By Kevin Madigan, BOSTON GLOBE
POPE FRANCIS RECENTLY declared that attacks not just on Jews but on the State of Israel are equally anti-Semitic. In a late-October address to commemorate the 50th anniversary of Nostra Aetate, the Vatican II decree that transformed relations between Jews and Catholics, the pontiff concluded: “The State of Israel has every right to exist in safety and prosperity.” Largely lost in the coverage of his remarks was any historical perspective on the degree to which Francis decisively overturned statements made by influential Catholic theologians, and by popes, on Zionism in the 19th and 20th centuries.
What had been the authoritative Catholic view on Zionism reaches back to the fifth century and to the church father, Augustine of Hippo. For Augustine, Jews had been exiled from their land and dispersed among the gentiles for their guilt in the death of Jesus. There they would be condemned to wander and to live, until the end of time, in a state of anxiety, misery, and servitude to gentile emperors and kings. This “doctrine of Jewish witness,” which underscored the sole responsibility of Jews for the death of Jesus of Nazareth, tried to explain why they had been exiled from their homeland (though the historical truth, little known, is that large numbers of Jews lived in the land in Augustine’s time).
It would be hard to exaggerate the catastrophic impact of this line of thinking. Not only was it the ideological seed for a history of calamities, a history in which Jewish communities, over the centuries, were murdered in the first three crusades, killed by the thousands for supposedly poisoning wells and causing the Black Death, forced to convert or emigrate, ghettoized, and made to wear stigmatizing clothing by popes. This Augustinian “theology of the Jews” was also the dogmatic ground for Catholic opposition to Zionism. Indeed, the Vatican did not recognize the State of Israel until December 1993. When Theodor Herzl, perhaps the most important father of modern Zionism, asked Pope Pius X to lend his support to the establishment of a Jewish homeland, the pontiff infamously responded, “Non possumus” (“We cannot”). This was the beginning of what seemed, until Francis’ historic remarks, to be indefinite papal opposition to Zionism.
No pontiff was as actively opposed to the establishment of a Jewish homeland as the controversial wartime pope, Pius XII. After successfully persuading many that Jews were aggressors and belligerents — this just years after the few survivors of Hitler were struggling to establish a homeland to ensure them basic security — he issued no fewer than three encyclicals opposing the State of Israel. The Church began to associate Zionism with Communism and other impious movements and to regard Israelis as contestants for the same territory: what the Church proprietarily regarded as “the Holy Land.” The statements of Pius XII put a seal on anti-Zionist attitudes that began with Herzl’s unhappy meeting with the pope in the early 20th century.
While Pope Francis visited the State of Israel in 2014, he made no statement like the one he recently expressed. But in his October remarks, he stated, “To attack Jews is anti-Semitism, but an outright attack on the State of Israel is also anti-Semitism.” Only against the lachrymose background of centuries of theological anti-Judaism, persecution, ghettoization, genocide — and, above all, papal opposition to Zionism — can we appreciate the import and novelty of the Holy Father’s declaration on anti-Semitism and the State of Israel. In historical context, Francis’ statement must be perceived for the welcome and fundamental reversal it is.
Kevin Madigan is professor of ecclesiastical history at Harvard Divinity School and author, most recently, of “Medieval Christianity.’’
I don’t believe the average priest/nun believes this 180 degree turn in the Catholic Church’s position; they’ll just wait and see what the next Pope does and says. For the remainder of my lifetime, as I see it, the hostility and anti-semitism remains the same, as always. The teaching in the parochial schools is the source of the anti-semitism. Once indoctrinated, it lasts a lifetime. Its an incurable disease of the Goy.
I think I remember seeing/hearing a comment on a TV program to that effect within the last ten years. I’m not sure it really makes a whole lot of difference communion/integrated orthodox rite to a conversation about Stalin’s ferocity versus his priestly education and training. How did they ever let that guy into seminary?!!?. Don’t they have a screening process? If he did make such a 180 degree turn from good to evil, why?
@ deanblake:
Thanks for that bit of information. Do you have some links that could corroborate it?
My understanding is that Stalin’s church of study was fully integrated and part of the Western Catholic Church, but had an Eastern rite; Georgian, I think it was.
deanblake Said:
Are you sure you have that right? What is an “Orthodox Roman Catholic”? I heard he had studied as a priest, but I thought he was Eastern Orthodox. I know there are some Eastern Orthodox churches that are in communion with the Catholic Church. Is that what you mean? Was his Orthodox church in communion with the Catholic Church?
@ babushka:
Stalin was not only Orthodox Roman Catholic, but had trained for two years as a priest!
ppksky Said:
same thing.
honeybee Said:
Really? I thought it was because they were sympathetic, much like the Irish Catholics of the US.
@ ppksky:
The Irish were too cowardly to fight the Nazis
A disproportionate number of Jews were killed in the Stalinist purges.
Stalin’s antisemitism is what led to the Molotov-Ribbentrop pact. The hand of Stalin reached all the way to Mexico City to murder Trotsky.
Stalin’s command over Comintern led to Jewish flight from Communist Parties all over the world.
A rich Jewish intellectual tradition has put Jews in the front lines of everything that is the latest and greatest in the East and West. At one time Communism was the latest thing. Jews are frequently the first to catch a rising intellectual tide and the first to suffer when the tide runs out. There are lessons there for everyone.
@ babushka:
Excellent, except you forgot pick pockets and crooked politicians.
@ Paddy:
http://www.irishleftreview.org/wp-content/uploads/2012/04/class_cultlorez2.jpg
A disproportionate number of Irishmen have been falling down drunks.
A disproportionate number of Jews have been communists. John Abt, Solomon Adler, Sonia Steinem Gold, the Greenglasses, the Rosenbergs, Vladimir Posner…the Venona list goes on and on.
Then, of course, there are the leaders Joseph Stalin brought back to rule a conquered Eastern Europe. It’s all bad news. Now, of course, the Marxists (again, many of them Jewish) are turning on the nation-state of Israel. The Pope is a puppy dog compared to these attack dogs chewing up the dream of Zion.
Like hell he does. As with all advocates of a Palestinian state led by terrorists who have pledged to annihilate Israel, he is anti-Zionist.
The Catholic church is not to be trusted. What we need to hear is that the Catholic church teaches that antisemitism is lies about Jews and that antisemitism is evil.
Just because the Catholic church admits that antisemitism is represented by attacks on Jews doesn’t mean that the Catholic Church believes that antisemites lie about Jews.
And just because the Catholic Church defends Israel doesn’t mean that it will defend Jews anywhere else, especially in Catholic countries.
This is just like all those countries who repent participating in the Holocaust, but won’t repent persecuting the Jews. They still want to believe that the Jews are guilty of something. But they are willing to admit that Nazi mass murder represents an unacceptable reaction.
Paddy Said:
So, tell me Paddy me boyo, who has done the Jews a favor.
Karl Marx did no Jews a favor by promulgating his atheistic plan to conquer the world. Now, his philosophy of Death is the greatest threat to the existence of Israel, not Islam. Jews don’t seem to notice?