Tag Archives: Heath A. Spencer

Webinar Note: The Opening of the Pius XII Archives and Holocaust Research

Contemporary Church History Quarterly

Volume 27, Number 2 (June 2021)

Webinar Note: The Opening of the Pius XII Archives and Holocaust Research

By Suzanne Brown-Fleming, United States Holocaust Memorial Museum

On March 2, 2020, the multiple archives relating to the pontificate of Pius XII (1939-1958) opened. Important but incomplete documentation has been available since the publication of the series Acts and Documents of the Holy See Relative to the Second World War (beginning in 1965).[1] Scholars have also had access to the archives from the pontificate of Pius XI (1922-1939, since 2006) and those of the Vatican Office of Information for Prisoners of War (1939-1947, since 2004).[2] Announced by Pope Francis on March 4, 2019 and marking 80 years since the election of Cardinal Eugenio Pacelli (Pope Pius XII) to the office of pope, the Pius XII archives are now accessible in multiple locations across Vatican City. The global reaction to the papal announcement invites us to reflect on the connections between history, memory, archives and public opinion.

On March 10, 2021, the American Catholic Historical Association held a webinar entitled “The Opening of the Pius XI Archive and Holocaust Research.” Presenters included Suzanne Brown-Fleming, US Holocaust Memorial Museum: Beth A. Griech-Polelle, Pacific Lutheran University; Claire Maligot, Ecole pratique des hautes études, Paris, and Institut d’études politiques, Strasbourg; Heath A. Spencer, Seattle University; and Robert A. Ventresca, King’s University College at Western University.

To view the video of the webinar, please visit https://achahistory.org/webinar/.

Notes:

[1] Actes et documents du Saint-Sìege relatifs à la seconde guerre mondiale, ed. Pierre Blet, Robert A. Graham, Angelo Martini, Burkhardt Schneider. Vatican City: Libreria Vaticana, 1965-1981, 12 vols.

[2] Inter arma caritas: l’Ufficio informazioni vaticano per i prigionieri di guerra istituito da Pio XII, 1939-1947. 2 vols.

Article Note: Jörg L. Spenkuch and Philipp Tillmann, “Elite Influence? Religion and the Electoral Success of the Nazis”

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Contemporary Church History Quarterly

Volume 26, Number 3 (September 2020)

Article Note: Jörg L. Spenkuch and Philipp Tillmann, “Elite Influence? Religion and the Electoral Success of the Nazis,” American Journal of Political Science 62:1 (January 2018): 19-36.

By Heath A. Spencer, Seattle University

Amid the current emphasis on Catholic complicity with Nazism, Jörg Spenkuch and Philipp Tillmann assess the Church’s ability to immunize its members against Nazism at the end of the Weimar era. Whereas researchers like Thomas Childers, Richard Hamilton, Jürgen Falter, and John O’Loughlin have already determined who voted for Hitler, Spenkuch and Tillmann address “the deeper question of why some groups radicalized while others did not” (20). They maintain that Catholic underrepresentation among Nazi voters was due primarily to the influence of the “Catholic Church and its dignitaries” rather than Catholic subculture or economic conditions in regions with a Catholic majority (22).

To make their case, they use a combination of county-level and municipal-level election results along with census data from 1925-1933. Controlling for other variables like demographic characteristics, unemployment rates according to occupation, workforce composition, and geographic differences, they find that “by itself, counties’ religious composition accounts for about 58% of the variation in the share of Nazi votes” (22). Using an Instrumental variables approach and ecological regression, they determine that “the ratio of Protestants to Catholics among NSDAP voters is about 8 to 1, relative to a population ratio of only 2 to 1” (27) and that “this difference cannot be attributed to systematic socioeconomic differences between both groups, as assumed in much of the prior literature” (28).

Having demonstrated the primacy of Catholic religious identity as an independent variable, the authors test their theory that elite influence shaped political choices by comparing the voting behavior of Catholics subject to the influence of pro-Nazi clerics with that of other Catholics.[1] They find that in such cases, the gap between Protestant and Catholic support for the NSDAP narrowed by 32-41%. In other words, “Catholics and Protestants voted considerably more alike in areas where the Catholic Church’s official warnings about the dangers of National Socialism were directly contradicted by the local clergy” (27).

The authors also address an anomaly that appears to undermine their claim of elite influence—the fact that Catholics were just as likely as Protestants to vote for the communist party despite the Church’s opposition. They attribute this asymmetry to the Catholic Center Party’s “ideological position” on the center-right of the political spectrum (31). While Protestant voters were free to choose the political party closest to their “ideal point,” Catholics faced sanctions if they supported the Nazis or the communists. However, Catholic voters who preferred the NSDAP found it easier than communist supporters to settle for the Center Party because it was closer to their “ideal point.”

Though Spenkuch and Tillmann are not the first to recognize the influence of the Catholic Church and its clergy on the political behavior of lay Catholics, their method quantifies and clarifies the nature of that influence in a discrete historical context. Applying their framework to “radicalized electorates” in the present, they posit that elite influence is most effective when warnings or penalties are accompanied by viable alternatives to extreme political movements: “Depending on the circumstances, a populist but influential elite may ultimately be preferable to a weak, principled one. Paradoxically, our work suggests that it may take a populist to save democracy from the fanatics” (35). They do not explain why populism is the only viable alternative, nor do they clarify the difference between populists and fanatics, but given the timing of their research and its publication, it is clear they have the United States and its religious and political landscapes in mind.

