Ethical relativism undergirds the secular liberal perspective. Increasing numbers of young people say, “I personally didn’t like the Shoah, but I can’t say that it was wrong.” There is not much safety for any of us in such a morally vacuous environment.

What Jews Can Offer Catholics
As Jews and Catholics walk together toward God, it is healthy for us to establish a principle of reciprocity.

Repentance
Memory and Reconciliation said, “It would also be desirable if these acts of repentance would stimulate the members of other religions to acknowledge the faults of their own past.”29 God loves all His covenant family; anti-Catholicism is the same sin as anti-Judaism. Comparable Jewish purification of memory might at minimum include some contrition for Rabbi Gamaliel’s Birkat ha Minim (Benediction of the Heretics), a 19th “benediction” added around 80 AD to the traditional Shemone Esre (Eighteen Benedictions) that sought to pray the Christians into hell as well as extremely scurrilous descriptions in Talmud of Jesus and Mary which have remained embedded in Jewish sacred tradition for 1,800 years. Jewish writings have consistently described Jesus and His Church, currently Pius XII, in scathing terms. Reconciliation can occur only if both sides confess their sins in true contrition and seek to know one another as brothers in God’s providence.

Civic Activity
The same principles for protection of religious and civic activity should apply to both Christians in Israel and Jews in the United States. Most Christians in Israel are Palestinian, as are most Muslims. There is a vast difference between Christians, whose religious doctrines expressly support freedom of worship, and Muslims, who characterize non-Muslims as “infidels,” bar them from the streets of Mecca and Medina, and might someday bar them from Jerusalem where stand together the Dome of the Rock, the Al-Aqsa Mosque, and the Wall. Palestinian Christians are often persecuted by Israel, which has generally restricted Palestinians without regard to the principle of freedom of worship, and by the Palestinian Authority, which discriminates against Christians because they support freedom of worship.

Canonized Saints
St. Maximilian Kolbe gave a stirring example by volunteering to be killed at Auschwitz in place of Polish army sergeant Francis Gajowniczek. Everyone who knew what that Catholic priest did saw in him a reflection of Jesus, who freely gave His own life on the cross for us. Yet some prominent Jews objected to his being canonized because they claimed that he was anti-Jewish. In fact, he wrote only occasionally on Jews or Judaism, and then his interest was in the conversion of Jews to Catholicism. Jesus calls every Catholic, “Go therefore and make disciples of all nations . . . teaching them to observe all that I have commanded you” (Mt 28:19).

St. Teresa Benedicta of the Cross30 was a cloistered nun who became a Catholic martyr at Auschwitz in 1942 by offering her life for the people of Israel. Many Jewish organizations objected to her canonization because she was the first Jewish-born saint since the apostles. The Jewish argument is that she was killed because she was a Jew and therefore could not be claimed as a Catholic martyr. St. Teresa Benedicta became Catholic at the moment of her baptism and was killed specifically as a Catholic of Jewish origin.

Pope Pius XII was hailed by prominent Jews in his day for heroic efforts to save Jewish lives in an extremely difficult environment. Rabbi Marvin Hier of the Simon Wiesenthal Center has been opposing his canonization as a Catholic saint, arguing that throughout World War II he “sat on the throne of St. Peter in stony silence, without ever lifting a finger, as each day thousands of Jews were sent to the gas chambers with his full knowledge.” Catholics who observe that a rabbi can press so bitter a calumny and still keep his job are apt to draw conclusions that will not help efforts to improve relations.

The decision as to who is a Catholic saint belongs to the Catholic Church. The dialogue between Jews and Catholics has great value, but when Jews extend the rubric of anti-Judaism to internal Catholic decisions they open the way for Catholics to raise comparable issues within Judaism.

Shoah
Jews correctly deplore the old “Jews killed Christ” blood libel, but many press a “Christianity begot the Shoah” blood libel. Moral clarity requires that the Nazi high command, whose orders built Auschwitz and whose orders could have dismantled it, be held solely responsible. The “continuity theory,” which disperses moral responsibility among a whole population, consistently applied, leads straight back to “the Jews killed Christ.”

Jews ask Catholics to respect Jewish suffering during the Shoah, but often decline to recognize that many Catholics and others died as well. The Nazis decimated the Catholic Church in Poland. In the Warthegau region the Nazis killed 80 percent of the Catholic clergy, in Wroclaw, 49.2 percent, in Chelmno, 47.8 percent; in Lodz, 36.8 percent; in Poznan, 31.1 percent. Poznan had 30 churches and 47 chapels; the Nazis left two open to serve 200,000 Catholics. In Lodz four churches were left open to serve 700,000 Catholics.31 In all, some three million Polish Catholics were killed.

