condemned him to death as a “saboteur” hours later. He
was hanged on the site of the demonstration before dawn the next day.
Hanged with him was the 74-year-old pensioner, Josef Zirkl, a staunch
opponent of the Nazis. His crime: protesting the priest’s arrest. The
46-year-old policeman Michael Lottner, retired due to a service-related
injury, also protested and was shot while defending himself from
beating. His body was laid beneath the gallows on which Maier and Zirkl
were hanged. The American troops entered Regensburg three days later
without a fight. Maier’s tomb in the Regensburg Cathedral bears the
inscription: “He gave his life for the preservation of Regensburg. …
His tongue is silenced, but his deed and his death continue to preach.”
The 22-year-old university student Eva-Maria Buch was beheaded in
Berlin on August 5, 1943 for distributing fliers to imprisoned French
workers in munition factories warning that their compatriots could be
killed by the fruits of their labor. The priest who gave Buch communion
before her execution marveled at her cheerfulness throughout her long
imprisonment and right up to her death.
Executed with Buch were 12 more women and 3 men from her resistance
group, one of them a Catholic: the 33-year-old Maria Terwiel, who
smuggled food and ration cards to Jews and in 1941 distributed copies of
the celebrated anti-Nazi sermons of Bishop von Galen of Münster.
The 28-year-old Army Lieutenant Alfons Zurawski was beheaded on October
6, 1942 for fraternizing with Polish forced laborers, and giving food to
starving Polish prisoners of war. His farewell letter said that the
sacraments he had just received “made my final hours some of the most
beautiful of my whole life.”
Mingled with these and hundreds of others who died in obscurity, and
would remain there but for this work, are the better known victims. The
lay Catholic Action leader Dr. Erich Klausener, was shot at his desk in
Berlin on June 30, 1934 as a “dangerous Catholic leader.” Blessed Karl
Leisner, secretly ordained priest on the Third Sunday in Advent 1944 in
the Dachau concentration camp by the imprisoned French bishop of
Clermont-Ferrand (outfitted by his fellow prisoners with the full
pontifical regalia!), died nine months later of illness contracted
during his imprisonment. His First Mass was also his last. Blessed
Bernard Lichtenberg, Provost of the Berlin Cathedral, was imprisoned for
praying publicly for “the sorely tried non-Aryan Christians, the Jews,
those in concentration camps, the victims of bombing and war on both
sides …” He died of maltreatment on the way to the Dachau on 5
November 1943, aged 68. Fr. Alfred Delp, one of seven Jesuits martyred
by the Nazis, was hanged in Berlin on February 2, 1945, for his
participation in the Kreisau Circle, a group of aristocrats and
intellectuals who met to plan a better Germany after Hitler’s defeat.
The infamous Nazi judge Roland Freisler (later killed in a bomb attack)
said at Delp’s trial: “National Socialism and Christianity have one
thing in common: we both demand the whole man.”
These victims of Hitler were not more heroic that their fellow
martyrs. But their stories are worth recounting today. One cannot read
their biographies, and especially the farewell letters, without being
moved. One wonders whether they will ever be seen by the tenured
academics and well paid journalists who today make careers, and money,
claiming that in Germany’s darkest hour, nothing was done (or at best
pathetically little) to resist the forces of evil.
JJH

