Association of Contemporary Church Historians

(Arbeitsgemeinschaft kirchlicher Zeitgeschichtler)

 John S. Conway, Editor. University of British Columbia

100th Issue

Dear Friends,
To my considerable astonishment, I calculate that this comes to you as the
100th issue of our Newsletter. When I began to send out this Newsletter,
as my retirement project after so many years of teaching at the University
of British Columbia, I imagined that some reviews of recent books on church
history might be of some help to colleagues interested in our field of
research and scholarship. I supposed that a few issues would suffice to
take care of the backlog. But due to your unabated interest and support
over the last eight and a half years, as well as to the flood of new works
constantly appearing in our field of contemporary church history, I have
been encouraged to continue. Despite some unfortunate technical
difficulties, which I trust have now been resolved, the replies you have so
kindly and warmly sent back to me have given me the incentive to keep
going. This gives me an opportunity to thank those members whose
assistance over the years has been particularly helpful: Doris Bergen,
Matthew Hockenos, Mike Phayer, and Jay Hughes.

In view of this 100th milestone, and in consideration of my own long-time
interest in German church history, I thought it might be of help to us all
to ask our colleague Prof. Gerhard Besier (Heidelberg) to give us a broad
survey of the situation of the German churches over the past seventy years
since Hitler’s rise to power. His essay will be carried in two parts. We
would like also to congratulate him on his new appointment as Director of
the Hannah Arendt Institute for Research on Totalitarianism at the
Technical University in Dresden, where he will be moving to shortly.

Contents:

Seventy Years after “Machtergreifung”. The German Churches’
Political Stance 1933-2003 (Part I)

Gerhard Besier
Churches and religious communities in 1933

When Hitler seized power, Germany was an almost completely
bi-denominational country. About 63% (in absolute numbers: 39.5 million)
were members of the Protestant state churches, and 32% (24.5 million) were
Roman Catholics. Of the smaller religious and ideological groups, the
Jewish communities were the largest with an amount of 0.9% (in absolute
numbers: half a million). There were considerable
differences in mentality between the two large denominations. While Roman
Catholicism had ceased being an “Empire Church” since the decline of the
Holy Roman Empire in 1806 and, independent from state protection, had
developed to a strong power in society paired with solid milieus,
Protestantism experienced the division of Church and State only at the
beginning of the Weimar Republic. Neither before 1918 nor afterwards did
Protestantism manage to create mass structures similar to those of the
Catholics. There was no “Protestant party”, and Protestant associations
could not compare themselves with Catholic organisations, neither in size
nor by inner consistence. Socialist subculture, which was quite
heterogeneous itself, contributed considerably to loosen religious bonds,
especially in milieus with a Protestant background. The majority of people
did not adopt Socialist rites of passage, but they did distance themselves
from what the churches offered. The complaint of the church about the
“dying Sunday” pointed to the fact that after the constitutional division
of Church and State, many people felt no longer obliged to go to church.
This process of distancing oneself from the church, however, had already
begun in the last third of the 19th century and would gain more ground.The National Socialist movement as a hope of new departures for the churches

Both for those persons who were ideologically indifferent, and for official
representatives of the churches, the National Socialist movement seemed to
offer a great hope. Some recognized in it a modern response to the crisis of the
day, and looked forward to a new future under vigorous Nazi leadership. On
the other hand, many bishops and lay members of the church establishment counted on a
state-supported re-Christianisation and trusted that the conditions as they existed before
1919 would be restored. Both believed that the unifying factor of religion
was vital for Germany’s political future.

Hitler won broad support from the churches with his government’s
declaration of 23 March 1933, which contained far-reaching assurances to the
churches as “most important factors for the preservation of our ethnicity.”
Protestants especially were reminded of the “spirit of 1914”, and were
gratified to see growing numbers of church-goers. They presumed the churches would be included
in the “national revolution” in the weeks that followed 30 January 1933.The vast majority was not affected by the measures taken against political, ideological and religious minorities and therefore took a rather
indifferent stance towards their persecution. The new government’s
unequivocal breaches of human rights raised no critique among the churches;
many Protestants indeed welcomed the restrictions of basic rights and the
strong measures taken for the development of the dictatorship as a step
back to the reestablishment of law and order.

In its declaration of 28 March 1933, the Catholic episcopacy recanted
its condemnations of National Socialism as expressed in previous years.
Catholicism had a significantly smaller problem with National Socialism,
since believers as well as theologians were hardly affected by this
“political religion.” With the help of the Reich Concordat and by assuming
a diplomatic position, the Catholic Church believed it would be able to defend
its rights even under a dictatorship. The “anti-bolshevism” shared with
National Socialism was, for both churches, an important factor of
ideological and political consensus.Attempts to synthesize Christianity and National Socialism
In Protestantism, on the contrary, there existed a group who aimed to
create a synthesis of National Socialism and Christianity even before
Hitler seized power: the so-called German Christians (Deutsche Christen,
DC). This new ideology had multiple sources. The völkische Bewegung
(‘national’ or ‘ethnic’ movement), which sprang up in the last third of the
19th century, played a significant role. The younger generation of pastors
were greatly influenced by this völkisch and national body of thought. Even
the majority of the small opposition group of Confessing Church (Bekennende
Kirche, BK) within the church was of the opinion that National Socialism
had created a political system appropriate to the Germans. They only wanted
to keep the Church out of the hands of those Nazis who advocated state
control – a position which would soon prove illusory. Although the German Christians
(DC) were a minority too, it may be assumed that the majority of church
members who were not very close to the Church shared a vast part of
DC-convictions. The readiness for obedience towards state authorities and
an opportunistic philosophy of survival did their part. Had the more
radical Nazis not continually distanced themselves from the DC and expelled
them with more and more determination from their own “movement,” a final
victory of the DC-movement and the creation of a “national church” might
have been the result. After all, the decline of the “Confessing Church”
after 1938 was obvious. The so-called “intact” churches of Hannover,
Wuerttemberg and Bavaria were more ready to compromise than the “destroyed”
Prussian churches. Whereas the former did not want to endanger their
status, the latter ones had nothing left to lose. This viewpoint deserves
priority beyond inner-Protestant denominational differences.

Privileged position of the Churches in postwar-Germany

The end of WWII led – with the exception of the churches – to the breakdown
of German society. The Western Allies were aware that the churches had
heavily compromised themselves, but they were convinced, due to the
conditions existing in their own countries, that a democratic society could
not be built without Christianity. This is why they granted privileges to
the churches and gave them much scope for renewed activity. Under the
pressure of the Allies, however, both major churches had to draft an admission of guilt
first. From then on the Stuttgart Declaration of Guilt issued in October
1945 was a notable document, but raised considerable objections in many
Protestant circles. Much more welcome was the attempt made by the churches
to see themselves as resistance organisations – an interpretation strongly
supported by the early post-war historiography of the Confessing Church.
Within Protestantism, the old dispute among Lutherans and United
Protestants revived in summer 1945. In order to circumvent this problem,
the traditional structures of the state churches were maintained and
reforms were mostly foregone.

On the wider scene, Protestants and Catholics were united in a
common negative opinion about the Allies’ military occupation policies. In
their struggle against denazification they withdrew to a position of legal positivism
which made all efforts of the Allies look like vindictive legislation.
Furthermore, they frequently explained away their own former positive
attitudes towards National Socialism as venial, comprehensible political errors in
reasoning, and pleaded for an end to all attempts to brand Germans as
collectively guilty. With this interpretation, the church leadership
strongly responded to the expectations of church members and improved their
social reputation. Yet, there was no lasting “movement of return to the
churches.” The numbers of people joining the churches reached their peak in
1946. In 1949, there were already 86,000 people leaving the
church versus 43,000 joining it. So, after a brief interruption, the
erosion of folk Protestantism went on. The Roman Catholic Church was spared
this erosion at first, but in the 1960s its own milieus began giving in too.
Churches and Church Policy in the GDR

When the GDR was founded, 80.5 % of the population were members of the
Protestant Church, while in 1989 the number had sunk to 24 %. While the
level of people leaving the church remained high until the mid-1970s, the
peaks lay in the years 1958 and 1975. From the mid-1970s the rate of
deserters sank, or was reduced by people joining the church. After the
collapse of the GDR, the rate of deserters increased again. The Roman
Catholic Church was in a classical minority position. Due to the refugees
from the former East German areas (now belonging to Poland) and the
Sudetenland, the number of Catholics increased from 4.7 % to 13.9 % between
1945 and 1949, but until 1954, it dropped again by a third because of
further migration and people leaving the country. In 1989, only 5.9 % of
the population were Catholics.

Two of the eight Protestant state churches, and seven Catholic dioceses
(Jurisdiktionsbezirke), covering the territory of the GDR, suffered severe
losses of territory and members because of the new frontier to Poland along
the rivers Oder and Neisse. These political factors caused substantial
reassessments in church policy and required special efforts for the
necessary re-structuring. Already in 1945, the “Conference of Eastern Churches”, called “Conference of Governing
Bodies of the Protestant Churches in the territory of the GDR” (KKL) from
1950 on, constituted itself. After the founding of both German states, the
Catholic church too established a regional bishops’ board in the territory
of the GDR, which was called “Berlin Conference of Diocesan Authorities”
(Berliner Ordinarienkonferenz, BOK).

The Soviet Military Administration (SMAD), which ruled Eastern Germany at
that time, gave the churches free rein at the beginning. The SED party,
founded by a forced unification of the Communist (KPD) and Social
Democratic (SPD) Parties in February 1946, expressed its tolerance and will
to cooperate with religious convictions and churches at the beginning, too.
This behaviour, which was mainly motivated by tactical reasons, was based
on the Basic Principles formulated by the “working group for religious
questions” of the National Committee for a Free Germany (Nationales Komitee
Freies Deutschland, NKFD) in the USSR since 1944. After 1945, some
clergymen of the NKFD had a secondary function as secret informants of the
Soviet and, later, the GDR secret service. In 1947, a “Department for
Church, Christendom and Religion” was integrated in the party structure,
while from 1949 on Walter Ulbricht’s “Small Secretariat” or some
ad-hoc-Commissions of the Politburo were appointed to treat church
questions. In 1950, a sector on “Churches and Religious Questions” was
formed within the SED State Administration, which was made an independent
department in 1954. The leaders of the Eastern Christian Democratic Union
(CDU) appointed a “Main Department on Church Questions” also. From the
beginning, the State Security Department (Ministerium für Staatssicherheit,
MfS) – that is, the Secret Service of East Germany -, founded in 1950,
worked for the SED regarding church questions too. The “political police”
K5, existing since 1947 and working closely with the Soviet Committee for a
Free Germany, had already been dealing with church questions. Still in
1950, a “Main Department for Contact with the Churches” was instituted
under the rule of Vice Prime Minister and CDU Chairman Otto Nuschke. This
department remained active until Nuschke’s death in 1957, but it gradually
lost importance. During the entire existence of the GDR, the SED party was
convinced, because of its ideological principles, that the churches were
bound to die out. The only matter of discussion over the years was the idea
of how this state-church relationship, which was expected to be limited in
time, should be organized.

The first and only summit meeting (“Spitzengespräch”) – a dialogue among
top officials – between representatives of the state and the churches of
both denominations took place in April 1950, with the aim to put an end to
church opposition against the communist development in society. Prime
Minister (Ministerpräsident) Otto Grotewohl, Walther Ulbricht, Otto
Nuschke, and MfS-Minister Wilhelm Zaisser among others, took part as
representatives of the state. This meeting brought about only a temporary
relief, which was destroyed by the forced Stalinization in 1952/53. After
Stalin’s death, the SED had to give up its policy of repression against the
“Youth Communities” and “Protestant Student Communities” at the beginning
of 1953. A second summit meeting with representatives of the churches ended
with the issuing of a communiqué stating that the conflicts were over. But
in 1954, the atheist Youth Consecration Ceremony enactment brought a new
escalation. This so-called Youth Consecration Ceremony was a secular rite
of passage intended for children of about 13 or 14 years of age by the
state. Its aim was to gradually offer a substitute for the religious rites such as
communion and confirmation maintained by the churches, an aim which was almost reached,
considering that up to the present time, about 13 years after the end of the
GDR, a much larger number of young East Germans still prefer the Youth
Consecration Ceremony to its religious equivalent.

In the spring of 1957, the office of the “State Secretary for Church
Questions” took the place of Nuschke’s “main department”. In a third summit
meeting on July 21, 1958, the representatives of the Protestant Church
declared that they acknowledged the development towards Socialism in the GDR
(“Church within Socialism”). Preceding these talks, the state had managed
to drive a wedge between the leaders of the Protestant churches by finding
certain individuals who were ready to cooperate with the regime, such as
the Bishop of Thuringia, Moritz Mitzenheim. Furthermore, the
State Security Department (MfS) had started to successfully infiltrate the
churches up to the bishops’ level with “unofficial collaborators” (IMs).
After setting up the Berlin Wall in 1961, the SED Party wanted to split the
Protestant national umbrella organisation, the EKD. In 1967, the EKD Synod
still rejected this demand, but the basis of discussion changed when a new GDR
Constitution was introduced in 1968. When the Federation of Protestant
Churches in the GDR (BEK) was founded, a new phase in state-church
relations began, the peaks of which were marked by the fourth summit
meeting of BEK chairman Bishop Albrecht Schönherr and state President Erich
Honecker on March 6, 1978, and by the agreement for cooperation between state
and church during the (500th) Martin Luther anniversary year in 1983. An
example of the poor way of “solving” conflicts during this period is the
appeasement policy followed – inclusive of the Western churches – when
dealing with the suicide of pastor Oskar Brüsewitz in 1976, who burnt
himself to death in protest against the GDR’s lack of religious freedom.
After having criticized the west German state-church-relationship in
connection with the rearmament policy in 1983, in 1984/85 BEK Chairman
Bishop Johannes Hempel could even speak of a “fundamental trust” existing
between church and state in the GDR. However,
soon after Hempel’s summit meeting with Honecker in mid-February 1985, the
tensions between state and church grew stronger again, because of the
opposition groups who gathered on the fringes of the churches, and the
repressions directed against them. But still, leading members of the BEK
stood up for a democratically renewed but now as before socialist GDR even
after the fall of 1989.

In contrast to the Protestants, the Catholic Church had kept a clear distance
from the SED state until 1974. Despite the bishops’ resistance, Pope
Paul VI opted for a policy of détente in 1974. In 1976, an independent
Berlin Board of Bishops was founded. However, the separation from west German
Catholicism, which was already planned, was not in the end made due to the
election of a new pope. John Paul II was, in his turn, a decided adversary
of the Eastern bloc.

The division of the Protestant Church in Germany

Against the background of the Cold War, the SED (Socialist Unity Party)
regime in Eastern Germany tried to force the eastern member churches to
leave the EKD (Evangelical Church in Germany), the VELKD (Union of Lutheran
Churches) and the EKU (United Churches formerly in Prussia). The treaty
signed by the EKD and the western Federal Republic of Germany in 1957
concerning pastoral care in the armed forces was the occasion for the
German Democratic Republic (GDR) to demand a division of these organisations. The GDR’s state secretariat for
church questions, led by Hans Seigewasser and founded on April 1st,
1957, received orders to keep in touch only with the eight churches
existing within the boundaries of the GDR from then on. On May 17, 1958,
GDR Prime Minister Otto Grotewohl cut diplomatic contacts to the EKD’s
appointee for the GDR, Heinrich Grüber. In 1962, one year after the
building of the Berlin Wall, the Conference of Governing Bodies of the
Protestant Churches in GDR (abbreviated as KKL – Konferenz der
Kirchenleitungen), instituted its own office in East Berlin, which was run
by a young church lawyer, Manfred Stolpe. In 1967, the Politburo of the
communist SED party which ruled East Germany, insisted on the existence of
two divided German nations and refused any legitimacy to a “pan-German”
Protestant Church organisation (EKD). In the same year, the EKD synod
sitting in Fürstenwalde refused to accede to the GDR government’s demand
for dividing and possibly disbanding the EKD. However, the Protestant
Student Communities (Evangelische Studentengemeinden, ESG) and the Work
Group of Protestant Youth (Arbeitsgemeinschaft der evangelischen Jugend,
AEJ) split in 1967. One of the causes, next to structural impediments to
any work in common, was the one-sided political indoctrination of young people.

However, against the background of the new Constitution of the GDR established in 1968, Bishop Moritz Mitzenheim of Thuringia declared on February 29, 1968: “The state boundaries of GDR
also constitute the limits for an organisation of the churches.” Without
any prior consultation with their western partner churches, the eastern churches
belonging to the VELKD (Union of Lutheran Churches) left this organisation
in order to form the separate VELKDDR in 1968. In 1969 there followed the
founding of the Federation of Protestant Churches in the GDR (Bund der
Evangelischen Kirchen in der DDR, BEK), an organisation totally independent
from the (western) EKD. The official recognition of the BEK by the SED-state did not however occur until
February 24, 1971. A reason for this delay may have been article 4, paragraph 4 of the
Constitution of the BEK, which stated: “The Federation acknowledges a
special union of the entire Protestant Christianity in Germany.” As a kind of contradiction
to this affirmation of unity, attempts were made to give theological
reasons for this institutional detachment from the EKD. A peculiar interpretation
of the theological theories proposed by Karl Barth and Dietrich Bonhoeffer,
as well as of the so-called “Darmstädter Wort”, the Declaration of
Darmstadt of 1947 which acknowledged the mistakes made by the Protestant
churches during the Third Reich, served this purpose. In addition to the
slogans “church for the others” and “community of witness and service”, the
ambivalent expression “church within Socialism” was used. When trying to
shape a theological profile of the BEK, the theologians in question
profited from differing concepts of what is a church, as could be seen in
the rival views expressed in German Protestantism since 1949. The BEK saw
itself more and more as the true “Confessing Church,” which however was being
scorned by the West. Some theologians from the Federal Republic and from
the ecumenical movement agreed with this estimation, thus reinforcing this
self-assessment. In this view, the western EKD seemed a rich
façade-organisation bound to capitalism and militarism, preserving only a few
spiritual qualities.

