Excerpt of "Jesuit Kaddish" by Notre Dame Press

J A M E S B E R N AU E R , S J

Jesuit Kaddish Jesuits, jews, and holocaust remembrance

University of Notre Dame Press Notre Dame, Indiana

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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

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contents

Acknowledgments vii Personal Prelude ix

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One

The Exorcising Examen of John Paul II

Two

The Demonic Milieu: On Jesuit Hostility to Jews and Judaism

t h r e e The Barbarian Within: Spirit versus Flesh, Body versus Soul

four

The Divine Milieu: Righteous Jesuits

five

Spiritual Exercises

103

Appendix. The Yad Vashem Jesuits

125

Notes Index

139 177

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chapter one

The Exorcising Examen of John Paul II

It may seem incongruous that our study of the Jesuits and the Holocaust would begin with a focus on papal activity. The particular conduct of the Jesuits that is this work’s concern is inexplicable, however, apart from their dealings with popes. This is not a novel theme, of course, because of the traditional relationship of the Jesuits with the papacy, which goes back to the founding of the Society of Jesus in 1540, when the Jesuits decided to take a special fourth vow (in addition to poverty, chastity, and obedience) to the popes of their availability for global missionary service. When the papacy became a more centralized institution in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, this missionary utility expanded to include general assistance to Vatican bureaucracies.1 While ecclesiastical historians tend to emphasize the contributions of the Jesuits to the Church and its leadership, our focus in this first chapter is on a particular service the papacy has rendered to the Society of Jesus. Certainly the contemporary approach of Jesuits to their conduct during the period of the Holocaust could not have been anticipated without the initiatives of Popes John XXIII and John Paul II. Traditional Jesuit practices of examination of conscience and discernment of spirits have been brought by papal statements into the present moment of the Catholic Church’s encounter with Jews, Judaism, and Holocaust tragedy. It is fitting, therefore, that Pope Saint John Paul II’s transforming ministry be featured at the beginning of our study. Many regard the contribution he made to the collapse of Communism as this 1

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pope’s greatest historic achievement. As great an accomplishment as that was, however, it should not be allowed to overshadow his effort to lay the foundation for a renewed Christianity for the third millennium. For him the Jubilee year of 2000 was both the culmination of Vatican Council II and the key to understanding his pontificate. The foundation for the year was sculpted by confessions of sin, proclamations of repentance, and promises of reform. The pope’s confessions of sin reached out to diverse communities: for example, to those who had suffered from the Crusades, from the wars of religion, and from the Inquisition and the papacy itself; to Protestants, native peoples, women and blacks.2 The figure who was at the center of this stage of remorse was the Jew, defiled and persecuted through the centuries of Christian hegemony and, finally, murdered on a mass scale in the lands of Christian civilization. John Paul II initiated an examen that aimed at exorcising an evil past. As I mentioned in the prelude, the examen is one of the most distinctive practices in Jesuit spirituality, the regular scrutinizing of how our lives have traveled down paths of goodness or have wandered into evil doing. Far more than a preparation for confession, the examen is an encounter with the very dynamic of one’s life, the movement of one’s heart and one’s mind. In the title of this chapter I have tried to capture the gravity of the self-examination to which John Paul summoned Christianity; this was intended as the taking stock not of everyday failures but rather of epochal depravity.

Papal Penitential Pilgrimage

Man of the theatre and seismographer of symbols that he was, John Paul II created a religious drama in which Catholics were performing against a backdrop of overwhelming evil. But the Pope’s pleas for forgiveness scripted Catholics into a liturgical performance before they were completely clear about what it was exactly for which they should feel a collective responsibility and embrace a penitential spirit. We are still early into the performance, but many already ache for catharsis. But why did it take so long to seek forgiveness, especially with respect to the Jews? The Catholic Church did not sleepwalk through the past century. It knew a great deal about what was happening to the Jews of

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The Exorcising Examen of John Paul II 3