Notes:

[1] For their data set, they took the 138 priests identified by Kevin Spicer in Hitler’s Priests: Catholic Clergy and National Socialism (DeKalb, IL: University of Northern Illinois Press, 2008), geocoded their locations at the end of the Weimar Republic, and included all communities within a ten-mile radius.

Article Note: Ionuṭ Biliuṭă, “Fascism, Race, and Religion in Interwar Transylvania: The Case of Father Liviu Stan (1910–1973)”

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Contemporary Church History Quarterly

Volume 26, Number 3 (September 2020)

Article Note: Ionuṭ Biliuṭă, “Fascism, Race, and Religion in Interwar Transylvania: The Case of Father Liviu Stan (1910–1973),” Church History 89:1 (March 2020): 101-124.

By Heath A. Spencer, Seattle University

Ionuṭ Biliuṭă uses the case of Father Liviu Stan to confront the “collective ecclesiastical forgetting” in works that celebrate the scholarship of Romania’s interwar theologians while ignoring their collaboration with fascist and communist regimes (102). Reverence for Stan is particularly noteworthy given his virulent racism, membership in the Iron Guard, and service in government during the National Legionary State and the communist era. There is an inverse relationship between appreciation for Stan’s theology and interest in his biography.

As a university student in the early 1930s, Stan actively and at times violently supported nationalist and antisemitic agendas. By 1935, he had “converted” to fascism and equated “radical nationalist politics” with “religious salvation” (110). He officially joined the Iron Guard in 1937, the same year in which he was ordained and appointed to the faculty of the Academy of Orthodox Theology in Sibiu. Although he left the Iron Guard in 1938, his commitment to fascist ideals continued. In articles he wrote for the Legionary press, he promoted antisemitism and the exclusion of Roma from the national community. His book Race and Religion “advocated for the religious necessity of a racist outlook in accordance with the divine plan initiated by God’s creation of man” (122), and its publication in 1942 coincided with the war against the Soviet Union and Romania’s participation in the murder of European Jews.

As head of the Department of Religious Denominations in 1940, Stan was part of a failed attempt to reform the church’s institutional structure and relationship to the National Legionary State. In the early communist era, he held the same office and played a key role in the development of state religious policy, the canonization process, and ecumenical initiatives. Stan’s postwar reputation and position in government were predicated on his willingness to collaborate with the Securitate (secret police), and his new patrons discarded him once his usefulness was exhausted.

Some of Biliuṭă’s most intriguing claims remain undeveloped or at odds with one another. Were Stan and his fellow theologians conformists who cared only about their physical and professional survival, pragmatists who compromised with fascists and communists in order to pursue an independent agenda, or “true believers” who embraced fascism for a time and then abandoned it (at least outwardly) in the postwar era? Biliuṭă’s conclusion points toward the first two options, whereas the bulk of the article supports the third. The abstract refers to “interactions with various ideologies … ideological and professional reconversions, and … ability to survive when confronted with various totalitarian challenges” (101). Unfortunately, Biliuṭă’s close analysis does not continue beyond 1945, and we are left wondering about the nature of Stan’s own reconversion as well as the “agendas” that made Orthodox clergy “eager to collaborate with any political regime” (123).

Despite these unanswered questions, Biliuṭă’s article makes an important contribution to contemporary Romanian church history. Although it was the Securitate that initially “imposed a conspiracy of silence on the Fascist history of the Orthodox Church,” ecclesiastical historians of the post-communist era have perpetuated the cover-up (124). Biliuṭă intends to set the record straight, and in that respect he is successful.

Review of Michael Wermke, ed., Transformation und religiöse Erziehung: Kontinuitäten und Brüche der Religionspädagogik 1933 und 1945

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Contemporary Church History Quarterly

Volume 19, Number 4 (December 2013)

**Review of Michael Wermke, ed., Transformation und religiöse Erziehung: Kontinuitäten und Brüche der Religionspädagogik 1933 und 1945 (Jena: IKS Garamond, 2011), 390 pp. ISBN 978-3941854376.**

Heath A. Spencer, Seattle University

Standard works on German church history during the Nazi era often focus on the extent to which theologians, clergy, church administrations and church-run institutions supported, complied with, or resisted the aims of the Nazi state. Also of interest is the degree to which Nazi ideology permeated, shaped or undermined religious life among ordinary Protestants and Catholics. Transformation und religiöse Erziehung, edited by Michael Wermke, makes a valuable contribution on both levels through its investigation of the theory and practice of religious education before and during the Third Reich. The research included in this volume was originally presented at the annual conference of the Arbeitskreis für Historische Religionspädagogik in 2010. Although a few of the chapters are aimed solely at specialists in the history of religious education, most will be of wider interest to contemporary church historians as well.

WermkeTransformation Two of the chapters are biographical studies of individual religious educators or professors at teacher training institutions. Thomas Martin Schneider’s “Die Umbrüche 1933 und 1945 und die Religionspädagogik” takes up the story of Georg Maus, a religion teacher at an Oberschule in Idar- Oberstein. Maus, who was associated with the Confessing Church, was accused of undermining the war effort because he failed to properly manage a class discussion of Jesus’ command to love one’s enemies. He received a two-year sentence and died while being transported to Dachau. Schneider contrasts Maus’ story with that of Reinhold Krause, also an educator, but most famous for his address to members of the German Christian Movement at the Berlin Sport Palace Rally in 1933. Schneider finds that Krause both appropriated and violated aspects of liberal Protestant thought. The cases of Maus and Krause, Schneider argues, call into question both the “conservative decadence model” that blames liberal Protestant theology for Nazi conceptions of Christianity and the “progress- optimistic model” that exonerates it of all charges. Theological orientations, including diverse political theologies in the twentieth century, cannot be judged apart from their historical contexts. Likewise, one should not reduce contemporary religious education to the narrow range of options that were present in the Third Reich, nor should one assume that those options will have the same value in all historical settings.