Yet at the same time, there remained substantial ties between the east and
west branches of the EKD. The western EKD continued to give strong
financial and manifold support to its sister organisation. In a variety of
ways, the western churches subsidized their eastern partners, despite these
differences of political view, often openly expressed. For example, in
order to promote such closer relations, both at the parish and regional
levels, a so-called “advisory board”, consisting of members of both
federations, was instituted in 1969, followed by an additional “consultation board” in 1980.
The protocols of their meetings document the ambivalence of closeness and
at the same time a growing estrangement. Despite this, subsidies both for
the maintenance of partner parishes, as well as for building costs, and
even for the “rescue” of church personnel in danger from the GDR’s secret
police, were paid by the western churches to the GDR

Plans for a reform of the state churches and for the formation of a
“United Protestant Church of the GDR” (Vereinigte Evangelische Kirche in
der DDR, VEK), which had been proposed since the end of the 1970s, failed
due to the opposition of some individual state churches. But this discussion led to a
self-dissolution of the VELKDDR. After the end of the GDR in 1989, some
representatives of EKD and BEK declared their wish for a re-unification of
state and church in the Loccum declaration of January 17, 1990. On the
other side, some left-wing church representatives sought to present an
alternative strategy, as expressed, for example, in the “Berlin Declaration” of February 9, 1990. Nevertheless
these opinions were ignored and the re-unification process took place
faster than expected. It was basically completed by June 1991

.On the History of a Change: Church within Socialism

The re-organisation of the eight eastern state churches in the Federation
of Protestant Churches in the GDR (BEK) at the end of the 1960s was
followed by a theological “reconsideration.” Its result was the ambiguous
expression: “a church within socialism.” This expression seemed ideal as a
central category of an ecclesiological theory, because it allowed
different self- and exterior descriptions and thus enabled both the SED
state and the churches to follow a flexible policy. However, this undefined
expression was motivated and limited by the (contemporary) historical and
ideological frame set by the “first German socialist” constitution of 1968.
The state secretary for church questions in the GDR, Hans Seigewasser,
proclaimed the principle that the church policy had to submit itself to
“general politics for the benefit of a full development of the socialist
human society.” Although some theologians (H. J. Fränkel) expressed a
substantial critique of the expression “socialist” and of its actual
meaning under the GDR-dictatorship, the Conference of Governing Bodies of
the Protestant Churches in the GDR declared on February 15, 1968: “As
citizens of a socialist state, we face the task of manifesting socialism as
a more just form of co-existence.” This self-assessment was regarded as an
important phase on the “path” towards a “learning process.” There had
already been some “road markers” before. For example, a common declaration
of state and church in 1958 stated: “They [that is, the Christians in the
GDR] respect the development towards socialism and contribute to a peaceful
establishment of everyday life.” In his formulation on the “foundations of
the relationship of state and church” of 1962, Manfred Stolpe, the
architect of the BEK, had already used the expression “church within
socialism” when describing this relationship. The concept of socialism was
definitely integrated in the church’s teachings during the Federal Synod of
Eisenach in 1971. From then on, many BEK-theologians adopted this
propagandistic key expression from their political-social surroundings
without reflecting that, within the structure taught by the communist SED,
it was granted metaphysical qualities. By doing this, they did not put the
spiritual autonomy of the church at the center of their ecclesiology, but
instead a semantic participation in the officially established political
reality. As the social context gained a normative quality, some church
people managed to see the reality of the GDR only in a distorted way, namely
through its own official self-definition.

Protestantism in the Federal Republic was also considerably influenced by
the ideas of social democracy at that time. This gave rise to considerable
debate on the question whether Christians should be socialists. These
tendencies were motivated by a perception of guilt towards the poor and
those deprived of their rights in the past (see, for example, the Darmstadt
Declaration of 1947). Furthermore, the churches in the GDR tried to
disprove the manipulative suspicion of the state that they were acting as a
“fifth column” of the “class enemy”. Although a steady approximation of the
BEK to the terminology and semantics of the “real socialist” ideology
was undeniable, the SED state had no reason to rejoice about it, since some
BEK theologians, due to their accommodation to the socialist surroundings,
claimed that they had a right to give further impulses to the future
development of socialism. One of the protagonists of this theological
direction was the Dean of Erfurt, Heino Falcke, who against the background
of the “Theology of the Word of God” supported an “improvable [form of]
socialism” (“verbesserlicher Sozialismus”). But, such views were not shared by all.
Several theologians, as a consequence of the repressive measures taken by
the SED regime against the churches, questioned the use of the
“compromising metaphor” (G. Planer-Friedrich) “church within socialism”.
These doubters were increasingly more vocal from the beginning of 1988.
But not until the fall of 1989, was Bishop W. Leich (from Thuringia) the
first bishop to openly reject the “idea of socialism” (“Sozialismus-Begriff”).

(To be continued)

With best wishes to you all
John S.Conway,
Jconway@interchange.ubc.ca

Dear Friends,

May I once again remind you please do NOT press the REPLY button to this
message, but to communicate to me at my personal address given at the end
on p. 10 below.

Contents:

1) Conference Report, Protestant Mentalities. Gottingen, February 2003
2) New Vatican documents unearthed
3) Book reviews

a) Goldhagen A Moral reckoning
b) Wood, Bishop John Taylor

4) Articles
5) Book notes

1) Conference Report, Göttingen, February 26-28th 2003.

At the invitation of Professor Hartmut Lehmann, Director of the Max Planck
Institute, and former Director of the German Historical Institute,
Washington, D.C., a useful three day conference was held in Göttingen at
the end of February on the topic of “Protestant Mentalities 1870-1970”.
All the sessions were plenary and were interspersed by coffee breaks and
communal meals in the building. So there was ample time for a full
exchange of views – a welcome change from so many similar meetings in North
America when the constraints of time and the pressures of alternative
sessions tend to limit the academic benefits. The predominantly male
participants were mainly younger historians from north German universities,
along with a few pastors, and, as foreign guests, Doris Bergen and Bob
Ericksen from the USA and myself from Canada.

The topic of Protestant Mentalities during the past century offered scope
for a wide range of explorations. We began with an analysis of two
seemingly contradictory, but in reality overlapping tendencies in German
Protestantism, namely the periods of euphoria (Frank Becker, Muenster) and
periods of traumatic shock (Frank-Michael Kuhlemann, Bielefeld). The
former could be seen in 1870, 1914, and 1933, when notable political events
produced strong reactions within the German Protestant churches. In 1870,
the defeat of France and Bismarck’s successful unification of the German
states were widely regarded as signs of God’s favour. The challenge from
Rome was finally settled and the Protestant destiny for northern and
central Europe secured. So too in 1914 the Protestant readiness to mobilize
support for the war effort gave a religious justification to what many
regarded as a Holy Crusade. And in 1933, the same kind of enthusiastic
support for Adolf Hitler’s new regime was widespread among all factions of
the German Evangelical Churches. In between, to be sure, there were
periods when a sense of trauma and crisis prevailed. Even before 1914, many
alert Protestants could not fail to be alarmed by the rapid growth of
sceptical humanism, which resulted in the defection of so many leading
intellectuals, as also by the failure of the church to hold the loyalty of
the urban working classes. After 1918, the catastrophic outcome of the
war disproved the clergy’s oft-repeated claims that God was on Germany’s
side. The result was a deep crisis of credibility. And the bitter
disillusionment of the second world war, and the subsequent political
division of the country, only led to an even greater sense of traumatic
loss among German Protestants. In one sense, the last fifty years have
been spent in the still unfinished task of coming to terms with these
legacies.

Matthias Pöhlmann, Berlin, outlined the organized attempts by the German
Protestant Churches to offset these trends through its educational and
propaganda activities. They met with only limited success. Doris Bergen,
Notre Dame, Indiana, gave a thoughtful analysis of War Protestantism in
both 1914 and 1939, on the basis of her study of military chaplains. She
pointed out how much the need to promote support for the war effort
distorted the preaching of the Christian gospel. The idealistic hopes that
the war would unite the population and revive their commitment to the
church proved illusory, especially since neither church nor chaplains could
offer any adequate response to the challenges of mass death.
Lucian Hölscher, Bochum, widened the discussion to tackle the whole issue
of secularization. The lack of precision in the use of the this term is
unsatisfactory, but the phenomenon is undoubted. But to what extent can
secularization be seen as an irreversible process, or even a German
development? There was room here for plenty of wide-ranging but as yet
unsettled discussion. This was followed by a novel and interesting
contribution by Rolf Schieder, Berlin, on the impact on the churches in the
1920s and 1930s of the new medium of radio broadcasting. As in England,
the authorities resolved to keep control of this in their own hands in
order to prevent either commercial exploitation or political influence.
Their aim was not, to give the German people what they wanted, but rather
what they ought to have. They maintained a high moral tone and a high
cultural standard.

The churches soon realized the advantages of this kind of high-minded
broadcasting, though some Protestants were alarmed when they learnt that
Catholic “error” would be granted equal time. But in 1940 Goebbels
suspended all religious broadcasting for the duration of the war. As an
aside, Rolf Schieder noted that the Nazis soon discovered that Adolf
Hitler’s declamatory oratory did not transfer at all well to the radio, and
presumably would have been even less successful on television if that had
existed at the time.

We had a paper from Thomas Kaufmann, Göttingen, on the two eminent
Protestant families, the Harnacks and the Seebergs, which gave an
interesting account of their differing theological and political views.
Later Bob Ericksen, Tacoma, gave an outline of the career of Wilhelm
Niemöller, the younger brother of the more famous Martin. During the 1950s,
Wilhelm became the historian of the German Church Struggle, and used his
findings very deliberately, but in the end unsuccessfully, in an attempt to
mould the post-war course of the German Evangelical Church.
Various other examples of Protestant mentalities from early 20th century
history were commented on. Certainly, from a later perspective, we need
to take a critical view of the Protestant failures to combat Nazism, or to
fulfill the mission of Christian love to fellowmen, particularly the Jews.
Or even, as one paper told us, to women, who were still being denied the
right of ordination in the Lutheran church, still placed under the
supervision of male colleagues, or even obliged to resign their posts upon
marriage, for many years after 1945. Throughout the whole century, as this
conference succeeded in showing, conservatism and nationalism were the
uppermost political influences upon Protestant mentalities. Some of the
participants obviously approved; others like me were more dubious. But in
all, under Hartmut Lehmann’s genial chairmanship, we benefited from the
profitable discussions and enjoyed his generous hospitality.
2) As part of the continuing controversy over the Vatican’s policies during
World War II, some new documentation has been found in the archive of the
diocese of Campagna, in southern Italy. Two letters referring to the aid
given on the orders of Pope Pius XII to those suffering for reasons of race
are printed in a new biography Giovanni Palatucci -Il poliziotto che salvo
migliaia de ebrei, Rome: Laurus Robuffo publishers, 2002.
This tells the story of the Italian police official in the district
of Fiume, who used his position to rescue Jews interned under Mussolini’s
racial laws. To this end, he recruited the aid of his uncle, Guiseppe
Palatucci, the Bishop of Campagna, who turned to the Vatican to ask for
support in this cause. The two replies are here given in an English
translation.

1) Secretariat of State of His Holiness
From the Vatican 3 October 1940
Your reverend Excellency,

I have submitted to the august attention of the Holy Father the request
made in your letter # 935 of September 15th on behalf of those who have
been interned.

The August Pontiff deigned to consider your request, and has ordered me to
see to it that the sum of 3000 Lire be sent to Your Excellency, which I now
do with the attached cheque drawn on the Bank of Rome.

His Holiness, in deference to the intentions of the donors, has also
charged me to make you aware that this money should preferably be destined
for those who suffer for reasons of race, and to communicate the Apostolic
Benediction, which he imparts with his whole heart to Your Excellency and
to the flock entrusted to your charge.

I am happy to carry out these august orders. And let me take this
opportunity of expressing to you my sincere feelings of esteem.

Your Excellency’s servant,
Luigi Cardinal Maglione (signed by hand)
2) From the Vatican, 29th November 1940

With regard to your letter of November 8th, seeking a new sum to be
directed for the support of Jews interned in your diocese, I am pleased to
tell Your Excellency that the Holy Father has benevolently decided that you
should be granted the extra assistance you asked for.

In keeping with this revered instruction, I am sending the enclosed cheque
for 10,000 Lire, asking Your Excellency to be good enough to send to the
Secretariat of State, when convenient, an exact, even if brief, report on
how this money was used.

I am likewise happy to tell our Excellency that His Holiness has learned
with great pleasure about the energetic charitable activities you have
undertaken. He imparts his Apostolic Benediction to you, your entire
diocese and to all those whom you are assisting.

Yours very sincerely,
G.B.Montini (signed by hand)
[Montini was the assistant to the Secretary of State, Cardinal Maglione and
later became Pope Paul VI]

Comment: There is a possibility, but no certainty, that the reference in
the first letter to the “wishes of the donors” and the specific intention
of assisting the victims of persecution because of their race, which in
this context can only mean Jews, refers to the sum of money received as a
personal gift by the Pope in December 1939 from the United Jewish Appeal in
Chicago. This amounted to $125,000 and was sent as a gift in memory of
Pope Pius XI. It was duly and fulsomely acknowledged with thanks by the
Auxiliary Bishop of Chicago, Mgr Sheil. It is clear that the donors hoped
that the Vatican could use its influence through its local dioceses to
assist Jews in need, and also at the same time to arrange for entry visas
to Catholic countries in Latin America, so that these victims of
persecution could escape from Europe. A few days later, in January 1940,
the officials of the Secretariat of State suggested to Cardinal Maglione
that, in line with the donors’ wishes, these sums should be disbursed
without favour to both converted and non-converted Jews. Later in April,
it was reported that $50,000 had been retained in the United States for aid
there, while $30,000 had been assigned to the Raphael Society in Hamburg,
the main Catholic agency assisting emigrants to leave Germany. Some 20,000
Lire was sent to Cardinal Boetto in Genoa to help with emigration from that
port, while $10,000 was earmarked for the Archbishop of Utrecht for the
same purpose, and $3000 was to be sent to the Nuncio in Switzerland. The
balance could be used for immediate needs when requested. Mgr Montini
noted “The Holy Father has seen and approved this planned disposition.
(See Actes et document du Saint Siege relatifs a la seconde guerre
mondiale: Vol. 6: Le Saint Siege et les victimes de la guerre, Mars 1939 –
Decembre 1940, documents 125, 126 and 183.) Similarly, some months
later, when the Cardinal Archbishop of Vienna, Innitzer, sent an urgent
appeal to the Vatican on behalf of the persecuted Jews whose fate was
becoming more dangerous, and calling for the provision of entry visas to
Brazil, the Secretariat of State replied with a gift of $2000, while
describing the minimal results of its efforts to get Brazil to open its
doors to “non-aryans”. (See Cardinal Innitzer to Pope Pius XII, 4 Feb.
1941, and Cardinal Maglione to Innitzer, 6 Feb. 1941, Actes et documents du
Saint Siege pendant la seconde guerre mondiale, Vol.8, documents 14 and 15.)
Together with the newly discovered letters from the diocese of Campagna,
this correspondence shows clearly enough that the Vatican was prepared to
assist Jews persecuted for reasons of race, though the sums available to
help were small, and their requests for entry visas for these refugees were
almost all turned down or scornfully spurned. It is not clear whether
the amounts sent were spent to help internees in the area of Bishop
Palatucci’s diocese, or whether he was forwarding these contributions to
help his nephew in Fiume, near Trieste. However, these measures do
something to refute the accusations made by Susan Zucotti in her recent
book on the fate of the Jews in Italy, and the alleged indifference of the
Vatican to their plight

.3a) Daniel J.Goldhagen, A MORAL RECKONING: THE ROLE OF THE CATHOLIC CHURCH
IN THE HOLOCAUST AND ITS UNFULFILLED DUTY OF REPAIR
New York: Alfred A. Knopf 2002. 363 pp. $38.00 US. 

(This review appeared earlier in the American Jewish Congress Monthly,
November/December 2002)

Daniel Goldhagen opens with the statement that “Christianity is a religion
of love”, and then spends the next 360 pages proving just the opposite.
Principally, he insists, Christian mistreatment of the Jewish people has
destroyed any credible claim that Christians live up to the precepts of the
founder of their faith, the Jew Jesus. Instead, for centuries, the
Christian Church has displayed bigotry and intolerance towards Jews,
chiefly sponsored by its largest and longest established branch, the Roman
Catholic Church, and by each succeeding generation of leaders in the Papacy
along with its attendant bureaucracy in the Vatican. This tradition of
hatred, decimation and persecution culminated in the shocking atrocity of
the Holocaust. The deep complicity of this Church, the willing
participation of many Catholics, and the silence of the then Pope, all
point to the present need for a moral reckoning. This is what Goldhagen
seeks to deliver.

In his earlier work, published some years ago, Goldhagen demonstrated his
capacity for sweeping and provocative generalizations. On that occasion he
attempted to attribute the dynamism of the Nazi campaign against the Jews
to the incidence of “eliminationist antisemitism”among all Germans, who
differed only in degree in the virulence of their hatred of Jews. He now
claims that this assessment was purely descriptive, and that in this new
book he wants to turn to the issue of culpability.

Antisemitism led to the Holocaust. Antisemitism has been integral to the
Catholic Church. The connection has to be stressed, all the more since the
Catholic Church was established in all of the countries where the Holocaust
took place. In none of them did its leaders seek to mobilize effective
resistance to the Germans’ atrocities. Consequently, Goldhagen avers, the
Catholic Church must bear much blame. Its record cannot be excused as that
of a complicit bystander. Rather Catholicism was a deliberate and
long-standing instigator of Jew-hatred. Its culpability is therefore far
more extensive than has hitherto been admitted.