Europe during the actual genocide, and, in the decades since, the historical record has cast light into many of the darkest recesses. Hannah Arendt is surely correct in claiming that forgiveness is intimately connected to the desire for a new beginning.3 But it was precisely that aspiration that was absent in the Catholic world for so long—the desire to begin a new relationship with the Jewish people after the Holocaust. Without such a desire, why perform penance, why plead for forgiveness? The relationship between Christians and Jews seemed theologically frozen, out of time, a stranger to those domains in which tragedy and sorrow could transform hearts and minds. As we shall see, there were a few who did prepare for the charismatic role seized by John Paul II: the elderly Jewish scholar Jules Isaac, who pressed to meet with Pope John XXIII to talk about the Church’s historical contempt for the Jews and who actually wrote of the Vatican Council II as a vast “examination of conscience”; Pope John, who was determined to end that disdain; and the bishops, who in 1965 adopted the “Declaration on the Relationship of the Church to Non-Christian Religions” at the Second Vatican Council.4 Still, it was John Paul II who dramatically advanced a new relationship with the Jewish people. How it will develop is for the future to disclose, but, if we have any appreciation for how the earlier relationship shaped and malformed Christianity, we are able to sense the radical reinvention that a loving relationship might entail. Catholicism’s desire for a new beginning with Judaism is, in effect, the desire for a new relationship with itself, a desire to get beyond Christendom. Christendom is not a historical epoch but rather a set of attitudes that generated a fortress Christianity. I shall mention but two of these attitudes. The first is that Christianity best interpreted itself through a particular form of European culture that asserted its spiritual surpassing and discarding of Judaism. The second maintains that the modern world is a definitive repudiation of Christianity and that the Church is responsible for neither its achievements nor its crimes. These distinctions stand behind the continual argument of Church authorities that there is an absolute border between medieval anti-Judaism and modern anti-Semitism. Taking a cue from the philosopher Charles Taylor, perhaps it could be claimed that modernity is frequently an embrace rather than an abandonment of Christianity. Taylor gives the example of modern liberal political culture’s proclamation of universal human rights as a

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“great advance in the practical penetration of the gospel in human life.”5 It was a progress that rested upon exit from an earlier version of Christian practice and rhetoric, as the historian James Chappel has argued. In Chappel’s analysis, twentieth-century totalitarianism drove Catholic thought to a language of human rights, human dignity, and religious freedom.6 While Taylor has stressed the positive side of Christianity’s survival in modern culture, the murder of European Jews may force us to regard the often toxic effects of that endurance as well. Do anti- Judaism and anti-Semitism interpenetrate in ways that have not yet been adequately mapped?7 Certainly Christendom’s historical contempt for the Jews is not a place from which some mere new set of ideas allows us egress. Like the Holy Roman Empire, Christendom formed an intoxicating, imaginative piece of theological and spiritual theatre. Only another drama of more than equal appeal will displace it. The new century witnessed the opening scenes of that new play. If we look for the roots of John Paul’s desire for a new relationship with the Jewish people, his personal connection to the many Jews with whom he had lived as a child in Wadowice, Poland, has a chronological and emotional priority. His long-serving secretary, Stanislaw Dziwisz, now his successor as Cardinal of Krakow, titled a chapter in his memoirs “John Paul II’s Jewish Roots.” The Pope was not Jewish, of course, but we still underestimate how intimately he lived with the Jewish community of Wadowice, a third of whose citizens were of the Jewish faith. Dziwisz comments: “So, thanks to a daily routine of friendship, esteem and tolerance, Karol Wojtyla got to know Judaism from the inside which included, of course, in the religious and spiritual sense.”8 At the end of the war, the future pope was devastated to learn of the extermination of almost all of the community’s Jews. There was one warm friendship from those days that possessed paramount significance, though—that with his classmate through grammar and high schools, Jerzy Kluger. Although they lost contact in the postwar period, their relationship was renewed in the early 1960s, when Karol Wojtyla participated in the Vatican Council in Rome, where Kluger had come to live. That friendship flourished after Cardinal Wojtyla was elected to the papacy, and it was Kluger and his family who were given the first private audience with the new pope.9 Through the years of his papacy, John Paul II would have regular, generally weekly, meals and meetings with Kluger. Well before then, how-

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The Exorcising Examen of John Paul II 5

