Science + Creation

[Angrboda]

What? Catholics have killed Jews in the past, but to say the Church sanctioned their slaughter wholesale? When? Where? Most of the quotes from Popes I know of explicitly condemn violence aimed toward Jewish folk.

"We would risk causing the victims of the most atrocious deaths to die again if we do not have an ardent desire for justice, if we do not commit ourselves to insure that evil does not prevail over good as it did for millions of children of the Jewish people...Humanity cannot permit all that to happen again." ~ Pope John Paul II

"Nazi anti-Judaism was the work of godless, anti-Christian criminals. But it would not have been possible without the almost two thousand years' pre-history of 'Christian' anti-Judaism..." ~ Hans Küng, a leading Catholic theologian

Two Church teachings became the foundation stones for centuries of oppression of Jews by the Church:

• Supercessionism: (a.k.a. Replacement Theology): The belief that God had rejected the Jews, unilaterally cancelled his covenants with them, and now favored Christians as the new chosen people.
  
• Translated responsibility: Holding all Jews, from the first century onwards, responsible for Jesus' execution circa 30 CE. This includes Jews who lived throughout the Roman Empire in the first century CE who never heard of Jesus, and Jews who were born as much as 19 centuries after Jesus' death.
  

From 315 CE, (when the Roman Empire extended freedom of religion to Christians) to 395 (when Christianity had become the state religion) Christians were able to initiate programs of discrimination and oppression against Jews. Some early examples were:

• 306 CE: The church Synod of Elvira banned marriages, sexual intercourse and community contacts between Christians and Jews.
  
• 325: The Council of Nicea decided to separate the celebration of Easter from the Jewish Passover. They stated: "let us have nothing in common with this odious people..."
  
• 337: The marriage of a Jewish man to a Christian woman became punishable by death.
  
• 339: Conversion to Judaism became a criminal offense.
  
• 367 - 376: St. Hilary of Poitiers referred to Jews as a perverse people who God has cursed forever. St. Ephroem referred to synagogues as brothels.
  
• 380: The Bishop of Milan initiated the destruction of a synagogue, which he referred to as "an act pleasing to God."
  

During the Middle Ages and Renaissance:

During this period, there were dozens of other instances of persecution of Jews by the church, including exiling Jews from cities, dioceses and entire countries; destruction of synagogues; denial of the right to own land or to hold office; and their reduction to serfdom and slavery. Perhaps the worst instances during these centuries were genocides during the Crusades. Hundreds of thousands of Jews were murdered in cold blood by Christian armies on their way to and from Palestine.

• 1205: Pope Innocent III wrote to the archbishops of Sens and Paris that "the Jews, by their own guilt, are consigned to perpetual servitude because they crucified the Lord...As slaves rejected by God, in whose death they wickedly conspire, they shall by the effect of this very action, recognize themselves as the slaves of those whom Christ's death set free..." i.e. they would be slaves of Christians.
  
• 1227: The Synod of Narbonne required Jews to wear an oval badge -- reminiscent of the Star of David that the Nazis required Jews to wear.
  
• 1478: The Spanish Inquisition was organized by the Church in order to detect insincere conversions of Jews to Christianity.
  
• 1555: A Roman Catholic Papal bull, "Cum nimis absurdum," required Jews in Vatican controlled lands to wear badges, and be confined to ghettos. Over 3,000 people were crammed into about 8 acres of land. The public health problems were horrendous.
  
• 1648-9: Massacres of Jews occurred in Nemirov, Polonnoye, Tulchin, Volhynia, Bar, Lvov, and other cities in Ukraine. About 100,000 Jews were murdered and 300 communities destroyed.
  

During these centuries, there were a few attempts by various popes to reduce the impact of the church's policies against the Jews. They were largely ignored. None had any lasting impact.

During 19th and first half of the 20th century CE:

In earlier centuries, persecution by church and state was directed at followers of Judaism. The Church believed that some Jews must be allowed to live, because the biblical book of Revelation indicated that they had a role to play in the "end times." However, since the Church at the time believed that all Jews were responsible for Jesus' death -- past, present and future -- then it was acceptable to make Jews' lives quite miserable. Jews could escape oppression by giving up their religion, converting to Christianity, and being baptized.

Subsequent attacks against Jews were mostly racially motivated, and perpetrated by Christian, governmental and secular groups and individuals. The Jewish people were viewed as a separate race more than as followers of a different religion.

• 1806: A French Jesuit Priest, Abbe Barruel, had written a treatise blaming the Masonic Order for the French Revolution. He later issued a letter alleging that Jews, not the Masons were the guilty party. Beliefs in an international Jewish conspiracy to control the world came from this source; they continue today.
  1846 - 1878: Pope Pius IX restored all of the previous restrictions against the Jews within the Vatican state. All Jews under Papal control were confined to Rome's ghetto - the last one in Europe until the Nazis recreated ghettos in the 1930s. Pius IX was beatified in the year 2000 -- the last step before sainthood.
  
• 1894: French Captain Alfred Dreyfus was framed by antisemitic officers, found guilty and was given a life sentence. The church, government and army united to suppress the truth. Ten years later, he was declared totally innocent. The Dreyfus Affair became world-wide news for years.
  
• 1930s: Some American clergy used their their radio programs to attack Jews. Father Charles E Coughlin was one of the best known. "In the 1930's, radio audiences heard him rail against the threat of Jews to America's economy and defend Hitler's treatment of Jews as justified in the fight against communism."
  