This sweeping contention is supported by no new research. Instead
Goldhagen makes use of highly selective quotations from other authors, most
of whom adopt the same pejorative viewpoints about the Catholic Church’s
record. Admittedly he attempts to cover his tracks in his Introduction. He
accepts the existence of Catholics who were not antisemites or whose
antisemitism was mild, and even some who saved Jews from death. But this
does not prevent him from subsequent wholesale condemnations of the Church,
of its doctrinal teachings, and of its leading personalities from
successive Popes downwards. His most venomous attacks, of course, are
made on the reigning Pope during the Holocaust, Pius XII, who is here
depicted as being all in favour of the Nazis’ eliminationist campaign. So
too the attitudes and policies of the Catholic leaders throughout Europe
are predictably excoriated. The German Catholic bishops protested against
the Nazis’ so-called “euthanasia” programme, but not against “the Final
Solution”. The President of Slovakia was a priest who handed over
thousands of Jews to the Germans. Most of them were promptly murdered. In
Croatia, the most fanatical antisemites were members of the Franciscan
order. And so on. Even when the Vatican intervened, this was due,
Goldhagen claims, more to the Church’s selfish political interest rather
than to compassion for the soon-to-be slaughtered Jews. In short he seeks
to prove that the Church’s widespread complicity in the mass murders of
Jews throughout Europe was due to its inherent and age-long antisemitism.
Goldhagen is not an historian, nor a sociologist, still less a theologian.
In fact he is a moralist. Having established his own idiosyncratic
standards of righteousness, he can easily enough criticize all those who do
not adhere to these archetypes. Moreover he assumes that such criteria
must be universally accepted. He shows little understanding of how
religious communities, like political organizations, develop so-called
“circles of obligation” primarily to their own members. Apathy,
disinterest, even intolerance characterize their attitudes towards
outsiders. The legacy of theological anti-Judaism amongst Catholics only
reinforced this stance. In Goldhagen’s view, the Church’s failure to stand
by the persecuted Jews was entirely a matter of moral will. Popes, bishops,
priests and laity could all have abandoned their antisemitic traditions,
and should have done so. They now stand condemned.

Paradoxically, however, Goldhagen has not entirely written off the
institution of the Catholic Church. At the end of the book, he changes his
tune to affirm that “the Catholic Church and its moral creed is, at its
core, good and admirable”. All it needs to do is to purify itself of its
antisemitic past, and to make suitable restitution to the Jewish people.
The last part of the book outlines some of the fanciful ways in which this
work of reparation could be undertaken.

It is difficult to see just for whom this work is intended. The small
handful of Catholic reformers pursuing their wishful thinking is clearly a
limited audience. More likely he seeks to appeal to the considerable
section of the Jewish community who are still searching for a single or
simplistic explanation of the disaster of the Holocaust, and are reluctant
to accept the ambiguities and complexities of the historical record.
Making a scapegoat of the Catholic Church was therefore welcome. But many
readers are likely to be sceptical of his final call for the Church to make
a full moral restitution. They may not share his optimism about such a
programme. But, Goldhagen argues, just as the Germans and their
governments since 1945 have purged themselves of their eliminationist
antisemitism by a deliberate mustering of the will, so the Catholic Church
could and should now follow suit.

This is indeed the moralist’s solution. But his suggestions for church
reform are too extraordinary to be adopted. And by denigrating the steps
already taken by the Vatican and other church bodies over the past thirty
years as too little and too late, he belittles the whole process of
Jewish-Christian reconciliation. Using the Holocaust as a moral cudgel to
beat Catholics over the head is hardly likely to bring about the goal
Goldhagen supposedly seeks. In fact, his extreme stance may possibly lead
to a revival of the antisemitism which he so rightly and energetically
deplores.
JSC

b) David Wood, Poet, Priest and Prophet – Bishop John V. Taylor, London:
Churches Together in Britain and Ireland, 2002, ISBN 0-85169-272-9, £ 14.95,
with a Foreword by Rowan Williams, Archbishop of Wales.

(This review appeared first in CONNECTIONS, a Review of the UK Churches’
Commission on Mission)

Among British Christians in the 20th century, John Vernon Taylor, who died
in January 2001, was undoubtedly one of the great saints and thinkers. For
me it was a high privilege to have had a fair amount to do with him,
professionally – and inevitably, through that, personally – over some 40
years, from an early reading of his 1957 Penguin Christianity and Politics
in Africa, through several inspiring encounters with him as Africa and then
General Secretary of the CMS, learning much from, and greatly enjoying his
successive books, as well as in significant episodes at major conferences of
the WCC, in welcoming him into an Honorary Fellowship at the Selly Oak
Colleges, and above all in Oxford these last 5 years, sharing as a neighbour
alike in the service to celebrate 60 years of married love with Peggy and,
too soon after, in the funeral service to which John in no little pain had
devoted his unique combination of inter-human sensitivity, God-directed
faith and winsome poetry – ‘every word’, said Peggy, ‘except those of the
preacher, written by John’.

This large, rich and reasonably priced study of John Taylor’s living,
believing, serving and exploring deserves many readers among those who have
known him, and still more among those who may have heard no more than a
phrase – ‘the go-between God’, most likely, or perhaps ‘enough is enough’ –
or of his inspiring leadership as Bishop of Winchester from 1974-85. It is
a generous treasure house. For me, above all for the poems, virtually none
of which I had come across before, not least the two – of some six or seven
he had been struggling to perfect in his last few days of earthly life –
first read aloud at his memorial service in Winchester Cathedral (p.182).
Hardly less for the amazingly profound feast of theological insight and
pilgrimage in which the Australian author passionately accompanies John
through the major stages and discoveries of his life.

The first chapter takes us immediately into the debate about the nature of
mission between such giants as Hendrik Kraemer, Max Warren, Lesslie Newbigin
and David Bosch, with the subsequently oft recurring struggle to find the
appropriate way for Christians to relate in friendship and respect with
people of other faith communities. So also the last, 40 page long chapter
is a sustained exploration into how John’s writings from his first book to
his last, including his three great ‘classics’ The Primal Vision – Christian
Presence amid African Religion (1963), The Go-Between God: The Holy Spirit
and the Christian Mission (1972), and The Christlike God (1992), all centre
on how the nature, purposes and characteristic behaviour of the
ever-mysterious God are factually, historically revealed and to be known and
followed in the person of Jesus of Nazareth, recognised as the Christ.
The chapters in between include other substantial theological explorations,
whether in the account of what Bonhoeffer’s writings meant to John in the
bleak months after his wholly unplanned and unwelcome return from Africa to
Britain in the mid-1950s (p.51ff.), his moving exposition of the shapes and
meanings of the Chapel of the Living Water in the new offices the CMS staff
moved into in 1966 (p.98ff.), or the theme of humble and serving presence as
the key, characteristic mark of true Christlike mission (p.127f., 212f.).

As an ‘intellectual biography’, a term Wood more or less borrows from
Kenneth Cragg (see p.12ff.), in which the author himself is exploring no
less excitedly and devotedly than his teacher, the book includes sensitive
accounts of the disappointments and difficulties involved in the return from
Africa, as of several unusual features of John’s way of being a diocesan
bishop, some of them rather less than ‘successful’ (p.151ff.) and of his
long, deeply rewarding relationship with Max Warren, his mentor from
Cambridge student days onward and predecessor as CMS General Secretary.
At the same time I cannot but remark on several important – and at least to
me dismaying – gaps in the record. One is that of some of the exact dates:
neither that of the beginning of his time at Mukono, Uganda (while the
Second World War was still raging), nor that of his sad departure from there
is chronicled; a small gap perhaps yet which adds an unnecessary impression
of vagueness quite unlike John or Peggy ! More acute is that of any account
of his later work in and for Africa; we learn not a little of the theology
set out in The Primal Vision, but no more than a brief factual mention of
the months spent in research for his two big books: The Growth of the Church
in Buganda (1958) and Christians of the Copperbelt (1961). Still more
worrying is the absence of African names: neither the Index, nor the
Bibliography, nor the long list of people whose help is acknowledged by the
author include names of African Christians and writers who John must have
known and appreciated – not even that of John Mbiti. I suspect that in the
long run this book will be known as the ‘white, Anglo-Saxon’ view of John
Taylor !

Again, as one who knew something, if by no means all, of his profoundly
important contributions over many years to the life and work of the World
Council of Churches, it is surprising, to put it mildly, that none of these
are carefully described. A few lines on p.69/70, seriously inaccurate as
well as wholly inadequate, mention the project ‘World Studies of Churches in
Mission’ to which John contributed enormously, alike at its outset in 1954
by writing a long and impressive memo outlining what was to become a major,
innovative and still echoing set of studies, and at its ‘completion’ as a
member of the 5-person team struggling in 1968/9 towards their revolutionary
conclusions that have been far too widely ignored. These centre on what God
can have meant by the virtually ungraspable diversity of the ‘results’ of
mission in the 15 different situations studied, in which John’s by then
strong faith in the never-fully-graspable purposes of the God who is known
in Jesus is all too recognisable in the team’s intriguing report Can
Churches Be Compared ? His vital, reconciling role at the WCC’s tumultuous
Uppsala Assembly of 1968 is briefly summarised from John’s own published
account (p.108), yet without adequate attention to the virulence of the
disagreements in the background, let alone to the subsequent history of
those disputes, while his magisterial, thoroughly down to earth and
profoundly challenging paper to the Melbourne World Mission Conference of
1980 on the relation of Church to Kingdom in God’s purposes is no more than
a line in the list of his writings (pp.254-6).

So while I look forward to a later volume that can bring out these other
dimensions of the life and witness of a significant twentieth century
church leader, there is plenty for us all to be learning from this one.
Martin Conway, Oxford

4) Articles a) ed B.Kosmala, and C Schoppmann, Uberleben im Untergrund.
(Solidarität und Hilfe für Juden während der NS-Zeit, Bd 5) Berlin:
Metropol Verlag 2002.
Two articles in this collection of essays describing how some Jews were
able to survive in hiding during the period 1941-1945 will be of interest
to our readers.

Ursula Büttner, who teaches history at Hamburg University contributes a
chapter on “Die andere Christen”, which pays tribute to those Christians,
both Catholic and Protestant, as well as some from the smaller sects, who
risked their own lives to give shelter and protection to Jews in need.
Angela Borgstedt, of the University of Karlsruhe, describes the rescue
efforts in south-west Germany, as organized by a valiant group of pastors
in the Confessing Church, and by Gertrud Luckner from her base in Freiburg
until her arrest in March 1943.

b) Peter Gemeinhardt, Krisis der Gechichte – Krisis der
Kirchengeschichtschreibung. Kirchengeschichte nach dem ersten Weltkrieg auf
der Suche nach ihrem Grund und Gegenstand in Zeitschrift für
Kirchengeschichte, Vol 113, no. 2, 2002, 210-236.

A very useful description of the various kinds of church history being
written in the aftermath of the defeat of 1918. Gemeinhardt concentrates on
three major church historians: the traditionalists, such as Harnack; the
theologians, such as Karl Barth; and the nationalists, such as Karl Holl,
the leader of the Luther renaissance. This analysis of the strengths and
weaknesses of each approach shows that the divisions within the ranks of
the scholarly community reflected the dissonance in the wider community,
and the impact of the war on the credibility of the whole profession.
c) Kevin Spicer, Fr A.Heuberger: Misshapen agent of God in the Third Reich,
New England Journal of History, Vol. 59, no.1, Fall 2002. This article
examines the career of a pro-Nazi Catholic priest, one of about 150 in all,
and analyses his motives. In most of these cases a desire to enhance their
self-importance, and quarrels with their ecclesiastical superiors led to
their pronounced political views. But they gained little support from the
Nazi Party authorities, and were sidelined by their own bishops. After
the war they were often able to have their past extremism overlooked.

4) Book notes:

A revised and expanded second edition of the Dictionary of the Ecumenical
Movement has recently been published by the World Council of Churches
Publications, Geneva. This is an essential reference work for all
interested in the growth and development of the ecumenical movement during
the last century.

At the moment this is only available in English, but other language
editions are in process.

With very best wishes,
John Conway
Jconway@interchange.ubc.ca

Dear Friends,
May I remind you once again that any reply you send to the address:
kirzeit-l@interchange.ubc.ca will go out to all 370 members around the
world. This should therefore be used only for notifications of general
interest to all the members. If you wish to get in touch with me directly,
then please use my own address = jconway@interchange.ubc.ca
This will then prevent “spam” from cluttering up other members’ mailboxes.
My apologies to those of you who received unwanted or unintended mail.
Of course, I should add that I am very glad to hear from any of you with
your comments on the contents of these Newsletters.
Contents:

1) Archbishop Williams’ Dimbleby Lecture
2) Conference Report: Lessons and Legacies, Minneapolis
3) Book reviews:

a) Griech-Polelle, Bishop von Galen
b) Voigt, Villa Emma

4) Articles
5) Short Notices
1) In December, the new Archbishop of Canterbury, Rowan Williams, delivered
a most stimulating public lecture on the present situation of the relations
between the individual and the state in western democracies, which raised
important moral issues. It deserves to be read as a significant
contribution from the side of a leading churchman. For the full text see:
http://www.anglicancommunion.org/acns/articles/32/25/acns3236.html

2) From November 1-4, 2002, the Lessons and Legacies conference on the
Holocaust met at the University of Minnesota in Minneapolis. This was the
seventh Lessons and Legacies conference, and like the first six, it
featured a program packed with scholars from the United States, Canada,
Europe, and Israel. The roundtables, panels, and workshops were roughly
organized around a broad theme, “The Holocaust in International
Perspective.” In keeping with that focus, one of the three plenary speakers
and an entire panel were devoted to the role of the churches in the Holocaust.

According to the program, Michael Marrus of the University of Toronto was
scheduled to speak on “Looking for a New Approach: The Vatican as Neutral.”
Instead, Professor Marrus decided to respond to Daniel Goldhagen’s new
book, _A Moral Reckoning: The Role of the Catholic Church in the Holocaust
and Its Unfulfilled Duty of Repair_. With characteristic wit and
thoroughness, Marrus proceeded to take apart Goldhagen’s work, which he
described as simplistic, misinformed, and detrimental to the cause of
understanding the complex past (and present) of the Vatican. It was a
compelling and spirited presentation, which led at least one person at my
table to remark that Professor Marrus must be a deeply committed Catholic
to feel so strongly about Pius XII. Michael would probably be surprised at
that observation, but it is a useful reminder of the (often misleading)
assumptions people tend to make about scholars of religion. Although almost
everyone in the room seemed to share Marrus’s critical view of Goldhagen,
some of those present were disturbed at the sharp tone of the speech.

Another large crowd–perhaps 200 people–gathered the next day for a panel
titled “Current Discussions on the Role of the Christian Churches in the
Holocaust.” Michael Marrus chaired the session, and Suzanne Brown-Fleming
from the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum; Bob Ericksen of Pacific Lutheran
University; and Michael Phayer from Marquette University presented papers.
Each of the three speakers seemed to understand their charge somewhat
differently, which made for an unusual but also very interesting session.
Brown-Fleming spoke on recent scholarship on the Catholic Church and the
Holocaust. Her thorough and well organized historiographical presentation
showed how much exciting work has been done in the field. At the same time,
it seemed from her talk that somehow the cumulative effect of all the
research tends to make things look worse and worse for the Vatican. Suzanne
ended with some insights from her own project on Bishop Aloisius Muench
that led her to the simple yet powerful conclusion that the Catholic church
during the Holocaust was an institution “more human than divine.”

Bob Ericksen followed with a very different presentation. Rather than an
historiographical survey of scholarship on the Protestant Churches,
Ericksen gave a personal account of what he sees as some persistent
theological and moral problems in the field. He based his reflections on a
recent conference he hosted at Pacific Lutheran on “Christian Teachings
About Jews in the Shadow of the Holocaust.” (John Conway reported on that
event in this newsletter). Observations at that meeting, Bob told us,
reminded him of how far we still had to go toward a historical scholarship
that promotes Christian-Jewish understanding rather than asserting
Christian triumphalism/supercessionism or perpetuating old antisemitic
stereotypes. Ericksen gave a number of examples to illustrate his points:
for example, he described the situation of one scholar, whose decision to
research Christian antisemitism met with a punitive response from
superiors. He also offered some grounds for optimism, however, not the
least important of which (in the opinion of this reporter) is his own
level-headed contribution to the field.

Michael Phayer chose to use his time to present some of his recent research
on Vatican finances. Less intensely personal than either of the two
presentations that preceded him, Phayer’s richly empirical paper offered a
hint of where he is going with his next book. The charge of
oversimplification that Marrus leveled against Goldhagen certainly does not
apply to Phayer, whose material was as complicated as one might expect
Vatican finances in the 1930s and ’40s to have been. In this case too,
however, it seems clear that more information–and more complexity–are
likely to reveal additional problematic aspects of the Vatican’s past.
Doris Bergen, Notre Dame

3)Book reviews:
a) Beth A. Griech-Polelle, Bishop von Galen: German Catholicism and
National Socialism. (New Haven: Yale University Press. 2002. Pp. 259.
$35.00)

Bishop of Münster from October 1933 until his death in March 1946, five
weeks after receiving a cardinal’s hat from Pope Pius XII, von Galen is
described in the Lexikon für Theologie und Kirche thus: “A conservative
Catholic, von Galen initially regarded the Nazi regime as acceptable at
the start of his episcopate. Very soon, however, he became an open
opponent of its totalitarianism and violations of justice. Called ‘Lion
of Münster’ for his three dramatic sermons against the suppression of
religious houses and the dispersal of their inhabitants, and the killing
of the mentally ill, preached in 1941 at the height of Hitler’s military
victories, von Galen defended the German people after the war against
the charge of collective guilt.”

Beth A.Griech-Polelle believes that this assessment overstates her
subject’s achievement. “I do not dispute”, she writes, “that von Galen
was a symbol of what was possible in the way of resistance under the
Third Reich.” She charges, however, that von Galen protested only when
church interests were at stake; that he never encouraged others to
resist the regime, let alone to mount a revolution (a charge repeated
six times over); and that he did nothing to help Jews.

Many of the primary sources for Galen’s career were lost in wartime
bombing. The secondary literature is in German. Griech-Polelle
deserves credit for having read this material, for archival research in
Germany, and for having written the first scholarly study of von Galen
in English. Unfortunately her understanding of the evidence is faulty;
and her interpretation of it demonstrably false at crucial points.
She appears to lack an insider’s familiarity with things Catholic. How
else to explain the book’s title: “Bishop” rather than “Cardinal”?
(She mistakenly awards this title to the papal Nuncio in Berlin, Cesare
Orsenigo, a bent reed from whom Pius XII withheld the customary red
hat.) She mistranslates Paul’s words on the church as the body of
Christ (1 Cor. 12:26) in order to criticize a sermon von Galen preached
on this text in 1938. The public reception of von Galen in Münster’s
Cathedral Square on March 16, 1946, following his return from Rome, was
not “his last Mass.” It was not a Mass at all, simply his last public
appearance. And it is untrue that Galen’s “canonization process was
officially closed in 1987.” The process of beatification (the
necessary prelude to canonization) is ongoing.