Mishna Sanhedrin 4:5 teaches that whoever destroys one life is considered by Torah as if he destroyed the entire world, and that whoever saves one life is considered by Torah as if he saved an entire world. We all have dead to mourn.

You Will Try to Convert Us
Jews and Christians see evangelization from very different perspectives. Jesus called His followers to go and make disciples of all nations (Mt 28:19). From the Jewish perspective, an invigorated Christianity would draw even more Jews.

The best defense is a strong faith. Orthodox Jewish conversions to Christianity are rare because their Jewish roots are deep. The plant with weak roots is the one easily pulled from the soil. Beyond that, let us review the Catholic teaching in this area. “Nobody may be forced to act against his convictions, nor is anyone to be restrained from acting in accordance with his conscience in religious matters in private or in public, alone or in association with others, within due limits. This right is based on the very nature of the human person, whose dignity enables him freely to assent to the divine truth which transcends the temporal order.”32 Catholics will never again force baptism on Jews.

An invigorated Jewish faith and an invigorated Catholic Church will continue walking as brothers in God’s providence. Catholics will try to lead Jews into the Church, and Jews will try to resist, until the end of time. But when we zoom the lens back from telephoto to wide angle, we will find the brothers much more healthy and better prepared to resist the secular forces that threaten both their flocks.

The Time is Now
Maimonides believed that before the Messiah’s arrival all the world would be Jewish. The Catholic Church, Judaism transformed by the Messiah, understands that the Messiah’s return is suspended at every moment of history until His recognition by all Israel.33 This is the context of Memory and Reconciliation. Jeff Jacoby observed, “The Pope’s confession is a moral event of seismic proportions.”34 Sidney Zion wrote that the Pope’s “plea to God for forgiveness [is] as awesome in its way as the Holocaust itself.”35

God promised to join Ezekiel’s two sticks, “that they may be one in my hand” (Ez 37:19). The stick of Jacob is the tribes of Judah and Benjamin, the Jews of today. The stick of Joseph is the stick of the Ten Lost Tribes of Israel. There has been a stirring of interest in the ten tribes. Although most descendants of the ten tribes assimilated into distant populations thousands of years ago, researchers have discovered throughout the world isolated communities practicing recognizably Jewish worship. Ezekiel’s prophecy continued, “My servant David shall be king over them; and they shall all have one shepherd” (Ez 37:24). The Son of David said, “There shall be one flock, one shepherd” (Jn 10:16).

Catholics recognize too that, “The Church will enter the glory of the kingdom only through this final Passover, when she will follow her Lord in his death and Resurrection.”36 The present confusion among so many bishops and priests in the United States, together with the federal government’s intense interest in being the nation’s moral tutor on issues such as life and death within the womb, relationships between the races, and homosexual behavior, while it actively seeks to suppress Christian influence in public life, suggests that we are in the final Passover today.

It has long been observed that, in a mysterious way, Jews across the centuries have reflected the image of Jesus. They have walked a long via crucis, beaten, mocked and derided. Mystically speaking, the Jews were crucified at Auschwitz and three years later rose from the dead in Israel after a three thousand year exile. The Jews as a people are taking on a Christlike character in their intense focus on the Shoah, their final sacrifice. Marc Chagall depicted that Christlike dimension in Exodus, White Crucifixion, and other paintings and lithographs.

This time in salvation history is so extraordinary, and is moving so rapidly, that our darkened intellects can scarcely comprehend it. To Jews who viscerally oppose any reconciliation with Christianity, we can only commend trust in God’s providence. To Catholics, we recall Christ’s explanation of the Holy Spirit, “The wind blows where it wills, and you hear the sound of it, but you do not know whence it comes or whither it goes” (Jn 3:8).

“I have put before you life and death, blessing and curse; therefore choose life, that you and your descendants may live” (Dt 30:19). This historic opportunity to come closer to God, and closer to one another, perfectly preserving the integrity of both faiths, may not last long. The Shoah and the sudden disappearance of Christianity from public life bring into sharp focus the need for all who serve our Father in heaven to work together against the culture of death. As both historic events recede into the sands of time, Jewish and Christian multitudes may come to see religion as less important in their lives, to their eternal loss. But if we can come together and love one another as God commanded, (Lev 19:18), our pilgrim journey on this long dark road will lead us to the superbrilliant light of His glory.