ever, Kluger had experienced his friend’s spiritual hospitality. He tells how, even before they were teenagers, he had rushed to the church where Wojtyla was attending Mass in order to bring him a message but had been challenged by a woman there who knew that he was Jewish and told him that Jews were not allowed to enter churches. Wojtyla countered the admonition by saying loudly, in the woman’s presence, “Doesn’t she know that Jews and Catholics are all children of the same God? . . .You can come here whenever you want.”10 This openness was strengthened as the result of the suffering that the Jews had experienced in the Holocaust. In a letter to Kluger on the occasion of the commemoration of a destroyed synagogue in their hometown, the pope wrote: “I remember very clearly the Wadowice Synagogue which was near to our high school. I have in front of my eyes the numerous worshipers, who during their holidays passed on their way to pray there.” He went on to request that at the ceremony Kluger “tell all who are gathered there that, together with them, how I venerate the memory of their cruelly killed coreligionists and compatriots and also this place of worship, which the invaders destroyed.”11 His exposure to Nazi crimes and to Jewish and Polish suffering was to mark the pope’s entire life, and, well before it found eloquent witness in his years as pope, he was afflicted with the questions raised by the murder of European Jews. As Kluger recalls: “One question that tormented him was whether the Church was in part to blame for the Holocaust.”12 Among the many places where this torment was expressed was in the apostolic letter he issued on the occasion of the fiftieth anniversary of the outbreak of World War II: “We have just recalled one of the bloodiest wars in history, a war which broke out on a continent with a Christian tradition. Acknowledgement of this fact compels us to make an examination of conscience about the quality of Europe’s evangelization. The collapse of Christian values that led to yesterday’s moral failures must make us vigilant as to the way the Gospel is proclaimed and lived out today.”13 On the first Sunday of the Church’s Lenten season in the new millennium, the pope presided at an extraordinary service held to confess sin and to request forgiveness. At the heart of the service was the seeking of pardon for sins against the Jewish people. Cardinal Edward Cassidy, president of the Vatican Commission for Religious Relations with Jews, opened the prayer: “Let us pray that, in recalling the sufferings

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endured by the people of Israel throughout history, Christians will acknowledge the sins committed by not a few of their number against the people of the covenant and the blessings, and in this way purify their hearts.” The pope continued: “God of our fathers, you chose Abraham and his descendants to bring your name to the nations: We are deeply saddened by the behavior of those who in the course of history have caused these children of yours to suffer, and asking your forgiveness, we wish to commit ourselves to genuine brotherhood with the people of the covenant.”14 This confession and plea for forgiveness emerged from the pope’s own journey into an ever deeper and more effective desire for a totally new relationship between Christians and Jews. There were several major moments in that journey. The initial one was his visit to Auschwitz in June of 1979, during his first papal visit to Poland less than one year after his election to the papacy. He described the camp as the “Golgatha of the modern world” and, while acknowledging the deaths suffered by other national groups, he paused and spoke before the Hebrew inscription that commemorated the Jewish victims: “The very people who received from God the Commandment, ‘thou shalt not kill,’ itself experienced in a special measure what is meant by killing. It is not permissible for anyone to pass by this inscription with indifference.”15 Fourteen years later, in response to numerous requests, he asked that the Carmelite sisters who lived at the camp move from their convent there so that the overwhelming reality of Auschwitz as a Jewish place of death be preserved. At the same time his letter to the sisters honored the significance of their ongoing spiritual presence to the memory of the suffering of the Polish people: “How the future will grow from this most painful past largely depends on whether, on the threshold of Oswiecim, ‘the love which is greater than death’ will stand watch. You, dear sisters, in a particular way, are entrusted with the mystery of this redeemed love—this love which saves the world.”16 For John Paul II, even the death camps—especially the death camps—must incite love. The second major moment was his visit to and address at the Synagogue of Rome on April 13, 1986. For the first time, a pope entered a synagogue and sat as an equal with its chief rabbi. John Paul had been in synagogues before, both as a child with his father and in 1968 as archbishop of Krakow, when he expressed solidarity with the Jewish community at a time of Communist purges of Jews in Poland.17 But the visit

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The Exorcising Examen of John Paul II 7

of a pope was very different, an event that announced, as perhaps no other could have, how unprecedented was this pope’s ambitious vision of a new relationship with Judaism. His friend and confidant Jerzy Kluger recalls the papal event: “There was one word burning inside him more than any other: genocide.”18 Kluger is accurate in remembering that the pope used the term in expressing his “abhorrence for the genocide decreed against the Jewish people during the last war, which led to the Holocaust of millions of innocent victims.”19 And John Paul II did not refrain from recalling pre-Nazi manifestations of hate. While pointing out that acceptance of religious pluralism was a achievement slowly arrived at, he went on to state that a “centuries-long cultural conditioning could not prevent us from recognizing that the acts of discrimination, unjustified limitation of religious freedom, oppression also on the level of civil freedom in regard to the Jews were, from an objective point of view, gravely deplorable manifestations.”20 Nevertheless, far more than “genocide,” the word that permeated the pope’s address was “love.” John Paul II expressed three convictions stemming from Vatican Council II’s “Declaration on the Relationship of the Church to Non-Christian Religions” (“Nostra Aetate”). These grounded the new relations between Catholics and Jews, relations that he did not want reduced to mere “coexistence.” The first conviction is that the Christian relationship with Judaism is unique: “The Jewish religion is not ‘extrinsic’ to us, but in a certain way is ‘intrinsic’ to our own religion. With Judaism, therefore, we have a relationship which we do not have with any other religion. You are our dearly beloved brothers and, in a certain way, it could be said that you are our elder brothers.” Secondly, no collective blame may be attributed to Jews for what happened to Jesus during his passion. “So any alleged theological justification for discriminatory measures or, worse still, for acts of persecution is unfounded.”21 Third, far from being accursed, “the Jews are beloved of God who has called them with an irrevocable calling.”22 The pope stated that the new relationship was only at its beginning but that it was full of promise because both communities had faith in the one God who loves strangers and renders justice to the orphan and the widow. Nearing the end of his speech, the pope recognized the desire for love and justice that Christians had learned “from the Torah, which you here venerate, and from Jesus, who took to its extreme consequence the love demanded by the Torah.”23 Not only did the pope and