The charge that von Galen protested only to defend church institutions
cannot withstand close inspection. His protest against the killing of
the mentally ill had nothing to do with church interests. Moreover, it
directly contradicts the author’s charge that “von Galen lost sight of
the larger, more humane questions involved in the brutality of the Nazi
regime.” His protest against the suppression of religious houses, the
subject of the first two of von Galen’s three sermons in the summer of
1941, was concerned not with buildings but with people. What moved von
Galen, a deeply emotional man who is reported to have wept as he uttered
these denunciations, was the sudden expulsion from their homes of people
he revered for their decades of selfless service: nuns, religious
priests and brothers – especially Jesuits, “my teachers [in Innsbruck],
tutors and friends, [to whom] I remain bound in love and gratitude until
my last breath.”

That von Galen encouraged passive but not active resistance, let alone
insurrection, is manifest. He expressed this forcefully in the
rhetorically brilliant metaphor which runs like a golden thread through
the second of his three sermons. “We are the anvil, not the hammer!
… The object which is forged on the anvil receives its shape not alone
from the hammer but also from the anvil. … Become hard! Remain firm!
If it is sufficiently tough and firm and hard, the anvil usually lasts
longer than the hammer.”

Only a person utterly unfamiliar with life under a totalitarian regime
which rules by ruthless terror, and unable to imagine such conditions,
could criticize a leader for failing to encourage open rebellion in such
circumstances. In Nazi Germany active resistance, however modest, meant
immediate arrest, usually death. The Catholic Church honors martyrdom.
It does not encourage it.

A newly published book by Sebastian Haffner, a young anti-Nazi jurist
who emigrated to England for political reasons in 1938, shows vividly
how limited were the possibilities for resistance to Hitler as early as
1933. Published in English in 2002 under the title Resisting Hitler,
the book was written in 1939 and discovered only after Haffner’s death
in 1999. Anyone unconvinced of the effectiveness of Nazi terror by
Haffner’s testimony should read that of an actual martyr to Hitler:
Count Helmut von Moltke, hanged in Berlin in January 1945 for organizing
the “Kreisau Circle” which discussed building a better Germany after
Hitler’s defeat. In a wartime letter to a friend in England von Moltke
described the virtual impossibility of resistance in wartime Germany:
inability to communicate by telephone, post, or messenger; the danger of
speaking openly even to trusted friends (who might be arrested and
tortured); the exhaustion of people whose energies were fully occupied
with the ordinary tasks of day-to-day survival; nineteen guillotines
executing an estimated fifty people daily, the relatives cowed into
silence for fear of suffering the same fate. (Cf. Beate Ruhm von Oppen
[ed.], Letters to Freya 1939- 1945 [New York, Knopf: 1990], pp.
281-290.)

It is tempting to think that if the German bishops had acted together
things would have been different. Griech-Polelle cites a comment to
this effect by Konrad Adenauer in 1946. “I believe that if all the
bishops had together made public statements from the pulpits on a
particular day, they could have prevented a great deal.” From March
1933, however, Adenauer refused all contact with opponents of the
regime. His biographer writes: “Adenauer respected the courage of those
who opposed the Nazis, but not their prudence. His ice-cold realism was
confirmed by the history of the opposition from 1938 to 1944.”
(Hans-Peter Schwarz, Adenauer. Der Aufstieg: 1876-1952 [Stuttgart:
Deutsche Verlags-Anstalt, 1986] p. 408.) If the bishops could not count
on a staunch anti-Nazi Catholic like Adenauer, where was their support
to come from?

Like Pius XII, von Galen confronted the agonizing dilemma of knowing
that the price of any protest he might launch would be paid by others.
The Nazis preferred to go after the “little people,” rather than their
leaders. “The fact that he was never interrogated or arrested … after
delivering the sermons,” Griech-Polelle writes, “suggests that [von
Galen] could have risked more.” That is hindsight. Contemporaries
testified that von Galen expected arrest: he mentioned the possibility
in his first sermon. He also reckoned with the possibility of
martyrdom. Griech-Polelle herself reports that people were executed for
the mere crime of distributing copies of von Galen’s sermons. How many
more might have died had he “risked more”?

The book’s treatment of Vatican policy is seriously deficient.
Griech-Polelle garbles the chronology of the 1933 Concordat negotiations
and errs in saying that the treaty made Rome “the first legal partner to
Hitler’s regime.” That honor belongs to the Soviet Union, which
concluded a trade agreement with Hitler two months before the Concordat.
The claim that Pius XI’s 1937 encyclical Mit brennender Sorge, in the
drafting of which von Galen had a hand, “contained no outright
condemnation of anti-Semitism” is seriously misleading. It contained an
outspoken condemnation of Nazi racial doctrines; and no one was in any
doubt about their target – least of all the Nazis, who unleashed a
furious persecution of those who had printed and distributed the
document. Almost half the copies were circulated in the diocese of
Münster, a fact which is hard to explain if its bishop was indifferent
to the persecution of Jews. Griech-Polelle herself concedes that von
Galen “protested the racism of the Nazis” as early as January 1934.
It is of course true that none of the German bishops mounted the
defense of Jews which we today, with knowledge of the Holocaust, would
wish. Von Galen, with his episcopal cousin von Preysing in Berlin,
tried to move the bishops to say more, but without success. For the
Nazis, on the other hand, whose propaganda constantly portrayed the
bishops, as well as Pacelli in Rome, as traitorous and shameless
supporters of the “international Jewish conspiracy,” the bishops said
far too much.

If von Galen “refused [in 1942] to believe the unconfirmed reports of
mass murder,” he was in good company. Even after the deportation from
Holland of over 15,000 Jews, the Jewish Council in Amsterdam refused to
believe eye-witness accounts of mass murder by people who had been in
Auschwitz, and dismissed BBC reports of such killings as “anti-German
propaganda.” (Cf. Louis de Jong, “Die Niederlande und Auschwitz”, in:
Vierteljahreshefte f. Zeitgeschichte 17/1 [Jan. 1969] 1-16.)

The book’s treatment of Pius XII is especially faulty. Griech-Polelle
accepts uncritically the black legend of the Pope’s “silence” in the
face of the Holocaust. She gives a totally false account of a papal
letter to Bishop von Preysing of Berlin on September 30, 1941.
Griech-Polelle translates the Pope’s words as follows: “We emphasize
that, because the Church in Germany is dependent upon your public
behavior … in public declarations you are duty bound to exercise
restraint.” She continues: “He continued his admonishment by claiming
that although bishops such as von Galen who championed the things of God
and the Holy Church would always have his support, he nevertheless
‘require[d] you and your colleagues not to protest.'” The Pope said
nothing of the kind.

The letter said that von Galen’s recently delivered three sermons had
given the Pope “more consolation and satisfaction than we have felt for
a long time.” Such forceful protests by the bishops in Germany were
especially important, the Pope wrote, “since the very difficult and
often conflicted general political situation requires the head of the
whole Church [i.e. the Pope, not the German bishops!] to exercise
reserve in his public statements.” (Cf. Burkhart Schneider [ed.], Die
Briefe Pius XII. an die deutschen Bischöfe 1939-1944 [Mainz:
Matthias-Grünewald, 1966] 155; emphasis supplied.)
Far from requiring the German bishops “not to protest”, as
Griech-Polelle claims, Pius XII explained in a letter to von Preysing of
April 30, 1943, that he must leave it to bishops with knowledge of the
local situation to decide whether protests would do more harm than good.
(Cf. Schneider, op. cit.. 240.) Griech- Polelle’s suggestion that von
Galen’s red hat may have been given him in part for “adopting the pope’s
priorities and curbing his own behavior after the 1941 denunciations” is
totally without foundation. The honor, unprecedented in Münster as in
Berlin (whose bishop received the hat in the same consistory with von
Galen) was Pius XII’s accolade for two bishops whom he deeply admired
for their courage in speaking the truth to tyrannical power in Germany’s
darkest hour.

Coming less than a year after the war’s conclusion, the creation of
three German cardinals in February 1946 was also the Pope’s reminder to
the world of “another Germany” which, despite the crimes committed in
her name by criminals who had declared war on their country’s historic
Christian values, still deserved an honorable place in the company of
nations. Both Pius XII and von Galen rejected the notion of collective
guilt. In Catholic teaching guilt is always personal. It was this
truth which inspired the Second Vatican Council to declare that “neither
all Jews indiscriminately at that time [of Jesus’ death], nor Jews
today, can be charged with the crimes committed during [Christ’s]
passion.” (Nostrae aetate 4.)

One is reluctant to criticize so severely the work of a young scholar
just embarked on her career. To have one’s first book published by a
prestigious university press is no small achievement. Would the same
publisher, or any other major house, have accepted her manuscript had it
been favorable to von Galen? One may be permitted a doubt.
Like the Pope who gave him his red hat, von Galen was a man of his
times, limited in a hundred ways by his upbringing and experience of
life in a world already in its death throes when Hitler became Germany’s
Chancellor on January 30, 1933. An aristocrat imbued with the
traditions of nineteenth-century nationalism, von Galen shared the
widespread horror of German conservatives at the political disorder and
social licentiousness of the Weimar republic. Like most of his fellow
bishops, von Galen found it difficult to believe (as von Preysing told
friends after Hitler’s seizure of power in 1933) that their country was
“in the hands of criminals and fools.” (Cited from Walter Adolph,
Kardinal Preysing und zwei Diktaturen [Berlin: Morus-Verlag, 1971] p.
16.) Even when the evidence for von Preysing’s words could no longer
be denied, von Galen still tried to show that he was a patriotic
German. Griech-Polelle herself gives many examples. As late as March
31, 1945, when American troops entered Münster, von Galen could still
speak of “this day of shame, when the enemy enters our city.”

The remarkable thing is not that von Galen’s resistance was “selective”
(as Griech-Polelle says), but that a man who continued as bishop to
mourn the disappearance of the patriarchal and authoritarian world of
his youth could mount the resistance that he did. The spectacle of von
Galen’s towering six foot seven inch figure thundering from the pulpit
on July 13, 1941, “Wir fordern Gerechtigkeit (We demand justice)” –
knowing that he could be carried off that same night to a concentration
camp and death – will always command respect.

Perhaps the best judgment on von Galen may be the one said to have been
pronounced on Pius XII by his longtime German secretary, Fr. Robert
Leiber SJ: “Grande si, santo no.”
John Jay Hughes. St. Louis
b) Klaus Voigt, Villa Emma. Jüdische Kinder aud der Flucht 1940-1945
(Solidarität und Hilfe für Juden während der NS-Zeit, Bd 6)
Berlin; Metropol Verlag 2002. 384 pp

This is a chapter of Holocaust history with a happy ending. Klaus Voigt’s
account of how some eighty Jewish teenagers escaped the Nazis’ clutches
while fleeing across half-a-dozen countries is not only a first-rate piece
of research. It isalso gripping. Will they manage to elude capture?
How will they all succeed in crossing the border, wading through the river
in the middle of the night? Will they be able to find shelter, or will
they be sent back into the Nazis’ arms? How will they be treated by the
local inhabitants?

Voigt describes the war-time fortunes of this group of Zionist youth
from Germany and Austria, first recruited in 1939 to be part of a youth
“aliyah’. They reached Zagreb by the end of 1940, but were denied entry
certificates to Palestine by the British Mandate, and were caught in
Yugoslavia by the German invasion. They first took refugee in a remote
hunting lodge in western Slovenia which fortunately was in the Italian zone
of military occupation. From there they were brought by Italian Jewish aid
groups to a dilapidated mansion on the outskirts of a small town near
Modena in the Po valley.

This was the Villa Emma, which forms the centre piece of Voigt’s
story, largely because of a splendidly preserved cache of documents held by
the Jewish community in Modena. He sticks closely to his sources, amplified
by survivors’ testimonies, and produces a vivid picture of these refugees’
situation. For sixteen months the young people lived as best they could
in war-time circumstances, all the while being trained as potential members
of a Zionist ‘kibbuz’, learning Iwrith and Italian, as well as their future
trades as farmers or carpenters. The Italian authorities treated them
favourably.

All this changed on September 7th 1943, when Italy changed sides.
The leader of the group, a young Croatian Zionist, instantly recognized the
danger. If the Germans took over, the children’s fate might well be
deportation and death. In this emergency he turned to the local priest and
asked for sanctuary in the town’s Seminary. It was readily granted. Within
minutes, the Villa Emma was emptied. The priests hid the boys in the high
school dormitory, whose pupils were fortunately still on holiday. The nuns
took care of most of the girls. And thirty other local families –
presumably all Catholics – were willing to take in the rest of these Jewish
children, not knowing what the consequences might be. The Germans indeed
arrived, but were preoccupied in hunting down partisans or escaped
prisoners-of-war, not kids, even Jewish ones.

This gave time for preparations to smuggle the whole group across the
frontier to Switzerland near Lugano. By the end of October 1943, they had
all, except one boy left behind in hospital, gained refuge in Switzerland,
and eighteen months later reached Haifa on board a Spanish freighter. But
they all fondly remembered the Villa Emma outside Nonantola and the
assistance so generously extended to them as a gesture of Christian
friendship by the priests, nuns and parishioners of this memorable small town.
The book’s story and its message clearly deserves to be made into a film
along the lines of Pierre Sauvage’s notable account of a similar rescue
effort at Le Chambon in southern France. Highly recommended to all who
read German.

4)Articles:

Stewart Stehlin, New York University, has recently contributed “Päpstliche
Diplomatie im Zweiten Weltkrieg: Pius XII, Deutschland und die Juden” in
Eichstätter Universitätsreden, Bd 109. This is a German text of a lecture
on the same theme which he delivered to the Pontifical University of the
Angelicum in Rome. In this paper, Stehlin defends Pius XII from some of
his detractors by concentrating on the political factors which affected the
options available to the Vatican at such a perilous time. At the same time
he warns his readers not to indulge in the dangerous practice of looking at
historical events through the wrong end of the telescope, or of making
anachronistic ethical judgments.

Patrick Porter, Oxford, has published an article on “The Sacred Service:
Australian Military Chaplains and the Great War” in War and Society, Vol.
20, no. 2, October 2002.

Shannon Ty Bontrager contributed “The Imagined Crusade: The Church of
England and the Mythology of Nationalism and Christianity during the Great
War” in Church History, Vol 71, no 4 (December 2002), p774 ff. This
traces the Church’s various attempts during the period 1910-20 to reverse
the trend towards de-Christianization (or secularization), and the
pejorative impact of the Great War on such endeavours. Since Bontrager is
a graduate student at Georgia State University, this is a most encouraging
beginning.

Xenia Dennen, The dissident movement and Soviet Christians in “Humanitas.
The Journal of the George Bell Institute” (Queen’s College, Birmingham,
UK), Vol 4 no 1, 7-58. This full report on the relationship between the
political dissidents of the former Soviet Union and their Christian
sympathizers makes clear that both groups were linked by a fundamental
opposition to Marxist dictatorship, and instead wanted to preserve man’s
dignity and freedom of spirit at all costs. This extensive and
well-researched article gives a comprehensive picture of the underground
movement which gave impetus to the churches to adopt a more critical stance
towards the Soviet government.

Donald Dietrich (Boston College) contributes an extensive review article to
the latest issue of Holocaust and Genocide Studies, Vol 16, no.3, Winter
2002 with the title “Antisemitism and the institutional Catholic Church”.
This assesses four of the recent works on the Catholic Church’s role in the
Holocaust, by Carroll, Phayer, Zucotti and Kertzer, all of them with highly
critical views which Dietrich would seem to share. We may certainly agree
with his conclusion that “Catholics and all Christians must rethink the
roles their faith communities played in the process that led to Auschwitz.
Both institutions and individuals can funnel evil into the world . . . The
logic of institutional preservation can hinder moral reasoning and
decision-making”. At the same time he could have pointed out that all
these authors’ wishful thinking about the past and their desire for future
reform of the church have clearly biased their views.

Peter Kent (University of New Brunswick) similarly gives a percipient
review to two of the same books, by Phayer and Zucotti, in International
History Review, Vol. XXIV, no. 3, September 2002. He rightly praises their
assiduous researches, but is also critical of Phayer’s counter-factual
lapses into speculation, and Zucotti’s readiness to indulge in polemical
denunciation, which serve to limit the impact of their findings.
Rainer Hering in Zeitschrift des Vereins für Hamburgische Geschichte, Bd
85, 1999, has written a hard-hitting article on the career of a highly
zealous pro-Nazi pastor in Hamburg, Johannes Vorrath. He points out how
reluctant the post-1945 church leaders in Hamburg were to face up to the
political extremism of some of their clergy and laity. It is time now, he
suggests, that such examples of silence and amnesia are no longer allowed
to damage the credibility of the church. Only an honest facing up to the
past will suffice.

5) Short notices:

For future review: a) Horst Dähn/Joachim Heise ed., Staat und Kirchen in
der DDR. Zum Stand der zeithistorischen und sozialwissenschaftlichen
Forschung.

Frankfurt/Berne/Vienna 2003. This collection of essays provides an
up-to-date summary of the current state of debate about this controversial
topic.

b) ed. Diane Kirby, Religion and the Cold War. Basingstoke:
Palgrave-Macmillan 2003 A collection of essays mainly by British
scholars, this work explores the immediate post-1945 scene.

Please note that the next i.e. March issue will come to you a few days
late, due to my absence at a conference in Germany.

My best wishes to you all.
John S.Conway
Jconway@interchange.ubc.ca

Dear Friends,

My warmest greetings for the New Year.

Contents:

1) AHA Conference, Chicago, January 2 – 5, 2003
2) Work in progress – Mark Ruff
3) Book reviews:

a) McNally, The Lord’s Distant Vineyard
b) Moltmann-Wendel, Autobiography

4) Journal Articles
5) Archives

List of books reviewed in 2002.

1) The following sessions of interest to our list members are being given
at the AHA conference:

Friday Jan. 3rd: 9.30: Catholics confronting totalitarianism, Jacques
Kornberg (Toronto), Eric Jarvis (King’s College, U. West.Ont)
Saturday Jan. 4th.9.30: Catholics and Secularization in Mexico and
Germany, T. Hartch, (Teikyo Post U.), Mark Ruff, (Concordia U., Portland)
Saturday Jan.4th 9.30: American Protestant Missionaries in Japan 1868-1934
Saturday Jan 4th 2.30: Russian Orthodoxy at Home and Abroad in the Soviet
Period
Sunday Jan 5th 11.00: Changing Missionary attitudes 1827-1964, Clifford
Putney (Bentley College)

2) Work in progress – Mark Ruff

Challenging Catholicism: the impact of German critics since 1945.
From 1945 to the present, the Roman Catholic church has been the subject of
vigorous public debates both in Germany and abroad. In particular, many
scholars, public intellectuals, playwrights, and even many loyal Catholics
have raised questions about the relationship between the church and the
National Socialist regime: did the church facilitate Hitler’s rise to power
and consolidation of power and was it complicit in the Nazi genocide
against the Jews? This project is an attempt to historicize these debates –
to put them into their historical context and perspective and to show how
they reflected larger changes in thought, culture and society.