The second biographical study is Folkert Rickers’ “’Vom Individuum zum Volksgenossen’: Helmuth Kittel und die Jugendbewegung.” In this work, Rickers explores the ideological orientation of Kittel, a youth movement leader, theologian, and professor of pedagogy. Kittel’s postwar autobiography minimizes his association with Nazism, but his writings from the 1920s and 1930s (more than 90 titles) indicate enthusiasm for völkisch ideology well before Hitler came to power. Contrary to his postwar claims, he seems to have experienced the Third Reich as the fulfillment of the goals of the German youth movement in which he played such a prominent role.

Jonas Flöter’s “Von der Landeschule zur Nationalpolitischen Erziehungsanstalt” examines the transition of the Landesschule Pforta, established in 1543, from an elite secondary school with a religious orientation to a de-Christianized training ground for political soldiers. The Reichsministerium für Wissenschaft, Erziehung, und Volksbildung exploited internal conflicts and scandals at the school in order to replace most teachers and administrators, and in 1935, SS member Dr. Adolf Schieffer was entrusted with the transformation of the school into an NPEA. However, religious services and religious instruction, including lessons in Hebrew and the Old Testament, were not abolished until 1937, and up to that point approximately two thirds of the students continued to participate in religion classes. In order to carry out the transformation of the school, the Reichserziehungsministerium had to work around school personnel, parents, students, and alumni who were not always fully compliant.

Five of the chapters in the collection focus on trends in Protestant and Catholic religious education at the regional and national levels. Werner Simon’s “Nationalpolitische Erziehung im katholischen Unterricht?” examines the writings of prominent Catholic theorists and contributors to Katechetische Blätter, a Catholic journal devoted to religious education. Simon finds considerable interest in 1933 and 1934 for “national-political education in Catholic religious instruction” (77), but there was little emphasis on such themes before or after that two-year period. In fact, articles published after 1934 were more likely to express opposition to what was seen as a Germanic narrowing of the faith or conflict between demands of the state and universal Christian ethics.

Joachim Maier’s “Traditionsbruch und Wandel religiöser Erziehung: Schule und katholischer Religionsunterricht in Baden 1933-1945” also suggests a blend of opposition and complicity on the part of German Catholics. After the Nazis came to power, church holidays and school prayers were replaced with National Socialist holidays and slogans. The new Hochschule für Lehrerbildung in Karlsruhe offered only minimal training in methods of religious education, and most teachers refused to teach religion in any case, especially if the Old Testament was part of the curriculum. As a result, many pious Catholics who initially had expressed enthusiasm for Hitler’s regime now viewed it with suspicion. Catholic leaders in Baden responded by publishing Katechismuswahrheiten (1936), a document that challenged Nazi racial ideology and stressed the importance of both the Old and New Testaments. Unfortunately, it also reinforced a number of anti-Jewish stereotypes and declared that German Catholics should give special consideration to their own Volk. Archbishop Conrad Gröber (Freiburg) sent mixed messages to the faithful by stressing obedience to the state and warning that “from the depravity and loss of faith among the youth it is only a very small step to the world view of our bitterest enemies in the east” (115). Nevertheless, Catholic authorities in Baden put up a more spirited defense of traditional religious instruction than Protestant leaders in the same region.

Desmond Bell’s “Ein Fehler im System? Das Alte Testament im preussischen Religionsunterricht nach 1933” illustrates the extent to which Prussian school curricula were stripped of religious content, especially that which was seen to be the result of Jewish influences. The National Socialist Teachers’ Association opposed religious instruction in general and the Old Testament in particular, whereas guidelines from the Protestant Reich Church administration called for removal of the Old Testament from religious instruction except those cases where it could be used to “demonstrate” that Jesus came to do battle with Judaism. Bell finds evidence that, in spite of these pressures, Old Testament material was still included in some religion texts as late as 1942. However, the content was reduced dramatically over time, and what was left was severed from Judaism and reframed in such a way as to promote an antisemitic and National Socialist worldview.

Johannes Wischmeyer’s “Transformationen des Bildungsraums im bayrischen ‘Schulkampf’ 1933-1938” focuses less on the religious curriculum within schools and more on the abolition of Protestant denominational school in Bavaria. In addition to curtailing religious instruction and removing clergy from teaching positions, both the state and the National Socialist Teachers’ Association put tremendous pressure on parents to send their children to Gemeinschaftschulen rather than denominational schools. This pressure included multiple home visits by teachers who denounced confessional schools as “residual schools” or “peasant schools” (128). The regional Bavarian Protestant Church responded with its own campaign to shore up support for denominational schools, but by 1936 only 2000 Protestant students remained enrolled, and the last denominational school was forced to close in 1937.