2a) Michael F. Feldkamp, “Pius XII. und Deutschland.” (Göttingen:
Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht. 236 p. DM 29,80)
Amid the flood of books defaming Pope Pius XII, and the occasional
defense of the pontiff, it is a pleasure to come upon the work of a
serious historian more interested in honestly examining the historical
record than in advancing a point of view. Michael Feldkamp is a young
historian (born 1962) in Berlin, author of several scholarly works about
relations between Germany and the Holy See from World War I onwards, and
editor of post-World War II documents of the German Foreign Office and
Bundestag. In this brief work, published in paperback, he shows
intimate familiarity with the primary sources and secondary literature
in German, Italian, French, and English.
The contrast between objective scholarship and advocacy is evident when
one compares Feldkamp’s treatment of Pacelli’s dealings with a German
rabbi in 1917 with the portrayal of this incident by John Cornwell in
“Hitler’s Pope”. In September of that year Pacelli, then nuncio to
Bavaria, received a letter from the Munich rabbi Dr. Mose Cossmann
Werner, asking help in getting the Italian customs authorities to
release some palm fronds to be used at the coming Jewish feast of
Tabernacles. Due to wartime export restrictions the palms had been held
up in the railway station at Como. Pacelli passed on the request to
Cardinal Gasparri, his superior in Rome, informing him that he had told
the rabbi that since the Holy See had no diplomatic relations with
Italy, a favorable response by the Italian authorities was unlikely in
the few weeks before the Jewish feast. Pacelli’s letter to Gasparri
also pointed out that the rabbi was asking assistance not merely in a
matter which involved civil rights but cooperation in the celebration of
non-Catholic religious rites – then forbidden by canon law
(“communicatio in sacris”). Gasparri replied that the Holy See could
not act, because of the lack of diplomatic relations with Italy. When
Pacelli explained this to the rabbi, the latter “thanked me warmly for
all that I had done on his behalf.”
Calling this “a diplomatic sleight of hand,” Cornwell says that
Pacelli’s letter to Gasparri “has lain buried in the files of the
Secretary of State until now” – while disclosing in a footnote that he
quotes it from a book published in 1956. Cornwell comments: “Pacelli
rejected a poignant plea of his Jewish brethren that might have brought
spiritual spiritual consolation to many thousands.” He uses the
incident as evidence of Pacelli’s alleged antisemitism. Feldkamp says
that the incident shows that Pacelli “remained a child of his times
unable, even as nuncio, to set himself above canon law.” The fact that
this canonical prohibition has been abrogated long since “affords no
basis for using Pacelli’s actions, which according to the law at that
time were formally correct, as evidence of latent antisemitism.”
Feldkamp devotes a chapter to each of the four periods of Eugenio Pacelli’s
relations with Germany: his work as nuncio, first in Munich then in Berlin
(1917-1929); his activity as papal Secretary of State (1930-39); his role as wartime
pope; and his post-war efforts to restore Germany to a place in the family of
nations. Non-German readers will be especially interested in the chapter
about Pius XII’s wartime role. The pope’s alleged “silence” (Feldkamp
places the word in quotation marks) “was due neither to concern for his
personal safety, nor the desire to maintain strict neutrality in order
to preserve his chance of being a future peacemaker. The pope’s policy
arose from his judgment that a public protest would not only fail to
deter the Nazis, but would provoke even greater atrocities. … The
pope’s decision to remain ‘silent’ cost him dearly.” By limiting
himself to private protests, while initiating rescue efforts behind the
scenes, Pius XII was able “to save thousands of lives.” Moreover,
Feldkamp writes, one must ask how free the wartime pope was to exercise
his office, living as he did in his tiny territory dependent on Hitler’s
ally Mussolini for such basic necessities as food, water, and
electricity – and with the constant threat of kidnapping. Hitler
actually ordered this on Sept. 12, 1943, but was talked out of it by
subordinates.
Feldkamp’s sober narration of the roundup of Roman Jews on October
16,1943, refutes the account given by Susan Zuccotti in “Under his Very
Windows”. Vigorous behind-the-scenes papal protests, unpublicized
because the German ambassador to the Holy See von Weiszäcker warned that
this was the only way to help the victims, resulted in “the deportation
to Auschwitz of somewhat more than 1,000 Jews rather than the 8,000
ordered [by Hitler]. Some 200,000 Italians, many Jews among them, were
hidden in more than 200 extra-territorial religious houses during the
months-long German occupation of Rome. Vatican sponsored organizations
enabled more Jews to emigrate. In addition, during the closing years of
the war the Vatican distributed thousands of passports from the
Argentine and Brazilian governments, and from the Swiss Red Cross.”
Feldkamp’s final chapter is entitled; “Controversy about the Pope’s
‘Silence’.” After narrating the course of the controversy to date,
Feldkamp writes: “The question separating Pius XII’s accusers and
defenders in the future will continue to be whether he should have done
more to publicize his moral condemnation [of Nazi atrocities]; or
whether his exercise of ethical responsibility enabled him to save more
lives. Pius XII chose what he considered the realistic course and left
the door open to negotiation. Nonetheless, he was not silent, as we
have shown. On the contrary, he steadfastly proclaimed Catholic
teaching.”
The same people who today condemn Pius XII for his wartime
“silence”, Feldkamp writes in his concluding paragraph, demand that his
present successor remain silent about other moral questions:
contraception, artificial insemination, and abortion. Feldkamp cites
John Conway’s judgment that making Pius XII responsible for the
Holocaust “ill serves both the victims and the full truth about the
human capacity to act against humanity’s fundamental laws.”
Scapegoating Pius XII, Feldkamp concludes, diverts attention from those
primarily responsible for the Holocaust: the Nazis and those who
cooperated with them.
JJH

2b) John L. Allen, Jr. “Cardinal Ratzinger: The Vatican’s Enforcer of
Faith” (New York: Continuum, 2000. xii + 340 pp. $24.95)
[The review which follows is by John A. Komonchak, holder of the John
C. and Gertrude P. Hubbard Chair of Religious Studies at the Catholic
University of America. A “centrist” theologian in today’s Catholic
theological spectrum, he is the co-editor of the multi-volume
English-language edition of “The History of Vatican II.” The review,
originally published in the Nov. 3, 2000 issue of the lay-edited and
left- leaning American Catholic bi-weekly “Commonweal,” is included
here with permission.]