These debates emerged for a brief time directly after the Second World
War, fell into silence for a period of approximately ten years, and then
reemerged in the late 1950s and early 1960s. This decade saw the
publication of works which attacked the role of Pius XII, examined the
decision to sign the 1933 Concordat, which defined the role and function of
the church in the National Socialist era, and above all criticized the
Church’s alleged failure to prevent the Nazi Holocaust. In 1963, for
instance, the playwright Rolf Hochhuth presented in Berlin a work for the
stage entitled, Der Stellvertreter (The Deputy), which centered around the
role of Pius XII. Even after the Second Vatican Council formally renounced
the traditional position of the church which attacked the Jews as the
killers of Christ, the attacks on the church continued.

One of the leading critics of the church was (and remains) Der Spiegel, a
leading German newsmagazine edited by Rudolf Augstein, which has printed
article after article denouncing the church for its failures during the
Third Reich (and also attacks the current positions of the church on a
regular basis.) More recently, many scholars, churchmen and intellectuals
in Germany have responded to John Cornwall’s book, Hitler’s Pope, and to
Daniel Jonah Goldhagen’s new work, which have added fuel to these already
vigorous fires.

In all of these debates, representatives and partisans of the church, not
surprisingly, defended, or attempted to defend the institution against the
onslaught of criticism. In the wake of the debates surrounding the
Concordat, the archdiocese of Cologne founded and funded a historical
institute, the Kommission für Zeitgeschichte, which was given the charge of
collecting, printing and interpreting collections of documents and
materials pertaining to the role of the church under National Socialism.
Those associated with this institute -historians such as Konrad Repgen (the
one, paradoxically, who first brought to light accounts of the Concordat),
Rudolf Morsey, Ludwig Esch, Heinz Hürten, Ulrich von Hehl -have written
dozens of books which attempt to paint the history of the church in a
manner different from that of their critics.

In light of these debates, I take up certain basic issues. Firstly, what
were the motives of the church’s critics? Why did they spend considerable
energy in attacking the church? What did they hope to achieve through
their attacks? Why did many critics (such as Augstein from Der Spiegel)
direct their fire disproportionately at the Catholic church, instead of at
the Protestant church, which was far more complicit in National Socialism
in Germany? Why did they attack the bystanders instead of the perpetrators?
Secondly, why did the church expend such considerable effort in the
defense of the church? Did its response take the forms of apologies or
genuine confessions of guilt? Why did church leaders not simply put
together an unambiguous statement of guilt, or even a limited statement in
the vein of the Stuttgart confession of guilt made by the Protestant church?
I would like to propose a number of hypotheses, which may or may not hold
up under further scrutiny.

1. The debates surrounding the church coincided with and indeed were a part
of a larger reexamination of the German past, with the process of
Vergangenheitsbewältigung. It was only natural, then, that the church would
be held up to scrutiny at the same time that other German institutions came
under fire. Some of the events which triggered the larger reexamination of
the past, such as the Eichmann trial in Jerusalem in 1961, would
inadvertently trigger attacks on the church, especially when Eichmann’ s
chief prosecutor suggested that the church knew of the Nazi genocide.

2. It is an irony that these debates broke out at precisely the point when
the church was itself opening itself up through aggiornamento – letting in
fresh air into a dusty edifice. But one can argue that the climate of
Vatican II certainly made these debates more possible, especially after the
death of Pius XII in the late 1950s and the ascent of John XXIII to the
papacy. John XXIII and other church leaders encouraged people to raise
questions, to question church orthodoxies – and it was only natural, then,
that many Catholics would raise the specter of the National Socialist past.
For conservative Catholics, such dialogue was equivalent to letting the
genie out the bottle.

3. It is important to remember that coming to terms with such traumatic
events requires time for processing – and a certain historical distance.
Would it have even been possible for church leaders in 1945 and 1946 – or
for German society at this time – to hold the mirror up to itself and
engage in painful soul searching – and not tear apart society even more in
the process and deepen the wounds? In the climate of the emerging Cold War,
the moral reconstruction of Germany had to be put on the back burner, at
the expense of justice. It entailed myth-making, the creation of fictions
in order to preserve social harmony, or not destroy it further. Often
times, this process of coming to terms with the past can take place only
when a new, younger generation steps to the plate. This generational
dynamic lends to the examination of the past not necessarily a greater
impartiality but, certainly, a greater distance. The debates in the 1960s
were conducted by a younger generation that was rising to challenge the
silence of their elders. As such, this process was part of the generational
conflict that characterized the 1960s.

4. While some of the accusers of the church were motivated by a genuine
moral outrage, in many cases, the motives went well beyond this. For some
Roman Catholic critics of the church, the attacks were an attempt to bring
about church reform – to realize the unfulfilled promise of Vatican II, to
bring about a democratization of the church, and to campaign against the
beatification of Pius XII. Their object was to show that the top
leadership of the church had effectively squelched any attempts to oppose
the Nazi Holocaust, had urged silence upon its members, and had signed
concordats with the enemy. If these allegations could be proved, they
would minimize the moral authority of the hierarchy and lead effectively
to a call for a democratization of the church as a whole.

5. For others, the attacks on the church were an attack on the entire
restructuring of the West German political culture and political structures
since 1945. From 1949 until the mid 1960s, German politics was governed by
representatives of the CSU (Christian Social Union) and the
interconfessional CDU (Christian Democractic Union). Although clerics did
not have the same power in the party that they had in the BVP (Bayerische
Volkspartei) or in the Zentrum, the CSU was (incorrectly) seen by some as
being controlled by the church. Attacking the church, especially for
younger radicals in the 1960s, was a way of attacking the moral edifice of
the Federal Republic and calling for greater reforms. Student leaders and
others in the so-called “New Left” could thus claim that the Federal
Republic was rotten to the core, its moral foundation tainted by its
inaction in the past. Some historians refer to the 1960s as the second
founding of the Federal Republic, seeing the 1950s under Adenauer, as a
transition era between authoritarianism and more genuine democracy.
Adenauer, according to this interpretation, can be seen as something akin
to an enlightened despot, a paternalistic dictator. As such, the debates
about the role of the church are essentially about the understanding of
democracy, about the incongruity of a party beholden to an authoritarian
institution at the helm of the Federal Republic. These debates were, thus,
about the presence of an authoritarian institution, one that in the eyes of
its critics had colluded with Nazism, in an age that was becoming rapidly
more democratic.

Mark Ruff, Concordia Universty, Portland, Oregon

3) Book reviews:

a) Vincent J.McNally, The Lord’s Distant Vineyard. A History of the Oblates
and the Catholic Community in British Columbia. Edmonton, Alberta:
University of Alberta Press, Western Canadian Publishers. 2000. xxvi and
443 pp. ISBN 0-88864-346-2

Terry Glavin and former students, Amongst God’s Own. The enduring legacy of
St. Mary’s Mission, Mission, B.C. 2002. 95 pp. ISBN 0-9686046-1-7
Vincent McNally opens with a challenging and commendable statement, which
is eminently repeatable:

“Church history provides an important means of understanding the Christian
people and their Church, since, if it is willing to use the historical
critical method, it thereby reveals where Christians have been and gives
them some important clues about where they are going. The picture it
reveals, if it is striving to be critical as well as objective, does not
always please. Shadows are part of all people and the institutions they
create. Institutional shadows can be ignored or deliberately concealed, but
the price is a heavy one. (xv-xvi)

It is part of McNally’s honest assessment to admit right away that the
story of the Oblate mission in British Columbia has shadows. Indeed, two
such shadows run as themes throughout the book – the failure to relate to
the native Indians to whom the mission was principally directed, and the
failure to halt the secularization of British Columbia society in the
formative years of the province’s growth. And yet the Oblates were to have
a significant impact which McNally has recorded with a carefully researched
and insightful account of their activities from the middle nineteenth
century to the present. This is the first such scholarly work and is
therefore very welcome, all the more since there is a notable paucity of
church history studies on British Columbia, possibly reflecting the
widespread indifference of the population towards all religion.
The Oblates came to the mainland of British Columbia in the late 1850s.
They had two ambitions: to undertake missions to the native Indian
population, and to evade the control of the local bishop. Since the latter
was based in Victoria on Vancouver Island, the Oblates established
themselves on the mainland, several miles up the Fraser River. But this was
exactly the time when the discovery of gold in the far interior of the
province brought a huge surge of gold-greedy humanity, most of them from
California, pouring into the virtually undiscovered and as yet ungoverned
territory. All of these incomers were obliged to use the Fraser River as
the only access route to the north. The resulting clashes with the natives
proved highly unfortunate, being characterized by racist attitudes of
superiority by the whites, which led to numerous outbursts of violence,
frequently lubricated by illegal liquor. The Oblates, despite sharing
similar racist views of native paganism ad backwardness, were obliged to
try and defend their prospective converts, especially in the fight against
alcohol.

But, as McNally rightly makes clear, the missionary strategy was itself
lacking in cultural sensitivity. The Oblates sought to bring about in their
“converts” or their children for whom schools were quickly established., a
kind of Christian-Catholic enclave, where the Indians would be led to
renounce their “savage” ways, but remain separate from the incursions of
the white settlers and miners. This was an unrealistic policy. The native
Indians turned to the church only as a means of protecting themselves from
the rapacity and harmful impact of the whites. Moreover, McNally suggests,
the missionaries may have helped to spread those European diseases, such as
smallpox, which killed off a third of the native population in the second
half of the nineteenth century. This was then interpreted as the
“destiny” of the native peoples. In contrast to the Americans’ violent
decimation, Canadians would adopt a kinder treatment and look after the
natives until “destiny” took its course. Such views continued well into the
twentieth century.

The Oblates soon found that the enormous size of British Columbia (four
times the area of Germany) and the scattered settlements of native
populations far exceeded the manpower the Order could provide. The tasks
of establishing an economically viable Mission, the attempts to learn the
indigenous language, and the needs both physical and spiritual of their
congregations, placed a tremendous strain on these priests. Furthermore,
the Oblates practised a rather rigid spiritual discipline, demanding
unswerving obedience to their superiors. This caused frequent personal
problems for which there was little opportunity of resolution. It was
often, McNally reports, a disheartening and even a depressing existence.
Nevertheless the Oblates persevered. Slowly they gained recruits from
France or Quebec or even locally, and reached out to more native bands. By
the 1870s they had successfully established a large farm on Okanagan Lake
whose flourishing orchards became nationally-known. But they were much
less successful in transforming these “poor savages” into loyal Catholic
peasants.

McNally is highly critical of the Oblates’ inflated claims for
“conversions”, and of their adamant refusal to regard native spirituality
as more than “pagan superstitions”. Instead, he writes with sympathy about
the pre-contact native traditions and wisdom, and indicates that a
considerable syncretism with Christianity had taken place before the
Oblates arrived. But since the priests lacked command of any native
language, their ability to make a convincing presentation of the Catholic
faith must have been rare. For the same reasons, the native cultures
remained a closed book to most Oblate missionaries.

McNally tackles the thorny issue of the residential schools with judicious
balance, and places it in its historical context. Of course, both the
Oblates and the dominant Europeans saw these schools as a vehicle for
acculturation of the natives. But Social Darwinism prevailed. The natives
were clearly to remain at the bottom of the economic ladder. The fact that
such schools were established by the Federal Government in Ottawa and
deliberately and miserably funded led to recurrent conditions of
discrimination and injustice. However devoted most of the teachers may
have been, the resources were always too limited. But the weightier charge
of stifling paternalism and hostility to any native traditions is
undoubtedly true. So too, unfortunately, is the fact, which McNally skirts
around, that a minority of pupils suffered physical abuse. Together, by the
1960s and 1970s, these charges brought about the end of the whole
residential school system, though another forty years were to elapse before
compensation for the victims could be agreed upon.

The third section of the book deals with the Oblates’ work with “whites”
or European congregations. This describes their failure to prevent the
establishment of a strictly non-sectarian school system for the immigrants
throughout the province. As a result British Columbia became and remains
the most secularized and unchurched area in the country. The situation
was not helped by such oddities of history, as when one Oblate bishop of
Victoria was murdered while on a missionary tour of Alaska, another was
forcibly deposed by the Vatican for alleged sexual misconduct, and a third
lost his post because of land speculation. The lesson was hardly learnt,
for seventy years later his successor in Victoria gambled away $13 million
of the diocese’s resources. Admittedly these last were not Oblates, but the
story was hardly edifying. And with the increase of anglophone immigrants,
the French-speaking Oblates became more and more peripheral. Particularly
from 1914 onwards there was no groundswell for any organized religion, let
alone one led by a religious order. The Oblates’ dream of a new and
fruitful ministry in effect withered on the vine.

Writing from today’s perspective, McNally laments the cultural
insensitivity of his Oblate predecessors, which he blames as the chief
cause for their lack of success. This is no triumphalist missionary
success story. Instead McNally’s skillful researches into the vast
archival records portray these men and their activities, shadows and all.
Readers will note with approval his ability to be both critical and
objective, and will be grateful for the insightful account of how the
Catholic Church has fared in this remote corner of the Lord’s vineyard.
Terry Glavin’s account of one of the Oblates’ now dissolved residential
schools at Mission, B.C., consists of a large number of excellently chosen
photographs, as well as reminiscences by many of the former pupils, mainly
from the 1940s and 1950s. He too challenges the widely-held view that these
schools were run by depraved priests and bureaucrats, victimizing the
pupils in a process of cultural genocide. Instead we are given a
sympathetic and balanced tribute to a lost community and a collective
memory of a system no longer practised.
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b) Elisabeth Moltmann-Wendel, Autobiography London: SCM Press 1997, 188pp

John Bowden’s elegant translation of Elisabeth Moltmann-Wendel’s
autobiography makes available to English-speaking audiences this
interesting and hitherto little-known voice among German theologians.
Elisabeth is a theologian in her own right, as well as being married to
the well-known professor of Systematic Theology in Tübingen. This account
of her struggles to find her personal and professional identity provides a
valuable insight into one aspect of German theological developments over
the past half century.

Moltmann-Wendel was brought up during the Nazi era in a conservative
Protestant family, which staunchly resisted all attempts to nazify the
church’s doctrines, and supported the Confessing Church and its leading
theologians Barth and Bonhoeffer. After the war, she started to study
theology in this tradition and became the second woman theologian to
achieve a doctorate from Göttingen. Then she met Jürgen Moltman and spent
the next years largely preoccupied with house and family cares.
Increasingly, however, she was discontent with the highly traditional and
male-dominated Evangelical Church in Germany and its associated theological
faculties.

In the 1970s, while on a tour of the United States, she was strongly
influenced by the early feminist writers, and saw the need to bring these
liberating ideas back to her own church. But she quickly recognized that
more was needed than merely an anti-male assertion of women’s rights. This
led her to embark on a search for a specific theology, derived from
Christian experience, which could replace, or at least challenge, the
historic and patriarchal Lutheran traditions.

This autobiography spells out her search for a Christianity which invites
women to active collaboration as autonomous persons. This meant trying to
discover the ways in which women are affected by the encounter with God. It
was not exhausted in the repudiation of masculine concepts and images, but
sought wholeness and community in life. If much of the impetus was
derived from political and liberation theology, nevertheless
Moltmann-Wendel sought to filter this through feminist ideas. Above all,
feminist theology began, not from above, but from below. It was to be
rooted in women’s genuine personal experiences, incorporating their
physical as well their intellectual perceptions.

This was, as she makes clear, an uphill struggle. “In the barren German
theological landscape, the churches were only irritated by feminist
theology and the theological faculties took no notice of it at all.”
Furthermore, there soon developed rival schools within the feminist
movement as a whole. Some abandoned Christianity or all religion; others
became pantheistic Goddess worshippers; others rejected all patriarchy,
including the Old Testament, to the point where the charge of antisemitism
was levelled. Moltmann-Wendel is at pains to point out that, in her
household and with her history, such an accusation is untenable. But
there are still divisive issues, such as lesbianism, which have as yet
remained unresolved.

Elisabeth Moltmann-Wendel looks back on her long years of participation in
the search for a feminist theology with both pride and perplexity. The
current situation is certainly ambivalent. Neither church nor university
favours these endeavours. But, she concludes, ” a broad area for
experiments and action remains between resignation and hope, in which a bit
of earthiness is provided not by scholastic opinions but by the reality of
women, their differences and their expectations of feminist theology”.
JSC

4) Articles:

a) Manfred Gailus, “Overwhelmed by their own fascination with the ideas of
1933: Berlin’s Protestant social milieu in the Third Reich” in German
History. Vol. 20, no.4 (2002), 462ff. This is a most valuable English
summary of Gailus’ new book Protestantismus und Nationalsozialismus:
Studien zur Durchdringung des protestantische Sozialmilieu in Berlin,
Cologne: Bohlau Verlag 2001. This local study reinforces what has already
been demonstrated by Doris Bergen and myself that the whole Protestant
Church was swept away by nationalist passions in early 1933, and never
recovered. Only a tiny handful resisted the fascination of Nazism which
seemed to many to be a genuine attempt to revive Germany’s fortunes through
spectacular and firm leadership. This local study of the central bastion
of Prussian Protestantism shows the variety of responses throughout the
city, and provides statistical proof of the impact of Nazi infiltration,
mostly self-invited by the pastors, but encouraged by their congregations.
JSC

b) Two of our list members have contributed articles to the conference
volume, edited by John A.Moses and Christopher Pugsley, The German Empire
and Britain’s Pacific Dominions, 1871-1919, Claremont, California: Regina
Books 2000.