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the chief rabbi share the same platform; they also embraced a similar duty. In his formulation, Rabbi Elio Toaff spoke of a “right to life” that was the right not only to exist but also to have confidence that one’s life was guaranteed against every threat and violence. He said: “It means the condemnation of every attack on a person’s self-respect, considered by Judaism to be equivalent to bloodshed.”24 Freedom from campaigns of conversion had been recognized as a human right. The third moment in John Paul II’s pilgrimage came two years after the second, in 1988, with his lamentation at Austria’s Mauthausen concentration camp, where he acknowledged that from the Holocaust “Europe emerges defeated.” While he spoke of Nazism’s program of extermination as an “insane plan” that aimed to turn “Europe back from the path it had followed for thousands of years,” his dramatic plea to the dead looked to a future that would learn from their suffering. He pleaded: Tell us, what direction should Europe and humanity follow “after Auschwitz” . . . and “after Mauthausen”? Is the direction we are following away from those past dreadful experiences the right one? Tell us, how should today’s person be and how should this generation of humanity live in the wake of the great defeat of the human being? How must that person be? How much should be required of himself? Tell us, how must nations and societies be? How must Europe go on living? Speak, you have the right to do so—you who have suffered and lost your lives. We have the duty to listen to your testimony.25 That same day, in an address to the Jewish community of Vienna, he spoke of the lesson he drew from the Holocaust: “To remember the Shoah also means to oppose every germ of violence and to protect and promote with patience and perseverance every tender shoot of freedom and peace.”26 An important but easily overlooked fourth station on the papal pilgrimage was his stopping along the way for beatifications and canonizations of Christians who, in resisting Nazism, lost their lives in such castles of the night as Dachau, Auschwitz, Mauthausen, and Buchenwald.27 In elevating these martyrs of Nazism, the pope was directly challenging that culture of excuse, which argued that nothing could have been done against such brutal force as the Nazis exercised.

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The Exorcising Examen of John Paul II 9

While this honoring of Christian heroes and heroines continued throughout his papacy, he particularly drove this point home during his pastoral visits to Germany. During his 1987 trip he beatified the Jesuit resister Rupert Mayer of Munich as well as the Jewish convert and later nun, Sister Edith Stein, who would be canonized in 1998. It was on his third visit there, in 1996, that he held up for devotion and imitation two priests, Karl Leiser and Bernhard Lichtenberg, both of whom had been martyred by the Nazi state. His remarks to the Jewish community paid special tribute to Lichtenberg, who had been provost of Saint Hedwig’s Cathedral in Berlin and whom the State of Israel recognized as one of the “righteous among the nations” for having risked his life trying to save Jews. Even before Hitler came to power in 1933, the Nazis denounced Lichtenberg for his articulate opposition to them. During Kristallnacht he proclaimed from the pulpit that the Jewish temples that had been set on fire were also houses of God. From then on he offered public prayers every evening in the cathedral for persecuted Jews, and he was arrested for doing so on October 25, 1941. He died two years later while being taken to the Dachau concentration camp. The pope declared: “Among all the memories that weigh heavily on us today, the precious historical fact that Berhard Lichtenberg was not alone in his commitment to those persecuted by the Nazi regime comes to mind. This shows the involvement of many Catholics, alone or in groups and at the cost of their lives, who offered their active assistance, often secretly.”28 John Paul then pointed to the activities of two laywomen, Margarete Sommer and Maria Terwiel, as well as to the bishop of Berlin at the time, Konrad von Preysing. Some years later, at a pivotal ecumenical service, John Paul II insisted that the twentieth century’s martyrs “must not be forgotten; rather they must be remembered and their lives documented.” He praised the witness of their refusal to “yield to the false gods” of Nazism and Communism: “Where hatred seemed to corrupt the whole of life, leaving no escape from its logic, they proved that ‘love is stronger than death.’”29 The culmination of the pope’s personal journey came with ’his pilgrimage to Jerusalem in the year 2000 and especially his speech at Yad Vashem, Israel’s memorial to the victims of the Holocaust. On that institution’s large campus, the Hall of Remembrance was selected as the location for his allocution, as if to inscribe Catholic sorrow into one of the most revered sanctuaries of Jewish memory. It is a simple, solemn