A French priest got into trouble during the anti-modernist repression
of the early 1900s when he suggested a radical reform of the Roman Curia
that would reduce it to two offices, one congregation for the defense of
the faith and another to defend Catholics against the actions of the
first congregation. One can sympathize, particularly when the
Congregation for the Doctrine of the faith (CDF) is making unprecedented
claims to near-sovereign authority to deal with a host of problems in
the church today.
Joseph Cardinal Ratzinger once said that the CDF has the sadly
necessary duty of dealing with “the pathology of faith.” Under his
leadership it appears to have found a good deal of illness, and in
recent years it has been more noted for its warnings and punishments
than for the positive promotion of doctrine that Pope Paul VI proposed
as its chief purpose when at the close of Vatican II he set out new
norms for what until then had been called the Holy Office. These
actions have made the Cardinal the target not only of criticism but of
downright vilification.
John L. Allen tells us in his preface that he was startled by such
actions because they ran counter to the Vatican II Catholicism in which
he, born in 1965, had been raised. He set out to find out what might
have led Joseph Ratzinger, one of the progressive theologians at the
Council, to the series of positions he has expressed both in private
speeches and articles and in the official actions of his office. Allen
wanted his book to avoid the polarization in the contemporary church
that he nicely describes: “Neither side is willing to spend the
intellectual effort to deeply understand the concerns that drive their
opponents, the arguments that have led them to the conclusions they
hold, the alternatives they have considered and rejected.” Rome bureau
chief for the “National Catholic Reporter,” he presumably counts himself
among those journalists who he says, with greater confidence than many
can muster, “instinctively seek ‘all sides’ of a discussion.”
Unfortunately, Allen seems to think that there are only two sides on
most of the issues he raises, and he finds Cardinal Ratzinger regularly
on the wrong one. In his preface he has a few lines about Ratzinger’s
personal kindness and sincerity and near the end of the book almost
three pages on four points on which he thinks the Cardinal worth
listening to. But Allen sees himself as a product and representative of
what he calls, with a reference to Michael Harrington’s famous book,
“the other Catholicism,” inspired and shaped by Vatican II, the
“evolving, socially engaged, compassionate Catholicism that was the
incubator of my faith” and that he thinks Ratzinger is trying to curb.
He contrasts Catholic “reformers” to “restorationists: and to a
“traditionalist camp” in which he includes Ratzinger and Hans Urs von
Balthasar. Theologians are divided into “a minority reflexively loyal
to Rome” and a majority “who are instinctively suspicious of church
authority.” There hardly ever appears to be, in any of these contrasts,
a middle ground.
The same over-simplifying framework controls Allen’s detailed treatment
of Roman actions with regard to liberation theology, women and
homosexuals, ecumenism and interreligious dialogue, and moral theology.
Because the issues at stake are most often presented in either-or terms
and the points at debate are reviewed with little depth or nuance, the
drama of the confrontations is reduced to a series of power plays by an
“enforcer” and the consequences are described hyperbolically. The end
of one chapter will give a sense of the whole treatment: “Like
Ratinzger’s crusades against liberation theology, feminism, and gay
rights, the pall that he has cast over ecumenism and interreligious
dialogue has had consequences beyond the borders of academic theology.
It has contributed to making the world a more fractured, and therefore a
more dangerous place.”
These descriptions are preceded by chapters in which Allen reviews
Ratzinger’s youth under Hitler’s regime, from which he believes the
Cardinal has not yet learned all the lessons (“Having seen fascism in
action, Ratzinger today believes that the best antidote to political
totalitarianism is ecclesial totalitarianism.”), superficially discusses
the chief theological influences on his thought, explores his role at
Vatican II, his disappointment at the Council’s aftermath, and what
Allen considers the decisive experience of student unrest at the
University of Tübingen in 1968, selectively reviews three of his major
works, and rapidly describes his brief term as Archbishop of Munich
before he was appointed head of the CDF. Much useful information can be
found here, but the treatment is very uneven, inadequately documented,
and marred by historical and bibliographical mistakes.
The most convincing section offers evidence that, contrary to the
Cardinal’s repeated claim, his views on a number of important issues
(collegiality, episcopal conferences, tradition, liturgy, ecumenism,
divorce and remarriage) have changed over the decades. Allen finds
continuity, however, in an enduring Augustinian counterpoising of church
and culture. There is something to this, and its roots lie in an
anthropology and epistemology that profoundly shape the fashion and the
terms in which Ratzinger spontaneously frames an issue. Had this
theological key been explored at greater length and with greater
subtlety, Allen might have been more successful in situating Ratzinger
within the history and variety of twentieth-century Catholic theology
and in analyzing the tensions that divide Catholics. Instead he is
content with the kind of Manichean journalism from which Catholics
suffer so much today.
This is too bad because we could use a good analysis and critique of
the thought and actions of a man who has played so powerful a role in
the church over the last twenty years. Ratzinger’s theology, early and
late, fits within a trajectory of Catholic thought which was one of the
paths of renewal which made Vatican II possible. It was not the only
one, of course, and a much-neglected dynamic of Vatican II was tension
among various groups within the majority. Latent when they had the
common goal of getting rid of the official texts prepared for the
Council, these differences began to be expressed in the last two
sessions of the Council and are visible in the final texts. When the
Council was followed by some developments in the church that few if any
had anticipated, the tensions became divisions and their representatives
now vie over how to interpret Vatican II both as a set of documents and
as an event in the life of the church. For the moment the line
represented by Cardinal Ratzinger is in the ascendancy in Rome and
claims a monopoly on the interpretation of the Council; and he has not
hesitated to use the power of his office to reinforce this line,
sometimes in language and by means that are difficult to reconcile with
either the texts of Vatican II or the communion-inspired methods of
Vatican II. But to show all this would require a more attentive and
critical book than this one.