Julian Jenkins writes on “Idealism confronts Realpolitik: The attempts to
avert a world crisis through a Peace Movement of the Churches, 1908-1914”,
which is a preview or part of his newly-published book Christian Pacifism
confronts German Nationalism: the ecumenical movement and the cause of
peace in Germany, 1914-1933, Edwin Mellen Press 2002 (to be reviewed here
shortly). Greg Munro writes on “The War Guilt Debate and the Belgian
atrocities: the reaction of the Roman Catholic Church in Belgium and
Germany”, which examines the German army’s treatment of Belgium as an item
in the post-war indictment. Predictably most German Catholics maintained a
wholly nationalistic stance, but Munro points to the lone voices of
Friedrich Wilhelm Foerster, a noted pacifist and the Catholic editor of a
small but resolute newspaper, Fr Moenius, who attempted to challenge the
alleged myth of German innocence. In the end they were outvoted even in the
Catholic ranks, but deserve credit for their wider sympathies. Not until
the 1950s, with the onslaught by Fritz Fischer on the received versions of
the origins of the 1914 war, and on the army’s conduct in Belgium, was
Moenius vindicated. But the Roman Catholics remained divided, and a true
acknowledgment of the need for repentance and reparation is still
outstanding. Both Jenkins and Munro show that the few intellectuals
inclined to a pacifist perspective were overwhelmed by the number of their
fellow Christians who supported the militarism and imperialism of the
ruling elite.

The latest issue of Kirchliche Zeitgeschichte (Vol. 15, no 1, 2002) is
devoted to German-Polish relations, and contains the papers given at a
conference in Ustron, Silesia not far from Auschwitz. These contributions
cover the story from 1870s onwards, and describe not only the relations
between the churches and new Polish state after 1918, but also the
traumatic effect of two German invasions in 1914 and 1939, and the
disastrous genocidal policies of the Nazis. The clashes caused by
religious nationalism are described by G.Besier and G.Ringshausen for the
German Protestants and by R Zerelik for the Russian Orthodox, while two
further articles give a picture of the fate of the Jehovah’s Witnesses in
Poland up to 1989. A.Stempin gives us an insightful piece on the
controversial figure of Maximilian Kolbe, the “saint against the Jews”?
And J.von Lüpke very appropriately concludes with an essay on “The Task of
Forgiveness” – a still unfinished obligation.

5) Archives:

The latest publication of the German Historical Institute, Washington,
D.C., is The GDRin German Archives”. This provides a useful list of Church
Archives, Protestant and Catholic. Since both churches are organized on a
local basis, and the material is held by each diocese/Land Church, this
listing gives a short description of the holdings, the e-mail and web-site
addresses, and even the hours of opening!. Most useful.

Books reviewed in 2002:

(All reviews were written by the Editor unless so indicated)
Besier, G. Die Kirchen und das Dritte Reich (N.Hope) February
Brechenmacher T. and Ostry, H. Paul VI – Rom und Jerusalem (J.J.Hughes)
September
Callaghan, W. The Catholic Church in Spain March
Christophers, B. Positioning the Missionary. .B. Good in British Columbia
April
Cresswell, A. and Tow, M. Franz Hildebrandt November
Dentan, P. Impossible de se taire December
Draper, A Pastor Andre Trocme December
Dudley-Smith, T. John Stott, Vol.2 April
Feldman, E. Catholics and Jews in 20th century America (Joshua Zeitz)
June
Fell, M. Christianity in Iceland October
Genizi, H. Holocaust, Israel and Canadian Protestant Churches November
Gray, D. Percy Dearmer. A Parson’s Pilgrimage March
Hill,R. Lord Acton (N.Hope) October
Kent, P. The lonely Cold War of Pope Pius XII (R.Ventresca) September
Lawler, J.G. Popes and Politics: Reform, resentment and the Holocaust
(J.J.Hughes) May
Lindsay, M. Covenanted Solidarity: Karl Barth (Matthew Hockenos) June
McInerny, R. Defamation of Pope Pius XII (J.J.Hughes) October
Putney, C. Muscular Christianity October
Raum, E. Dietrich Bonhoeffer October
Sanchez, J Pius XII and the Holocaust (J.J.Hughes) May
Sundkler, B. and Steed, C. A history of the Church in Africa January
Thorne, S. Congregational Missions and Imperialism October
Van Die, M. ed. Religion and Public Life in Canada (G.Egerton) March
Wainwright, G. Lesslie Newbiggin January
Wolgast, E. Die Wahrnehmung des Dritten Reiches AprilWith very best wishes to you all,

Sincerely,
John S.Conway
Jconway@interchange.ubc.ca

Dear Friends
My very best wishes to you all at this season. May the celebration of the
birth of Jesus be a time of joy and refreshment to you. At a time when the
wider political scene is so laden with gloom and disasters, we can only
pray that the Light of the World will indeed prevail. In the meantime, we
can surely remind ourselves that it is better to light a candle than to
curse the darkness. A few lines from George Herbert for this season follow:

The shepherds sing; and shall I silent be?
My God no hymne for thee?
My soul’s a shepherd too; a flock it feeds
Of thoughts, and words, and deeds.
The pasture is thy word; the streams, thy grace
Enriching all the place.
Shepherd and flock shall sing, and all my powers
Out-sing the day-light hours
Then we will chide the sunne for letting night
Take up his place and right:
We sing one common Lord; wherefore he should
Himself the candle hold.
I will go searching, till I find a sunne
Shall stay, till we have done;
A willing shiner, that shall shine as gladly,
As frost-nipt sunnes look sadly.
Then we will sing, and shine all our own day,
And one another pay:
His beams shall cheer my breast, and both so twine
Till ev’n his beams sing, and my musick shine.

Contents

1) Report on KZG conference 2002
2) Report on GSA conference 2002
3) Karl Barth-Rezeption Since 1990
4) Book reviews:

a) Dentan, Impossible de se taire
b) Draper, Pastor Andre Trocmé

5) Book Review Symposium – J.G.Lawler, Popes and Politics
1) Report on the KZG conference 2002
For the first time, the Kirchliche Zeitgeschichte group held its annual
meeting outside Europe. The 2002 conference took place at the Pacific
Lutheran University, near Tacoma, Washington, USA. Luckily, it was
possible for our founder and editor of the journal, Prof. Gerhard Besier,
to attend along with most of our European colleagues on the editorial
board. As well we were fortunate to have guests from Israel, Poland,
Finland, Sweden and Germany, along with numerous participants from the
United States and myself from Canada. This was made possible by grants
from the US Holocaust Memorial Museum and other foundations. We were also
grateful for a presentation by three Holocaust survivors, who recounted
their personal experiences.
The theme of the conference was “Christian teachings about Jews: National
comparisons in the shadow of the Holocaust”, with the emphasis on the
period before 1939. We heard reports on Germany, Poland, Spain and Latin
America, Estonia and Denmark, which gave rise to sombre comparisons. The
picture would have been even darker if we had been able to have full reports on France, Roumania,
Hungary and Russia. Yet, it became clear that each national situation
involved a complex mixture of political and social as well as theological
elements. We learnt, for example, that, despite the virulent antisemitism
of such men as Court Preacher Adolf Stoecker, Germany before 1914 was one
of the best places for Jews to live. Likewise we learnt that the most
successful rescue of Jews during the Holocaust, namely in Denmark, could
not be attributed to the lack of antisemitism in that country, even in
Christian circles.

Such comparisons also invited the question as to how far words or ideas
led to action. It was clearly necessary to explore further the relation of
Christian teachings to the actual murderous policies of the Holocaust. Such
considerations also needed to evaluate the secular aspects of antisemitism.
How were Christian antisemitic attitudes picked up and institutionalized?
Above all, a fuller consideration had to be given to the issue of
continuity versus contingency in this crucial period.

Equally, left for another conference were the questions of post-1945
Christian teachings about Jews. To some of the audience, it seemed, little
had or has changed, given the continuity of Christian symbolism and
liturgies, especially about the Crucifixion. To others, on the other hand,
the developments since the Second Vatican Council in the 1960s and the
equivalent Protestant changes towards Judaism, mark the most significant
event in church history in the twentieth century, with the abandonment of
sixteen hundred years of polemical bigotry. Another fruitful topic for a
future conference would be to examine the ways in which church history has
been used (or misused) in the post-Communist countries of eastern Europe.
Another unprecedented event in KZG’s history was the presence at both
evening sessions of several young persons holding up anti-Israeli or
anti-Holocaust placards. The most blatant of these stated categorically:
“Luther was right about the Jews”. When I attempted to ask the placard
holder whether she was a Lutheran or had read what Luther had once said, I
was told that this was a silent protest and that the perpetrators were
forbidden to engage in any discussion. The conference members were
naturally distressed at this wholly unwanted presence.

But in the conference itself, a lively dialogue on Christian-Jewish
relations was possible in an atmosphere of mutual respect and equality.
This meeting therefore followed the pattern established over the past
thirty years, showing that the North America provides a fruitful meeting
ground for such encounters.

The quality of the papers presented was excellent and they will appear ,
together with some of the responses, in the first issue of Kirchliche
Zeitgeschichte in 2003. If your Library does not subscribe, you might like
to get in touch with Gerhard Lindemann, Kisselgasse 1, D69117 Heidelberg,
Germany.
JSC

2) German Studies Association, San Diego, CA, 4-6 October 2002
The first day of the conference included a session titled “Mennonites,
Prostitutes, Catholics, and Jews: The ‘Other’ and Nation-Building in
Nineteenth-Century Germany.” Mark Jantzen of Bethel College in Kansas
opened with a paper on “The First Duty of a Citizen: Mennonite Emancipation
and Opposition to Prussian Military Service, 1848-1890.” Jantzen introduced
listeners to a topic new to many of them: the Mennonites of the Vistula
Delta and their conflicts with the Prussian (later German) government over
issues of military service in the second half of the nineteenth century. As
the case of the pacifist Mennonites demonstrates, Jantzen argued,
acceptance of military service was a “necessary precondition” for admission
into the German nation. By 1890, Mennonites in Germany either emigrated or
agreed to abandon their pacifism and take up arms. Keith Pickus of Wichita
State University gave a paper on “Nation-Building on the Periphery:
Catholics and Jews in Hesse.” Pickus used a regional focus to offer new
perspectives on the Kulturkampf and antisemitism in Imperial Germany. In
Hesse, he showed, the antisemitic movement associated with the romantic
populist Otto Boeckel contained anti-Prussian elements that made it
attractive to some local Catholics. At the same time, the Jewish liberal
politician and Kulturkaempfer Ludwig Bamberger repeatedly won election to
the Reichstag, backed by Protestant, Catholic, and Jewish votes. Like
Jantzen, Pickus showed the relationship between religion and the German
nation to be much more complex than familiar models of confessional dualism
suggest. Julia Bruggemann’s very interesting paper on prostitution falls
outside our area so will not be discussed here. In his stimulating comment,
Helmut Walser Smith of Vanderbilt University asked whether the idea of the
nation was the optimum principle around which to organize these three
papers. All three topics, he suggested, revealed the “underside of national
unity as the long-term decline of internal diversity.”

A good crowd gathered on the second day of the conference for a session on
“Theology as Ideology in Nazi and Postwar Germany.” Richard Steigmann-Gall
of Kent State University led off with a paper titled “The Text and Context
of Nazi ‘Theology’.” Steigmann-Gall argued that even Heinrich Himmler, the
Reichsfuehrer-SS, qualified his condemnation of Christianity and retained
some aspects of Christian teaching. According to Steigmann-Gall, Nazi
Pagans demonstrated a “surprisingly favorable view of Protestantism” and
even depended on certain varieties of Protestant thought. Suzanne
Brown-Fleming of the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum followed with
a presentation titled “‘Christian Charity’ and ‘Jewish Vengeance’: Bishop
Aloisius Muench’s One World in Charity, 1946-1947.” Brown-Fleming showed
how the American bishop Muench, Catholic liaison representative to the U.S.
Army in occupied Germany from 1946 to 1949, became popular among German
Catholics as a sympathetic, pro-German figure. In a celebrated pastoral
letter called “One World in Charity,” Muench preached a version of
“Christian” love that implied “Jewish” hate and contempt for God. It was
ironic but not surprising, Brown-Fleming concluded, that a myth grew up
associating Muench with Adolf Eichmann. Finally Matthew Hockenos of
Skidmore College offered reflections on “Protestant Theology and the
Conversion of Jews, 1945-1950.” Hockenos described how a handful of
Lutherans in Bavaria resumed efforts to convert Jews almost immediately
after World War II ended. Displaced persons camps provided missionaries
with concentrated groups of Jews to whom they preached the gospel in the
hope of winning them to Christianity. Habits of Christian anti-Judaism
combined with Christian guilt about the abandonment of the Jews under
Nazism kept the church’s mission to the Jews alive for decades after the
Holocaust. Doris Bergen of the University of Notre Dame provided the
commentary. Bergen noted the different definitions of “religion” in each of
the three papers and drew attention to common themes of ambiguity and
confusion.

The third panel on religion took place in the very last conference session,
so that at times the presenters threatened to outnumber their audience.
Nevertheless the panel titled “Religious Institutions in the Nazi Era”
featured two interesting papers, both by subscribers to this newsletter.
Gerhard Besier spoke on “The Policy of the Ecclesiastical Foreign Office of
the German Protestant Church (DEK) during the Spanish Civil War,” and
Michael Phayer sent a paper (read in his absence by Judith Meyers of
Olympic College) titled “NS church Policy for the Protestant Volksdeutsch
Church in Poland.” Besier presented an intriguing picture of the German
Protestant Church in Spain in the 1930s, where official representatives of
the church’s foreign office under Bishop Heckel supported Franco, whereas
many other German Protestants sympathized with the Republican cause.
Phayer’s paper emphasized Nazi duplicity toward the ethnic German
Protestants of Poland after September 1939. In the former Polish lands,
Phayer argued, Nazis faced no constraints in expressing their hatred of the
Christian churches: they used the Volksdeutschen and their piety to
consolidate Nazi power and then turned on them with radical efforts to
disestablish their churches. Robert Ericksen of Pacific Lutheran University
responded with a spirited comment that acknowledged the innovative nature
of Besier’s and Phayer’s work but drew attention to tendencies in Phayer’s
paper that could come across as apologetic.

Taken together, these three panels on religion represent some of the most
exciting research in German Studies occurring on both sides of the Atlantic.
Doris Bergen, Notre Dame University

3) Karl Barth Rezeption since 1990
In the years since 1995, when this Arbeitsgemeinschaft was first
established, the brief of the group has always been a wide one. There has
been geographical diversity, both in terms of membership and also in terms
of themes discussed in the newsletters. There has been confessional
diversity, with studies of Protestant, Catholic, Mormon and Jehovah’s
Witness churches all coming under scrutiny. And there has been disciplinary
diversity – not only have the histories of institutional churches been
considered and discussed, but (as should always happen within the realm of
Church history) theology and theologians have also found their just
recognition. It is in this context that the present piece finds a place,
being a reflection upon a man who, as a person and as a theologian, has
received quite some exposure within this forum over the past seven years,
Karl Barth. More specifically, this piece is intended as a brief summary of
the scholarly reception of Barth’s work since 1990.

The former Director of the Karl Barth-Archiv in Basel, Dr Hinrich
Stoevesandt, said some years ago that, although Barth was undoubtedly one
of the most influential theologians for both Protestants and Catholics
during the twentieth century, theology ‘has in the main gone down other
roads than those to which he pointed’ in the years following his death in
1968. In other words, Barth’s influence, while indisputable, has been
fundamentally antithetical to the path of mainstream theology and Church
praxis. Or, perhaps better, in the decades following his death, mainstream
theological study was undoubtedly influenced, but in an overly antithetical
sense, by Karl Barth. Paths taken were deliberate divergences from those
Barth would have wished to see followed.

Whether or not this is still the case is an open question. What is
absolutely clear, however, is that scholarly study of Barth has increased
massively throughout the past twelve years and, crucially, not only in the
northern hemisphere but also in countries such as Australia, South Africa
and even Japan.

A significant reason for this boom in Barth studies has undoubtedly been
the increasing availability of Barth’s own writings, including many pieces
that were hitherto available only to those who trawled through the
archives. In this, the work of the Barth-Archiv and the Karl Barth
Foundation have been indispensable, in particular with their decision to
produce a Gesamtausgabe: Section I (Sermons); Section II (Academic Works);
Section 3 (Individual Lectures and Brief Works); Section 4 (Conversations);
Section 5 (Letters); Section 6 (From Barth’s Life). The collection and
production of this Gesamtausgabe is, obviously, a work-in-progress and,
given the massive size of Barth’s writings, will not be completed for many
years to come. However, the fruits of the work to date are already
noticeable and have spawned a renewed interest in Barth’s life and work,
from scholars throughout the world.

As far as the actual content of current Barth studies is concerned, the
major contributions in recent years have been concentrated upon four basic
areas:

Barth’s theological methodology
Barth’s ethics and anthropology
Barth’s understanding of the Jewish question
Barth’s relationship with Charlotte von Kirschbaum

On the first, the major area of debate has been focused on the revision of
the traditional view, put forward by Hans Urs von Balthasar et al in the
early 1950s, that Barth’s dialectical method evolved into an analogical
method after 1931. In recent years, German and American scholars have done
much to critique this argument, by convincingly showing the presence of
dialectic, as a significant piece of Barth’s methodology, well into his
‘Church Dogmatics’. Scholars such as Michael Beintker led the way in this
revision, with the most influential study coming from Bruce McCormack, in
his 1995 book ‘Karl Barth’s Critically Realistic Dialectical Theology’ (a
book which won him the Karl Barth prize in 1998). This book has been, in
fact, arguably the most influential book on Barth since Berkouwer’s 1956
study ‘Triumph of Grace’.

As a brief aside, another methodological problem which has engaged Barth
scholars has been the extent to which Barthian theology is compatible with
postmodernist and deconstructionist discourse. Three books, in particular,
shed light on this. The first was written by Graham Ward in 1995, on
‘Barth, Derrida and the Language of Theology’. The second, which appeared
the following year, was entitled ‘Deconstructing Barth: a Study of the
Complementary Methods in Karl Barth and Jacques Derrida’ (written by Isolde
Andrews). The third, which has demonstrated the vitality of Barth
scholarship in Australia, was the result of a 1998 conference celebrating
the 30th anniversary of his death, and appeared as ‘Karl Barth: A Future
for Postmodern Theology?’ There is more to be done here, but at least it
can be said that discourse scholars have not overlooked the figure of Barth
who was, most clearly, a pioneer in European intellectual history.

