Such arguments no doubt soothed Christian consciences. They made Christians spectators, witnesses to a divine-human drama of guilt and expiation, of punishment and final conversion. As late as 1941 Archbishop Conrad Gröber of Freiburg, who was even then supporting attempts to help persecuted Jews, stated in a pastoral letter that the sad lot of the Jews was the result of the curse that they had called down upon themselves when they murdered Christ. Anton Rauscher is correct when he writes that Catholic theology of that time reflected “a view of the Jews which provoked anti-Semitism on the one hand, while on the other undermining the ability to oppose it.” And the historian Konrad Repgen is also correct when he says that “people thought differently at that time.” But this fact, which is precisely the problem, and which distresses us today, should not be used to excuse past Catholic failure.

The way Catholics of that time viewed Jews in no way diminishes the fact that many Catholics—priests, religious, laity, and above all Pius XII—helped a great many Jews, sometimes at the risk of the rescuers’ lives. There was little hatred or personal animosity to Jews as individuals. Their steadily increasing misery, culminating finally in their deportation to an unknown fate, aroused indignation or at least pity. This was especially true in Holland and France, where some bishops spoke out clearly against the deportations.

Sympathy for the increasing distress and misery of the Jews certainly seems the best explanation for the words of Pius XI to Belgian pilgrims in September 1938, which are constantly cited for apologetic purposes. With tears in his eyes the aged and ailing Pope cried out spontaneously: “Anti-Semitism is inadmissible. Spiritually we are all Semites.” The words were a reference to liturgical texts in the Missal that the Belgian pilgrims had just presented: the phrase in the Eucharistic Canon, after the narrative of institution, about the “offering of Abel, Abraham, and Melchizedek.” The Pope’s words were never officially published; they were reported later in some Belgian papers. As David Kertzer writes, the words were “heartfelt and sincere, the cry of a man who saw a dark shadow growing ever darker across Europe.”

In any event, the Pope’s words remained without influence on official Church policy. They were a one-time emotional outburst of a large-hearted and impulsive man who counted Jews among his personal friends. Despite the fact that Italian racial laws had been issued shortly before this address, Pius XI did not mention them. Nor is this really surprising. For immediately before the famous words, he declared: “We recognize the right of all people to defend themselves, to take measures against all who threaten their legitimate interests.” Only then did he say: “But anti-Semitism is inadmissible—spiritually we are all Semites.” It is reasonable to understand the words as meaning: legitimate defense against undue Jewish influence, Yes; “anti-Semitism,” hatred of the Jews as a people, No.

Had the Church really wanted to mount effective opposition to the fate that awaited the Jews, it would have had to condemn—from the very start—not only racism but anti-Semitism in any form, including the social anti-Semitism espoused by not a few churchmen. This the Church never did: not in 1933, not in 1937, nor in 1938 or 1939. It is of course true that there was no direct road from Christian anti-Judaism and anti-Semitism to Auschwitz. For Christians the solution to the “Jewish question” was conversion, not liquidation (although the history of Christian anti-Judaism also features examples of the latter). But racism alone did not lead to Auschwitz, either. Something more was needed: hatred of Jews. Rooted in large part in Christian tradition, it was this hatred that made modern anti-Semitism possible.

It is a truism to say that racism devoid of hatred for the Jews would not have endangered them. Even though the racist anti-Semitism of the Nazis and Christian anti-Judaism or Christian anti-Semitism differ fundamentally and are even mutually incompatible, the precondition that made the Nazis’ racial anti-Semitism (which led in turn to Auschwitz) even conceivable was the heritage of traditional anti-Judaism and anti-Semitism. Together they created what Steven Theodore Katz, Director of the Center for Judaic Studies at the University of Boston, has called the “terrifying otherness” of the Jews, thus stigmatizing and demonizing them. Traditional Christian anti-Judaism was the breeding ground for what Jules Isaac has called “the teaching of contempt.” Without this contempt modern racism would never have been able to forge its alliance with enmity toward Jews and anti-Semitism. At a time when no one could even have imagined Hitler’s “final solution” (not even the bureaucrats who would later carry it out), the only thing that could have derailed the trains to Auschwitz—if indeed that was ever possible—was unmistakable condemnation of anti-Semitism in any form.

