madbaron | For the simple tenets of their faith, most Roman Catholics rely on the catechism’s hard questions and imprimatured answers. Children in Church schools memorize its passages, which they rarely forget the rest of their lives. In the catechism, they learn that Catholic dogma does not change and, far more vividly, that Jews killed Jesus Christ. Because of that Christian concept, for the past 20 centuries anti- Semitism spread as a kind of social disease on the body of mankind. Its incidence rose and fell, but anti-Semites were never quite out of style. The ill-minded who argued all other matters could still join in contempt for Jews. It was a gentlemen’s agreement that carried into Auschwitz.
Few Catholics were ever directly taught to hate Jews. Yet Catholic teaching could not get around the New Testament account that Jews provoked the Crucifixion. The gas chambers were only the latest proof that they had not yet been pardoned. The best hope that the Church of Rome will not again seem an accomplice to genocide is the fourth chapter of its Declaration on the Relation of the Church to Non- Christian Religions, which Pope Paul VI declared Church law near the end of Vatican Council II. At no place in his address from the Chair of Peter did the Pope talk of Jules Isaac. But perhaps the archbishop of Aix, Charles de Provenchères, had made Isaac’s role perfectly clear some few years earlier. “It is a sign of the times,” the Archbishop said, “ that a layman, and a Jewish layman at that, has become the originator of a Council decree.”
Jules Isaac was a history scholar, a Legion of Honor member, and the inspector of schools in France. In 1943, he was 66, a despairing man living near Vichy, when the Germans picked up his daughter and wife. From then on, Isaac could think of little but the apathy of the Christian world before the fate of incinerated Jews. His book Jesus and Israel was published in 1948, and after reading it, Father Paul Démann in Paris searched schoolbooks and verified Isaac’s sad claim that inadvertently, if not by intent, Catholics taught contempt for Jews. Gregory Baum, an Augustinian priest born an Orthodox Jews, called it “a moving account of the love which Jesus had for his people, the Jews, and of the contempt which the Christians, later, harbored for them.”
Isaac’s book was noticed. In 1949, Pope Pius XII received its author briefly. But 11 years went by before Isaac saw real hope. In Rome, in mid-June, 1960, the French Embassy pressed Isaac on to the Holy See. Isaac wanted to see John XXIII. He was passed from the old Cardinal Eugene Tisserant to the archconservative Cardinal Alfredo Ottaviani. Ottaviani sent him on to the...
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While we shouldn't hate them, we still must not trust them or let them influence the Catholic Church or our lives.