One of the most interesting contributions to the volume is David Käbisch’s, “Eine Typologie des Versagens? Das Personal und Lehrprofil für das Fach Religion an den nationalsozialistischen Hochschulen fur Lehrerbildung.” In this article, Käbisch surveys the available data on 818 religion courses offered at teacher training institutes throughout Germany, comparing what was taught before and after 1933. In addition to recommending approaches for further research, Käbisch identifies patterns that are already apparent. For example, after 1933 it was more common to see topics such as “The Protestant Faith as a Particular Expression of the German Character, Demonstrated by Great Men of German History (Luther, Bach, Arndt, Lagarde, Bismarck, Hindenburg, etc.)” (175). Of the courses offered between 1939 and 1945, 8 addressed explicitly Christological themes, 26 focused on Martin Luther, and 43 dealt with “contemporary problems.” It is also possible to track changes in the priorities of individual professors. For example, Fritz Hoffmann of the Pädagogische Akademie in Elbing taught courses on “The Kingdom of God in the Sermons of Jesus” and similar topics before 1933, but after 1933 he was teaching subjects like “German Christianity: State, Church and School” and “The German Concept of Honor and Christian Morality” (169, 185-189). Following Käbisch’s analysis, Appendix II (pages 174-214) includes a complete list of the individual courses, identifying the instructors, denominations, institutions, and dates.

One other chapter of interest to church historians is Hein Retter’s “Protestantische Milieus vor und nach 1933. Der Christlich-Soziale Volksdienst und der Reichsverband deutscher evangelischer Schulgemeinden e.V.” Both the political party and the school association in this study emerged out of free-church, Biblicist, and Pietistic circles in Württemberg, Westphalia, Hanover, and the Rhineland. Their supporters opposed rationalism, liberalism, and Marxism, yet they were also loyal to the Weimar Republic and willing to advance their culturally conservative agendas through a democratic process. Although many in the Schulgemeindeverband initially expressed enthusiasm for the Nazi state, seeing it as a solution to moral decline, it was not long before they moved toward a more oppositional stance. Retter applauds their publication of an agenda for religious instruction that was inspired by the Barmen Declaration, affirmed the important of both the Old and New Testaments, and refused to make National Socialism the standard for religious education.

Altogether, the contributors to this volume present a fascinating account of both continuity and change in religious education following the Nazi revolution in 1933. A few chapters address the postwar era as well, but overall this period receives less attention and the results are less striking. Several contributors mention the challenges posed by incomplete records and the limited range of the sources. For example, it is easier to identify the content of text books and course plans than to know what actually happened in the classroom and how it was experienced by children and youth. In spite of such limitations, this collective effort by the Arbeitskreis für Historische Religionspädagogik provides important insights into how the policies of state and church played out at the local level among ordinary people. They take us beyond institutional histories and church politics and into the world of students, teachers, professors, and parents, all of whom had their own role to play alongside religious and political leaders.

Review of Katharina Kunter and Jens Holger Schjørring, eds., Europäisches und Globales Christentum/European and Global Christianity: Herausforderungen und Transformationen im 20. Jahrhundert/Challenges and Transformations in the 20th Century

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ACCH Quarterly Vol. 18, No. 3, September 2012

Review of Katharina Kunter and Jens Holger Schjørring, eds., Europäisches und Globales Christentum/European and Global Christianity: Herausforderungen und Transformationen im 20. Jahrhundert/Challenges and Transformations in the 20^th Century (Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 2011), 381 Pp. ISBN-13: 978-3-525-55706-8.

By Heath A. Spencer, Seattle University

What were the most important developments in twentieth-century Christianity? If the focus is on Europe, we might emphasize secularization, declining church attendance, Christian complicity in an era of war and genocide, or the challenges faced by churches under various dictatorships. If we are more global in scope, our attention might be drawn to the peculiarity of the United States in comparison to Europe, the dramatic expansion of Christianity in the global south, the global prominence of Pentecostal-charismatic varieties of Christianity, and relations between European and non-European Christianities during a transition from colonial empires to newly independent states. All of these themes are addressed in European and Global Christianity, a collection of papers presented in Denmark in 2008 at the conference “Taking Stock of Church History in the Twentieth Century from an International Perspective.” While the book does not propose a new master narrative for the history of world Christianity, individual contributors offer an indication of themes and questions that would have to be included in such a project.

In the first section, “Transformations and Historical Turning Points in the Twentieth Century,” Hartmut Lehmann and Hugh McLeod highlight broad trends in Europe and the wider world. Both see a weakening of confessional boundaries, greater religious pluralism and a dramatic decline in church attendance to be among the most important developments in European Christianity over the course of the twentieth century. McLeod identifies the 1960s as the tipping point for this ‘decline of Christendom’ but notes that the United States diverged from the European pattern in the latter part of the century. Lehmann is more attentive to trends beyond Europe and North America, drawing attention to the surge of Pentecostal-charismatic forms of Christianity and the complexity of Christian-Muslim relations. Within Europe, he also sees positive developments such as greater international understanding and a thorough discrediting of Christian anti-Judaism.

Aud V. Tønnessen and Uffe Østergård are less interested in megatrends and international comparisons than in the reactionary or progressive tendencies in Scandinavian Christianity. Tønnessen notes the persistence of an ideology of ‘gender complementarity’, not only in early twentieth-century debates about birth control and sexual morality, but also in more recent controversies over the ordination of women and the blessing of same-sex unions. Østergård’s “Lutheranism, nationalism and the universal welfare state” challenges the conventional view that trade unions and social democratic parties deserve all the credit for the modern welfare state. Instead, he concludes that “the Danish welfare state is a result of secularized Lutheranism in national garment rather than international socialism” (93).