It is true that the Church’s condemnation of racism was an implicit rejection of the policy that led to the Holocaust. Seen, however, against the background of Christian and official Church attitudes towards the Jews, this was insufficient to prevent the inexorable course of events. That would have required a mobilization of Christian consciences by Protestants as well as Catholics. Germany was, after all, a predominantly Protestant country. On that side of the confessional divide, however, things were no better for the Jews: in fact they were worse. Most of the official Protestant Church failed. In growing measure German Protestants were receptive to the Nazis’ racist and volkisch ideology and to their myth of the German people’s rebirth. Even the “Confessing Church” (the most anti-Nazi group in German Protestantism) continued, like the Catholic Church, to uphold traditional Christian anti-Judaism, and defended only baptized Jews.

Later episcopal protests against the deportation of Jews in Holland and France cannot conceal the fact, noted by the respected Italian historian Giovanni Miccoli, that up to then not a single bishop anywhere had said a word about discrimination against non-baptized Jews. During the 1930s no one ever imagined that the culmination of the persecution of Jews would be their systematic liquidation. Hence people were unable to perceive the murderous danger that lurked behind the Nazis’ racist theories (and, later on, the mass deportations), let alone connect it with something like the Holocaust.

This was not on anyone’s horizon. The only motive people could discern for what the Nazis were doing was enmity towards Jews pure and simple. Anyone wanting to avert the Jews’ fate would have had to condemn even nonracist forms of anti-Semitism. For it was these, at least in the early years, that gave the Nazis’ racial policy a certain legitimacy even in Catholic eyes. And anti-Semitism was what made the Nazis’ racist ideology—the deifying of “Aryan man”—into an engine of death for Jews. Questioning the legitimacy of the Nazis’ racial policy, and possibly even slowing it down, required the condemnation from the very start of measures that discriminated against Jews and deprived them of their rights—as well as condemnation of the regime that instituted such measures. This is precisely what Edith Stein, bitterly aware that the German bishops were allowing themselves to be deceived, demanded of Pius XI in her now widely publicized letter of early April 1933.

This was the very time when Hitler was trying to convince the bishops of his benevolent intentions towards the Church in order to obtain a Concordat. Far from excluding the “Jewish question,” Hitler put it front and center. Receiving the representative of the German Bishops’ Conference, Bishop Wilhelm Berning of Osnabrück, in audience on April 26, Hitler declared: “I have been attacked because of my handling of the Jewish question. The Catholic Church considered the Jews pestilent for fifteen hundred years, put them in ghettos, etc., because it recognized the Jews for what they were. In the epoch of liberalism the danger was no longer recognized. I am moving back toward the time in which a fifteen-hundred-year-long tradition was implemented. I do not set race over religion, but I recognize the representatives of this race as pestilent for the state and for the Church, and perhaps I am thereby doing Christianity a great service by pushing them out of schools and public functions.” The transcript that records these remarks contains no response by Bishop Berning. This is hardly surprising: for a Catholic Bishop in 1933 there was really nothing terribly objectionable in this historically correct reminder. And on this occasion, as always, Hitler was concealing his true intentions.

It is also true that no institution opposed the Nazis’ deification of the state, people, and race as clearly as the Catholic Church. To judge rightly, however, the significance for the Jews of the condemnation of racial absolutism in the encyclical Mit brennender Sorge (issued, as noted above, very late in the day), we must keep in mind the morally compromised historical context. By 1937 clarification of the Church’s doctrine had become urgently necessary in order to refute the Nazis’ mendacious anti-Catholic propaganda. This was the encyclical’s precise purpose: to defend the Church in the face of totalitarian dictatorship. As Secretary of State Pacelli wrote to Cardinal Faulhaber on April 2, 1937, the encyclical was theologically and pastorally necessary “to preserve the true faith in Germany.” The encyclical also defended baptized Jews, considered still Jews by the Nazis because of racial theories that the Church could not accept. But the encyclical never discussed Jews in general.

