Antisemitism Studies

The short answer to John Pawlikowski's question is: no, antisemitism has not been uprooted from Christianity. In fact, it may never be completely uprooted because Christians constitute a huge and diverse population, separated into churches of various affiliations and groupings. Only some Christians have taken an official position condemning antisemitism. There may always be subsets among Christians who claim that antisemitism is justified based on their understanding of Christian sources. Nearly all Pawlikowski's references are to Catholic sources. He is asking the question of Catholics, and the short answer is regrettably "no" and frustratingly "not yet." The massive communion of the Catholic Church includes 20 or more churches, with Latin or Roman Catholics constituting the vast majority, and uprooting antisemitism among Catholics is a more complex task than it might seem. Pawlikowski pleads for Catholics "in [a] concrete, detailed effort to finally uproot antisemitism from Christian religious identity." My reply is a resounding yes in agreement that Catholics should make a concerted effort to remove antisemitism finally from all aspects of Catholic identity.

Pope Benedict XVI, speaking at the Yad Vashem Memorial on May 11, 2009, made clear that there is no room anywhere [End Page 299] within Catholicism or outside it for antisemitism and denial of the Holocaust: "May the names of these victims never perish! May their suffering never be denied, belittled or forgotten! And may all people of goodwill remain vigilant in rooting out from the heart of man anything that could lead to tragedies such as this!"¹ This was a very strong statement by Pope Benedict. Earlier that year, when he granted remission of excommunication to four bishops ordained illicitly by Archbishop Marcel Lefebvre, Pope Benedict had not realized that one of the four was a denier of the Holocaust. All four bishops, including Lefebvre, who passed away in 1991, were deniers of the teachings of the Second Vatican Ecumenical Council (Vatican II), including its teachings on Jews, which Pawlikowski summarized in his essay. In the Pope's haste to offer dissenting bishops an incentive to accept the full teachings of the Catholic Church, the pope and his advisors failed in the task of recognizing and uprooting the vestiges of antisemitism from the Church. To clarify that denial of the Holocaust was incompatible with Catholic teaching, Pope Benedict offered this prayer at his public audience on January 28, 2009, following that unfortunate realization: "May the Shoah be a warning for all against forgetfulness, denial or reductionism, because violence committed against one single human being is violence against all."²

There may always be antisemites among those who identify as Catholic, but such people should know that they will find no justification from current Catholic teaching for being antisemitic. Deborah E. Lipstadt, President Biden's Special Envoy to Monitor and Combat Antisemitism, has described antisemitism as "not unlike a stubborn infection."³ Lipstadt notes that the operative word is "persisting" in a definition provided by Helen Fein some years ago: "A persisting latent structure of hostile beliefs towards Jews as a collectivity manifested in individuals, as attitudes, and in culture as myth, ideology, folklore, and imagery, and in actions—social or legal discrimination, political mobilization against Jews, and collective or state violence—which results in and/or is designed to distance, displace, or destroy Jews as Jews."⁴ The unfortunate fact is that antisemitism persists because it has existed in some form [End Page 300] or another for nearly two millennia among Christians and others who learned it from Christians.