The second area of significant development has been concerned with Barth’s
ethics and the related field of Barthian anthropology. Both Nigel Biggar
(‘The Hastening That Waits’, 1993) and John Webster (‘Barth’s Ethics of
Reconciliation’, 1995, and ‘Barth’s Moral Theology’, 1998) have countered
the traditional view, put forward by people like Robert Willis, that Barth
so emphasised the transcendental ‘Wholly Other’ God that he allowed no
place for human agency in the field of ethics. The reality, as these two
scholars, and others like them have shown, is far different. With renewed
readings of Barth’s Christ-centred theology (that is, a theology that takes
the vere homo of Jesus as seriously as the vere Deus) and the consequently
sharpened focus on Barth’s anthropology, it is now generally understood
that Barth’s ‘system’ allowed for no other stance other than a very
activistic ethics. This is not to suggest that Barth took a similar view to
Brunner and Tillich, believing that theology could begin with humanity. But
it is to argue strongly that, precisely because his theology started with
the God of the Incarnation, Barth had to deal sympathetically with human
ethical agency. Not surprisingly, this fresh paradigm has enabled new and,
to many, very surprising insights into Barth’s political life.

Thirdly, and in part as a result of the above, there have been numerous
works in the past twelve years that have looked at Barth’s understanding of
the Jewish question, arguably one of the most pressing politico-ethical
issues that dominated his lifetime. The older view (until the early 1990s)
was that Barth was indifferent to Judaism, that he believed the Jews to be
a religiously anachronistic people, or – worse – that he was positively
hostile to them. However, Eberhard Busch (‘Unter dem Bogen des Einen
Bundes’, 1996), and Mark R. Lindsay (‘Covenanted Solidarity’, 2001) have
both sought to over-turn this view, by looking at both Barth’s political
activities and writings, and the theological bases upon which they were
built. Katherine Sonderegger has, it is true, presented a more critical
view (‘That Jesus Christ Was Born a Jew’, 1992) but it does appear that, in
general, the tide seems to be turning away from the old, uncritically
negative view of Barth on this score.

Finally, at the level of Barth’s personal life, new research is now being
done on Barth’s personal relations, in particular with his long-time
colleague Charlotte von Kirschbaum. Was she simply a devoted secretary,
without whose steadfastness Barth’s work would never have been what it in
fact became? Was she exploited by him, as many feminist writers have
suggested? Were the two of them in love, with Barth’s own wife Nelly in
fact the exploited figure? Perhaps all three are true. But certainly there
is a wealth of material here that is only just starting to be uncovered.
There are many other strands of Barthian scholarship that are currently
being pursued, including critical works on his biblical commentaries,
studies of his sacramental theology, and studies from the perspectives of
liberation, feminist and black theologies, all of which illustrate the
continuing relevance of Barth’s theology for the present age. Perhaps,
though, the clearest evidence that Barth scholarship is alive and well is
the fact that, in 1997, Princeton Theological Seminary successfully
tendered to establish the Center for Karl Barth Studies (Yale was the other
interested party). Since its inception, the Center has hosted successful
conferences and is actively involved in fostering Barth studies, in
conjunction with the Karl Barth Society of North America.

There is, evidently, huge and growing interest in the life and work of this
most influential theologian. Not all share his views nor indeed should
anyone share the views of any theologian without a duly critical stance.
But those of us who see in Barth a champion of the Church, of the Gospel,
and of the human freedom that it proclaims, can only regard the current
status of Barth research as immensely exciting.
Finally, to quote Arthur Cochrane (notable for his work on the Church
Struggle), ‘the interest of the [Karl Barth] Society is not in promoting
Barth’s theology, but in using it because of its striking clarity in
saying ‘what the apostles and prophets witnessed.’ This, surely, is of
interest to all who are involved in theology and the Church.
Dr Mark R. Lindsay
Director of Academic Studies
Trinity College
Fellow, Department of History
University of Melbourne
Parkville 3052
email: mlindsay@trinity.unimelb.edu.au
4) Book reviews
a) Paul-Emil Dentan, Impossible de se taire. Des protestants suisses face
au nazisme. Geneva: Labor et fides. 2000. 134 pp.
Everyone knows that Karl Barth was the champion of the resistance against
the nazification of the German Evangelical Church. After his enforced
expulsion to his homeland Switzerland in 1935, he became even more
outspoken in his opposition to Nazi totalitarianism. But he was not alone.
This short book pays tribute to a dozen other Swiss personalities, largely
inspired by Barth, who sought by thought and deed to stand firm in the hour
of danger.

Some were pastors whose resolute preaching of the gospel stressed the need
to prevent any weakening of the faith and to defend human rights. Others,
like Pastor Vogt of Zurich and Gertrud Kurz, became notably active in
support of the refugees seeking asylum in Switzerland, most of whom were
Jewish. They were already heavily engaged in this work, when, in the
summer of 1942, the Swiss government ordered their borders to be closed and
all refugees to be turned back. This move aroused a wave of protests in
Swiss Protestant circles. Their outrage at the government’s complicity
with the Nazis was heightened by their moral and biblical insights, which
are here quoted at some length. Their efforts were curtailed, their
activities placed under surveillance, and their public speeches and sermons
censored. But the Hugenot tradition of resistance against oppression gave
them strength, and they successfully mobilized at least a portion of the
church against opportunism and expediency. Their traditional links to
France made them particularly anxious to smuggle endangered refugees across
the Franco-Swiss border, in many cases successfully. Amongst those
involved in this work was the honorary Swiss citizen, the Dutchman Visser
‘t Hooft, then acting as general secretary of the World Council of Churches
(in process of formation)., whose resistance story was later told in his
autobiography.

In recent years, the Swiss record in the second world war has been heavily
criticized, and its reputation for peaceful neutrality challenged. So
Dentan’s tribute (recently translated into German under the title
Nachstehen oder Widerstehen, Zurich: Theologisches Verlag) is designed to
show that there were those who upheld the ideals of generosity and
integrity based on the Protestant tradition, i.e. the other and better
Switzerland.
JSC

b) Allison Stark Draper, Pastor André Trocmé. Spiritual Leader of the
French village Le Chambon. New York: Rosen Publishing Group, Inc. 2001.
112pp.

The fame of the holiday resort village Le Cambon sur Lignon in the uplands
of southern France first came through an American professor, Philip Hallie,
in his book Lest innocent blood be shed, followed by Pierre Sauvage’s
inspiring film Weapons of the Spirit. They both narrated how this remote
community, peopled mainly by Hugenot Protestants, became a haven during the
second world war for some 5000 refugees, both Jewish and non-Jewish,
seeking asylum from the threat of imprisonment or deportation at the hands
of the Nazis and their French collaborators.

Allison Draper has now summarized their findings in a concise effective
book designed for teenagers. It is one of a series of so-called “Holocaust
Biographies”, giving an introduction to some of the historical
personalities of sixty years ago. André Trocmé was the Protestant pastor
of this village who successfully mobilized his people to provide a whole
series of hiding places, mainly in remote farm houses in the countryside.
Trocmé had already discovered two features of this community distinguishing
them from others. First, the deeply entrenched memory of the persecution
suffered by the Hugenots over many centuries at the hands of the majority
Catholics made them identify with the victims of modern oppression.
Second, these Calvinists maintained a strong attachment to the Hebrew
Scriptures in their Old Testament, and hence regarded with high respect
God’s Chosen People, the Jews. Trocmé himself was a charismatic and
conscientious pacifist, whose hatred of violence, tyranny and militarism
led to his passionate and dedicated involvement, and brought him into the
clandestine resistance movement. The school he established for non-violent
peace studies became the centre for protecting the refugees. At the height
of the Nazi round-up of Jews in 1942, Trocmé and his congregation not only
provided safe houses for Jews and other anti-Nazi victims, but also
participated in underground efforts to smuggle them across the frontier to
Switzerland. These activities quickly led to confrontations with the French
authorities, but Trocmé was backed by the defiant spirit of his flock. In
1943 he and his two closest associates were arrested by the Vichy police
and held for a month in a concentration camp. Later he was forced to take
refuge himself and survived in hiding until the end of the war. Later on,
he was frequently asked why this community had behaved so nobly in such a
unique conspiracy of goodness. But for all in Le Chambon, this was the
normal thing to do, a fulfillment of their Christian obligation towards
their neighbours.

After 1945 Trocmé dedicated his services to the cause of peace through the
Fellowship of Reconciliation, and later became a pastor in Geneva until his
death in 1971. Allison Draper’s short and sympathetic description of his
career includes some well-chosen photographs and can be commended – not
only to beginning students – to accompany showings of Sauvage’s splendid film.
JSC

5) Book review Symposium
The Spring 2002 issue of the U.S.Catholic Historian, Vol. 20, no.2,
contains a lengthy book review section, examining J.G.Lawler’s recent book,
Popes and Politics: Reform, Resentment and the Holocaust (reviewed here in
the May 2002 issue). This work is itself largely a review of a number of
recent books, particularly those dealing with Pius XII and developments
within the Roman Catholic Church. So it was the idea of this journal’s
editor to invite four of those authors criticized by Lawler to respond at
some length to his views. This they do with vigour (p.62-88). Lawler then
gives his own response to their challenges (p.89 – 117), which again takes
up the cudgels to point out the egregious blunders, flaws and errors of
these commentators. Not much of historical value emerges from this
battle, but it affords a good overview of the present state of the debate
for those who have not struggled through the material recently. In fact at
least 15 books dealing with Pius XII have appeared in the last while, so
this kind of argumentative and critical summary may well be of help.
JSC
With very best wishes to you all. I hope to be in touch with you again in 2003
John S.Conway
Jconway@interchange.ubc.ca

Dear Friends,
November 2nd has always been set aside in the Church Calendar as All Souls’
Day, marking the commemoration of the dead. Along with the more
nationalistic ceremonies of Armistice Day on November 11th , which mark the
annual remembrance of the fallen in the twentieth century’s wars, this
would seem to be an appropriate occasion for a short discourse on modern
martyrology, which I here offer for your consideration.

Contents:

1)Modern martyrology.
2) In Memoriam: Prof. Kurt Nowak, Leipzig
3) Book reviews:

a) Genizi, Holocaust, Israel, and Canadian Protestant churches
b) Cresswell and Tow, Franz Hildebrandt

4) Review article by Prof. K.Repgen of M.Phayer, Catholic Church and the
Holocaust

1) Modern martyrology

In July 1998, in the presence of Her Majesty the Queen, a notable ceremony
was held outside the main, west entrance to Westminster Abbey in London.
It marked the unveiling of ten new statues of modern Christian martyrs – an
event full of remarkable significance. Westminster Abbey is, of course,
England’s most renowned ecclesiastical building. Its location in the heart
of the nation’s capital, the grandeur of its architecture, its thousand
years of continual worship, its multiple associations with the royal family
as the site of coronations, weddings and funerals, and its role as the
resting place of England’s great and good from monarchs to poets and an
Unknown Soldier – all combine to make the Abbey the most famous shrine of
England’s civil religion.

The decision, therefore, of the Abbey authorities to commission this new
group of sculptures was challenging and clearly deliberately so. For none
of those here commemorated was English, or indeed had any institutional
connections with the Church of England. Instead, this tribute was intended
to signify a wider vision of the Church by including a sample of men and
women from every part of the globe. Every continent is represented,
making this an emphatic statement of the Church’s universal witness.
Equally inclusive is the range of denominational affiliations, as also the
rank of these martyrs from Catholic Archbishop to humble Papuan catechist.

No less challenging is the fact that these men and women so honoured are
all contemporary or near contemporary figures. The intention is clearly to
mark the fact that the Church is called to remember not only the heroes and
heroines of the distant past, but to proclaim the continuity of this
witness into the present. Most challenging of all was the decision to
commemorate not the apparently successful leaders of the Church, but ten
individuals who made the ultimate sacrifice of dying for their faith. The
purpose is to declare that the twentieth century was a century of Christian
martyrdom, and indeed that the number of Christians who died for their
beliefs was greater in this century than in any previous period in the
history of the Church. This sobering message is one of which too few people
are aware. The tragedies here depicted are a tangible, if limited, reminder
of the price of faith in a violent world of suspicion, ideology and conflict.

This striking, if surely unpopular, testimony to the cost of contemporary
discipleship is all the more remarkable because of the infrequency with
which it has been undertaken. Since the Reformation, the Church of
England, like other Protestant churches, has dispensed with the idea or the
practice of commemorating saints and martyrs. No institutional machinery to
do so exists – in contrast to the elaborate procedures still adhered to by
the Roman Catholic Church. And although the Anglican Church still
upholds the doctrine of sanctity and venerates individual saints of earlier
centuries, it has no mechanism for adding to their number. Indeed martyrs
and martyrdom, to many people, suggested overtones of superstition or
fanaticism. Over the centuries, the evocation of martyrs in England,
particularly those of Protestants who died at the hand of Queen Mary in the
1550s, aroused political passions of a vitriolic, even violent, kind. In
the nineteenth century an enormous struggle took place in Oxford to erect a
suitable memorial to the martyrs, Cranmer, Latimer and Ridley, burnt to
death in the heart of the university. It aroused such controversy as to
make a repetition of this commemoration seem unwise. So the decision of
the Westminster Abbey authorities aroused considerable interest but also
some anxious questioning. Such doubts may have been in part mitigated by
the fact that most of the names selected were the victims of those
politically repressive and anti-Christian forces, particularly Nazism and
Communism, which, by the 1990s, had been overthrown. This fact seemed to
give a final proof that these martyrs’ sacrifices had not been in vain.

The criteria used for their selection by the Abbey’s Dean and Chapter
(i.e. the clergy members of staff) have not been revealed. The process must
have been difficult and indeed invidious. Nevertheless it may surely be
regretted that none of their own countrymen was chosen, such as, for
example, the eminently eligible figure of Miss Jane Haining, who was the
only Scotswoman to be murdered by the Nazis in Auschwitz.
Jane Haining grew up in the lowlands of Scotland, but as an adult
discovered an interest in the Christian Mission to the Jews. In 1932 she
received a call to go out and help the Church of Scotland Mission to the
Jews in Budapest, where she became the matron of the girls’ school and
hostel, which housed many pupils of Jewish background.
Hungarian is a difficult language to learn. But evidently, Jane Haining
succeeded in establishing warm contact with her charges, a feeling mutually
returned.

When war broke out in 1939, Jane Haining chose to remain in Hungary,
trusting in its neutrality. But as the tide of war swept across Europe, all
foreign civilians were advised to be evacuated. She refused to go, despite
the clear dangers. Finally in March 1944 German troops seized control of
Hungary. Almost immediately Adolf Eichmann arrived in Budapest to organize
the mass deportation of Jews to the killing fields of Poland. Jane
Haining saw the need to protect her charges. “If these children need me in
the days of sunshine”, she said,” how much more do they need me in the days
of darkness”.

Her courage was matched by the resolute action of a few other Hungarian
Protestants, such as the pastor of the Good Shepherd Church, who organized
an extensive rescue mission on behalf of the persecuted Jews. But the
Germans and their Hungarian fascist associates were ruthless. Jane Haining
was well known to be a foreigner. She was denounced as being a British spy,
for giving aid to escaped British prisoners-of-war, and above all for
helping the now unwanted Jews. As a result, in May, her school was raided
by the Hungarian police, and she was given fifteen minutes to get ready
before they took her away to jail.

On her arrival in Auschwitz, she was put in the women’s camp and had the
number 79467 tattooed on her arm. One last letter was received by her
friends in Budapest, asking for food. But on 17 August 1944, along with a
batch of Hungarian women, she was gassed. Subsequently her selfless
dedication to the Jewish children and her Christian faithfulness unto death
were remembered both in her home parish in Glasgow and at the Holocaust
Memorial Centre at Yad Washem in Jerusalem. And in 1984 a plaque was
placed on the wall of the Scottish church in Budapest, whose inscription
reads as follows:

“Remembering with eternal gratitude and reverence Miss Jane Haining
who in 1944 for her humaneness died as a martyr in Auschwitz.
The Jewish parish Budapest 1944-1984”

At the present time, the Protestant church most engaged with the
commemoration of twentieth century martyrs is the Evangelical Church of
Germany. Since 1990, when both the nation and the Evangelical Church were
again reunited, it has become feasible to consider recording the fates of
those victimized by the dictatorships prevailing in Germany between 1933
and 1989. To be sure, after 1945, some steps were taken to commemorate
those members, particularly of the minority Confessing Church, such as
Dietrich Bonhoeffer and Paul Schneider, for their deaths at the Nazis’
hands. But the widespread refusal of the majority of the population to come
to terms with their Nazi past, and the blanket of forgetfulness which
prevailed in those early years, made any adequate recognition almost
impossible. Too many German Evangelicals had given their uncritical and
fulsome support to the Nazi regime for any praise of its victims to be
welcome. Similarly, the Church’s compromises and accommodations with the
subsequent Communist dictatorship during the forty years of the German
Democratic Republic were a sad legacy. It led many Evangelicals to avoid
being reminded of the sacrifices of such men as Pastor Oskar Brüsewitz, who
burnt himself to death in protest against the regime’s religious policies
in 1976.
The changed political climate in recent years now makes it possible to
seek to compile a comprehensive and accurate listing of all German-speaking
martyrs of the German Evangelical Church during these fateful years. But
there remains an overtone of this being something of an attempt to rescue
the credibility of this Church after its chequered record over the last
century. As well, there is a need to emulate the parallel efforts of the
German Catholic Church, whose list of their martyrs occupies two large
volumes.

The criteria for selection are still being discussed. Since the
Evangelical Church, in contrast to the Catholics, has no continuing process
for denoting martyrs, it had to start more or less from scratch.
Agreement was quickly reached to make the period covered extend from 1917
to 1989, and also to include German-speaking Protestants not only in
Germany itself but in some of its outposts in eastern Europe. Researches
are now being undertaken not only in church archives, but also in newly
available government or police papers. The aim is to compile as accurate
and complete a historical record as possible. But over the years, the
perception has grown that the concept of martyrdom needs to be enlarged.