Pacelli himself added to Faulhaber’s milder draft of the encyclical the well-known and more sharply worded passage: “Whoever exalts race, or the people, or the state, or a particular form of state, or the depositories of power, or any other fundamental value of the human community—however necessary and honorable be their function in worldly things—whoever raises these notions above their standard value and divinizes them to an idolatrous level, distorts and perverts an order of the world planned and created by God.” Speaking as pope to the cardinals on June 2, 1945, the author of this passage gave what may be considered its authentic interpretation. “The fundamental incompatibility of the National Socialist state and the Catholic Church culminates in this sentence of the encyclical. Once this had become clear, the Church could not refrain, without being unfaithful to its mission, from stating its position before the whole world.” Astonishingly, there is not a single reference in this allocution, delivered a month after the end of the war in Europe, to the slaughter of millions of Jews. Instead the Pope, with his vision still limited to Catholics and Church concerns, lamented the killing of thousands of priests, religious, and laypeople. He added: “With virtual unanimity German Catholics recognized that the encyclical Mit brennender Sorge gave direction, consolation, and strength to all who took the Christian religion seriously and wished to put it into practice.”

It is clear that as late as June 1945, and despite knowledge of the Holocaust, Pius XII still did not view the condemnation of racism as something intended to benefit the Jews. And it is also questionable whether the condemnation was so viewed in 1937. The same may be said of the oft-cited “Syllabus against Racism” (1938). This Vatican document says nothing about Jews or their persecution, but does mention “grief at the terrible persecution to which, as everyone knows, the Church in Germany is exposed.”

The general condemnation of racism of course included the Nazis’ anti-Semitic racial mania, and condemned it implicitly. The question, however, is not what the Church’s theological position with regard to Nazi racism and anti-Semitism was in 1937, but whether Church statements were clear enough for everyone to realize that the Church included Jews in its pastoral concern, thus summoning Christian consciences to solidarity with them. In light of what we have seen, it seems clear that the answer to this question must be No. In 1937 the Church was concerned not with the Jews but with entirely different matters that the Church considered more important and more urgent. An explicit defense of the Jews might well have jeopardized success in these other areas.

This is confirmed by a remarkable (and sadly characteristic) exchange in November 1941 between Cardinal Faulhaber and Adolf Cardinal Bertram, President of the Fulda Bishops’ Conference. Faulhaber wrote that he was being asked by laypeople whether the bishops could not do something about the “brutal deportation of non-Aryans to Poland under inhuman conditions paralleled only in the African slave trade.” Bertram replied that in view of the Church’s limited ability to influence the regime’s policy, the bishops must “concentrate on other concerns which are more important for the Church and more far-reaching”; in particular “the ever more urgent question of how best to prevent anti-Christian and anti-Church influences on the education of Catholic youth.”

This concentration on specific pastoral concerns and Church affairs was already dominant in 1933. The Catholic Church was in imminent danger. Priority had to be given to the conclusion of a Concordat guaranteeing Church rights. Defending Jews was inadvisable, Cardinal Faulhaber wrote to Pacelli on April 10, 1933, “because that would transform the attack on the Jews into an attack on the Church; and because the Jews are able to look after themselves” (these are the same arguments used in Faulhaber’s letter to Wurm two days earlier). Needless to say, the assumption that the Jews could look after themselves turned out to be a monumental error.

After the Catholic Church had spent four years trying, with the help of the Concordat, to keep its head above water through a kind of “hostile cooperation” with the regime, it finally had to clarify its position and take a stand if the faithful were not to become hopelessly confused. At least until the outbreak of war, Church pronouncements, as well as its diplomacy, were restricted to intra-Church concerns. This was true in Italy as well, where the Vatican’s protest against the Italian racial laws (autumn 1938) concerned only baptized Jews, and the Church’s right, guaranteed in the Italian Concordat, to regulate their marriages by canon law.

Pius XII’s 1939 encyclical Summi Pontificatus contains no explicit reference to racism. The topic is covered implicitly in the section on “The unity of the human race”—which is possibly an echo of the famous and never-issued encyclical against racism. That document would have dealt with anti-Semitism and the “Jewish question”—topics which Summi Pontificatus does not mention.

