This post is a follow up to the last post where I dealt with the attempted slight of hand of David Kertzer to say that anti-Judaism and anti-Semitism are essentially the same thing. One popular charge leveled against the Church is that while it isn’t directly responsible for the holocaust, it played a role by it’s previous actions by spreading hatred and implementing the policies of segregation and other milder forms of persecution in past centuries.
Here are some direct quotes from Kertzer in his book The Popes Against the Jews:
Regarding the dichotomy between anti-Judaism and anti-Semitism Kertzer writes on page 8:
Such a distinction also permits the Roman Catholic Church to argue that it played no role in the spreading the hatred of the Jews in Europe that helped make the Holocaust possible.
So according to Kertzer the Church made the holocaust possible and therefore has to take part of the blame, certainly not all the blame put a small portion of it.
On the next page Kertzer writes:
When all is said and done, the Church’s claim of lack of responsibility for the kind of anti-Semitism that made the Holocaust possible comes down to this: The Roman Catholic Church never called for, or sanctioned, the mass murder of the Jews. Yes, Jews should be stripped of their rights as equal citizens. Yes, they should be kept from contact with the rest of society. But Christian charity and Christian theology forbade good Christians to round them up and murder them.
Yet if the Vatican never approved the extermination of the Jews-indeed, the Vatican opposed it (albeit quietly)-the teachings and actions of the Church, including those of the popes themselves, helped make it possible.
And just what are these actions? on page 11 he tells us. He writes:
Where the popes acted as temporal rulers, as they did in the Papal States until the States’ absorption into a unified Italy over the period 1859-70, discrimination against Jews was public policy. Indeed, the Jews were consigned to ghettos, made to wear Jew badges on their clothes so all would know of their reviled status, and forbidden to have normal social interaction with their Christian neighbors. The popes and the Vatican worked hard to keep Jews in their subservient place-barring them from owning property, from practicing professions, from attending university, from travelling freely-and did all this according to canon law and the centuries-old belief that in doing so they were upholding the most basic tenets of Christianity.
The above statement is true. In the past, the Church did make the Jews live in a ghetto, wear distinct clothing, and barred them from certain professions. However, as Kertzer admits, the mass murder of Jews was never ordered by the Church.
I don’t know if Kertzer realizes it but he actually refuted himself. It is true that the Nazis did everything that the Church did but then went far beyond in the holocaust. The Nazis first made the Jews wear distinctive clothing then put them into ghettos. This was before the camps were set up. If Kertzer wanted to say that the Church paved the way for the Nazis’ forcing the Jews to wear unique clothing and being put into a ghetto, it would be a solid argument. The Church did it, then the Nazis’ did the same thing.
However, since the Church didn’t engage in extermination, it can’t be blamed for it. Kertzer can say that the Church made possible the clothing and ghetto’s. This argument is valid. What isn’t valid is saying that it made the holocaust possible as it certainly did not.
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