• 1936: The Nazi government passed the anti-Jewish Nuremberg Laws, which paralleled earlier Church laws against Jews.
  
• 1936: Cardinal Hloud of Poland urged Catholics to boycott Jewish businesses.
  
• 1938: Hitler brought back various century-old church regulations, ordering all Jews to wear a yellow Star of David as identification.
  

The Roman Catholic Church reversed its theology later in the 20th century and is now a strong supporter of religious tolerance towards Jews. [Gee, isn't that speshul! -ed]

What the exact role of the pope during the Nazi atrocities was is not known in depth, though there were some good things he, or the church, did. However, below is a list of less salable items:

• Although informed of the massive Nazi attacks of synagogues and Jewish business in on Kristallnacht 1938-NOV, Pope Pius XII issued no public criticism.
  
• Although informed during 1940 to 1943 of Nazi atrocities in at least Austria, Lithuania, Poland, Spain, and the Ukraine, (including deportations to death camps) he made no public comments.
  
• "He refused to join a resolution of the Allies condemning the Nazi crimes."
  
• "He never excommunicated any Nazi," although he did excommunicate some German Catholics who supported cremation as an alternative to burial.
  
• "He never declared it a sin for Catholics to participate in the slaughter."
  
• 1941 when asked about proposed anti-Jewish laws in Vichy France, Pius XII answered that the church condemned racism, but did not repudiate every rule against the Jews.
  

In late 1999, the Vatican Commission for Religious Relations with the Jews established an international panel, composed of three Jewish and three Christian scholars from the U.S., Canada and Israel. They were given the task of trying to evaluate role of Pope Pius XII and the rest of the Vatican during the Holocaust. The panel was able to search published volumes of wartime Vatican documents. They found that the Vatican had received reports of Nazi atrocities as early as 1941-JAN. However, "the pope's responses to reports of atrocities were missing from the sources they examined."

In 2000-OCT, the panel issued a preliminary report, "The Vatican and the Holocaust," asking 47 questions which can only be answered by consulting the unpublished Vatican files from the World War II era. They unanimously asked for access to the records. In 2001-JUN, the Vatican refused. [In other words, the Vatican refused its own commission access to the documents they needed to complete their task. I wonder why? -ed]

All statements not sourced above may be sourced to The Ontario Consultants On Religious Tolerance: Anti-semitism, the Nazi Holocaust,
and the Roman Catholic Church

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The Inquisition had been created in the twelfth century by Pope Lucius III to fight heresy in the south of what is now France. The Catholic Monarchs decided to introduce the Inquisition to Castile, and requested the Pope's assent. On 1 November 1478 Pope Sixtus IV published the Papal bull, Exigit Sinceras Devotionis Affectus, through which the Inquisition was established in the Kingdom of Castile; it was later extended to all of Spain. The bull gave the monarchs exclusive authority to name the inquisitors. [unsourced paragraph]

During the reign of the Catholic Monarchs and long afterwards the Inquisition was active in persecuting people for offences such as crypto-Judaism, heresy, Protestantism, blasphemy, and bigamy. The last trial for crypto-Judaism was held in 1818.

The Alhambra Decree (also known as the Edict of Expulsion) was an edict issued on 31 March 1492 by the joint Catholic Monarchs of Spain (Isabella I of Castile and Ferdinand II of Aragon) ordering the expulsion of Jews from the Kingdoms of Castile and Aragon (not from the Kingdom of Navarre) and its territories and possessions by 31 July of that year.

The edict was formally revoked on 16 December 1968, following the Second Vatican Council. Today, the number of Jews in Spain is estimated at 50,000.

Ferdinand and Isabella took seriously the reports that some crypto-Jews were not only privately practicing their former faith, but were secretly trying to draw other conversos back into the Jewish fold. In 1478, Ferdinand and Isabella made formal application to Rome for a tribunal of the Inquisition in Castile to investigate these and other suspicions. In 1487, King Ferdinand established the Spanish Inquisition in Aragon. It is not known how many had not truly converted, had lapsed from their new Christianity, or were attempting to persuade others to revert.

Scholars disagree about how many Jews left Spain as a result of the decree; the numbers vary between 130,000 and 800,000. Many (likely more than half) went to Portugal, where they eluded persecution for only a few years (see Portuguese Inquisition). The Jewish community in Portugal (perhaps then some 10% of that country's population) were then declared Christians by Royal decree unless they left, but since their departure was severely hindered by the King (who needed their expertise for Portugal's overseas enterprises), the vast majority was forced to stay as nominal Christians.

Other Spanish Jews (estimates range between 50,000 and 70,000)[citation needed] chose to avoid expulsion by conversion to Christianity. However, their conversion did not protect them from ecclesiastical hostility after the Spanish Inquisition came into full effect; persecution and expulsion were common.

The Portuguese Inquisition was formally established in Portugal in 1536 at the request of the King of Portugal, João III. Manuel I had asked for the installation of the Inquisition in 1515 to fulfill the commitment of marriage with Maria of Aragon, but it was only after his death that Pope Paul III acquiesced.

It held its first auto-da-fé in Portugal in 1540. Like the Spanish Inquisition, it concentrated its efforts on rooting out those who had converted from other faiths (overwhelmingly Judaism) but [who] did not adhere to the strictures of Catholic orthodoxy.

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