It is undeniable that the Church’s defense of natural law was a major factor in causing people to recognize the injustice of what was happening to the Jews. (This is brought out in Bishop Clemens von Galen’s July 31, 1937 commentary on Mit brennender Sorge.) This injustice was the basis for the decision to draft another encyclical that, on the basis of natural law, would condemn the persecution of the Jews explicitly. “Equality in natural law,” however, was not equivalent in the Church’s eyes to equality in civil law. What the Church defended above all was the right of physical inviolability, property rights, the right of parents to bring up their children in the parents’ faith. The Church did not necessarily advocate equal political and economic rights. Indeed, the Church had denied these rights to Jews for centuries. In Christian eyes Jews remained a danger in politics and economics.

Moreover, the contemplated encyclical against racism and anti-Semitism was never published, and the drafts that have come to light in recent years do not make entirely pleasant reading. We can be thankful that the document never reached the level of papal teaching. Gustav Gundlach’s draft, for instance, called Jewish emancipation “an error,” and defended the “social separation of the people of Israel” as a divinely willed necessity to “prevent harmful contacts between Christians and Jews.” The draft condemns as unjust and a violation of charity “laws which withhold civil rights from baptized Jews, thus interfering illegitimately with the Church’s marriage laws.” That was a matter of legitimate concern. But the perspective remains very limited.

And it was precisely this perspective which dominated. Consider another letter from Cardinal Faulhaber to Cardinal Bertram, written on October 23, 1936. “The state is justified in proceeding against Jewish excesses in civil society, especially when Jewish Bolshevists and Communists endanger public order. With regard, however, to Jews who enter the Catholic Church . . . the state can have every confidence that they are not Communists or Bolshevists.” The passage immediately following shows why the rejection of racism is so crucial: “With their insistent principle, ‘Once a Jew always a Jew,’ the Nazis treat baptized Jews the same as those who are not baptized. The bishops hold that a converted Jew . . . has truly become a child of God. . . . Hence baptized Jews are entitled to be treated by the Church as Christians and not as Jews, and at least not to be delivered into the hands of their anti-Semitic enemies.”

Granted, we must judge such statements in their historical context: at stake was the compelling concern to keep baptized Jews out of the Nazis’ clutches. The protection of baptized Jews—and not a general condemnation of all hostility to Jews—was always the dominant perspective whenever the “Jewish question” was discussed, and whenever the Church condemned racism. The Church’s opposition to racism (though belated) was a defense of its own teaching as well as natural law. As such it merits admiration. Claiming that it was something more is questionable.

We must also bear in mind that Catholics never entirely rejected the idea of national or volkisch identity based on race. Here too the boundary was blurred. There is, for example, the article on “race” from the Handbook of Contemporary Religious Questions, published in 1937 and edited by Archbishop Gröber of Freiburg. While clearly rejecting Nazi racial theories, the article recognizes the need for measures to safeguard German racial purity. It adds that a people that has proved itself before the bar of history is endangered by the admixture of foreign blood.

Even the encyclical Mit brennender Sorge states that “race” is a “fundamental value of the human community . . . necessary and honorable . . . in worldly things.” What the encyclical condemns is the “exaltation of race, or the people, or the state, or a particular form of state . . . above their standard value . . . to an idolatrous level.” In Cardinal Faulhaber’s original draft this passage was considerably weaker: “Be vigilant that race, or the state, or other communal values, which can claim an honorable place in worldly things, are not magnified and idolized.” Against this background we can hardly be surprised that Faulhaber proposed in an internal Church memorandum that the bishops should inform the government “that the Church, through the application of its marriage laws, has made and continues to make, an important contribution to the state’s policy of racial purity; and is thus performing a valuable service for the regime’s population policy.” Even if Faulhaber was referring only to the Nazi policy of “eliminating parenthood for the mentally ill,” his proposal, coming at the time, remained highly ambivalent.

The Church’s “silence” in the years prior to the outbreak of war arose from a complex combination of anti-Jewish and anti-Semitic thinking on the one hand, and on the other hand the feeling of Church leaders that other matters were more important. This feeling arose from the belief that they were really not responsible for Jews in general.

It is of course not even remotely true to say that there was a positive intention not to help the Jews. It would be false, indeed slanderous, to claim that the Church deliberately delivered the Jews to their Nazi executioners. Nor can anyone claim that there was no desire, at least on the part of the Holy See, to help the Jews. As the London Jewish Chronicle reported on May 12, 1933, the Pope had recently met a delegation of Jewish leaders, including his personal friend Rabbi da Fano. “It is understood,” the paper wrote, “that the Pope was extremely concerned about the sufferings imposed on the Jews in Germany.”