The second section of the book offers two articles on the world wars and their repercussions for the churches. Martin Greschat shows both change and diversity in the responses of Christians to the violence of the twentieth century. During the First World War, most churches enthusiastically endorsed the slaughter. However, in the interwar period, leaders in the ecumenical movement were promoting peace and reconciliation and challenging the absolute claims of nations and states. During the Second World War, many Christians supported their governments out of a sense of fatalism and obedience to authority, but religiously-motivated resistance was also a possibility. Unlike Greschat, Nicholas Hope tells a more uniform story of Christian capitulation to the claims of ‘the State.’ Unfortunately, he does little more than raise interesting talking points (for example, the role of the churches in what James Sheehan has called the rise of the ‘civilian state’) and then drop them without further development.

The third section of the book addresses the Protestant and Catholic churches in postwar Europe. In his comparison of East German and other Eastern European churches, Miklós Tomka demonstrates that labels like ‘conformity’ and ‘resistance’ fail to do justice to the complexity of situations faced by churches and churchgoers in east bloc countries, where it was not always easy to distinguish between hypocrisy and pragmatic survival strategies. If we imagine ‘church’ to mean the clerical hierarchy and ‘resistance’ to mean openly confronting dictatorship, then these churches were seriously compromised. On the other hand, if we focus on the congregational level and pay attention to more subtle forms of opposition, then churches appear to be among the most important sites of opposition to dictatorship in the twentieth century, particularly after 1945. Tomka’s sociological analysis is complemented by Dag Thorkildsen’s historical theology in “Unconditional Christian Loyalty towards the Rulers?” Although Luther and his early modern successors left little room for challenging the social or political status quo, Norwegian theologians of the twentieth century interpreted Romans 13 (“Everyone must submit himself to the governing authorities…”) in such a way as to justify popular sovereignty on the one hand and resistance to German occupiers and Norwegian collaborators on the other. In the study of scriptural religions, the history of interpretation is at least as important as the texts themselves, and “Norwegian history shows that Lutheranism does not necessarily have to lead to an unconditional Christian loyalty towards the rulers” (268).

Harry Oelke and Karl-Joseph Hummel offer narrower studies of the German Protestant and Catholic churches. Oelke highlights the ongoing relevance of national studies, noting that Germany’s recent past has given a particular twist to postwar debates among German Protestants over political engagement, collective guilt, and nationalism. Hummel surveys the research on the Catholic Church in Germany, much of which has focused on the Nazi era. Immediate postwar narratives of Catholic resistance and victimhood gave way in the 1960s to critical appraisals arguing that an illiberal and anti-modern Catholic hierarchy helped facilitate the Nazi ‘seizure of power.’ More recent scholarship strikes a balance, recognizing Catholic Resistenz to national socialist ideology and its totalitarian claims as well as broad areas of complicity. Hummel also explores cases where political, moral, and theological agendas have shaped and at times distorted postwar memories and representations of German Catholicism.

The articles in the final section of the book return to some of the global trends mentioned by Lehmann in the opening article. Klaus Koschorke stresses the need for a coherent narrative of World Christianity and points to promising areas for comparative study such as church independence movements in Asia and Africa, colonial-ethical discourses, and the year 1989 as a global caesura (rather than merely European). Kevin Ward and Ezra Gebremedhim follow up by highlighting the unique dynamics of African Christianities rather than presenting them as African adaptations of a ‘European’ religion. Ward argues that in Africa, religious pluralism has long been the norm, and “religion has been the midwife of modernity rather than its opponent” (303). As a result, African Christians do not feel compelled to fight the same kinds of culture wars as have Europeans and North Americans. Ezra Gebremedhim assesses progress toward independence and equality in the relationship between the Ethiopian Evangelical Church Mekane Yesus and the Church of Sweden. The nature of that equal partnership is revealed in the current dialogue between the two churches over the Church of Sweden’s decision to bless same-sex partnerships. The section ends with Viggo Mortensen’s reflections on the state of Christianity as a global religion in a pluralistic world. Mortensen identifies fundamentalism, relativism, and syncretism as threats to the integrity of Christianity, arguing that Christians must hold on to their convictions while engaging in dialogue with others in a spirit of konvivenz. Unfortunately, Mortensen’s call for konvivenz is compromised by his references to ‘Eurabia’ and ‘dhimmitude’ as well as the dubious claim that ‘Islam’ has no history of multicultural sympathy with the ‘other.’ One is left wondering what he means when he poses questions like, “What will win out: Protestantisation of religion or the islamisation of Christianity?” (368).

Overall, this book delivers what the title promises, a useful constellation of articles on European and global Christianity, covering key moments, themes, and trends over the course of the twentieth century. Chapters are in English or German, and the authors represent a variety of countries (Germany, the United Kingdom, Denmark, Norway, Sweden, and Hungary) and disciplines (church history, theology, and sociology of religion). The middle sections privilege European church history, but the others offer a range of global perspectives that suggest new ways to imagine and contextualize European developments. The individual articles are uneven in terms of quality, significance, and originality, but the collection as a whole gives evidence of the richness and diversity of twentieth-century Christianities, within and outside of Europe.

Article Note: Douglas Pratt and Barbara Göb, “Islam and Christian-Muslim Relations in Germany: Recent Developments and Continuing Issues”

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ACCH Quarterly Vol. 17, No. 4, December 2011

Article Note: Douglas Pratt and Barbara Göb, “Islam and Christian-Muslim Relations in Germany: Recent Developments and Continuing Issues,” Islam and Christian-Muslim Relations 18 no. 1 (January 2007): 43-65.