3) The following article, by Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger, Prefect of the
Roman Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith, was published on the
front page of the Italian edition of “Osservatore Romano” on 29 Dec.
2000. The English translation was procured by the Sisters of Sion in
Rome, a congregation with a special concern for Jews.

Joseph Cardinal Ratzinger: “The Heritage of Abraham: the Gift of Christmas”

At Christmas we exchange gifts, in order to bring joy to others, and to
share in the joy which the choir of angels announced to the shepherds,
calling to mind once more the gift par excellence which God made to
humanity when he gave us his Son Jesus Christ. But God prepared this
gift over the course of a long history, during which – as St. Irenaeus
says – God became accustomed to being with human beings, and human
beings became accustomed to being in communion with God. This story
begins with the faith of Abraham, the father of those who believe, and
also the father of our faith as Christians – one who, through faith, is
also our father. The story continues with the blessings granted to the
patriarchs, the revelation to Moses, and Israel’s exodus toward the
Promised Land. A new stage opens up with the promise of an unending
kingship – the promise made to David and his descendants. The prophets
in turn interpret this history, calling people to repentance and
conversion, thus preparing human hearts to receive the ultimate gift.
Abraham, father of the people of Israel, father of faith, thus becomes
the source of blessing, for in him “all the families of the earth shall
call themselves blessed” (Genesis 12:3). The task of the Chosen People
is, therefore, to make a gift of their God – the one true God – to every
other people; in reality, as Christians we are the inheritors of their
faith in the one God. Our gratitude, therefore, must be extended to our
Jewish brothers and sisters who, despite the hardships of their own
history, have held on to the faith in this God right up to the present,
and who witness to it in the sight of those peoples who, lacking
knowledge of the one God, “dwell in darkness and in the shadow of death”
(Luke 1:79).

The God of the Jewish Bible (which, together with the New Testament, is
also the Christian Bible) – a God at times infinitely tender, and at
times so severe as to inspire fear – is also the God of Jesus Christ and
of the Apostles. The Church of the second century had to resist the
denial of this God by the Gnostics and, above all, by Marcion, who
created a dichotomy between the New Testament God and the “inferior”
Creator God who was the source of the Old Testament. The Church,
however, has always maintained its faith in a single God, the Creator of
the world, and the author of both Testaments. The awareness of God
contained in the New Testament, which finds its summit in the Johannine
definition that “God is love” (1 John 4:16), does not contradict the
past, but rather serves as a summary of all of salvation history, which
initially had Israel as its central figure. For this reason, the voices
of Moses and the prophets have rung out in the Church’s liturgy from its
very beginnings until today; Israel’s psalter is also the great book of
the Church’s prayer. As a result, the primitive Church did not pit
itself against Israel, but in all simplicity believed itself to be the
legitimate continuation of Israel. The splendid image of chapter 12 of
the book of Revelation – of a woman clothed with the sun, crowned with
twelve stars, pregnant and suffering in the pangs of giving birth – is
Israel, which was “to rule over all nations with an iron scepter” (Psalm
2:9). Nonetheless, this woman is transformed into the new Israel, the
mother of new peoples, and she is personified in Mary, the Mother of
Jesus. The bringing together of these three meanings – Israel, Mary,
the Church – shows how Israel and the Church were, and are, inseparable
for the Christian faith.