Moreover, on April 4, 1933, Cardinal Pacelli, at the request of “important Israelite personalities,” wrote the Papal Nuncio Cesare Orsenigo in Berlin directing him to explore the possibility of a diplomatic intervention against “anti-Semitic excesses” in Germany. Orsenigo answered immediately that any intervention by the Holy See was impossible, since anti-Semitism was now part of the official policy of the German government. The Church could not protest against German laws; that would be rejected as interference in internal politics. Orsenigo was presumably referring to the “Law for the Restoration of the Civil Service,” passed on April 7, 1933. This excluded “non-Aryans,” including Catholics and Protestants, from the civil service. This response from the Berlin nuncio, along with the letter of April 10 from Faulhaber to Pacelli, appears to have set the course for the Vatican’s future policy. Once the Concordat was agreed to the following July, the Holy See was definitively barred from interceding explicitly and publicly for the Jews. When the Concordat was ratified in September 1933, Pacelli handed the German chargé d’affaires, Hanns Kerrl, a “Promemoria” of the Holy See stating merely that “the Holy See permits itself a word in favor of Catholics who have come to the Church from Judaism.” Jews as such were not a topic for discussion.

It would appear that this is the point at which the policies of the Vatican and the German bishops (led by Cardinals Bertram and Faulhaber) began to converge, and the notorious “silence” about the Jews commenced. It is astonishing nonetheless that the Church continued to intervene on behalf of Catholic Jews, which Hitler’s government always sharply rejected as political interference, forbidden by the Concordat, and anti-German. In the event, Orsenigo’s warning, cited above, that protests against German laws would not be entertained by the government was not heeded in regard to non-Aryan Catholics. The encyclical Mit brennender Sorge is a prime example, since it confirms that the Catholic Church, and especially the German bishops who were in the front line, did risk total confrontation with the Nazi state. But as we have seen, they never did this on behalf of the Jews in general. The Church acted in self-defense, to defend its pastoral interests and the faithful—and always in the hope of bringing the Nazi state to some kind of modus vivendi that the Church could accept.

Does this make Church leaders “guilty”? We are not called to stand in judgment over the consciences of others—especially when they were subject to pressures we have never experienced. What is essential, however, is that we ascertain the facts and not mistake the Church’s condemnation of racism for a defense of Jews in general.

What is at issue, then, is not the question of guilt or innocence of individuals but recognition that the Catholic Church contributed in some measure to the developments that made the Holocaust possible. The “official Church,” to be sure, was certainly not one of the causes of the Holocaust. And once the trains started rolling toward Auschwitz, the Church was powerless to stop them. Yet neither can the Church boast that it was among those who, from the start, tried to avert Auschwitz by standing up publicly for its future victims. Given the undeniable intellectual and moral quality of the German episcopate of that era and the bishops’ impressive ideological opposition to Nazi persecution of the Church, their failure with regard to the Jews can only be described as tragic.

Well-intentioned Catholic apologists continue to produce reports of Church condemnations of Nazism and racism. But these do not really answer the Church’s critics. The real problem is not the Church’s relationship to National Socialism and racism, but the Church’s relationship to the Jews. Here we need what the Church today urges: a “purification of memory and conscience.” The Catholic Church’s undeniable hostility to National Socialism and racism cannot be used to justify its silence about the persecution of the Jews. It is one thing to explain this silence historically and make it understandable. It is quite another to use such explanations for apologetic purposes.

Christians and Jews belong together. They are both part of the one, though still divided, Israel. This is why Pope John Paul II has called Jews, in exemplary fashion, our “elder brothers.” Brotherhood includes, however, the ability to speak openly about past failures and shortcomings. This is true, of course, for both sides. But in view of all that Christians have done to Jews in history, it is Christians who should take the lead in the purification of memory and conscience.

Martin Rhonheimer a native of Switzerland and a priest of the Opus Dei Prelature, is a professor of ethics and political philosophy at Rome’s Pontifical University of the Holy Cross. The article was translated from the German by Father John Jay Hughes.