By Heath A. Spencer, Seattle University

Pratt and Göb argue that Christian-Muslim relations in Germany are basically sound, but “a growing sense of unease keeps public interest closely attentive to any conflicts between Muslim habits and secular laws and customs” (44). Such fears have had an impact on inter-religious dialogue, where the focus has shifted from “theological rapprochement” to “questions of acceptance of democratic and liberal values” (53). The notion that Islam might be incompatible with the modern, secular state mirrors suspicions about German Catholics during the Kulturkampf of the 1870s.

The authors describe a wide range of organizations involved in dialogue activities within Germany, including the Intercultural Council, the Round Table of World Religions, Abrahamic Forums, the Christian-Islamic Society, the World Council for Religion and Peace, and the Coordination Council of Associations of Christian-Islamic Dialogue in Germany. The challenges of this work are significant. Christian theologians are often more theologically liberal than the Islamic laypersons they encounter in interfaith conversations. Nominal Muslims and Christians are less hung up on theological differences but have little interest in interreligious dialogue as such. The prevalence of hostile media images of Islam is also a barrier to productive discussion, as are some misguided attempts to use dialogue as a way to pressure Muslims to make symbolic, public affirmations of “Western values”.

The authors see Catholic theologian Heiner Bielefeldt’s recommendations as a more promising approach. Bielefeldt, director of the German Institute for Human Rights from 2003 to 2009 and UN Special Rapporteur for Freedom of Religion or Belief since 2010, argues that the best defense of the secular, constitutional state is to guarantee religious freedom. For Muslims, this includes Islamic religious education in state schools (comparable to what is already offered for Protestant, Catholic, and Jewish students), the right to build mosques without undue hindrances, and legal accommodations to Islamic burial practices. In the end, the authors caution that there is no simple answer to current controversies, but careful and sustained work aimed at mutual understanding will be more productive than sensationalism and stereotyping.

Review of Jeremy Cohen, Christ Killers: The Jews and the Passion from the Bible to the Big Screen

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ACCH Quarterly Vol. 17, No. 1, March 2011

Review of Jeremy Cohen, Christ Killers: The Jews and the Passion from the Bible to the Big Screen (New York: Oxford University Press, 2007), 313 pp. ISBN: 978-0-19-517841-8.

By Heath A. Spencer, Seattle University

In this book, Cohen explores the origin and evolution of the Christ-killer myth from the first century to the present, focusing his analysis on religious texts, sculptures, paintings, stage plays, and films. The result is a fascinating but sobering study of an idea that has troubled Christian-Jewish relations and contributed to considerable anti-Jewish violence.

Cohen begins by noting that New Testament stories of Jesus’ crucifixion stood firmly within Jewish traditions, drawing inspiration from the Akedah, Passover, and “suffering servant” motifs as well as themes like deliverance and atonement that were already present in Jewish theology. Unfortunately, the passion narratives also assign Jewish leaders a key role in Jesus’ arrest and trial, and they depict a Jewish crowd that demands his death. In Matthew’s Gospel, the crowd even cries out, “His blood be on us and our children!” Cohen is aware that Christians do not all draw the same conclusions from these stories, and he introduces the reader to a range of views among contemporary New Testament scholars, from those who see the passion narratives as historically reliable to those who understand them as “prophecy historicized” (23) or “the Christian faith put in narrative form” (16). However, even if some of this scholarship has the potential to mitigate anti-Jewish readings of the New Testament, most Christians are not familiar with it and are more likely to be influenced by a long tradition of anti-Jewish thought that builds on and embellishes the already problematic content of the New Testament passion narratives.

Cohen continues with a survey of Christian theologians from antiquity to the early modern era who commented on the passion, noting that most of them promoted the idea – already present in Matthew’s Gospel – that all Jews were guilty of the crucifixion. Theologians from Augustine to Anselm argued that first-century Jews killed Jesus in ignorance, not realizing he was the Son of God. However, from the twelfth century on a more sinister view gained currency, as theologians like Peter Lombard, Thomas Aquinas, and John Duns Scotus imagined that Jewish leaders were willfully ignorant, killing Jesus out of hatred and envy. They would have known Jesus was divine, so the argument ran, if they had not been blinded by their malice. The notion that Jews were obstinate in their unbelief coincided with more hostile appraisals of Talmudic Judaism and dovetailed with accusations of ritual murder, ritual cannibalism, and host desecration that emerged in the twelfth century and continued into the modern era. Devotional manuals from this period also instructed readers to imagine Jesus’ suffering (along with those who inflicted it) at length and in exquisite detail. Together, these developments indicate an intensification of the Christ-killer myth and a tendency to see contemporary Jews as intentional Christ killers.

Cohen’s exploration of “The Myth and the Arts” reveals a fascinating correlation between developments in Christian theology and the visual arts. For example, early medieval depictions of the figures “Synagoga” and “Ecclesia” reflected the belief that Jews rejected Christ out of ignorance, whereas works from later periods depicted Jews (but not Romans) enthusiastically torturing Christ in his final hours. Often, the Jewish tormentors were shown wearing the same kinds of clothing as the artist’s contemporaries, collapsing past and present in a provocative manner.