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structure of stone and concrete, and engraved on its floor are the names of twenty-two concentration camps and extermination sites that represent the hundreds of places where Jews were tortured and killed. An eternal flame illumines the hall in front of the ashes of murdered Jews that were brought to Israel from European death camps. John Paul’s secretary recalls: “When we entered Yad Vashem, I understood from the emotion on the Holy Father’s face why he absolutely wanted to go there. And I think the emotion he showed was just a tiny part of the emotion he was feeling inside, of the feelings he was sharing with the Jewish people. Maybe . . . the Holy Father, feeling the end of his life approaching, was worried that he hadn’t done enough to condemn the people and ideologies responsible for the tragedy of the Holocaust.”30 Paying homage to the victims of the Holocaust, the Pope said: “Here, as at Auschwitz and many other places in Europe, we are overcome by the echo of the heart-rending laments of so many. Men, women and children cry out to us from the depths of the horror that they knew. How can we fail to heed their cry?” He went on to attribute Nazi crimes to a “godless ideology,” but then expressed the sorrow that he hoped would be the foundation for a new relationship between Christians and Jews. The pope declared: “As bishop of Rome and successor of the apostle Peter, I assure the Jewish people that the Catholic Church, motivated by the Gospel law of truth and love and by no political considerations, is deeply saddened by the hatred, acts of persecution and displays of anti-Semitism directed against the Jews by Christians at any time and in any place.”31 Once again, in tribute to martyrs who had resisted the Nazis, he recalled Yad Vashem’s own program for honoring gentiles who had come to the rescue of Jews: “The honor given to the ‘just gentiles’ by the State of Israel at Yad Vashem for having acted heroically to save Jews, sometimes to the point of giving their own lives, is a recognition that not even in the darkest hour is every light extinguished.”32 The Israeli prime minister at the time, Ehud Barak, captured the historical significance of the pope’s admission: “You have done more than anyone else to bring about the historic change in the attitude of the Church toward the Jewish people initiated by the good Pope John XXIII and to dress the gaping wounds that festered over many bitter centuries. And I think I can say, Your Holiness, that your coming here

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The Exorcising Examen of John Paul II 11

today to the Tent of Remembrance at Yad Vashem is a climax of this historic journey of healing. Here, right now, time itself has come to a standstill. This very moment holds within it 2,000 years of history. And their weight is almost too much to bear.”33 Three days later the pope prayed at the Western Wall of the second temple in Jerusalem, Judaism’s holiest location, and, following the custom of pious Jews, he placed between its stones the plea for forgiveness he had prayed at the March 2000 service in Rome: “God of our fathers, you chose Abraham and his descendants to bring your Name to the Nations: we are deeply saddened by the behaviour of those who in the course of history have caused these children of yours to suffer, and asking your forgiveness we wish to commit ourselves to genuine brotherhood with the people of the Covenant.”34 John Paul II’s secretary notes: “At the time, I wondered what this scene would mean for Jews. My question was answered a few days later when I read the following statement by Elie Wiesel in a newspaper: ‘When I was a child, I was always afraid of walking by a church. Now all of that has changed.’”35 The pope’s journey was never intended to be merely personal. Near the end of 1998, he had issued a formal statement that encouraged Catholics to embrace their pilgrim identity during the Jubilee year of 2000. Indeed, he claimed that this identity was the first sign of a jubilee celebration: “From birth to death, the condition of each individual is that of the homo viator [journeying man].” A pilgrimage is an “exercise of practical asceticism, of repentance for human weaknesses, of constant vigilance over one’s own frailty, of interior preparation for a change of heart.”36 For the pope a penitential spirit is characteristic of the Catholic pilgrim and needed to be a defining feature of the Jubilee Year 2000. In his original announcement of the Jubilee he stressed that an examination of conscience and a purification of the memory of sin would be conducted. He wrote that the “Church cannot cross the threshold of the new millennium without encouraging her children to purify themselves, through repentance of past errors and instances of infidelity, inconsistency, and slowness to act. Acknowledging the weakness of the past is an act of honesty and courage which helps us to strengthen our faith, which alerts us to face today’s temptations and challenges and prepares us to meet them.”37 John Paul II had been deeply affected by Vatican Council II’s declaration on the “Church Today” (“Gaudium et Spes”). That declaration had identified as one

