Jesuit Kaddish

James Bernauer S.J.

Description

While much has been written about the Catholic Church and the Holocaust, little has been published about the hostile role of priests, in particular Jesuits, toward Jews and Judaism. Jesuit Kaddish is a long overdue study that examines Jesuit hostility toward Judaism before the Shoah and the development of a new understanding of the Catholic Church’s relation to Judaism that culminated with Vatican II’s landmark decree Nostra aetate. James Bernauer undertakes a self-examination as a member of the Jesuit order and writes this story in the hopes that it will contribute to interreligious reconciliation. Jesuit Kaddish demonstrates the way Jesuit hostility operated, examining Jesuit moral theology’s dualistic approach to sexuality and, in the case of Nazi Germany, the articulation of an unholy alliance between a sexualizing and a Judaizing of German culture. Bernauer then identifies an influential group of Jesuits whose thought and action contributed to the developments in Catholic teaching about Judaism that eventually led to the watershed moment of Nostra aetate. This book concludes with a proposed statement of repentance from the Jesuits and an appendix presenting the fifteen Jesuits who have been honored as “Righteous Among the Nations” by Israel’s Yad Vashem Holocaust Center. Jesuit Kaddish offers a crucial contribution to the fields of Catholicism and Nazism, Catholic-Jewish relations, Jesuit history, and the history of anti-Semitism in Europe.

Sujets

• Religion
• Christianisme
• Vatican II
• Religious Intolerance
• 20th Century
• Jewish Studies
• Modern
• Holocaust
• HISTORY
• Histoire
• Nazism
• The Holocaust
• Modern history
• Christian Church
• Second Vatican Council
• Society of Jesus
• Judaism
• Obermodern-Zutzendorf
• IIe concile ?cuménique du Vatican
• Holocauste

Informations

• Publié par: University of Notre Dame Press
• Date de parution: 30 mars 2020
• Nombre de lectures: 0
• EAN13: 9780268107031
• Langue: English