We know that every act of giving birth is difficult. Certainly, from
the very beginning, relations between the infant Church and Israel were
often marked by conflict. The Church was considered by her own mother
to be a degenerate daughter, while Christians considered their mother to
be blind and obstinate. Down through the history of Christianity
relations, already strained, deteriorated farther, even giving birth in
many cases to anti-Jewish attitudes, which throughout history have led
to deplorable acts of violence. Even if the most recent, loathsome
experience of the Shoah was perpetrated in the name of an anti-Christian
ideology, which tried to strike the Christian faith at its Abrahamic
roots – in the people of Israel – it cannot be denied that a certain
insufficient resistance to this atrocity on the part of Christians can
be explained by an inherited anti-Judaism present in the hearts of not a
few Christians. Perhaps it is precisely because of this latest tragedy
that a new vision of the relationship between the Church and Israel has
been born: a sincere willingness to overcome every kind of anti-Judaism,
and to initiate a constructive dialogue based on knowledge of each
other, and on reconciliation. If such a dialogue is to be fruitful, it
must begin with a prayer to our God, first of all that he might grant to
us Christians a greater esteem and love for that people – the people of
Israel – to whom belong “the adoption as sons, the glory, the covenants,
the giving of the law, the worship, and the promises; theirs are the
patriarchs, and from them comes Christ according to the flesh, he who is
over all, God blessed forever. Amen.” (Romans 9:4-5) – and this not only
in the past, but still today, “for the gifts and call of God are
irrevocable” (Romans 11:29). In the same way, let us pray that he may
grant also to the children of Israel a deeper knowledge of Jesus of
Nazareth, who is their son, and the gift they have made to us. Since we
are both awaiting the final redemption, let us pray that the paths we
follow may converge.

It is evident that, as Christians, our dialogue with the Jews is
situated on a different level than that in which we engage with other
religious. The faith witnessed to by the Jewish Bible (for Christians
the Old Testament) is not merely another religion to us, but is the
foundation of our own faith. Therefore Christians – and today
increasingly in collaboration with their Jewish sisters and brothers –
read and attentively study these books of Sacred Scripture, as a part of
their common heritage. It is true that Islam considers itself as one of
Abraham’s offspring, and has inherited from Jews and Christians this
same God. Muslims, however, follow a different path, and so dialogue
with them calls for different parameters.

To return to the exchange of Christmas gifts with which I began this
meditation: we must first of all recognize that everything we have and
do is a gift of God, which is gained only through humble, sincere
prayer. It is a gift that must be shared between various ethnic groups,
between religions who are seeking a better grasp of the divine mystery,
between nations who seek peace, and between people who wish to build a
society where justice and peace reign. This is the programme sketched
out by the Second Vatican Council for the Church of the future, and we
Catholics ask the Lord to help us to persevere on that path.

NOTE: The 3-day meeting in New York in early May of the International
Catholic-Jewish Liaison Committee issued a statement quoting Cardinal
Walter Kasper of the Pontifical Commission for Religious Relations with
Jews and a participant in the meeting, as saying that the Vatican
document “Dominus Iesus,” issued by Cardinal Ratzinger’s CDF, is “an
intra- Catholic document about interreligious dialogue addressed to
Catholic theologians … It does not enter into the Jewish-Catholic
dialogue. … [There] is no missionary activity on the part of the
church directed toward converting Jews.”

4) Nuncio Angelo Roncalli’s efforts to assist Jewish victims of the
Holocaust.
At the instigation of the Raoul Wallenberg Foundation, research is
being undertaken on the humanitarian interventions by Nuncio Roncalli
(later Pope John XXIII) on behalf of Jewish victims in the Balkan
countries. The results, catalogued from the later volumes of Actes et
documents du Saint Siège pendant la deuxième guerre mondiale are to be
found on the website:
http://www.raoul-wallenberg.org.ar/engkish/roncallinfo2,htm