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of the sources of atheism itself the manner in which many Christians lived: “They must be said to conceal rather than reveal the authentic face of God and religion.” It spoke of a lack of fidelity among both the clergy and laypeople to the “Spirit of God during the course of many centuries.”38 But does the admission of weakness among Christians defame the Church, the Mystical Body, which is regarded as holy? How is it possible for the Holy Catholic Church to confess its own sinfulness? Would the sacramental character of the Church as the vehicle of God’s grace survive such a confession?39 This was the dilemma to which Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger as head of the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith (later Pope Benedict XVI) sought a resolution, and he turned to the International Theological Commission for it. The commission released an account of its reflection in March 2000 as “Memory and Reconciliation: The Church and the Faults of the Past.” The commission’s thirty papally chosen theologians realized that John Paul II had placed the Church in an unprecedented position. They wrote, “In none of the jubilees celebrated till now has there been . . . an awareness in conscience of any faults in the church’s past nor of the need to ask God’s pardon for conduct in the recent or remote past. Indeed, in the entire history of the church there are no precedents for requests for forgiveness by the magisterium for past wrongs.”40 The theologians worried that some Catholics “wonder how they can hand on a love for the church to younger generations if this same church is imputed with crimes and faults.”41 The commission adopted a traditional view as its response: the Church continues to be holy even as it admits to the sins of its sons and daughters. But there was resistance to this solution by other theologians, who did not see it as adequate to the unique confession and state to which John Paul II seemed to be calling Catholics. The theologian Francis A. Sullivan recalled his fellow Jesuit Karl Rahner’s earlier withering criticism of this traditional approach: “The Church . . . is somehow, without its being noticed, ‘hypostasised,’ she became almost like an independent existent ‘entity,’ which stands as teacher and guide over against the people of God; she does not appear to be this people of God itself . . . in its actual state of pilgrimage.”42 Later Joseph Komonchak voiced a similar criticism when he contrasted the region of Christian sinners that historians examine with the sphere of the Church as sinless, seeming “to be float-

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The Exorcising Examen of John Paul II 13

ing off somewhere in the ether, describing a Church with no human beings in it.”43 John Paul admitted that many factors were at work in justifying words and deeds that are now regarded as evil and sin. Still, the pope insisted: “Yet the consideration of mitigating factors does not exonerate the Church from the obligation to express profound regret for the weaknesses of so many of her sons and daughters who sullied her face, preventing her from fully mirroring the image of her crucified Lord.”44 But how is it possible for the Church to have its face sullied? Although for many there continued to be an ambiguity in John Paul II’s thinking about the Church as sinning, his pilgrimage and his ongoing reflection on the issue undermined the theology that had guided the Church for the century before Vatican Council II, namely the theology that had seen the Church as a perfect society, as the spiritual, unsullied Body of Christ. This ecclesiology stressed its hierarchial character, justified an authoritarian form of governance, and claimed a metaphysical wisdom standing above history in general and modernity in particular. The Church’s primary mission was regarded as the salvation of believers by means of the sacraments, religious instruction, and obedience to ecclesiastical authorities.”45 Papal recognition of widespread sin among Catholics and in their institution forced open a window into Catholic conduct that ecclesiastical authorities had successfully closed for decades. And it encouraged a penitential spirit that had been kept at a distance for so long.

Postwar Discussion

If we look for the reasons that the Catholic Church delayed in confronting its failures during the period of National Socialism, initial papal statements made at the end of the war would provide a major one. Pope Pius XII’s address to the College of Cardinals in June 1945 set the tone for the Vatican’s approach to Catholic conduct during the Holocaust for the following thirteen years. He strongly defended the concordat that he had negotiated with the Nazi government in 1933. He presented the Church as a victim, as a survivor of the “sorrowful passion” that Nazi enmity that had been forced upon it. He portrayed the Church as a unified force of resistance to the Nazi attacks: “To resist such attacks millions of courageous Catholics, men and women, closed

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