To limit it to the earlier presumption of a witness to Christ, who was
killed in upholding some particular article of faith or defended some
particular ecclesiastical institution or programme, now seems too narrow in
the face of the kind of oppression instituted by the twentieth century’s
racial and political dictatorships. The ideologically-based persecution
of the Churches by such regimes was instituted principally for their
upholding the cause of downtrodden minorities or opposing flagrant acts of
injustice. Therefore, participation in the defence of a wider spectrum of
Christian values, especially those relating to justice and peace, would
seem more persuasive as grounds for possible recognition as a modern
martyr. Dietrich Bonhoeffer saw this dilemma clearly in 1939. Germans had
the choice of “either willing the defeat of Germany in order that
Christian civilization may survive, or willing the victory of their nation
and thereby destroying our civilization”. His decision for the former
alternative drove him to join the resistance movement and led directly to
his eventual death. But such discipleship involved political opposition and
even engaging in acts of violence, such as the assassination of the
dictator Hitler. For the majority of conservative German Evangelicals such
a stance was inadmissible. When, as late as 1960, one senior Lutheran
bishop was asked to unveil a memorial plaque in Bonhoeffer’s honour, he
refused to do so on the grounds that Bonhoeffer was not a Christian martyr
but a political traitor, and deserved the fate he got.

Today there is greater sensitivity that the boundaries defining martyrdom
should not be so narrowly drawn.

Such an extension of the criteria to include those murdered while
struggling against political oppression, however, raises further
difficulties. In the case of the German Resistance Movement, many of
those who lost their lives had only tenuous connections with the church, or
were prompted by purely secular or nationalist motives. Should the Church
thus exclude them from any listing of martyrs? Is a revolt of conscience
enough, especially when this can only be a subjective judgment on the part
of the later beholder? And where whole groups or minorities were
persecuted or put to death, such as Jews, gypsies, the mentally handicapped
or homosexuals, can the church claim that their nominal membership makes
them eligible? Should Edith Stein, for example, gassed in Auschwitz in
1942, be remembered as a Catholic nun or as a Jewish woman? Or does the
definition of martyrdom require some positive and conscious acceptance of
the risk of death, as a terrible alternative governing behaviour.

Particularly problematical is the question of suicide. Was Pastor
Brüsewitz’s deliberate act of self-immolation an act to which the church
should later give its approval and praise, and by implication reprove
others who did not choose such a path? Or take the case of the famous
German writer Jochen Klepper who committed suicide with his whole family in
1942 out of fear that they would be committed to deportation and death
under the Nazi racial edicts. Should such a death be seen as participating
in the sufferings of a persecuted group, and hence be worthy of the name of
martyrdom.

As Ursula Büttner of Hamburg recently pointed out, these are some of the
issues currently engaging the scholars of the German Evangelical Church’s
historical commission. If the traditional definition of martyrdom now seems
too limited and exclusive, the newer perspectives also cause problems
because they lack boundaries or exactitude. Even as the search for
accurate biographical details continues, it will be necessary to find a
sustainable but comprehensive concept, which will carry conviction among
church members, and provide inspiration to the whole church in the future.

2) In Memoriam, Kurt Nowak, Leipzig
To mark the death at the end of last year of Professor Kurt Leipzig, the
most distinguished church historian in east Germany, a ceremony was held at
the University of Leipzig recently at which his Collected Essays were
presented to his widow and to the Dean of the Theological Faculty, and the
following tribute paid to his memory.

Wie Herausgeber Prof. Dr. Jochen-Christoph Kaiser (Marburg) auf der
Gedenkveranstaltung sagte, habe sich Prof. Nowak seit Mitte der 70er
Jahre für die Errichtung einer publizistischen Plattform für Themen der
kirchlichen Zeitgeschichte engagiert, und zwar als gesamtdeutsch zu
realisierendes Projekt, mit dem die engeren Grenzen der traditionellen
Kirchengeschichte überschritten werden sollten. Band 1 erschien 1988,
Band 30 wird Ende 2003 herauskommen. Anspruch war und ist, einer
größeren Öffentlichkeit die historische Ortsbestimmung des Christentums in
der Zeitgeschichte (vom Ende des 18. Jahrhunderts bis zur Gegenwart)
zu verdeutlichen, was nur im Zusammenhang mit der allgemeinen
Geschichte, also mit politischen, sozialen, kulturellen und religiösen
Fragestellungen geschehen kann. Insgesamt lässt sich feststellen, dass
die Grenzüberschreitung von der Theologie zur Geschichte, wie sie von
Prof. Nowak und dem Leipziger Institut für Kirchengeschichte praktiziert
wurde, zur Etablierung der kirchlichen Zeitgeschichte als Disziplin mit
eigenem Anspruch und Gewicht Wesentliches beigetragen hat.
Zuvor hatten Dekan Prof. Dr. Dr. Günther Wartenberg, Rektor Prof. Dr.
Volker Bigl und Prof. Dr. Martin Greschat (Münster) in Worten des
Gedenkens Person und Werk des viel zu früh verstorbenen Historikers,
Theologen, Universitätspredigers und Schriftstellers gewürdigt. Immer
wieder wurden dabei sein enzyklopädisches Wissen, sein Ideenreichtum,
seine Kreativität, seine ausgeprägte Interdisziplinarität hervorgehoben.

In DDR-Zeiten sei er bei aller klugen Taktik gelegentlicher Konzessionen
selbstbewusst gegen enge Grenzziehungen und Einengungen für sein Fach,
für die Theologie und die historischen Wissenschaften insgesamt
angegangen und habe er sich so ein wissenschaftliches Wirken mit
Ausstrahlung über Leipzig und die DDR hinaus gesichert. Und für die Zeit
nach dem Umbruch von 1989/90 konnte Prof. Bigl feststellen, dass Kurt
Nowak den wissenschaftlichen Ruf der Universität Leipzig im In- und
Ausland gemehrt und er den Anfang gemacht habe, die Theologie in einer
säkularen Gesellschaft wieder stärker in der Mitte der Universität zu
verorten. Dies sei zugleich sein Vermächtnis an die heutige Universität.

3) Book reviews
a) Haim Genizi, Holocaust, Israel, and Canadian Protestant Churches.
Montreal/Kingston: McGill-Queen’s University Press 2002 xvi,320 pp.
Can$ 49.95. ISBN 0-7735-7401-0

Haim Genizi is an Israeli scholar who has already written two notable
books on American attitudes towards refugees from Nazi-dominated Europe. The current
work can be seen as a sequel. While it concentrates on the Canadian Protestant
churches, it describes the responses to Judaism and the Jewish people, and in particular
to the fortunes of the State of Israel in the fifty years after its
foundation in 1948, which are shared by several other church bodies. It is
hence a complementary study to Alan Davies’ and Marilyn Nefsky’s 1997 book
How silent were the Churches? Canadian Protestantism and the Jewish plight
during the Nazi Era, as well as to Paul Merkley’s recent work Christian
Attitudes towards the State of Israel. It is too bad that a similar
account of Catholic responses has still to be written.

Genizi believes that Canadian Protestant attitudes during the Holocaust,
and their critical views of the State of Israel, can be accounted for,
mainly but not exclusively, by Christian antisemitism, whether consciously
or unconsciously. The initial Protestant opinions of Judaism and the State
of Israel were more theologically- than politically-based. But over the
years, this position has been reversed. The Protestants’ sense of guilt
about their failure to do more for the Jewish victims of Nazism led to a
reassessment of their inherited anti-Judaic intolerance, and to a striking
change of attitudes towards Judaism. By the 1970s, this major alteration
in mainstream Protestantism, as also in the Roman Catholic Church, saw a
new appreciation of the Jewish heritage, an abandonment of Church
supersessionism and a revision of missionary approaches.

On the other hand, Protestant views of Israel have also changed markedly –
to a much more critical stance. Particularly after 1967, sympathy with
the Palestinians has been uppermost in the majority of Canadian Protestant
publications. Genizi concentrates especially on the largest Protestant
community, the United Church of Canada and on its journal The Observer.
Four central and detailed, though somewhat repetitive, chapters outline the
opinions of this journal’s editor, A.C. Forrest, whose outspoken criticisms
of Israel during the 1970s led to a serious poisoning of relations between
his supporters and the Canadian Jewish community.

The United Church of Canada saw, and sees, itself as the bastion of
liberal democratic views. Under Forrest, its journal became a champion for
the underdog, namely the victimized Palestinians. The one-sidedness of the
approach, and the violence of the language used, was bound to be offensive
to Canadian Jews, whose “exile psychology” led them to see any Gentile
criticism of Israel as yet another example of traditional Christian
antisemitism. And yet, the United Church had a commendable record of
shedding earlier dogmatism and entrenched attitudes. Its strictures were
hence derived from ethical rather than theological principles. Its leaders
shared a universalist vision of world peace. The Middle East, they hoped,
could be a region where the wolf and the lamb would feed together, and
where “righteousness and praise would spring forth before all the nations”.
But the Israeli occupation of the West Bank, and its treatment of the
civilian population, seemed only to rekindle ancient hatreds. As one
leading United Churchman lamented: “The Holy Land might become the Unholy
Land . . . since . . . that which was intended for the healing of the
nations will only prove to be a curse and an abomination”.

For the United Church, both political and ecumenical considerations led to
strong support for the Arab cause, ignoring the Israelis’ justifications.
Its Councils abandoned the kind of balanced approach which most of the
other Canadian churches sought to adopt, at least until the 1980s. Genizi
rightly deplores the one-sidedness of these pronouncements with the double
standard of morality, which condemned Israeli violence against the
Palestinians while excusing Arab violence in return.

Yet, at the same time, Genizi is aware that Canadian Protestant circles
are not unanimous, but rather display contradictory views over the Middle
East. On the one side, many Protestants learnt from the Holocaust that
they should repudiate the sad legacy of theological anti-Judaism of earlier
centuries. After 1945, the influence of the noted Swiss theologian, Karl
Barth, played a considerable role in creating a much more positive image of
Judaism. There was a renewal of interest in the Hebrew Scriptures, i.e. the
Old Testament, and a recognition of the significance of the land in Jewish
history and thinking. These factors led to important support for the State
of Israel and for its desire to live in peace within secure and defensible
borders.

On the other hand, other Protestants learnt a different lesson from the
Holocaust. They believed that the churches’ lack of concern about the
Jewish plight was due, not so much to entrenched antisemitism, as to the
pietistic tendency to limit Christian discipleship to the search for
individual salvation. The time had come, they now believed, for the church
to become far more active in its political witness, both at home and
abroad. Building on the tradition of the social gospel, this meant
resolute stands on behalf of the poor, the needy, the refugees and the
oppressed. Canadian Protestants, particularly from the 1960s, took their
cue from the World Council of Churches, believing that they were called to
be “the voice of the voiceless”. The implications of such a stand in terms
of the Middle East are obvious.

Since these opposing and incompatible views within the Protestant ranks
appeal to equally valid theological premises, it has been impossible to
find a reconciling formula. In fact, the situation over the past decades is
and has been a sore trial to Christian consciences. The complications and
ambiguities of the Middle East have been a constant source of conflict and
frustration. Critical observers are right to suspect the tendency to
misuse faith perspectives for one-sided political purposes. Genizi could
have given more attention to this complexity in many Protestant minds
For other Canadian Protestants, however, their humanitarian, if somewhat
simplistic, sympathies for the underdog in the conditions of military
occupation and oppression, have propelled them to express undifferentiated
support for the Palestinians. Their leaders’ dilemma has been how to
express strong criticism of the Israeli government’s policies without
arousing the suspicion that they are rehashing traditional antisemitic
attitudes. Genizi’s careful narrative of how this dilemma has been faced
is most commendable. So too is his acquaintance with and understanding of
Canadian ecclesiastical structures and personalities. This lends extra
credibility to his analysis of the attitudes of such leading churchmen as
Claris Silcox, E.M.Howse, A.C.Forrest and Archbishop Michael Peers. These
descriptions are skillfully drawn from the extensive archival sources
Genizi has consulted, supplemented by a few personal interviews. We could
wish that more of these, from a larger and more representative sample of
Protestant opinion beyond the Toronto centre, had been included. These
would surely have shown even more clearly the ambivalent attitudes of
Canadian Protestants, which are notably shared by other secular sections of
Canadian opinion.

Genizi makes clear his regret that Canadian Protestants have so constantly
expressed their support of Israel’s opponents in the Middle East. Since he
can’t admit the validity of these criticisms of his own government, he
attributes such attacks to an underlying Christian antisemitism, and thus
reinforces the view long held by many sections of the Canadian Jewish
community.

But had he taken a wider perspective, he would have recognized that such a
stance is fully consistent with the approach towards the broad range of
international affairs adopted by the Canadian Protestant churches for the
past half century. First and foremost has been their fear of nuclear war
and the use of weapons of mass destruction. Hence the priority given to
the need for world disarmament, and consequently the support for
international peace-keeping through the UN. Second, Canadians have
expressed their strong opposition to military interventions, especially by
the United States in support of its allies. Hence the resolute Canadian
campaign against any involvement in Vietnam or Iraq. Third, their sympathy
with victimized societies can be seen in Latin America in Cuba and
Nicaragua, or in Africa, for Biafra and Ethiopia. Canadian Protestants
have vigorously combated racism, especially in South Africa; they have
protested against ethnic cleansing in Bosnia;
Their stance in the Middle East is therefore all part of this
moralistic-humanitarian vision of world peace, prompted by Christian
idealism. This view refuses to endorse such concepts as “Realpolitik” or
to support politically expedient compromises. Such a vision necessarily
leads to much frustration, when its ideals are not achieved. But the
Protestant watchword is: hope; its characteristic failing is: naivete. By
mobilizing church opinion, debating resolutions, writing pamphlets,
lobbying politicians, these church activists campaign year in year out for
a better world. If the policies of the Israeli government seem to have
thwarted such a desirable goal, the consequent criticisms should be seen as
the product, not of Christian antisemitism, but of heartfelt
disappointment. Nevertheless, despite all the complexities and
ambiguities of the Middle East situation, Canadian Protestants continue to
believe that one day their goals of tolerance, peace, justice and
righteousness will prevail. These are, after all, Jewish goals too.

Genizi’s well-written survey of Canadian Protestant opinion deserves to be
widely read, if only because the issues he analyses are being discussed in
many other western Protestant communities. His narrative of the debate
shows clearly the continuing difficulty of how to apply Christian
principles in the circumstances of seemingly incompatible political
hostilities and irreconcilable antipathies of the Middle East. Genizi has
given us a thoughtful account of this ongoing but unresolved controversy.
Both Canadians and non-Canadians will benefit from his insights.
JSC
b) Amos Cresswell and Maxwell Tow, Dr Franz Hildebrandt. Mr Valiant-for
Truth. Macon, Georgia: Smyth and Helwys Publishing Inc. 2000. 254 pp.

Franz Hildebrandt, a close associate of Dietrich Bonhoeffer, has the good
fortune to have two biographies, one in German, the other in English.
Holger Roggelin’s well-researched study (reviewed here Vol.VI, no 5 – May
2000) described Hildebrandt’s early years until his enforced exile from
Germany. This memoir by two former colleagues, one British, one American,
together traces Hildebrandt’s subsequent career in their respective
countries. As can be expected, the first chapters recapitulate the German
background.

Hildebrandt’s strong attachment to the Confessing Church, his service as
Niemöller’s curate, and his partly Jewish background, made him a marked
man. In 1937 he was arrested by the Gestapo while holding a service. After
a short imprisonment, he left the country immediately, unable to return.
His first refuge was in England, where he moved to Cambridge to study
theology at Ridley College. At the same time, he gathered together the
German Protestant refugees in the city and acted as their pastor in a
specially forged congregation. The outbreak of war in 1939 only increased
the personal and psychological stress faced by these exiles. Their
attachment to their homeland was shattered, even as they faced suspicion or
worse amongst their new hosts. In 1940, like most “enemy aliens”,
Hildebrandt was interned on the Isle of Man. Fortunately the support of
such Anglican leaders as Bishop Bell of Chichester secured his release
after a few months. From then on, he was very much engaged in his pastoral
duties. At the same time he wrestled with the theological issues caused by
the war, especially pacifism to which he clung resolutely. The same German
theological thoroughness made him impatient with the compromises of
Anglican theology, especially of leading liberals such as Canon Charles
Raven, one of his benefactors in Cambridge. The resulting clash was perhaps
the reason why he refused to accept the offer of Anglican ordination.
Instead he gave his allegiance to the Methodists, having been much moved by
the piety of the Wesleys and their hymns.

He readily believed that the English Luther could be found in Charles Wesley.
Hildebrandt found the Methodist fellowship and his charge in Cambridge to
be warm and welcoming. His idealism for the Church was however matched by
a certain rigour and intolerance of error, especially theological. It was
hardly surprising that in 1953 he should have been recruited for a teaching
post at the Methodist Drew University in New Jersey, and served there for a
number of years. His Lutheran and biblical background complemented his
vision of spreading scriptural holiness throughout the land. But in the
triumphalist and materialist culture of the United States, such a goal
meant hard striving. Many of his students found Hildebrandt’s courses too
demanding. But he was convinced that the true Christians were those who
discovered the Bible as the living word of God, placing it at the centre of
their lives.
Unfortunately Hildebrandt’s term at Drew University came to an end in 1967
over a heated dispute with an autocratic President. The majority of his
colleagues in theology resigned, bringing to an end much of the impetus he
had sought to establish. He retreated to Scotland, but found himself
embroiled in an equally critical debate over the future of the Methodist
Church and its possible merger with the Church of England. As before, he
refused any compromise over possible re-ordination of Methodist ministers
and remained obdurate against any watering down of doctrines through
‘liberty of interpretation’. Along with other dissentients, he stood firm
on the Reformation principle of sola scriptura, solo Christo, solo gratia.
In the end the proposed scheme of unity failed, but it led Hildebrandt to
resign from the Methodist ministry amidst considerable acrimony.
He ended his days as a part-time associate in the Church of Scotland, but
never achieved the recognition he deserved from any ecclesiastical
structure. Cresswell and Tow pay tribute to his strengths. They suggest
that his experience of the German Confessing Church Struggle made him a
resolute opponent of any misuse of power by church or secular authorities.
He was therefore incisively critical of institutional expediency – in
short a Mr. Valiant-for-Truth. It was a stance which required courage but
did not bring popularity. But like his model the Wesleys, he could be
upheld by the certainty of righteousness. And this was his reward.
JSC
4) Review article: With the title “Connecting the Church and the Shoah”,
Professor Konrad Repgen, the doyen of German Catholic Church Historians,
has written an extensive and critical review of Michael Phayer,The Catholic
Church and the Holocaust, 1930-1965, in the recent issue of Catholic
Historical Review, Vol LXXXVIII, no 3, July 2002, p 546-553.

With best wishes to you all in this autumnal season.
John S.Conway
Jconway@interchange.ubc.ca

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.
JSC

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.
JSC
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.
JSC
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