Extrait

Jesuit Kaddish
Jesuit Kaddish
JESUITS, JEWS, AND HOLOCAUST REMEMBRANCE
JAMES BERNAUER, SJ
University of Notre Dame Press
Notre Dame, Indiana
Copyright © 2020 by the University of Notre Dame
Notre Dame, Indiana 46556
undpress.nd.edu
All Rights Reserved
Published in the United States of America
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Names: Bernauer, James William, author.
Title: Jesuit Kaddish : Jesuits, Jews, and Holocaust remembrance / James Bernauer, SJ.
Description: Notre Dame, Indiana : University of Notre Dame Press, [2019] |
Includes index.
Identifiers: LCCN 2019054898 (print) | LCCN 2019054899 (ebook) | ISBN 9780268107017 (hardback) | ISBN 9780268107048 (adobe pdf) | ISBN 9780268107031 (epub)
Subjects: LCSH: Jesuits—History—20th century. | Jesuits—History— 21st century. | Holocaust (Christian theology) | Holocaust, Jewish (1939–1945) | Catholic Church—Relations—Judaism. | Judaism— Relations—Catholic Church. | Vatican Council (2nd : 1962–1965 : Basilica di San Pietro in Vaticano). Declaratio de ecclesiae habitudine ad religiones non-Christianas. | Righteous Gentiles in the Holocaust.
Classification: LCC BX3706.3 .B47 2019 (print) | LCC BX3706.3 (ebook) |
DDC 261.2/608827153—dc23
LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2019054898
LC ebook record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2019054899
This e-Book was converted from the original source file by a third-party vendor. Readers who notice any formatting, textual, or readability issues are encouraged to contact the publisher at [e-mail]
CONTENTS
Acknowledgments
Personal Prelude
ONE The Exorcising Examen of John Paul II
TWO The Demonic Milieu: On Jesuit Hostility to Jews and Judaism
THREE The Barbarian Within: Spirit versus Flesh, Body versus Soul
FOUR The Divine Milieu: Righteous Jesuits
FIVE Spiritual Exercises
Appendix. The Yad Vashem Jesuits
Notes
Index
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
My debts to the many people and institutions that have assisted me in my work on this long journey of research and writing are profound and extensive, and it is a pleasure to acknowledge some of them here. The Jesuits who had been recognized by Israel’s Holocaust Center, Yad Vashem, and with whom I lived in Paris were an initial inspiration. During my many years at Boston College I have received the support of a vibrant Jesuit Community, an excellent academic institution, outstanding colleagues in many departments, and many talented students who have encouraged my questions. Boston College and its president, Father William Leahy, honored me with the Kraft Family Professorship, and that made it possible for me to attend the conferences and visit the institutions where I could do my work.
I have been blessed over those years by an extraordinary group of interdisciplinary research assistants: Peter Glazar, Dalia Nasser, Rufus Caine, David Giles, Jason Barrett, Jessica Wuebeker, Tracey Stark, Peter Li, Joseph Haggerty, Grant Edwards, Strand Sheldahl-Thomason, Martin Bernales, Derek Brown, and especially Felix Jimenez, who has worked with me for five years as the Kraft Family chair’s assistant both in Boston and in Munich.
I have profited from many libraries and archives, especially those at Boston College, where the staff could not have been more helpful. I thank the researchers at Yad Vashem in Jerusalem and the Reverend Robert Bonfils, the retired archivist at the Jesuit archives in Vanves, France.
I have had the opportunity to develop my ideas in lectures at many institutions from whose scholars and students I have learned, and I am very appreciative of their invitations: Le Moyne College in Syracuse; the University of Santa Clara, where I was a Bannan Foundation Fellow; De Paul University in Chicago; Rome’s Gregorian University; Loyola University of Chicago, where I occupied the Jesuit University Professorship; the Ateneo University of Manila; the École des Hautes Études en Sciences Culturelles in Tokyo; Nazareth College in Rochester; John Carroll University in Cleveland; the College of the Holy Cross and Assumption College in Worcester; the University of Massachusetts in Boston; the Jagiellonian University in Krakow; the Pontifical Biblical Institute in Jerusalem; and the Vanderbilt University Divinity School in Nashville.
I thank the editors of two journals and one collection in which I published earlier fragments of chapters 1 and 4: Studies in the Spirituality of Jesuits (Summer 2004), the Journal of Jesuit Studies (Spring 2018), and “The Tragic Couple”: Encounters between Jews and Jesuits (the Netherlands: Brill, 2014). I am very grateful to Dr. Robert Maryks, who is the founding editor of the Journal of Jesuit Studies and who has become a personal friend.
Among the scholars and friends I wish to thank are Walter Modrys, Edward McGushin, Serena Parekh, Kyle Logan, Vanessa Rumble, Douglas Kull, Michael Mahon, Paula Perry, Peggy Bakalo, Arthur Madigan, Susannah Heschel, Frank Herrmann, Chi and Zheng Zeng, David Rasmussen, Pamela Berger, Jeffrey Johnson, David Neuhaus, Alec Walker, Camille Markey, Richard Lynch, Ruth Langer, Frank Clooney, Martin Bernales Odino, Agustin Colombo, Bernardo Sada Monroy, Vincent Lapomarda, Martin Stuflesser, and my brothers Jack and Kenneth. Of course they are not responsible for any errors or shortcomings in my study.
My dealings with the University of Notre Dame Press have been professionally satisfying and personally enjoyable. I appreciate the original interest in my project by its director, Stephen Wrinn, the ongoing care of its acquisitions editor, Stephen Little, and the professional assistance of its copyeditor, Marilyn Martin. I hope that I will learn someday the identities of the two scholars who anonymously reviewed my manuscript for Notre Dame. To them I would express my appreciation for the remarkable learning and generous diligence they exhibited in suggesting improvements for my text. They strengthened this volume immeasurably and set a new standard for me as to how reviews should be done.
PERSONAL PRELUDE
The two words of this book’s title may startle. Why join together one of Judaism’s most recognizable prayers with the name of the Roman Catholic order of the Jesuits, which is officially known as the Society of Jesus? This volume will present a response to that question as we meditate on the drama of the Holocaust and the Jesuits. Here, however, in a personal prelude, some guiding emotions might be expressed, feelings for the welcoming of life and for the acceptance of death. Life, first of all, because the Kaddish is a prayer of praise of God and of the holy gift of life. “Magnified and sanctified may his great name be in the world that he created, as he wills, and may his kingdom come in your lives and in your days, and in the lives of all the house of Israel, swiftly and soon, and say all Amen!” Those are the first two stanzas of the six-stanza prayer. As descendants of the Jewish elders in faith, there is not a single word of the prayer that Christians cannot proclaim faithfully, not a single word that Christians would not embrace. Should not all who have read the Torah, even if under a different name, be able to join the chorus in petitioning, “May a great peace from heaven and life!—be upon us and all Israel, and say all Amen”? (That was the fifth stanza.) Still the Kaddish is a prayer of mourning, a litany that challenges death. For the Jews, the prayer first emerged in the wake of the Crusades, for Christians and Jesuits in the aftermath of the Shoah. We who are Catholics are not strangers to Jewish cemeteries. Isn’t the most extensive of them, Auschwitz, located on the soil of one of Europe’s most Catholic countries and now a site of international visitation?
A French priest, Father Patrick Desbois, has devoted years to a sacred mission: to locate every mass grave or site at which Jews were killed during the Holocaust. His motivation was a Jewish invisibility: “While the mass graves of the thousands of Jews who were shot are untraceable, every German killed during the war has been reburied and identified by name. The cemeteries are on the scale of the Reich. Magnificent cemeteries for the Germans, including the SS, little graves for the French, white stones covered in brambles for the tens of thousands of anonymous Soviet soldiers, and absolutely nothing for the Jews.” 1 Desbois has succeeded in uncovering hundreds of grave sites by asking local people in the blood lands of Eastern Europe about the murders of the Jews they witnessed. Perhaps his success has been assisted by his priestly identity, as one Jewish scholar judged: “If a Jewish taker-of-testimony comes, what would people think—that this is someone coming to accuse. When a priest comes, people open up. He brings to the subject a kind of legitimacy, a sense that it is o.k. to talk about the past. There’s absolution through confession.” 2 Of course, there are other reasons for a Catholic presence at Jewish graveyards—out of respect for the dead, to mourn, certainly; but perhaps out of moral necessity as well, to wonder: How responsible are we Christians for such mass deaths? Were some of our words and beliefs murderous? Did we respect them in life, these people who are now buried?
Indeed, isn’t it the case that Christians were explicitly invited by Jews themselves to participate in the remembrance of the Jewish dead and to reflect upon their destruction? Wasn’t the establishment of Yad Vashem in Jerusalem an invitation as well as a summons? When the Israeli Knesset passed the Law of the Martyrs’ and Heroes’ Remembrance Authority in 1953, Yad Vashem was founded as a memorial to the six million Jews killed in the Shoah. Among the duties assigned to the institution was to discover and commemorate those non-Jews who had risked or lost their lives in efforts to save Jews during the period of the Holocaust. They were to be named “Righteous Among the Nations,” an expression that was borrowed from the ancient