The book ends with analysis of the Christ-killer myth on stage and on the screen. Cohen tracks the evolution of the famous Oberammergaupassion play, which had a strong anti-Jewish slant until quite recently but then went through considerable revisions in 1980, 1984, 1990, and 2000. The blood curse of Matthew’s Gospel has been eliminated, Pilate is portrayed less sympathetically, and Jesus’ Jewish identity is acknowledged. However, the Jewish priests still conspire against Jesus and the Jewish crowd still demands his death, so Cohen sees the changes as largely cosmetic. Films about the passion also get mixed reviews. Il Vangelo secondo Matteo (1964) portrays Jews as obstinate, but it also universalizes the story, making it suitable as a commentary on twentieth-century Italy. The Gospel of John (2003) does a better job than the Fourth Gospel itself in placing Jesus in his Jewish context, and it projects much of the evil onto a single Jewish antagonist. Nevertheless, Cohen still sees an anti-Jewish bias in the depiction of the Pharisees and the crowd. The Last Temptation of Christ (1988) and Jesus of Montreal (1989) largely avoid overt anti-Judaism, though the public controversy over Scorcese’s film brought some antisemitic rhetoric out into the open. Mel Gibson’s The Passion of the Christ (2004), on the other hand, exonerates Pilate, demonizes Jesus’ antagonists while highlighting their “Jewishness,” and serves as a stark reminder that the Christ-killer myth still resonates with many in spite of all the work that has gone into debunking it.

One serious weakness of Cohen’s book is its almost exclusive emphasis on intellectuals, artists, and other elite individuals. Several other recent studies on religion and violence demonstrate that the behavior of ordinary people did not always correspond to the decrees of rulers or the writings of intellectuals. Benjamin Kaplan’s Divided by Faith: Religious Conflict and the Practice of Toleration shows that in early modern Europe, hateful ideas were often combined with a kind of pragmatic toleration. New Testament scholar Amy-Jill Levine (The Misunderstood Jew: The Church and the Scandal of the Jewish Jesus) sees a similar phenomenon in contemporary American society. Cohen promises that his book will explore “the direct effect that theology had on the treatment of Jews in Christian lands” during the Middle Ages (6), but in most cases he simply assumes that bad theology will have uniformly bad effects, as if ideas had a consistent and autonomous power regardless of context. For example, Cohen presents the famous example of Thomas of Monmouth, who used a ritual murder accusation to promote the cult of St. William of Norwich. However, one might also want to know what impact such a story had in a given locale. Did it lead to popular violence, judicial murder, or apathy? How many people cared enough to visit the shrine? Anthony Bayle’s “Fictions of Judaism in England before 1290” (in Patricia Skinner, ed., Jews in Medieval Britain) reveals that donations to the shrine of St. William of Norwich eventually fell as low as 6d per year, an indication that ritual murder accusations did not always gain traction or maintain their appeal. Medievalists Robert Chazan (In the Year 1096…The First Crusade and the Jews) and Jonathan Elukin (Living Together, Living Apart: Rethinking Jewish-Christian Relations in the Middle Ages) also highlight the broad spectrum of Christian attitudes and behaviors toward Jews, even during episodes of intense conflict. Understanding the causes of anti-Jewish violence – or its absence – requires more than a mere survey of anti-Jewish ideas.

Cohen does acknowledge important shifts in Christian teaching following the Holocaust, most notably in the Catholic declaration Nostra Aetate. However, he finds such developments insufficient because they fail to challenge the historicity of the New Testament passion narratives and often refuse to acknowledge the contribution of the churches to a long history of anti-Jewish thought and action. If the source of the Christ-killer myth is the New Testament itself, Christians are faced with an intractable problem, and Cohen expresses little optimism they will achieve a satisfactory resolution. Nevertheless, his book can raise awareness among Christians that their scriptures and institutions have created an anti-Jewish mythology with destructive potential. Perhaps such awareness will deny the myth some of its power, even if it can’t be eradicated.

Review of Hubert Wolf, Pope and Devil: The Vatican’s Archives and the Third Reich

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ACCH Quarterly Vol. 15, No. 3, September 2010

Review of Hubert Wolf, Pope and Devil: The Vatican’s Archives and the Third Reich, translated by Kenneth Kronenberg (Cambridge, Mass. and London: The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 2010), 325 pp. ISBN: 978-0-674-05081-5.

By Heath A. Spencer, Seattle University

In this English translation of Papst und Teufel (first published in 2008), Hubert Wolf successfully challenges the conspiracy theories and sensationalism of a number of playwrights, novelists, journalists, and historians who have assessed the relationship between the Catholic Church and the Nazi state. Remarkably, he does so without letting Catholic leaders off the hook or covering up their very real moral failures. Making use of recently released materials from the Vatican Secret Archives, he has produced a provocative and highly readable account of the “view from Rome” during the turbulent decades between the two world wars, as well as new insights into the way Pope Pius XI and Eugenio Pacelli (the future Pope Pius XII) understood, interpreted, and responded to the early stages of a catastrophe that culminated in world war and genocide after 1939.

Wolf begins with an analysis of Pacelli as nuncio in Germany from 1917 to 1929. The failure of Benedict XV’s peace appeal in 1917 seems to have convinced Pacelli that direct papal intervention in the Great War (and future conflicts) was ill-advised. Pacelli’s reports from this period also reveal his preoccupation with the ills of modernism (ranging from liberalism and socialism to contraceptives and coeducational sports) and his desire to make state-oriented German Catholic bishops more responsive to Vatican directives. Although Pacelli was anti-democratic and anti-socialist, he was pragmatic enough to recognize the need for the Catholic Center Party to work with the Social Democrats in the Weimar Republic, and although he displayed a level of anti-Semitism that was typical among European Catholics in this era, he strongly condemned the virulent racism of völkisch groups he encountered in Germany during the 1920s.

Wolf follows up with an assessment of attitudes toward Jews and Judaism in the Vatican during the 1920s. Unlike Daniel Jonah Goldhagen, who posits a uniform and essentialist Catholic anti-Semitism, Wolf finds evidence of diverse views ranging from the philo-Semitism of Amici Israel, a Catholic organization promoting Jewish-Christian reconciliation, to the vehemently anti-Jewish orientation of Raffaele Merry del Val, head of the Holy Office under Pius XI. Unfortunately, Pius XI took the side of the Holy Office in a controversy over reform of the Good Friday liturgy, leading to the censure of philo-Semites in the Congregation of Rites and the dissolution of Amici Israel. Pius XI’s famous condemnation of anti-Semitism in 1928 was an attempt to deflect accusations that might emerge when he dissolved a pro-Jewish Catholic organization, as well as a way to distinguish between an “acceptable” Catholic anti-Judaism and racist anti-Semitism. The back story Wolf reveals to Pius XI’s decree is a more nuanced story of moral failure than the one Goldhagen tells, but it still seriously undermines simplistic representations of Pius XI as a courageous opponent of anti-Semitism.

Wolf’s chapter on the Concordat of 1933 challenges the “package-deal thesis” promoted by Klaus Scholder, who suggested that Pacelli, as Papal Secretary of State, pressured German bishops to lift the ban on Catholic membership in the Nazi Party and encouraged the Center Party to support the Enabling Act—both in order to secure passage of a Concordat with the German government. Nuncial reports as well as Pacelli’s notes on meetings with Pius XI and various ambassadors to the Holy See reveal that Pacelli was caught off guard by the German bishops when they announced they were lifting the ban. Wolf argues persuasively that if Pacelli had been pulling the strings, he would have demanded something in return for this concession. Instead, he had to negotiate the Concordat without some of his key bargaining chips.

In the end, both Pius XI and Pacelli made unpalatable compromises in order to preserve the Church’s ability to provide pastoral care under hostile regimes. It was easy for them, as well as the German episcopate, to condemn Nazi ideologues like Alfred Rosenberg, but much harder to openly condemn a head of state—even Adolf Hitler. In such cases, they preferred indirect approaches, refuting ideas that were contrary to Catholic teaching without naming the authors of those ideas. Even in the context of race war and genocide after 1939, Pacelli (by then Pope Pius XII) indicated that he preferred public action by German bishops to direct intervention by the Vatican. When such action was insufficient, Pius XII still considered his own hands tied.

Pope and Devil, by revealing the decision-making processes in the Vatican in such rich detail, presents us with a nuanced story that includes moral successes and failures as well as a large gray zone in between. Wolf’s theological training, ordination, and prior years of experience in the Vatican Archives work to his advantage as he assesses the interplay of individual personalities and institutional dynamics in the Catholic hierarchy. His ability to transmit his scholarship to specialists and non-specialists alike earned him the Communicator Award from the Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft in 2004, and it continues to play out in his leadership of a critical online edition of Pacelli’s reports to Rome during the latter’s years as nuncio in Germany. Some American readers will be disappointed that Wolf does not do more to engage credible scholarship on this side of the Atlantic, but perhaps his priority was to address readers who are more likely to have heard of figures like Goldhagen, John Cornwell, and Dan Brown—even though such authors make relatively easy targets. In any case, the book is a refreshing contribution to a longstanding but still unresolved debate about the Vatican’s responses to National Socialism, particularly where Pacelli was involved. It will not end the “Pius war,” but by demolishing the most egregious misrepresentations on both sides, it points the way toward more productive discussions in the future.

Article Note: Heath A. Spencer, “Kulturprotestantismus and ‘Positive Christianity’: A Case for Discontinuity”

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ACCH Quarterly Vol. 15, No. 1, March 2010

Article Note: Heath A. Spencer, “Kulturprotestantismus and ‘Positive Christianity’: A Case for Discontinuity.” Kirchliche Zeitgeschichte, Heft 2/2009: 519-549.

By John S. Conway, University of British Columbia

The latest issue of Kirchliche Zeitgeschichte commemorates a number of significant anniversaries in the life of Germany’s church and state, and is entitled “2009 – A Year of Commemoration and Jubilee”. The articles however cover a wider range of topics in recent European and American church history. Only two are in English. Most notable is the contribution of ACCH member Heath Spencer of the Department of History, University of Seattle. His article discusses “Kulturprotestantismus and ‘Positive Christianity’: A Case for Discontinuity”. In this essay he refutes the opinion advanced by Richard Steigmann-Gall in his book The Holy Reich, in which he claimed that German liberal Protestantism had a striking resemblance to Nazi conceptions of Christianity. Steigmann-Gall also believed that the pro-Nazi Protestants who so loudly acclaimed Hitler in 1933 derived their views from their predecessors in the ranks of liberal Protestantism. Spencer, while acknowledging that there were some overlapping similarities, shows that Steigmann-Gall downplayed the differences between these two groups. Most liberal Protestants, for instance, were put off by the virulence of Nazi racism and appalled by the totalitarian appeal of Nazism. They did not reject the Old Testament as a Jewish document, like the pro-Nazi “German Christians”, but saw it as a valuable source of historical knowledge. In short, liberal Protestantism contained a wide variety of opinions. Rather than these proto-Nazis inspiring or turning into pro-Nazis, the situation was much more complex. This leads Spencer to claim that the discontinuities proved to be more significant than the similarities.